This volume focuses on the ways in which corporations exercise political power, and how changes in the political-legal arrangements in which corporations are embedded affect their organizational behavior. Drawing from a range of theoretical perspectives, the articles in this collection further our understanding of political capitalism, the utilization of political outlets to attain conditions of stability, predictability, and security in the economy and to preserve the social relations in capitalist society. Corporations exercise political and economic power to establish...

Scholars, political leaders, and members of the business community tend to narrowly focus on globalization as an economic phenomenon. Even critics of globalization focus on the economic dimension of recent transformations of the global system. As a result, little attention has been given to the political responses to globalization. This volume attempts to fill that gap in the literature by examining how classes and other groups respond politically to economic globalization. Drawing on a range of theoretical perspectives, the articles in this volume empirically examine the political response...

The articles in this volume directly or indirectly examine central tenets of neoliberalism: interference with market mechanisms is the cause of poor economic performance, and returning to market fundamentalism will restore prosperity. Despite these bold claims, scholars have not examined the extent to which neoliberal policies result in positive outcomes or whether economic successes are explained by neoliberalism. This volume of Research in Political Sociology assesses these neoliberal claims. The introductory article compares classical liberalism to neoliberalism, and summarizes the...

This volume of "Research in Political Sociology" focuses on one of the central themes in political sociology: the relationship between political power and the policy formation process. The first section examines the exercise of power in two distinct policy arenas: the interlocking networks among policy-planning organizations, and the effects of PACs on the voting behavior of elected officials in Canada and the U.S. In contrast to corporate interlocking directorates, although a shift to the right occurred in the 1980s and 1990s, board interlocks of policy-planning organizations are relatively...