Earth Incorporated: Centralization and Variegation in the Global Company Network

Abstract

Abstract:Over the past 20 years, a widening gulf has appeared between the increasingly internationalized financing arrangements of the world's leading corporations, and the persistence of nationally compartmentalized approaches to the study of corporate control. In lieu of direct empirical evidence on corporate control at the global level, the most widespread assumption is that the globalization of ownership has taken the form of an expansion of arms-length, marketbased arrangements traditionally prevailing in the Anglo-American economies. Here, however, we challenge this assumption, both empirically and conceptually. Empirically, we show that three quarters of the world's 205 largest firms by sales are linked to a single global company network of concentrated (5%) ownership ties. This network has a hierarchically centralized organization, with a dominant "global network core" of US fund managers ringed by a more geographically diverse "state capitalist periphery." Conceptually, we argue that the this architecture can be broadly explained through a Polanyian "variegated capitalist" model of contradictory market institutionalization, with the formation of the global company network actually a counterintuitive product of global financial marketization. In order to understand this process of network formation, however, it is necessary to extend Polanyi's model of a double movement mediated through political interventions in the market, to incorporate Veblenian processes of evolutionary institutional change mediated through the market.

The rise of transnational state capital: state-led foreign investment in the 21st century

“…This line of work takes the transnationality of state involvement seriously, for instance by analyzing state ownership and strategy in specific GVCs (Adolf, Bush, & Vellema, 2016), the role of states as regulator, producer and buyer within those chains (Horner, 2017) and the conceptual role of state agency and power within them (Mayer & Phillips, 2017). Accounts that put more emphasis on the geographical dimension of foreign state investment confirm the centrality of state capital for the global network of corporate control (Haberly & W ojcik, 2017).…”

Spatial Differentiation of Variegated Capitalisms: A Comparative Analysis of Russian and Australian Oil and Gas Corporate City Networks

“…VoC debates have largely developed in heterodox economic scholarship, attracting critique of their nationally scaled analysis of economic performance, binary labeling of countries, and tendency to privilege typological classification over causal explanation (Deeg and Jackson 2007;Peck and Theodore 2007). Nonetheless, there have been many productive theoretical and methodological attempts in economic geography to engage with VoC (Christopherson 2002;Peck and Theodore 2007;MacKinnon et al 2009;Dixon 2011;Haberly and Wójcik 2017).…”

When Theory Meets Methods: The Naissance of Computer Assisted Corporate Interlock Research

“…Early work has uncovered a complex global network of board interlocks with a clear multi-level structure that sometimes -but not always -disregards national borders Heemskerk et al 2016b). Related work on the global network of corporate ownership points to an unprecedented concentration of corporate control in the hands of a few financial institutions (Davis 2008;Fichtner et al 2017;Haberly and Wójcik 2016;Vitali et al 2011). Indeed, with a worldwide surge in inequality and the position of elites at the top of the distribution, corporate elite research is once again a 'hotbed' of activity (Mizruchi 2016: 8).…”