After Unity, Autonomy: Monsanto and the Remaking of Corporate Power, 1972-1985

• In Event: 066 - Section on Political Sociology Roundtables (one-hour)
  In Refereed Roundtable: Table 08. Political Economy

Abstract

Recent scholarship suggests that corporate unity reached its high point in the United States in the early 1980s. But having achieved its primary aims, American business subsequently lost the will and capacity to form a cohesive political bloc. The dominant theory of corporate power—the so-called “unity thesis”—predicts that in a pluralistic polity this decline in unity would engender an equivalent decline in business influence. Most students of business and politics, however, observe the opposite trend, suggesting that over the past three decades corporations have bolstered their position in American political life. This presents a theoretical and empirical puzzle—how might we explain rising corporate influence alongside declining corporate unity? In this paper I trace the changing political orientation and action of a single large corporation, namely Monsanto, from the early 1970s to the mid-1980s. I describe how this firm’s political capacities were reconstituted and extended in the face of severe commercial and political strictures. While corporate unity declined during the period of analysis, Monsanto’s organizational autonomy was greatly expanded; Monsanto gained the capacity to articulate long-term political aims and to monitor and shape its institutional environment. Importantly, the financial and institutional mechanisms which compelled Monsanto towards autonomy were hardly unique to this firm and they may form a crucial element of any comprehensive explanation of historical variation in business influence. (The research presented here is based on archival work at Monsanto and interviews with former executives and managers of the firm.)

Author

• Jensen Karl Sass, Yale University