From Unity to Autonomy: Remaking Monsanto and the New Modalities of Corporate Power

• In Event: 481 - Section on Organizations, Occupations and Work Paper Sessions. Organizational Governance, Deviance and Protest

Abstract

Recent scholarship suggests that political unity among American corporations reached its high point in the early 1980s. But having achieved its primary aims, American corporations subsequently lost the capacity to form a cohesive political bloc. The dominant theory of corporate power—the so-called ‘unity thesis’—predicts that any decline in unity would engender a comparable decline in corporate political 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 in the face of 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 and they likely form a key element of any general explanation of historical variation in the political influence of corporations.

Author

• Jensen Sass, University of Canberra