Neoliberalism as Corporate Power

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Abstract

Accounts of neoliberalism have noted, but not fully explored, the neoliberal empowerment of corporations. The corporate power literature, similarly, rarely makes the connection between corporate agents and neoliberalism as a power structure. This article fills the gap between these literatures with a dual contribution. It develops these contributions by first reviewing the neoliberalism literature and in so doing, developing the idea of neoliberalism as a bricolage of practice and ideas. It then discusses the mischaracterization of the corporation within neoliberalism before deconstructing four core policy areas of neoliberalism – deregulation, non-intervention, free markets and free trade. In each policy area it is shown how the practice of these policies has enhanced the social and economic power of major corporations – thereby deepening practice-based accounts of neoliberalism – and how the discourse of these policies has empowered corporations in the political arena – thereby deepening the corporate power literature’s account of how corporations operate powerfully. More generally this article offers a much fuller account of how 40 years of ‘free market’ policies have resulted in the creation of oligopolistic corporate economies.

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APA

Hathaway, T. (2020). Neoliberalism as Corporate Power. Competition and Change, 24(3–4), 315–337. https://doi.org/10.1177/1024529420910382

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