What are some risk mitigation strategies for companies facing geopolitical risk? This chapter highlights how companies and managers can buffer against geopolitical risk through strategic decisions regarding resources (who gets what), competitive advantage (how to win), and firm organization (who does what). These decisions are impacted by managers’ cognitive frames for decision-making. The imperative for such strategic decision-making extends beyond companies in what were traditionally considered to be “strategic sectors,” as well as firms of different sizes.

This chapter introduces the post-War labour regime that has been dominant in the glasshouse agrifood sector. It highlights the important, but regionally differentiated, role of migrant labour. It examines the organisation of the labour regime and the labour process in the two regions up until the UK’s departure from the European Union.

This chapter introduces the two regional contexts through which the book’s analysis proceeds. It positions these regions over time with respect to the role that glasshouse agrifood production has played in each region and how the industry has developed over time.

What is the relevance of global politics and international relations for companies, managers, and work? How will it impact your company and why should you care? This chapter identifies how changing global order thrusts upon all global businesses to respond to and actively manage geopolitics. Companies have to balance corporate interests with broader security externalities that their governments emphasize because geopolitics and economics are closely intertwined. Geopolitical risk arises when states prioritize national security and limit how companies leverage their assets in generating economic rents. A key factor shaping how a company will be impacted by the risk is its corporate nationality. Geopolitical risk in a given market is higher for companies from perceived rival countries than those from friendly ones. In order to assess the impact of geopolitical risk on their firm, companies, managers, and employees can focus on a structural perspective that emphasizes four levers that reshape the basic market structure for global companies: market access, level playing field, investment security, and institutional alignment. Ultimately, while navigating geopolitical tensions is increasingly a part of the job for many managers, it can also come at a cost to the company.

Viscount Victor Spencer was representative of the British social elites deeply entrenched in business at the beginning of the twentieth century. He was amongst the 41 per cent of CEOs who were peers of the realm. Like most of these peers, he did not have a background in the business world or industry. This chapter details why these aristocratic amateurs initially dominated corporate leadership roles but rapidly declined in number as social and political changes reduced the importance of the aristocracy and the economic environment was transformed by the technological and business innovations of the second industrial revolution. They were replaced by professional managers like Thomas Sutherland of the shipping company P&O, founder CEOs such as Thomas Lipton, and family CEOs such as Archibald Coats of the textile business J & P Coats. These CEOs developed extensive business experience as insiders within their companies, which allowed them to innovate the strategy and structure of their companies. Despite their decline, the gentleman amateurs performed no worse than these players.

Who supplies and reliably secures energy at affordable prices has been a driver of global security. As the world moved from coal to oil and gas, and then to green energy sources, reliable access to fuel supplies remained the key geopolitical considerations. The critical materials and technologies needed for renewable energy generation, distribution, and storage remain concentrated among a few countries and companies. This creates dependence on countries that have them. The chapter highlights some major companies in the green energy sector, the challenges faced by them, and government policies that influence how they can function. Government actions influence market access, level playing field, investment security, and institutional alignment. Green energy companies have adopted various strategies to manage corporate nationality and geopolitical tensions, including reshaping country of origin, turning geopolitical rivalry into opportunity, diversification of supply chains, and corporate diplomacy.

This chapter addresses how one could quantify and explore the impact of geopolitics on global businesses. Computational geopolitics is an attempt to integrate quantitative methods and geopolitical analysis to understand and predict trends. The explosive growth of data, improvements in computational power, and access to cloud computing have led to a proliferation of computational methods in analyzing geopolitics and its impact on companies. The chapter explores some tools and techniques used in computational geopolitics, including events-based approaches to measuring geopolitical tensions, textual approaches, and empirical approaches. In addition, it provides examples of ways in which analysts can quantify the impact of geopolitics on trade and foreign direct investment. It also introduces experimental methods to assess the effectiveness of companies’ strategic responses to geopolitical tensions. Large language models (LLMs) can be used for sentiment analysis, spotting trends, scenario building, risk assessment, and strategic recommendations. While they methods offer advances in quantifying the impact of geopolitics on global businesses, analysts should also be cautious about data quality and availability as well as the complexity of the phenomenon and the geopolitics of AI. The chapter concludes by pointing the reader to some widely used data sources for computational geopolitics.

Geopolitical forces are fundamentally altering the landscape of e-commerce and digital trade. Cross-border e-commerce is increasingly fragmented along geopolitical lines, as e-commerce companies are forced to reckon with the security implications of their operations. This includes governments’ concerns about data security and sovereignty. When foreign firms collect extensive data on the behavior of the country’s customers, there is potential for those data to be exploited in shaping consumer behavior or spreading information in the country. Additionally, when a foreign firm plays an important role in the domestic economy, local governments have limited means to encourage those firms to act in the “national interest” or broader societal and economic goals beyond maximizing profits. Because of these concerns, governments have adopted policies to shape the behavior of e-commerce companies. This includes shaping market access, level playing field, investment security, and institutional alignment. E-commerce companies have adopted various strategies to manage corporate nationality and geopolitical tensions, including masking country of origin, diversifying supply chains, relocating control rights, focusing on alternate markets, and corporate diplomacy.

With the rise of strategic rivalry and geopolitical competition, governments turned to economic policy to gain influence, power, and resources. The defining feature became the pursuit of national interest, which was invoked to introduce investment screening policies, increase tariffs, prevent cross-border M&A deals, expropriate assets, restrict technology transfer, provide preferential subsidies, and create national champions. To respond effectively, global companies must recognize the systemic changes underway and develop capabilities to address them. Companies need to acknowledge that they will come to be defined by their nationality and innovation is an important battlefield. Government policies to contain the influence of foreign firms from adversarial countries cluster around four levers: market access, level playing field, investment security, and institutional alignment. To actively manage geopolitical tensions, companies need to assess how geopolitics will share their resources, competitive advantage, and firm organization. They need to develop skills to scan the global landscape, personalize the information, plan the response, and pivot if there are headwinds. Impact on employees, who works, how work is performed, and where it takes place need to be evaluated. Managing policymakers becomes a crucial part of managing a global business.

This chapter sets out the concept of ‘agrarian biopolitical articulations’ as a framework to understand the enduring food security crises faced by the UK and how these are articulated with the role that organisations play in the value chain. It brings together research on labour, technology and value chains to establish this theoretical framing for the book.