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Reflection: Firms, Rules, and Global Capitalism
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 03 January 2024
Extract
Every organization of the world economy has been unstable. Each system is necessarily composed of trade-offs. Opportunities emerge, and disappointments abound. Nothing lasts; nothing is finished; and nothing is perfect.
- Type
- Reflection
- Information
- Business History Review , Volume 97 , Issue 3: Governing Global Capitalism , Autumn 2023 , pp. 633 - 644
- Copyright
- © 2023 The President and Fellows of Harvard College
Footnotes
I thank Grace Ballor and Sabine Pitteloud for their thoughtful reactions to an earlier draft of this essay as well as for their invitation to contribute to this endeavor. I am grateful to Sogomon Tarontsi for preparing elegant visualizations of the data.
References
1 Max Weber, The Methodology of the Social Sciences, trans. Edward A. Shils and Henry A. Finch (Glencoe, Il., 1949), 56. For the best elucidation of the implications of Weber’s thinking for patterns of world politics, see John Gerard Ruggie, “What Makes the World Hang Together? Neo-Utilitarianism and the Social Constructivist Challenge,” International Organization 52, no. 4 (1988): 855–885.
2 John Gerard Ruggie, “International Regimes, Transactions, and Change: Embedded Liberalism in the Postwar Economic Order,” International Organization 36, no. 2 (1982): 379–416.
3 Peter J. Katzenstein, A World of Regions: Asia and Europe in the American Imperium (Ithaca, 2005).
4 Rawi Abdelal, Capital Rules: The Construction of Global Finance (Cambridge, MA, 2007); Rawi Abdelal and Sophie Meunier, “Managed Globalization: Doctrine, Practice, and Promise,” Journal of European Public Policy 17, no. 3 (2010): 350–367. On the intellectual foundations of the European approach, see Pascal Lamy, La democratie monde: pour une autre gouvernance globale (Paris, 2004).
5 Grace Ballor, “Liberal Environmentalism: The Public-Private Production of European Emissions Standards,” Business History Review 97, no. 3 (Autumn 2023): 579.
6 Ballor, 589.
7 Ballor, 593.
8 Ballor, 588.
9 Ann-Kristin Bergquist and Thomas David, “Beyond Planetary Limits! The International Chamber of Commerce, the United Nations, and the Invention of Sustainable Development,” Business History Review 97, no. 3 (Autumn 2023): 482.
10 Bergquist and David, 486.
11 Bergquist and David, 487.
12 Véronique Dimier and Sarah Stockwell, “Development, Inc.? The EEC, Britain, Post-Colonial Overseas Development Aid, and Business,” Business History Review 97, no. 3 (Autumn 2023): 524.
13 Dimier and Stockwell, 537.
14 Dimier and Stockwell, 540.
15 Dimier and Stockwell.
16 Dimier and Stockwell, 546.
17 John Gerard Ruggie, “Corporate Globalization and the Liberal Order: Disembedding and Reembedding Governing Norms,” in The Downfall of the American Order?, ed. Peter J. Katzenstein and Jonathan Kirshner (Ithaca, 2022), 144–164.
18 Rogers Brubaker, “Why Populism?” Theory and Society 46, no. 5 (2017): 357–385.
19 Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time (repr. Boston, [1944] 1957), 25.
20 Once upon a time we would have simply described intergenerational economic mobility as class mobility. See Miles Corak, “Income Inequality, Equality of Opportunity, and Intergenerational Mobility,” Journal of Economic Perspectives 27, no. 3 (2013): 79–102; and Raj Chetty, David Grusky, Maximilian Hell, Nathaniel Hendren, Robert Manduca, and Jimmy Narang, “The Fading American Dream: Trends in Absolute Income Mobility since 1940,” Science 356, no. 6336 (2017): 398–406.
21 Rawi Abdelal, “Dignity, Inequality, and the Populist Backlash: Lessons from America and Europe for a Sustainable Globalization,” Global Policy 11, no. 4 (2020): 492–500.
22 Ruggie, “Corporate Globalization and the Liberal Order,” 147.
23 Grace Ballor and Sabine Pitteloud, “Introduction: Capitalism and Global Governance in Business History,” Business History Review 97, no. 3 (Autumn 2023): 459–479.
24 Frank Knight, Risk, Uncertainty, and Profit (New York, 1921); James G. March and Zur Shapira, “Managerial Perspectives on Risk and Risk-Taking,” Management Science 33, no. 11 (1987): 1404–1418; Jens Beckert, “What Is Sociological about Economic Sociology?” Theory and Society 25, no. 6 (1996): 803–840.
25 Cornelia Woll, Firm Interests: How Governments Shape Business Lobbying on Global Trade (Ithaca, 2008).