Taming Corporate Power in the 21st Century

The digital revolution has radically re-organized the economy and changed the rules of corporate power - this Element explores how.

Gerald F. Davis (Author)

9781009095426, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 2 June 2022

75 pages
22.8 x 15.1 x 0.5 cm, 0.15 kg

There is broad consensus across the political spectrum in the US that monopolistic corporations – particularly Big Tech companies -- have grown too powerful, and that we need to revive antitrust to take on the 'curse of bigness.' But both the diagnosis and the cure are rooted in an outdated understanding of how the American economy is organized. Information and communication technologies have fundamentally altered the markets for capital, labor, supplies, and distribution in ways that undermine the basic categories we use to understand the economy. Nationality, industry, firm, size, employee, and other fundamental terms are increasingly detached from the operations of the economy. If we want to understand and tame the new sources of economic power, we need a new diagnosis and a new set of tools.

Introduction
1. The digital transformation of business
2. Rising monopoly power and a new Gilded Age?
3. The problems with the monopoly narrative
4. What is nationality now?
5. What is industry now?
6. What is size now?
7. Every man an LLC? The hollow promise of entrepreneurship for all
8. What next? Business models and power
References.

Subject Areas: Corporate governance [KJR]