Firms are central to trade policy-making. Some analysts even suggest that they dictate policy on the basis of their material interests. Cornelia Woll counters these assumptions, arguing that firms do not always know what they want. To be sure, firms lobby hard to attain a desired policy once they have defined their goals. Yet material factors are insufficient to account for these preferences. The ways in which firms are embedded in political settings are much more decisive. Woll demonstrates her case by analyzing the surprising evolution of support from large firms for liberalization in telecommunications and international air transport in the United States and Europe. Within less than a decade, former monopolies with important home markets abandoned their earlier calls for subsidies and protectionism and joined competitive multinationals in the demand for global markets. By comparing the complex evolution of firm preferences across sectors and countries, Woll shows that firms may influence policy outcomes, but policies and politics in turn influence business demands. This is particularly true in the European Union, where the constraints of multilevel decision-making encourage firms to pay lip service to liberalization if they want to maintain good working relations with supranational officials. In the United States, firms adjust their sectoral demands to fit the government's agenda. In both contexts, the interaction between government and firm representatives affects not only the strategy but also the content of business lobbying on global trade.

This Handbook presents a theory of Business Interest Associations and fifteen empirical country by country case studies in the EU. The book is organized into three main parts. Part I develops a theory of business associations which centres on firm size as the key explanatory variable. Part II consists of country studies covering the EU-15, which are written along strictly comparable lines of analysis. Part III contains the cross-nationally comparative analysis. The book will make essential reading for researchers working in organization studies, industrial relations, industrial sociology and political science, as well as practioners in related fields.

The corporate business enterprise is a core institution of capitalism. It holds immense political, economic, and cultural power in society. It mobilizes social and planetary resources to its utility in pursuit of private profit maximization and with little regard for social concerns. Its influence over so much of societal life and effects on the natural environment raise critical questions about the firm and its governance in democratic society. Various voices seek reforms of regulation and corporate governance practices to those shaped by the neoliberal policies persisting in the current decades. But prospects for amelioration within our current horizons of thinking appear elusive. This book contributes a distinctly social theoretical approach to the social problem of governing the firm. Its discussions complement debates in economics, politics, and law. Its critical social theorizations challenge conventional understandings of the firm and neoliberal legitimacies of its governance and posit alternatives. The book explores the social relations and moral fabric of the firm and the creativity of human action at work. It proposes a reimagined corporate governance premised on just recognition of that social vitality. It invites unprecedented collaboration for a robust participatory democracy for governing the firm and market action oriented to ecological and social sustainability.

This title examines in a practical manner the complex law and regulations that now exist in the United Kingdom, the United States of America and various other important jurisdictions concerning the concept of conflicts of interest and how the principles have been applied in the financial services industry

This three-volume book constitutes the first attempt to define corporate finance law as an independent field of law with its own principles and tools. The book also contains a unique theory of corporate governance with the firm as the most important principal.

Annika Geyer aims to advance the current understanding of variations in family businesses' growth performance and to explain their potential origins. She focuses on the respective impact of the set of relevant background factors (stemming from top executives' individual characteristics as well as the given organizational and social environment) on the firms growth performance and the underlying processes through which this impact is transmitted. The insights of this work constitute an essential step towards settling the debate on how the family actually contributes to the family firm's performance and hold some important implications for practitioners.