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- Corporate Power and Agenda Setting (4)
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Articles 1 - 15 of 15
Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences
Globalisation: Before And After The Crisis, Sharon Beder
Globalisation: Before And After The Crisis, Sharon Beder
Sharon Beder
So-called »free« markets are becoming the new organising principle for the global order. The idea that governments should protect citizens against the excesses of free enterprise has been replaced with the idea that government should protect business activities against the excesses of democratic regulation. What business leaders seek, and to a large extent have achieved, are »business-managed democracies«, that is, democracies where the politics and cultural life of nations are managed in the interests of business.
Business-Managed Democracy : The Trade Agenda, Sharon Beder
Business-Managed Democracy : The Trade Agenda, Sharon Beder
Sharon Beder
The architecture of global governance that has emerged in the past two decades has been strongly influenced by transnational policy actors. This article examines the role of transnational corporate agency in social policy by focusing in particular on the role of business coalitions, elite networking bodies and policy planning groups in fostering unity amongst corporate actors and enrolling political actors into managing democracies in the interests of business. The example of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) and the World Trade Organization (WTO) is used to examine how corporate agency is wielded through elite networking organizations and how …
Neoliberalism And The Global Financial Crisis, Sharon Beder
Neoliberalism And The Global Financial Crisis, Sharon Beder
Sharon Beder
The new right advocated policies that aided the accumulation of profits and wealth in fewer hands with the argument that it would promote investment, thereby creating more jobs and more prosperity for all. However financial markets provide opportunities for investment without creating jobs and, as the global financial crisis has revealed, speculative investment feeds an ephemeral prosperity that can be wiped out in a short time period. Inequities resulting from new right policies – including the deregulation of labour markets and the reduction of government spending – reduced consumer demand which had to be propped up with consumer credit and …
Balancing Bias In The Media, Sharon Beder
Balancing Bias In The Media, Sharon Beder
Sharon Beder
The news is presented to give the impression it is factual, uncoloured by journalistic bias, so each side of a controversy is accurately reported. This paper outlines the way that the influence of editors, owners, advertisers – as well as journalistic conventions – are more important to the final result of journalism than the reporting skills or biases of individual journalists.
The Corporate Agenda For Environmental Property Rights, Sharon Beder
The Corporate Agenda For Environmental Property Rights, Sharon Beder
Sharon Beder
Market and property-rights based approaches to environmental problems have been heavily promoted by conservative think tanks. Consequently policies such as emissions trading, water markets, tradeable fishing quotas and conservation banking pervade environmental policy in English speaking nations. They have enabled the corporate neo-liberal agenda of deregulation, privatisation and an unconstrained market to be dressed up as an environmental virtue. This market-faith based approach is proving to be largely ineffective at protecting the environment and also inequitable.
Market Mechanisms, Ecological Sustainability And Social Equity, Sharon Beder
Market Mechanisms, Ecological Sustainability And Social Equity, Sharon Beder
Sharon Beder
In most cases the use of market mechanisms to protect the environment aim to maximise economic efficiency rather than environmental effectiveness or equity. The use of emissions trading to reduce greenhouse gases in the atmosphere is used as a case study to demonstrate this.
Neoliberal Think Tanks And Free Market Environmentalism, Sharon Beder
Neoliberal Think Tanks And Free Market Environmentalism, Sharon Beder
Sharon Beder
[Extract] The root of the environmental problem, however, is the priority given to economic considerations over environmental considerations. Economic instruments, privatisation and environmental ‘valuation’ ensure that priority is still given to economic goals and they enable firms to make decisions that affect others on the basis of their own economic interests. Even if those economic interests have been slightly modified to give a small economic value to environmental impacts, the basic paradigm remains unchanged: whenever big profits can be made the environment will be destroyed.
Neo-Liberal Think Tanks And Neo-Liberal Restructuring: Learning The Lessons From Project Victoria And The Privatisation Of Victoria's Electricity Industry, Damien Cahill, Sharon Beder
Neo-Liberal Think Tanks And Neo-Liberal Restructuring: Learning The Lessons From Project Victoria And The Privatisation Of Victoria's Electricity Industry, Damien Cahill, Sharon Beder
Sharon Beder
In 1990, neo-liberal think tanks the Institute of Public Affairs and the Tasman Institute collaborated with 13 employer associations to form 'Project Victoria' - a venture which outlined a neo-liberal agenda for the incoming Victorian (Coalition) Government. This article analyses Project Victoria and the privatisation of Victoria's electricity industry as a case study of the impact of neo-liberal think tanks. The analysis of Project Victoria highlights three main aspects of the impact of neo-liberal think tanks in contemporary Australia. First, neo-liberal think tanks are inextricably bound to the interests of business. Second, neo-liberal think tanks provide a broad framework within …
Beyond Technicalities: Expanding Engineering Thinking, Sharon Beder
Beyond Technicalities: Expanding Engineering Thinking, Sharon Beder
Sharon Beder
Engineering appears to be at a turning point. It is evolving from an occupation that provides employers and clients with competent technical advice to a profession that serves the community in a socially responsible manner. Traditional engineering education caters to the former ideal, whereas increasingly both engineers themselves and their professional societies aspire to the latter. Employers are also requiring more from their engineering employees than technical proficiency. A new educational approach is needed to meet these changing requirements. It is no longer sufficient, nor even practical, to attempt to cram students full of technical knowledge in the hope that …
Moulding And Manipulating The News, Sharon Beder
Moulding And Manipulating The News, Sharon Beder
Sharon Beder
The media are accused of bias by people from both ends of the political spectrum, but journalists, editors and owners maintain that they provide an objective source of news. This chapter will consider the ways in which the news is shaped and how this in turn influences the way environmental issues are reported and constructed in the mass media.
Environmentalists Help Manage Corporate Reputation: Changing Perceptions Not Behaviour, Sharon Beder
Environmentalists Help Manage Corporate Reputation: Changing Perceptions Not Behaviour, Sharon Beder
Sharon Beder
Environmentalists have traditionally drawn attention to environmental problems by highlighting corporate misdeeds and thereby damaged the good reputation of those companies. However, nowadays those very corporations are drawing on environmentalists to help repair their reputations. Nike and BP are two examples of companies that have adopted some environmental reforms as part of their reputation management strategies and received the praise of environmental groups for doing so. Yet both continue with the practices that earned them poor reputations in the first place. Clearly the role of environmentalists in working with such companies is misguided and ineffective in terms of long-term environmental …
Drug Companies And Schizophrenia: Unbridled Capitalism Meets Madness, L. R. Mosher, R. Gosden, Sharon Beder
Drug Companies And Schizophrenia: Unbridled Capitalism Meets Madness, L. R. Mosher, R. Gosden, Sharon Beder
Sharon Beder
While the major thrust of this volume is an examination of the psychosocial origins and approaches to dealing with the problem labeled as “schizophrenia” it must also provide a historical context and examine critically how the current complete domination of schizophrenia’s “treatment” by the neuroleptic drugs (we’ll use this term and antipsychotic interchangeably) came to be. Not only do they dictate practice but they also buttress the biomedical theorizing that dominates thinking about the problem.
Corporate Propaganda And Global Capitalism - Selling Free Enterprise?, Sharon Beder
Corporate Propaganda And Global Capitalism - Selling Free Enterprise?, Sharon Beder
Sharon Beder
This chapter examines the way in which capitalism has been underpinned by a self-conscious propaganda campaign on the part of the world’s major corporate powers. Corporations have used a variety of propaganda techniques not only to dominate markets but also to attempt to monopolise the realm of ideas where dissent and alternate voices might be heard (Beder 2002; Ewen 1996). The rise of corporate propaganda since the 1970s has been particularly aimed at selling the idea of free, unregulated business enterprise and an accompanying policy agenda that facilitates the expansion and spread of global capitalism. Ideas associated with the maintenance …
The Corporate Assault On Democracy, Sharon Beder
The Corporate Assault On Democracy, Sharon Beder
Sharon Beder
The revolutionary shift that we are witnessing at the beginning of the 21st Century from democracy to corporate rule is as significant as the shift from monarchy to democracy, which ushered in the modern age of nation states. It represents a wholesale change in cultural values and aspirations.
Electricity: The Global Impact Of Power Reforms, Sharon Beder
Electricity: The Global Impact Of Power Reforms, Sharon Beder
Sharon Beder
Dozens of governments have embarked on the pathway to electricity deregulation and privatisation since the mid-1990s. It has become the accepted wisdom amongst governments and opinion leaders despite the consequent price rises and disasters that have followed in its wake: the series of blackouts that have been experienced from Buenos Aires to Auckland; the government bailouts of electricity companies that have been necessary in California and Britain; the need for electricity rationing in Brazil; and the fact that it has become too expensive for millions of people from India to South Africa.