Academia
A few handfuls of scholars have contributed academically to the understanding of State capture and a subset of them have addressed corporate capture from one angle or another.
A good bibliography of academic contributions can be found in “The Mexican Council of Businessmen: Business Politics, Elites, and Decision-‐Making in Mexico.” Otherwise, among the subset of scholars who address corporate capture in their work, an even smaller portion employs social network analysis and relational mapping (e.g. power mapping) to visualize the data. Key contributions in this area include Julián Cárdenas (Universidad de Valencia), Armando Razo (Indiana University), Alejandra Salas-Porras (Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México), and Benjamin Cokelet (Project on Organizing, Development, Education, and Research [PODER] and Empower, formerly New York University).
Of these contributions, the work of Cárdenas is indicative of the power of mapping and visualization within the context of corporate capture, as follows:
- “Manual de Curso: Elites y desarrollo”: Regarding the corporate capture of the State, “[It] may be for Latin American business elites a lifeline to maintain their positions of power, market privileges, economic growth, and political, social, and ideological influence. Therefore, the mechanisms of the corporate capture of the State, such as revolving doors and financing of electoral campaigns, take on a determining role, especially during electoral periods. All over the world, companies (and other agents) seek to influence the rules of the game determined by the State for their growth, development, and well-being. The difference between Latin America and other regions, is that, in Latin America, the high concomitance between business and political elites has not led to high economic and social development and, therefore, we must ask ourselves why some countries grow and others do not.”
- El Poder Económico Mundial: “The objective of this research is to find out how large companies and their elites organize themselves through the study of corporate networks of ‘interlocking directorates’ (relationships between companies when a manager or director simultaneously belongs to several boards of directors). After carrying out a comparative analysis of corporate networks among a large number of countries, this work explains the differences and similarities based on the institutional environment of corporations. It then presents and exposes the various ways of organizing the economy, known as varieties of capitalism. Finally, it explores corporate networks at the international level to demonstrate the existence of transnational economic power. By studying the networks of global economic power and understanding how large companies and their elites are organized and related, we better understand how the world works: international relations, state interventions in the economy, privatizations of public companies, the banking system, the crisis, the construction of Europe, globalization, and the future that awaits us.”
- Select examples of social network visualizations: