Organized Business Interests in Changing Environments

Over the past few decades the political systems in advanced industrial societies have sailed through turbulent times. The globalization and liberalization of markets -- driven in part by a revolution in communication technologies -- coincided with an unprecedented mobility of capital, goods and services as well as increasing dependence of national polities on political and economic processes beyond their immediate control. Although these changes did not seal the end of the nation state, as some alarmist accounts had predicted, it undoubtedly transformed political power structures. An important question is how this deep structural change has affected the political sub-system of associational interest intermediation. The authors follow up that question by leaning on established accounts of collective action research and including more recent insights from organization theory, evolutionary theory and network analysis. They present empirical results having been obtained from hundreds of interviews with CEOs of business associations in the US, Britain, Germany, Switzerland and Austria. The core sectors are chemicals and information and communication technologies. There are also chapters on automotives and the dairy industry.