Earth Incorporated: Centralization and Variegation in the Global Company Network

Daniel Haberly and Dariusz Wójcik

Economic Geography, 2017, vol. 93, issue 3, 241-266

Abstract: Over the past twenty years, a widening gulf has appeared between the increasingly internationalized financing arrangements of the world’s leading corporations and the persistence of nationally compartmentalized approaches to the study of corporate control. In lieu of direct empirical evidence on corporate control at the global level, the most widespread assumption is that the globalization of ownership has taken the form of an expansion of arm’s-length, market-based arrangements traditionally prevailing in the Anglo-American economies. Here, however, we challenge this assumption, both empirically and conceptually. Empirically, we show that three-quarters of the world’s 205 largest firms by sales are linked to a single global company network of concentrated (5 percent) ownership ties. This network has a hierarchically centralized organization, with a dominant global network core of US fund managers ringed by a more geographically diverse state capitalist periphery. Conceptually, we argue that the this architecture can be broadly explained through a Polanyian variegated capitalist model of contradictory market institutionalization, with the formation of the global company network actually a counterintuitive product of global financial marketization. In order to understand this process of network formation, however, it is necessary to extend Polanyi’s model of a double movement, mediated through political interventions in the market, to incorporate Veblenian processes of evolutionary institutional change, mediated through the market.

Date: 2017
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (9)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/00130095.2016.1267561 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:taf:recgxx:v:93:y:2017:i:3:p:241-266

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/recg20

DOI: 10.1080/00130095.2016.1267561

Access Statistics for this article

Economic Geography is currently edited by James Murphy

More articles in Economic Geography from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().