Minorités et pouvoir dans les pays anglophones November 20, 2008
Caen, Lower Normandy
David Miller will deliver a keynote address at Minorités et pouvoir dans les pays anglophones.
The paper is co-written with William Dinan
Abstract:
This paper will address the role of lobbying under neoliberalism. It will draw on examples at multiple levels of governance (Scotland, the UK, the EU and global governance) and examine the way in which lobbying plays into relations between majority/minority and special interests/general interest. In particular it will examine corporate power - the power of the 'minority' of owners and agents of Capital pursuing special interests as opposed to general interests.
The paper provides a critique of contemporary approaches to lobbying by advancing a communicative approach. It distinguishes between two sorts of lobbying – however entwined in practice – firstly, lobbying for specific interests of a corporation or industrial sector and secondly classwide processes of putting in place the architecture of global power relations.
Lobbying, it is argued is a process of elite communication and a means of protecting elite discourse from contamination from popular pressures. It is a means of putting in place specific ways of understanding and operating which suit the classwide interests of the corporations. This paper sees lobbying as a significant area of study for sociology and thus deals with the major ways of explaining lobbying in various other disciplines (including in Economics, political science and management).
It focuses on lobbying as communicative action in context and thus draws on power structure research, critical (global) political economy and media and communication studies. In the context of debates about neoliberalism it sees lobbying as both a question of competitive advantage and of structural transformation of the architecture of global and national governance.
Added by Spinwatch.org on October 4, 2008