Earth Incorporated: Centralization and Variegation in the Global Company Network
研究发现全球205家最大公司中四分之三通过集中持股连接成一个单一网络，核心是美国基金管理者，外围是多样化的国家资本主义，挑战了全球化即市场化的普遍假设。
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.