Periodic Reporting for period 1 - REBALANCE (Rebalancing disruptivE Business of multinAtional corporation and gLobal value chAins within democratic and iNClusive citizenship processes)
Período documentado: 2022-10-01 hasta 2023-09-30
While globalization, financialization and monopolies increasingly weaken democracies, large companies are having an ever-greater influence on how democracy is enacted in Europe, leading to a ‘market-conforming capitalism’. Firms are eluding regulation, lobbying for their own rather than citizens’ interest, abusing human rights and push the abused to withdraw from democratic processes, fueling populism. Some economic actors are experimenting with alternative models and demonstrating more interest in sustainability and tentative routes toward an alternative “democracy-conforming capitalism”. In this debate, the application of political-science lenses has black-boxed large companies, while the viewpoint of management scholars has usually considered firms’ economic gains rather than impact on society and democracy. This has left a gap in our understanding of the mutual influence among large companies and democracies.
The REBALANCE project will fill this gap by investigating how large companies have contributed to past and present threats to democracy and how they can promote future democracy, enhancing different business models and alternative organizational forms.
The project aim to identify which is the most effective regulatory control of economic actors, which avoids anti-democratic distortions and reveals human rights violators, and what makes large firms accept or resist such control and which are the most effective ways to tackle (self-)exclusion from the democratic participation of victims of business-related human rights infringements and other marginalized categories, relying on empowerment centered partnerships between firms and other entities (e.g. NGOs).
REBALANCE will also investigate whether and how companies respond to populisms, and how alternative organizational forms such as social enterprises might embed and foster democracy.
The expected project outcomes are in line with the call for: ‘Theoretically and empirically robust recommendations aiming to instill greater democratic accountability and inclusion in economic processes'.
The REBALANCE project will fill this gap by investigating how large companies have contributed to past and present threats to democracy and how they can promote future democracy, enhancing different business models and alternative organizational forms.
The project aim to identify which is the most effective regulatory control of economic actors, which avoids anti-democratic distortions and reveals human rights violators, and what makes large firms accept or resist such control and which are the most effective ways to tackle (self-)exclusion from the democratic participation of victims of business-related human rights infringements and other marginalized categories, relying on empowerment centered partnerships between firms and other entities (e.g. NGOs).
REBALANCE will also investigate whether and how companies respond to populisms, and how alternative organizational forms such as social enterprises might embed and foster democracy.
The expected project outcomes are in line with the call for: ‘Theoretically and empirically robust recommendations aiming to instill greater democratic accountability and inclusion in economic processes'.
After one year of the project, substantial progress has been made towards our objectives and all of our milestones and deliverables for the period have been achieved. The project team has produced a major literature review on democracy and capitalism as a foundation for the project as well as a common vocabulary of relevant terms and concepts and their definitions. Data collection protocols have been established for all of the sub-projects and data collection is well underway to address each of our research questions. The various research terms are all on-target to complete their research by the end of the project.
The literature review revealed a surprising lack of integrated networks of scholars in the study of democracy and capitalism. While there are common topics and journals where scholars interested in these topics publish, there are few connections between the most influential researchers in this field. Some small groups of collaborators exist, but the majority of researchers primarily work with a single partner. Given the importance of collaboration for scientific advancement, this suggests a need for projects such as Rebalance (and funding such as Horizon) to foster these collaborations and advance this field of research. Further results from the project will be reported as the project advances.