Media review - Styhre's The New Corporate Landscape.

Abstract

In this book, the management and organization scholar Alexander Styhre makes a contemporary case for renewed attention to the problem of the concentration of power in the hands of corporations. It is an informative compilation of evidence and thinking about political economy that describes well how a “new corporate landscape” has emerged following the Global Financial Crisis of 2007-09. It details how these developments have disappointed critics of capitalism and financial markets who saw in the crisis a chance for reform. It arrives at an auspicious time, too, when the climate crisis and pandemic are much on our minds. But it would require a fortune teller, not an economic historian or management theorist, to have imagined a Russian invasion of its neighbour Ukraine, with its threat to energy strangulation of European countries, or the resulting imminent risk of a global return to 1970s-style stagflation. These events seem to illustrate the importance of states and the impotence of corporations in the face of global challenges. Is the book, then, accidentally an anachronism? And does its analysis matter to organizations themselves and the scholars who study them?