7 - Conclusion

Summary

I began this book with a comparison of business' positions in contentious and private politics in the United States from the late 1970s onward. In contentious politics, business went from worrying about being “rolled up and put in the trash” to quote Procter & Gamble's chief representative in Washington, DC, Bryce Harlow, in the early 1970s (Berman 1998, 25) to, by the early 1980s, enjoying a friendlier political environment created through a significant investment in its political capacity. In contrast to these efforts to limit formal regulation, firms substantially increased their self-regulation through private policymaking during this time period. Chapter 1 and Chapters 3 through 6 documented how this trend unfolded starting in the late 1970s and showed how American firms moved beyond traditional forms of corporate welfare and corporate social responsibility to engage in private policymaking at higher rates and in more diverse and sophisticated ways.

As I argue throughout this book, these two patterns cannot be analyzed separately. Firms' decisions in contentious and private politics cannot be divorced from one another, as private policymaking is just as much a product of politics as it is of market forces, and decisions in private politics have profound impacts on how contentious politics unfolds. This interrelation highlights how firms need to strategize across both of these realms simultaneously and how important external political factors are to firm decision-making.