Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: Over the past three decades, business and professional intermediaries have become key players in the governance of the global political economy. These agents, which include accounting firms, credit-rating firms, corporate law firms, business consulting firms, and financial market regulators, are omnipresent in the making of major business deals, structuring corporate governance, allocating corporate finance, and shaping the priorities and strategies of public policy-making. To this point, however, scholars have only begun the task of understanding who these intermediaries are and what they do. In this paper, I develop a framework for analyzing the contemporary role of business and professional intermediaries. This framework draws heavily on the literature on networks and norm diffusion, and provides an orientation for ongoing research on the ways in which intermediaries are implicated in the governance of the global economy, while exploring the similarities and differences in the roles played by intermediaries. My overall analysis suggests that these actors are particularly crucial in the application of norms to specific problems and contexts, and in the monitoring of business and policy practice. I apply this framework to the role of private lawyers and law firms in the global political economy, with a focus on transnational competition policy. The paper concludes with a consideration of how the study of business intermediaries can inform our understanding of the role of networks in shaping the use of power in the global system.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: Using data collected from a national survey of the American electorate immediately after the 2004 election, this paper provides a first cut examination of the role the “intermediation system” of media, political organizations, and personal discussion networks may have played in the presidential contest. The study both supports and challenges the conventional wisdom about 2004. The major political parties were unusually active at the grass roots in mobilizing voters, but they courted many of the same voters rather than only their loyalists. Labor unions followed their expected pattern of grassroots activity, but in 2004 they were joined by churches, especially evangelical and Catholic churches in which the congregation was politically homogeneous. The paper also shows that the intermediation system may have contributed to polarization of the electorate in 2004 as well. An aggressively partisan new media – especially talk radio and television, the Internet, and some new television news shows – has provided powerful media reinforcement for partisan positions in contrast to an old media that provided more balanced information about the candidates and parties during the campaign. Personal discussion networks too seem to have become more homogeneous for the most partisan voters.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: There has been a significant rise of the ‘service class’ worldwide today, which has been driven partly by the global significance of tourism. Today, Hong Kong’s service-oriented economy and vast consumer culture continue to accelerate in the age of rapid socio-economic integration into the Pearl River Delta region (PRD), resulting in a dynamic cultural belt. This paper focuses on tourist service providers as special ‘agents of cultural circulation’ whose occupations, work routines, cultural knowledge, social discourses, and self-identities are situated between the production and consumption of tourism, between supply and demand, ‘the cultural’ and ‘the economic.’ It explores their significant role as ‘cultural intermediaries’ defined as a unique class of creative practitioners involved chiefly in the provision of symbolic goods and services.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: Since the 1960s, a succession of job-training and workforce development initiatives for the disadvantaged have been put in place: Manpower, the Comprehensive Employment and Training Act (CETA), the Job Training Partnership Act (JTPA), and the Workforce Investment Act (WIA). At the same time, the overall structure of public services for the poor and disadvantaged has been fundamentally restructured. Community based service agencies have grown dramatically in number and diversity of service orientation during the last 30 years. Public agencies at the state and local level were split and reorganized so that by the early 1990s, separate agencies for income maintenance, child welfare, job training, community and economic development were often the norm in many states. A set of diversified local municipal agencies responsible for helping the disadvantaged further complicates the overall service system. As this service system was becoming more fragmented and complex, expectations on the performance of job training programs (and services in general) have become much higher. Compounding these problems in the delivery of services were changes in the labor market including: the increased geographic separation between many disadvantaged workers and potential jobs; the decline of many manufacturing firms; and the growing diversity of the disadvantaged workforce. These changes in the labor market meant that the fragmented, disjointed service system was even more unsuited for effective performance than in the past. In response, a consensus emerged that effective workforce systems were based on collaborative productive relationships between government, nonprofit service providers and business and a transparent system of services based on outcomes. Services needed better integration and a much better match was required between the job-seeker and potential employers. Helping to provide this match would be third party public and private intermediaries such as community-based service organizations or new coordinating entities. While a consensus emerged throughout the country among policymakers and scholars on this new approach, significant barriers to its full achievement exist. Yet, indicators of success in the creation of this type of system are developing, offering real prospects for fundamental changes to workforce development systems. This paper focuses on the reform of workforce systems in Seattle since the early 1990s and major public and private efforts to develop more effective, integrated workforce systems. An important player in this change effort is the intermediary, Seattle Jobs Initiative (SJI) but many other players exist including community based organizations (CBOs), the nonprofit Seattle King County Workforce Development Council and state and local agencies, especially those agencies involved with the implementation of welfare reform. Key conclusions of the paper are that CBOs and intermediary programs like Seattle Jobs Initiative can successfully achieve positive change in the structure of the workforce development system. But important challenges and obstacles remain, including the organizational capacity of CBOs, the reluctance of private business and community colleges to actively collaborate, and ongoing funding constraints.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: The creation and maintenance of reputation is one of the central underpinnings of global governance. Much of the infrastructure of modern commerce is built on reputational intermediaries that make transactions possible between parties who have no knowledge of each other in the shareholder-centric form of capitalism. Internationally, these reputational intermediaries constitute a hidden global governance, influencing policy and process where there is a desire to engage with the global economy dominated by the shareholder form. Examples include law and accounting firms, investment analysts, consultants and the major debt rating agencies.

This paper argues that reputation produces epistemic authority, in the sense of consequential speech, which influences the parameters of policy-making. This mechanism, and the occult network of global governance it contributes to, is a major but neglected feature of global public policy-making. Secondly, the paper charts the vulnerabilities of occult global governance to corrosion and collapse. Although authority relationships based on reputation are not ones of persuasion, authority remains vulnerable to crisis when the reputational capital which underpins it is challenged by developments. The paper will discuss the circumstances that can give rise to the corrosion of authority among reputational intermediaries, and those that actually cause a collapse in an agent of occult global governance, incorporating evidence from the corporate bankruptcies of 2001/2002.