Neoliberalism as Corporate Power

Accounts of neoliberalism have noted, but not fully explored, the neoliberal empowerment of corporations. The corporate power literature, similarly, rarely makes the connection between corporate agents and neoliberalism as a power structure. This article fills the gap between these literatures with a dual contribution. It develops these contributions by first reviewing the neoliberalism literature and in so doing, developing the idea of neoliberalism as a bricolage of practice and ideas. It then discusses the mischaracterization of the corporation within neoliberalism before deconstructing four core policy areas of neoliberalism – deregulation, non-intervention, free markets and free trade. In each policy area it is shown how the practice of these policies has enhanced the social and economic power of major corporations – thereby deepening practice-based accounts of neoliberalism – and how the discourse of these policies has empowered corporations in the political arena – thereby deepening the corporate power literature’s account of how corporations operate powerfully. More generally this article offers a much fuller account of how 40 years of ‘free market’ policies have resulted in the creation of oligopolistic corporate economies.