This volume of "Research in Political Sociology" focuses on one of the central themes in political sociology: the relationship between political power and the policy formation process. The first section examines the exercise of power in two distinct policy arenas: the interlocking networks among policy-planning organizations, and the effects of PACs on the voting behavior of elected officials in Canada and the U.S. In contrast to corporate interlocking directorates, although a shift to the right occurred in the 1980s and 1990s, board interlocks of policy-planning organizations are relatively stable over time. The second article shows that PACs affect voting behavior of U.S. elected officials, but they have little influence on voting in Canada's House of Commons. This suggests that the structure of the state affects the capacity of elites to exercise power over it.The second section examines the capacity of theories in economic sociology to explain the social organization of capitalism. The authors move beyond the current institutional frameworks by elaborating how the generic tendencies and contradictions of capitalism generate political conflicts and outcomes. This framework also stresses how organizational and institutional structures, class conflict, logics of action, and the contradictions of capitalism shape and limit the options that are available to social actors. The articles in the third section examine the effects of labor and community based political strategies on policy outcomes. These articles identify the contingent basis of political behavior and show how social structures and historical conditions create both opportunities for and limitations on the exercise power.Whereas the legal structure of labor relations in the U.S. limited the capacity of workers to mobilize, the flexibility of community-based coalitions increased their capacity to form coalitions to mobilize politically. Together, the articles in this volume show that political struggles are integral to capitalist society. These struggles take a range of forms and the outcomes are affected by the historically specific organizational and institutional arrangements in which they are embedded.

The articles in this volume directly or indirectly examine central tenets of neoliberalism: interference with market mechanisms is the cause of poor economic performance, and returning to market fundamentalism will restore prosperity. Despite these bold claims, scholars have not examined the extent to which neoliberal policies result in positive outcomes or whether economic successes are explained by neoliberalism. This volume of Research in Political Sociology assesses these neoliberal claims. The introductory article compares classical liberalism to neoliberalism, and summarizes the political-legal changes in corporations??? environment and the redistribution of income and wealth from the mid-1970s to the present in the United States. The first part of this volume examines the effects of neoliberal policies on higher education in the state of Missouri and workers??? health in Canada, and whether neoliberalism can explain changes in social service provisions and economic development initiatives by local US governments. The second part of this volume examines how the politics of neoliberal reforms affected polices of racial redress in Fuji and Tanzania, and the capacity of neoliberalism to explain economic development and change in the organization of business enterprises in China and India. Together, these articles find little support for the claims of neoliberalism, which suggests that liberalism is better understood as an ideology than as a theory.

This volume focuses on the ways in which corporations exercise political power, and how changes in the political-legal arrangements in which corporations are embedded affect their organizational behavior. Drawing from a range of theoretical perspectives, the articles in this collection further our understanding of political capitalism, the utilization of political outlets to attain conditions of stability, predictability, and security in the economy and to preserve the social relations in capitalist society. Corporations exercise political and economic power to establish public policies that facilitate rationalization of the economy: creating the political, economic and ideological conditions that are intended to advance their capital accumulation agendas. By examining the historical and dialectical relationship between the corporation and the state, the authors identify conditions within which capitalists mobilize politically to define and redefine the institutional arrangement in which they are embedded. However, the capitalist class and corporate management do not always have a coherent conception of the relationships between their economic goals and the means necessary to achieve those goals. Thus, in addition to the intended consequences of corporate political mobilization, these articles show that rationalization is a historical process that is characterized by contradictions and unintended consequences.

Scholars, political leaders, and members of the business community tend to narrowly focus on globalization as an economic phenomenon. Even critics of globalization focus on the economic dimension of recent transformations of the global system. As a result, little attention has been given to the political responses to globalization. This volume attempts to fill that gap in the literature by examining how classes and other groups respond politically to economic globalization. Drawing on a range of theoretical perspectives, the articles in this volume empirically examine the political response to globalization in diverse geographic and historical contexts.
The contributors to this volume analyze the interrelationships between political protest against trade liberalization in the U.S. and the repressive policies of the Bush administration, the effects of business elites on the 1998 presidential election in Venezuela, how politically excluded classes in nondemocratic settings in the global periphery used civil organizations to engage in large-scale collective action, the class struggle over urban development in downtown Mexico City, how fast track state structures created opportunities for the capitalist classes to influence the outcome of the NAFTA negotiations, how class-based accounts of intercorporate networks affect U.S. trade policy, and how the pending realization crisis and environmental destruction challenge the fundamental idea of a global consumer society.
By examining the relationships between politics and globalization in these historically and geographical diverse settings and identifying the conditions within which political behavior occurs, these articles makeimportant contributions to advancing our understanding how globalization structures and processes are politically constructed.
*Examines the political responses to globalization as opposed to only the economic effects
*Cites well-known historical examples and discusses their importance
*An important contribution to our understanding of globalization impacts

In Normalized Financial Wrongdoing, Harland Prechel examines how social structural arrangements that extended corporate property rights and increased managerial control opened the door for misconduct and, ultimately, the 2008 financial crisis. Beginning his analysis with the financialization of the home-mortgage market in the 1930s, Prechel shows how pervasive these arrangements had become by the end of the century, when the bank and energy sectors developed political strategies to participate in financial markets. His account adopts a multilevel approach that considers the political and legal landscapes in which corporations are embedded to answer two questions: how did banks and financial firms transition from being providers of capital to financial market actors? Second, how did new organizational structures cause market participants to engage in high-risk activities? After careful historical analysis, Prechel examines how organizational and political-legal arrangements contribute to current record-high income and wealth inequality, and considers societal preconditions for change.

In Normalized Financial Wrongdoing, Harland Prechel examines how social structural arrangements that extended corporate property rights and increased managerial control opened the door for misconduct and, ultimately, the 2008 financial crisis. Beginning his analysis with the financialization of the home-mortgage market in the 1930s, Prechel shows how pervasive these arrangements had become by the end of the century, when the bank and energy sectors developed political strategies to participate in financial markets. His account adopts a multilevel approach that considers the political and legal landscapes in which corporations are embedded to answer two questions: how did banks and financial firms transition from being providers of capital to financial market actors? Second, how did new organizational structures cause market participants to engage in high-risk activities? After careful historical analysis, Prechel examines how organizational and political-legal arrangements contribute to current record-high income and wealth inequality, and considers societal preconditions for change.