Leonard Seabrooke L.Seabrooke@warwick.ac.uk

1. International Business in the International System Leonard SeabrookeL.Seabrooke@warwick.ac.uk EleniTsingouE.Tsingou@warwick.ac.uk

2. Course Objectives: • To examine the changing environment for businesses within the international political economy. • To engage critically with the key approaches of International Political Economy in explaining multinational and other business activities and debating their role and influence in the international system. • To develop a critical understanding of the emerging international business agenda

3. Assessment Requirements: • Two 5,000 word essays. • 15 minute presentation for discussion. • 5 minute role as a discussant on a presentation • Essay questions to be distributed or negotiated

4. Readings: • Reading is essential. Otherwise class will be awkward. • Noted core reading that must be read every week. • Everything is online from a Warwick login. • Supplementary reading from independent searches. • Use journals as well as books. Use the library databases.

5. Course Format: • Theories – how do we understand what actors are relevant and how they behave across cases and contexts? • Contexts – in which arenas do these actors operate? • Cases – why do particular theories help us to understand how actors and context interact in particular cases.

6. Theories: • Government – studies of state rivalries • Governance – studies of non-state coordination • Markets – studies of the grounds for behaviour within markets • All are relevant for the contexts and cases. They ask us to specify the different actors and forms of authority, control, and market influence

8. Principal Agent Models of Change: • Peter A. Gourevitch and James Shinn (2005), Political Power and Corporate Control, Princeton, Chapter 1 . • Walter Mattli and Tim Büthe (2003) ‘Setting International Standards: Technological Rationality or Primacy of Power?’, World Politics, Vol. 56, No. 1, pp. 1-42.  • Daniel W. Drezner (2001) ‘Globalization and Policy Convergence’, International Studies Review, Vol. 3, No. 1, pp. 53-78

9. Principal Agent Models of Change: • Stress on strategic interest – actors know what they want. • Stress on public authority as ultimately in charge. • Coalitions fights, domestically or internationally, over how to achieve their pre-defined goals • Institutions exhibit high degrees of path dependence. • Theories of delegation to international regimes • International regimes merely reflect the interests of dominant states.

10. Fields of Governance: • Marie-Laure Djelic and Kerstin Sahlin-Andersson (2005) ‘Transnational Governance in the making – Regulatory Fields and their Dynamics’ 3rd ECPR Conference, Budapest, September • A. Claire Cutler (1999) ‘Locating "Authority" in the Global Political Economy’, International Studies Quarterly, Vol. 43, No. 1, pp. 59-81 • Doris Fuchs (2005) ‘Commanding Heights? The Strength and Fragility of Business Power in Global Politics’, Millennium - Journal of International Studies Vol. 33, No. 3, pp. 771-801

11. Fields of Governance: • “Governance is also about dense organizing, discursive and monitoring activities that embed, frame, stabilize and reproduce rules and regulations” • “We need to find ways to combine and integrate studies of individual behaviors, studies of interactions and processes, together with studies of institutional and cultural forces – the latter shaping and structuring both patterns of behaviors and patterns of interactions” • Marie-Laure Djelic and Kerstin Sahlin-Andersson. .

12. Fields of Governance: • Governance across and between nations. • Allocation of responsibility is fluid, not public or private • Shared authority, or rise of private authority. • Spatial and relational ‘topographies’ ofgovernance. • Translation and hybridization governance processes • Networks underpin governance by class or knowledge. • Cultural and institutional frames matter but change • Instrumentalist, structuralist and discursive types of power in transnational business communities.