Name this area of study
October 26, 2010 3:08 PM Subscribe
I'm interested in the intersection of corporations and government. I come from a legal background What area of study would you class this as, and what reading could you give me? Bonus points for UK-specific, but US and global are fine as well.
Specifically, I think that my interests lie towards:
- Influence of corporations on government policy and legislation, both direct and indirect
- How the structure of government institutions and the manner of government allows/prevents this
- Quantification of the results (both in terms of for the corporations and the voting populace) of this intersection
Specifically, I think that my interests lie towards:
- Influence of corporations on government policy and legislation, both direct and indirect
- How the structure of government institutions and the manner of government allows/prevents this
- Quantification of the results (both in terms of for the corporations and the voting populace) of this intersection
Hi OP,
I can't point you to anything specifically fabulous, but I'm in law school and can at least identify this area of study, from a legal perspective. You should check out reading on administrative law.
Administrative law is basically the study of regulatory agencies (in the US, these are mostly established under the executive power, and with varying levels of autonomy). In the US, in a ridiculously-reduced format, generally what happens is: Congress decides to regulate an industry or an area, so it passes a broad set of laws setting up regulatory guidelines. (say, The Clean Air Act, or the Clean Water Act). It delegates some rule-setting authority, and often enforcement authority, to an Agency (in our hypothetical, the EPA). The agency then studies the broad guidelines and produces a series of more specific rules, setting various industry standards, etc. The agency then proceeds to enforce these standards.
Each area of regulation is an entire field of study (environmental law, in our example). But "Administrative Law", more generally, is the study of how these rules are given by congress to the agencies, what the agencies can and cannot do with them, how the agencies can enforce them, etc.
And some material you can find in this general subject area definitely focuses on some of the more specific points you are searching for. For instance, there is a lot of scholarship on the idea of "capture". That is, government agencies need to have detailed knowledge about an industry in order to properly regulate it. As a result, the agency will hire people from these industries, and the agency will also work side by side with the industries on a regular basis. Some people believe that this interaction between agency and private industry leads to problems, since agencies won't want to harshly regulate these industries they are closely tied to. This is what scholars in the legal field refer to as "capture", since the industry has "captured" the regulatory agency.
posted by HabeasCorpus at 4:01 PM on October 26, 2010
I can't point you to anything specifically fabulous, but I'm in law school and can at least identify this area of study, from a legal perspective. You should check out reading on administrative law.
Administrative law is basically the study of regulatory agencies (in the US, these are mostly established under the executive power, and with varying levels of autonomy). In the US, in a ridiculously-reduced format, generally what happens is: Congress decides to regulate an industry or an area, so it passes a broad set of laws setting up regulatory guidelines. (say, The Clean Air Act, or the Clean Water Act). It delegates some rule-setting authority, and often enforcement authority, to an Agency (in our hypothetical, the EPA). The agency then studies the broad guidelines and produces a series of more specific rules, setting various industry standards, etc. The agency then proceeds to enforce these standards.
Each area of regulation is an entire field of study (environmental law, in our example). But "Administrative Law", more generally, is the study of how these rules are given by congress to the agencies, what the agencies can and cannot do with them, how the agencies can enforce them, etc.
And some material you can find in this general subject area definitely focuses on some of the more specific points you are searching for. For instance, there is a lot of scholarship on the idea of "capture". That is, government agencies need to have detailed knowledge about an industry in order to properly regulate it. As a result, the agency will hire people from these industries, and the agency will also work side by side with the industries on a regular basis. Some people believe that this interaction between agency and private industry leads to problems, since agencies won't want to harshly regulate these industries they are closely tied to. This is what scholars in the legal field refer to as "capture", since the industry has "captured" the regulatory agency.
posted by HabeasCorpus at 4:01 PM on October 26, 2010
This thread is closed to new comments.
You'd deal with exactly these topics in the second or third year of a political science or government major in an Australian university, or in much more detail in a Masters of public policy or public administration.
posted by Fiasco da Gama at 3:57 PM on October 26, 2010