Multiplexores de 1 bit y sus expresiones booleanas

In the last section, it was argued that the analysis of the structure/agency relationship in business representation focuses on whether structural changes have damaged business power and whether agency, in form of DIY representation, which also includes the decision to act through collective bodies when suitable, has been able to counteract any negative effects. An argument against assumptions about the power of new actors – and therefore their relevance as opponents – and the

questioning of power as an inflexible and finite resource was put forward. It is now time to analyse the turn to individual representation not as a mechanism for retrieving some lost power but as a way of securing aspects of power accessible to all players.

The departure point is the overlapping conclusion that agency has become crucial for business representation. The next step is to identify the form this agency has taken according to each version. At a first glance, political and economic representation of business seem intrinsically different: in cultural economy, it is the exercise of

managing investors through stories that combine promises and numbers with the aim of smoothing expectations; in political science, it is about using material resources to

influence the political process. In between these two extremes are the roles performed by experts on brand management and public relations.

The nature of the activity and its objectives are therefore dissimilar: one is a proactive and subtle exercise aiming at the creation of connections among actors while the other is a reactive exercise responding to crisis (e.g. increasing attacks on profitability through heightened taxes or regulations). There is, however, an important point: political science identifies two shifts in business representation. The first one, marking the beginning of individual representation, is indeed about a reaction to environmental changes; the second, which overlaps with the starting point of the cultural economy analysis of the 1990s, marks the turn from reactive to proactive political representation: from the ad hoc to a strategic approach to business representation, as Coen and Willman (1998) have phrased it.

Therefore, the 1990s was an important moment for business representation. On the one hand, legitimacy problems started to haunt the European Union, whose reaction was to change its decision making structure to respond to criticism; on the other hand there was the emergence of the so-called industrial compact in which managers accepted regular communication flows and the shareholder value target as the new rules of the game in equity markets. In the UK, the third way of New Labour

established compacts with the voluntary sector. Once again we return to the key point of the last section: the new entrants and the effects of their arrival. This is important because, when the focus was on structural shifts, the impression was that there were the changes in the arenas that allowed the entry of new players. However, when the picture is about the agency of different actors in the 1990s, what one can see is that things happened simultaneously, with a new range of players becoming legitimate enough to challenge incumbent actors.

Civil society groups certainly pointed at the lack of legitimacy of the European Union as a policy making arena, a claim that in many ways was reinforced by the aggressive and growing business lobbying in Brussels – the EU was challenged for being not only undemocratic but also dominated by business interests. In the UK, even if one subscribes to the co-option motive behind the voluntary sector compacts, the very attempt to co-opt reveals the increasing importance of the sector and its criticism. Shareholders and particularly institutional investors, on the other hand, were actively pushing for more direct control of corporate decisions. In other words, all these actors were contesting the role of business in these structures, setting in motion

structural changes that have the potential to alter power relations. New rules at European level and the creation of regulators like the Financial Services Authority (FSA) had the effect of institutionalising and, therefore, further legitimising the importance of these actors and their interests. This makes explaining away the new entrants as powerless even more unconvincing. It is because of their increasing influence that they are allowed to enter the official system.

Central to the agency of these actors has been the challenging of business practices. Demands for accountability were suddenly flooding corporations: about product market decisions affecting society (with the environmental impact of these decisions leading the list), lobbying activities at all levels of the political sphere, strategic business planning (how, when, where to invest) and corporate governance. After being shielded by a discreet form of representation for more than half a century, giant corporations were faced with the need to justify themselves. Making things worse, the criticism does not necessarily go in the same direction: not investing in Canadian tar sands is the answer environmental groups would like to hear from major integrated oil companies but not the right one for analysts worrying about diminishing reserves.

This is the process that Boltanski and Thévenot (1999) describe as a scene, a moment that results from actors realising that something is not working well and demonstrating discontent. The scene, on the other hand, turns into a “discussion in which criticisms, blames and grievances are exchanged”. From this point onwards, both sides are under the “imperative of justification” (Ibidem, p.360) and the only way out of this impasse is to return to agreement. Attempts to do so, according to

Boltanski and Thévenot, involve making references to principles of equivalence, something that is mutually understood and, therefore, susceptible to calculations and comparisons. These ideas are at the core of the main point of this thesis, further developed in the next section: stories are the vehicle through which corporations justify and negotiate their interests in public spheres.