Power in Marketing:

A Broadly Dimensional Approach

© John Desmond

First published, October, 2025

Grianan Publishing,

John’s Brae,

Shrove, ROI, F93E7R9

Cover design, “Feeding Frenzy” © Jean Hall

Chapter Six: One-Dimensional Power: From Dahl to Social Movement Theory

Introduction

The American political theorist Robert Dahl remains as the most significant theorist of liberal power. He is equally well known for his contribution to the liberal understanding of democracy and the preservation of values of equality and freedom, especially for minorities. Dahl advocated the form of democracy called polyarchy, or representative democracy outlined in the last chapter, based on open competition between parties, which he contended is the most appropriate form of democracy for the complex large-scale societies of today. Polyarchy arises in societies made up of a plurality of interests arising from differences in social class, ethnicity and religious and sexual orientation, amongst others.

Dahl experienced a huge number of changes over the course of a long life; as a longshoreman and union activist; a soldier who served in the Second World War; experiencing the postwar consumer boom and subsequent disquiet with big government, big business and marketing practices; the oil-shock of the 1970s and its aftermath; the slow rise of neoliberalsm; the fall of communism and the supposed triumph of democracy; a new wave of globalization, of western de-industrialization and rapid growth in Asia; the spectacular development of the Internet and of the vast corporations that control it; “9/11”; the Gulf War; the Credit Crunch, and its aftermath; subsequent calls for the repatriation of industry to Western countries; growing sensibility to climate borne calamity.¹ Dahl, who, like his predecessor Tocqueville, worried about the tyranny of the majority and thus sought to limit the threat to democracy from populism, died in 2014.

This chapter is divided into three unevenly sized sections in an attempt to render it more readable. Part one outlines Robert Dahl’s theory of power and discusses his views on freedom, the market, corporations and worker democracy in order to provide some balance to the idea that he was a social conservative. Part two offers a basic model of the operation of power in business and marketing as a vehicle to outline the roles played by government, business and interest groups. This is further illustrated through discussion of the ‘McLibel” case which offers a means to critique aspects of Dahl’s theory and to suggest that some of these can be addressed through an approach from social movement theory. Part three, which discusses the international context of power is largely taken up by a case analysis of child labour in Bangladesh. Finally, section four briefly discusses direct action beyond the law and responses to this by the state.

Section One: Robert Dahl on Power

Much has changed in US and world politics in the seventy years and indeed, during his lifetime Dahl, for whom equality and perceived fairness are essential to the preservation of democracy, expressed concern about the threat posed by growing acceptance of arguments for unregulated markets, the rapid growth of unaccountable multinational corporations beyond the reach of national governments, and increasing disparity in income and wealth between rich and poor. These issues are discussed later below in relation to questions of rationality, equality and the size of corporations where Dahl’s arguments are read alongside those of contemporary theorists. First, I briefly describe his study of power.

The New Haven Study

In relation to power, Dahl is best known for conducting the study in New Haven Connecticut to test the hypothesis that community politics is organised by a shadowy business elite. While rigorous, the focus of the research programme on overt behaviour subsequently drew criticism that it ignored machinations behind the scenes to frame the agenda for discussion.Dahl was an empiricist who argued that it is important to learn how democracy works in practice (Mayhew, 2015). He focused on developing big, broad, questions that he sought to answer by formulating propositions, collecting data and subjecting this to quantitative analysis. For instance, he asked whether democracies are more likely to emerge as countries become economically developed or do they emerge independently of this? Research by Chibub et al., (1996) along similar lines found that to expect a country to have a democracy in the coming year, then an existing democracy, affluence, growth with moderate inflation, declining inequality, a favourable international climate and parliamentary institutions are important.² Linked to this, Przeworski (2000) studied the relations between democracy and dictatorship and economic development.

In their study of power, Dahl’s research team utilised a combination of interviews, aggregate voting records, newspaper articles and historical research to test hypotheses on political decision-making in New Haven Connecticut. The choice of this small coastal town makes more sense to the outsider when one learns that New Haven is sometimes referred to as “the greatest small city in America” and is where the research team from Yale University was based. It was widely thought at the time of Dahl’s research that decision making in towns such as New Haven was dominated by a clandestine clique of business interests. Dahl’s team studied the role played by prominent individuals in relation to three issues, utilising a combination of interviews, aggregate voting records, newspaper reports and historical research. Whilst subscribing to a positivist nomothetic approach Dahl’s team employed mixed methods in the New Haven study on power. Graduate students conducted many of the forty-six interviews in addition to which Dahl supervised three sample surveys, leading to the production of detailed event charts. Dahl also used aggregate voting data and an array of material over a century from sources such as the US census, city directories and historical works.³

From this study Dahl rejected the hypothesis that decisions in New Haven were controlled by an elite but rather that power relations changed from a Puritan oligarchy that in the nineteenth century controlled virtually all resources, to the situation prevailing by the mid-twentieth century where power was dispersed between a plurality of groups, defined by social-class, ethnicity, profession and religion, partly because no interviewee hinted at the existence of such a cabal⁴. He concluded from this study that politics in New Haven was characteristic of liberal pluralism, where successful decisions were the outcome of coalitions involving key individuals such as the mayor and representatives of groups with different interests.

Dahl’s Theory of Power

Dahl approach to researching power was positivist, concerned to provide an empirical basis for power in decision-making that enabled this to be observed and measured in practice, as a capacity that is exercised by one individual over another,

My intuitive idea of power is that A has power over B to the extent that he can get B to do something that B would not otherwise do” (Dahl, 1957a: 203/4).

Moreover this relation could be expressed in terms of probabilities;

P1 = The probability that the object actor will act in the desired direction with threat of action.

P2 = The probability that the object actor will act in the desired direction without the threat of action.

M =P1- P2: is a measure of the so-called powerful actor's power.

A’s power over B is at a maximum when P1 = 1 and P2 = 0. When M = 0, no power relation exists. Negative power arises in the situation where P1= 0 and P2 = 1, where B might have acted voluntarily in the direction expected by A, but would be unresponsive to threats from A. This suggests that B will do the opposite of what A’s wants her to do, once B knows A’s intention.

Bases of Power

In chapter one I mentioned Dahl’s example of the power of the professor over her students based on her authority to assign grades. In society at large, wealth and property constitute important bases of power, as wealthy individuals can hire and fire at will and are able effectively to ‘call the shots’ in subtle and not-so-subtle ways over those they wish to silence. In a particularly notorious example, Yevgeniy Prigozhin issued a “Strategic Litigation Against Public Participation” (SLAPP) action against Eliot Higgins of Bellingcat, who had alleged, correctly as it turned out, that Prigozhin was head of the Wagner mercenary group. A legal individual can take an action for libel for two reasons, either to eliminate the action that caused the suit to be raised, or to be awarded of financial compensation for harm caused by the defendants. In a SLAPP action it is only the former reason that matters, which is to ensure that the annoying activities will be discontinued, or that the opposition will be nullified when the very expensive issue in time and resources is brought before the courts. By means of the SLAPP the billionaire Progozhin, (who was actually sanctioned by the UK government at the time), was given free rein to legitimately harassed Higgins and almost ruined him financially, stifling the freedom of Bellingcat to reveal what turned out to be the truth.

Control over information is an important base of power which can range from that exercised by an expert in a particular field, to control of media reporting. Although the circulation of traditional newspapers has fallen sharply in recent years, ownership still enables those who control them access to the heights of government. Rupert Murdoch’s ownership and control of newspapers once garnered him the moniker of “kingmaker” in UK and US elections.⁵ Given their reach the purchase of a newspaper to a foreign national is has been regarded as something to be wary of, so the sale in 2009 of the failing London Evening Standard to “former” member of the Russian intelligence service Alexander Lebedev, for £1 raised eyebrows in Whitehall, despite Lebedev stating that he had no interest in interfering in British politics.⁶

Today one-way communications media such as newspapers and TV are disparaged as “legacy media”, dinosaurs that will soon be extinct in the new Wild West of the information age. Despite its relative recency, the growth in digital media has already had a profound effect on the daily life on the landscape by replacing “bricks and mortar” transactions with online communications, leading to a major shift in crime away from the physical to the virtual arena involving a mixture of escalating “ransomware” attacks on business by a mixture of bored teenagers, criminals and agents from malevolent states, and the duping of millions of consumers by scammers. Most insidiously, and most widely commented upon, is the enablement of the deliberate spread of misinformation by anonymous actors on multiple platforms, from Facebook to X, 4Chan to 8Chan, or from Telegram to WhatAp, alongside tardy and negligable responses to requests to remove it. Driven by algorithms that deliberately promote sensationalist content in chasing ever higher revenues, crpies for help from parents such as those whose teenage children were encouraged to kill themselves online are ignored or whitewashed⁷, while the US President threatens any form of regulation with punitive action. Over and above this is the concern that the collective power of Meta, Amazon, Apple, Netscape and Alphabet is such that this poses a threat to democracy itself.

Dahl mentions looser forms of influence based on esteem, social standing, charisma and popularity. Additionally, some agencies such as the police, customs officers and tax collectors are sanctioned by the state to legitimately infringe on the free action of others in the interest of upholding the law. ⁸ Solidarity, is also important for Dahl as the capacity of one member of society to evoke support from others who identify with that individual by seeing themselves like them in terms of a characteristic such as wealth, ethnicity, or religion.

In marketing contexts Dahl’s conception of power is most often to be found in relation to relations between channel members and is based on the capacity to reward others.⁹ Michman and Sibley (1980), developed from Dahl seven bases of power in the distribution chain. The most important bases in their scheme are material, comprising the size of the firm and its command of resources. Economic bases relate indirectly to the other bases of power. Economic muscle can be leveraged through competitive advantage gained from the development of unique expertise in areas that are crucial to economic success. This success may in turn serve as the basis for emulation by other firms. Once developed, the sheer size and command of resources can then serve as a base to legitimize the establishment of a superior-subordinate relationship. Increased economic power also widens the scope of the firm’s capacity to reward and punish suppliers and others that cross its path. For example, the retail giant Wal-Mart employs millions of people, has a turnover larger than that of many nation states and operates about 5,000 “big-box” stores in the USA which enables it to ‘reward’ firms that agree to work within its extremely tight cost-control policies and delivery schedules. The corporation has the power of life and death over small suppliers, particularly those in industrialising countries. Wal-Mart’s unique knowledge lies in its ability to track real-time logistics and transactions data, an accomplishment that gained it the grudging respect of competitors.

Discussion

While acknowledging the rigour of Dahl’s approach, Clegg (1989, 53) argues that the method Dahl and his team used in the New Haven study did not quite follow the precepts laid down in his work on power; for example, he did not include a comparative case. Moreover, Clegg notes that although Dahl constructs an ‘agency’ explanation of power, his focus, influenced by behaviourism, is entirely on responses to, or the effects of, power. Given this behaviourist influence Dahl was thus loath to incorporate anything ‘within the skin’ into his explanation, such as the intentions of A or B, that must be inferred as they are not open to direct observation. Clegg illustrates his point that this leads to a paradox with an example. Consider that B responds to an A without A having initially done anything overtly that would cause B to act in this way. Clegg asks how, in this situation, could B’s responses be obtained without stimuli or causes, except by means of intentions?¹⁰ Thus, a problem with Dahl’s explanation is that unlike Thomas Hobbes, Max Weber and Denis Wrong, Dahl excludes intentions from his explanation. As we shall see below another major difficulty is that Dahl’s model does not take context into account.

Dahl’s conclusion has also been criticised on the grounds that his framing of pluralism in terms of polyarchy was too narrow, omitting consideration of the exclusion of groups from political representation, the low levels of participation in politics, and the uneven allocation of resources between different groups.¹¹ Where Dahl (1956;1961) had argued that all legitimate groups have the potential to make themselves heard, others warned of the undue influence exerted by wealthy elites and well-organised corporate interests (Domhoff, [1967], 2023).¹²

When I first came across theory of power, I made the mistake of imagining Dahl as a narrow behaviourist, positivist and empiricist. While all of that is indeed the case, when reading his work on politics and the economy more widely, I was surprised to discover a more radical side of his character that is quite different to the caricature. Below I briefly outline some aspects of this in relation to his concept of freedom, the operation of the market, the growing power of corporations and his arguments for the establishment of a worker democracy.

Dahl on Freedom

Although committed to the principal of freedom, MacGilvray (2015) notes the paradox that on the one hand Dahl espoused a negative view of this as freedom-from, while on the other, his arguments for the regulation of business and for other forms of intervention approximate to a positive form of power advocated by civic republicans. Dahl’s conception is negative in two respects; firstly, it is not concerned with enabling ‘the people’ to decide political outcomes, but rather to ensure that no one has unchecked decision-making power; and secondly, it is not concerned with developing people’s capacities to the fullest as is the case with civic republicanism, but rather seeks to ensure the existence of a competitive arena such that no one can impose their will unilaterally on the whole.¹³

The paradox can be partially explained if not resolved by recognising that Dahl refers much more often to the importance of equality for the functioning of democracy and the lack of equality in today’s society. Although a liberal, Dahl was definitely no libertarian, nor did he subscribe to a neoliberal understanding of the economy.

Dahl on the Market

Dahl did not subscribe to the view that politics and the economy are separate spheres of activity¹⁴, to argue instead that their close relation is evident in distinct forms of capitalism that emerged in different social and political contexts, ranging from the heavily taxed and highly redistributive systems prevalent in Scandinavia, where social equality is highly valued, to the low-tax, low-welfare system prevalent in the USA – as is surely now evident more than ever in the era of Trump-47. Indeed he argued that there was ‘a remarkable dearth of studies on the subject” of the relations between business and politics, arguing the need to study the scope and magnitude of corporate influence. He was not only interested to discuss this in relation to “big” politics but also in relation to local communities, for instance,, by noting differences between Aitken, South Carolina, where Dupont executives appeared to dominate the local community in a way that General Electric executives did not, in Schenectady.¹⁵

While broadly subscribing to market principles Dahl differed from neoliberals in several important respects. Firstly, he argued that markets are not natural and do not arise spontaneously, but are historical formations produced by government action. Relatedly, he did not believe that markets are self-regulating, but require intervention from government, for instance, to protect property rights, ensure competitive markets, authorise ownership of economic entities, enforce contracts and prevent monopoly.¹⁶

Dahl made his views on libertarianism plain, referring with a wry sense of humour to the free-market advocate Herbert Spencer in 1884, who complained of “horrendous legislative attacks on the sanctity of the free market” by campaigners who argued that it should be illegal for boys under twelve to be employed labouring in mines, and for the appointment of food safety inspectors.¹⁷ From his analysis of the nineteenth-century British economy, Dahl shared the concern of John Stuart Mill (1848), that the unfettered operation of the market can result in morally repugnant outcomes and that markets must be regulated if they are to operate humanely in a manner conducive to democracy. In these respects, his position seems closer to the position of the German ordoliberals than the neoliberals. From Polanyi, Dahl developed two fundamental axioms; that unregulated markets inevitably inflict harm on some people; and that if people harmed by the market have the freedom to do so, they will attempt to regulate the market to eliminate the harm they perceive.¹⁸

Dahl criticized neoclassical economists’ conception of homo economicus, “as a supremely rational computer” and also because their narrow focus on buyers and sellers in the context of exchange excludes consideration of the wider political context of the citizen. In a paper late into his career, he alluded to the neoliberal assumption of Pareto optimality that markets are more efficient at allocating resources at given prices. While acknowledging the argument that market economies are more efficient at allocating resources at given prices than are command economies, Dahl retorted tongue in cheek that, “If a competitive market economy produces socially optimal outcomes, why have all democratic countries adopted seemingly more inefficient alternatives that necessarily produce suboptimal outcomes?”…(which suggests an), “egregious incapacity of citizens and leaders to make rational judgements”. ¹⁹ He also countered assertions that unregulated market economies allow more room for individual freedom and can build self-reliance, by arguing that those who are damaged by the market will regard such arguments as nothing more than propaganda.

Dahl on the Power of Corporations

Writing early on, Dahl (1958) had argued that corporations can present a serious challenge to democracy because of their command of resources and their unified organization.²⁰ From then on he expressed mounting concern (Dahl, 1989, 1990, Dahl & Levi, 2009), in relation to the power amassed by multinational corporations, for even at the time when he first wrote, capitalism had seriously compromised the democratic process in the USA, undermining political equality by generating massive inequalities in wealth, status, and control of information and enabling the rise of an elite that deploys resources to further its interests over the majority of citizens. Back then Dahl had argued that the growing size and lack of accountability of business posed a direct threat to democratic institutions, as the corporate leviathans of his time and the individuals who managed and owned them were beyond the legal jurisdiction and reach of the nation-state.²¹ He was concerned that not all the democratic institutions in his country operated with the degree of independence accorded to them. For instance, on the basis of his analysis of Supreme Court judgements, Dahl (1957b) held out little hope that the US judiciary would ever act as a brake on the power of the executive, a matter that is nowadays of considerable interest and concern.²²

Dahl would no doubt be dismayed and even shocked by the overt demands and threats made by the Trump-47 regime to governments in the UK, EU and South Korea in seeking to protect the rights of their citizens from the predations of US owned Big Tech. This pressure coincided with EU investigations into X, Apple and Meta.²³ Such is the lack of competitiveness, concentration and unaccountability of this industry that with the overt endorsement of Trump-47 it seems able to act with impunity. Democrats worry that the unelected owners of these corporations have the capacity to control entire markets, posing a threat to democracy through the constant drip-feed of toxic mis-information and the danger this poses to the basic rights of citizens by objectifying them through the collection and sale of their data based on facial recognition and of their everyday habits and social interactions.²⁴

It is worth mentioning that government agencies worked hand-in-glove with business interests even when Dahl first wrote. It is quite likely that he did not know that In 1953, while he was refining his theory of polyarchy, that the CIA successfully put into action plots to overthrow the democratically elected governments of Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh of Iran (with the British) and President Jacobo Arbenz of Guatemala, to serve the respective interests of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (later British Petroleum or BP) and the American Fruit Company, better known to consumers through its brand Chiquita.²⁵ However, surely he must have known something of the CIA involvement in 1970 in the downfall of the democratically elected Allende regime in Chile?²⁶

Dahl On The Need For Worker Democracy.

For Dahl, size matters. He justified polyarchy on the ground that direct democracy is not feasible given the size and complexity of modern society. He similarly argued that the changing size and scope of business organization requires democratic oversight and control as competition between small businesses has given way to oligopolistic competition administered by massive corporations, leading to an unprecedented concentration of wealth and power. That Dahl was not alone amongst theorists in calling out the danger presented by large corporations is evidenced by a quote at the time from Menninger that, ‘political scientists are likely to judge the large corporation’s concentration of resources and wealth to be an anomaly that upsets the balance between democracy and capitalism”.²⁷

Dahl later argued that the corporation is a political system in its own right. Although it is a public institution, the corporation is a hierarchy that eludes democratic standards of accountability even though its leaders hold direct power over employees, consumers suppliers and local communities, and enjoys access to leading politicians and high officials that is denied to the ordinary citizen. He argued that as political systems operating within a democratic polyarchy corporations should be governed by democratic processes.

Similar to J.K. Galbraith, Dahl was concerned by the emergence of a self-serving managerial elite that is autonomous from shareholders and from the public.²⁸ Consequently, he argued the need for ‘serious scrutiny’ of the internal governance of corporations and of their influence on the political system.²⁹ Political scientists needed to better understand what was going on by conducting research into the internal workings of corporations and into their influence on members of the wider political system.³⁰ This remains pertinent today as in recent decades managerial control has been increased through share buybacks linked to increased renumeration for executives. ³¹ Their level of excess was such that it led US Senators Chuck Shumer and Bernie Sanders to write that, “at a time of huge income and wealth inequality, Americans should be outraged that these most profitable companies are laying off workers while spending billions of dollars to boost their share value to further enrich the few.”³² In the face of this massive concentration of wealth and power Dahl called for an economy managed by workers.³³ There was a radical edge to his call for citizens to become more directly engaged in politics when at work and in their own localities as while,

he does not dwell on it, the realization of worker democracy would entail a breathtaking restructuring of American government and society, regardless of which of the various incarnations.³⁴

Moreover, Dahl’s argument to subordinate private property rights to the interests of the larger public would have had profound implications, as to implement these ideas would involve a complete overhaul of private ownership rights.³⁵ Dahl had argued that it was “absurd” to extend Locke’s arguments for private property rights to ownership or control of corporations and that,

any large economic enterprise is in principle a public enterprise. It exists not by private right but only to meet social goals. Questions about these social goals, and the comparative advantages and disadvantages of different forms, are properly in the public domain, matters for public discussion, choice and decision, to be determined collectively by processes that satisfy the criteria of procedural democracy (Theory of Democracy, 746–747).

Hoffman summarizes that, “In other words, a regime of strict property rights may be appropriate for small-scale capitalism, but not for modern, corporate capitalism”,³⁶ and corporations where ownership rights are divorced from managerial control should no longer be treated as private. Even more than instituting local democracy, worker participation would approach the democratic ideal, leading to greater material equality by diffusing the gains from ownership of property more widely, and by halting ever-spiralling differentials between salaries paid to executives and those lower down the scale. For Hoffman, Dahl was caught in a “theoretical bind’, on the one hand by setting out a radical vision for deepening democracy in business and in cities and localities, while on the other, he espoused the liberal belief that individuals know their interest best and from experience, that most individuals suffer from a ‘motivation deficit’, in that they are not particularly concerned to become more involved.³⁷

Section Two: Exploring Power in Business and Marketing

In the New Haven study that informed Who Governs, Dahl (1961) examined decision making in three issue-areas; urban redevelopment, public education, and political party nominations. Those who successfully initiated policy proposals in these areas were judged as being the most influential. Because the scope of Dahl’s theory of power was narrow, involving just two individuals, A and B, it has been used to explore bilateral power relations in business-to-business contexts. For instance, of the many examples In the marketing literature Brier and Stern (1969) discuss the case of a large retailer that chooses to ignore the fair-trade policy of a manufacturer.³⁸ However, relations between business and consumers are more complex as they are mediated in important ways by￼

Figure 6.1: Relations Between Different Interests

Figure 6.1: Relations Between Different Interests

government, as illustrated in the Figure below.

The context includes relations between government, business and representative groups of consumer interests as well as self-appointed groups of individuals who are concerned about the harms done to consumers or to third parties.

Business Consumer Relations

There has been much talk of the “empowered’ consumer in marketing journals in recent years.³⁹ As a consumer I am presumed to be the author of my own satisfaction as the one who ‘co-creates’ the meaning of what I consume, who fabricates an identity from the vast array of goods, services and experiences on offer that provide a ticket for my entry into a particular tribe. While introspection can be frowned upon it is sometimes useful to take one’s own experiences as a starting point to reflect on such matters and I must say that I personally find it difficult to recognize myself in the mirror that marketing holds up to me, which of course may qualify me as an irresponsible consumer.

As a consumer I do not feel powerful especially in relation to two broad categories of business. The first concerns my relations with local tradesmen who are often undependable and who, when they eventually do condescend to show up, seem to think that I have all the time in the world to listen to them spouting opinions that I imagine might have been shared by Genghis Khan. The second category involves remote and often frustrating encounters with utilities and telecoms providers, large corporations and the head-offices of local supermarkets with whom I have an ongoing dispute about their apparently inexhaustible enthusiasm to sheath everything they sell in plastic. At a time of climate crisis when the world is drowning in rubbish, corporations continue to seek to accrue maximum value to themselves by building obsolescence into products such as phones televisions, computers, lawnmowers - the list goes on and on - despite Vance Packard’s exposé of this practice almost seventy years ago.⁴⁰ Then there are the multiform devious means to extract value, such as pack designs engineered to dispense too much, or alternatively are half full of air,

All in all I feel powerless; the tradesmen either ignore my requests or when they do eventually condescend to “squeeze me in”, they often fail to turn up; the retailers communicate replies to my missives in public-relations-speak, quite possibly formulated by an ex-student of marketing communications; the utilities, whose prices are usually within a whisker of each other, brazenly over-charge me unless I devote a half-day to bargaining them down to a still unreasonable offer; and the “customer satisfaction associate” smiles indifferently as I complain that my kettle expired after just two years. My feeling of being patronised when writing to large supermarkets about their extensive use of plastics was reflected in the findings of a large-scale study of business language on the topic which concluded that this constructed a parent-child relation between business and customer.⁴¹

The more I get down to thinking about it the more there is to describe, from the ritual debasement when traveling with budget airlines to the multifarious ways in which peace of mind is hijacked by supraliminal, never mind subliminal messaging, the small frustrations of pack designs with labels at the back in fonts too small to read, and the constant blitz of advertising everywhere all at once. There is the paradox of choice, on the one hand the non-choice signified by the ubiquitous bland retail outlets that differ only in terms of their logo, and on the other, of over-choice, for instance, when faced by an entire isle devoted to washing-powder or pet-food. Behind the façade and furthest from consciousness are the algorithms that silently steer my online attention and the bottom-feeders deliberately maintaining a “low profile” that lurk near the bottom end of supply chains, whether in the “meat-recovery” business or producing ‘forever’ chemicals sprayed on my food, furniture and gardens that now form part of “me”.

I do not think that my annoyances are out of the ordinary, as in the UK consumer affairs programmes on TV and radio often feature the situation where some customer, A, has been grossly overcharged by a dodgy B for defective work on their electricity-supply, roof, or garden. Other common complaints are raised against utility and broadband providers that arbitrarily raise their monthly charge, or mobile phone providers who charge exorbitant fees for services that no individual would ever use, such as “unlimited” texts. A common difficulty is that as business has progressively moved online, so we customers have no local retail outlet to visit where we can discuss our concern. Consequently, we complain of spending hours in a fruitless quest to have our concerns addressed.

From a liberal perspective the above account is one-sided, misplaced and curmudgeonly not only by excluding the fun, creative side of consumption, but mainly because everyone knows that while the individual consumer is powerless most of the time and in fact that most consumers are powerless most of the time, in the long run producers must serve the interest of consumers or fail. However, such reasoning omits to acknowledge, as Keynes famously did, that in the long run we are all dead. In capitalism, it seems that in the “short run” consumers have to hope to rely on a third party wielding a big stick to protect them from harm.

Government-Consumer-Relations

it ought to be mentioned that Dahl’s idea of what constitutes an ‘individual’ is elastic and can encompass a group, an office, such as President, a government, or even a nation-state. Although he did not devote himself overmuch to discussing the question of economic representation, one can surmise that this would follow in line with his argument for representative government, to wit, that the vast majority of consumers have neither the time nor the concern to directly express their concern to business, which in any event should be respond generally their needs through the action of the price mechanism, so ought to be content to place the responsibility to represent their interest in the hands of a representative group such as the Consumer’s Association.

When it comes to relations between government and consumers what most obviously comes to mind is consumer protection. While this is discussed further below, I next consider how legislators can play a much more central role in the construction of the consumer. A profound way in which the legislature is involved with consumption lies in its ability to abrogate the right of the individual to decide what is good for them or alternatively to reverse this by extending negative power to those previously regarded as lacking capacity to decide for themselves. This was illustrated in the description of the case of Sammy that is described in chapter five who habitually chooses food that is bad for his health and purchases items such as mobile phones on a whim and then quickly discards them, against the better judgement of his carers. In A/b terms Sammy seems to be top dog but is he?

The basis of the negative power accorded to Sammy to freely choose what he wants derives from UK government legislation enacted in the 1990s. An Act of Parliament allotted responsibility for community care to local Councils⁴², while Putting People First: A shared vision and commitment to adult social care protocol, (2007) delegated payments by offering personal budgets to ‘those who are eligible’, ‘promoting person-centred planning with a greater emphasis on self-assessment and management; ‘offering direct payments to enable users to plan and purchase their own care’; and ‘involving relatives and carers in care planning’.

The difficulties that can arise in the gap that emerges between the short-term satisfaction of desire versus the individual’s long-run interests, pointed to by Kotler (1972), is starkly evident in this case. Sammy’s carer mentioned the wastefulness and poor health outcomes that ensued from Sammy’s “free” choices, which he found hard to thole and to stand apart from, never mind Sammy’s routine exploitation by callous relatives and third parties. Such abuses were most probably unforeseen at the time the legislation was enacted. Despite this Sammy proclaims himself happy to be in control, raising the question as to the grounds on which it can be argued that Sammy should be denied his moments of happiness? On the other hand, Sammy’s carer argues from the perspective of positive freedom that Sammy’s long-run interest will be better served if others can make decisions on Sammy’s behalf. This raises the further question as to why should there be one rule for Sammy and a different rule for everyone else, given that wastefulness and poor health outcomes such as obesity and Type-Two diabetes are not exclusively restricted to his situation but are widespread throughout society? Questions such as the above which concern preferences and interests stray beyond Dahl’s one-dimensional explanation and are considered more fully in chapter eight which discusses Steven Lukes’ third dimension of power.

Consumer Protection

In the UK, quasi-governmental agencies have proliferated in the neoliberal era to regulate (or not) the actions of utilities, public transportation and other consumer necessities that were once run directly by government. Some of the most important are the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) and the “OFs”; Ofgem (Office of Gas and Electricity Markets); Ofwat (water); and OFcom that are supposedly devoted to protect the consumer interest. UK regulation and enforcement of anti-trust activity is conducted by the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA). Antitrust activities are business practices that limit or block competition between firms and deny consumers access to goods at normally competitive prices. Vertical anti-trust involves the aim to capture the chain of activity that flows from producer to the marketplace whereas horizontal anti-trust involves two or more competitors who meet to fix the price of a product that each company produces.

In chapter five the influential role of neoliberal arguments promoted by the American jurist Robert Bork were outlined, who had successfully argued that the goal of anti-trust policy should be to maximize consumer welfare. While superficially this might seem to be a laudable aim, as Heyer points out, it is not what it seems, because Bork’s idea of welfare is, “unfortunate and confusing”.⁴³ This is because Bork equated consumer welfare with efficiency. By persuading the legal establishment of this logic Bork succeeded in effectively reversing anti-trust enforcement action in law that had previously sought to encourage competition by protecting small business owners. By equating consumer welfare to efficiency, Bork argued that the only reason why a merger might be tolerated is that the resulting entity would be more efficient than the entities it incorporates. He reasoned from this that the only difference between horizontal and vertical agreements is that in the latter mergers between firms can lead to greater efficiencies whilst with in the case of cartels they will not. Given this, whilst mergers might be tolerated, there ought to be no defence for price-fixing through the operation of a cartel (Bork, 1978: 66-67).⁴⁴

Since the 1970s there has been a marked decline in anti-trust enforcement leading to growing unease at the vast size and market power of some corporations.⁴⁵. While at time of writing the state has enjoyed some success in reining in the power of Big Tech in the USA,⁴⁶ although in the chaos created by the Trump-47 regime it is very difficult to work out what is going on. In any event no-one can ever know the true extent of price-fixing and bid rigging in the economy. It may be unwise to use data for cases and convictions as a basis for generalisation as those caught out may merely be those who take the most chances because of the circumstances which they are in. Some historical studies link price-fixing to large poorly performing companies in profitable industries and more serious cases where the industry was also performing poorly. From one study it seems actual cases form the tip of a very large iceberg, where one antitrust lawyer mentioned that if the U.S. antitrust division tripled their staff, they would triple their cases.⁴⁷

Food Standards

That the UK Food Standards Agency (FSA) operates as an arm of government is testament to the visceral harm that business can do to consumers through the adulteration of food and drink. Government has long been directly involved in the regulation of these industries. In Britain prior to this the adulteration of staples such as bread, milk, beer, tea, coffee and confectionary was endemic (London, 2014). Thanks to the actions of nineteenth-century campaigners such as the chemist Frederick Accum and the medic Arthur Hill Hassall and the influence of medical journals such as The Lancet, bakers no longer add alum, chalk, or sawdust to their loaves, nor do brewers add flavour-enhancing substances, some containing strychnine, to their beer, in order to contain cost.⁴⁸ Following years of debate, the British Government passed a Food Adulteration Act in 1860, although it took almost forty years for this to be fit for purpose. Despite this, new scandals occur periodically, from poisoning by campylobacter; E-Coli, to the horrific outbreak of Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (BSE), which manifests in humans as Creutzfeldt–Jakob disease (CJD). In 2013, the Food Safety Authority of Ireland (FSAI) discovered that horsemeat unfit for human consumption labelled as beef was widely sold in a range of products including “beefburgers” through supermarkets and other retail outlets. The proportion of horsemeat in samples ranged from 30% to 80% and testing revealed that 85% of beefburgers also contained pigmeat. Although discovered in Ireland, this turned out to be an international scam involved importing cheap horsemeat from Canada, Belgium and Romania and sold as beef at considerable profit. While no companies were prosecuted custodial sentences were passed on individuals in Holland, France and the UK – one individual received a two-year sentence for mislabelling five hundred tonnes of meat. While the scandal led to a radical change in the regime of food testing this is no doubt not the last.⁴⁹

Interest Groups

Dahl’s argument for polyarchy is based on the assumption that most individuals are apathetic in matters of politics and so are content to delegate the representation of their interests to others. Liberal pluralism is the political equivalent of economic liberalism in that it conceives of society as constructed of a plurality of competing groups, each of which is comprised of like-minded individuals who act rationally in pursuit of their self-interest. Interest group activity therefore provides more information between elections which allows the decision-makers within the state to weight preferences during the formulation of policy.

Between elections a variety of groups will emerge from civil society to coalesce around specific interests, selecting representatives to advocate their case to the government of the day. In light of concern about pollution “Mums for Lungs” formed as a pressure group to advocate for the reduction of road traffic in South London. On the other side a pressure group was formed by a bunch of angry motorists who were inconvenienced and increasingly frustrated by restrictions on speed and on road use.

The battle surrounding President Reagan’s nomination of Robert Bork to the US Supreme Court is illustrative of interest group activity. As a known conservative, a number of oppositional interest groups fought hard against Bork’s appointment, including, Common Cause, the Sierra Club, Planned Parenthood and the National Mental Health Association. These groups made use of opinion polls and mass advertising in conducting their campaign, but nevertheless lost.

The Soda Tax

In March 2010 Mayor Nutter of Philadelphia announced the ‘Healthy Philadelphia Initiative’, comprising a two cents per ounce tax on all sweetened beverages sold in the city. This would raise the price of a twenty-ounce bottle of Coca-Cola by forty cents and a two-litre bottle by $1.35, Of the $77 million raised annually by this tax, he proposed that $20 million would be spent on the provision of healthy eating programmes in the city. It was widely reported that a similar tax was being also under active consideration by the authorities in New York and San Francisco.

A soda tax was first mooted in 2008 in a report by the Congressional Budget Office. A supportive article was then published in the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine, which argued that such a tax would reduce the growing problem associated with obesity. Linked to this the World Health Organization argued that this could help alleviate chronic conditions such as obesity, diabetes, and heart disease, which disproportionately affect the poorest in society. Another reason mentioned by the Mayor was the need to make up for the shortfall in revenue following the Credit Crunch.

Two interest groups actively opposed the tax; the Pennsylvania Beverage Association, and the Teamsters Union which opposed the tax for fear that this would decrease spending and jobs. Owners of small restaurants and refreshment outlets also reported concerns. Former mayor John F. Street opposed the tax, claiming that it would have a disproportionate effect on the poor. On the other side of the debate, Kelly D. Brownell of the Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity at Yale University argued that the tax on sugar would have a direct ameliorating effect on obesity. Gary Foster, an academic at Temple University’s Center for Obesity Research also supported the tax.

The beverage industry lobby declared the tax dead, whilst advertising vigorously against it, amounting in 2009 to $11 million from a total budget of $18.9 million, which was more than 30 times the amount spent in 2008.⁵⁰ The advertising campaign was attacked by New York State Health Commissioner Richard F. Daines, who argued that it was misleading because it argued that the proposed ‘soda tax’ could influence a person’s entire grocery bill.⁵¹ In reality, he said, the tax would only affect those drinks containing sugar. In April 2010, Angela Quitola, a citizen of Philadelphia confronted Mayor Nutter in an encounter that gained a lot of publicity. Quitola said that her husband worked for Coca-Cola and was concerned that he would lose his job if the tax was implemented.⁵²

The soda tax was eventually introduced in 2017, amounting to 1.5 cents per ounce, raising the cost of a 2-litre soda bottle from about $1.50 to $2.50, with the money raised spent on enhancing childhood education. A small-scale follow-up study of low-income parents, most of them African American found that they strongly supported the use of the tax for education, although the authorities needed to be more transparent about how the money was spent. Overall, respondents broadly supported the tax.⁵³

The range of interests involved in the soda tax is fairly typical of those that tend to cluster around such issues today. On the one hand there are a range of corporate interests equipped with large advertising and promotional budgets. On the other side are ranged a disparate number of groups which also command a publicity budget, usually smaller in scale. Paid-for advertising does not necessarily play a major role. A well-planned and well-funded campaign may founder because of an incident such as that involving an individual, such as Mrs. Quitola. If Mayor Nutter had handled this encounter badly, the media could have gone into overdrive by replaying this incident to the detriment of his campaign, as UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown found to considerable cost to his cause on the eve of a general election.⁵⁴

Although confrontations between “ordinary individuals” and politicians may be unintentional, they are increasingly organized as planned pseudo-events designed to spoil the prospects of an adversary. This practice is known as astroturf marketing, since US senator Lloyd Bentsen reputedly said, ‘a fellow from Texas can tell the difference between grass roots and AstroTurf’, has a long provenance.⁵⁵ Over and above the harmful effects caused by disinformation caused by deceptive advertising, astro-turfing can “poison the well” by corroding trust in advocacy groups.⁵⁶ Monbiot (2010) argues that astroturfing is a favoured strategy by pro-corporate anti-regulation campaigns that have sufficient funding to hire PR consultants. He mentions the example of online messages by two individuals, “Mary Murphy” and “Andura Smetacek” who launched “ferocious attacks” on a scientist who had published research that Mexican corn had been widely contaminated by GM pollen. It transpired that these messages had come from a domain associated with internet PR agency the Bivings Group and that the IP address linked to Smetacek’s account was linked to Monsanto.⁵⁷

Academics and campaign groups have noticed a dramatic and concerning increase in the scale of corporate lobbying of politicians in the European Union over the past ten years.⁵⁸ This was confirmed in the most dramatic terms when a leading official was found to be in possession of a suitcase full of cash.⁵⁹ Although dated, the study by Yu and Yu (2011) of major frauds conducted between 1998 and 2004, found that firms that lobby have a lower chance of being convicted of fraud and evade fraud detection for longer than those that do not; the authors found that fraudulent firms spent 77% more on lobbying than did not fraudulent firms.

Cause-Related Campaigns

In contrast to sectional interest groups such as the Consumers Association, cause-related groups are concerned to promote a particular issue. Given that the cause is not of direct benefit to them the individuals that form these groups are often motivated by religious or moral concerns. For instance, the Don’t Make A Wave Committee was established in 1970 with the aim to stop a second nuclear weapons test at Amchitka Island in the Aleutian islands, and in 1971, a small group embarked and sailed to Amchitka on The Greenpeace. Organizations such as Greenpeace International now engage in a wide range of activities including lobbying and litigation but also resort to direct action when deemed necessary, taking care to ensure that this is within the framework of national and international law. Some are more likely to cross the line by engaging in illegal activity if the individuals involved feel that they are outsiders and particularly if their world view is sufficiently apocalyptic (‘We’ve got to save the planet now, at all costs!’). A complicating factor is that the line between what is legal and what is not is not static but evolves as a game of cat and mouse, whereby new tactics are developed by activists in response the imposition of laws and penalties by the state.

Consumer Boycotts

The consumer boycott is the most acceptable form of protest to liberal thinking on the assumption that the dollar or pound in a consumer’s pocket is equivalent to a vote. In this view those offerings that receive the most ‘votes’ are rewarded for their success in giving the market what it wants. Liberals propose a simple solution for the person who doesn’t like the product that a company produces, the service it offers, its environmental policies or the way in which it treats its workforce; withdraw your ‘vote’ and spend your money elsewhere. As a result, if enough people feel like you then competitive offerings that do take your preferences into account will emerge to displace the firm which displeases you. On the other hand, if other people do not see the situation in the way that you do, you may vote with your money, but nobody else will follow.

The rather loose definition of a boycott as, ‘a concerted refusal to do business with a particular person or business in order to obtain concessions or to express displeasure with certain acts or practices of a person or business,’⁶⁰ provides scope for a range of actions and targets; for instance, Garrett, (1987) mentions a boycott conducted by nuns against a theatre production. In the context of marketing boycotts have been organised to protest against a corporation’s product offering (McDonald’s, KFC), working conditions in its supply chain (Wal-Mart, Apple), unethical marketing practices (Nestlé), or by association (Starbucks association with Nestlé), or for links to an oppressive regime (as in the historic targeting of Barclays Bank for links to South Africa and currently, Israel).

From the above if a group of individuals in civil society believes that a business, or indeed a country, is misbehaving, then it is perfectly legitimate for them to seek to organize the collective “voting” behaviour of consumers as a tactic to put a stop to these. The boycott is one of the most prominent forms of action that has been deployed effectively as a weapon in some of the most famous cases of A/b power. While it is not a last resort, boycotts often come to the fore when more conciliatory approaches have been rebuffed. While some boycotts such as Buy Nothing Day are temporary, others have lasted for decades. On the face of it because a boycott involves two parties, most boycotts should be amenable to research that determines the extent to which a particular boycott has been successful. For instance, Garrett (1987) hypothesizes that the group that a boycott will be most successful when economic and image pressure on the target corporation are high and when the commitment of the target to the policy that provoked the boycott is low. This perhaps helps explain why consumer boycotts are so often targeted against high-profile organizations. Here the effectiveness of the boycott can be measured in relation to the degree of the change to the target’s disputed policies. At one extreme complete capitulation resulting from a change in policy signals absolute success while on the other, the boycott has failed where there is no change at all.

The End Loans to South-Africa (ELTSA) campaign was initiated in 1974 to stop loans by European banks to the apartheid South African regime. At one stage ELTSA established a ‘shadow board’ of Barclays Bank, producing an alternative annual report, picketing bank branches and distributing leaflets. On the face of it in the terms described above the boycott was successful, as Barclays ended its relations with the apartheid government in 1986. Yet the full story is more complex and involved more actors and factors than can adequately be covered here.⁶¹

Another well-known and longstanding case is the boycott of Nestlé, which was organised in 1974 after the publication of “The Baby Killer” by War on Want, which highlighted the harmful effects including many thousands of infant deaths, resulting from their marketing of formula milk products in Africa.⁶² Nestlé was not the only ‘offender’ but it was one of the largest supplier of infant formula to the Third World. A US boycott of Nestlé was instigated by Baby Milk Action in1977, following an industry response that was regarded as cynical and unyielding, which quickly spread to Europe and beyond, coordinated by the International Baby Food Action Network (IBFAN). Following a period of intense pressure, the largest manufacturers were forced to adhere to a non-binding International Code on the Marketing of Breast-Milk Substitutes established by the World Health Organisation. Nestlé also formed an independent commission which included some of those who had participated in the boycott. The boycott was lifted in 1984, but was reinstated in 1988, and indeed in one of the longest running boycotts, Baby Milk Action continues today to ask consumers to boycott Nestlé products due to its marketing of baby-food, “with misleading idealised and unsubstantiated claims”.⁶³

The next case flags up aspects of power in the context of business and marketing that are deserving of further consideration with respect to individuality and accountability. Thinking in A/b terms, consider that a large multinational takeaway food business wants to counter the negative publicity contained in a leaflet circulated by members of B, a tiny minority group based on London. The leaflet includes a list of purported abuses carried out by A and calls for a customer boycott of A’s products. From Dahl, one might first enquire as to the bases of power that A and B can draw upon. A has access to virtually unlimited financial resources and the favourable opinions of its millions of loyal customers internationally. Its huge organization employs specialists in accounting, property, planning applications, legal affairs, marketing and public relations who have built good relationships with officials from local and national government. B on the other hand consists of five volunteers who spend their limited free time in campaigning but who are relatively impoverished with little resources. Given that B’s leaflet was circulated to just a few hundred people, A might simply have choose to ignore B. Alternatively, A might challenge B’s narrative by commissioning paid-for advertising and a PR campaign to promote its own preferred message. A might also informally request B to stop circulating the leaflet. As a final course of action, if A thinks that the contents of B’s leaflet are false, misleading or even libellous, then A might flex its financial muscles to hire the best lawyers available to threaten legal action against members of B if they do not publicly retract the claims made in the leaflet and apologize to A. Dahl argues that in such instances the amount of power A has over B can be calculated as a probability. Given A’s massive resources and the scope of the means at their disposal, then a reasonable person might assign a score of 8 or 9 out of 10 for the probability that if the massive corporation A initiates legal proceedings against the five individual members of B named in the writ, these individuals will back down and apologize to A.

The “McLibel” Case

The above is a summary of events leading up to the case of McDonald’s Corporation v Steel & Morris [1997], the longest trial in English legal history and better known as the ‘McLibel’ case. London Greenpeace (which should not be confused with Greenpeace International) was a single-issue group consisted of five members. The leaflet handed out by London Greenpeace included a number of allegations, accusing McDonald’s of involvement in animal cruelty, despoilation of the environment, paying low wages and resisting unionisation. McDonald’s responded by issuing members of London Greenpeace with a SLAPP (Strategic Lawsuit against Public Participation) action with the presumed aim of stopping them from circulating the leaflet whilst tying them up in complex and expensive legal proceedings. If successful, this could only have a beneficial effect on the share price.⁶⁴ In legal terms a SLAPP action can only be served on a named legal individual. Because London Greenpeace was unincorporated and thus was not recognised as a legal entity in its own right, liability devolved onto the shoulders of its five flesh and blood members, so the five individual members of London Greenpeace were served formal written notification of the action. On receipt of the papers three of the five apologised to McDonald’s, leaving just two individuals, Helen Steel and David Morris to confront the other legal ‘individual’, the McDonald’s Corporation, in court.

The Corporation as an Individual

Incongruous as it may seem, legal personhood has been granted to joint-stock companies in the UK since 1862 and in the USA since 1868. While the five flesh and blood individuals in the “McLibel” case were publicly named, no-one got to know the names of the McDonald’s executives who decided to bring the action against London Greenpeace, although we do know the names of the top legal team that represented McDonald’s that included Richard Rampton QC, Timothy Atkinson and Pattie Brinley-Codd. ⁶⁵ The cash-strapped defendants Helen Steel and Dave Morris on the other hand generally defended themselves. Importantly legislation not only preserves the anonymity of the individuals involved in a corporation but restricts the liability of its shareholders. Effectively, this means that if a company were to fail or to cause damage, its shareholders can only be made liable for their stake in the business and not for any loss that exceeds that. This might be considered ironic given that the British test-case establishing limited liability consisted of an act of fraud where an individual was both the chief shareholder and the chief creditor of the business.⁶⁶ Corporations since have lobbied successfully for rights to free speech and privacy, against a duty to provide public goods, and for ‘non-human’ rights such as the ability to own other corporations.

When Steel and Morris decided to defend their leaflet in court they had no idea that this would end as the longest libel case in British history. Publicity surrounding the case from mainstream news media and generated by the McSpotlight website and a documentary aired on Channel Four led to an upwelling of support for the pair, leading to a powerful anti-McDonald’s movement, After 313 days, the judge finally ruled that Steel and Morris had not proved a number of the allegations made in the leaflet against McDonald's, such as alleged destruction of the rainforest, and in relation to packaging, food poisoning, starvation in the Third World, heart disease, cancer and bad working conditions for workers. Consequently, McDonald’s ultimately won their libel case, but at a price to its reputation, as the court accepted London Greenpeace’s arguments about the corporation’s use of misleading advertising, its culpability regarding cruelty to animals and its antipathy to unionisation. Steel and Morris were ordered to pay damages of £60,000 to McDonald’s which they refused to pay,⁶⁷ although McDonald’s had earlier stated that it was not going to seek to enforce payment. It didn’t end there as Steel and Morris then took the case to the Court of Appeal⁶⁸. The higher court confirmed most of the findings of the High Court but rejected its’ finding regarding McDonald’s health claims and reduced the damages awarded to McDonald’s by one-third.

In 2005 Steel and Morris brought a further case against the British Government to the European Court of Human Rights on the grounds that in the earlier trial their freedom of expression had been denied and they had been denied a fair trial.⁶⁹ The court ruled in favour of Steel and Morris on the basis that their right to a fair trial had been impeded by the complexity and length of the procedure and that their right to right to freedom of expression had been compromised, ordering the UK government pay Steel and Morris £57,000 in compensation. This decision by the European Court that the English legal system historically respected the protection of reputation over freedom of expression might be construed as a form of censure against the continuing use of SLAPP actions in the UK.⁷⁰

A curious parallel to the above involved the unlikely alliance struck between McDonald’s corporation and Greenpeace International (Yes, the other Greenpeace) along with several large UK supermarkets, with the aim to address one of the key issues mentioned in the McLibel leaflet, concerning damage to the Amazon rainforest. This unlikely alliance was formed as the consequence a Greenpeace three year-long investigation into Cargill, one of the largest food corporations in the world, which supplied soya products to McDonald’s. Greenpeace accused Cargill of growing soya beans on recently cleared rainforest but given that Cargill maintains a very low corporate profile, Greenpeace initially decided that it would be more effective to target the more visible McDonalds, chaining two-metre chickens to outlets in seven UK cities and amplifying its message through an extensive media campaign. McDonald’s eventually agreed to remove soya produced in the Amazon from its repertoire of ingredients and joined in the alliance against Cargill along with Marks and Spencer, Waitrose and Asda. Collectively they were successful in forcing Cargill into signing a two-year moratorium on buying soya from newly deforested land in the Amazon. Despite their success, Cargill has been repeated accused by Greenpeace of growing soya-beans on cleared rainforest.⁷¹

Overall, despite that McDonald’s won damages, many of those on the Left regard the ‘McLibel’ case as a win against McDonald’s because of the huge publicity generated from the case. So consequential was the trial that twenty-five years later some of the key players participated in The Reunion (BBC, 2022) and later of a BBC podcast, Shadow World: The People vs. McDonlald’s.⁷²

Questions of Accountability

From the above, organizations such as London Greenpeace that are not joint-stock companies are not legal persons, so responsibility falls onto the shoulders of the real individual human beings who belong to them, whilst the shareholders of a corporation like McDonald’s are only liable up to the total value of the shares they own. Differences extend to the risk of criminal liability of those who engage in anti-corporate activity compared with the employees of corporations. Massive fraud was a contributing factor to the catastrophic Great Financial Crash (GFC) of 2008 that caused lasting harm to the lives and prospects of billions of people. Supposedly well-run, responsible and well-regulated financial institutions went to the wall forcing governments to bail them out and to pump trillions into the world economy to forestall an economic meltdown. How many bankers went to jail? Forty-seven in all, the majority of twenty-five in Iceland (population 300,000), while just one person was convicted in the USA (population 340 million).⁷³

In contrast, the nature of anti-corporate activism means that protestors often end up before a criminal court of law. Just Stop Oil organiser Roger Hallam was given a five-year prison sentence for having protestors climb onto gantries on the M25.⁷⁴ More than 20 uniformed police, some equipped with tasers, forced their way into a Quaker Meeting House in Westminster arresting six women and confiscating their mobile phones.⁷⁵ Activism is a game of cat and mouse where avenues for protest opened by tactical innovations of activists are closed down by legislation and rigorous enforcement. For instance, one tactic employed by Extinction Rebellion, to block busy thoroughfares such as Oxford Circus⁷⁶ was criminalised by legislation that included offences pertaining to disruption of life, involving noise, static demonstrations, and one-person protests.⁷⁷

Compared to citizens, employees of corporations can seemingly act with relative impunity for their actions, hiding behind the carapace of the legal person. Yet, as Crane and his co-authors note, corporations may use governments to undermine the rights of citizens by directly shaping the nature of regulation through bribes to politicians. Additionally, given their size, they “themselves” are often in the position to act as governments (Crane et al., 2008, 76).

Bases of Power in ‘McLibel’

What bases of power might have figured in the McLibel case? Expressed in A/b terms, London Greenpeace (A) sought to prevent McDonald’s from doing what it wanted to do by drawing attention to the alleged environmental harm caused by the corporation and thus to disrupt McDonald’s operations. McDonald’s massive size, organization and command of legal and other resources enabled it to apply condign power well beyond the resources available to London Greenpeace. Because London Greenpeace was not incorporated, McDonald’s had to take action against named individuals. The corporation hired seven individuals from private investigation agencies to infiltrate the group. In the process of gathering information these infiltrators engaged fully in group activities to the extent that it was reported that as many spies as activists attended meeting, one of whom had a love affair with an activist.⁷⁸ Additionally, the corporation sought to build on the loyalty of its customers by compiling a set of “McFacts” cards to promote its side of the story.⁷⁹

By comparison, the scant resources of Steel and Morris offered little, if any, prospect of renumeration to McDonald’s for the very substantial costs involved in hiring an expensive team of lawyers. The outcome of the McLibel trial was complex, as although McDonald’s won their legal case in court, theirs was a pyrrhic victory which was arguably lost to an extent in the court of public opinion through some reputational damage. However, in the medium term, there was no sign that McDonald’s operations or share price were affected.

Discussion

By this stage you may rightly be critical of the simple model shown earlier in Figure 6.1, as it fails to account for several aspects of the McLibel case. For one thing the members of London Greenpeace were not customers of McDonald’s nor were they consumers of their products, but social activists. Legally “London Greenpeace” does not fit with Dahl’s prescription, as it had no substance as a definitive “A” for McDonald’s to litigate against as the case had to be brought against two individuals, Steel and Morris. Nor does it capture important emergent aspects of the case, which unfolded dynamically involving new actors, the formation of a network of alliances and the adoption of counter-strategies. Although McDonald’s presented the same monolithic face to the world throughout, and although Steel and Morris were also constantly in the foreground, the emergent actions of those who energised the campaign included collaborations between a multiplicity of actors that spilled out well beyond main protagonists both nationally and abroad. Finally, to paraphrase Donald Rumsfeld, there are gaps involving questions of “known-unknowns” and “unknown unknowns”. For instance, unknown to several members of London Greenpeace was that at the outset they had no idea that their small group had been closely monitored by private investigators and penetrated by the police.

The above raises important questions for the study of power in the context of business and marketing. Crane et al. (2008: 76) rather bluntly, and perhaps wisely, warn researchers off from attempting to study power relations between business and government as far too complex to follow because the process would involve tracing the actual influence of corporations on political actors and then determining whether or not a certain decision was solely or largely the result of corporate influence. Their observations point up the major difficulty of gaining research access to the inner workings or deliberations of those who work for corporations, never mind those between government and corporations. That said, while relations between government, corporate interests and activists are often complex and opaque, this should not entail that academics abrogate their responsibility by ruling out empirical research tout-court. Dahl was concerned by the paucity of empirical research on the important question of the power of business, which unfortunately remains the case today in relation to marketing and consumer research. Crane et al’s (2008) arguments could apply to any attempt to research the inner-workings of a corporation or its engagement with any of its stakeholders. While the difficulties are real enough, it can be argued that these ought to be balanced against the importance of the issues involved which are vital to democracy, such as research into the corporate capture of government.

The difficulties should not be under-estimated. Corporations have means to fund the campaigns of politicians, much of it covert, to hire professional lobbyists, and to avail of the “revolving door’ where regulators move seamlessly into the higher echelons of business, which taken together pose a threat to democratic functioning. Millions of pounds are provided annually to fund UK university programmes into research on tobacco and alcohol and obesity which can bring those working in these areas directly into conflict with the profit-driven aim of these industries, which has unsurprisingly resulted in litigation.⁸⁰ While it is creditable that research institutes have been developed “at scale” to investigate vexing questions pertaining to obesity and addiction, given its importance, one might imagine that there ought to be something similar devoted to the study of power relations in business and marketing. This is of course a huge area ranging from the daily frustrations experienced by customers and consumer ailments to the strategies engaged in by social and corporate activists and more complex relations in the international sphere.

Beyond Dahl: Social Movement Theory

While Dahl’s prescription may be suitable for relatively simple static and clear-cut instances of power where a defined “A” is observed to exercise power over a “B”, when for example a Ryanair attendant informs a hapless passenger that they must pay to have their baggage put in the hold, it does not get to grips with complex cases where “As” and “Bs” can be difficult to define and change their identities in the course of a complex and shifting process. The multiform nature of the McLibel case seems to better fit the description of a social movement, defined as a network ‘of informal interactions, between a plurality of individuals, groups or associations, engaged in a political or cultural conflict, on the basis of a shared collective identity’ (Diani, 1992).

There are resonances here with resource mobilization theory and political process theory where power relations are envisaged as nested within wider social relations such that a contest at one level is embedded in a larger system where different actors, issues and dynamics may come into play that may or may not have a bearing on the outcome at the lower level; conflicts on the same issue can arise at different levels and involve different “rules of the game”.⁸¹ As illustrated in Figure 6.2 below, the case of McDonald’s and London Greenpeace was transformed when it was elevated into a contest between London Greenpeace and the UK Government at the supranational level of the Court of Human Rights. There are also overlaps at the horizontal level, concerning whether or not the legal actions involving London Greenpeace had any effect on the concurrent direct-action campaign against McDonalds initiated by Greenpeace International against McDonald’s.

Actions such as that between McDonald’s and London Greenpeace can involve issues that concern social movement activists on a spectrum from left to right in relation to issues such as workers’ rights, identity politics, child labour, environmental destruction and animal cruelty, which can spill well beyond the bounds of the formal political system. as envisaged by Dahl. McAdam (1999) criticised Dahl’s (1967, 23) contention that because of its diversity, the pluralist system ought to offer sufficient scope for all citizens to participate in formal politics. As Dahl saw it any group that feels that its interests might be compromised or harmed by a particular policy has the opportunity to press its case by working cooperatively with others to delay or even to prevent its implementation.￼

Figure 6.2. Levels of Action in ‘McLibel’ Cases

Figure 6.2. Levels of Action in ‘McLibel’ Cases

McAdam (1992) asks why, if Dahl’s pluralist account is accurate, do social movements exist outside and beyond the limits of the formal system? McAdam contends that pluralist theory had exerted such a grip on the academy that up until the 1980s, social movements were generally thought to be made up of marginalised, alienated and irrational misfits and consequently that, “a tidy scholarly division of labor emerged; with pluralists explaining the workings of institutional politics and social movements…left to “the social psychologist whose intellectual tools prepare him to better understand the irrational.’ ⁸² Informed by this understanding, rather than looking at McLibel as a form of resistance to corporate power, academics might instead have restricted their remit to probe into the supposedly irrational psychology of Helen Steel and David Morris to discover the conditions that led to their involvement. McAdam explains that this narrow a-political understanding of social movements undermined scholarly faith in pluralism and became untenable in the 1960s.

Studying Contentious Politics

At this point I should mention that there are various social movement theories which from the 1970s coalesced into two relatively distinct groupings. In Europe, New Social Movement (NSM) theory focuses mainly on the construction of identity by social actors (Touraine, 1985), whilst Resource Mobilization Theory (RMT), which developed in the USA, (Della Porta & Diani, 1999) focuses more on the creation of “social movement industries”⁸³ and on the human, material, technical and organizational resources that movements deploy to gain access to the system of formal politics. Thus, Chatzidakis, Maclaran and Varman (2021) employed NSM theory to inform their study of the perseverance of solidarity in maintaining the resilience social movements in Athens, Greece, following in the period following the Great Financial Crash. The following discussion is based largely on political process theory (McAdam, 1982) and especially on ‘Contentious Politics’ (McAdam et al., 2001) which aims to develop a synthetic account that incorporate the concerns of NSM theorists.into RMT theory.⁸⁴

McAdam et al. (2001) ask similarly broad questions to those posed by Dahl, although they are more concerned to discover processes than outcomes. While informed by a similarly mechanistic ethos, as sociologists influenced by the structural-functionalist tradition of Robert Merton, their approach to the study of power is quite different to that of Dahl. In relation to ontology, they differ from Dahl, who takes the individual mind as the basic site of social reality to focus on the deliberate choices made by individuals or by collectives considered as individuals, to argue that social transactions are irreducible to individual mental events. Consequently, theorists are not so interested as was Dahl, to discover rationalist accounts of crucial decisions, but rather relational interactions between social sites. Identity is not considered by them as immutable, but rather as modified and shaped in interaction so that when making a claim identity is mobilized and deployed strategically through constant manipulation and modification. Epistemologically, the aim is to identify causal chains, ‘that consist of mechanisms that reappear in a variety of settings but in different sequences and combinations.’ Rather than trying to develop all-encompassing laws to explain complex events such as revolutions and social movements, they acknowledge that no truly general account is attainable, adopting an approach similar to that of the molecular biologist by breaking events down into smaller episodes and then seeking to identify recurrent mechanisms and processes within them (McAdam et al. 2001).

Where Dahl speaks of bases of power, resource mobilization theory seeks to explain enabling factors that build the capacity for group action through funding, manpower and non-material resources (Jenkins, 1983). In terms of its rigour, research into contentious politics matches the exacting and detailed standards one might expect from Dahl. For instance, McAdam et al (2005) wanted to know if the social ecology of protest activity had changed between 1970 and 2000? They particularly wanted to know if protest had been motivated by international, national or local concern and additionally, whether particular neighbourhoods were more likely to initiate protest events? The overall approach is broadly similar to that employed by Dahl in the New Haven study in (a) selecting a “typical” city as the focus for study, (b) defining terms for coding and analysis (c) collecting data on the population, or on a sample of relevant events (d) coding, analysis and (e) reporting. From a relatively small amount of data gathered on thousands of events the authors) were able to tell a story that was quite different to the “stylized” version conveyed by the literature on social movements. For instance, their analysis indicated a distinctive shift over time in the typical protestor, who changed over the period from being an Africa-American member of a disadvantaged city-centre minority to being a white suburbanite.

In the context of McLibel it is useful to note that event analysis is not only used by social movement researchers but also in financial economics where it is used to identify the effects on a share price of publicly revealing events that are relevant to a firm’s value such as firing a CEO.⁸⁵  Vick and Campbell (2001) focused on the events surrounding the McLibel case to ask if the protests or subsequent publicity had a temporary or lasting effect on the corporation’s share price, concluding that the only event that had a negative impact was the Channel Four documentary that aired on 17th-18th May 1997. Although there was a downturn in McDonald’s share price this was not sustained,⁸⁶ and indeed over the period of study, McDonald’s stock outperformed the Standard and Poors index.⁸⁷ The authors offer two reasons for this outcome; that the corporation’s “omnipresent” advertising campaign of “feel-good” messages may have drowned out the negative aspects; and because the product appeal was principally to children and young people who are likely to be less influenced than older consumers by such campaigns.

An additional benefit of adopting political process theory to studying power in marketing is the availability of a lexicon by which to describe processes involved in contentious politics which can allow for cross-comparison of cases. For instance, the McLibel case can be seen to involve a number of episodes which are not given but are rather defined by the individuals involved. Some mechanisms were cognitive, as in the reluctance expressed by some members of London Greenpeace to engage in the legal process. Brokerage was a crucial mechanism when a lawyer acquaintance of Steel and Morris mentioned a “friend who owed him a favour”, who turned out to be the barrister Keir Starmer who agreed to provide pro bono advice to the pair. Certification is an important process which involves external recognition of the validity of claims and of performances made by individuals. Certification was vital if Steel and Morris were to win their case, as their performances and claims needed to be convincing to those in external authority. The mobilization of identity thus played an important role in making claims. The case also involved co-aptation in that previously excluded actors were incorporated into the site of power. Finally, how issues were framed by the different actors played an important role.

While the development of a common lexicon is most useful as it enables the cross-comparison of many cases, political process theory developed by McAdam (1982) is one of a number of explanations for the development and growth of movements that develop outside the system of formal politics, which highlights the role of political and institutional factors in shaping social movements. McAdam hypothesised that social movements tend to emerge and have a better chance of sustaining themselves and exerting influence when the overall configuration of institutional power is broadly receptive to their interests. Because social movements occupy spaces that are outside the tent of institutional politics, their representatives (supposing that they have some) have no standing, nor any familiarity with the workings of the system. However, the formal political status quo is not immutable and can be upset through war, economic crises, regime change and major demographic shifts, providing openings for social movements to exert influence.

McAdam argues that when such opportunities open, social movements need to have mobilizing structures in place as a basis to continue sustained action. Finally, cultural factors and shared meaning as playing a vital role in mobilizing support, particularly in relation to how an issue is framed. At a minimum, people need to feel both aggrieved about (or threatened by) some aspect of their lives and also optimistic that by acting collectively they can begin to redress the problem. For Davis and Thompson (1994) while people are often discontented, most will only act on their grievances when stimulated to do so by an issue entrepreneur.⁸⁸ Moreover formal organizations are also critical if social movements are to engage in the formation of government policy as this, “is in effect the price of admission to the polity”. They also argue the for a multilevel approach by recognising that distributive conflicts that result in concrete outcomes at one level are linked to definitional conflicts at a higher level concerning the “rules of the game” that enable or restrict the scope of action at the lower level.

Changes in the Institutional Context

Davis and Thompson (1994) argue that definitional conflicts played an important role in the growth of the shareholder rights movement in the USA during the early 1990s. The background to this pertains to a conflict of interest between shareholders, who favour takeovers because they are offered a premium for their shares, whilst executives will resist takeovers because of the threat these pose to their tenure. Until the 1980s managers had successfully dominated shareholders by restricting takeovers. However that changed under the regime of Ronald Reagan, who subscribed to the Chicago School doctrine of efficient markets and the political climate swung more in favour of shareholders. Reagan’s regime was so benign to corporate interests that the administration did not act even after thirty percent of the Fortune 500 companies became subjected to a hostile takeover.⁸⁹ Following the logic outlined by McAdam (1982) of the importance of the political climate, the authors argue that this inspired an “insurgent consciousness” amongst shareholders to act. Although executive pay was not the only issue that concerned them, ‘runaway” executive pay had received a lot of publicity and formed a clear and popular issue for rights activists to focus on. Activists lobbied state and federal authorities, attended Congressional hearings and sponsored legislation to restrict executive pay, framing this as a governance issue linked to the overall accountability of the firm to its shareholders.⁹⁰ The authors conclude that the results of the campaign were “impressive” in definitional terms by changing the rules of the game, enabling shareholders to take concrete action to rein in executive power in a number of ways including gaining the right to vote in cases of “golden parachutes” and to play an advisory role in executive pay.⁹¹

The Power of Platforms

In the global arena today there is increasing competition between hardening blocs surrounding the interests of China and the USA which are competing partly through the construction of rival global platforms and artificial intelligence systems. As each bloc develops its own systems so pressure is applied to ensure that members of client states make the “correct” decisions.

“Platform’ derives its name from the auto-industry where different models can be built on the same frame or platform.⁹² Applied to software, Intel, Nvidia Cisco, Microsoft and Apple, have all become leaders on the basis of the power of their operating systems known as ‘transaction’ platforms (Cusumano et al. 2019). From the mid-1990s US-based platforms grew rapidly to dominate many overseas markets through a mixture of “organic” growth and acquisition. Regulation is now an important concern given that the growth of these virtual monopolies was partly a consequence of benign “light-touch” regulation by foreign governments which failed to spot their growing power. State administrators in Europe and elsewhere have slowly woken up to the power of global platforms whose algorithms are designed to maximise user engagement by amplifying content including misinformation that shocks and stirs the emotions, resulting in harm to vulnerable individuals, whilst monetising the valuable “data exhaust” obtained from surveillance.⁹³ The Trump-47 regime is currently applying enormous pressure on these countries that the US has traditionally considered in its “back yard” to drop taxes and ease regulation of these platforms. For instance, in one of many moves the president described the EU Digital Markets Act designed to regulate competition in the sector as “overseas extortion” of American companies and has threatened to impose further tariffs on the bloc.⁹⁴

While discussion of the regulation of ‘Big Tech’ is almost exclusively held at the level of governments and transnational institutions, these discussions and outcomes such as the regulation (or lack of it), that follows, can have a direct effect on the lives of billions of users. But what of the situation where the institutional context is so fragile that a very specific demand for cheaper public transport escalates to the very top of the state and brings down the government? This is discussed below in relation to the case of Movimento Pass Livre.

Movimento Passe Livre (MPL)

The campaign by Movimento Passe Livre (MPL) for free transport in Sao Paul ostensibly succeeded in its original aim, but provoked a backlash, that then unleashed a political storm which shook the entire country. In June 2013 the city administration of Sao Paulo announced that as inflation was running at over 15%, transport tickets would be increased from 3 reals (£0.90) to 3.2 reals (0.96). This prompted a group of young firebrand activists to name themselves the Movimento Passe Livre (MPL) around which to organize a protest, not just against the fare rise, but to demand free public transport for all.

The young radicals who joined the MPL were idealists who put their belief in flat organization into practice. To begin with the campaign did not enlist widespread support as their tactics, which included street protests and burning barricades, were reported on negatively by the mainstream media. However, when social media relayed real-time imagery of the heavy-handed response by police, this mobilised many thousands of outraged citizens from different backgrounds to join the protests, with almost one million people taking to the streets. Weeks later the mood of the huge crowd was electric and euphoric when news spread that the city officials had announced an end to the fare increase.

While the above suggests a happy ending for the MPL, unfortunately for them, it did not end there. In How We Burn, Vincent Bevins (2024) describes how, as other groups were drawn into the protest, so did the list of grievances. What started out as a simple protest against increased bus fares morphed into a campaign against systemic corruption. Responding to the wave of unrest Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff brought in laws to tackle systemic corruption. The subsequent investigation named Lava Jato (Operation Carwash), unravelled a massive web of corruption involving Petrobas, the state oil company, industry executives and politicians. As the true extent of corruption began to be revealed so public anger turned onto politicians, particularly on ex-President Lula and current President Rousseff, who were both from the Workers Party. The right-wing media, “trumpeted the message that the dirty socialists in Brasilia” were entirely responsible for the corruption, whereas Bevins explains the reality, that corruption was so endemic that every party was involved and additionally, that Rousseff had actually initiated the action that enabled the anti-corruption investigation.

To cut a long and complex story short, in 2015, one of Brazil’s most corrupt politicians sought to have Rousseff impeached, “in an attempt to stop or divert Car Wash”. She was accused of shifting government funds between accounts to make the state finances look better than they were. Although dubious, this had been a common practice, but as Bevins says, this was just a pretext, and the real point of the impeachment was to strike back at Rousseff over the Carwash investigation. Rousseff was eventually impeached and Michael Temer, her replacement as President, who was himself deeply mired in accusations of corruption, promptly capped public spending and removed protections for the Amazon Rainforest.

Bevins summarises that when looked at in the round, MPL is an example of a familiar story where bottom-up protests by idealists is turned round to serve the ends of the forces of reaction. Subsequently, members of the MPL lamented their lack of an overall strategy and of the political nous to achieve it. From the perspective of political process theory (McAdam, 1982), while the opportunity for change was initially dampened through negative reports circulated by the mainstream media, this was invigorated by widespread social media reports of police violence. However, once the initial limited aim of the campaign had succeeded, given splits between different groups and interests the new goal of ‘anti-corruption’ proved to be the lowest common denominator to mobilise joint action. This led in quick succession to the Lava Jato investigation, the removal of Rousseff on a pretext and her replacement with Temer, then Jair Bolsonaro in 2018.

However, given the complexity of the case and the number of levels involved it is important to recognize the existence of “known-unknowns” and ‘unknown-unknowns’ about this case. Known-unknowns for instance concern the bitter infighting behind groups in Brazil behind the scenes and the level of influence exerted by foreign governments. The former is evidenced by the subsequent arrest of Temer on charges of corruption in 2019, and then of Bolsonaro, who was sentenced to twenty-seven years in prison for plotting a military coup that was widely seen as a copycat action to that instigated by Donald Trump on 6th January of that year.⁹⁵ Trump has since imposed huge tariffs on Brazil as retaliation for the arrest of his “friend” Bolsanaro.⁹⁶

Section Three: The International Context

Media “Stings”

‘“When I was fired, I cried for two weeks’, how interventions went wrong in Morocco’s garment industry’ (Bourdillion et al., 2013). The title of this contribution to an edited collection on child labour makes plain the authors’ argument that naïve Western interventions made on the basis of ethnocentric values into countries such as Morocco, can have negative and even perverse consequences for the children involved. The authors borrow the quotation from the study published by Fatina Zalami and her colleagues (Zalami, 1998) who followed up what happened to the child workers who were summarily dismissed from the Sicome factory in Méknès, Morocco in the wake of the World in Action programme, St Michael: Has The Halo Slipped?, broadcast in January 1996. Bourdillion et al. argue that in December 1995 following a ‘quick visit’ from M&S staff in advance of the broadcast, many of the children were summarily dismissed by their employer, so that when the World in Action programme aired in January 1996, Marks and Spencer could argue that no young person under the age of fifteen was employed there. It should be noted against this accusation of cynical disregard that Marks & Spencer did not make this statement, but rather said that, ‘it had never knowingly sourced garments made using child labour and denied that other incorrectly labelled clothing could be available in M&S stores” (Independent, 1996). Additionally, in March that year Marks and Spencer won significant libel damages from Granada Television following a similar allegation.

That the supplier to Marks and Spencer repudiated the existence of child labour is perhaps understandable given that Amal, whose quote opens this paragraph, told Zalami that when British buyers visited the plant the children were told to hide. Hobbs et al. (1999) who also discuss the Méknès case, make it clear that Granada Television withdrew this claim and paid compensation to Marks and Spencer (ibid., 156). Zalami et al. 1998 found that that girls aged 12-15 were employed in the factory at Méknès, quite legally as it turned out, as some were official apprentices under Moroccan law. Amal worked among one hundred other apprentices in the factory at Sicome, all of whom had reached the legal minimum age for apprenticeship in Morocco and the age for employment in light work in developing countries permitted by the ILO Minimum Age convention (no. 138 of 1973). However, the girls received little, if any training, worked long hours and were never paid overtime. In her interview with Zalami and her colleagues Amal says that following the World in Action exposé, Shadia, one of the company accountants asked her to sign some papers which she later realized contained her resignation, and was paid ninety dollars severance. Amal said that she had wanted to go to school but had no money to buy books and so the factory job offered the only alternative. Now it is too late for her to do so and she needs to work in order to help her family. Following their dismissal from the factory some girls stayed at home and made buttons; a trade that is poorly paid and damaging to eyesight. It was reported also that at least one girl became involved in prostitution.

Zalami’s report argues that neither the TV team nor Marks & Spencer took any interest in the employment context in Morocco, nor did they speak to, or take into account the girls’ own preferences. From their own point of view the girls had been knocked off their foothold into a desirable job opportunity and were now desperate to find alternative work. The TV team did not appear interested to investigate the context of life and work in Morocco and appeared more concerned to appeal to the moral outrage of UK viewers. The retailer too seemed more concerned with maintaining its profit base than in dealing with the plight of the children. They could have used their power to mitigate working conditions inside the factory, to ensure that the employers properly comply with government apprenticeship regulation that were supposed to protect teenagers. From the above, the World in Action team could have done a better job by checking their facts in advance of airing the ‘fly on the wall’ documentary.

Child Labour in Bangladesh

My reasons for including the following lengthy case are fourfold. Firstly, the accounts discussed so far imply that all of the relevant factors about a situation can be identified. In the case of Marks and Spencer in Morocco, academics were quick to call out mistakes made by the World in Action programme, but what if the detailed accounts by academics themselves differ in important respects, as is in the following case which is about child labour in Bangladesh? My attempt at a potential solution described below, is to engage in fact-checking and a form of dialectical argument. Secondly, the case affords an opportunity to discuss the application of social movement theory, as one of the explanations developed by Shereen Hertel (2006), is that the focus on child labour came about as the result of what she calls a “failed boomerang”. A third reason is that like that of the Movimento Passe Livre (MPL), the case of child labour in Bangladesh illustrates the importance of recognizing that there are unknowns, especially pertaining to the role played by government and ‘northern’ corporations. Finally, the case is of particular interest to me as I travelled to Bangladesh and interviewed some of the key actors involved.

The format used above by World in Action was virtually identical to the ‘sting’ relayed by the US broadcaster NBC in their Dateline segment to millions of viewers on 22nd of December 1992. The ostensible target of the progamme was Wal-Mart’s “Buy American” campaign that had been initially launched by founder Sam Walton back in 1985, at a time of increasing unemployment. The NBC sting aimed to reveal Wal-Mart’s hypocrisy to millions of consumers by using hidden cameras to show footage of goods marketed under the “Made in America” promotion being manufactured in Bangladesh. The intent to highlight Wal-Mart’s hypocrisy was overshadowed by footage that one might have thought was even more damaging, as it showed children as young as nine involved in the production process.

Two and half years after Dateline aired, the first of two Memoranda of Understanding (MoU) was signed in Bangladesh on the 4th July 1995. A broad timetable of events that unfolded in the intervening period is shown in the event chart in Table One in the appendix to this chapter may be of help, as the case of child labour in Bangladesh is one of the most complex, if not the most complex in the transnational context of power, presenting a formidable challenge to those who have chosen to research it. The MoU was regarded as significant because it was the first of its kind to involve an entire industry. It consisted of four phases; firstly an initial fact-finding survey to identify child workers; secondly, an education programme coordinated by UNICEF, local NGOs and the government of Bangladesh; third, income maintenance as compensation to children for lost income; and finally, monitoring and verification by the ILO.

By the time of NBC Dateline, the ready-made-garment (RMG) industry in Bangladesh had grown rapidly from almost nothing in 1980 to account for around 70% of Bangladeshi exports in 1992 employing 750,000 workers, most of them female, in about 1,500 factories.⁹⁷ Working in factories was considered as an attractive prospect for girls as it offered them the prospect of a degree of personal independence. During my visit to Bangladesh in 2004 Rosaline Costa told me that while there were virtually no child labourers wandering the streets of Dhaka in the early 1980s, this had become strikingly visible by the end of that decade.

Figure 6.3. Some organizational links in run-up to Bangladesh MoU:1993-1995

Figure 6.3. Some organizational links in run-up to Bangladesh MoU:1993-1995

Figure 6.3 shows some of the organizations involved in events leading up to the roughly two and a half years from the NBC Dateline broadcast to the signing of the Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) in 1995. These included; the Bangladesh Garment Manufacturers and Exporters Association (BGMEA); international brands such as Wal-Mart and Levi-Strauss; US and Bangladeshi government and quasi-governmental agencies; international agencies such as UNICEF, and the ILO; international development agencies such as Save the Children; the US Child Labor Coalition (CLC)⁹⁸, local NGOs, such as UBINIG, Hotline and Gonoshahajjo Sangstha (GSS); the human rights forum Ain o Salish Kendra (ASK); US union organizations such as the AFL-CIO, the AAFLI, the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions (ICFTU) and The International Textile, Garment and Leather Workers' Federation (ITGLWF); and local unions such as BIGU founded by women garment workers. The Figure illustrates something of the complexity of the organizational context. The dotted lines describe some communication links involved between actors, notably between Terry Collingsworth of the AAFLI, (who since played a pivotal role in lawsuits against Chiquita Bananas, Nestle and Shell), who had close links with Pharis Harvey of the Child Labour Coalition and in 1994 helped to establish BIGU, the first female run garment workers union along with Rosaline Costa of Hotline Bangladesh together with former child labourers Nazma Sheikh, Kalpona Akter and Babul Akter who later formed the Bangladesh Independent Garment Workers Union (BIGU). Other prominent voices were members of prominent NGOs, including, Mazhar and Farida Akter of UBINIG, and Nur Liton from ASK.

To borrow a phrase from Donald Rumsfeld, discussions between government and business interests and between the corporations that played a pivotal role in the MoU were largely shrouded in secrecy, constituting “known unknowns”. In light of this subsequent authors on this period have based their research on interview data, while others have drawn on information revealed in litigation, from testimony to government or have drawn on all three sources.

In trying to make sense of this case I selected three accounts of the series of events leading from the NBC Dateline broadcast to the signing of the MoU, by Ethel Brooks, (2006), Michael Nielsen, (2005) and Shareen Hertel (2007). I constructed an event chart (shown in table one in the Appendix) based to the best of my knowledge on verifiable sources and where possible, compared the events related by the authors with those on the chart. Next, I read the authors’ conflicting accounts against each other in relation to two questions; firstly in relation to the claim that the focus on child labour was a protectionist ploy by sectional interests in the USA; and secondly, whether the case is illustrative of a social movement “boomerang strategy” that went awry.

The MoU: A Price Worth Paying?

Given that there is no prospect of attaining an Archimedean point from which to survey the whole and come to a definitive conclusion about this case, a number of differing interpretations have emerged, some of them better than others. Can one reduce this complexity from a “Dahlian” perspective to ask if some ‘A’ succeeded in achieving its aims over a ‘B’? This depends on whom one decides ‘A’ and “B’ are. Taking a crude perspective that distils ‘A’ from US interests, and ‘B’, from Bangladeshi interests, it could be argued that ‘A’ prevailed over ‘B’ largely through economic coercion, but at a severe cost to many involved. Coercion involved the introduction of the Child Labor Deterrence act to the Senate by Senator Harkin in October 1992⁹⁹ and its re-presentation in 1993 and 1994, coupled with the airing of the NBC NBC Dateline programme on the 22nd December, followed by two and a half years of intense wrangling and brinkmanship and culminating in the US consumer boycott of Bangladeshi goods in the month before the signature of the MoU.

According to the ILO, by the end of 2001, 8,509 children had been enrolled in 336 MOU schools. The price was high for many involved. In the interim between Dateline and the signing of the MoU between forty and fifty thousand children were reported to have been dismissed from their jobs with no compensation nor any offer of schooling. The consequences were also severe for Rosaline Costa of Hotline Bangladesh who had helped organize the Dateline segment, who was cut adrift from her organization for a time and whose life was subsequently threatened, and for her mentor Richard Timm who had to leave Bangladesh and was only allowed to return seven years later.¹⁰⁰

A key question asked by critics is why the situation of workers in Bangladesh was narrowed to child labour as opposed to the general health and wellbeing of all of those who worked in the industry. Brooks (2006) and Hertel (2007) argue that at least in part this was driven by a US protectionist agenda whilst Nielsen argues against this claim. This is discussed next.

Was the focus on child labour a protectionist ploy?

The case for the motion

An argument that gained a lot of traction in Bangladesh following NBC Dateline was that the focus on children’s rights provided a smokescreen for US protectionist interests whose aim was to repatriate manufacturing jobs to the USA. Advocates for this view point to the introduction of the Child Labor Deterrence Act or the “Harkin Bill”, named after the senator who presented it to Congress. If passed into law, the Harkin Bill would have prohibited the importation of manufactured and mined goods into the USA produced by children under the age of fifteen. While the Bill had global application, it was widely argued in Bangladesh that it was no coincidence that the Bill was re-introduced to the US Senate in October 1992, a couple of months before the NBC Dateline broadcast. They might also argue that American politicians actually cared little for children’s rights and that they did so only because they were indebted to the unions for funding and electoral support. Moreover, they could also point to the pivotal role played in the process by Terry Collingsworth of the American Asian Free Labour Institute (AAFLI) who at the time was based in the US embassy in Dhaka. The AAFLI was part of the AFL-CIO, the largest union federation in the USA, and Collingsworth was at the time involved in establishing labour unions in the RMG sector in Bangladesh.¹⁰¹

Ethel Brooks (2007) argues that child labour was constructed as a specific issue as opposed to general workers’ rights because it had wide appeal and was sure to gain the attention of western consumers. In her account the particular focus on child labour in the USA formed part of a protectionist agenda against the backdrop of a sharp decline in US manufacturing, which prompted Senator Harkin to propose the Child Labor Deterrence Bill in 1992, which if passed, would have had the effect of banning all imports of products made by children into the USA. To support her argument Brooks argues that the child labour campaign was motivated primarily by US protectionist interests. She makes two broad claims to support her argument, firstly that the NBC Dateline television segment that aired to millions of US consumers, which she mistakenly dates to 1993 that contained ‘fly on the wall’ footage of children employed in the manufacture of clothing for sale by Wal-Mart was no coincidence. Secondly, she links this to the call by the Asian American Free Labor Institute (AAFLI), a wing of the US labour movement together with forty NGOs under the wing of the Child Labor Coalition called for a boycott of Bangladeshi goods.

Brooks contrasts the corporate responses of Wal-Mart and Levi-Strauss, describing how the latter had earlier developed a code of conduct for offshore manufacturing following accusations of employing bonded labour in Saipan. Following that incident Levi-Strauss immediately required employees in Bangladesh factories to provide proof of age, carried out inspections, and placed underage workers in schools, paying for tuition, books and uniforms in return for jobs, thus enabling them to be portrayed as a “good citizen”. She argues incorrectly,¹⁰² that in contrast, Wal-Mart had responded to the NBC Dateline broadcast by promoting a ‘Buy American’ campaign in its stores, and by doing so, ‘nativism and shopping were thus reconciled with social conscience’. Rather than placing the child workers in schools, she contends that through the ‘Buy American’ campaign, Wal-Mart effectively entirely dissociated itself from the ‘taint of foreignness’, blaming Bangladesh as a ‘callous society’, ‘a site of forever failure’ where ‘Bangladeshi’s are eternal victims’, ‘leaving space for Wal-Mart, Dateline and US and European conscientious consumers to have a try at Bangladesh’s salvation’. Brooks continues that after NBC Dateline, Bangladesh became “a signifier” for child labour. By the end of 1994, she reports, the case for boycotting Bangladeshi imports of clothing was “strongly built”.

Brooks mentions that year-on-year from 1992, a growing number of consumers boycotted Bangladeshi-made garments in support of children’s rights. She also mentions that the Bangladeshi NGO, UBINIG, complained that the boycott was protectionist and imperialist and moreover that Bangladeshi’s were being treated either as, ‘stupid innocents’ unable to defend themselves from corporate greed, or as fiends who would sell their children to labour in the factories subcontracted by the multinational corporations. The boycott, she argues, deprived the people most affected of developing their own solutions.

Shareen Hertel (2006) also considers whether the focus on children’s rights might partly have provided a smokescreen for US protectionist interests whose aim was to repatriate manufacturing jobs to the USA. Developing Hertel’s argument, in relation to the US context proponents might contend that Senators Pease and Harkin who were behind the Child Labour Deterrence Act, actually cared little for children’s rights and only did so because they were in hock to the unions for funding and electoral support. They might further argue that it was no coincidence that the Bill was introduced in August 1992, a few months before the NBC Dateline broadcast. Additionally they might point to the links between Terry Collingsworth of the AAFLI and local activist Rosaline Costa from the Hotline agency who had facilitated access for the NBC Dateline production team. Moreover, in 1990 Costa had demonstrated the plight of child labourers in Bangladesh to US consumers by bringing children on tour to eighty-six venues in the USA. Indeed well before the Dateline broadcast, early 1991, the United food and Commercial Workers’ Union (UFRC) specifically targeted Wal-Mart’s ‘Made in America’ campaign, calling for a “Mother’s Day” boycott of all clothing sold in Wal-Mart stores to protest against the use of child labour in Bangladesh.

Protectionism: The case against the motion.

in contrast to Brooks (2006), and Hertel (2007), Michael Nielsen (2005) found little evidence to support the claim that US protectionism was behind the focus on child labour in Bangladesh in the period leading up to the MoU. Nielsen’s account differs from Brooks (2006) as he argues that the focus by NBC on Bangladesh and child labour was ‘to some degree a coincidence’, as the initial target for NBC Dateline had been to expose Wal-Mart’s ‘Buy American’ promotional campaign; ‘So this reporter with a television crew goes into a Wal-Mart. Underneath the banner “Buy America” there’s these shirts, and he starts looking at them, and they all say Made in Bangladesh’—'Made in Bangladesh’! ... if they had said ‘Made in Mexico,’ he would have gone to Mexico’.¹⁰³ Given that a large number of children were employed in the industry in Bangladesh, the programme framed the issue narrowly as comprising child labour and thus sidelined the often dangerous and unsanitary conditions of work and the lack of workers’ rights.

Nielsen agrees with Brooks (2006) and Hertel (2007) that the threat posed by the Harkin Bill narrowed the focus away from a general concern with workers’ rights and onto the specific issue of child labour. He also concurs with Hertel’s claim that this led to a sharp division between NGOs with UNICEF, IPEC and most local NGOs siding with the media and local manufacturers. Nielsen departs from Brooks and Hertel by arguing that the Harkin Bill was effectively deployed by the garment industry to displace blame from itself by redefining the problem away from its exploitation of its workers, to focus instead on the negative consequences for children summarily dismissed from their jobs and as a means to attack supposedly ‘malicious critics’ of the industry. The accusation of protectionism can be a potent weapon to deploy if one wishes to establish a broad coalition of interests against perceived outside interference as it invokes strong emotions linked to the fear that the entire industry is under threat and with it the lives of the many thousands of those employed in the RMG sector and of the millions who depended on them. It is thus understandable that at the time arguments to the contrary in Bangladesh were consequently not greeted with much respect or tolerance.

Nielsen describes how in the wake of the NBC Dateline broadcast the issue of child labour was amplified by the media in Bangladesh which reframed the problem to focus away from the exploitation of children by garment manufacturers, to make the claim that this was an international protectionist conspiracy against the entire Bangladeshi garment industry that ultimately worked against the interests of the children involved. He also contends that the BGMEA was more exercised about the negative impact of the legislation, the NBC Dateline broadcast and subsequent boycotts on the garment industry, than it was about the plight of the children. The focus on child labour led to, ‘a sharply polarized debate, in which the negative consequences of the elimination of child labour quickly became a dominant theme.’¹⁰⁴

Nielsen also mentions that for Terry Collingsworth of the AAFLI the Harkin Bill offered a ‘wedge’ and ‘point of leverage’ over the BGMEA to do something about educating the children. In his view the re-introduction of the Bill in 1993 and again in July, 1994 maintained this leverage to an extent, although the BGMEA countered with threats to dismiss all child workers, and the Bill lost much of its force each time it was introduced and was effectively stalled once the Republicans assumed power in Congress in the Autumn of 1994. Discussion narrowed onto items such as the size of the problem of child labour and here Nielsen notes that statistics on the number of child labourers working in the industry were unreliable as they were deeply enmeshed in politics, “reflecting the narrow interests of those reporting them”.¹⁰⁵

Importantly, Nielsen mentions that a few days after the NBC Dateline broadcast Collingsworth had made the BGMEA an offer that they work jointly to provide a framework for the education of children working in the RMG sector. Taken together with Collingsworth’s subsequent role in helping establish the Bangladesh Independent Garment Workers Union (BIGU), this suggests that his goal was not to protect US industry but rather to protect the rights of children. Given that he was working in the US embassy at the time from whence he later made a speech to this effect suggests that this was the official position.

Nielsen argues that media criticism deflected from the BGMEA onto those “northeners” who championed the Harkin Bill. This had the related effect of de-legitimizing the AAFLI and local activists, “charging them with an international conspiracy against the Bangladeshi garment industry, US protectionism, and working against the interests of the children in question.’¹⁰⁶ Nielsen concludes that this framing of the issue facilitated the aim of the BGMEA and its oft-repeated threats to summarily dismiss all of the child labourers. Moreover this failed to recognize that at the time the AAFLI was working to establish the Bangladesh Independent Garment-Workers Union (BIGU) staffed by ex-child labourers.¹⁰⁷

Nielsen concludes that the threat of trade sanctions posed by the Harkin Bill played a large role in bringing about the MoU, although some of his interviewees argued that a softer approach might have been just as effective if not more so. In response to such concerns, Pharis Harvey commented, “trade sanctions are a very blunt instrument but we were dealing with some very blunt people, and we got their attention.’¹⁰⁸

Discussion of Protectionist Arguments

How to explain the contrasting interpretations offered by the three authors mentioned above? While limited, my personal experience provided some purchase for my reading of the accounts summarised above.¹⁰⁹ One observation which seems obvious, is that one’s point of view is influenced by one’s point of entry into a situation recalling the well-known trope about the researcher and the elephant. When I visited Bangladesh in 2004 my initial contact was with Rosaline Costa, director of Hotline whom Hertel also describes meeting early on, while Brooks mentions UBINIG as her primary point of contact, and Nielsen, the AAFLI. As illustrated in Figure 6.2 these organizations embody differing ideologies, for example, Hotline had institutional links to the Catholic Justice and Peace Commission, while the founders of UBINIG were Marxists, of whom Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, who provided theoretical inspiration for Brooks, was a personal friend and the AAFLI played a quasi-governmental role.¹¹⁰

These shade into ideological differences pertaining to rights, as to whether a child has an absolute right to education, or whether this ought to be balanced against their economic right to survival. In light of this the account one provides is given shape as much by the facts one decides to omit or is simply unaware of, as much as those that one chooses to include, and in this complex case there are many facts and differing shades of opinion. This openness to interpretation was recognized by Hertel (2006) who towards the end of her piece briefly discusses three alternative explanations as to why the dispute came to focus exclusively on the topic of child labour as opposed to wider issues pertaining to security of employment and conditions of work.

Looking back at statements made by the sponsors of the “Harkin Bill” at the time, as reiterated by Collingsworth at a press conference from the USA Embassy in Bangladesh, the stated aim of the Bill was to penalize importers who attempted to bring goods made with child labour through customs. Bangladesh was not singled out but was one of fifteen countries named in relation to child labour. In his statement on the Harkin Bill, Senator Pease said nothing about Bangladesh but mentioned the plight of Vincent Guerro, a promising Mexican boy who worked fulltime spreading toxic toluene glue on the soles of athletic shoes, with his bare hands “Within weeks Vincent is home in bed, coughing, with burning eyes and nausea.” (Tonya, 1992, 632).¹¹¹ On the other hand it is clear that Senator Harkin was appraised of the situation in Bangladesh as he specifically mentioned that Rosaline Costa had told him that 60% of the five hundred workers in the Saraka plant, where twenty-seven people had died in a fire in 1990, were aged under thirteen.¹¹²

An important element of the case for protection cited by Ethel Brooks (2006) is the accusation that Wal-Mart responded to the NBC NBC Dateline segment by promoting a ‘Buy American’ campaign in its stores, and by doing so, ‘nativism and shopping were thus reconciled with social conscience’. By means of this, she argues, Wal-Mart entirely dissociated itself from the ‘taint of foreignness” and pinned the blame on Bangladesh as a “callous society”. if this allegation against the biggest retailer in the USA had substance it would have leant considerable weight to allegations of protectionism. However, her claim does not square with the facts, given that Sam Walton the founder of Wal-Mart had actually initiated the “Buy American” promotion seven years earlier in 1985.¹¹³ Indeed, rather than pulling out of Bangladesh or reducing its orders the evidence suggests the opposite, as Wal-Mart announced a new set of sourcing standards and subsequently increased its purchases of garments in Bangladesh which scarcely fits with arguments about protectionism.¹¹⁴

Failed Boomerang?

The case for.

Hertel (2006) offers an explanation for the prominence of child labour in Bangladesh based on social movement theory (McAdam, 1982). She describes three factors as crucial to the success of a social movement such as that for the elimination of child labour; “(a) the political opportunities and constraints confronting any would-be movement; (b) the organizational vehicles available to embryonic movements as sites for mobilization; and (c) the collective processes of interpretation, attribution, and social construction that mediate between opportunity and action.”¹¹⁵ Hertel argues along these lines that savvy activists in Bangladesh and the United States focused on a high-profile industrial sector (garments), a country with an NGO sector replete with potential allies, and on an issue area (children's rights) that was salient in public discourse. These activists identified a political opportunity (the growth of the sector and a potential American protectionist backlash), a mobilizing structure (well-developed NGO sectors in both countries), and a frame (children's rights) and capitalized on them to launch a skilful campaign.

Hertel (2006) describes Rosaline Costa from Hotline Bangladesh as an issue entrepreneur who followed a “boomerang” strategy, which is commonly employed by activists as a vehicle to exert pressure from the outside to shame the BGMEA and the Bangladeshi government into taking action on working conditions in the industry and on child labour.¹¹⁶ She explains that the aim of the strategy was to mobilize support from the US government and to raise the consciousness of consumers to their unknowing complicity in supporting the continuing practice of child labour. Hertel argues that this strategy failed because following the NBC Dateline broadcast Costa was isolated and harassed as a social pariah.¹¹⁷ Hertel quotes Bangladesh media reports from that time which, while recognising the unacceptability of child labour (which was illegal in Bangladesh), the Harkin Bill was viewed with considerable trepidation because poverty was at the root of the problem and those behind the Harkin bill in the USA ought to have been cognisant of the reality of the situation.¹¹⁸

Central to Hertel’s thesis is that the ‘outside-in’ strategy mainly organised by US activists through the Harkin Bill failed to engage the support of prominent local NGOs such as UBINIG and ASK, nor indeed of other “northern’ based agencies such as Save the Children, nor transnational agencies such as UNICEF.¹¹⁹ Hertel quotes accusations from representatives of UBINIG and ASK that the Harkin Bill served as a pretext for US protectionism and particularly the role played by Nur Khan Liton of local NGO ASK, who argued that Senator Harkin had “rashly” misinterpreted ILO guidelines by asking for a complete ban on child labour, thus failing to recognize the prior need for child labourers to obtain the necessities for survival. Liton sought to block the Harkin bill by arguing that this would constitute a violation of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, to argue instead that the ‘ right to food is no less basic than the right to liberty’.¹²⁰

Effectively, Hertel argues that Bangladeshi NGOs blocked the Harkin bill. This was firstly, because those behind the “outside-in” campaign were decoupled from the realities of life in Bangladesh. Secondly, whilst blocking assumed many forms, Hertel mentions that the story that some of the children who had been dismissed from factories had become prostitutes was widely circulated throughout NGOs, the ILO and UNICEF.¹²¹ She then mentions that the release of the US Department of Labor report, By the sweat and toil of children had mentioned new elements in the proposed legislation, including the need to address problems of poverty, “poor education and lack of opportunity to attend school”.¹²²

Blocking thus appeared to have had its desired affect: Senator Harkin and the Child Labor Coalition had to make explicit their support for economic rights. Given horrific claims of child prostitution, the Child Labor Coalition insisted that the garment manufacturers themselves must assume responsibility for the welfare of children displaced from the factories. Central to any agreement negotiated among the parties, the CLC urged, should be both a remediation program and a factory-monitoring program. The Child Labor Coalition, too, moved to accept the receiving-end activists' demand to include economic rights explicitly in the bargaining framework. ¹²³

Given this turn of events, Hertel then asks why the Child Labor Coalition pushed for a boycott of Bangladeshi goods in 1995,” one of the most widely criticized aspects of its overall involvement in Bangladesh?”¹²⁴ She mentions CLC claims that they only took this course of action as a last resort because the BGMEA had essentially stalled negotiations for a year because they were loath to become involved in the education of children and were resistant to external monitoring of their factories. It was also hoped that Hilary Clinton’s impending visit to Bangladesh on 31st March might provide the impetus to get a draft MoU over the line. Additionally, the proposed Harkin Bill had lost momentum and leverage since the Republicans had taken over Congress in the autumn of 1994.

Hertel describes how there followed a tit-for-tat exchange between Pharis Harvey of the Child Labor Coalition (CLC ) who threatened a consumer boycott countered by the BGMEA with the threat to summarily dismiss all of the remaining children. The boycott came into force on the 20th May and the BGMEA quickly returned to the negotiating table. Hertel quotes a representative of the CLC who stated that the boycott was a last resort and, ‘was very short-lived mainly because it was more of a tactic than anything.’ She mentions the CLC letter of 2nd June to thirty major American manufacturers that a draft Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) was imminent, and asking for their approval of this ‘model’ program.’ The CLC membership was then requested to halt the boycott by 5 July 1995. Finally, Hertel mentions that the CLC regarded as “"extremely important” the need to publicize to the BGMEA and the international press, “that the boycott was driven by our concern for children-not a plot by US groups to destroy the Bangladesh garment industry”.

“Failed Boomerang”: The case against

Nielsen (2005) agrees with Hertel’s (2006) statement that prominent NGOs in Bangladesh were vocal against the Harkin Bill, which they accused as protectionist. He notes too that this brought them into a curious alignment with the interests of the BGMEA and (although he does not state this openly), of members of the government who held an extensive stake in the industry. While mentioning correspondence from Pharis Harvey of the CLC to the BGMEA, Hertel does not discuss the extensive role played by the industry, the governments nor the corporations involved. Nielsen reports that on the 26th of December 1992, just a few days after NBC Dateline aired, Collingsworth had proposed to the president of the BGMEA that they establish a collaborative scheme to establish schools for the child labourers. To quote Nielsen at length,

The BGMEA would provide ‘access to the workers to inform them of the program, physical space for the classrooms where possible, and some degree of financial support’; would ‘permit access to the adult workers for AAFLI to provide education and training. Again, the BGMEA would provide physical space and some degree of financial support, as well as cooperation in arranging times when the workers could attend our programs’; and would meet regularly with an AAFLI representative to be presented with information about labour law violations on the part of BGMEA members, at which point the BGMEA would have an opportunity to correct the problems ‘before AAFLI used all available means to force compliance with the law’.¹²⁵

Thus while the core of Hertel’s argument is that the local NGOs blocking tactics effectively swung US policy towards allowing the children to continue working, given that Collingsworth was then attached to the US embassy, it seems clear from the above that this policy may have been the official US position all along! As Collingsworth explained it the Harkin Bill was useful as a ‘wedge’ to get the otherwise recalcitrant BGMEA to move forward on establishing worker rights. Moreover, Nielsen also mentions that two versions of the MoU were later mooted, of which the version which eventually formed the basis for the MoU was to remove all child labourers from the workplace and into schools. However the second version which would have allowed for a combination of work and education for all children aged over eleven was acceptable to the US embassy, the US Department of Labor, the CLC, ILRF and AAFLI, but was rejected by the BGMEA on the ground that it was ‘inconsistent with Bangladeshi law’ and ‘would not be acceptable to international buyers’.¹²⁶

Nielsen strongly refutes the frequently made argument that the whole affair was ‘northern driven’, coming from the AAFLI and CLC who were largely ignorant of the realities of life in Bangladesh. He points instead to subsequent effects on local activists such as Rosaline Costa and un-named others as,

another facet of ‘northern driven’ criticism which is less often discussed: namely, the intimidation, repression and physical violence which local critics often face, which may be part of the reason why ‘northern’ critics are not always too keen on naming their ‘southern’ partners. (Nielsen, 2005, 573).

While Hertel paints Rosaline Costa, the director of Hotline, as an isolated figure, Nielsen argues that this is one side of more complex story. As he describes it there were very close links between Costa, Collingsworth and Pharis Harvey. Collingsworth had helped with the tour organised by Costa in 1990 of child labourers from Bangladesh to eighty-six venues in the USA, where they spoke directly of their privations to church communities and to consumers. She had also played a key role in facilitating the Dateline media sting that aired in December 1992. While the above seems to cement the argument that Costa was in thrall to “northern” interests, this submerges her continuing support of indigenous minorities through Hotline and her fiercely held commitment to the plight of workers, particularly her concern to improve the opportunities for child labourers, as in 1994, when she and Collingsworth facilitated the formation of the Bangladesh Independent Garment Union (BIGU), the first of its kind set up by former child labourers.

Discussion

Hertel (2006) draws on the tripartite scheme developed by McAdam to identify the key factors that are likely to shape the likelihood of popular support for a given issue as (a) the political opportunities and constraints; (b) the organizational vehicles that constitute sites for collective action and (c) the collective framing of meaning and its interpretation and attribution. These can be summed as political opportunities, mobilizing structures and framing processes.

As Hertel (2007) explains it Rosaline Costa and her (mainly ‘northern’) allies followed a boomerang strategy in seeking to shame the Bangladeshi government and the BGMEA into taking action on child labour and on the education of children. She maintains that this strategy rebounded because of the formation and rapid growth of a movement that led to the blocking of the Harkin Bill. Hertel’s case is based on two claims; firstly, that the intention of ‘northern’ activists was to eliminate all child labour in Bangladesh; and secondly, that the movement against the Bill was a grassroots movement.

Taking the first point, Hertel’s contention that ‘northern’ activists played a strong role in proceedings makes sense, as Collingsworth from the AAFLI and Pharis Harvey head of the Child Labor Coalition (CLC) had established a close working relationship.¹²⁷ Collingsworth had close links the CLC, as legal counsel for the US-based International Labour Rights Fund (ILRF) which was a member of the CLC. In the years leading up to the signing of the MoU he had several exchanges with Harvey, who had called for a consumer boycott of garments made in Bangladesh. Collingsworth told Nielsen that he wasn’t initially concerned with child labour but became drawn into it when as a union organizer in the RMG sector he noticed the large number of children employed. Indeed there had been suggestions that Collingsworth that some were concerned that he had strayed from his main role in the AAFLI to focus on child labour.

However there is little evidence that the aim was to eliminate all child labour. If one takes what Terry Collingsworth, Pharis Harvey and Rosaline Costa said at face value, then the intention of the AAFLI and CLC was not the summary dismissal of child workers but to ensure that they were educated. Indeed, the summary dismissal of children was the threat made by the BGMEA in response to the Dateline broadcast. As mentioned above, four days after the NBC Dateline broadcast Collingsworth had proposed to work jointly with the BGMEA to establish a group that would coordinate NGOs and the government to set up schools for child workers.¹²⁸ Later on in the negotiations when two versions of the MoU had been developed, the “northerners” were amenable to the alternative that would have provided for time being set aside for the education of child labourers, whilst the BGMEA opted for the second, which was to remove all child labour.

On the second point, Hertel’s description of doughty challengers who established a grassroots movement that stood up to power by engaging in successful collective action does not quite ring true. There is little doubt that the supposed threat of “northern” protectionism aroused deep fears in the hearts of many while simultaneously providing them with a sense of agency and purpose in campaigning against the Harkin Bill. As McAdam (1982) might have explained it, this melding of the affective and cognitive dimensions worked as a powerful social glue. However, there is no doubt that the BGMEA and media were also heavily involved in setting the agenda by effectively re-framing the issue as protectionist, thus posing a threat to the RMG industry and indeed the livelihood of the entire nation, thus moving the complicity of the the industry and of the government out of the limelight and off the hook. As alluded to by Nielsen, the real risk and danger coupled with the courage to stand for principles and to suffer reputational and personal harm, was on the other side of the argument, and not on that of the BGMEA. Subsequently, it seems that the BGMEA stymied the operation of the second MoU by failing to provide its promised funding and thus hampering its operation to the extent that it lost its chief technical adviser.¹²⁹ Depressingly, as is discussed further below, the plight of child labourers and of labourers generally in Bangladesh is still dire today.

The Role of Business

Nielsen asks, “what about the Bangladeshi government, the garment manufacturers, the international buyers?” This is a good point, as it was mentioned earlier that two versions of the MoU were available, one of which would have enabled children aged eleven or so to engage in a combination of work and education, while the other would move all those children into school. In Nielsen’s view the focus by activists on the negative consequences of eliminating child labour led to the redefinition of the problem and narrowing the agenda in a manner that transferred moral culpability from corporations to their critics.¹³⁰ He mentions that in relation to the employment of children in the RMG sector, the general feeling of corporations operating in Bangladesh at the time the NBC Dateline segment aired was, ‘more or less tacit acceptance that ‘that’s just the way things are done over here’.¹³¹

Wal-Mart

Despite its projected hard image of an organisation that is prepared to sacrifice the wellbeing of its workers to the bottom line, sweated child labour seemed a step too far even for Wal-Mart. Those who surmised that NBC Dateline came as a total surprise for Wal-Mart executives were half-right, because they would have been forewarned by the action taken by Levi-Strauss much earlier that year to place child workers in their two factories in school and by communications between Pharis Harvey of the CLC and David Dayne Glass, CEO of Wal-Mart, and between Glass and the BGMEA. The images of child labour shown in the documentary would nonetheless have come as a nasty surprise for Glass given that twelve days before the NBC Dateline segment aired the BGMEA had written to him, ‘assuring the company that all necessary steps had been taken to ensure that BGMEA garments would be child-free’. Nielsen describes the shock; ‘Reeling from the negative exposure from the Dateline program, Mr Glass responded with a detailed letter which included commitment by Wal-Mart to establish a fund for factories and/or garment associations in order to help educate the children of Bangladesh.’ It was also reported that an immediate consequence of the programme was the report that Wal-Mart had introduced new buying and sourcing standards.¹³²

While the NBC Dateline broadcast had an immediate effect on Wal-Mart’s share price, which dropped by 3.7%, it quickly recovered to just over half of the loss and over the course of the next year a series of other factors came into play that affected the price.¹³³ Indeed 1992 was generally a record year for the retail giant¹³⁴ (the corporation has since resurrected its “buy American” policy several times since). Walton apparently initiated the Buy American policy when he saw small-town customers losing their jobs, writing to 3,000 businesses in the USA to tell them Wal-Mart wants to buy more US goods.¹³⁵ Following the furore in 1992, Wal-Mart’s launch. of another “Buy American campaign in 2013 was greeted with the following jibe, “Like Sam Walton’s promises twenty years ago Bill Simon’s rediscovery of American manufacturing in 2013 isn’t worth the paper his press release is printed on”.¹³⁶ Then in 2021 Wal-Mart, by then the largest importer of Chinese goods into the USA, pledged once more to buy more US manufactured goods.¹³⁷

In general terms although clearly mindful of the need for public relations, Wal-Mart’s actions exemplify Milton Friedman’s (1970) injunction that profitability should be the sole interest and focus of the corporate executive. The evidence suggests that the NBC Dateline segment had little effect on discouraging value-oriented Wal-Mart shoppers over the Christmas period. Wal-Mart founder Sam Walton had made his single-minded concern to privilege customer value over the interests of employees for a decent standard of living and security of employment, as a lever to it becoming the biggest retailer in the USA; “I pay low wages. I can take advantage of that. We're going to be successful, but the basis is a very low-wage, low-benefit model of employment”.¹³⁸ Wal-Mart stood out against other retailers but not for the best of reasons, as another commentator noted, in an America “blissfully uninterested in reckoning with the structural forces of inequality, Wal-Mart stands as a marked exception… and…its relations to politics, economics, labor, culture and community cohesion as a major cultural problem in the modern United States (Jessen, Adams, 2011, 117).

Wal-Mart’s hard-nosed image was reinforced in Barbara Ehrenreich’s (2001) memoir Nickel and Dimed, about her time as a sales associate at Wal-Mart, where she worked long hours for low pay and little time for discussion with other employees and random work rescheduling, in an environment that strongly discouraged unionisation. Ehrenreich’s book aroused considerable controversy and was followed by a PBS Frontline programme, Is Wal-Mart Good For America, which aired in 2004 and the sequel, Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price, in November 2005. Given its sheer size and obsessive relentlessness in driving down prices, once a Wal-Mart “Big Box is constructed in a small town the “Wal-Mart Effect” changes the entire retail landscape, depresses employee wages and conditions of work and ultimately crushes much of the retail giant’s competition. This has led some authors to question the moral equation whether the sum total of the savings to customers yielded by “the Wal-Mart effect exceeds the costs to its direct employees and those who labour in its supply chain and to the environment?¹³⁹ In 2021, Wal-Mart also fell foul of a report by the Clean Clothes Campaign of free riding on the efforts of those who signed up to the International Accord for Safety and Health that would protect the safety of workers, whilst refusing to sign itself.¹⁴⁰ Additionally, it has been the target of a lively anti-Walmart movement.¹⁴¹

How has Wal-Mart countered such negative publicity? Apart from its much vaunted “value” proposition, Arnold, Kozinets, and Handelman (2001) argued some time ago tht its strategy was to wrap itself in the flag of patriotism, although as mentioned above, each time it decides to haul out its “Buy American” theme, Wal-Mart today tends to attract as much sarcasm as praise.

Levi-Strauss

Nielsen mentions that along with Wal-Mart, Levi-Strauss and other major brands were involved in talks in Bangladesh in early 1993, although he provides no further details of what transpired. It is noteworthy that Levi Strauss adopted a different approach to Wal-Mart’s in relation to child labour in Bangladesh. Six months prior to the NBC Dateline broadcast the corporation had announced the discovery of child workers in two factories in Bangladesh which contravened its new Sourcing Guidelines and that it had made arrangements for their schooling.¹⁴² In a decision that foreshadowed the final MoU that came into force three years later in July 1995, Levi-Strauss agreed to pay the salaries of the children enrolled in school.

Levi-Strauss had good reason to implement a new system of Global Sourcing Guidelines in 1991 following a damaging news report that a supplier to Levi-Strauss and twenty-seven other US companies based in the Northern Mariana islands in Saipan had abused its workforce which mainly comprised immigrants. This story was reported to be ‘especially embarrassing’ because goods manufactured in the Northern Mariana Island, a US protectorate, could be labelled “Made in the USA’.¹⁴³ Given this when it came to Bangladesh, the company was already “up and running” in relation to worker exploitation. During my visit to Bangladesh in 2004 I learned that Levi Strauss had played a positive mediating role with the Bangladesh Centre for Workers Solidarity (BCWS) in resolving a dispute involving forty-eight employees who had been dismissed by Beximco, a major producer of garments, for assaulting a superviser.

A Fire and Safety Accord was signed in 2015 by 173 brands to protect workers following the Rana Plaza tragedy, by far the worst of many such incidents and in 2021 this was updated by expanding its provisions to other countries with a history of violations. Levi-Strauss did not sign up to this, proclaiming its standards as second to none. It is important to mention that over the years Levi-Strauss has studiously curated its brand identity to resonate with the values of its target market. Its stand against pollution was was eulogized by Greenpeace International, with its declaration in 2012 to become a “Detox leader”, reiterated in 2017 for its “Too dirty to wear” promotion¹⁴⁴ Its aim for a hip countercultural image was evident not just from the content of “Go Forth” ad that showed a man confronting riot police in 2011, but that it had to pull the ad due to actual violence.¹⁴⁵ However, in 2022 Levi’s came under fire from a concerted campaign to force it to sign an expanded Fire and Safety Accord. The corporation’s assertion that its standards were second to none was contradicted in an excoriating report by the Clean Clothes Campaign (2022) which accused Levi-Strauss not only of free-riding on the Accord’s efforts but also because its suppliers scored “very poorly” on safety.¹⁴⁶

The BGMEA

That several authors including Brooks and Hertel are largely silent on the role played by the Bangladesh Garment Manufacturers and Exporters Association (BGMEA) is perhaps unsurprising, given the difficulty of access, but worthy of note as this organization was one of the main players in the affair. Nielsen (2005) on the other hand argues that their role was deliberately obscured thanks to their re-framing of the issue to deflect attention from them. Nielsen (2005) contends that the BGMEA was the main target for activists such as Rosaline Costa and Terry Collingsworth and in his view their aim was to ensure a pathway for child education and to remove abuses against adults working in the RMG sector. In this understanding, following the introduction of the Harkin Bill and NBC Dateline, accusations of conspiracy and betrayal made by the media and NGOs such as UBINIG and ASK, that this was a conspiracy to destroy the RMG sector in Bangladesh, perfectly suited the aims of the BGMEA.

Gilbert (2018) notes that although the plight of young women in the RMG sector has been extensively documented, that of business or its owners has received scant attention from researchers. He mentions that one reason for this may have been the reluctance of, ‘post-critical’ ethnographers who have been reluctant, ‘to engage with questions of class, exploitation, and capitalism, particularly when this may lead to critical depictions of one’s ethnographic subjects”.¹⁴⁷ In his study Gilbert (2018) did not find much alignment between bureaucrats attempting to build “Brand Bangladesh” and the internationally mobile elite, many of whom owned RMG factories. In contrast, the elite who lived in the relatively pacific area of Gulshan appeared more interested in ensuring their own social reproduction than in corporate governance as a means to stimulate inward investment.¹⁴⁸ Retaining old-style connections and values of “club-ability’ that hark back to the British occupation, members of the elite distinguish themselves from the nouveau riche who more recently have gained access to resources through their political connections. To illustrate how the Gulshan elite acts to maintain its interests Gilbert quotes Sabur, who bluntly argued against the attempt to build “Brand Bangladesh” to attract inward investment noting that over the years, “as quality of governance goes down, growth goes up. Maybe we should discourage intervention”.¹⁴⁹ Gilbert quotes Ijaz, a development broker that, ‘Bangladesh is the Walmart of suppliers; it’s the lowest cost. It’s an inherent hedge—a real grab for value’¹⁵⁰ and, if Gilbert’s paper is anything to go by, then it seems still to be in the interests of the elite to keep it that way.

What of the legacy of the MoU? The final report by IPEC (2004) stated that child labour had fallen tiny proportion of the overall workforce in BGMEA factories.

Government

At one time purportedly labelled as a ‘basket case’ by Henry Kissinger, the crisis provoked by the introduction of the Harkin Bill and the NBC Dateline broadcast occurred just as military rule ended with a move to “elected authoritarian rule” by the Bangladesh National Party (BNP) in alliance with the hardline fundamentalist Jamaat-I-Islami against the Awami League (AL). Although in 1992 neither the broadcast nor those who proposed the Harkin Bill mentioned the Bangladeshi government, subsequent investigations in the wake of the collapse of the Rana Plaza on 24th April 2013, revealed extensive links between government and the RMG industry. According to a report produced following the disaster ten percent of members of parliament owned RMG factories and 50% had industry links of some sort. Mohammad Fazlul Azim, a member of parliament in 2013 and head of the Azim Group with 23 factories, who spoke out that while costs had doubled corporate buyers responded by telling him to increase productivity. The report also mentioned that factory owners ruthlessly suppressed dissent through the action of an “Industrial Police”, keeping wages low to increase their profits.¹⁵¹

At the time, Mohammed Yunus, who at time of writing is president of Bangladesh, called for a common minimum wage at double the prevailing rate of the time, asking, “Would a consumer in a shopping mall feel upset if they were asked to pay $35.50 instead of $35 for the item of clothing?”¹⁵² If these were the Wal-Mart consumers envisaged by Sam Walton, it seems the answer is likely to be “yes”.¹⁵³ A report by McKinsey (2011) two years prior to the Rana Plaza disaster highlighted that the ‘hard’ advantages for RMG buyers doing business in Bangladesh were capacity and price, with the latter as the prime advantage. The report had also pointed to an insufficiently skilled workforce and to serious lack of investment in machinery and technology.

At the time of the NBC Dateline broadcast in 1992 Bangladesh was ranked one of the least developed nations at 135th on the UN Human Development Index¹⁵⁴ A World Bank report of that year mentioned the need for “structural adjustment “ in light of endemic corruption, “ shortages and increasing militancy of skilled labour” as an ‘efficiency limiting’ barrier to private sector development in manufacturing.¹⁵⁵ The continuing power of the military was evident in that 17% of the budget was devoted to defence. By 2025 Bangladesh had risen to 130th on the HDI, a seemingly modest but important increase which indicated that the country had progressed to the level of “medium human development” and was now on an equal footing with India.¹⁵⁶

Given the significant improvement in human development, one might have imagined that the lot of workers, particularly of child labourers in the RMG sector, had improved in the interim. There has been no shortage of initiatives from government and NGOs. The National Child Labor Elimination Policy (NCLEP) was formulated in 2010 to protect children working in the formal sector, to ensure their education and provide a framework to eliminate child labour. In 2015 the Domestic Workers Protection and Welfare Policy set a minimum age of twelve for “domestic light work” and a number of agencies are now tasked with monitoring and responding to violations of child labour laws.¹⁵⁷ In light of this it is deeply depressing that the ILO recently criticized the government of Bangladesh in very strong terms relating to its non-observance of key conventions.¹⁵⁸

Witness Testimony

Ethel Brooks (2005) applies Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s work on the subaltern to the witness testimony provided by child labourers to western audiences. As she portrays it the anti-sweatshop movement is as vampiric as capitalism by feeding off the real suffering of people and transforming this into surplus value in the form of slick schooled accounts that are engineered to evoke the sympathy of legislators and groups of citizens in the USA and in Europe. Brooks employs Spivak’s distinction between ‘History I’ and ‘History 2’ to discuss anti-sweatshop actions such as the US tours and testimony provided by child labourers whose ‘living proof’ forms History 2, the surplus value, M’, that is required by the system of anti-sweatshop activism to reproduce itself. In this understanding the incorporation of History 2 into History 1 involves considerable epistemic violence that extracts surplus value from the suffering of others and which casts the subject into an impossible position when they are asked to ‘bear witness to something that is impossible to bear witness to’. The unsayable is negated as words are stuffed into the mouth of the victim who is then confronted with the alienating rote repetition of events they have suffered that seem to have happened to someone else.

In my view Brooks has a point as during my brief visit to Bangladesh in 2004 I also experienced an unsettling and curiously distanced feeling when listening to similar accounts from those who had been child workers. For Brooks, ‘there is an impossibility of understanding classed sites in Bangladesh once they travel along transnational circuits…that ‘labour may be politically and juridically free but is socially unfree…that such ‘living proof’ “shows the limits of capital’s and protest’s abilities to extract surplus value from the bodies of women.¹⁵⁹ This is of course intimately bound up with power relations as this contends that child labourers are exploited as they are moulded by “northern” interests to do what they would not otherwise have chosen to do. Yet my experience is different. During my visit to Bangladesh I spent a good deal of time with Sheik Nazma and Kalpona and Babul Akhter who had all been child labourers. While at first their accounts and those of others I listened to had the formal quality of the performance of “witness testimony” that Brooks describes, this soon changed as I got to know them better. They did not have to tell me of reality of violence, as this was all around.

On the other hand, one might offer a different view informed by McAdam et al., (2001), that identity is not immutable but malleable, and that particularly in situations involving contentious politics, the strategic presentation of self can be manipulated and changed in the course of interaction. Additionally, these theorists ask us to bear in mind the importance of certification, or the requirement for individuals to be treated with respect by others to ensure that they take their claims seriously. In situations where the stakes are so high one might suggest that it is understandable that when standing before church groups or members of the US Congress, some form of schooling of “witness testimony” would have been imperative if the plight of the individuals concerned to be taken seriously and acted upon.

Summing Up

How then to evaluate the two Memoranda of Understanding and their aftermath? In the short term it seems that these were successful, at least to the extent of removing child labour is concerned as the final report by IPEC (2004) stated that children constituted a tiny proportion of overall labour in BGMEA factories. However, the authors mentioned that while the BGMEA had ‘benefited greatly from the child labour free status…financial contributions towards the MOU are long overdue’. Lack of finance was cited as having significantly impacted the management and monitoring of the project; the number of government inspectors was grossly insufficient and the BGMEA could not be trusted to monitor the situation on its own.

In the longer the report of a comprehensive study of workers in the RMG sector by Kliuha et al. (2025) makes for depressing reading. The authors found that all of the children interviewed were employed illegally and that, against the presumption that child labour is confined to the informal domestic market, one-fifth of the children interviewed worked in factories that produced exclusively for the export market.¹⁶⁰ One of the report’s recommendations was to “Cease, remediate and prevent child labour”.¹⁶¹ For adults, persistent problems remained in subcontracted factories who experienced production pressures, late payment of wages and being paid below the minimum. Report states that, ‘discrimination, underpayment, abuse, and exploitative practices are systemic across the sector, and worsened for those working at subcontracted factories. This depressing quote is all the moreso given that the Nazma Sheik and Kalpona had been motivated to strike because of non-payment of wages.

Child labour remains a pressing issue in Bangladesh today, despite the existence of an established legal framework and an institutional apparatus consisting of state, local NGOs and transnational agencies to monitor and to regulate it and ameliorate the worst excesses.¹⁶²

Finally, it should be mentioned that the focus on developing countries shifted attention away from the extensive use of forced labour in the US and in Europe. Cooper mentions in relation to the discovery of indentured child labourers from Thailand in California and New York in 1995, that,

…many interest groups preferred to confine their campaigns to the squalid conditions in the developing world. Perhaps it was easier and more politically advantageous to blame multinationals and seemingly uncaring Third World legislators for the problem than to try to rectify such complex inequities at home (Cooper, 1997, 412).

Case Conclusion

Congratulations are due if you have managed to read from the start of this case to this point. My motivation to read accounts against the grain in order to substantiate facts and query assumptions has perhaps been partly successful but has led to me infiltrating my own biases. It is depressing that scandalous working conditions still appear to be common and that victims of Rana Plaza are still traumatized (Begum, 2023).

From my reading there seems to be little evidence that the focus on child labour was a protectionist ploy and rather the weight of evidence supports that this resulted from the actions of social activists in Bangladesh and in the USA. I find Hertel’s (2007) argument that this is an example of a “reverse boomerang” party supported (a) because the provision of education for child workers was supported by the AAFLI and the US administration perhaps from the start and (b) because there was more involvement from activists within Bangladesh than is mentioned in her account. That said there remain many ‘known-unknowns’ such as the communications between prominent “northern” brands and the BGMEA, of which there were likely many, and between these actors and the governments, the ILO and UNICEF. Nielsen (2005) seems to reflect the spirit of Dahl in such complex cases by calling for,

more in-depth analyses—including clear, detailed and documented chronologies of events—of why concrete changes that involve a shift towards corporate responsibility in the governance of social justice have occurred and taken on particular forms. By focusing on the struggles between conflicting forces and the selective inclusion and exclusion of issues, groups or organizations, such specific histories could be a significant counterforce in (and outside) a CSR discourse which is increasingly glossy, highly dominated by managerial needs and concerns, business cases and best practices, ‘partnerships’ and ‘dialogues.¹⁶³

I might add that I have now become something of a convert to archival sources of information as a necessary supplement to interview data, for where the latter is often self-interested, the latter can show where the bodies are buried. This has caused me to wonder about access to corporate archives and indeed the extent to which what if anything is being archived today?

Towards a More Complex Model

The above case is complex involving a host of different agencies.. Civil society groups seek to mobilize consumer support by boycotting brands or to take direct action on others’ behalf. There is also the power exercised by the elite, constituted not only those who live in luxury penthouses who lord it over the bonded labourers who service their lifestyles, but also by the materialistic “Northern” consumer so engrossed with constructing their identity project and with associated status games that they simply can’t be bothered looking elsewhere.¹⁶⁴

The more complex model below perhaps better illustrates the complexity of issues pertaining to power in the context of consumption. As per Dahl, the basic building blocks consist of the political realm (legislature and executive arms and quasi-governmental bodies), the courts, interest groups, churches, charities and other civil society organizations, business, consumers, third-parties and last but not least, the media, together with their inter-relations.

￼

Section Four: Direct Action Beyond the Law

The above references to legality and legitimacy signal the importance of recognizing legal constraints on the scope of the actions of A and B. They also highlight the interrelation between what happens in the economy, the judicial system and in politics. While B is accorded freedom of speech in calling for a boycott of A, in a democratic country it would be illegal for them to impede A’s lawful business, for example, by occupying or blocking access to A’s premises, in which case A would be justified in calling on the State power of the police. Similarly, it would be illegal for A to intimidate or threaten individual members of B. In the McLibel case it turned out that one of the two members of London Greenpeace who were sued by McDonald’s had not written the offending leaflet which had actually been co-authored by an undercover police officer who conveniently disappeared prior to the case. It also subsequently emerged that McDonald’s had met with members of the Metropolitan Police to discuss the case and had hired several private detectives to dig dirt on members of London Greenpeace. Such actions, particularly the duplicitous role of the police in this way undermine faith in the justice system and in democracy.

In 2012 Greenpeace began a concerted legal campaign to “Save the Arctic” in seeking to prevent oil corporations from drilling for oil and gas. This succeeded in forcing Shell to discontinue its programme of Arctic exploration and later pushed the Obama administration in the USA to abandon all drilling in US waters, slowing down the exploitation of this once pristine landscape.¹⁶⁵ Greenpeace subsequently successfully sued the Norwegian government to prevent them from drilling for oil in their sector of the arctic. However the group’s actions to stop drilling for gas by Russia went seriously awry when Russian agents fired shots at a group of activists who were peacefully trying to board a drilling platform and then attacked and boarded the Arctic Sunrise and took her crew of thirty into detention.¹⁶⁶ This effectively demonstrated the limits of direct action, which relies crucially that all parties respect the rule of law.¹⁶⁷ Clearly Vladimir Putin had other ideas.

A difficulty arises when those who are concerned about some aspect of corporate mis-behaviour with respect to some issue feel that their ‘votes’ will not make a difference. While organizations such as Greenpeace strive to work within the law other groups may work outside the liberal consensus by resorting to direct actions that involve the harassment of employees, occupation of buildings, or damage to stock. The Animal Liberation Front (ALF) which was formed in the early 1970s to call attention to the hidden exploitation and cruelty imposed on animals eventually employed tactics such as bombings, arson and other forms of physical violence to staff employed by Huntington Life Sciences, Oxford University and those of contractors involved in the construction of buildings to be used for animal experimentation. At the peak of the protest, the UK government offered to deploy troops to help secure the buildings. The UK then ratified changes in the Anti-Social Behaviour Act 2004, which created an offence of aggravated trespass to cover buildings. Company and University staff were protected by enforcing anti-harassment laws.¹⁶⁸

More recently, groups such as Extinction Rebellion and Just Stop Oil, have evolved generally more peaceful tactics, blocking traffic, interrupting sporting and cultural events, smashing windows and defacing artworks. In November 2023 nine members of Extinction Rebellion caused a reputed £500,000 of damage to the windows of the Canary Wharf headquarters of banking giant HSBC. The group argued that the damage they caused was in protest at the bank’s continued investments in fossil fuels from which it had made eighty million dollars since the Paris Climate Agreement. The rationale they put forward for their defence was based on arguments for positive liberty, that when considered from a rational perspective, executives of the bank would have been justified for breaking their own windows In response to the actions of Extinction Rebellion and Just Stop Oil, the UK government introduced the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act, (2022), which extended the powers of the police to prevent “significant” disruption, or “delay to the delivery of a time-sensitive product to consumers of that product”, restrict “static demonstrations”, issue ‘Serious Disruption Prevention Orders’ and to label ‘persistent offenders” as terrorist groups. In July 2024 five activists who had encouraged others to close down the motorway system around London were each given jail sentences of up to five years. While the judge acknowledged the scientific rationale that human-made climate change is a reality and that action should be taken to avert it, but that nevertheless, the protestors had “crossed the line, from campaigner to fanatic”.¹⁶⁹

Some groups are more diffuse and ephemeral than those described above. In the appropriately entitled Senseless Acts of Beauty , George McKay describes a number of cause groups that are fluid and amorphous, with no clear structure, hierarchy or spokepersons.¹⁷⁰ A feature of every democracy, in the UK one can think of the ‘New Age travellers’, ‘crusties’ and protestors against road development that were prevalent in the 1990s, and the Occupy movement that rose up in capital cities in the wake of the 2008 financial crash. “Swampy” – no-one knew his real name – achieved media celebrity having spent a week in a tunnel during a road protest in the 1990s. Although insisting that he was part of a movement that had no head, nonetheless he was labelled as ‘spokesman’ for this diverse movement.

While commentators often point to these generally leftist groups one of the most potent in terms of achieving its aims was the sectional group that formed to combat the UK government at the turn of the Millenium. Consider the situation where the British Prime Minister makes a televised appeal for calm, stating that troops have been deployed to help and he is considering recalling Parliament to discuss the rapidly deteriorating situation. Local chambers of commerce report that businesses are losing hundreds of millions of pounds a day, the Royal Mail says it only has resources for one more day’s deliveries, supermarkets are reporting signs of panic buying and are rationing essentials, the National Health Service has been placed on an emergency footing, and there are reports that petrol stations around the country will run out of fuel within forty-eight hours. At a hastily convened press conference the Prime Minister addresses the nation,

No government, indeed no country can retain credibility in its democratic process or its economic policy-making were it to give in to such protests. Real damage is being done to real people… we will listen, but we will not be intimidated.¹⁷¹

This is not science-fiction but describes the set of events that almost drove the United Kingdom to its knees in a matter of weeks in the year 2000. This was not a radical plot, nor left-wing conspiracy, but rather a loose alliance of independent fuel delivery drivers and farmers who halted deliveries and blocked fuel terminals in response to rapid price rises. An alliance of drivers with the opposition Conservative Party organised, “Boycott the Pumps” and “Dump the Pumps” campaigns against the Labour government. The “Gilets jaune” movement in France similarly mobilised mass support against the imposition by the Macron government of an environmentally motivated tax on fuel. Together these cases show that effective unrest can come from the Right as well as the Left.

Although the UK fuel protests are now a distant memory, the blockage of major traffic routes by truckers protesting against a steep rise in the price of fuel in September 2000 is noteworthy, because of how quickly the panic spread amongst consumers, business and government. The dispute escalated to the extent that the prime minister ordered troops to ferry fuel to petrol stations, threatening to recall parliament.¹⁷² News reporters initially searched in vain for the ‘leaders’ of this movement finding Brynle Williams, a sheep and cattle farmer and vice-chairman of the Flintshire branch of the Farmers' Union of Wales, and Richard Haddock. These ‘spokespersons’ who eventually and somewhat reluctantly came forward insisted that there was no leadership. This was also a characteristic of the protest by truckers in Ottawa against Covid restrictions in 2022.

General Conclusion

This chapter introduces Robert Dahl’s theory of power and acknowledges him as a more rounded figure than he is sometimes portrayed. The strengths of Dahl’s approach lie in the attention accorded to the detailed recording of facts and events, a monotonous, tedious and time-consuming task that is nonetheless worthwhile, because at the end of the day, facts matter. The pressures of academic life today are such that it can be tempting to fit facts to one’s favourite theory, for after all, one is evaluated by referees not so much on the basis of the facts one presents as on one’s theoretical contribution.

Scope for Social movement theory?

Dahl’s theory of power works best when one is dealing with a clear-cut “A” and “B” that operate within the formal pluralist system and not with dynamic situations involving loose and shifting constellations of interests that operate largely outside of the formal system. I thus turned to explore the potential of social movement theories such as political process theory developed by Doug McAdam and his colleagues (McAdam et al., 2001) as more amenable to explanations that focus on process and change. While these theorists are also interested in causality there are of course major differences between their focus on social transactions and relational interactions rather than on rationalist accounts of key decisions involving individuals. While focusing on complex social processes, the attempt by social movement theorists to simplify this by identifying causal chains consisting of mechanisms that appear in a variety of settings t in different sequences, would no doubt have appealed to Dahl,

It’s great to look out at night and see the stars but you’re not understanding anything about the nature of the universe. It has to be simplified. And in simplification you lose some potential information, but the gain is to provide comprehensibility and coherence.(Dahl, p. 7, in Dahl & Levi, 2009).

From the above there is in my view scope for the application of social movement theory to the study of power in contexts of marketing and consumption. However, given that this often involves studies of hundreds if not thousands of incidents, there is also room for qualitative studies such as that of child labour in Bangladesh, which are complex and indeed indeterminate in some respects, given the number of actors, differing accounts and the absence of information on the actions of corporations and governments behind the scenes. Where social theorists focus on interaction, this case highlights the significant role played by particular individuals such as Rosaline Costa and Terry Collingsworth without whose action things could have turned out differently. While social movement theorists refer to Costa as an ‘issue entrepreneur’ (Hertel, 2006), this anodyne description does not do justice to how far out of line her action was in facilitating the NBC Dateline reporters, which led to her abandonment by the church authorities and placed her in direct fear for her life. On reflection, given that the situation for child labour in Bangladesh is currently reported to be as bad now as it was in the early 1990s, it may have been better for researchers to focus less on the plight of the workers and more on the role of the elite in seeking to maintain their social position by maintaining Bangladesh as the ‘Wal-Mart’ of international suppliers (Gilbert, 2018, 49). Gilbert argues that a “community of complicity” operates amongst the elite which with a nod and a wink, chooses to ignore formal agreements. He mentions the reply of RMG owner Sabur to the question as to whether he had implemented his 5% fund yet (the fund was established following the Rana Plaza disaster to set aside profits for employee welfare)? Sabur responded ironically, to general laughter, “Of course not! How would I live?!”¹⁷³

The Corporation and its Responsibilities

An important point arising from earlier discussion in this chapter is that indeterminacy as to what a corporation is and what it ought to be, what its responsibilities are and who should be to blame when things go wrong, provides fuel for academic debate and feeds a lucrative industry for corporate ethicists to peddle their wares. The mainstream argument famously argued for by Friedman (1980) is that the corporation is a separate legal person whose executives are agents whose aim is to maximise the utility of its owners such that, ‘shareholder value has become the ethic by which executives construe and judge their own conduct’. (Roberts, 2005, 254).

Edward Freeman (1984) offered an alternative vision which, while agreeing that the satisfaction of shareholders is indeed a key responsibility for executives, argued that corporations should also cater to the interests of those others who have an important stake in its operations, such as employees, customers, suppliers, competitors, government and civil society. At a superficial level in relation to the foregoing discussion of child labour in Bangladesh, the attitude and behaviour of Wal-Mart may seem generally to conform to Friedman’s (1980) prescription whereas the actions of Levi-Strauss in arranging schooling for underage workers and for helping resolve the dispute at Beximco may be more compatible with Freeman (1984).

The explanation is not quite so simple. Quick to mention that it was the author of the first ever set of General Sourcing and Operating Guidelines in 1991, Levi Strauss & Co. was for obvious reasons coy to describe the reason why. Serving as guard-rails for engagement with suppliers overseas the guidelines combine word-play that allows for ‘wriggle room’ with specifics. The guidelines are elastic in stating the desire to work with businesses that, ‘aspire as individuals and in the conduct of all their businesses to a set of ethical standards not incompatible with our own”. This is followed by specific statements that Levi-Strauss will not work with businesses that hire children under 15 years old, use forced labour, administer corporal punishment, or have working hours in excess of sixty hours per week, and will engage with those that pay wages which meet ‘prevailing industry standards’ and permit freedom of association. While the general ethical statement allows sufficient leeway that one could drive a tractor through it, the specifics had sufficient real-world traction in 1992 when they were minted, to stimulate Levi Strauss employees to respond to the discovery of underage children in two factories by establishing schools, stipends and teaching materials for children. Additionally, as mentioned earlier, during my visit to Bangladesh in 2004, I learned that Levi-Strauss had acted positively by stepping in to mediate a dispute involving workers at Beximco. More recently, in the same year that Levi-Strauss at last signed a binding agreement to recognize workers’ rights in Pakistan, the corporation was criticised for failing to uphold workers’ rights in Turkey.¹⁷⁴

Given the above patchy record there is seems little support for the idea that Levi-Straus & Co.did anything other than seek to maintain its brand image and profitability. Given the importance of brand meaning in the formulation of the identity of the generally youthful “opinionated and savvy’¹⁷⁵ segment of customers in the early 1990s, one might have expected that Levi-Strauss would have done everything possible to maintain a positive image in the face of accusations of using child labour in the manufacture of its clothing.

Another aspect of the Bangladesh case is how the spotlight quickly shifted from focusing on the actions of Wal-Mart and onto anti-child labour activists. This is to an extent not surprising, as the most ready access to researchers in that case was provided by activists, whilst Wal-Mart and other corporates maintained a low profile and stayed well below the radar. It is clear that cost-competitiveness was, and is, of paramount importance to these corporations, especially for “value” brands, and that cost pressures have had a depressing effect on wages in the sector. In which light archival study of communications between corporations, the BGMEA and governments would shed a lot more light on this complex case.¹⁷⁶

Questions of Accountabilty

This chapter also raised the important question of accountability. Robert Dahl was concerned to rein in the self-serving behaviour of the corporate elite and his prescription which was to introduce workplace democracy, which was considered radical then, would no doubt be greeted with astonishment by apparatchiks of the Trump-47 regime. There is however a precedent, as since the enactment of the Mitbestimmungsgesetz in 1976, German workers have had formal authority in corporate decision-making, so it should be possible to discover whether this involvement has had a beneficial effect on corporate behaviour. Although it was long believed that this structure provided for more enlightened decisions than would otherwise have been the case, this presumption was seriously challenged following the emissions scandal that enveloped Volkswagen and a number of other corporations in 2015, which indicated that corporate boards had superficially complied with what was required by law but had grossly failed to effectively supervise and monitor operations¹⁷⁷.

Where do the authority, responsibility and accountability of the corporation lie?  Friedman (1970) had argued that managerial authority derives from the shareholders who own the business. Contributors to the literature on business ethics on the other hand contend that corporations own themselves because, as corporate assets are separate from those of shareholders, so directors are only agents of, and responsible to, the legal entity of the corporation.¹⁷⁸   Below I outline a third argument based on Hobbes presented by Mansell,(2025), that the corporation is simultaneously a separate legal entity and is authorised by the collective assembly of shareholders who are responsible for the action of its managers.

Mansell, (2025) first clarifies the role of the state in relation to the corporation, by countering the argument that corporate actions are authorised by the citizens of the state  He cites Hobbes, for whom the sovereign can only represent the overall public interest and not the private interest of the corporation. Rather, through issuance of a charter, the state gives permission to the future shareholders of the corporation which enables them to incorporate. 

Mansell next clarifies the relation of the directors and employees of the corporation to its shareholders. A common argument is that because they do not own corporate assets, shareholders cannot be principals and even if they were, directors would not be their agents, because shareholders have no power to control their actions. Here Mansell notes that Hobbes likens the relation of the citizen to the state authority to that of the shareholder to the business corporation, to argue that,

Hobbes accepts both premises: citizens or shareholders do not own the assets of a state or business corporation, and they have bestowed control on a representative who may delegate that authority to a government or board of directors. However, neither premise leads to the conclusion that the representative has no obligation to serve the citizens’ or shareholders’ interests.

If one accepts the above, then is the responsibility of the shareholder as a principal?   Quentin Skinner and Philip Pettit separately assert from a civic republican stance that authors ought to be responsible for the actions of those who represent them, the implication being that shareholders should carry the can for misdemeanours carried out in their name by corporate executives.  The corporation is a hierarchical entity and the directors that form its executive are authorised by the assembly of shareholders at its AGM to act as their representatives. Directors then hire general managers, who in turn recruit lower-level employees, such that those in more senior positions are morally responsible for the actions of their subordinates.

Mansell refers to Fleming (2020, who distinguishes the “nominal responsibility” that comes from ownership, from culpability, or blame, which attaches to the one who intended the wrongful action.  Ownership can be incurred vicariously, while culpability cannot, because intent cannot be transferred from a representative to a representee (ibid. 2020, 101). Mansell offers the example that if an employee commits fraud against a customer, the blame is not attributable to the employer unless they have been complicit. By extension, although the ownership of a decision by shareholders can be laid on the shoulders of each of its members, unless every shareholder voted for it, moral blame or culpability cannot.

Mansell then asks if one can blame shareholders for acts of corporate wrongdoing they were unaware of or that were committed in the past?  To my mind this summons the troubling issue of slavery and lest we forget, slavery is not a thing of the past but is very much with us today.  Mansell offers two reasons from Pasternak (2021), pertaining to situations when individuals might be blamed; on the basis of their association with the organisation; or if they benefitted from the wrongdoing. He mentions that in the case of the state, remedies may involve compensation, rehabilitation and ‘reparative measures’.  In the corporate realm he cites the example of the British Petroleum Deepwater Horizon disaster which placed a similar collective duty on the corporation’s shareholders, as the estimated $61.6 billion in costs were drawn from shareholder equity.

The paper by Mansell (2025), contributes to the ongoing debate on governance and accountability in the rarified subject area of business ethics that seem remote from the trials and challenges of everyday life.  From the standpoint of political process theory, Mansell’s argument and those like it, offer a potential resource for the issue entrepreneur who is alert to opportunities that may arise when the current system fails and who develops a mobilising structure around such arguments to present a challenge to the legitimacy of the prevailing system and to disrupt the balance of interests surrounding the status quo.  This is more or less the explanation offered by Davis and Thompson (1994), for the emergence of the shareholder rights movement in the 1980s when the prevailing system of corporate governance had broken down because executives tried to sideline the interests of shareholders by introducing “poison pills” and by lobbying US state governments to enact legislation against hostile takeovers. The authors argue that resentment by shareholders was mobilised by issue entrepreneurs who constructed effective mobilising structures for action to rein in executive pay and to prevent executive action to forestall takeovers, in the ideological climate of the Reagan regime that was favourable to the interests of shareholders.  While no social movement has as yet developed to press for the accountability of shareholders, the general aims of the interest group Corporate Accountability seem to make it a potentially good fit for such arguments.¹⁷⁹

Mansell’s (2025) mention of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill illustrates that very occasionally, public outcry over an issue can result in swift action. The oil spill from the Exxon Valdez in 1989 was one such moment, spurring the US Congress to ratify the Oil Pollution Act in the same year, stipulating that the ‘polluter pays’ and requiring Exxon to pay $900 million to a restoration trust fund, followed by in 2010 by the $8.8 billion paid by British Petroleum as redress for the Deepwater Horizon spill.¹⁸⁰

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¹ Hochchild, J. (2014). Robert Dahl, scholar, teacher, democrat and mensch. Washington Post, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2014/02/11/robert-dahl-scholar-teacher-democrat-and-mensch/

2 This was of 135 countries between 1950 and 1990.

³ Mayhew, (2017, 346).

⁴ Dahl, (1961: 185).

⁵ In 2023 Murdoch, who owned Fox News, paid $787.5 million to forestall a trial brought by Dominion. Fox had widely circulated false claims that Dominion's ballot-counting machines were used to manipulate the presidential election in favor of Democrat Joe Biden over then-President Donald Trump, a Republican. See, Coster Helen & Jack Queen, (2023). Fox settles Dominion lawsuit for $787.5 million over US election lies. Reuters, April 19th. https://www.reuters.com/legal/dominions-defamation-case-against-fox-poised-trial-after-delay-2023-04-18/

Boris Johnson features in this rather murky tale. The London Evening Standard had supported Boris for London mayor, and when Lebedev passed his interest in the paper to his son Alexander, the latter stated that he would continue to support Boris.⁶ Lebedev Jnr. was subsequently witnessed hobnobbing with political heavyweights such as Tony Blair and George Osborne, one-time Chancellor of the UK Exchequer, who took up the role as editor, then editor-in-chief of the London Evening Standard. When he was Prime Minister Boris Johnson successfully nominated Alexander for the UK House of Lords, despite trenchant warnings against doing so from the UK security services; Johnson was reported as the first Prime Minister to have ignored such advice. As Prime Minister Johnson was also reported to have unusually met Lebedev secretly in Tuscany without his security detail. Sources, Harding, Luke & Mark Sweney, (2009). Russian Oligarch to Buy London Evening Standard. The Guardian Wed. 14th January. https://www.theguardian.com/media/2009/jan/14/russian-oligarch-alexander-lebedev-buy-london-evening-standard. See also, Radden-Keefe, P. (2022). How Putin’s Oligarchs bought London. The New Yorker, March 17th. Finally, Channel 4. (2023). Boris, the Lord and the Russian Spy. Dispatches. https://www.channel4.com/programmes/boris-the-lord-the-russian-spy-dispatches

⁷ Crawford, a. & B. Bell, (2022). Molly Russell inquest: Father makes social media plea. BBC, 30th September.

⁸ Dahl, (1961: 226). https://www.lawgazette.co.uk/news/textbook-slapp-oligarchs-libel-lawyers-reported-to-sra/5112544.article

⁹ Brier & Stern, (1969).

¹⁰ Clegg, (1989, 66).

¹¹ See Newton, (1969). Stewart Clegg (59-65) provides a good summary of Newton’s argument.

¹² Developed by Domhoff, (1967) Power Structure research aims to “debunk the prevailing myths about American democracy and to advance an alternative view of power in America”. The principal methodologies used are network analysis and content analysis. The Who Rules America website is well-maintained and has links to a number of useful resources. https://whorulesamerica.ucsc.edu

¹³ MacGilvary (2015) suggests that, ironically, the moral basis for Dahl’s argument rests on the Madisonian system that Dahl rejects. While like Madison, Dahl focuses on the republican aim of preventing the arbitrary exercise of power, rather than the democratic aim of securing popular control over elected officials Dahl departs from Madison when arguing that the success of this project should depends on social rather than constitutional factors.

¹⁴ Dahl & Lindblom, (1953).

¹⁵ Dahl, (1959, 25).

¹⁶ Dahl, (1998). On Democracy, 173-177.

¹⁷ Dahl, (1993, 267).

¹⁸ Ibid., (267)

¹⁹ Ibid., (269-271).

²⁰ See also Mizruchi & Hirschman, (2010).

²¹ Dahl, (1970). After the Revolution, 98.

²² See also, Pikkety, (2021), Sunstein et al. (1998) and Posner, (1997) for a dissenting opinion. References at the end of chapter five.

²³ Moens, B.; A. Bounds & Laura Dubois, (2025). EU stands its grounds on digital rules despite Trump’s warning. Financial Times, 26th August; Moens, B. & H. Foy, (2025). Vallet, C. (2025). EU rocked by Trump’s attack on digital regulation. Le Monde, 29th August; EU antitrust chief urges defiance of US. Financial Times, 30th August, 4.

²⁴ Calabrese, S, & R. Virah-Sawmy, (2025). Big tech is avoiding responsibility: here’s what the EU can do about it. European Democracy Hub., 26th March.

²⁵ Haines, G.K. (1995). CIA and Guatemala assassination proposals 1952-1954. CIA Historical Review Program Release as Sanitized 1997. CIA, (2023). FILE 013: PART II - The Side of the Argo Mission You’ve Never Heard – Exfiltration, 14th September. The Langley Files, CIA’s Podcast.

²⁶ Whiting, Van R., Jr., Political Mobilization and Breakdown of Democracy in Chile, vol. 1. Latin American Issues [On-line], 1.Available: https://sites.allegheny.edu/latinamericanstudies/latin-american-issues/volume-1/

²⁷ Menninger, (1985), in Vogel, (1987, 387).

²⁸ Hoffman, (2003, 124). However, as noted by Mizruchi and Hirschman, (2010), Galbraith differed from Dahl by arguing for “countervailing power”. In this view firms have conflicting interests which effectively cancel themselves out, thereby preventing business from constituting a unified political force. This argument predates his ideas about the “technostructure”, that control was no longer vested in managers but in technocrats “who bring specialized knowledge, talent or experience to group decision making”.

²⁹ Dahl, (Theory of Democracy, 819)

³⁰ Excerpt from Dahl (1959) in Theory of Democracy (ch. 55) cited in Hoffman, (2003, 225).

³¹ 30% of all listed companies bought back their shares in 2023. See the post by Seigne, M. and J.R.Osterrieder (2023), Implementation of Share Buybacks and Their Impact on Corporate Governance. Harvard Law School Forum on Corporate Governance. “We found that 46% used per share metrics such as earnings per share (EPS) or cash flow per share in their executive short-term and/or long-term incentive plans. Our research shows that of these companies that use per share metrics, 76% either don’t adjust for buybacks when determining incentive payouts or are silent in the disclosures about the use of adjustments” (Ringlee et al., 2023). See Ringlee, L.; M. Madu and J. Ogelsby, (2023) Share Buybacks and Executive Compensation: Assessing Key Criticisms. Harvard Law School Forum on Corporate Governance, 16th July.

³² Power, Thomas, (2020). Share Buybacks and Income Inequality. Articles. 12.

https://arrow.tudublin.ie/engineducart/12

³³ Dahl, (1970). After the Revolution chapter 3.

³⁴Hoffman, (2003, 130).

³⁵ Dahl, (1998). Theory of Democracy, (744-746), In Hoffman, (2003)

³⁶ Op Cit., 131.

³⁷ Op. Cit., 136.

³⁸ Brier, (1969, 125).

³⁹ See for instance, Pires, G.D.; J. Stanton & P. Rita, (2006). The internet, consumer empowerment and marketing strategies. European Journal of Marketing, 40, 936-949. https://api.semanticscholar.org/CorpusID:167735647 Also, Department of Business Innovation and Skills, (2012). Empowered consumers and growth: literature review. Gov UK, 31st July.

⁴⁰ Packard, V., (1960). The waste makers, NY: David McKay & Co.

⁴¹ Mehl, (2022).

⁴² The National Health Service and Community Care Act, (1990).

⁴³ Heyer, (2014, s. 20).

⁴⁴ Bork was more cautious about mergers that would lead to a monopolistic position as motivated by the drive to control the market, distinguishing this from internal growth which he took as a sign of greater efficiency. The problem arose he adduced, in how to measure efficiency in a particular case, which he rejected in favour of a rule (Heyer, 2014.: 24).

⁴⁵ See Yale School of Management, Antitrust Enforcement. Modern U.S. antitrust theory and evidence amid rising concerns of market power and its effects. Accessed July 2024.

⁴⁶ Office of Public Affairs, (2025). Department of Justice Prevails in Landmark Antitrust Case Against Google. US Department of Justice, 17h April. This reports that United States et al. v. Google, the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia held that Google violated antitrust law by monopolizing open-web digital advertising markets.

⁴⁷ Jamieson, (1994).

⁴⁸ Coley, N. (2017). The fight against food adulteration. Education in Chemistry. The Royal Society of Chemistry. https://edu.rsc.org/feature/the-fight-against-food-adulteration/2020253.article

⁴⁹ O’Sullivan, B. (2023) A decade on how the horsemeat scandal changed the way the world thinks about food safety, The Irish Times, 7th January.

⁵⁰ Sussman, Beth (2010) Industry Spends $18.9 million to fight tax. National Journal: Under the Influence: An insight view of the lobbying and advocacy Industry. Jan. 29th http://undertheinfluence.nationaljournal.com/2010/01/beverage-lobby-spent-189-million.php

⁵¹ http://www.health.state.ny.us/press/releases/2010/2010-02-10_beverage_lobby_steps_up_anti-soda_tax.htm

⁵² http://www.nbcphiladelphia.com/news/politics/Cola-Confrontation-Woman-Fights-Mayor-Over-Sugar-Tax-86696452.html

Edmondson, E., J. Shea, E. Gregory, C. Roberto, S Garcia, J. Kwon, & S. Virudachalam, (2022). Low-income parents’ perceptions of a sweetened beverage tax in Philadelphia. Journal of Nutritional Science,11, E67. doi:10.1017/jns.2022.64

⁵⁴ Lyall, S. (2010). In British race a stray remark haunts Brown. The New York Times, 28th April. https://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/29/world/europe/29brown.html

⁵⁵ See Boorstin, (1962) and for the quote (amongst several authors), Gittlitz, A.M. (2013). I was a political astroturfer. Salon.14th April. https://www.salon.com/2013/04/14/i_was_a_political_astroturfer/

⁵⁶ See Kang et al., (2015); Walker & Le, (2023), Chan, (2022).

⁵⁷ Monbiot, G. (2010). These astroturf libertarians are the real threat to online democracy. The Guardian, 13th December. He mentions Taki Oldham Astroturf Wars – a training film for American Majority on how to “manipulate the medium”, funded by the libertarian Sam Adams Alliance.

⁵⁸ Corporate Europe Observatory, (2025). The EU’s lobby league table Tech, Banking, Energy, Chemicals dominate. https://corporateeurope.org/en/2025/02/eus-lobby-league-table. See also, Hanegraaph & Poletti, (2021).

⁵⁹ O’Leary, N. (2022). A suitcase full of cash: European Parliament hit by Qatar corruption investigation. The Irish Times, 12th December.

⁶⁰ Garrett, (1987, 46).

⁶¹ The extensive ELTSA archive can be accessed at the following address. https://archiveshub.jisc.ac.uk/search/archives/bf424edf-65b6-3958-9cc3 cba53d93085b#:~:text=End%20Loans%20to%20Southern%20Africa%20(ELTSA)%20campaigned%20for%20the%20end,imposition%20of%20effective%20financial%20sanctions.

⁶² A paper by Anttilla-Hughes et al. (2018), estimates this caused 9.8 deaths per thousand that were otherwise preventable, resulting in 66,000 deaths in 1981, which was the peak. For background the following case is an example; The Oxford Centre for Global History (2019). Nestlé’s corporate reputation and the long history of infant formula. Case study 12, Global History of Capitalism Project, Said Business School. https://globalcapitalism.history.ox.ac.uk/files/case12-nestlescorporatereputationpdf-1. See also, Sasson, (2016).

⁶³ Baby Milk Action (IBFAN-UK) Why the Nestlé boycott continues. http://www.babymilkaction.org/nestlefree. Accessed March 2022. See also, Changing Markets Foundation (2017) Milking it: How milk formula companies are putting profits before science: https://changingmarkets.org/ portfolio/milking-it/. World Health Organization (2017) Infant and young child feeding: http://www.who.int/mediacentre/factsheets/fs342/en/. Nestlé. Why was a Nestlé boycott launched? https://www.nestle.com/ask-nestle/our-company/answers/nestle-boycott. Accessed March 2022.

⁶⁴ Vick & Campbell, (2001, 211-212).

⁶⁵ Curiously, in the USA, the rights granted to freed slaves under the Fourteenth Amendment to the US Constitution were extended to private corporations in 1868. In Britain legal personhood of a joint-stock company separate from its shareholders was established by the Companies Act (1862).

⁶⁶ The 1862 Companies Act was ratified by the House of Lords in the judgement of the case of Salomon vs Salomon & Co (1897), which re-iterated the principle of limited liability (Plesch & Brankenberg, 2008, 15).

⁶⁷ The McLibel Trial Judgement, McSpotlight. https://www.mcspotlight.org/case/trial/verdict/index.html

⁶⁸ Steel v. McDonald's Corpn. (1999) QBENF 97/1281/1 (CA).

⁶⁹ HUDOC, Steel and Morris vs. The United Kingdom, (2005).

⁷⁰ Vick & Campbell, (2001).

⁷¹ Sauven, J. (2006). The odd couple. The Guardian, 2nd August. Kirkman, A. (2020). From burned Brazilian forest to the shelves of Tesco, Asda and Lidl. Greenpeace, 25th November. Also, Kirkman, A. (2022). The “hidden” Amazon deforestation in UK supermarket supply chains. Greenpeace, 10th February.

⁷² BBC, (2022). The McLibel Trial, The Reunion. https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m00168fp. Also Mark Steel, (2025). Shadow World: The People vs McDonald’s. BBC Radio 4, August. (seven parts).

⁷³ Eleven were convicted in Spain, seven in Ireland and one person each in Cyprus, Germany, Italy and the USA. Noonan, Laura, Cale Tilford, Richard Milne, Ian Mount and Peter Wise (2018). Who went to jail for their role in the financial crisis? Financial Times, 20th September.

⁷⁴ Hallam’s sentence was reduced to four years on appeal and Daniel Shaw, Louise Lancaster, Lucia Whittaker De Abreu and Cressida Gethin were also subsequently reduced. (Gayle, D. (2025). Just Stop Oil protesters’ jail sentences shortened after appeal. The Guardian, 7th March).

⁷⁵ Vernon, H. (2025). Met raids Quaker meeting house and arrests six women at Youth Demand talk. The Guardian, 29th March.

⁷⁶ Gayle, D. (2021). Extinction Rebellion protestors block Oxford Circus in London. The Guardian, 25th August.

⁷⁷ These are covered under the Police, Crime, Sentencing & Courts (“Policing”) Act which came into effect in April 2022.

⁷⁸ The McLibel Trial Story, McSpotlight. https://www.mcspotlight.org/case/trial/story.html

⁷⁹ See above footnote. This was in 1989 as the anti-McDonald’s campaign gathered impetus.

⁸⁰ See for instance the case brought by Philip Morris against the University of Stirling. Dunnion, K. (2011). Decision 129/2011 Philip Morris International and the University of Stirling, 30th June. Scottish Information Commision. For more insight see Carrell, S., (2011). Tobacco firm demands university’s research into children and smoking. The Guardian, 1st September.

⁸¹ See Davis et al. (2005), especially the four chapters in section 2.

⁸² McAdam, (1999, 6).

⁸³ Edelman, (2001, 289).

⁸⁴ Edelman describes how RMT came under fire from NSM theorists for lacking attention to discourse and identity formation and the response by McAdam et al., (2001) by including ‘political opportunities’, ‘mobilizing structures’ and ‘framing’ to include how collective identities arise and the interpretive and discursive practices and performances that shape the understandings of participants. (Edelman, 2001, 291).

⁸⁵ Davis and Thompson, (1994, 161).

⁸⁶ Ibid., 232.

⁸⁷ Ibid., Table 2, 233.

⁸⁸ For more about issue entrepreneurs Davis and Thompson reference McCarthy & Zald, 1977, (1215).

⁸⁹ Davis & Thompson, (1994, 158)

⁹⁰ Ibid., 167.

⁹¹ Ibid., 168.

⁹² Garcia, (2025).

⁹³ “Data exhaust” is a term used by Zuboff, (2019).

⁹⁴ Parry, J. (2025). EU risks more Trump tariffs in looming Big Tech crackdown. Politico, 19th March.

⁹⁵ BBC News, (2019). Michel Temer: Brazil ex-president arrested in corruption probe, 21st March.

Wells, I. & V. Buschschlüter (2025). Bolsonaro sentenced to 27 years in prison for plotting Brazil coup, BBC News, 11th September.

⁹⁶ Iqbal, N. & L. Prazeres (2025). Bolsonaro's son praises Trump's tariff hike on Brazil. BBC News, 14th August.

⁹⁷ UNICEF/ILO (2004, 5). In relation to Bangladesh quoted statistics should be treated with some caution as estimates can vary widely.

⁹⁸ The CLC represented twenty-two organisations at the time.

⁹⁹ Pease, Donald J. (1992). “H.R.6090 - 102nd Congress (1991-1992): Child Labor Deterrence Act of 1992.” Congress.gov, (October 6, 1992). https://www.congress.gov/bill/102nd-congress/house-bill/6090/text?s=1&r=1.

¹⁰⁰ Brooks (2006) argues that the levels of deprivation, violence and trauma in Bangladesh are novel and shocking to westerners and that the reality of the experience of this is covered over by the testimony that individuals are expected and at least to an extent schooled to give time and time again to politicians, funders and researchers distancing them from the actuality.

¹⁰¹ The above adds some detail to the explanation for protectionism advanced by Hertel, (2006).

¹⁰² This is an important point as Wal-Mart had actually initiated this programme in 1985.

¹⁰³ Nielsen, (2005, 572).

¹⁰⁴ Ibid., 572.

¹⁰⁵ The children range in ages from eight to fourteen work in the garment industry. It is reported that most of the children are girls with an average age of just over 13 years. Estimates vary widely with Farida Akhter saying one quarter are below the age of fifteen whilst the BGMEA cites figure of one percent. Ranges quoted are from zero to forty percent. P. 24 in US Department of Labor, (1994), By the sweat and toil of children, A report to Congress.

¹⁰⁶ Nielsen, (2005, 573).

¹⁰⁷ Nielsen, (2005, 576).

¹⁰⁸ Ibid., 575.

¹⁰⁹ My contribution, in the form of a reflective conference paper to EGOS and a later presentation to the Macromarketing conference , was distinctively more modest than those of the above. Prior to my visit I knew almost nothing about the RMGindustry in Bangladesh nor anything about child labour as my motivation sprang mainly from concern to ensure the welfare of workers in a business in which I had a small interest that had recently moved production to Bangladesh. While I approached several NGOs including UBINIG, only Rosaline Costa from Hotline responded and I ended up staying for a week in the compound that Hotline shared with Caritas.

¹¹⁰ Hertel (2006) does not mention the institutional link of Hotline to the Justice and Peace Commission and I could not find a reference from Brooks (2007) to mentions the personal relation between Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and Farhad Mazhar mentioned in the latter’s Wikipedia page.

¹¹¹ Tonya references Nardinelli, I. (1990) who mentions Bangladesh as well as Argentina, Bolivia, Ecuador, Egypt, Ghana, Guatemala, India, Mali, Morocco, Nepal, Somalia, Spain, Sudan, and the Republic of Yemen “are pressured by tradition and necessity to bring in money for their poor families” (ibid., 644).

¹¹² Hertel, (2007, 35).

¹¹³ The campaign 'was designed to keep the small business sector afloat and work toward a long-range goal of strengthening the free-enterprise system,' according to 'The Sam Walton Story,' a book about the retail icon published in 1991.

¹¹⁴ See for instance Nielsen (2005) who quotes several media sources. At the time of my visit to Bangladesh in 2004, interviewees mentioned that Wal-Mart was extensively involved in Bangladesh and still figured amongst the worst for failing to adhere to standards.

¹¹⁵ McAdam, (2017).

¹¹⁶ Hertel, (2006, 34).

¹¹⁷ I can confirm this from my interviews with Rosaline Costa. Additionally Richard Timm was effectively expelled from Bangladesh. His visa revoked so he was not able to return to Bangladesh until 1999 when a new visa was issued.

¹¹⁸ Hertel, (2006, 37).

¹¹⁹ Ibid., 42.

¹²⁰ Ibid., 39.

¹²¹ I tried to track down the source of this claim back in 2004 but found little by way of substantive evidence for it. ILO's International Programme on the Elimination of Child Labor (IPEC) (US Dept of Labor, 1995, 7).

¹²² Emphasis in Hertel, (2006, 43). I could not find any quote like this in the report. Perhaps this was in the press release? The 1994 report (vol. 1) discusses Bangladesh amongst nineteen countries. Specifically, ‘Conditions for child workers in garment factories vary, but employers and labor officials sometimes argue that the work carried out by young teenagers in garment factories qualifies as "light work." ILO Convention 138 permits "light work" for 12 and 13 year olds, so long as it is not likely to harm the health or development of young persons, and that it not prejudice their attendance at school, their participation in vocational orientation or training programs, or their capacity to benefit from the instruction received.’ (US Department of Labor, 1994, 12). Source, U.S. Department of Labor. (1994). By the sweat & toil of children: The use of child labor in American imports. Washington, DC.

The 1995 report (vol. II) is also wide-ranging report covers twenty-seven industries in Africa, Asia and Latin America. Schooling receives a lot of attention. Specifically in relation to Bangladesh, it mentions the ‘historic agreement’ to phase out child labour in Bangladesh and to give adult relatives preference of employment (p. 7); mention that ambassador Merrill had praised the BGMEA for donating $900,000 to the programme, urging them to act in good faith (p. 17) Source. Bureau of International Labor Affairs, (1995). By the sweat and toil of children, Vols 2, US Department of Labor.

¹²³ Ibid., 43.

¹²⁴ Ibid., 45.

¹²⁵ Nielsen, (2005, 568-569).

¹²⁶ Ibid., 577.

¹²⁷ As well as heading up the Child Labor Coalition Harvey was executive director of the International Labor Rights Fund (ILRF) and Collingsworth as its legal counsel.

¹²⁸ Nielsen, (2005, 568).

¹²⁹ UNICEF/ILO, (2004).

¹³⁰ Nielsen, (2005, 580).

¹³¹ Nielsen, (2005, 563).

¹³² Nielsen, (2005, 569). Glass had walked out of NBC interview where he was confronted with images of child labour involved in the manufacture of Wal-Mart clothes, but later invited the reporter back. Source, NBC questions Wal-Mart's 'Buy American' campaign. UPI Archives, 22nd December 1992.

¹³³ Hayes, T.C. (1992) Wal-Mart disputes report on labor. New York Times, 24th December. The Wal-Mart stock price actually rose to $3.45 by March 1993 but thereafter fell, largely due to a stock-split once the corporation went public, and due to concerns unrelated to the Dateline programme. At the time of my research in Bangladesh in 2004, Wal-Mart was mentioned by several of those I interviewed as one of the worst.

¹³⁴ On 27th February 1992 Wal-Mart reported that profit had rise by 25% to a record $1.61 billion in 1991.

¹³⁵ Kilborn, P. (1985). Wal-Mart’s “Buy American”, New York Times, section D1, p, 1, 10th April.

¹³⁶ Norman, A. (2013) Wal-Mart discovers “Made in America – Again!, Huff Post, 22nd Jan.

¹³⁷ Heller, L. (2023. Wal-Mart’s made in the USA claim, fact or fiction? Forbes, 28th June.

¹³⁸ Quote from, PBS, (2004) Is Wal-Mart Good For America: Inside the World’s Largest Company. https://www.pbs.org/video/frontline-wal-mart-good-america/. See also, NeCastro, M. (2014), 46.

¹³⁹ Fishman, (2006, 8. 9 & 11).

¹⁴⁰ Clean Clothes Campaign, (2022). A decade after Bangladesh’s most deadly factory fires, brands like Walmart still ignore workers’ safety.

¹⁴¹ Hollenbeck & Zinkhan, (2010).

¹⁴² Levi-Strauss & Co. (1992). Bangladesh workers back to school, News Watch, 30th June, p. 2.

¹⁴³ Smithsonian Center, Levi-Strauss, (1991) terms of engagement. Shenon, P., (1993). Made in the USA? Hard Labour on a Pacific Island, No American Dream. The New York Times, 18th July. In 1999 a class action was brought against twenty-seven US companies including Gap, J.C. Penney & Co and Target. Levi’s was added in 2001. The suit was dropped in 2004 following a $20 million out of court settlement. See, Staff Reporters, (2004). Saipan Levi Case Dismissed, Women’s Wear Daily, 9th January. The suit had alleged that up to 30,000 workers had been treated as indentured labour between 1989 and 2002.

¹⁴⁴ Grenpeace International, (2012). Levi’s shapes up to be a Detox leader, 13th December.

¹⁴⁵ Neate, R. (2011). Levis pulls “riot ad” after UK violence, The Guardian, 11th August.

¹⁴⁶ Clean Clothes Campaign, (2022, 4).

¹⁴⁷ Gilbert, (2018, 44-45).

¹⁴⁸ Gilbert, 2018,50).

¹⁴⁹ Gilbert, (2018, 51).

¹⁵⁰ Gilbert, (2018, 49).

¹⁵¹ Chalmers, J. (2013). Special Report: how textile kings weave a hold on Bangladesh. Reuters, 3rd May.

¹⁵² Burke, J. (2013). Muhammad Yunus appeals to west to help Bangladesh's garment industry. The Guardian, 12th May.

¹⁵³ From reading Fishman (2006) the answer to that question is that Wal-Mart would probably oppose such a move. He describes how the corporation removed cardboard packaging that cost around a nickel from lines of products

¹⁵⁴ UNDP, (1992), Human Development Report, Oxford University Press, Table 1.2, 20.

¹⁵⁵ Khan, (1993, 153). See also Transparency International which ranked Bangladesh as 151/ 180 countries.

¹⁵⁶ UNDP, (2025). A matter of choice: People and possibilities in the age of AI. Human Development Report, 2025, Table 1, 276.

¹⁵⁷ See Hoq, (2024, esp. Table 4: Institutional arrangements to tackle child labour in Bangladesh.

¹⁵⁸ ILO, (2025). Decision concerning the report by the Government of Bangladesh on progress made in the implementation of the road map to address all outstanding issues mentioned in the article 26 complaint concerning alleged non-observance of Conventions Nos 81, 87 and 98. GB.353/INS/9(Rev.1)/Decision. Geneva, 10th-10th March.

¹⁵⁹ Brooks, (2007, 152).

¹⁶⁰ Kliuha, A.; Lois Bosatta, Katarina Schwarz et al., (2025). Modern slavery and child labour in Bangladesh's garment sector: Documenting risks and informing solutions. University of Nottingham Rights Lab, 120.

¹⁶¹ The conditions of employment for al 122 minors interviewed violated terms of the 2006 Act making them illegally employed. (ibid., 29). Wages were lower than adults who did the same amount of work; one third had to work in servicing machine parts; most were subjected to verbal and some to physical abuse; while most regretted this, virtually none attended school because of family need or they could not afford fees. They believed that they would have been able to secure better jobs if they had achieved better schooling

¹⁶² Hoque, (2024), table 3, p. 5 and table 4, p. 6.

¹⁶³ Nielsen, (2005, 579).

¹⁶⁴ See for instance the material on consumer identity projects in CCT research, (Arnauld & Thompson, 2005).

¹⁶⁵ Greenpeace International, (2023). After 13 days and nearly 4,000km – Greenpeace occupation of Shell oil platform ends with no arrests. Greenpeace Release. 12th Feb. Glaser, April, (2015). In late 2015 Shell announced that it was abandoning its quest to pump oil in the Arctic. (April Glaser, You did it! Shell abandons arctic drilling. Greenpeace Release 30th September.

¹⁶⁶ Vidal, J. (2014). Arctic 30: Russia releases Greenpeace ship. The Guardian, 6th June.

¹⁶⁷ Greenpeace International, (2024). Putin vs Greenpeace: the story of the Arctic 30, and why it still matters today, Greenpeace Release, 4th June. Sterling, Toby (2017). Arbitration panel tells Russia to pay Dutch $6 million over Greenpeace boat seizure, Reuters, 18th July.

¹⁶⁸ See Grant, W., (2005) for more detail.

¹⁶⁹ Gayle, Damien, (2024). Five Just Stop Oil activists receive record sentences for planning to block M25. The Guardian, 18th July.

¹⁷⁰ McKay, George (1996) Senseless acts of beauty: cultures of resistance since the sixties, London: Verso.

¹⁷¹ Wintour, P. & J. Wilson (2000). Blair’s pleas are ignored as Britain grinds to a halt. The Guardian, 14th September. https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2000/sep/14/tonyblair.oil

¹⁷³ Gilbert, (2018, 52).

¹⁷⁴ Clean Clothes Campaign, (2024). Trail of broken promises: Levi’s denies justice to unlawfully fired workers in Türkiye. Clean Clothes Campaign, (2024). After years of pressure Levi’s commits to protecting workers in Pakistan.

¹⁷⁵ Holt (2002, 85).

¹⁷⁶ In relation to this I was provided some useful archival material from Levi-Strauss in relation to events in the early 1990s, although there was unfortunately no record of meetings with the BGMEA nor with government officials or NGOs.

¹⁷⁷ Sharpe, (2017).

¹⁷⁸ Mansell (2025) includes a quote from Phillips, (2003), “who would own the corporation if it bought back its own stock?”  This is pertinent because earlier I mentioned that this is a common practice that is ostensibly used by managers to boost their renumeration.

¹⁷⁹ Corporate Accountability. https://corporateaccountability.org/what-we-do/

¹⁸⁰ US Government Accountablity Office,(GAO). (2019). 30 Years after Exxon Valdez, 9 Years after Deepwater Horizon: What We Found. 21st March. In relation to Deepwater Horizon, it was reported that President Obama wanted to know “whose ass to kick” in connection with the crisis and the US Justice Department put pressure on BP to drop its dividend. (Bleiweiss, S., (2010) UK feels backlash from BP oil spill: the view from Europe. The Atlantic, 11th June.