Taming Corporate Power in the 21st Century

The digital revolution has radically re-organized the economy and changed the rules of corporate power - this Element explores how.

The theme of corporate power, antitrust, and the changing shape of the economy are seeing a vast outpouring of interest. This Element brings a highly accessible view rooted in recent research and theory.There is broad consensus across the political spectrum in the US that monopolistic corporations – particularly Big Tech companies -- have grown too powerful, and that we need to revive antitrust to take on the 'curse of bigness.' But both the diagnosis and the cure are rooted in an outdated understanding of how the American economy is organized. Information and communication technologies have fundamentally altered the markets for capital, labor, supplies, and distribution in ways that undermine the basic categories we use to understand the economy. Nationality, industry, firm, size, employee, and other fundamental terms are increasingly detached from the operations of the economy. If we want to understand and tame the new sources of economic power, we need a new diagnosis and a new set of tools.