The Corporate State: Technopoly, Privatization and Corporate Predation

This book critically examines key features of the contemporary organizational landscape by focusing on major beneficiaries of recent historical politicalcultural transformations involving the embrace of market fundamentalism and a market society: corporations, those who direct them, and those who use them for their own benefit.

Part I examines the big US-based tech firms (i.e., Facebook, Google, Apple, and Amazon), highlighting numerous tensions and contradictions between their highly cultivated, flattering, yet unwarranted public images and the reality of how they operate as extremely competitive, at times deceptive, profitseeking entities. A focus on these firms also highlights just how dramatically the economic realm has been transformed over the past few decades due to accelerating advances in information technology and corporate-managed globalization. Part II explores how the state has been pushed back via privatization and corporate predation in such areas as health care, military/security, criminal justice, philanthropy, and education and concludes by looking forward with a vision of a knowledge-caring society that must rebalance corporate-managed market fundamentalism.

Through the use of clear cases that bring the theory to life for students, the book is ideal as a supplementary text for advanced undergraduate and graduate students in a range of coursework in the fields of organizational theory and behavior, leadership in organizations, and management responsibility and business ethics. It will also be of great interest to students of sociology, specifically in the areas of complex organizations, economic sociology, theory, political sociology, and law and society.

Robert M. Orrange is Professor of Sociology at Eastern Michigan University. He is the author of Work, Family, and Leisure: Uncertainty in a Risk Society and Social Structure: Organizations and Institutions.