Firm Interests

"""This is a truly excellent book that should take the field of international political economy in promising directions. Firm Interests deserves a wide audience of political scientists, policymakers, economists, and scholars of management, public policy, and business-government relations... It will help us to make better sense of how firms' managers decide what is best and, as well, how firms attempt to influence policies in their favor... Woll has engaged in impressive field research to find out what firms wanted and why, combining prodigious secondary research with primary interviews at many of the firms that participated in some of the most important trade debates of the past 20 years.""-Perspectives on Politics ""I love the case studies in this book! On the basis of seventy interviews with key political and business leaders from more than a half-dozen nations, Cornelia Woll reconstructs the international negotiations that led to the liberalization of the global telecommunications and airline markets. She gets into the heads of the relevant actors, using interview data to confirm her intuitions about their motivations and perceived interests.""-J. Lawrence Broz, University of California, San Diego ""Firm Interests is theoretically ambitious and empirically rich. Political economists typically take the notion of an actor's interests as something to 'do the explaining with' rather than 'something to be explained.' Yet essentially similar material environments seem to engender great variation in the interests real actors hold. Rather than ignore this inconvenient truth, Cornelia Woll confronts it head-on in a major contribution to constructivist scholarship in political economy. Firm Interests shows how actors as diverse as telecommunications firms and airlines can hold interests that cannot be assumed from their asset-baskets or sectoral positions. Rather, firms actively construct ideas about what their interests should be given their interaction with other agents. Firm Interests puts the study of what actors want on much firmer ground.""-Mark Blyth, The Johns Hopkins University"