Int. Journal of Business Science and Applied Management / Business-and-Management.org
BOOK REVIEW
Michael Moran is a Professor of government and politics who admits his major concern over the
past 30 years of his academic career has been to investigate what happens when you marry capitalism
and democracy? In his new book he investigates the relationship between business, politics and society
in the UK and USA. I reviewed this book from the perspective of an academic in the field of new
technology management, information systems and e-government. I found this book extremely well
written and very edifying. The book is broken down into 8 chapters each of which is linked with
material in the previous chapters and references to future chapters yet to be read.
The first chapter lays the foundations of the book highlighting the major themes and summarising
the major arguments that will be covered in the following 7 chapters which explore the interaction
between capitalism, democracy and the power of business. The book focuses on the UK and US as
examples of the two most high profile and established capitalist democracies that have a common
assimilation to a single model, but with differences that have emerged from variations in their histories
and institutions. Chapter 2 traces through the historical roots of business communities, their relations
with systems of politics and the wider civil society in the two countries. Moran presents a “path
dependent” nature of the historical development of systems of business and politics where rather than
the past determining the present, he maintains that historical experience has produced important
divergences that have shaped the different patterns of interaction between politics and business in the
UK and US. Chapter three isolates one of the factors that impact relationships between business,
partisan politics and the wider relations with society – namely business lobbying. This chapter charts
the growth and professionalization of business lobbying with increased resources and sophistication
and the birth of partnership between big business and big government and the importance of
multinational enterprise in the new age. This leads seamlessly to the next chapter which examines the
giant multinational corporation as a key participant in politics and economic life. Their importance is
underlined by the statistics - in the UK, multinational corporations account for 0.1% of enterprises by
number but 41% employment and 49% turnover (p.61). The political strength of corporate giants has
arisen from the extensive resources that are available to them on a multinational scale and the central
importance of business in the economic functioning of a modern capitalist state. With such strengths
come the increasing unpopularity of giant corporations in society and the need for them to counter
growing critical institutions in civil society through reputation and brand management and corporate
governance. Having established the political character of the giant corporation, the next chapter (5)
examines the impact of small business on politics, which is the largest in numbers (nearly 99% of firms
are small in the UK) and thus the potential political strength of this collective group. The difficulty of
small businesses is that they are extremely heterogeneous, operating in many different sectors has
given rise to political and institutional innovation to represent their interests. Moran however sees this
as a sign of weakness not strength which he goes on to explain in Chapter 6. The connection between
business and party politics are summarised into two questions: “how far do parties have to rely on
business support?” and “how dependent is business on parties?” and explored throughout the chapter.
The escalation of campaigning costs, the dwindling number of party members and voluntary party
activists has meant that a much closer relationship with business has had to be forged by political
parties often giving rise to political scandal and increased regulation on both sides of the Atlantic. As
the book draws to a close, the final couple of chapters do an excellent job in summarising the major
themes and issues and placing them in a theoretical context of Marxism and pluralism. He presents
Gramsci and Schumpeter as the lens through which to view social and cultural context of business
institutions in modern capitalist society, where both agree on the convergence of advanced capitalist
systems in their dominant cultural traits, but differ in their discourse on what capitalist systems
converge on. Mixed into this framework is the perspective of pluralism. In the final chapter Moran
concludes that Schumpeter’s “restless capitalism” has combined with restless democracy. Although a
model of capitalism is an economic image, it is primarily a political image shaped by regulatory
regimes under which economic institutions operate. Moran observes that the UK and US systems are
not converging and rather than undergoing Americanisation, the UK system is looking increasingly
European because of the role of the EU in regulation – a critical factor in understanding how politics
intervenes in the business system. What Moran does see is that there are common features in the
exercise of business power and influence in both Anglo-American political systems. The differences,
which he sees as very important, are highly contingent on national history, culture and institutional
setting.
Overall, I highly recommend this book to all who have an interest in business, e-government,
government and society. It knits together the major issues and while focusing on the systems in the UK
and US, throughout the book Moran presents separate vignettes or “boxes” of information that vary in
