Corporate Statecraft
A Research Program led by Marco Mari and supported by Italia Innovation.
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Corporate Statecraft
A Research Program led by Marco Mari and supported by Italia Innovation.
Google Scholar Page
SSRN Profile
❶ Front Page / Research Manifesto
❷ Literature Review
❸ Methodologies
❹ Cases and Living Labs
❺ Author: Marco Mari
The study of corporate statecraft builds on and integrates a constellation of theoretical traditions across political economy, sociology, law, management, and institutional history.
Institutional and Neo-Institutional Theory
At its core, it extends institutional and neo-institutional theory, particularly the concepts of embedded agency and institutional entrepreneurship developed by Paul DiMaggio, Julie Battilana, Jens Beckert, and Kathleen Thelen. These scholars show that actors are not merely constrained by institutions but can, under certain conditions, act creatively within and upon them to bring about institutional change. Thelen’s work on gradual institutional evolution and Hall and Soskice’s Varieties of Capitalism (2001) framework provide key foundations for understanding how institutional configurations differ across contexts and how these variations shape firms’ strategic behavior and governance roles.
Political Economy and Democratic Experimentalism
Building on this foundation, the project engages with classic and contemporary political economy. Robert Dahl’s theory of polyarchy (1971) conceptualizes democracy as a system sustained by pluralism, contestability, and dispersed power. Dahl’s insights are extended by studies of democratic experimentalism and industrial transformation by Suzanne Berger, Richard Locke, and Charles Sabel, which demonstrate how political openness and economic innovation can be mutually reinforcing. This connection between pluralism and productivity situates corporate statecraft within a broader theory of co-evolution between political and economic systems: firms’ embeddedness in regional or national structures can either reinforce oligarchic lock-in or foster polyarchic renewal, depending on how power is distributed and contested.
Law, Governance, and the Firm as Legal-Political Actor
From corporate law and governance, the project draws on Ronald Coase’s foundational understanding of the firm as a nexus of contracts (Coase 1937). This view is extended by Ronald Gilson and Lucian Bebchuk’s analyses of corporate control and shareholder power, and by Katharina Pistor’s The Code of Capital (2019), which reframes law as a constitutive infrastructure of capitalism, showing how legal codification endows private assets with public authority. Robert Jackson’s recent work on corporate political engagement adds a normative dimension, questioning how corporate power intersects with accountability and fairness. Together, these perspectives recast the corporation as a legal-political actor capable of producing, interpreting, and enforcing norms—thus performing quasi-governmental functions central to corporate statecraft.
Economic Sociology and Embedded Networks
The project is equally grounded in economic sociology. Foundational theories of embeddedness developed by Karl Polanyi (1944) and Mark Granovetter (1985) emphasize that markets are never autonomous but are structured by social relations, cultural norms, and institutional settings. David Stark and Walter Powell’s analyses of heterarchies and networked organizations extend this by showing how innovation and coordination emerge through flexible, interdependent arrangements rather than hierarchical command. Olav Sorenson’s work on regional networks and entrepreneurship further demonstrates how localized social capital and reputation systems mediate firm behavior and regional development. These insights inform the study’s focus on uncharted entrepreneurship: actors who navigate inherited social structures to create new paths of institutional renewal within over-embedded regions.
Business and Institutional History
From business and institutional history, the project draws on Alfred D. Chandler Jr., Sophus Reinert, and Margaret O’Mara, whose longitudinal analyses show how corporations have historically acted as state-like agents—organizing production, shaping education systems, and building the infrastructure that sustains regional and national development. Chandler’s notion of the visible hand (1977) and Reinert’s studies of mercantilist and developmental traditions illustrate that firms have long been integral to political-economic architectures, even when their agency was not explicitly theorized as statecraft. These historical perspectives remind us that the boundary between public and private roles in governance has always been fluid and contested.
Reflexive and Experimentalist Governance
The framework also draws on theories of reflexive and experimentalist governance. Charles Sabel, Jonathan Zeitlin, and Richard Locke conceptualize governance as a decentralized, iterative process of mutual learning and problem-solving. Rather than fixed regulation, complex economies evolve through experimentation, benchmarking, and feedback loops. Corporate statecraft aligns with this view by examining how firms—through their organizational routines, partnerships, and community engagements—participate in rule-making processes that are adaptive, reflexive, and locally grounded, paralleling experimentalist forms of public governance.
Sociology of Law and Legitimacy
Finally, the project engages with the sociology of law and theories of legitimacy. Mark Suchman, Margaret Levi, Jürgen Habermas, and Lauren Edelman have shown how institutions maintain authority through perceived fairness, transparency, and inclusion. Suchman’s definition of legitimacy as “a generalized perception of appropriateness” (1995) offers a foundation for analyzing how corporations secure social acceptance. Habermas’s theory of communicative legitimacy links that acceptance to deliberation and consent, while Edelman’s studies of legal endogeneity reveal how corporate practices can reshape the meaning and implementation of law from within. These perspectives anchor the normative dimension of the project, emphasizing accountability and moral authority in private governance.
Case-Specific Literatures and Contextual Scholarship
Each empirical case will also engage its own specialized body of literature to ground historical interpretation and regional analysis. For Italy, this includes the contributions of Franco Amatori and Andrea Colli to the history of family capitalism and industrial districts, as well as the comparative work of Charles Sabel and Richard Locke on local production systems. For Silicon Valley and Stanford, the research builds on studies by Margaret O’Mara, Leslie Berlin, and C. Stewart Gillmor on the origins of the innovation ecosystem and its institutional underpinnings. For Pittsburgh, the inquiry draws on scholarship by Ben Armstrong, Richard Florida, and Sabina Dietrick, who have traced the region’s post-industrial transformation and uneven renewal. These literatures will be treated in dedicated subsections for each case, ensuring that the project’s theoretical synthesis is continually tested against the most relevant historical and regional scholarship.
Integrative Contribution
Taken together, these theoretical and historical foundations position corporate statecraft as a bridge between firm-level agency and macro-institutional transformation. They conceptualize corporations not merely as economic engines but as political and institutional architects—actors capable of rewriting rules, coordinating collective action, and redefining the boundaries between market and polity. By integrating insights from institutional theory, political economy, corporate law, economic sociology, business history, governance studies, and the sociology of law, this project provides a comprehensive framework for understanding how the contemporary institutional order is being reshaped from within—by corporations acting, consciously or not, as the institutional designers of the modern economy.
❶ Author
Marco Mari
PhD Candidate
Politecnico di Milano
Department of Management, Economics and Industrial Engineering
marco [dot] mari [at] polimi [dot] it
marcomari.com