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 project employs four complementary approaches—Theoretical, Analytical, Historiographical, and Ethnographic—followed by an integrated Measurement and Causal Strategy that connects field observation to rigorous causal inference.
Theoretical
Building on the law-and-economics tradition and legal institutionalism, I will develop a two-step general theory of corporate statecraft.
- Step 1 (positive): using a multidisciplinary framework that integrates the economic analysis of law with a legal-constitutional analysis of the economy, I will causally describe how private organizations exercise rule-making and governance capacity within market societies. The analysis will focus on accountability architectures, the balance between self-regulation and public (normative) regulation, and processes of norm entrepreneurship that shape institutional evolution across sectors and regions. This phase remains non-ideological and macro-institutional, analyzing the economy’s legal foundations rather than discrete doctrines or firm-level behaviors.
- Step 2 (normative): upon completion of the analytical and empirical inquiry, the project will articulate design principles for how corporate statecraft can foster institutional arrangements that are fair, transparent, and coherent with the constitutional values of their order—clarifying the respective responsibilities of corporations and the state, and specifying when private governance should be recognized, complemented, or constrained. In doing so, it extends the law-and-economics tradition beyond micro-doctrinal analysis toward a macro-institutional theory of governance oriented to the fulfillment and preservation of constitutional coherence.
Analytical
Linking field observation to rigorous causal analysis, I will ground the research in deep comparative fieldwork across the anchor cases and regions that exemplify different modes of corporate statecraft. Field observation will generate and refine hypotheses about how firm-led governance reshapes institutional orders, which I will then evaluate through systematic quantitative and causal methods—event-study and difference-in-differences designs, synthetic controls, and network models—using process tracing to connect observed mechanisms to measurable effects. Measurement will follow the full arc of the inquiry, from empirical behavior to normative consequence, assessing whether and how corporate statecraft reinforces or undermines the coherence of its given institutional order.
The resulting indicators will move beyond conventional growth metrics to capture the broader social and civic dimensions of economic performance: economic and social mobility and shared prosperity (intergenerational mobility, wage progression, employment stability); competitiveness and capability diversification (productivity adjusted for inclusion, SME scaling, entry into complementary sectors, export sophistication); and innovation quality and direction (breakthrough or disruptive outcomes proxied by citation-weighted patents, participation in standards, and new-to-market products), together with governance openness and legitimacy (associational pluralism, contestability, voter participation, stakeholder trust, transparency). Classic measures such as GDP growth or patent counts will serve only as contextual baselines, not as ultimate endpoints, as the focus is on whether corporate statecraft contributes to the uplift and resilience of communities.
Historiographical
I will ground each case in primary sources—corporate records and filings, public–private partnership charters, municipal proceedings, archival collections, and oral histories. Through archival research and oral histories, this study reconstructs the evolution of corporate statecraft by tracing how firms developed organizational capabilities and coordination mechanisms that extended beyond markets, triangulating primary sources—corporate records, partnership charters, and municipal archives—into analytical narratives of firm-led institutional transformation.
Ethnographic
Through comparative fieldwork and living-lab collaborations, this research investigates corporate statecraft as a dynamic process of coordination and rule-making, mapping its regional and institutional boundaries and documenting how firms and local partners jointly experiment, adapt, and build capabilities in real time.
Measurement and Causal Strategy
To complement the theoretical and field-based components, the research will operationalize the mechanisms of corporate statecraft through a set of measurement and data strategies designed to make causal relationships explicit while preserving the richness of comparative inquiry. Building on the proposed causal architecture—from corporate intent and capacity → institutional instrumentation → governance change → outcomes, with feedback and contextual moderators—the study will use mixed methods to ensure that each link in this chain is evidenced rather than asserted. Deep qualitative observation will guide variable definition and case sequencing, while quantitative techniques (such as process tracing informed by causal tests, event studies, difference-in-differences, and network analysis) will assess whether observed governance mechanisms translate into measurable institutional and social effects.
The goal is to trace how firm-led interventions shape institutional order—testing whether they enhance capability formation, openness, and legitimacy, or instead reinforce concentration and exclusion. Key measures will thus follow the empirical-to-normative arc of the inquiry: from observable coordination mechanisms (coalition formation, rule or standard adoption, new governance bodies) to societal outcomes that capture institutional quality and moral performance—upward mobility, competitiveness, capability diversification, shared prosperity, innovation directionality, and perceived fairness. Traditional economic indicators (productivity, patenting, output) will serve as contextual baselines, while the primary focus remains on how corporate statecraft uplifts or erodes communities and the institutional fabric that sustains them.
Together, these approaches will produce a coherent causal framework linking empirical observation, legal-institutional theory, and normative evaluation—a foundation for the broader theoretical and practical contributions of the dissertation.
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.
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