Business-managed democracy: The trade agenda

The architecture of global governance that has emerged in the past two decades has been strongly influenced by transnational policy actors. This article examines the role of transnational corporate agency in social policy by focusing in particular on the role of business coalitions, elite networking bodies and policy planning groups in fostering unity amongst corporate actors and enrolling political actors into managing democracies in the interests of business. The example of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) and the World Trade Organization (WTO) is used to examine how corporate agency is wielded through elite networking organizations and how this is eroding national social policy