Shahid Bolsen the Democratisation of Corporate Influence | Bandung, 2018

In principle, corporations should be highly susceptible to democratization, some more than others. We can begin to approach corporations as the political entities that they are. Whenever I used to write about the democratization of corporate power, the first thing that everyone would always think of is boycotts. Whenever a company takes a position or implements a policy within that company that reflects a particular political ideology and that political ideology actually conflicts with the values or the political ideology of their core customers, then those customers rebel and reject those policies or that position being taken by the company and boycott. This concept and this approach could potentially be expanded beyond corporations, you know, internal policies.

I think that that this approach could be used to demand that corporations sway politicians, that corporations sway governments in favor or against legislative policies. We already know that corporations exert a tremendous amount of influence, a tremendous amount of power and tend to get what they want, but they're they're using their influence to sway policy in a way that benefits themselves and their shareholders and not in a way that benefits their consumers, their customers or their workers. The rigid logic, the logic of profit and loss should be pretty straightforward to, pressure that. Positive in a negative way that you can apply pressure. On the negative side, of course, you have to figure out how you can impose loss on that company or those companies.

And on the positive side, you would have to figure out how to, in an organized way, boost their profit. You know, companies gather a tremendous amount of information about who their consumers are. And it seems to me that it's worth exploring, as I said, to what extent it would be possible to organize those demographic groups more or less in the same way that you would organize voting blocks. Obviously, this would require a tremendous amount of research. But if you can find significant overlap between consumer groups, consumer demographics that are valuable to a multiplicity of companies, then that particular group could potentially have a lot of ability to exert influence on a variety of companies.

And they could potentially be a very powerful consumer coalition to lobby businesses. You go to the corporations, go to the companies, and say, look, we know that you exert a tremendous amount of influence. We know that the government listens to you, and we know that they don't listen to us. We know that they don't have to listen to us. But we also know that you have to listen to us because we're your customers.

Without us, you have no business. We're your workers. Without us, you have no business. We know that the government listens to you, and we know that you listen to us. So we're going to bring our demands, not to the government, but to you, and ask you to forward our our program.

So much power has been transferred from the public sector to the private sector, but political activism or political participation, political organizing has not transferred, not made that transition. We are all still focusing on the government even though so much power has gone to the private sector. So we have to figure out a way, it seems to me, to influence the the power in the private sector. If you can sort of make the the transition in your mind of recognizing that corporations are power entities, they are political entities, they take political positions, do influence policy, that do influence legislation. And so therefore, I'm going to now redirect my activism, redirect my political grievances, my political expectations, my political demands away from the government.

And I'm gonna direct directly towards the private sector, directly towards corporations. That's the theory of democratization of corporate influence. Of the of the two sided, you know, the punishment or reward approaches, the easiest one or the simplest one, the most straightforward one is gonna be the imposition of loss for a company. They cannot tolerate loss. Their entire ethos, entire philosophy is maximization of profit.

They cannot tolerate loss. And every corporation is vulnerable. They spend so much of their time figuring out how they can maximize profit. And they're all dependent, corporations are all dependent on extremely intricate systems that they must flow smoothly in order to maximize profit. Anywhere within those systems there will be vulnerabilities.

It means that they are aspects of that system that are susceptible to external pressure. Pressure by consumers, pressure by customers, or even just the people who, live in the vicinity of a company. You know, issue that you can look at is their share price. Share prices are very volatile and are subject to any number of factors that can cause a share price to fall or to go up. This is what happened actually in the case of, Starbucks and Target, the examples I gave earlier.

And that just when the news came out that these companies were going to be boycotted, their share prices fell dramatically to the point that the boards of directors and the shareholders could not tolerate that and the policies had to change. In the case of Target, it was that they had said like some a man who considers himself a woman could go into a woman's restroom, you know, and vice versa. And when the announcement came that they were going to be boycotted, the share price fell and the shareholders said, okay, we're not going to do that policy, so they changed their mind. So share price is also something that that that you can look at in terms of trying to pressure democratization. Democratization here, it just means making companies responsive to consumers in a way that you would want governments to be responsible to voters and then using their disproportionate influence that they have over government in a way that benefits those consumers.

If you're going after trying to democratize corporations, trying to get corporations to respond to you, then you're you're focusing on the the real power structure, and there will be consequences. So you have to be very careful about how you do it, and you have to be very patient. You have to be methodical. You have to be patient, and you have to accept the inevitability of incremental progress.