Stephen Bell is Professor and former Head of the School of Political Science and International Studies at the University of Queensland. Prior to this he served as Head of the School of Government at the University of Tasmania. He is the author or editor of seven books and has published widely in national and international journals. His latest books deal with the politics of monetary policy and the institutional dynamics of the Reserve Bank of Australia, including Australia's Money Mandarins: The Reserve Bank and the Politics of Money, Cambridge University Press. He has also just co-authored Rethinking Governance: Bringing the State Back In, Cambridge University Press. He is currently engaged in a major Australian Research Council-funded research project dealing with financial reform and the politics of central banking in China.
This article explores the conditions that promoted (and inhibited) the collective political action of business leaders connected with the Business Council of Australia (BCA) during the 1980s and 1990s. It does so via "tough cases," namely, business collectivism aimed not at firm- or industry- specific goals (where payoffs are likely to be concentrated) but instead involving wider cross-sectoral business mobilization directed at economy-wide public policy goals.
Formed in 1983, the BCA's members are corporate chief executive officers (CEOs), much the same as with the Business Roundtable in the United States. These days, members are drawn from about one hundred of the largest corporations operating in Australia, from a variety of sectors. The full Council, comprised of all CEO members, meets several times each year and is the main deliberative and decision-making body of the BCA. The BCA is led by a president, and its research and advocacy work is supported by a secretariat. Since its inception the BCA has carved out a distinctive modis operandi in politics: it does not provide direct service to members, directly lobby governments on discrete firm level or sectoral issues, or explicitly enter the realm of party politics or the electoral process. Instead, the BCA engages mainly in research-based policy advocacy aimed at a selected number of medium-term, economy-wide public policy goals.
The individualism and competition of the business world stand in awkward juxtaposition to efforts to mobilize business collectively. Business leaders often find active engagement in politics difficult, especially given time constraints and the increasing bottom line pressures exerted by shareholders and equity markets. And even if business leaders do engage in politics, they potentially face serious collective action problems of the kind originally theorized by Mancur Olson.1 The broad comparative evidence often confirms such problems. In analyzing business politics and the problems of business collective action in Russia, for example, Markus suggests that "effective and enduring mobilization of business should strike us as being even more puzzling than collective action by other socio-economic clusters."2 Similarly, Schneider's analysis of business collectivism in Latin America labels the collective organizations of business as "unnatural," while Moran's recent review of business politics in the U.K. argues that business collective action is becoming ever more difficult due to underlying structural and cultural shifts.3
Nevertheless, as Olson originally argued, solutions to collective action problems might be found if the number of actors is relatively small (as in this case) and particularly if certain selective benefits to aid group activity can be arranged. This article agrees with such findings, at least as far as they go, but argues that Olsonian deductive reasoning is too abstracted from the empirical richness of this case to be of more than basic utility. As Doner and Schneider argue, "a deductive Olsonian approach ignores the combination of internal attributes and external pressures that seem to account best for differences in associational behaviors."4 Across more than two decades from the early 1980s, this paper traces the causal drivers of the emergence of business collective action, particularly surrounding the formation of the BCA and subsequent industrial relations and taxation policy campaigns. This work traces the peaks of effectiveness and the ultimate fragility of business collective action, which reflected the activities and shifting institutional capacities of the BCA. Beyond those just mentioned, existing theoretical approaches point to a number of factors that appear to support business collective action, including the role of perceived threat or opportunity, and the capacity to discursively frame such threats or opportunities to produce motivating stratagems and preferences among business elites.5 These factors are found to be important in this case. The role of business political entrepreneurs, the specific organizational environment of the business leaders in question, and the effects of the wider ideological context also helped promote business collective action. In this manner a model of the factors that promoted business collective action in the cases examined in this paper is constructed and tested.
Nevertheless, in contrast to some high-profile arguments in the extant literature regarding the role of the state in helping to mobilize business interests, this article argues instead for a largely business-centric account of collective action, especially in terms of the factors that spurred initial mobilization. Based on the evidence here, I seek to question and revise such state-centric accounts. In this Australian case the collective action centering on the BCA was primarily driven by business leaders. Moreover, it was only after business had successfully mobilized and then pressured the government that a form of business–government alliance on key policy campaigns developed, which in turn helped sustain business mobilization. This suggests that the role of the state and the exact nature and phasing of the interactions between business and the state need to be carefully specified.
Explaining Business Collective Action
Theorists of business collective action, such as Andrew Polsky, are correct to emphasize the "daunting conditions" that are required to facilitate business collective action, especially on a cross-sectoral basis.6 This section outlines the range of conditions that needed to be in place to support business collective action in the cases examined here. In particular, certain elements of extant theory are blended with other causal elements found to be important in spurring business collective action.
Collective action based upon the BCA was facilitated by the relatively small numbers of players involved and by their resources base. The BCA's membership numbered less than one hundred. The BCA was a forum of regular meetings between members. And the CEOs in question were able to muster substantial corporate resources to aid political engagement, not least their status as leaders of the nation's largest companies. Scholars have identified other factors to explain business collective action. Polsky argues that three conditions are central. First, business leaders must experience a shift in economic conditions, a perceived crisis or threat or a major opportunity born of such conditions that offers the prospect of substantial policy gains.7 Second, following the work of David Plotke and Cathy Jo Martin, Polsky argues there must be a "discursive process" to help business leaders arrive at a common, consensual interpretation of their situation and a shared vision and set of preferences of what might be achieved in policy terms to advance their interests.8 Third, Polsky argues there must be political actors or entrepreneurs who are able and "prepared to absorb the costs of mobilizing business for collective action."9
The empirical analysis below supports all of the factors highlighted by Polsky. The role of threat, crisis, and perceived opportunity in motivating business leaders was certainly important in the cases examined. The work of scholars that highlights the role of discursive processes and preference formation within the business world is also found to be important. However, this article seeks to add a more explicit ideological or cultural dimension to the latter type of account. In particular, the ideological foundations and broader culture of business–government relations also matters. Amidst complexity and uncertainty, actors such as business leaders must actively interpret their world. Approaches that argue that business preferences can be derived from the mechanics of economic structure are too simple, largely because they miss this crucial constructivist dimension to preference and interest definition.10 Instead, discursive framing, strategic calculation, and the role of ideas and simplifying ideologies help actors construct the world and chart action.11 In the case at hand, the deeply ingrained liberal (and increasingly neoliberal) character of Australia's business culture was important in shaping business preferences as to how the conduct of business–government relations would operate. In Australia an entrenched liberal business culture prevails, which values private managerial prerogatives, non-intrusive styles of regulation, and associational voluntarism and pluralism. Furthermore, and most importantly, there is a strong preference for an arm's length relationship with the state. This relationship is often one of low trust and at times there is an abrasive interface between business and government. Vogel's arguments about business distrust of the state in the U.S. have certain important parallels in Australia.12 In another Anglo system, Moran similarly finds that in the U.K. business politics has been underpinned by an "ingrained belief in the autonomy of the firm."13 Hence, there is much caution in business ranks about getting too close to governments, in part because they are vulnerable to anti-business constituencies and in part because of the vagaries of party politics and electoral short-termism. Furthermore, distrust of governments is increasingly widespread in society and it would be surprising if business were immune to such sentiments.14
This is not to suggest that relations between business and government have not been supportive in a range of ways. For example, government activism was a prime mover in Australia's economic development. Prior to the neoliberal turn in the 1970s and 1980s, the history of the Australian state was in many ways interventionist.15 There is even evidence of close clientistic relations, for example, in the post-war era between the federal government and the manufacturing sector, involving generous tariff protection.16 The rural sector was also supported as part of this system of "protection all round."17 Nor is corruption and crony capitalism entirely absent at the level of the State governments.
Crucially, however, even amidst such opportunistic relations, business interests in Australia have always strongly defended their private autonomy and associational pluralism and taken the notion of "private enterprise" seriously. The increasing neoliberalism of recent decades has only strengthened these basic liberal sentiments. Hence, the ideological foundations of liberalism have shaped the pattern of business–government relations, the specifics of relevant institutional engagements, forms of interest representation, and, as argued in this paper, the dynamics of business collective action. Such liberal institutional and ideological foundations suggest relative associational autonomy and, a priori, a business-centric as opposed to a state-centric logic of mobilization.18 As a number of scholars have pointed out, "market systems are compatible with widely divergent relations between business and the state," and clear specifications of regime characteristics in this regard are therefore required.19 Compared to more corporatist or coordinated market systems, the relative autonomy of business interests is more pronounced in liberal regimes. In the Australian case, the key causal drivers of business mobilization came from business.
Beyond such interpretivist and ideological perspectives, this article seeks to revise (by adding nuance to) a common argument in many accounts of business collective action that privilege the role of state or government elites as key political actors or entrepreneurs, who are, as Polsky argues, "prepared to absorb the costs of mobilizing business for collective action."20 According to Polsky, "politicians seeking to gain or retain office...appear to have the greatest incentive and the requisite wherewithal to initiate political mobilizations."21 Polsky also argues that "firms operate as policy seekers who posses valued political resources that partisan politicians need in their quest to control the state.... A deliberate project of regime-building by partisan political entrepreneurs stands as the most likely situation to yield a general mobilization of business interests."22 Polsky's focus on such state-centric drivers of business collective action is also shared by Martin.23 She argues that the political infrastructure for the surge of business mobilization in the U.S. in the 1970s was laid by the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, in efforts to secure business support for their reformist economic programs. She argues that in situations where government leaders propose an activist or reformist agenda or where they face a crisis or internal dissent within the state, they are most likely to seek business allies. This type of statist argument is also elaborated by Ben Ross Schneider in relation to business organization and activism in Latin America. Schneider criticizes Olson's treatment of business collective action as having an excessively passive view of the state. He argues state elites in Latin America have played an important role—as "pivotal causal agents"—in helping to organize and mobilize business associations for partisan political reasons.24 Schneider argues that state leaders provide important selective benefits such as resources and access to the state to help encourage business collective action. Stanislaw Markus is another state-centric theorist of business collective action. He argues that central state elites in Russia under Putin have sought to mobilize business as allies in intra-state conflicts, particularly with recalcitrant bureaucracies in Russia's "debilitated" dirigist regime.25 Bowman's study of collective action in the U.S. coal industry also relies in part on state actors as allies in business collective action.26 More broadly, statist scholars, such as Skocpol, have also argued that the activities of state actors and the particular configuration of states may also help encourage group formation and collective action among societal associations.27
For government leaders, business participation in politics is often welcomed because business leaders may be able to provide much needed political support or resources in particular contexts and also important information about economic conditions and prospects.28 And from the perspective of business, government elites are in a position to encourage business collective action and to act as coalitional partners in policy campaigns and the construction of partisan regimes. In particular, business collective action may well be spurred if state leaders offer substantial selective benefits such as public policy rewards or access to key decisionmakers, hence increasing the incentives and reducing the uncertainty and transaction costs typically associated with business collective action.29 Furthermore, scholars such as Markus argue that business leaders will be encouraged to mobilize if key selective benefits are offered, such as the opportunity to participate in helping to construct from scratch new institutional and regulatory environments in transition economies.30 According to such perspectives state leaders are in a powerful position in relation to organizing business interests.
It is certainly the case that business and the state interact in important ways: business activism is often a direct response to state policy initiatives, while the institutional configuration, policy traditions, and the preferences of state elites will also shape patterns of business engagement with the state.31 Yet the statist approach, while obviously very useful in a range of settings, cannot explain the dynamics of Australian business collective action examined here. My argument about business collective action in this case, to be precise, is that the initial causal momentum regarding collective action came from business. Only subsequently did the role of the government become somewhat more important, especially in helping to sustain business political mobilization through the promise of policy influence and success. The sequencing matters here. Only at this subsequent stage did the forms of more explicit government–business synergy or alliance emphasized by Polsky in his "partisan regimes" approach or in similar statist accounts come into play. Even here, however, the "alliance" could only be described as loose, opportunistic, and relatively short-lived.
Hence, a business-centric perspective and an emphasis on business political entrepreneurs32 is an important component of the argument advanced here. This includes not only those business leaders drawn directly from the corporate sector, especially the role played by vanguard CEOs, but also those who operated as associational entrepreneurs within the associations of business, and especially within the BCA's Secretariat. These business actors were the prime movers in establishing the BCA, in establishing a motivating and consensus-based discursive agenda of business politics, and in mobilizing CEOs and spearheading successful policy campaigns.
This paper also argues that the organizational context surrounding business collectivism matters. In terms of the extant business collective action literature, Polsky argues that "business political mobilization will be encouraged by pre-existing inter-firm interaction," but does not systematically explore the role played by institutional or organizational parameters in facilitating or hindering business collective action. Martin raises such organizational issues to a significant status (although not to explain collective action per se) when she argues that the level of interest U.S. firms have in progressive human capital policy will be shaped by factors such as in-house policy expertise and deliberative capacity and the associational environment firms inhabit.33 Further recognition of such issues at a theoretical level comes from Doner and Schneider, who argue that associational capacity is one factor that helps business associations pursue positive developmental goals in the economy, rather than the more zero-sum kinds of rent seeking and distributional politics usually attributed to associations in Olsonian institutional economics.34 Finally, the "varieties of capitalism" literature locates firms in their associational context when explaining various forms of corporate coordination, while important work by Culpepper in this tradition argues that business collective action around worker training is heavily mediated by the information sharing, deliberation, interest redefinition, and trust building that can be facilitated within business associations.35
Associational capacity in this context is usually defined in terms of organizational resources, the capacity to provide selective incentives or benefits to members, leadership capacity, and the capacity to mediate member interests and behavior, especially through the provision of information and providing a organizational forum for ongoing deliberation and trust building. As argued below, all of these attributes were important in the BCA. Indeed, business leaders when engaging in collective action relied on resources and capacity that the BCA was almost purpose-built to provide. And even prior to its formation, pre-existing organizational or institutional resources were important in helping to build the BCA. Further, as we will see, such organizational factors also help explain the current fragility of the BCA.
To summarize, this article supports much of the extant literature on business collective action that suggests the centrality of factors such as small numbers, conditions of crisis, threat or opportunity, and a discursive and ideational process that shapes business preferences regarding collective action. Furthermore, it highlights the importance of a supportive organizational context as an aid in spurring business collective action, especially one able to provide discursively framed agendas and selective benefits to business participants. The role of political entrepreneurs also stands out. However, this work parts company with many existing accounts of business collective action by highlighting the role of business rather than state-based political entrepreneurs in spurring such collective action. This in turn can be linked to the essentially liberal attitudes regarding political participation that prevail within Australian business culture.
The case material below deals with key peaks in business political mobilization in Australia in the 1980s and 1990s, especially the formation of the BCA, as well as with subsequent industrial relations and taxation battles. The evidence demonstrates that business interests were prime movers in initiating and carrying forward such mobilizations. Government subsequently become useful as an ally and supporter, but this was only after an initial beachhead had been established by business. Owing to space constraints, the account below will deal briefly with the BCA's formation and taxation reform but dwell somewhat more fully on industrial relations reform.
Explaining the Peaks of Business Collective Action
BCA Formation
Formation of the BCA in 1983 should be seen as the first significant expression of collective action by big business in Australia's corporate history. The shift towards overt political engagement by CEOs under the banner of the BCA, although building on prior initiatives, was a very significant departure in Australian business politics. Never before had CEOs played such an active role in the political arena. All respondents interviewed for this research agreed that CEO involvement and the "market perspective" CEOs bought to policy debates was one of the BCA's major assets.36 Established industry association leaders had argued at the time of the BCA's formation that an organization based on CEOs would not work, "because you can't corral those stallions."37 But the BCA did appear to corral them.38
Most of the key causal drivers specified above were all components in the formation of the BCA, including the role played by economic crises and challenges, the gradual formation of a compelling (neoliberal) discourse and policy roadmap, and an assemblage of innovative and supportive organizational experiments that subsequently formed the basis of the BCA model. Also important were committed political entrepreneurs from the business world, as well as highly problematic business representation and relations with government. Only activist government support for business mobilization was missing.
First, the economic crises of the 1970s and early 1980s in Australia have been well documented.39 There were unprecedented macroeconomic challenges, such as stagflation, which in part could be traced back to wage pressures born of union mobilization and intense distributional conflict.40 The period was also marked by major structural adjustment issues on the back of an increasingly uncompetitive manufacturing sector, growing import pressures, and current account problems. Two major recessions (mid-1970s and early 1980s), intense business hostility to the Whitlam Labor government (1972–1975), and substantial disappointment with the conservative Fraser government (1975–1983), completed the dismal picture. Second, and partly in response, there was a widespread search for new policy discourse and framework, not only in Australia but elsewhere. This was the genesis of the neoliberal movement that eventually was to largely replace the historic Australian Settlement framework of high tariffs and centralized industrial relations, as well as the Keynesian full employment paradigm of the post-war era.41 The period saw a proliferation of conservative think tanks. For the first time business began to invest substantially in the search for a new policy paradigm, a program that was also being taken up (relatively independently) by key bureaucratic agencies. Third, there were major problems in business representation and, as above, in relations with governments. Part of the genesis of the BCA was the emergence, especially within big business, of concerns about effective political leadership and policy advocacy.42 Big business, in particular, was aware of its lack of presence in national affairs and the national capital; except for personal and particularistic relations with certain political leaders, big business and CEOs had not previously played a significant overt role in politics in Australia. The BCA's first Executive Director, Geoff Allen, recalls that the business community in the 1970s was "frustrated, nervous and leaderless."43
Fourth, given the testing times, the late 1970s saw a series of experiments in new forms of business organization. The federal, multi-sectoral "association of associations," the Confederation of Australian Industry (CAI), was formed in 1977. More important for big business, however, CEOs inspired by the U.S. lead formed the Business Roundtable. And under the leadership of Geoff Allen, the long-established Australian Industry Development Association (AIDA) started to adopt an innovative research-based advocacy role. The Roundtable and AIDA formed key organizational foundations that helped spur further business collective action in innovative ways. These two organizations merged in the early 1980s to create the BCA. A cathartic moment, stemming from still unresolved problems of business organization and advocacy, occurred in early 1983 when the new Hawke government held a National Economic Summit in Parliament House, Canberra, at which business representatives were outmaneuvered by the unions and the Labor government. Being described as a "rabble" in the press accelerated the efforts of Geoff Allen and a number of vanguard CEOs to form the BCA.44 Finally, Prime Minister Hawke was supportive of the formation of the BCA, but, significantly, all the prior heavy lifting had been done within the ranks of big business.45
Industrial Relations
The first decade of the BCA's operations during the 1980s and early 1990s coincided with an era of "low hanging fruit" during which business found it relatively easy to secure major neoliberal policy reforms, including more stringent macroeconomic policies and major microeconomic reforms such as financial and trade liberalization.46 The BCA had campaigned on all these issues and encouraged a relatively willing post-1983 Hawke Labor government down a broadly neoliberal path. In turn, the government's neoliberalism no doubt further emboldened CEOs about what was possible and so helped lower barriers to collective action. Nevertheless, the issue of industrial relations caused major tensions. The government was wedded to Australia's historic centralized approach to industrial relations, and in the 1980s had added another layer of centralism in the form of a corporatist wages accord with the unions (as led by the encompassing Australian Council of Trade Unions, ACTU).47
Increasingly dissatisfied with centralism in industrial relations, the BCA had first flagged the need for fundamental reform of the system in the mid-1980s, arguing for a shift to direct employer–employee relations or "enterprise bargaining" (EB). Hawke's initial reaction to the idea was "over my dead body," while the unions thought the move would increase the bargaining power of employers. This left the initiative on industrial relations squarely with big business, and it eventually prevailed. By the late 1980s, both the government and unions began to offer qualified support to the "EB" agenda. The government increasingly recognized that such a move was the natural corollary of its "competitiveness" agenda and earlier financial and product market deregulation.48 There was also a wish to pre-empt even more drastic versions of EB likely to be introduced in the future by the conservative opposition, while the unions (in part to help sustain the Accord) also saw EB as providing somewhat more bargaining flexibility for stronger unions. Hence, by late in the decade the BCA's EB rhetoric had become the prevalent discourse.49 And by 1994 Labor had passed legislation institutionalizing a new EB approach to "employee relations." As the BCA's Executive Director commented in 1991, "No issue has better demonstrated the Business Council's commitment to objective research, avoidance of party politics and taking the longer view than its work on industrial relations.... The treatment of this issue by large companies through the Business Council appears so far to have been its most successful endeavor."50
In explaining the success of such business collective action, we need again to draw on the theoretical elements outlined above. First, business leaders must confront a shift in economic conditions, a perceived crisis or at least a major or indeed extraordinary policy opportunity born of such conditions. In the case at hand, the BCA boldly embraced the quest for EB because a successful attack on Australia's historic centralized industrial relations system was seen as a once-in-a-generation opportunity to institutionalize employer dominance. It was the first time that business had seriously challenged the system. The challenge took place against a backdrop of unsettled economic conditions—including, since the 1970s, a series of recessions, high unemployment, and growing labor market insecurity—that increasingly gave greater bargaining power to employers. It was true that a degree of wage moderation had been achieved by the post-1983 Labor/ACTU Accord, but for business such corporatist pacts were troubling politically and represented a potentially unstable form of wage restraint. Given the changes in labor market conditions, the BCA employers felt emboldened to confront the government and the unions in an historic showdown. Subsequently other employer groups came on board, with the recession of the early 1990s providing further impetus to confront the unions.
Second, agendas require persuasive discursive framing in order to help stimulate business mobilization. This too was important. The mindset surrounding Australian industrial relations since the beginning of the twentieth century had been framed in terms of statism and centralism in a semi-judicial arbitral environment, with the Labor governments of the 1980s adding a further corporatist layer to this system. In this context, the BCA's well-funded research-based advocacy around the concept of EB amounted to a major shift in discourse and approach. The BCA gathered resources and established a special taskforce (the Employee Relations Study Commission) to research and push the EB agenda, a strategy that actively engaged with the media. Since the increasingly neoliberal flavor of national economic discourse had already embraced a language of competitiveness, productivity, and flexibility, the discourse of EB quickly caught on. As one commentator argues, "In 1987 the concept of enterprise-based regulation of labour was barely part of the industrial relations discourse. By 1993 the concept was widely accepted."51 Indeed, the shift in mindset was so complete by the 1990s in Australia that "employee relations" (implying an enterprise focus) had displaced the more centrist "industrial relations" as the new vocabulary.
Third, by the mid-1980s, the BCA had a membership of around 80 CEOs, most of whom were active in Council meetings. Just as importantly, there were also several high-profile, vanguard CEOs, drawn mainly from the politically ascendant resources sector, who had a strong commitment to what they saw as overdue national (neoliberal) policy reform.52 As Doner and Schneider argue, one of the factors that drives business leaders and their associations towards such "productive" national engagements is concern about "economic vulnerability" in the face of globalization and international competition, and this is exactly the view that gripped the big business community in the 1980s. The BCA's CEOs also had the ear of government and were willing to publicly campaign on major reformist causes, especially EB. This entrepreneurial activity was reinforced by the role of the BCA's Secretariat, led by highly visible Executive Directors, such as Geoff Allen and, during the EB campaign, Peter McLaughlin, a former senior federal Treasury official. The Secretariat essentially acted as the BCA's brain's trust and secured the services of a number of former senior public servants and leading economists, as well other supporting staff, some drawn from the corporate sector. It was on this basis that the BCA spearheaded research-based advocacy in Australia.
Furthermore, the formation and then the subsequent organizational development of the BCA added considerable new collective institutional capacity to big business in Australia.53 It provided an important forum for face-to-face CEO interaction and deliberation, which was decisive in moving big business political activity beyond its former relatively disorganized, atomistic state. Through corporate contributions and the role of the Secretariat, a very substantial research capacity was also achieved; one, for the first time, that was strategically targeted at matching if not bettering the capacity of the federal bureaucracy. In some respects, then, the BCA achieved a degree of "institutional strength." Doner and Schneider are right to claim that many business associations "are more than the sum of their parts."54 But they are on shakier ground when they claim that business associations wield "significant power" over members by "changing their preferences." The liberal ideological foundations of the BCA did not support top-down member discipline: any change in member preferences was through deliberation.55
Following Olson, Schnieder also emphasizes the role of selective benefits offered to business, which help "dissolve obstacles to collective action." He argues in relation to his Latin American cases that such benefits "typically originate not in associations but in the state."56 Yet, in this case, it was the BCA, not the state, that offered the key selective benefits as inducements to participation. It offered members a ready-made CEO networking forum and the other resources and opportunities mentioned above, all of which were regarded as novel and important. In fact, the BCA offered CEOs a chance to come in from a world of political atomization and begin to play a key organized role in national affairs, thus conferring on them a new-found status. Other scholars emphasize the selective benefit of "institutionalized access to policy deliberations in the government."57 This was also significant in the Australian case. True, the CEOs of the largest companies already had access to government leaders, but the BCA provided CEOs, especially the BCA's key leaders, with alternative or additional access routes. What is also significant is that the BCA—as an organization and meeting place—helped foster collective commitments within big business, helped build trust and social capital among CEOs, and helped reduce the transaction costs and uncertainties regarding shared commitments that otherwise plague collectivism.58
The BCA's organizational capacity was also instrumental in forging new networking relationships between formally disparate business associations by encouraging them to cooperate in ad hoc coalitions focused on particular policy issues, including EB and the environment.59 Hence, the formation and development of the BCA provided an important organizational basis from which to launch concerted forms of business collective action. In an interview, a former BCA insider outlined what he saw as the "strengths" of the BCA model in these terms:
I think the great strength of the Business Council was that it was "research based"...and it positioned almost all that it did in terms of some notion of the "national interest." I think a second strength...was the Business Council was always best listened to when it spoke through its CEOs, through its President, and through the CEO heads of its various committees. The arrival of CEOs on the political stage was a very significant shift. A third strength was that the Business Council had a good model of public policy advocacy...it never set out to influence public opinion, it set out to influence leader opinion. The other strength was...the quality of the Secretariat and its high level of intellectual capability. The Business Council's strength was that it could over time mostly achieve consensus on tough issues. The other thing was that the Council was patient. It was prepared to work through issues over time. In the area in which I worked, labor market reform, the Council's position was that it would take 10 years.60
Finally, what of arguments that emphasize the role of state or government elites in mobilizing business? In the case at hand, there was, for an Australian government, an atypical attempt to offer big business the key selective benefit of formal incorporation with government. Labor's Prime Minister, Bob Hawke (1983–1991), was an instinctive corporatist and had sought a formal alliance with big business via the BCA, much as he had done with the unions via the Accord's corporatist wage agreements. This kind of approach from government is consistent with Polsky's thesis and with other statist scholars who emphasize a state-centric view of business mobilization.61 Schmitter and Streeck also point out that political or economic vulnerabilities may encourage state elites to attempt to "create a favorable set of organizational properties for business associations."62
The problem with the statist thesis in this case, however, is that the BCA, reflecting entrenched liberal sentiments, flatly rejected such overtures. For its part, the BCA preferred to maintain a cordial but arm's length relationship with government.63 As a former BCA insider put it during interview, "Hawke thought the creation of the Business Council was a marvelous opportunity to shore up corporatism, but he was sadly disappointed because the Council position was: 'this is our policy and we are not going to negotiate with you on policy. We'll advocate our position. You'll have to take a decision in government.'"64 This stance created tensions with the government. Hawke wanted the BCA to deliver a key constituency to the bargaining table. In one instance Hawke demanded all the BCA's CEOs leave a Council meeting in Melbourne and fly to Canberra to support the government on a specific issue. Hawke was furious when the CEOs rejected the demand. In response, the BCA quietly worked to convince Hawke that his approach was inappropriate. Arvi Parbo, the BCA's first President, sums up Hawke's mood on this issue in the following way: "Despite many attempts to explain our pluralist philosophy, there is no question that both the government and the unions—probably with the mindset of their centralized industrial relations background—came to see our refusal to deliver deals on behalf of some monolithic business entity as a sign of inadequacy, poor organization and weakness."65 Yet the BCA's strategy reflected realistic judgment. The corporate sector was, on the whole, ideologically opposed to "collaboration" with government, and especially back-room, corporatist deal-making. Moreover, even if that path had been pursued, associations of business in Australia (despite the capacities of the BCA) are not centralized, disciplined, or encompassing enough to be able to centrally bargain with or deliver constituencies to government.66
An alliance of sorts on industrial relations between the BCA and the government was finally established, but only after initial successful mobilization by business. Coalitional analysis is thus still potentially useful and has been emphasized by a range of scholars as important in the politics of analyzing public policy formation.67 But again, such alliance building, particularly of a state-centric kind, was not the key and certainly not the initial causal driver of business collective action in this case. Nevertheless, once the government had come on board, it was an alliance that then had second round effects by helping in subsequently sustaining the level of business mobilization required to keep pushing for the more than the half decade it took to finally legislate for EB in 1993–1994.
Taxation Reform
Since the early 1970s, taxation reform in Australia, especially efforts to introduce base broadening via a consumption tax, had been bogged down in political controversy. After failed efforts in the 1980s, the BCA's leadership met with the newly installed Prime Minister John Howard soon after the 1996 federal election and pressed the case for tax reform. The final legislative passage of a goods and services tax (GST) by the conservative Howard government in 2000 reflected a surge in business mobilization in the late 1990s on this issue. The Business Council's involvement with tax reform is widely regarded (including by BCA insiders) as the most significant engagement in policy reform by the Council since the late 1980s work on EB. The factors behind the BCA's mobilization on tax reform were much the same as those at work in the earlier EB campaign.
First, the arrival of a conservative government in 1996, one potentially amenable to a new campaign on taxation reform, was perceived by business interests as a major opportunity, which helped propel business mobilization. In early meetings with the Prime Minister, BCA leaders as well as other business elites made it clear that tax reform was central to business expectations of the new government. Second, by the late 1990s, amid discourses of neoliberalism and globalization, business interests had become increasingly frustrated by what was often depicted as an "uncompetitive" tax system that invited corporate "off-shoring" and exit options. Third, much as with EB, the federal government was initially wary of plunging into such a major reform campaign. Given past debacles with taxation reform (by then known as the thirty- year problem),68 the government was doubly wary. Nevertheless, it was finally prompted and persuaded by business elites to move on the issue. Again, the causal arrows initially ran from business to government. Business interests, initially led by the Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry (ACCI), forged an alliance with the major social welfare lobby, the Australian Council of Social Services, and argued the merits of base-broadening tax reform on equity and efficiency grounds. This equity/efficiency argument reinforced the discursive agenda favoring reform. Entering the picture following this initial consensus-building work, the BCA contributed substantially to a fund to support a tax reform campaign and subsequently led another ad hoc coalition, the Business Coalition for Tax Reform, consisting of forty-two business associations, in a campaign to secure the GST agenda.
The Howard government was eventually encouraged to take up the challenge of tax reform. Business support for the changes and the leadership displayed by ACCI and the BCA were clearly key political ingredients that ultimately helped embolden the government. But again, contrary to statist accounts of business mobilization, it was government inactivity that promoted business mobilization. As Eccleston argues in relation to this case, "the failure of Australian governments to consolidate tax reform proposals over the period provided business interest associations with incentives to form more concentrated organizational structures and create a more formalized policy network,"69 all aimed at pressuring the government. Only subsequently was there the formation of a loose business–government alliance on the issue that provided a mutually supportive environment for both parties. This helped sustain business mobilization around tax reform and also further emboldened the government.
Further (Inverse) Tests
Given the "daunting conditions" outlined above that must be met to realize business collective action, it is not surprising that the major peaks of such action have been relatively few in number. But is it reasonable to argue that all of the ingredients above are necessary to spur business collective action? The cases examined here suggest so, but this question is difficult to answer definitively. In this respect it may be illuminating to look very briefly at two inverse cases where some of the above ingredients were missing and also at a case where the BCA confronted an overtly hostile government. All such cases underline the contingencies and fragilities that attend business collective action.
First, the politics of the greenhouse emissions issue in the early 2000s illustrates that collective action can collapse if appropriate issue framing and a consensual, discursive agenda that is able to reconcile divergent interests is not achieved. In this case the BCA was split between energy firms and the "carbon lobby" and more progressive business elements over responses to the Greenhouse issue. The BCA's failure to successfully work through a response was cited by a number of respondents as a case of fumbling an important policy issue. The central problem for the BCA was an incapacity to frame a compelling and unifying position on Greenhouse. The BCA's initial response to the setting of greenhouse emissions targets was supportive and for a period internal debates advanced this approach within the BCA. And, as with industrial relations and tax reform, the aim was to pressure a reluctant government to move forward on the issue. However, in the early 2000s there was shift in position as a range of dominant energy and resources interests within the BCA began to increasingly oppose ratification of the Kyoto Protocol. The Howard government also reportedly pressured the BCA not to endorse the Kyoto Protocol.70 Moves to endorse Kyoto by progressive elements then split the BCA, with internal conflict becoming public amid a leaking of documents. Indeed, the Chairman of ESSO Australia warned the BCA's Executive Director that endorsing the Kyoto Protocol "would undoubtedly marginalize the BCA within the government...and cause a split in the BCA membership."71 Subsequently, the BCA retreated to a non-committal, neutral position on the issue.
Second, rather than supporting the BCA as an organization, as had earlier institutional developments within the business community, more recent corporate institutional changes during the 1990s have weakened it. In particular, the pressure that CEOs face to achieve bottom line results increasingly limits their capacity to commit to the BCA. This is compounded by the pressures of internationalization, which take the form of a trend toward off-shoring in the large corporate sector, the growing multinational firm membership of the BCA, the need for CEOs to spend greater amounts of their time overseas on corporate business, and the growing numbers of foreign CEOs now in Australia on short-term tenure. As a former BCA Executive Director commented:
Some would argue that this problem is a product of the branch office economy where in fact the Australian companies increasingly are subsidiaries of global players, taking their cue from global leadership. Others would argue that it's the short-term pressure for performance reflected through institutional shareholder interests. Some would argue it's a by product of the way remuneration packages are now structured, with an emphasis on short-term share prices.... Whatever it is, the reality is that today you have very few full time CEOs actively prepared to run with a public agenda.... I think that you're struggling now to identify business leadership figures that have the authority, credibility and muscle....72
These pressures have all weakened the BCA's key organizational resource: CEO power. As a former member of the BCA Secretariat comments, "The move from domestic companies who were predominantly a domestic membership to one which is not predominantly but certainly moving towards a large multinational membership, where CEOs come into Australia on short term circuits with varying degrees of interest in Australia.... That does place a strain on how the BCA functions."73
Finally, although government support as a key condition of collective action has not been emphasized in the this article, especially regarding initial mobilization, it is interesting to observe what happened when the BCA confronted overt government hostility. In this respect, the Keating government (1991–1996) turned on the BCA, claiming (largely erroneously) that it had been partisan during the 1993 federal election. Subsequently, Keating publicly attacked CEOs, and ministers and senior bureaucrats were discouraged from active engagement with the BCA. The fact that a government thinks it can turn on a big business association such as the BCA speaks volumes about at least the perceived power dynamics in play. Keating also engaged in divide and rule strategies among BCA member firms by siding with some and alienating others. A former BCA Executive Director, remarks, "The philosophy that informed government's attitude was if business put its head above the parapet then it'd be kicked in. And that had the effect of causing many in the business leadership to actually retreat. They ultimately had an obligation to their own shareholders not to expose the company to retaliation at the political level... And they backed off."74 Similarly, the Allen Review of the BCA in 1996 stated: "The style and agenda of the government under Keating, and the then Prime Minister's strategy to undermine the BCA as a source of national influence, contributed to a relative decline of the effectiveness of the Council in this period... Keating's propaganda regarding the BCA became self-fullfilling, as CEOs retreated from public advocacy to protect shareholder interest."75 This is a case, then, of government hostility destabilizing business mobilization.
Conclusion
An important argument of this article is that cross-sectoral corporate political mobilization or collective action is not easy, even for the well-resourced leaders of big business. Such mobilization requires meeting a substantial or even daunting set of drivers and facilitative conditions. It appears that even the absence of one of the supportive conditions might stymie collective action. This article has also argued that extant theories of business collective action, especially those that emphasizes the role of the state, are insufficient or misleading in accounting for this case. Hence, rethinking the role of government (or at least its potential role) is a further important implication of this work. Contrary to much extant theory that emphasizes the role of government in spurring business collective action, this article has argued instead that business leaders were the prime movers. Governments only provided support after initial business mobilization. From the case of the Keating government, it also appears that business mobilization can well be stymied by a hostile government. Hence, governments do matter, but it is how they matter (and when) that this work has attempted to flesh out.
Instead of a focus on the state, attention was turned to the entrepreneurial business drivers of collective action and the way these were supported and shaped particularly by the organizational context and by the nature of the national business culture. The Australian example highlights the importance of organizational resources, and, indeed, institution building within business politics. Formation of the BCA drew on pre-existing organizational resources; once established, it provided an organizational foundation for further and more ambitious bouts of collective mobilization on key issues. Now that this foundation appears to be weakening, future collective action will no doubt become more difficult or require ever more specialized conditions. At a more macro-level, it was argued that wider regime characteristics are important when analyzing business collective action. In Australia's case, the context of a liberal business culture has tended to produce a wary, arm's length approach to the state. In turn, this has produced a reliance on indigenous mobilization on the part of business and somewhat less reliance on supportive mobilizing synergies with the state. The difference in this respect even across supposedly liberal regimes is noteworthy. Martin's work noted above on U.S. government activism in relation to business mobilization, and Grant and Marsh's work on the activist role of government during the formation of the Confederation of British Industry (CBI), point to a closer business–government relationship than that found in Australia.76 Nevertheless, even in the Australia case, it was also shown that governments were potentially important interlocutors in reformist coalitions or "partisan regimes" with business, but only after initial mobilization by business.
All this suggests that the organizational and ideological foundations for business collectivism are likely to be different in liberal compared to more coordinated capitalist systems. Not only will business atomism be more pronounced in liberal systems, but state coordination or facilitation of business activism—not to mention formal alliance building—is also likely to be less pronounced than in more coordinated systems. As this article shows, the result in liberal systems, or at least in Australia's liberal system, is that business interests themselves needed to do a substantial amount of heavy lifting in orchestrating their own forms of mobilization. These business political entrepreneurs included an initial cadre of vanguard CEOs that was able to spearhead campaigns and engender wider corporate participation. Also important were associational elites that played a pivotal organizational and intellectual role in business mobilization.
As for future research, the propositions and directions outlined in this paper need to be further tested against a wider set of case studies. In particular, a direct comparison with the political dynamics of collective action at the U.S. Business Roundtable would be interesting. Another implication of this paper is that researchers may need to keep looking for potentially new independent variables on which to base more elaborate theory building, especially in terms of which causal variables apply under what conditions. Relatedly, further work should be done in testing for the impact of broader regime characteristics of business collectivism. In this case, the impact of liberal regime characteristics and traditions in promoting business, as opposed to state drivers of business collectivism, were emphasized, but further testing under other conditions may yield different outcomes. More work should also be done in wider settings on the conditions, especially the institutional conditions that foster or deter indigenous business mobilization. Another question worth pursuing, and this is apposite to work already done by Moran and Coleman and to other work I have done on the BCA, is whether globalization and domestic structural change is undermining the capacity of nationally based business interests to drive business mobilization and collective action, and, if so, what implications and business strategies have followed?77 A final issue worth exploring would be the impact on the capacity for collective action of business associations that work in multi-level governance settings or supranational settings.
Notes
1 Mancur Olson, The Logic of Collective Action (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1965).
2 Stanislaw Markus, "Capitalists of all Russia Unite! Business Mobilization Under Debilitated Dirigisme," Polity 39 (2007): 278.
3 Ben Ross Schneider, Business Politics and the State in Twentieth Century Latin America, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 12; Michael Moran, "The Company of Strangers: Defending the Power of Business in Britain, 1975–2005," New Political Economy 11 (2006): 453–77. The structural shifts Moran describes are to do with the break up of former interlocks and business ties, while broader cultural changes in the U.K. have been hostile to business and especially have questioned earlier forms of firm autonomy and the culture of self-regulation.
4 Richard Doner and Ben Ross Schneider, "Business Associations and Economic Development: Why Some Associations Contribute More than Others," Business and Politics 2 (2000): 279.
5 Andrew Polsky, "When Business Speaks: Political Entrepreneurship, Discourse and Mobilization in American Partisan Regimes," Journal of Theoretical Politics 12 (2000): 455–76.
6 Polsky, "When Business Speaks," 460.
7 The threat/opportunity motive for business collective action is one commonly found in the literature. See David Vogel, Fluctuating Fortunes, The Political Power of Business in America (Boulder, Co: Westview Press, 1992 and Washington, DC: Beard Books, 2003); "Capitalists of all Russia Unite!" adds a twist to the opportunity rationale by arguing that "green field" institutional development in transition economies offers business major incentives to mobilize and help create the "rules of the game" in economic development and business practices.
8 David Plotke, "The Political Mobilization of Business," in The Politics of Interests: Interest Groups Transformed, ed. Mark P. Petracca (Boulder, Co: Westview Press, 1992); Cathy Jo Martin's institutional analysis of business preference formation and policy cognition and the specific forms of institutional capacity (both firm-centric and associational) that helps underpin this is an important contribution to understanding business politics. See Cathy Jo Martin, Stuck in Neutral: Business and the Politics of Human Capital Investment Policy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000); and Martin, "Nature or Nurture: Sources of Firm Preference for National Health Reform," American Political Science Review 89 (1995): 898–913; Polsky's first two conditions are also highlighted by Patrick J. Akard, "Corporate Mobilisation and Political Power: The Transformation of U.S. Economic Policy in the 1970s," American Sociological Review: 57 (1992): 597–615.
9 Polsky, "When Business Speaks," 460.
10 See, for example, Jeffrey Frieden, "Sectoral Conflict in U.S. Foreign Economic Policy," International Organization 42 (1988): 59–90; Peter Gourevitch, Politics in Hard Times (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1986). In Australia, such an approach, for example, could not have predicted the support of the rural sector for the post-war government's protectionist coalition dominated by trade minister John McEwen.
11 For a primer on constructivist approaches, see Colin Hay, "Constructivist Institutionalism," in Oxford Handbook of Political Institutions, ed. Rod Rhodes, Sarah A. Binder, and Bert A. Rockman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006). Martin, Stuck in Neutral, 28–30, similarly endorses a constructivist approach to understanding business preference formation. Moreover, as Hart comments, "ideology can be a particularly powerful force in business political decision making," in David M. Hart, "'Business' is Not an Interest Group: On the Study of Corporations in American Politics," Annual Review of Political Science 7 (2004): 58.
12 David Vogel, "Why Businessmen Distrust Their State: The Political Consciousness of American Corporate Executives," British Journal of Political Science 8 (1978): 45–78.
13 Moran, "The Company of Strangers," 455.
14 A further problem has been the failure to achieve close alignment between big business and Australia's major conservative party, the Liberal party, which has traditionally been more aligned with small business.
15 Stephen Bell, Ungoverning the Economy: The Politics of Economic Policy in Australia (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1997).
16 Stephen Bell, Australian Manufacturing and the State: The Politics of Industry Policy in Post-War Australia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993).
17 Leon Glezer, Tariff Politics (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1982).
18 For an account of Australian business association politics that employs such a liberal frame of reference, but also highlights mutual interaction between business associations and the state, see Stephen Bell, "Between the Market and the State: The Role of Business Associations in Public Policy: Evidence from Australia," Comparative Politics 28 (1995): 25–53.
19 Jacob S. Hacker and Paul Pierson, "Business Power and Social Policy: Employers and the Formation of the American Welfare State," Politics and Society 30 (2002): 281. See also David Vogel, "Political Science and the Study of Corporate Power: A Dissent From the New Conventional Wisdom," British Journal of Political Science 17 (1987): 384–408.
20 Polsky, "When Business Speaks," 460. By contrast, some researchers in this field, such as Frieden, have argued that this can be largely explained by looking at sectoral economic dynamics, such as levels of concentration, similarities in asset specificity, etc., and largely reject the state as having any causal role. I am certainly not in this camp. See Frieden, "Sectoral Conflict in U.S. Foreign Economic Policy."
21 Polsky, "When Business Speaks," 463.
22 Polsky, "When Business Speaks," 457, emphasis added.
23 Cathy Jo Martin, "Business and the New Economic Activism: The Growth of Corporate Lobbies in the Sixties," Polity 27 (1994): 49–76.
24 Ben Ross Schneider, Business Politics and the State. See also "Why is Mexican Business So Organised?" Latin American Research Review 37 (2002): 77–118.
25 Markus, "Capitalists of all Russia Unite!"
26 John Bowman, Capitalist Collective Action: Competition, Cooperation and Conflict in the Coal Industry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989).
27 Theda Skocpol, "Introduction," in Bringing the State Back In. ed. Peter B. Evans, Dietrich Rueschemeyer and Theda Skocpol (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 21.
28 For a fuller discussion see Markus, "Capitalists of all Russia Unite!" 279–81.
29 Schneider, Business Politics and the State, emphasizes the importance of offering such selective benefits to business to assist in collective action.
30 Markus, "Capitalists of all Russia Unite!" 281.
31 See Bell, "Between the Market and the State"; and Martin, Stuck in Neutral, 43–44.
32 David B. Yoffie and Sigrid Bergenstein, "Creating Political Advantage: The Rise of Corporate Political Entrepreneurs," California Management Review 28 (1985): 129–39. More generally, the key source dealing with the role of political entrepreneurs amidst collective action dynamics is Norman Frolich, Joe Oppenheimer, and Oran Young, Political Leadership and Collective Action (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971).
33 Martin, Stuck in Neutral.
34 Doner and Schneider, "Business Associations and Economic Development."
35 See Peter A. Hall and David Soskice, eds., Varieties of Capitalism: The Institutional Foundations of Comparative Advantage (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001). Pepper D. Culpepper, "Employers, Public Policy and the Politics of Decentralized Cooperation in Germany and France," in Varieties of Capitalism.
36 The research reported in this paper is partly based on a series of interviews, conducted mainly during 2003/2004, with current and former BCA insiders, including all of the former BCA's Executive Directors.
37 George Polities, quoted in Business Council of Australia, Business Council: Performance and Challenges, Background paper for a Review of the Council's Activities and Processes, (Melbourne: BCA, 1985).
38 An internal review of the BCA's functioning and performance in 1985 argued: "It is a constant source of amazement to observers that bi-monthly Council meetings are normally attended by between 45 and 60 Council members, and that it is possible for a group that size to meaningfully determine or confirm policy. Despite the expectations of skeptics, after two years it is true to say that this is genuinely an organisation of Chief Executives." Business Council of Australia, Business Council: Performance and Challenges, 6.
39 Bell, Ungoverning the Economy.
40 Business activism in response to union mobilization had long been a hallmark of business politics in Australia. See Trevor Matthews, "Business Associations and the State, 1980–1979," in State and Economy in Australia, ed. Brian Head (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1983).
41 Bell, Ungoverning the Economy.
42 Useful accounts of the origins and work of the BCA are: Peter A. McLaughlin, "How Business Relates to the Hawke Government: The Captains of Industry," in Business and Government Under Labor,ed. Brian Galligan and Gywnneth Singleton (Melbourne: Longman, 1991); Arvi Parbo, Address to the 10th Anniversary Dinner, Business Council of Australia, Melbourne, 14th October, 1993.
43 Interview, Melbourne, 3/10/2003.
44 These leaders came especially from the resources sector, one long discriminated against under the cost structures imposed by centralized industrial relations and protectionism. Its leaders included Arvi Parbo, Sir Rod Carnegie, Hugh Moran and others. See Ian Perkin, "Business Lobbying Turns into a Capital-Intensive Industry," The Australian, 3/6/1983
45 This is made clear by the BCA's first President in his recounting of the BCA's history. See Arvi Parbo, Address to the 10th Anniversary Dinner, Business Council of Australia.
46 Bell, Ungoverning the Economy; John Quiggin, "Economic Governance and Microeconomic Reform," in The Institutional Dynamics of Economic Governance, ed. Bell (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 2002).
47 Bell, Ungoverning the Economy, chapter 8.
48 Bell, Ungoverning the Economy; and relevant chapters in Bell, ed. The Institutional Dynamics of Economic Governance.
49 Braham Dabscheck, "The BCA's Plan to Americanise Australian Industrial Relations," Journal of Australian Political Economy 27 (1990): 1–14; Peter Sheldon and Lyn Thornthwaite, "Ex Parte Accord: The Business Council of Australia and Industrial Relations Change," International Journal of Business Studies (October, 1993): 37–55.
50 McLaughlin, "How Business Relates to the Hawke Government": 162–63.
51 John O'Brien, "McKinsey, Hilmer and the BCA: The 'New Management' Model of Labour Market Reform," Journal of Industrial Relations 36 (1994): 469.
52 Perkin, "Business Lobbying Turns into a Capital-Intensive Industry."
53 Analysts of business politics, such as Michael Useem, have argued that the collective political capacities of business have improved in recent decades because of institutional factors, especially the increasing density of inter-corporate networks. See Michael Useem, The Inner Circle: Large Corporations and the Rise of Business Political Activity in the US and UK (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984). There is no scope here to explore the shared ownership or directorship networks on which Useem has focused, nor is it clear that these have played an important role in business collectivism in Australia. See Malcolm Alexander, "Boardroom Networks Among Australian Company Directors, 1976 and 1996: The Impact of Investor Capitalism," Journal of Sociology 39 (2003): 231–51.
54 Doner and Schneider, "Business Associations and Economic Development," 270.
55 This included an understanding that member CEOs could "opt out" of specific BCA positions, but still remain members.
56 Schneider, Business Politics and the State, 22, 12.
57 Doner and Schneider, "Business Associations and Economic Development," 263.
58 Martin, Stuck in Neutral, 30, makes a similar point: "Groups channel information, broaden political identities, and increase trust that others will join in politically risky action."
59 Bell, "Between the Market and the State," 39–41.
60 Interview, Melbourne, 22/4/04.
61 As Schneider, Business Politics and the State, 26, argues, "sometimes policy makers are motivated to achieve particular policy goals and enlist business collaboration to these ends."
62 Philippe C. Schmitter and Wolfgang Streeck, The Organisation of Business Interests (Berlin: International Institute of Business, 1981) 124; plus the updated version published by Max-Plank Institut für Gesellschaftforschung, Köln, March 1999, 35.
63 McLaughlin, "How Business Relates to the Hawke Government," 153–57.
64 Interview, Melbourne, 25/11/03.
65 Parbo, "Address to the 10th Anniversary BCA Dinner," 5.
66 Bell, "Between the Market and the State"; see also Colin Gordon, "Why No Corporatism in the United States? Business Disorganization and Its Consequences," Business and Economic History 27 (1998): 29–46.
67 Bill Winders, "Maintaining the Coalition: Class Coalitions and Policy Trajectories," Politics and Society 33 (2005): 387–423. On the politics of cross-class coalitions in driving policy reform, see Peter Swenson, Capitalists Against Markets: The Making of Labour Markets and Welfare States in the United States and Sweden (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002); and "Arranged Alliance: Business Interests and the New Deal," Politics and Society 25 (1997): 66–116.
68 Richard Eccleston, The Thirty Year Problem: The Politics of Australian Tax Reform (Sydney: Australian Taxation Research Foundation, 2004).
69 Richard Eccleston, "The Significance of Business Interest Associations in Economic Policy Reform: The Case of Australian Taxation Policy," Business and Politics 2 (2000): 311.
70 Guy Pearce, High and Dry: John Howard, Climate Change and the Selling of Australia's Future (Melbourne: Penguin, 2007), 243.
71 Michael, McLachlan "Big Business Splits Over Greenhouse," Australian Financial Review, 22 November, 2002, 10.
72 Interview, Melbourne, 26/11/03.
73 Interview, Melbourne, 26/1/03. These changing institutional issues within the BCA are dealt with in detail in Stephen Bell, "A Victim of its Own Success: Internationalization, Neoliberalism, and Organizational Involution at the Business Council of Australia," Politics and Society, 34 (2006): 543–70.
74 Interview, Melbourne, 25/11/07/
75 Allen Consulting, Review of the BCA, Melbourne, 1996, 1.
76 Martin, "Business and the New Economic Activism"; Wynn Grant and David Marsh, The Confederation of British Industry (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1977).
77 Michael Moran, "The Company of Strangers: Defending the Power of Business in Britain"; William Coleman, "Associational Governance in a Globalising Era: Weathering the Storm," in Contemporary Capitalism: The Embeddedness of Institutions, ed. J. Rogers Hollingsworth and Robert Boyer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997); Bell, "A Victim of Its Own Success."
