Structural Power

It’s not just “money in politics” — capitalists get what they want through structural power over the economy.

The importance of overt levers of business influence on government policy—notably campaign finance and lobbying—has been overemphasized. Using Executive branch financial policymaking during the Obama administration as a case study, this paper shows that those paths of influence are only two of many, and not, in this case, the most important. Drawing upon documents from the Federal Reserve Board and other regulatory agencies, reports from the business press, and policymaker memoirs, the paper places special emphasis on the structural power that large banks and corporations wield by virtue of their control over the flow of capital and its impact on employment levels, business investment, and tax collection. This control, often made visible by a drop in " business confidence, " is frequently sufficient to veto or weaken progressive policies, irrespective of more overt channels of influence like campaign finance or lobbying. At other times, economically disruptive disinvestment, combined with overt demands from the business community for government policy changes, constitutes an explicit " capital strike, " which then impacts many aspects of the policy process, including political appointments and policy implementation. This analysis has important implications for our understanding of political power in the United States and other capitalist economies.

This paper departs from the observation that a systematic review of the available theories, concepts, and methods and techniques for researching lobbying is lacking. Lobbying is a relational geography of power. And although economic and political geographers study a range of practices that could be considered constitutive to lobbying, they have hitherto largely ignored the spaces of lobbying. We conceptualize lobbying as a practice of three flows between spaces of lobbying: the flows of people between organizations, the flows of ideas between these people and the flows of resources between organizations. Lobbying is fundamental to understanding the execution of power by firms towards a range of state actors, and understood as the directed actions of individuals and groups to alter, influence or hamper the decision-making process of governments; these actions consist of the mobilization of resources that activate power and enable access to spaces of lobbying. Access to different spaces of lobbying will influence the effectiveness of lobbying practices. Geographers are in a unique position to look at the mobilization of power through access to spaces of lobbying and its resources. We discuss how lobbying is supported by material and immaterial resources for the re/production of spaces of lobbying. Finally, we present different methods and techniques to research lobbying. 
Keywords: firms, state, power, space, lobbying, economic geography, political geography

El objetivo del presente artículo consiste en analizar el modo en que ha sido abordado el problema del poder de la clase trabajadora. Emprendemos esta tarea con el propósito de estudiar de qué
modo el poder estructural de los/as trabajadores/as se expresa en su capacidad de negociación y qué papel tienen las estrategias sindicales en esa relación. Para ello recuperamos críticamente un conjunto de trabajos clásicos y contemporáneos, otorgando particular atención a la distinción entre poder estructural y poder asociativo planteada por Wright [2000] y adoptada por Silver [2005], así como a la reelaboración realizada a partir del enfoque de los recursos de poder por
investigadores/as de la Universidad de Jena (Alemania). Pese a la difusión de este último enfoque, planteamos la necesidad de revisar sus supuestos teóricos y metodológicos, subrayando la importancia de las condiciones estructurales en el análisis de la lucha de clases y de interrogarnos en torno al para qué de las estrategias sindicales y las diversas formas de construcción sindical como elementos clave para el análisis del poder de clase. // The aim of this paper is to analyze the way in which the problem of the power of the working class has been approached. We undertake this task with the purpose of studying how the workers' structural power is expressed in their bargaining abilities and what role union strategies play in that relationship. For this, we critically revise a set of classic and contemporary written works,
paying special attention to the distinction between structural and associative power proposed by Wright [2000] and adopted by Silver [2005], as well as the reworking carried out on the basis of
the Power resources approach by researchers from the University of Jena (Germany). Despite the spread of this latter approach, we raise the need to review its theoretical and methodological assumptions. We underline the importance of structural conditions in the analysis of class struggle and to ask ourselves about the purpose of union strategies and the various forms of union building as key elements for the analysis of class power.

Lately, the concept of ‘resistance’ has gained considerable traction as a tool for critically exploring subaltern practices in relation to power. Few researchers, however, have elaborated on the inter-linkage of shifting forms of resistance; and above all, how acts of everyday
resistance entangle with more organized and sometimes mass-based resistance activities. In this paper, these entanglements are analysed by taking into consideration the connections between articulations of resistance and technologies of power. Empirical observations from
Cambodia are theorized in order to provide better theoretical tools for searching and investigating the inter-linkage between different resistance forms that contribute to social change. In addition, it is argued that modalities of power and its related resistance must be understood, or theorized, in relation to the concepts of ‘agency’, ‘self reflexivity’ and ‘techniques of the self’.

Heat-related illness (also called heat illness) is a recurring and avoidable condition that results in multiple deaths in California farm fields every year. We conducted five focus groups as part of the California Heat Illness Prevention Study (CHIPS) in Fresno, California, during the summer of 2013. We used qualitative coding methods to analyze focus group transcript data with consideration of workers' behaviors and beliefs, workplace safety training experiences, employer-employee relations, and workplace conditions and organization. Discrete and complex factors related to worker self-care were identified, and suggest that heat illness cannot be viewed as simply a biomedical or behavioral issue, and that preventive health interventions in agriculture also need to take into account power and control structures existing in