Abstract
This chapter reviews the rise of the Business Roundtable, examines the organizational methods underpinning its success, and considers whether it is now, as some have argued, in a state of decline. An historical method is employed, drawing on a variety of accounts of the major policy battlegrounds over the last 50 years in some detail. This method is supplemented by a social network analysis of the changing position of the Roundtable in the network of congressional lobbying, employing a little-used dataset. The author finds that the persistence of the Roundtable and its effective modus operandi indicates that the forces of elite cohesion are wider than those formed by the interlocking personnel between organizations. It has been able to accommodate new powerful organizational entities that have emerged with changes to the structure of the economy, and continues to become increasingly central to the US policy advocacy network.
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Acknowledgements
I am grateful to Bill Carroll and David Peetz for their detailed and constructive comments on this paper, to David Dekker for the lobbying competitiveness metaphor, and to Larry Su for suggesting the divergence test employed.
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Cronin, B. (2017). The Rise and Decline of the Business Roundtable?. In: Salas-Porras, A., Murray, G. (eds) Think Tanks and Global Politics. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-56756-7_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-56756-7_6
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