Organisational Structure and Lobbying

This paper seeks to unwrap the black box of how UK firms design and manage their political activities and how they transpose these activities to the international level. Theoretically, the study applies Schuler and Rehbein’s (1997) ‘filter model’, which posits that although external political, economic and industrial factors affect corporate political activity, an individual firm’s behaviour is influenced by its organisational structures, procedures, experiences and resources. The article aims to examine the firm-level decision process of corporate political activity design and investigate how this process affects firm’s political engagement strategies at the EU-level. Neither management literature, nor EU studies link managerial choice with EU-level engagement strategies. Hence, despite the fact that both investigate corporate political activities, their findings cannot explain how firms design their political strategies and execute them on the EU level. The paper explores how firms’ domestic and EU-level political strategies relate to each other and whether the existence of certain domestic-level organisational capabilities would lead to specific EU-level structures.

According to some scholars Europeanization is the “extension of lobbying activities to the European level” (Klüver, 2010: 188). Firms engage in order to make their voices heard by the European institutions. Following on from this perspective, I define ‘corporate Europeanization’ as the bottom-up process, through which firms extend their lobbying activities and political capabilities to the EU level and engage in direct EU level representation. I argue that at firm-level, Europeanization needs to be explored as an internal organizational process, in which corporate resources, capabilities and the organizational arrangement of lobbying activities become internationalised and re-arranged in order to access the supranational institutions. The paper explores the determinants of managerial choice in relation to the Europeanization of corporate lobbying strategies. In the study, lobbying is seen as a corporate activity, similarly to marketing or sales. Such a focus allows us to unpack the process of EU level corporate engagement and examine Europeanization of political activities at a deeper, more complex level.