Corporate governmentality: building the empirical and theoretical case

ABSTRACT

This paper develops a theoretical framework for interpreting novel (if not unprecedented) corporate involvement in the spaces of health, welfare and prosperity from an adapted Foucauldian perspective. By tracing how corporations’ social interventions have moved beyond corporate social responsibility, we build a theoretical case for interpreting emerging social interventions as exercises in governmentality, or, more specifically, corporate governmentality. We seek to test the utility of this concept empirically by exploring case studies from Coca-Cola and Facebook, who, through different means and modalities, we argue, display a corporate governmentality in specific social intervention programmes. Ultimately, we claim that reading these activities through the lens of governmentality enables us to interpret corporate ambitions as rationalities of the governmental as well as the commercial. Analysis further claims that in identifying the practices of governmentality that exist outside of the genealogies of that state, we can discern novel trends in emerging patterns of 21st-century governmentality, including their territorial form.

KEYWORDS:

• governmentality
• biopolitics
• Coca-Cola
• Facebook
• corporate governmentality
• corporate responsibility

1. INTRODUCTION

In 2012 the local panchayat (local government area) in Kizhakkambalam, India, refused to renew a working licence for Kitex Garments for alleged contamination of ground water sources by their dying and bleaching units (Philip, 2015). In May 2013, the Anna-Kitex Group, registered Twenty20 under the Charitable Societies Act as the corporate social responsibility (CSR) arm of the company. Twenty20 was created to ‘transform Kizhakkambalam into India’s first model village  …  into the smartest and the best governed village by the year 2020’ (Twenty 20, 2018). Twenty20 commenced several initiatives related to food and nutrition security, education, housing and sanitation, healthcare, mother and childcare, roads and infrastructure, drinking water, farming and ground water conservation. It used an ostensible CSR programme to construct and manage territory in Kizhakkambalam by assuming responsibility for the administration and government of the panchayat. The management team, board of directors and employees claimed that they would ‘build a society that works for everyone’ (Kitex Garments Ltd, n.d.) In 2015 Twenty20 won 17 out of the 19 seats (against the Indian National Congress – INC) in the Kizhakkambalam village panchayat of Ernakula. We claim that although this initiative was formally codified as a CSR programme, that it actually exceeds the explanatory power of the CSR literature. In this context we claim that Twenty20 went beyond taking responsibility ‘for the impacts of its decisions and activities on society and the environment’ and ‘engaging in public deliberations, collective decisions, and the provision of public goods or the restriction of public bads in cases where public authorities are unable or unwilling to fulfil this role’ (International Organization for Standardization (ISO), 2010). Instead we argue Twenty20 became the legitimate governmental and administrative actor for a specific territory where public authorities were able and willing to fulfil their role.

Corporations have historically supported the processes of government central to the production and maintenance of social stability. Our contention is that the blurring of the lines between government and corporate activities is increasingly common in political life (Scherer, Rasche, Palazzo, & Spicer, 2016) and is even exceeding notions such as extended corporate citizenship (Matten & Crane, 2005). We argue that novel corporate governmental activities tend to elude the explanatory categories that are available to interpret them. We further claim that related programmes embody more than the moral and philanthropic aims of CSR (Carroll, 1979, 1991; Lepoutre et al., 2007). We assert that these activities are not just another expression of the advanced privatization of public services that have become common place under neoliberalism; and which are contradictory to how the corporation is conceived since the introduction of general incorporation laws since 1896.

This paper moves beyond the explanatory logics of established CSR discourses (which emphasize business ethics and reputational management). Our analysis built on the insights of existing critical interpretations of CSR. We thus argue that many forms of corporate engagement in public life represent more than just smoke screens or gimmicks designed to cover up corporate malpractices (Hanlon & Fleming, 2009). In this context, Hanlon and Fleming argue that advanced practices of CSR reflect a significant extension of commercial power within social and political life. We argue, however, that related interventions embody more than the extended reach of capitalism into everyday – they reflect an emerging governmental logic within corporations. To critically interpret the emerging roles of the private sector within the administration of public life, we introduce the concept of corporate governmentality. We are seeing signs that corporate governmentality is becoming manifest in multiple ways: (1) big-tech companies are stimulating socially oriented actions in order to generate new data streams (what we term incidental corporate governmentality); (2) companies are actively seeking responsibility for social interventions targeting public health and welfare (O’Tool, 2019) (voluntary corporate governmentality); and (3) commercial entities are thrust into a governmental role due to poor regulation in particular spaces (forced corporate governmentality).¹ This paper outlines a general theory of corporate governmentality reflecting on examples of incidental and voluntary corporate actions (see Collier & Whitehead, 2022, for a discussion of forced corporate governmentality).

We are not the first authors to use the idea of corporate governmentality (Schrauwers, 2011b; Vicencio, 2014). We are, however, the first to apply it to the manifestations of government outlined above. Our analysis pertains to practices associated with the administration, governance and management of life by corporations. We begin by considering the limitations that exist when equating certain contemporary corporate interventions in the administration of public life with CSR. The following section outlines the key features of a theory of corporate governmentality, and how our utilization of the term differs from its previous iterations. The final two sections apply the notion of corporate governmentality to two case studies: (1) a voluntary governmentality towards watershed management programmes in India which was developed by Coca-Cola; and (2) the emergence of corporate governmentality in the digital world through the example of Facebook’s Voter Megaphone initiative. Each case study reveals different aspects of the territorial flexibility that is characteristic of corporate governmentality.

2. MOVING BEYOND CORPORATE SOCIAL RESPONSIBILITY

Simply, CSR can be understood as ‘the responsibility of enterprises for their impact on society’ (European Commission, 2019). Perhaps the most comprehensive definition is provided by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO), which describes CSR as the ‘Responsibility of an organization for the impacts of its decisions and activities on society and the environment, through transparent and ethical behavior that contributes to sustainable development, including health and the welfare of society’ (ISO, 2010). CSR connects to a broader, ongoing debate regarding a corporation’s purpose and responsibility within society. According to Friedman, ‘there is one and only one social responsibility of business to use its resources and engage in activities designed to increase its profits  …  [while it] engages in open and free competition, without deception or fraud’ (Friedman, 1970, p. 6). Freeman’s Stakeholder theory, contrastingly, delineates the groups apart from the stockholders, who have an interest in the success of a corporation including employees, customers, suppliers, financiers, communities, governmental bodies, political groups, trade associations and trade unions. Freeman asserts that corporations who take a stakeholder approach are more profitable in the long term and enhance their legitimacy to operate. Despite uncertainties about its commercial benefits, CSR now receives widespread political support and is endorsed by most major national and international governmental bodies (Habisch et al., 2005; Vallentin & Murillo, 2011).

The activities of the corporate sector with regards to CSR are best thought of as a continuum of behaviours. Kolter and Lee (2005) categorize the practices of CSR into six primary types ranging from cause promotion to socially responsible business practices. Carroll suggests CSR ‘outlines the newly emerging and still amorphous responsibilities that business should assume to become more broadly involved in actively improving the social environment’ (Carroll, 2008, p. 29). We recognize that aspects of the activities which we describe in this paper overlap with the different aspects of CSR outlined by Kolter and Lee (2005). But, critically, we claim that when looked at in terms of their broader aims and practices they exceed categorization as CSR. Crucially, we argue that while the processes we outline may involve taking responsibility for the impacts of corporate activities on public life, they surpass this remit. Consequently, while the interventions we explore may be partially motivated by the compensatory logics of CSR, they are also animated by broader governmental rationalities. These governmental rationalities not only involve corporations attempting to socially and ethically offset their socio-environmental impacts through various interventions, but to more actively shape and control the social worlds in which they operate. If CSR involves corporations taking responsibility for the social consequences of their actions, corporate governmentality involves them adopting responsibility for the actions of others. Although the motivations for corporate governmentality may derive, originally, from the same compensatory logics as CSR, its logics and goals are inadequately described within the existing nomenclature of the CSR literature. The closest equivalent to corporate governmentality in analyses of CSR is the notion of political CSR. Political CSR involves greater public oversight of the governance of corporations and corporations plugging the governing gaps left by states (Maier, 2021). Although the practices of corporate governmentality do make questions of corporate political accountability more important than ever, the focus of political CSR is too narrow to account for the processes we present here.

The distinctions between CSR and corporate governmentality can be discerned in a series of ways. While both CSR and corporate governmentality remain oriented towards the profit motivations of corporations they do so in different ways. CSR generally seeks to either socially compensate for the externalities generated by profit-making or directly enhance profit-making by generating positive corporate consumer relations. In both instances, CSR is oriented towards managing the financial needs and social relations of a corporation within its particular area of responsibility (so a water company’s CSR would generally address its impacts on hydrological issues; while those of McDonald’s might address the impacts of cattle ranching on ecological decline). Corporate governmentality on the other tends is more holistic in form, addressing issues and relations that extend well beyond the direct responsibilities of a corporation for people and the environment (as we have seen with Facebook supporting public responses to the COVID-19 pandemic and Google intervening in urban public transport). In this context, while corporate governmentality still supports corporate image and profit-making it tends to do so in a much more temporally and spatially obscure ways.

When understood on these terms, it is clear that the practices of corporate governmentality have been outlined in existing work on social welfare and model communities (Matten & Crane, 2005; O’Tool, 2019). According to Matten and Crane (2005), companies taking responsibility for societal welfare of various kinds frequently also take on the administration of citizen rights including the right to education, healthcare and welfare. Matten and Crane (2005) argue that corporations’ administration of social rights can be observed where governments stop being the exclusive administrators of citizens’ rights, or where the administration of rights is beyond the capabilities of the state (due to political, geographical and/or financial limitations). Corporate administration of rights can range from supply chain management in the apparel sector (by Levi Strauss; Matten & Crane, 2005; O’Tool, 2019) to holistic biopolitical administration and responsibility in the form of model communities (such as New Lanark, Port Sunlight and Bourneville) (O'Tool, 2019). However, these initiatives were often motivated by the moral visions of company owners and were not part of a more generalized shift in corporate activity. They could be interpreted as forms of proto-corporate governmentality, focused on employees, and not broader sets of stakeholders, thus distinct from the practices considered in this paper.

Historically, before general incorporation laws in 1896, companies that became administrators of various aspects of public life were often state owned (Henry et al., 2016), or incorporated by charters that explicitly made them a means or technique of governing by the state (Barkan, 2013) (such as Vereenigde Nederlandsche Oost Indische Compagnie or the East India Company). The charter under which companies were incorporated before 1896 held an explicit public welfare mandate and had strong institutional links with state objectives (Schrauwers, 2011a). In the post-general incorporation laws era corporations are unconnected institutional actors operating without a public welfare mandate: they are adopting a responsibility for some degree of public welfare remit. The governmental programmes change how the corporation can be understood as the rationality for engagement with public welfare as it does not conform to the Friedman/Freeman debate on corporate rationalities or CSR behaviours.

A further distinction between corporate governmentality and CSR is their respective scopes of action. CSR operations have been involved in the production of new public territories (through corporate sponsored sanitation and drainage schemes, and public parks and green spaces); the promotion of social behaviour change (towards pro-social and pro-environmental goals); and the delivery of improved health and welfare (through, for example, vaccination programmes). It is unusual to find CSR programmes integrating elements of each of these forms of intervention. Where they do they reflect something that is strictly speaking beyond the scope of CSR the combined emphasis on each of these targets (environmental context, human behaviour, welfare) reflects a focus on the conditions of life that are more typical of the field of action associated with governmentality (Figure 1). We are particularly interested in corporate practices that operate at the intersection of these areas of governmental action. In this context, corporate governmentality is marked by both an uncoupling of corporate action from areas of direct responsibility (as with offsetting a harm or compensating directly for damage), and an heighten scope of intervention across various aspects of social life. On these terms, corporate governmentality exhibits a distinctly anticipatory approach to intervention, as related practices seek to actively shape the public sphere in ways that generate longer term corporate advantage.

Figure 1. Corporate governmentality and holistic corporate intervention in the conditions of life.

Our account of corporate governmentality does overlap with more critical interpretations of CSR. According to Hanlon and Fleming (2009), in the post-Enron, post-credit crunch world of CSR there has been a significant shift in the nature and intent of corporate interventions in public life. Hanlon and Fleming claim that CSR no longer simply distracts and obscures the pernicious impacts of corporations of collective life. Hanlon and Fleming claim that many forms of CSR reflect a significant shift in the nature of capitalism, which pursues the predatory capture of social life for commercialization. We support Hanlon and Fleming’s claims that there is more going on in contemporary CSR than reputational management, but we argue that what is happening exceeds the narrow commercial logic of, and indeed the very term, CSR. To understand corporate interventions in contemporary public life requires an appreciation of not just commercial but also governmental rationalities.

3. CORPORATE GOVERNMENTALITY

3.1. Precursory theoretical developments of corporate governmentality

Several scholars have already used the term ‘corporate governmentality’. Relevant to this paper are Schrauwers (2011a, 2011b) and Vicencio (2014). Schrauwers concentrates his analysis on the advent of the Netherlands Trading Company (Nederlandsche Handel-Maatschappij – NMH) in the 19th century and the ‘delegation of royal sovereignty to a new form of social organization, the corporation, in order to administer economic processes at home and abroad’ (p. 77). Schrauwers describes how the ‘merchant-king’, Willem I, devolved political sovereignty to a chartered company and tasked it with the economic objective of competing in the international cotton trade, and the dual purpose of policing and managing the behaviours of ‘paupers’ through the corporate administration of the socio-economic environment. Schrauwers observed that this new corporate entity sought to manage the ‘population to become productive citizen-workers’ (Schrauwers, 2011a, p. 97).

Corporate administration of the economic conditions of paupers enabled Willem I to enact unpopular policies without the need for legislative review: the budgets and administration of corporations, like the Benevolent Society and the NHM, were outside the legislative processes of the Dutch state (Schrauwers, 2011a). Whilst there are similarities between the conceptualization of corporate governmentality developed by Schrauwers and our conceptualization, there are also key differences. Prime among these differences is that this paper’s mobilization of corporate governmentality is focused solely on the private firm that is bound only by general incorporation law instead of corporate charter and is thus disconnected from the state.

Corporative governmentality is developed in the work of Vicencio (2014). He asserts that the consolidation of power, and the appropriation of wealth, by private sector firms following the neoliberal privatization process enacted in the 1980s stripped the wealth of the state and minimized their capacities for intervention, potentially resulting in private multinationals becoming more powerful than states themselves (Peck, 2011; Davies, 2014). Vicencio (2014) states that under neoliberalism the private sector escaped the regulatory net of the state, and ‘sought to seize the systems of health, pensions, and education at all levels, etc.’ (p. 290); Vicencio’s argument that the privatization of public services is corporative governmentality is different from our conception of corporate governmentality. The privatization of public services is not sufficient to qualify as a form of corporate governmentality. Private firms delivering public services does not necessarily mean engagement in a rationality of government. There is a critical leap and distinction outlined in our conceptualization of corporate governmentality that is related not just to the accumulation of wealth or privatization of public services, but to the practices of the government of individuals by corporations.

3.2. Relations with Foucauldian governmentality

Foucault’s work did not focus on the broader political–economic role of the corporation within the systems of government. Foucault instead focused on the study of the connections between governmental power and political economic systems. Foucault’s lectures at the College de France in 1978 and 1979 explored the genealogies of the modern state. Within these genealogies Foucault identified the practices of government (best thought of in historical contexts as formalized systems of pastoralism, or care for all) as being central to the purposes of the secular state (Foucault, 2007; Foucault, Burchell, & Davidson, 2008). To Lemke (2011), governmentality is best thought of as a compound neologism, which connects the acts of governing with the political rationalities (mentalities) that inform state activity (p. 50). While corporations are acknowledged as key players within the governmental matrices of the state, corporate activities are generally seen to operate within the umbra of security and territorial frameworks associated with the state. Within neoliberal forms of governmentality, the state takes a less significant role within the achievement of the goals of good government, as greater responsibility for social order is placed in the hands of the market and responsibilized individuals (Trnka & Trundle, 2014). It has been claimed that long-established forms of CSR support neoliberal systems of governmentality, as they encourage individualized forms of action on socio-environmental problems as opposed to more collective approaches (Hanlon & Fleming, 2009). However, even in a neoliberal context, the state continues to carry the greatest burden of responsibility for risk abatement and maintains its position as the ultimate arbiter of government within its own territory. The notion of corporate governmentality is potentially significant to theories of (state) governmentality not because it suggests that there has been a move away from the governmental ethos of care (for all) identified by Foucault, but because it indicates that the practices and rationalities associated with government are not only a product of the genealogy of the state alone. We assert that corporate governmentality is emerging as part of nascent form of post-neoliberal governmentality, within which markets and responsibilized individuals are no longer seen as reliable guarantors of good governance, and more behaviourally interventionist systems of governmentality, instigated by the state and corporations, are becoming more common (Rose, 2017; Whitehead et al., 2017).

Governmentality’s characteristic forms and dimensions have been interrupted in multiple ways (Gordon, 1991; Legg, 2005; Miller & Rose, 2008; Rose, O'Malley, & Valverde, 2006) as a move from an authoritarian direct rule to a ‘more diffuse form of power’ used to ‘manage its population and resources by employing a new set of saviors or rationalities (such as statistics) which enabled an unprecedented degree of control and surveillance over individual lives’ (Bakker & Bridge, 2008, p. 225). With populations being understood as a biological unit (Lemke, 2011) that has been referred to by others as ‘biopolitical governmentality’ (Oksala, 2013); ‘seeks to enhance the productivity and controllability of the population through improving its overall wellbeing’ (Andreucci & Kallis, 2017, p. 97). Within the work of Foucault governmentality denotes both a micro-political analysis of emerging governmental forms and a more specific description of modern statehood.

We start our analysis from Foucault’s definition of government as ‘an activity that undertakes to conduct individuals throughout their lives by placing them under the authority of a guide responsible for what they do and what happens to them’ (Foucault, 2004, p. 363).² To understand the nature of corporate governmentality, and what it might mean for theories of governmentality more generally, it is helpful to consider specific features of a governmentalized state. The work of Dean (2010) provides one, among several, codifications of governmentality. While by no means exhaustive, we find Dean’s framework a helpful context to articulate (in comparative terms) the nature of corporate governmentality (Table 1).

Table 1. Comparison of (state-based) governmentality and corporate governmentality using Dean’s (2010) framework.

Key similarities and differences between governmentality and corporate governmentality
	Governmentality	Corporate governmentality
Population	Population(s) as the object	Stakeholders as the object, and experimental targeting of population segments
	Health, welfare, prosperity and happiness of the population	Health, welfare, prosperity and happiness of a target population for the benefit of stakeholders
	Economic government; and economically fiscal use of power	Must itself be economically and fiscally efficient
Relationship to forms of power – sovereignty and discipline	Mechanisms – constitutions, laws and parliaments	Mechanisms – infrastructure provision and management projects, company policy, digital surveillance, behavioural initiatives, and platforms
	Sovereign power exercised through juridical and executive arms of the state	Power exercised through ability to shape freedom; manage the choices available; intervene and change of everyday behaviours
	Authority over subjects of the state within a definite territory	Power to influence stakeholders characterized by a distinctively flexible form of territorial power – in relation to both the jurisdictional territories it operates within, the selective localization of territorial power and the arbitrary determination of what the corporation is responsible for within its territory
	Discipline as exercise of power	Non-regulatory forms of interventions (incentives, nudges, persuasion, choice architectures)
	Subjects’ capacities to be fostered, to be used and to be optimized	Stakeholders’ capacities as resources to be managed, fostered, to be used and to be optimized
Apparatuses of security	Practices and institutions ensure optimal and proper functioning of the economic, vital and social processes – including health, welfare and educations systems	Practices and institutions ensure optimal and proper functioning of the economic, vital and social processes for corporations via their stakeholders – including health, welfare and educations systems
	Apparatuses of security: standing armies, police forces, diplomatic corps, intelligence services, etc.	Apparatuses of security: corporate intelligence services, counter terrorist teams, regulation of political expression and hate
Governmentalization	Administrative state based on regulation and disciplines are gradually governmentalized	Administrative practices of the corporation and disciplines are rapidly governmentalized
	The rationality of government not only to sovereignty but also to the administrative imperative to optimize health welfare and life of populations: biopolitics	The economic rationality of profit is conjoined with a governmental concern with the biopolitical basis for fiscal well-being

Table 1 demonstrates key forms of continuity between state-oriented and corporate governmentalities. It also reveals prominent lines of divergence. Significant among these is the shift from the population focus of governmentality to the more specific concern with Freemans’ conception of stakeholders; and commercially relevant operational territories that are characteristic of corporate governmentality. There will always be a disparity of care in state systems of governmentality between different demographic groups. Within corporate governmentality, however, there is a more deliberate narrowing of governmental care towards key stakeholders and, in particular, customers and clients (both actual and potential). The more deliberate focus on segments of the population (to the benefit of share and stakeholders), and territorial areas, as opposed to populations defined by a state’s territoriality, raises ethical questions concerning the nature of public responsibility that is manifest in programmes of corporate governmentality. Are the forms of governmental care associated with corporate governmentality focused mainly on where economic utility is found, or is it a more arbitrary outcome of who chooses (or is likely to choose) to be a customer? A further line of divergence relates to the move away from juridical processes and associated systems of legitimacy. Corporations have no formal, legal method for the exercise of discipline over the population segments they concern themselves biopolitically with. While corporate governmentality inevitably continues to operate within the shadow of juridical power, the mechanisms of democratic accountability associated with its manifestations are less clear than they are in state-based governmentality. As we discuss below, this vacuum of accountability has significance in relation to the forms of continuous trials and experiments that are common within digital forms of corporate governmentality. Corporate governmentality initiatives thus often seek to secure public legitimacy by recourse to the free choices that are offered to the subjects of interventions. Addressing issues of legitimacy could see a fusion between corporate governmentality and practices of political CSR emerge.

In terms of the apparatuses of security, corporate governmentality still relies on the established apparatuses of government associated with the police and military. On the other hand, and particularly in relation to the operation of digital forms of corporate governmentality (see below), companies now have capacities for intelligence gathering, policing, censure, and the regulation of public expression that were traditionally the realm of the state (Facebook, for example, has its own counter terrorist unit employing 350 people). Finally, corporate governmentality embodies similar processes of governmentalization as would be expected within the state, as corporate bureaucracy adapts and inevitably expands to meet new governmental responsibilities. The governmentalization of the state is, however, related to a rationality of government within which care for a population is aligned with the broader fiscal needs of a defined political territory. In relation to corporate governmentality, the rationality of governmentalization involves the alignment of the care for clients and stakeholders alongside the narrower fiscal needs of the corporation (Collier & Whitehead, 2022). This results in a concept of territorial control that, if fit for purpose, can manifest in similarly aligned national territories as those associated with states, but can also create subnational spaces that are out of sync or in conflict with national spaces. The more flexible territorialities associated with corporate governmentality can present larger challenges that impact the topologies of territory where there is governing across national territories.

Governmentality is as much a method of analysing the emerging nature of a governmental system as a form that governmental power takes. It is important to think about corporate governmentality as an emerging system of power, which itself needs to be analysed. To these ends, we seek to identify the characteristics of corporate power that may align with governmentality, but also to allow these systems of power to challenge how we might conceive of governmentality itself. This process is particularly evident in the second case study of corporate governmentality, Facebook’s Voter Megaphone, which we discuss below; this initiative is part of the novel commercial strategies known as surveillance capitalism. The notion of Surveillance capitalism was developed by Shoshana Zuboff, who described it as, ‘[a] new economic order that claims human experience as free raw material for hidden commercial practices of extraction, prediction, and sales’ (Zuboff, 2019, p. vii). Through its acquisition of human experience surveillance capitalism has strong practical connections to the practices of biopolitics. Its underlying economic logic, however, generates a distinctive form of governmentality, which are not, entirely, anticipated within existing theories of the biopolitical (see also Deleuze, 1990). The governmentalization of the state, which started in eighteenth Century, was a response to the crisis of the raison d’être of the state. Nevertheless, the governmentalization of the state still involved an interplay between the notion of care and existing statal features such as territory, population, and political security. In thinking about the governmentalization of the corporation, we should thus be open to understanding how emerging systems of corporate care arise in the context of the institutional forms and commercial logics of corporations (global, stakeholder-focused, platform economies, etc.).

4. CORPORATE GOVERNMENTALITY COCA-COLA STYLE: WATERSHED MANAGEMENT IN INDIA

Features of corporate governmentality are evident in Coca-Cola’s CSR arm’s (the Anandana Foundation) watershed management programme in India. This watershed management programme provides a specific example of voluntary corporate governmentality and the governmentalization of a corporate actor. The watershed management programme involved construction and management initiatives alongside behaviour change programmes aimed at addressing the health, welfare and prosperity of targeted populations in specific subnational territories. These initiatives focused on water provision in farming communities surrounding Coca-Cola’s bottling plants.

The characteristics of corporate governmentality shown in the case study of Coca-Cola include stakeholders as the object of intervention; health welfare and prosperity as the target intervention; power exercised through the ability to manage choices and intervene in everyday behaviours; influence undefined by a socio-political territory; optimization of capacities and resources; practices that ensure the proper functioning of corporations via their stakeholders; and administrative practices that are rapidly governmentalized.

The governmentalization of Coca-Cola’s activities in India had three stages:

• Identification of a need for governmental responsibility.

• Internal response.

• The creation of a stakeholder management programme targeted at the local farming community.

In 2002–03 Coca-Cola was faced with multiple campaigns against them and their bottling operations in India. ActionAid and CorpWatch took up residents’ campaigns and detailed the allegations against both Coca-Cola and Pepsi in the Kerala area (NUS Services Ltd, 2004). The campaigns focused on accusations of abstracting water at unsustainable levels, decreasing ground water aquifer levels and the contamination of local surface water sources (caused by heavy metals from the effluent and toxic biosolid waste produced in the area) (NUS Services Ltd, 2004). Additionally, in 2003 The Centre for Science and Environment (CSE) released a report that established that levels of pesticides in consumer beverages in Europe were well below the levels of pesticides originating from Coca-Cola and PepsiCo’s operations in India (Vedwan, 2007).

The campaigns brought critical scrutiny to the broader environmental impacts of Coca-Cola. While Coca-Cola was not directly responsible for pesticide pollution, the CSE used the company’s brand image, and status as a multinational corporation, to consolidate its support. The negative brand image created a problem for the contracts that Coca-Cola had with major outlets for their products in the United States, Canada and the UK. New York University (NYU) banned Coca-Cola products from their campuses, which led to over 30 additional institutions across North America suspending their contracts with Coca-Cola (Massey, 2007; Szeto, 2007) and reviews of contracts with the National Students Union (NUS) in the UK (NUS Services Ltd, 2004). To re-establish trust Coca-Cola decided it needed to review its own practices among a range of stakeholders.

The effect of the protests hit Coca-Cola on multiple levels and in different stakeholder populations. First, they affected Coca-Cola’s internal management and administrative practices, both at the Coca-Cola system level and its bottling operations. Second, the protests impacted the company’s local community stakeholders in the areas surrounding bottling plants. Third, they affected the international market activities of Coca-Cola. The production of socio-environmental harm in this way offers a prototypical context within which we might expect the deployment of CSR strategies designed to ethically compensate for corporate negative externalities. However, Coca-Cola’s response was not just about ‘doing good’ for the social–environment – it involved orchestrated activities of government focused on securing the conditions for the reproduction of socio-ecological life.

Coca-Cola’s response regarding its operations in India included reacting to middle-class outcry, local stakeholder’s concerns, and ultimately involved rethinking its own operations in India and globally. The responses included legal action taken to explore the Indian government’s decisions regarding Coca-Cola’s licence to operate in certain regions of India; choice of how to, and who should, conduct evaluations of the situation; management of brand reputation globally; and its initiation of sustainability reporting (begun in 2002; Karnani, 2013). While Coca-Cola’s actions sought to change the way the company presented itself to the public and stakeholders (a classic trait of CSR), its response went further than just changing brand identity. Coca-Cola conducted programmatic changes in its own internal operations through the creation of BIG (Bottling Investment Group) and the Anandana Foundation. We claim these internal initiatives embodied core characteristics of corporate governmentality related to the administrative practices associated with governmentalization of corporate activities (a key feature of corporate governmentality). As with the governmentalization of the state in the eighteenth century, the governmentalization of the corporation involves the formation of bureaucratic structures which better facilitate a sensitivity to biopolitical needs and an enhanced ability to deliver governmental interventions.

Coca-Cola’s corporate structure is different from many traditional companies. The Coca-Cola system has a hierarchical structure for its business. At the highest tier is The Coca-Cola Company (TCCC): the global corporate office. From there similar national or regional corporate offices manage their own regional practices. There are also the bottling operations in different countries, as Coca-Cola is not the producer of most of its branded beverages. The franchisee bottlers, known as the concentrate businesses, sell concentrates to authorized bottling operations that combine the concentrate with sweeteners, water or syrups to produce the finished products.

The other side of the organization is their finished products operations that are ‘Company-owned or controlled bottling, sales, and distribution operations’. Since 2006 this part of the company falls under the Bottling Investments Group management (Coca-Cola Company, 2018). In India this branch of the Coca-Cola Business is known as Hindustan Coca-Cola Beverage Private Ltd. Finally, in India Coca-Cola also operate a ‘CSR’ arm of the company, the Anandana Foundation, which was created in 2008. Coca-Cola’s corporate structure is unique. Rather than an exclusively centrally controlled manufacturing process (e.g., PepsiCo), its operations are decentralized and local and regional managers are mandated to make decisions on the behalf of headquarters (Borgatti & Foster, 2003) while TCCC headquarters focus on longer term strategic planning.

Following the campaign against Coca-Cola the company questioned its operating model and mechanisms relating to infrastructure provision, management, company policy, and surveillance. The company had to address and reconceptualize its own brand identity and its operations. TCCC’s response to how to conduct their own company’s conduct, was to create BIG:

BIG was created to ensure those bottling operations receive the appropriate investments and expertise to ensure their long-term success. By strategically investing in select bottling operations, temporarily taking them under Coca-Cola ownership, and utilizing the leadership and resources of The Coca-Cola Company, BIG can drive long-term growth in critical markets and address major structural or investment challenges. (The Coca-Cola Company, n.d.)

The creation of BIG provided the opportunity to adopt a govern-mentality in a programmatic manner. Internationally and institutionally the creation of BIG provided a process for addressing the challenges within the bottler operations that had previously been outside of the control of the Coca-Cola System, such as effluent disposal and pesticide levels in the production processes. Some of these problems were inevitably beyond corporate control (i.e., pesticide levels from agriculture), and others (effluent disposal) had been deliberately externalized as part of the formation of an economically optimal corporate structure, mirroring a state-orientated mentality towards fiscally economic use of power.

The creation of BIG provides a relationship to the forms of power it wields through a change in its management and internal infrastructure that allowed the corporation to address the concerns of the local community stakeholders (a specific targeted population for the benefit of their wider stakeholder groups) surrounding water abstraction, to intervene and exercise their power to change related behaviours, and implement practices to ensure optimal and proper functioning of the economic, vital and social processes for corporations. We assert that the restructuring of Coca-Cola’s international corporate culture goes beyond the remit of established forms of CSR, but does however mirror the features of governmentality outlined in Table 1. By reasserting control and liability for its international operations in India, Coca-Cola essentially reversed the economic logic that undergirds multinational corporation under neoliberalism. What it lost though in terms of Byzantine’s structures of organized irresponsibility and limited liability, it gained in relation to an ability to govern its activities and their bio-ecological impacts.

In 2008 Coca-Cola India Ltd created Anandana, its CSR arm, to complement its broader institutional restructuring that provided them an additional mechanism, through an infrastructural provision to manage legitimate intervention programmes in line with company policy. Anandana was ‘committed to sustainable development and inclusive growth by focusing on issues relating to water, the environment, healthy living and social advance so that it can contribute to a strong and resolute India enabling the common man [sic] to better his or her life’ (Anandana, n.d.). The local interventions of the Anandana Foundation focused specifically on the issues of water management, addressing the original concerns of the local population over water abstraction. The Anandana Foundation stated their core purpose areas are Water Sustainability, Climate Control/Environment, Healthy Living, and Inclusive Social Development. These purposes are achieved through their projects around India in the form of watershed development projects, the construction of check dams, water recharge efforts, watershed management, potable water efforts, and economic development. If the creation of BIG facilitated greater control of its own corporate system for Coca-Cola (a reinternalization of franchised activity), then the Anandana Foundation was key to enabling Coca-Cola to exert influence on specific subnational spaces, community practices and social systems outside of the corporation.

The water management programmes included 11 water-related interventions across Bundelkhand, Banswara, Gujarat, Chaksu and Rajasthan that focused on watershed management, water sustainability, potable water provision and watershed replenishment projects (Anandana, n.d.). These interventions amounted to the construction and/or renovation of over 39 check or earthen dams; renovation or digging of 46 farm ponds; instillation of reverse osmosis machines to serve five villages; the construction of 61 water conservation structures; field bunding and field contours across more than eight locations (covering more than 625 hectares of land), and recharging more than 120 wells. Through its watershed management and focus on water sustainability Anandana was able to manage the physical territory surrounding Coca-Cola’s bottling plants. Its actions through the Anandana Foundation impacted on the local communities’ social, cultural, economic and geographical territories. The management of local community and farming environments also include strategies to change local resident’s conduct via non-regulatory intervention.

Irrigation is the number one use for water in India. The watershed management programmes led by the Anandana Foundation used behavioural insights to attempt to change the hydrological behaviour of farmers. The watershed management projects employ multiple behaviour change methods to reduce the farmers’ own water abstraction from the surface level aquifers, and therefore reduce the problem of Coca-Cola’s water abstraction. The programme thus seeks to reduce the ‘friction costs’ associated with developing and using alternate water sources by working with the local communities on the construction of new sources. By working with the communities and providing them with a sense of ownership over the watershed adjustment, the programme generated an ‘endowment effect’ that helped to support the ongoing use of the new water management facilities. Furthermore, watershed management provided a substitute for the well-water abstraction via rainwater harvesting rather than attempting to stop the excessive water abstraction resulting from advances in water pumps. Related initiatives also instilled a sense of reciprocity between Coca-Cola and the local community that could be used to mitigate future negative campaigning by tapping into a sense of obligation from the local stakeholders towards Coca-Cola.

The Anandana Foundation’s watershed management initiatives integrate Coca-Cola’s interventions into the eco-regional fabrics of everyday rural life. The interventions include social and cultural change in the way that the communities view water management; economic transformation in the availability of water for the primary economic activity of farming; and geographic change in the movement of the labour market (in some cases reversing the trend of urbanization with more availability of work in the farming sector).

These interventions are emblematic of a programme of corporate governmentality that is beyond the remit of CSR (traditional or political). The programmatic nature takes it out of the currently established remit of CSR of solely taking responsibility for its operating practice or engaging in the collective decision-making characteristic of (political) CSR. It is our contention that in its attempt to control the physical, social, and behavioural operating spaces of corporate activity (in this instance a watershed and not just a company town or model village reminiscent of the enlightened capitalists), and the actions of different branches of the corporate systems (as expressed in the BIG programme), Coca-Cola has been engaging in a form of governmentality that is beyond the genealogies of the state and more than merely CSR. It is a rationality of government intervention that facilitates ostensible social and ecological care, but which ultimately creates an extended space of socio-environmental influence for the corporation.

While such interventions appear to bring benefits to corporate, social and governmental organizations in the short-term, in shifting the fulcrum of governmental action from the state and towards the corporation they carry with them significant jurisdiction and democratic implications. It is also clear that while the governmental practices associated with Coca-Cola’s may be similar to those enacted by a state government, the mentalities and rationality are different. Echoing the sentiments of Hanlon and Fleming (2009), it thus clear that the actions of Coca-Cola in Indian seek to control aspects of the non-corporate lifeworld to serve corporate needs. While this rationality may be the heart of all CSR initiatives, we assert that the nature and extent of the social, behavioural and environmental interventions evident in Coca-Cola’s actions are more closely aligned with territorial government than the more narrowly defined reputational management activities associated with CSR. These activities embody a pre-emptive shaping of the operational territory of the corporation, not merely managing the consequences deriving from corporate activities.

5. DIGITAL CORPORATE GOVERNMENTALITY: FACEBOOK’S VOTER MEGAPHONE PROGRAMME

In 2012 the journal Nature published an attention-arresting Research Letter (Bond et al., 2012) entitled ‘A 61-million-person experiment in social influence and political mobilisation’ and which reported on a randomized control trial (RCT) conducted during the 2010 US congressional elections. The letter, and the RCT, were the product of a collaboration between academics at the University of California and Facebook Data Science. The trial sought to establish the power of social influence in political territories, with a particular focus on political self-expression and voting behaviour. The trial focused on US users of Facebook on 2 November 2010 (p. 295). These users were randomly assigned to three groups. The first ‘social message group’ (n > 60 million) were shown a post encouraging them to vote, information on local polling places, and a clickable ‘I Voted Button’ (Bond et al., 2012). In addition, this group could also see a counter of Facebook users who had recorded voting and a series of profile pictures of the user’s Facebook friends who had pressed the ‘I Voted Button’ (p. 295). The second ‘information group (n > 600,000) were shown the message encouraging them to vote, the vote counter, but no faces of friends who had voted (p. 295). The third, control, group received no message or indication of which friends had used the ‘I Voted’ button. The RCT revealed that real-world voting patterns between the information and control groups were the same, but that the turnout among the social message group was significantly higher (p. 296). The study ultimately concluded that the Facebook initiative increased voter turnout by appropriately 340,000 people (p. 296).

The research reported in Nature was part of a broader Facebook initiative called Voter Megaphone. Voter Megaphone used the tools of social influence described above in a series of territories including India, Brazil, Indonesia and the UK to ostensibly promote voter turnout. We claim that Voter Megaphone embodies an important digital manifestation of corporate governmentality, and that it can be considered an act of corporate governmentality to the extent that it seeks to promote a social good among users (in this context expressed in the form of enhanced civic engagement and voter turnout) through acts of non-coercive behavioural modification which are not (directly) connected to commercial gain (interestingly in relation to commercial gain, reports suggest that Facebook has actually scaled back its Voter Megaphone experiments due to the bad publicity it has generated, although there were reports that it has been used again in Taiwan (Bolluyt, 2014). A Facebook spokesperson asserted the political and commercial neutrality of the initiative when they stated:

Our effort is neutral  …  while we encourage any and all candidates, groups, and voters to use our platform to engage in the elections, we as a company have not used our products in a way that attempts to influence how people vote. (quoted in Brandom, 2014)

There are several significant aspects of the Facebook Voter Megaphone project which have import for how we might think of corporate governmentality in the digital realm. The first is the scale of corporate governmentality it facilitates. As with other social media platforms, smart-tech devices and search engines, Facebook has the capacity to shape and govern behaviour at previously unimaged scales (Guszcza, 2015; Risdon, 2017) Around the time of the first Voter Megaphone trial Facebook had approximately 150 million users in the United States (Bolluyt, 2014). In the first quarter of 2019 Facebook had approximately 2.38 billion users worldwide (Statista, 2022). Despite the scale of the Voter Megaphone project, it is important to note that in relation to governmental population, its experimental form involves the deliberate targeting of some portions of the population and not others. This is typical of the experimental logics of big tech and makes it distinct from the more inclusive population targets identified by Dean in established systems of governmentality. The second key aspect is that Voter Megaphone operates in the form of a platform. The platformed nature of Facebook is based upon a business model whereby a non-human intermediary seeks to use network effects to co-produce political and economic value amongst its users (Barns, 2019; Langley & Leyshon, 2017). As with other multi-sided platform networks, Facebook is functionally reliant on a high degree of editorial separation from the interactions that emerge in its operating space. The limited curation of its content is what generates the forms of participatory energies and creativities that are associated with the success of this economic model. The economic model of the platform may function efficiently in relation to market exchange, but it does create problems when those exchanges are more political in nature. If Facebook exhibits features of platform-based governmentality, it lacks the forms of jurisdictional accountability and responsibility that are associated with analogue government systems (Bartlett, 2018). In this context it is important to speculate about the territorial form of platformed-based systems of governmentality. As a minimum, platform-governmentality appears to exbibit a distinctively flexible territorial form. This flexibility in part relates to the ability of platforms to operate within multiple territorial jurisdictions and to be able to withdraw (or threaten to withdraw) service provision in those territories at short notice (as evidenced by the threats made by Facebook in relation to its service provision in Australia). The territorial flexibility of platforms also pertains to their ability to decided what they choose to be responsible for (in relation to content) within different territorial jurisdictions. What is able to pass over the territorial threshold of a platform can thus easily vary between the different jurisdictional territories the platform operates within. The flexibility of Facebook’s territorial power is, however, expressed most clearly in the way in which it is able to construct virtual territorial systems of power. In the context of the Voter Megaphone these virtual territorialities exist in the dividing lines between the RCT’s different groups. The Voter Megaphone depended upon the construction of territorial partitions between its users so that its efficacy could be assessed. It appears that the experimental logics of surveillance capitalism rely on the ability to generate an almost infinite and ever-changing set of experimental territories and allied populations. The fact that a stakeholder can exist in multiple digital territories at the same time, and that their territorial position can constantly change, is suggestive of an almost quantum form of territorial power (Deleuze, 1990).

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Having established the peculiarities of platform-based corporate government, it is important to consider the motivations that informed the Voter Megaphone project and the extent to which these may cause us to rethink these actions in relation to corporate governmentality. Our contention is that the key to interpreting digital forms of corporate governmentality is the aforementioned concept of surveillance capitalism (Zuboff, 2015; Zuboff, 2019). According to Zuboff, surveillance capitalism emerged out of the economic logics that Google developed in the early 2000s. Google noticed that every search it facilitated produced ‘collateral data’ (including search terms, spelling, dwell time, click through patterns, etc.) (p. 67). The commercial value of this data lay in the fact that it provided a ‘broad sensor of human behaviour’ (p. 68), whose predictive power could be used to sell goods more effectively (Dijck, 2014). Critically, Zuboff (2019) recognized that as the predictive power of data science fused with the insights of the behavioural sciences, surveillance capitalism has been able to move from prediction to behavioural actuation (the deliberate shaping of behaviour, as demonstrated in the case of Voter Megaphone) (Zuboff, 2019; see also Guszcza, 2015; Risdon, 2017; Yeung, 2016). Although Zuboff’s analysis is Marxist in its orientation, it has clear parallels with Foucauldian notions of governmentality.³ Surveillance capitalism focuses on the commercial potential of the entirety of human experience and the digital monitoring of human nature is clearly biopolitical in its orientation. Although Zuboff’s theory of surveillance capitalism does not consider governmental issues directly, it nevertheless provides critical insight into the forms of corporate rationality that inform big tech’s motivations when it moves into the governmental sphere. In terms of the practices of governmentalization outlined in Table 1, surveillance capitalism involves a peculiarly direct correlation between the gathering of biopolitical data and the stimulation of biopolitical activities that are closely aligned to a rationality of corporate profit-making.

Thinking about emerging forms of digital corporate governmentality through the lens of surveillance capitalism reveals important perspectives on this governmental project. First, it suggests that, at least in the digital realm, forms of corporate governmentality are never divorced entirely from profit-making. Consequently, whether promoting participation in elections, saving for pensions or improving public health the everyday actions that are captured by surveillance capitalism’s platforms can be converted directly into upstream financial gain. Here the biopolitical is always already bioeconomic. In the context of the Voter Megaphone project then, while it may not have been used to manipulate the way in which people voted, by merely pressing the I Voted button Facebook users were providing valuable behavioural data that, when combined with other data streams, could have value to political clients in future elections (as it most likely did in the 2012, 2016, 2020 US presidential elections). This is an example of incidental corporate governmentality to the extent that the governmental goal (promoting voter turnout) is incidental to the data that is generated by the act of digitally promoting voter action.

But none of this means that digital corporate governmentality is merely capitalism by another means. If, as we have argued, governmentality refers to a governmental logic in and through which certain forms of socio-economic order are pursued in a more-than-profit-making context, it is clear surveillance capitalism has governmental dimensions. It is also apparent that these governmental features are novel. Drawing on Alex Pentland’s behaviouralist infused notion of social physics, Zuboff identified the emergence of a novel instrumentarian logic of government at the heart of surveillance capitalism. While Foucauldian notions of governmentality suggest the search for order within uncertain systems – a quest that under neoliberal forms of governmentality would default to a reliance on self-governance – instrumentarian systems are based upon a much more complete knowledge of socio-economic systems facilitated by the extended monitoring capacities of surveillance capitalism. Within such systems, governmentality need not be based upon the management of uncertainty and systems of enhanced personal responsibility – it can be grounded instead on increasing levels of certainty about what is going on and what is likely to happen. Within this view of reality, governmental theories/rationalities of how the world works can be replaced by increasingly sophisticated insights in to the social physics of reality (Anderson, 2008). Beyond the profit motivation then, it appears that the desire to create a more efficient and effective social realm animates the emerging forms of corporate governmentality that are associated with surveillance capitalism: it is a form of civilizational level change that technologists are keen to be associated with. Of course, to maximize effectiveness, digital corporate governmentality requires the maximal spread of smart technologies and platforms into everyday life, so that algorithmic government can be refined and enhanced by infinite loops of machine learning.

Interestingly, Zuboff (after Pentland) discerns a shift within what we term digital corporate governmentality away from individual behaviour change and towards the use of networks of connections between people in order to generate social pressure for change at scale (2019, p. 436). Within this behaviourist inspired model, freedom is increasingly seen as an illusion, and the neoliberal recourse to govern through freedom is inevitably diminished (Rose, 2017). Zuboff cautions that the certainties of instrumentarian rationalities of government could also drive the emergence of more coercive styles of governance, as your smart fridge denies you access to it once you have reached your daily calorie intake, or your smart car switches off due to the occurrence of too many traffic violations (Rose, 2017). It is in this context that digital forms of corporate governmentality may not only challenge the logics of neoliberal governmentality, but the liberal limitations placed on governmental power itself (Amoore, 2020; Whitehead et al., 2017).

It is perhaps in the digital realm that we can most clearly see the distinction between neoliberal governmentality, CSR and corporate governmentality. According to Hanlon and Fleming (2009), many CSR initiatives support neoliberal systems of government by promoting ethically oriented self-responsibility. In this context, providing ethical choices to consumers pre-empts the need for more structural and regulatory forms of intervention. In contradistinction to neoliberalism and CSR, emerging forms of corporate governmentality, in the analogue and virtual worlds, appear to be characterized by much more overt attempt to actively shape environments and behaviours.

6. CONCLUSIONS

Corporate governmentality embodies those activities conducted by commercial entities which simultaneously involve territorial modification (whether it be in physical or virtual contexts), aspects of behavioural modification, and a concern for the enhancement of human welfare (broadly defined). While not all manifestations of corporate governmentality necessarily address each of these spheres of activity with equal emphasis, it is the holistic nature of related interventions in to social and environmental systems that tends to distinguish them from more narrowly defined forms of CSR. The holistic nature of corporate governmentality is a distinguishing feature primarily because it indicates a desire to effect more systemic forms of change in the operating spaces of the corporation than those associated with CSR.

This paper has put forward arguments surrounding a critical advancement on the existing literature surrounding corporate governmentality by codifying the aspects where it overlaps with and departs from the existing theories of governmentality and strategic corporate social responsibiliy. The implications of corporate governmentality are potentially far reaching, incorporating debates about the nature of public policy, ethical debates surrounding CSR, and concerns over how the corporate sector is intervening in issues that are beyond the established boundaries of commercial activity. There are several areas of future research that need to be conducted to establish the validity of the notion of corporate governmentality as a framework to interpret the novel connections between corporate and governmental interventions. A particularly significant line of future inquiry, in the context of this journal at least, are the connections between corporate governmentality and territoriality. Although corporate governmentality appears to loosen the connections between government and territoriality, at least in relation to national territories, in many ways it is associated with a multiplication and intensification of territorial practices. These practices can be discerned in the corporate-sponsored reforging of neglected local territories by the Anandana Foundation in India. They can also be seen in the malleable digital acts of enclosure generated by big tech. We have attempted in this paper to provide a theory of, and an initial empirical exploration into, the characteristics of corporate governmentality, and the implications that this has for questions of territory, politics and governance that are central concerns of this journal.

DISCLOSURE STATEMENT

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Wales DTP grant reference number ES/P00069X/1.

Notes

1 These categorizations of corporate governmentality were developed following the completion of a three year Economic and Social Research Foundation project exploring the emerging governmental role of corporations in social and political life. This project involved conducting 12 interviews with corporate informants and the documentary analysis of a wide range of corporate CSR strategies from around the world. The categories described here best reflect the different forms and motivations that appeared to characterize the forms of corporate governmentality we were able to identify.

2 It is important to note that, according to Foucault, the governmentalization of the state emerged out of a crisis of the pre-modern state that was triggered by the scientific revolution and the Enlightenment of the 18th century. Shorn of their claims to divine power, monarchical state systems required a new raison d’être, which would focus on the care of the population. In this context, of course, national territory and territoriality are important aspects in defining the extent of control and governance of populations. In this context, territory acts to define both the limits of governmental responsibility (the spatial border) and the scope of governmental care (with each within a territory expecting to receive equal degrees of care).

3 In many ways these connections were foreshadowed in Delueze’s account of the emergence of a Society of Control: a society where ‘free floating forms’ of digital power replace the disciplinary powers of territorial enclosure (Deleuze, 1990).