Backstage orchestration: a new method of business influence

The pathways of business influence on policy and regulation are numerous. In this paper Jensen Sass will examine a new addition to that armoury - backstage orchestration. This practice sees a corporation acting as a principal, enrolling diverse agents to speak on its behalf in policy and regulatory settings.

Jensen will illustrate this practice via a discussion of an offensive campaign that recently targeted the WHO and explain the political constraints which motivate the use of backstage orchestration, the organizational and psychological mechanisms which indicate its efficacy, and suggest why it is normatively problematic in a democratic polity and thereby warrants distinctive forms of regulation.

About the Speaker

Jensen Sass is a Braithwaite Fellow at RegNet who works at the intersection of normative political theory and the empirical study of corporations, technology, and the public sphere. He is currently a Chief Investigator on the ARC Discovery Project Democratic Resilience: The Public Sphere and Extremist Attacks".

This event will be delivered online via Zoom.

Image credit: image of humans staging an illuminated projection of a classical western orchestra of human figures by Ars Electonica on flickr (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0).