Digital transformations have significant consequences for organizational attempts to shape their environments. Our focus is on how corporate political activity evolves in ways that require us to pay more attention to how information gets structured in digital spaces, and on how information ecosystems operate and shape strategic communication activities in organizational settings. We outline these digital transformations, offer a focus on corporate political activity as informational and develop a typology of datafied corporate political activity techniques to illustrate how the workings of digital spaces shape political issues more concretely. This serves to highlight the necessity of extending the focus of informational corporate political activity beyond the contents of overt and direct messages to include the more covert and subtle forms of influence made possible through the strategic structuring of information itself. This also contributes to our understanding of the political significance of corporate political activity, which is less about influencing political issues by composing appealing messages and distributing them to relevant audiences, and more about influencing political issues by organizing digital information and feeding algorithms. We suggest that such datastructures and algorithmic forms of sorting will become as important as message contents, and that datafied advocacy will become a central component of corporate political activity and other organizational activities.

This article investigates how an industry leveraged media coverage to publicly oppose governmental policy.Based on a frame analysis of the political contest between the mining industry and the Australian governmentover a proposed tax on resource corporations, we show how the industry aligned its position with massmedia to (a) make the policy contest salient, (b) frame their position in the contest as legitimate and(c) construct negative representations of the policy as dominant. The analysis reveals how the industry’scorporate political activities leveraged media coverage to align disparate frames into a consistent messageagainst the policy in the public sphere. This contributes to the literature on corporate political activity byexplaining the process of alignment with mass media frames to legitimize corporate positions on salientissues. Second, we contribute to the framing literature by demonstrating the process of frame alignmentbetween non-collaborative actors. Finally, we contribute to the broader discussion on corporations’ role insociety by showing how corporate campaigns can leverage the media to facilitate the favourable settlementof contentious issues. These contributions highlight the pitfalls of corporate political influence withoutnecessary democratic standards.

Traditionally, CPA scholarship has either assumed away policy intermediaries completely, or depicted them as corporate mouthpieces. Meanwhile, research on policy intermediaries has portrayed actors such as think tanks, PR firms and lobbying firms as far more active and self-interested. Our study investigates this puzzle by attending to the question: 'Whose political agenda is expressed by intermediaries during their lobbying on behalf of corporate clients?' By importing insights from studies of policy intermediaries, and approaching the world of lobbying qualitatively - delving deep into the 'how' and 'why' of corporate lobbying using ethnographic field data and interviews with corporate lobbyists - we provide a different, more fine-grained picture of the lobbyist-client relationship, in which policy intermediaries shape, adapt and even invent their clients' agendas. Our study contributes CPA scholarship by (1) providing an analytical distinction between the political agendas of corporate clients and those of their lobbyists, (2) bringing further detail and modification to Barley's theory of an institutional field of political influence and (3) identifying agency problems between client and lobbyist as a novel explanation for why the financial profitability of CPA investment has been difficult to verify. Moreover, the study brings further sophistication to a burgeoning literature on policy intermediaries by suggesting that lobbyists' own professional characteristics - such as length of political experience and strength of political convictions - influence how independently of their clients they dare to act.

This article connects the previously isolated literatures on corporate citizenship and corporate political activity to explain how firms construct political influence in the public sphere. The public engagement of firms as political actors is explored empirically through a discursive analysis of a public debate between the mining industry and the Australian government over a proposed tax. The findings show how the mining industry acted as a corporate citizen concerned about the common good. This, in turn, legitimized corporate political activity, which undermined deliberation about the common good. The findings explain how the public sphere is refeudalized through corporate manipulation of deliberative processes via what we term corporate citizenspeak—simultaneously speaking as corporate citizens and for individual citizens. Corporate citizenspeak illustrates the duplicitous engagement of firms as political actors, claiming political legitimacy while subverting deliberative norms. This contributes to the theoretical development of corporations as political actors by explaining how corporate interests are aggregated to represent the common good and how corporate political activity is employed to dominate the public sphere. This has important implications for understanding how corporations undermine democratic principles.

Digital transformations and processes of datafication fundamentally reshape how information is produced, circulated and given meaning. In this article, we provide a concept of datastructuring which seeks to capture this reshaping as both a product of and productive of social activity. To do this we focus on (1) how new forms of social action map onto and are enabled by technological changes related to datafication, and (2) how new forms of datafied social action constitute a form of knowledge production which becomes embedded in technologies themselves. We illustrate the potential of the datastructuring concept with empirical examples which also serve to highlight some new avenues for research and some empirical questions to explore further. We suggest a focus on datastructuring can ignite scholarly debates across disciplines that may share an interest in the technological configurations, sorting activities, and other socio-material forces that shape digital spaces, but which are rarely brought together. Such cross-disciplinary conceptualizations may give more attention to how information is structured and organized, becomes algorithmically recognizable, and emerges as (in)visible in digital, datafied spaces. Such a concept, we suggest, may help us better understand the novel ways in which backstage datawork and data sorting processes gain traction in political interventions, commercial processes, and social ordering.

The process of financialisation has been cast as a major contributor to increasing inequality of wealth and income in a number of advanced industrialised economies, but the nature of the link requires precise clarification. In this article, we argue that financialisation in Australia has advanced inequality, but in a particular way. Charting several features of financialisation of the macroeconomy', we accept that this process has contributed to increased inequality in the sense that the wealthy have increased their wealth faster than households and individuals at the lower end of the wealth distribution. However, there is limited Australian evidence to suggest that income redistribution has occurred as a result of the financialisation of the firm'. At the level of the firm, increased inequality of wealth can be attributed directly to financialisation if firm practices are oriented to increasing shareholder value at the expense of returns to other stakeholders such as workers or suppliers, and increased income inequality can be linked specifically to financialisation through increases in earnings to financial agents. We suggest several reasons for the relative absence of a firm-level dimension of financialisation but caution that such a trend remains possible, particularly if regulation of the labour market is weakened.

Studies of organizational interventions in social and political matters mostly focus on how interests are framed as messages and transmitted to audiences. We argue that it is necessary to extend the existing focus on the contents, crafting and effectiveness of overt and direct messages to consider the more covert and subtle forms of influence and intervention embedded in the strategic structuring of information. Digital transformations require that we give more attention to the way information is configured and how digital information infrastructures operate. Increasingly, the power to shape public opinion will be less about framing issues in strategic ways by composing overt and appealing messages, and more about priming audiences by organizing information and feeding algorithms in covert ways. Using illustrations from organizational advocacy, we suggest that ‘infostructuring’ may become as important as message contents, and that such forms of priming and controlling information are increasingly central to organizational interventions.

Corporations play an increasingly significant role in public policy and democratic politics. This article seeks to understand how corporate political activities gain political influence through intertextual strategies. The analysis is conducted on the texts produced by the Australian government in proposing a new tax as well as the texts produced by the mining industry in campaigning against the tax. We show how the government texts represent the proposed tax as a fair opportunity, while the mining industry texts represent the tax as an unfair threat. The findings attend to the processes of how the mining industry stitched' together constituencies in support of their representation. This article contributes to the existing literature on corporate political activity by showing how overt and indirect corporate activities and communications influence public policy agendas. It also contributes to critical studies of corporate political activity by theorizing how textual strategies can be used to align corporate interests in hegemonic political struggles through the creation of a phantom community. Finally, the article contributes to theories of intertextuality by developing a typology to analyse textual representation.