ABSTRACT
Through the title of perhaps his most infl uential book, Harold Lasswell (1936) famously defi ned politics as “who gets what, when, how.” In an increasingly global world in which markets and free enterprise have largely prevailed over their twentieth-century rivals, and where so much wealth, power, and infl uence is concentrated in private hands, anybody taking Lasswell’s elegant defi nition seriously should immediately recognize that business is inherently political. When Walmart considers where to open its next store, Nestlé chooses a supplier, and Apple weighs an exclusive deal with a telecom provider, these fi rms’ managers take political decisions, whether they are conscious of it or not.
