Maha Rafi Atal, Ph.D.

maharafi.atal@glasgow.ac.uk


Assistant Professor

University of Glasgow

Year of PhD: 2019

City: Cambridge, England

Country: United Kingdom

About Me:

I am Lecturer (Assistant Professor) in the School of Social and Political Sciences at the University of Glasgow, where my research focuses on the intersection of business and international affairs, and in particular on how corporations exercise political power. This includes corporate influence in the media, the power of Big Tech companies and how to regulate them, and corporate responsibility for global challenges from labor rights to climate change. I'm also a former journalist and policy researcher, and the founder and Executive Director of the media nonprofit Public Business, and so eager to assist journalists wherever I can.

Research Interests

Development

Political Economy

African Politics

Asian Politics

International Political Economy

Globalization

Global Governance

Corporate Social Responsibility

Multinational Corporations

News Media

Countries of Interest

India

Kenya

South Africa

United States

United Kingdom

My Research:

I research corporations, and how they exercise political power, both historically and in our world today. I am currently writing a book on the role of multinational corporations as political authorities in India, Kenya and South Africa, covering the contemporary role of 'corporate social responsibility' as well as the history of political corporations going back to colonial times. I have also conducted research on corporate influence in the media, including case studies in the United States, the United Kingdom and South Africa. Finally, I am currently researching the role of corporations in international trade, and how issues like labor rights or environmental protection are affected by international trade policy and globalization. I'm eager to the speak to the media about corporate social responsibility and economic development, about the general politics, economics and history of India, Kenya and South Africa, about any issues of corporate accountability and regulation, and about international economic policy more broadly, including labor and environmental issues.

Publications:

Journal Articles:

(2021) The Janus Faces of Silicon Valley, Review of International Political Economy

In recent years, the power of large technology corporations has become a focus of public debate in both developed and developing countries. This growing chorus brings together complaints about breaches of privacy and data protection, competition and market consolidation, and electoral and other political interference. The most powerful of these companies have grown into behemoths by establishing themselves both as purveyors of their own products, and as the hosts of “platforms” that circumscribe, and profit from, the activities of other organizations. This platform function gives these companies substantial power over their commercial rivals, who depend upon these platforms to operate. More fundamentally, this article argues, the dual function of these “platform companies” allows them to straddle the very categories that we use to organize our understanding of the political and economic world. They are at once product companies, service companies and infrastructure companies; players in the market and markets of the marketplace; private platforms and public spheres. The straddling of these categories places these companies in the institutional cracks of the regulatory system. Moreover, companies consciously exploit this regulatory straddling to thwart challenges to their power. This article argues that such deliberate shape-shifting has allowed these companies to control the political and economic stage on which their own power must be contested, and compromised the ability of scholars, the public and ultimately states to see clearly, and therefore constrain, that power.

(2018) The Cultural and Economic Power of Advertisers in the Business Press, Journalism

Media studies scholarship on advertising has traditionally fallen into two camps. Cultural analysis emphasizes the signals advertisements send to consumers, focusing primarily on the role of advertising creatives. Economic analysis emphasizes advertising’s impact on media companies’ financial performance, focusing on the role of sales managers and proprietors. Both approaches minimize the role of reporters, against whose work advertisers place their messages. This article draws on interviews, as well as financial analysis, at six newsrooms to examine the impact of advertising practices on the editorial independence of reporters. Combining cultural and economic analysis, the article highlights the unique threat advertiser influence poses to critical business reporting, which takes as its subject the very firms who must choose to advertise against it. The article argues that the new forms of advertising, where branded content is presented alongside, and intended to mimic, reported content, increase the threat of advertiser capture. At four legacy outlets studied, investigative business coverage has declined as media organizations react to the changed operating environment with practices that compromise the divide between news and advertising staff. At two online startups studied, where new advertising formats have always been part of strategy, news and sales staff remain separate. Yet there is limited appetite at these outlets for conducting critical business journalism, which is not seen as key to organizational mission. The article concludes with policy recommendations to safeguard the viability of critical business journalism.

(2017) White Capital: Corporate Social Responsibility and the Failure of Transformation in post-apartheid South Africa.", Extractive Industries and Society

Since the 2012 Marikana killings there has been a boom in scholarship about labour relations in the South African mining sector, focused primarily on the ability of workers to organise and the role of state violence in policing strikes. Quality of life issues in mining communities are usually explored only insofar as they affect these labour relations. This article argues that this focus is incomplete, because it ignores the way that services and infrastructure in mining communities affect local residents who have no formal links to the mine. Local residents engage in resistance to the mine’s operations quite separately from labour activists. Scholarship that treats these local residents simply as a potential labour force subject to stabilisation overlooks their political agency. Indeed, local residents and labour groups come into conflict with one another, and with the state, even as all three groups come into conflict with the mine. The article situates the 2012 violence within an ongoing multi-party conflict over the post-apartheid social settlement. It finds that the logic of transformation, with its emphasis on companies’ contributions to social welfare, places white-owned mining companies in a position of political authority, and strengthens their position against demands for reform.

Book Chapters:

(2017) Competing Forms of Media Capture in Developing Democracies, CIMA

Media capture has been historically manifest in four forms—plutocratic, state, corporate and intersecting—but the intersecting form of media capture is likely to be dominant in countries where independent media institutions are still consolidating in the context of the shift to digital forms of communication. Powerful plutocrats affiliated with political elites often seek to capture print and broadcast media to limit the scope for political debate. While new communication technologies and outlets can provide a check against this plutocratic capture, new platforms in the developing world may—as in the developed world—also be captured through advertising and corporate pressure. Because “traditional” and “new” media technologies have emerged simultaneously in many developing democracies, these forms of capture do not replace one another, but combine and compete. This chapter relies on examples across the developing world and a case study on South African media to explore the challenges and implications of four interacting forms of media capture.

Media Appearances:

Radio Appearances:

(2017) BBC

Discussion of white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia and historical links between racism and misogyny in American politics on BBC Radio 4.

(2015) BBC

Discussion of Indian history, in particular role of East India Company in colonialism, on BBC Radio 3.

Newspaper Quotes:

(2020) Forbes

Coverage of my research on corporate responses to covid-19

Blog Posts:

(2020) Washington Post

A blog post for the Washington Post analyzing the US Department of Justice's new investigation of Google

(2016) SPERI Comment

Analysis of the ways that the makeup of the working class in developed democracies in changing - both in terms of the racial and gender demographics of who is working class, and in terms of the types of work they are doing, with flexible and part-time jobs for companies like Uber replacing steady unionized work in industry. Argues that for left and center-left parties, this requires both economic policy to address hardship and a new moral politics that engages with the cultural and political values of this new working class.

(2016) SPERI Comment

Analysis of the fight between hard left and center-left/liberal factions in the UK Labour Party, arguing that the two factions have different views of the purpose of political parties in the first place, which shape what they want the Labour Party to do. These different view of what political parties are for may not be reconcilable.