Sophie Grilliat: Collective action by businesses driving globalisation in metropolitan areas. A comparative analysis of lobbying strategies in London and the Île-de-France region

Over the past twenty years or so, interest groups representing private companies have been (re)structuring their collective action in the metropolitan areas of Paris and London. These groups include the regional Chambers of Commerce (CCI Paris Île-de-France, LCCI), regional employers’ organisations (Medef, CBI) and recently formed groups (Paris Ile-de-France Capitale Economique and London First). Once focused – at the local level – on internal and organisational concerns, these groups are now in the public eye, are assertive in their demands and are making their case on an unprecedented scale: the regional-metropolitan level.

Our work has developed at the intersection of two areas of inquiry:

On the one hand, research into collective action by businesses is marked by a debate that challenges the notion that collective action by general economic interests is necessarily politicised. Some authors indeed demonstrate their inability to sustainably build collective action capable of exerting influence; this interest being ‘naturally’ subject to the dynamics of collective action based on membership (Olson 1971).

On the other hand, the reference framework for this collective action – the metropolitan region – poses a problem insofar as its governmental and institutional basis is unclear (the Île-de-France region, the Greater Paris metropolitan area?) or relatively recent and lacking in power (London and the GLA)  (Jouve and Lefèvre 2004).

Our research therefore seeks to address the following question: Does the (re)structuring of collective action by economic interest groups in London and Paris Ile-de-France aim to influence its political environment? If so, how can we explain the choice of the metropolis as the spatial scale for this restructuring?

By tracing the history of these groups’ collective action (Part 1), examining their internal and external operating mechanisms (Part 2) and demonstrating that they represent the specific interests of the corporations driving globalisation (Part 3), we argue that these groups are developing a genuine strategy of influence.

Using transport as a prime example, we demonstrate not only that the metropolis constitutes one of the scales of their space of dependency (Cox 1998), but also that this space is multi-scalar. Consequently, the metropolis appears more as their new sphere of engagement (Cox 1998). This specific economic interest finds here the means to achieve the scalar synthesis of all its scales of dependency: from the local to the global.