LIST OF WORKSHOPS

Research Question: How do corporations strategically shape knowledge, practices and attitudes to steer policy and influence agenda-setting?

Corporations do far more than market products: they strategically shape entire knowledge ecologies and, through them, professional practices, public discourse, regulatory agendas, and policy outcomes. A substantial body of scholarship in public policy, political economy, and science and technology studies (STS) has documented how the pervasive influence of large corporations shape and redefine public policy, the public interest, and market economies (1–9).

In many sectors, dominant corporations have the capacity to influence socio-political structures through orchestrated production and dissemination of research and expertise and obstruction against adverse narratives (6,10–13), as well as through different forms of capture over professionals, regulations, technology, civil society or media (14–19). The term “ghost-management” refers to these systematic corporate strategies to shape science, culture, policy agenda and public narratives, to hide risks and downplay harms of specific products and to influence experts, opinion leaders and policymakers, all while keeping the corporations’ roles obscured or in the shadows. Ghost-management encompasses practices such as planning, funding, and scripting of research; authorship and sponsorship arrangements; control over data, study design, and selective publication; deployment of key opinion leaders and “independent” intermediaries; revolving doors; litigation and lobbying strategies; and the architecture of social programs and public expenditures. Taken together, these practices can significantly influence or manipulate agenda-setting in public policy by steering what counts as evidence, which problems are seen as urgent, whose risks matter, and what regulatory solutions are “feasible.”

In different industrial sectors, such as pharmaceuticals (6,19–22), tobacco (23,24), oil and gas (25,26), agriculture (27–29), online platforms (9,30) or chemicals (31,32), these strategies seem to have become a new normal taken directly from playbooks fostered by corporate lobbies and consulting, public relations, or communications companies. Because of ghost-management activities, public policy, especially when it came to sectors in which risk assessment has been central to earning-capacity (33), has long been vulnerable to corporate influence. The post-truth context in which disinformation, “alternative facts”, and “fake news” are becoming a growing challenge for the democratic governance of policy, is now amplifying these vulnerabilities to a whole new level (34,35). New populist movements and governments have embraced some ghost-managed knowledge, and have loudly rejected customary use of evidence within policymaking as epistemically corrupt, creating new dynamics affecting the politics of knowledge (36–39).

This workshop invites contributions that theorize or empirically examine corporate ghost-management as a mode of governance.

This workshop intends to bring together people from different disciplines to discuss how to study and identify ghost-management strategies, so as to develop policy tools to counter these corporate dynamics detrimental to the policy process. Corporate ghost-management represents a “wicked problem” because its drivers are interdependent, its mechanisms are opaque, and its solutions require cross-sectoral coordination and reflexivity. Addressing it demands not only better regulation, but deeper institutional learning about how knowledge and power intertwine in policymaking.

This workshop seeks to advance a coherent research program on corporate influence and ghost-management in public policy. We welcome three types of contribution:

1.      Empirical work that analyzes hidden corporate strategies at work to influence the policy process, or maps its mechanisms across sectors;

2.      Theoretical work that supports an analytical framework to investigate these strategies; refines the conceptual approach based on ghost-management; or connects to theories of policy processes (e.g., Advocacy Coalition Framework, Multiple Streams, Punctuated Equilibrium), or explores governmentality and post-structural approaches;

3.      Analytical works that translates findings into policy options and recommendations for institutional and policy remedies.

We welcome submissions from public policy, political science, STS/STS-informed policy, sociology, law, public health, communication studies, economics, information science, and adjacent fields. We particularly encourage team-authored work that bridges disciplines or pairs academics with practitioners, journalists, or civil society organizations. We envision this workshop as helping to build an international network of researchers examining corporate influence on knowledge and policy.

All accepted contributors will be invited to participate in the workshop discussions at Carleton University, where they will have the opportunity to present and receive feedback on their papers. Following the workshop, participants will be encouraged to submit revised versions of their papers for consideration for a special theme of the journal Studies in Political Economy dedicated to corporate ghost-management.

References:

1.           Veblen T. The theory of business enterprise. New Brunswick, N.J: Transaction Books; 1904. xx+400.

2.           Baran PA, Sweezy PM. Monopoly capital: an essay on the American economic and social order. New York: Monthly Review Press; 1967. ix+402.

3.           Galbraith JK. The New Industrial State. Princeton, N.J: Princeton University Press; 1967. 576 p.

4.           Fligstein N. The architecture of markets: an economic sociology of twenty-first-century capitalist societies. Princeton, N.J. ; Princeton University Press; 2001. xiv+274.

5.           Birch K, Peacock M, Wellen R, Hossein C, Scott S, Salazar A. Business and Society: A Critical Introduction. London: Zed Books; 2017. 312 p.

6.           Sismondo S. Ghost-Managed Medicine: Big Pharma’s Invisible Hands. Mattering Press; 2018. 234 p.

7.           Carroll WK, Sapinski JP. Organizing the 1%: How Corporate Power Works. Black Point, Nova Scotia ; Winnipeg, Manitoba: Fernwood Publishing; 2018. 184 p.

8.           Benquet M, Bourgeron T. Accumulating capital today: contemporary strategies of profit and dispossessive policies. Abingdon, Oxon ; Routledge; 2021. (Routledge studies in social and political thought).

9.           Rikap C. Capitalism, Power and Innovation: Intellectual Monopoly Capitalism Uncovered [Internet]. Routledge; 2021 [cited 2021 Nov 2]. Available from: https://www.routledge.com/Capitalism-Power-and-Innovation-Intellectual-Monopoly-Capitalism-Uncovered/Rikap/p/book/9780367357634

10.        Michaels D. Doubt is Their Product: How Industry’s Assault on Science Threatens Your Health. Oxford University Press, USA; 2008. 385 p.

11.        Elmore, Bartow J. Seed Money: Monsanto’s Past and Our Food Future. New York: W.W. Norton & Compagny; 2021. 387 p.

12.        Oreskes N, Conway EM. Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Climate Change. New York London Oxford New Delhi Sydney: Bloomsbury Publishing; 2022. 368 p.

13.        Rampton S, Stauber J. Trust us, we’re experts!: how industry manipulates science and gambles with your future. New York: Jeremy P. Tarcher/Putnam; 2001. 360 p.

14.        Carpenter D, Moss DA, editors. Preventing Regulatory Capture: Special Interest Influence and How to Limit it [Internet]. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; 2013 [cited 2022 Nov 2]. Available from: https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/preventing-regulatory-capture/4DF3FC5A3202552A18F3D41835D46833

15.        Miller D, Harkins C. Corporate strategy, corporate capture: Food and alcohol industry lobbying and public health. Critical Social Policy. 2010 Nov 1;30(4):564–89.

16.        Lapira TM, Thomas HF. Revolving door lobbyists and interest representation. Interest Groups & Advocacy. 2014 Mar;3(1):4–29.

17.        Finch J, Geiger S, Reid E. Captured by technology? How material agency sustains interaction between regulators and industry actors. Research Policy. 2017 Feb 1;46(1):160–70.

18.        Gagnon MA. Ghost management as a central feature of accumulation in corporate capitalism : The case of the global pharmaceutical sector. In: Marlène Benquet, Théo Bourgeron, editors. Accumulating Capital Today. London and New York: Routledge; 2021.

19.        Gagnon MA, Dong M. What did the scientific literature learn from internal company documents in the pharmaceutical industry? A scoping review. Cochrane Evidence Synthesis and Methods. 2023;1(3):e12011.

20.        Chiu K, Grundy Q, Bero L. ‘Spin’ in published biomedical literature: A methodological systematic review. PLOS Biology. 2017;15(9):e2-.

21.        Fabbri A, Lai A, Grundy Q, Bero LA. The Influence of Industry Sponsorship on the Research Agenda: A Scoping Review. Am J Public Health. 2018 Nov;108(11):e9–16.

22.        Riva C, Tinari S, Gagnon MA. Ghost Management at Work: A Practical Guide for the Investigation and Mapping of Health Affairs [Internet]. Ottawa: Carleton University; 2024 p. 52. Available from: https://carleton.ca/ghostmanagement/wp-content/uploads/GMW-A-Cr15-EN-Digital-1.pdf

23.        Proctor RN. Golden Holocaust: Origins of the Cigarette Catastrophe and the Case for Abolition. Berkeley: University of California Press; 2012. 774 p.

24.        Wieland LS, Rutkow L, Vedula SS, Kaufmann CN, Rosman LM, Twose C, et al. Who Has Used Internal Company Documents for Biomedical and Public Health Research and Where Did They Find Them? PLoS One. 2014 May 6;9(5):e94709.

25.        Downie C. Business actors, political resistance, and strategies for policymakers. Energy Policy. 2017;108:583–92.

26.        Plehwe D. Think tank networks and the knowledge-interest nexus: the case of climate change. Critical policy studies. 2014;8(1):101–15.

27.        Krimsky S, Gillam C. Roundup litigation discovery documents: implications for public health and journal ethics. Journal of Public Health Policy. 2018;39(3):318–26.

28.        Bacon MH, Vandelac L, Gagnon MA, Parent L. Poisoning Regulation, Research, Health, and the Environment: The Glyphosate-Based Herbicides Case in Canada. Toxics. 2023 Feb;11(2):121.

29.        Clapp J. Titans of Industrial Agriculture: How a Few Giant Corporations Came to Dominate the Farm Sector and Why It Matters. Cambridge, MA, USA: MIT Press; 2025. 474 p.

30.        Bucher T. If ... Then: Algorithmic Power and Politics. Oxford University Press; 2018. 217 p.

31.        Richter L, Cordner A, Brown P. Producing Ignorance Through Regulatory Structure: The Case of Per- and Polyfluoroalkyl Substances (PFAS). Sociological Perspectives. 2021 Aug 1;64(4):631–56.

32.        Dong M, Gagnon MA. Unveiling chemical industry secrets: Insights gleaned from scientific literatures that examine internal chemical corporate documents—A scoping review. PLOS ONE. 2025 Jan 2;20(1):e0310116.

33.        Beck U. World at risk. Cambridge, UK ; Polity Press; 2009. viii+269.

34.        Speed E, Mannion R. The Rise of Post-truth Populism in Pluralist Liberal Democracies: Challenges for Health Policy. International Journal of Health Policy and Management. 2017 May 1;6(5):249–51.

35.        Fischer F. Knowledge politics and post-truth in climate denial: on the social construction of alternative facts. Critical policy studies. 2019;13(2):133–52.

36.        Ylä-Anttila T. Populist knowledge: ‘Post-truth’ repertoires of contesting epistemic authorities. European Journal of Cultural and Political Sociology. 2018 Oct 2;5(4):356–88.

37.        Kwok H, Singh P, Heimans S. The regime of ‘post-truth’: COVID-19 and the politics of knowledge. Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education. 2023 Jan 2;44(1):106–20.

38.        Kidd IJ. Epistemic corruption and political institutions. In: The Routledge Handbook of Political Epistemology. Routledge; 2021.

39.        Sismondo S. Epistemic Corruption, the Pharmaceutical Industry, and the Body of Medical Science. Front Res Metr Anal [Internet]. 2021 Mar 8 [cited 2025 Apr 4];6. Available from: https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/research-metrics-and-analytics/articles/10.3389/frma.2021.614013/full

Corporate power and public policy: Shaping and controlling knowledge, practices, policies, and regulations

How do corporations strategically shape knowledge, practices and attitudes to steer policy and influence agenda-setting? Corporations do far more than market products: they strategically shape entire knowledge ecologies and, through them, professional practices, public discourse, regulatory agendas, and policy outcomes. A substantial body of scholarship in public policy, political economy, and science and technology studies (STS) has documented how the pervasive influence of large corporations shape and redefine public policy, the public interest, and market.

The term “ghost-management” refers to systematic corporate strategies to shape science, culture, policy agenda and public narratives, to hide risks and downplay harms of specific products and to influence experts, opinion leaders and policymakers, all while keeping the corporations’ roles obscured or in the shadows. Ghost-management encompasses practices such as planning, funding, and scripting of research; authorship and sponsorship arrangements; control over data, study design, and selective publication; deployment of key opinion leaders and “independent” intermediaries; revolving doors; litigation and lobbying strategies; and the architecture of social programs and public expenditures. Taken together, these practices can significantly influence or manipulate agenda-setting in public policy by steering what counts as evidence, which problems are seen as urgent, whose risks matter, and what regulatory solutions are “feasible.”

Because of ghost-management activities, public policy, especially when it came to sectors in which risk assessment has been central to earning-capacity, has long been vulnerable to corporate influence. The post-truth context in which disinformation, “alternative facts”, and “fake news” are becoming a growing challenge for the democratic governance of policy, is now amplifying these vulnerabilities to a whole new level.

This workshop invites contributions that theorize or empirically examine corporate ghost-management as a mode of governance. This workshop will bring together people from different disciplines to discuss how to study the influence of corporate power over public policy and to identify existing ghost-management strategies, so as to develop policy tools to counter these corporate dynamics detrimental to the policy process.

We welcome submissions from public policy, political science, STS/STS-informed policy, sociology, law, public health, communication studies, economics, information science, and adjacent fields. We particularly encourage team-authored work that bridges disciplines or pairs academics with practitioners, journalists, or civil society organizations. We welcome three types of contribution:

1.     Empirical work analyzing hidden corporate strategies at work to influence the policy process, or mapping its mechanisms across sectors;

2.     Theoretical work supporting an analytical framework to investigate these strategies; refining the conceptual approach based on ghost-management; connecting to theories of policy processes; or exploring governmentality and post-structural approaches;

3.     Analytical works translating findings into policy options and recommendations for institutional and policy remedies.

All accepted contributors will be invited to participate in the workshop discussions at Carleton University, where they will have the opportunity to present and receive feedback on their papers. Following the workshop, participants will be encouraged to submit revised versions of their papers for consideration for a special theme of the journal Studies in Political Economy.

How do corporations strategically shape knowledge, practices and attitudes to steer policy and influence agenda-setting? Corporations do far more than market products: they strategically shape entire knowledge ecologies and, through them, professional practices, public discourse, regulatory agendas, and policy outcomes. A substantial body of scholarship in public policy, political economy, and science and technology studies (STS) has documented how the pervasive influence of large corporations shape and redefine public policy, the public interest, and market.

The term “ghost-management” refers to these systematic corporate strategies to shape science, culture, policy agenda and public narratives, to hide risks and downplay harms of specific products and to influence experts, opinion leaders and policymakers, all while keeping the corporations’ roles obscured or in the shadows. Ghost-management encompasses practices such as planning, funding, and scripting of research; authorship and sponsorship arrangements; control over data, study design, and selective publication; deployment of key opinion leaders and “independent” intermediaries; revolving doors; litigation and lobbying strategies; and the architecture of social programs and public expenditures. Taken together, these practices can significantly influence or manipulate agenda-setting in public policy by steering what counts as evidence, which problems are seen as urgent, whose risks matter, and what regulatory solutions are “feasible.”

Especially when it came to sectors in which risk assessment has been central to earning-capacity, has long been vulnerable to corporate influence. The post-truth context in which disinformation, “alternative facts”, and “fake news” are becoming a growing challenge for the democratic governance of policy, is now amplifying these vulnerabilities to a whole new level.

This workshop discusses and presents contributions that theorize or empirically examine corporate ghost-management as a mode of governance. This inter-disciplinary workshop discusses how to study and identify ghost-management strategies, so as to develop policy tools to counter these corporate dynamics detrimental to the policy process.

Marc-André Gagnon is Full Professor and Graduate Supervisor at the School of Public Policy and Administration at Carleton University (Ottawa, Canada). He is a Research Fellow with the World Health Organization Collaborating Center on Governance, Accountability and Transparency in the Pharmaceutical Sector. He holds a PhD in political science from York University, a Diplôme d’études approfondies in Economics from Paris-I Sorbonne and École Normale Supérieure de Fontenay/Saint-Cloud. His research focuses on commercial determinants of health as well as the political economy of the drug industry. More specifically, his on-going research focuses on commercial influence over research and policy, on comparative analysis of health care coverage, on innovation policy and intellectual property in the knowledge-based economy, as well as institutional corruption in pharmaceutical research.

Sergio Sismondo (Queen’s University, Canada) is editor of Social Studies of Science, a flagship journal in Science and Technology Studies. He is the author of An Introduction to Science and Technology Studies, as well as some other general or theoretical works in the field. For a number of years Sismondo’s empirical research has been on how the pharmaceutical industry creates and shapes the knowledge landscapes on which it operates; see his Ghost-Managed Medicine: Big Pharma’s Invisible Hands. Recently, he has been working on a project on Epistemic Corruption.

Dr. Quinn Grundy is Associate Professor at the Lawrence Bloomberg Faculty of Nursing, University of Toronto and a registered nurse. Dr. Grundy leads a program of research that seeks to document and analyze the implications of pharmaceutical and medical device industry initiatives and strategies to promote access to and uptake of their products within health systems. Dr. Grundy serves as the Director of the World Health Organization Collaborating Centre on Governance, Accountability, and Transparency in the Pharmaceutical Sector.