Business and Government in the Era of Free Market Fundamentalism

This panel explores instances of cooperation between business and government that complicate narratives of free market ideology in the decades after the 1960s. Standard accounts of these years emphasize the widespread adoption of market-oriented logic that insisted government had no role to play in the affairs of business. The papers on this panel offer a different account of the era. Despite the predominance of market and anti-statist rhetoric, many businesses worked closely with governments to promote economic growth and solve pressing social problems. The result was an updated version of a mixed economy. Governments often learned to be more entrepreneurial and businesses learned to capture and exploit the resources of governments. Each paper approaches this idea through a different case study. Benke interrogates how consulting firms including the Stanford Research Institute and the Institute for the Future developed a type of corporate “futurism” that tied business and government together in an effort to manage an increasingly unpredictable future. Busch looks at the Microelectronics and Computer Corporation, a publicly funded research consortium, to argue that the burgeoning high tech field required significant involvement from multiple levels of government to compete both locally and globally. Lisle analyzes the rise of craft brewing as a creativity-oriented urban revitalization and tourism strategy that promoted cooperation among brewers and also between brewers and governments. In sum, these papers suggest that, rather than a move toward less government involvement in business, the latter part of the twentieth century provided spaces for both business and government to work more closely towards ends that promoted the interests of both.