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Social problems in the global South are often explained by reference to domestic decisions or "institutional quality" in the Southern countries, while there are also prominent criticisms of such "nationalist explanations". Crucially, the dispute over correct mode of explanation is not only epistemological, but also political, as has been often noted in analyses of hegemony. This paper develops such ideas about "hegemonic" forms of explanation by analysing how an explanatory tendency becomes institutionalised in the operating logic of international organisations. We analyse as a case study the long-term developments within the UN in the field of multinational enterprises (MNEs). We follow the process in which an agenda focused on the regulation of MNEs shifted into the direction of focusing on local institutional quality and emphasising "partnerships" instead of regulation. The analysis demonstrates how political momentum and external challenges affect explanatory tendencies, and generally the deep impact of organisational embeddedness of these tendencies. ; peerReviewed

In recent years, interest in the world-political role of cities has grown. The use of public procurement for promoting world-political goals has also gathered scholarly attention, as has the tax justice policy agenda. This article contributes to these discussions by demonstrating how global responsibility became part of the city of Helsinki's policy alignments, which were then turned into several concrete initiatives. In particular, I focus on the contrast between the relative ease with which Helsinki became a "Fair Trade" city on the one hand and the difficulties it faced in its attempts to become a "Fair Tax" city on the other. I argue that that these initiatives illustrate how cities can utilize public procurement to promote world-political goals. I also show how the increasing complexity of the required procurement criteria can make the success contingent on help from "emergent entrepreneurs" of social movements. These developments highlight the contradictory and complex effects of the "economization" and"marketization" of the political sphere. While economization isolates many societal issues from political control, it can also allow for politicizing local and global issues in ways that were unthinkable. Finally, adding to the existing research on the world-political role of cities, I demonstrate that a city does not need to be a metropolis in order to act in world politics. ; Peer reviewed

This Master's thesis' purpose is to analyse the challenges that the offshore finance/economy causes to the modern state sovereignty. The offshore finance consists of tax havens, flags of convenience registers, export processing zones, offshore financial centres and international banking facilities, and has grown to such an extent that if we want to understand the international political economy the offshore simply cannot be left unnoticed. I approach the concept of sovereignty by adopting Giorgio Agamben's idea of the close link between sovereignty and the ability to issue a state of exception. Agamben argues that sovereignty is defined by the ability to issue a state of exception and that in contemporary world the exception takes increasingly often the form of a camp. Albeit Agamben's theory focuses mostly on his idea of biopolitics, I find it imperative to extend its reach. Ronen Palan has shown how offshore jurisdictions commercialise their sovereignty by turning the right to draft legislation into a tradable asset. I will analyse the phenomenon of commercialised sovereignty by using Agamben's theory. The question is who has the de facto power to issue and control the commercialised states of exception within the offshore world? Can we see some kind of shift of sovereignty from states to non-traditional actors of politics? My methodological approach to this question comes from international relations' constructivism. In line with Nicolas Onuf's constructivist method that operates around the concepts of structures and agents, I start by setting focus on how different types of offshore jurisdictions (structures) establish and use the states of exception. I will then analyse role of the agents that benefit from the special legislation, with particular focus transborder corporations. Onuf argues that the relationship between agents and structures is not mechanical or rigid relation. I agree with him on this. I will take Onuf's point into account by presenting the connections that the politics of offshore has with larger trends of contemporary economical and financial globalisation Susan Strange's theory of the competition state will be extremely helpful in this research process. After focusing on some empirical case studies I conclude that control of the state of exception within the offshore has, at least in some cases, partially shifted to transborder corporations. Therefore, there are some grounds for analysing transborder corporations as participants in politics and bearers of sovereignty. I argue that these kinds of corporations should be called transnational, while their competitors that do not have significant offshore businesses are essentially multinational. Too often these terms are used interexchangeably and without proper definitions. I end my dissertation by suggesting that our fixation on modern state sovereignty is badly outdated in face of the tremendous rise of the offshore world. In the final chapter I introduce one solution for overcoming the difficulties in combining national regulation with increasingly transnational corporations: the new accounting standards proposed by accountant Richard Murphy. The proposed standards would tax transborder corporations as global entities, thus making the regulatory or tax shopping in offshore by and large useless.

AbstractSocial scientists have neglected the ways in which the consultancy assignments of legal scholars mediate private interests, even though their opinions provide important guidance in legal proceedings. Through a case study from Finland, we document a process where private tax advisory firms utilize their access to academic forums to defend their clients' interests. With further evidence on related dependencies, we trace a twofold process that amplifies the voice of tax advisors and suppresses public interest‐related concerns. By achieving positions of trust in the academia, tax consultancy firms gain important gatekeeper roles that facilitate corporate‐friendly research and subdue critical arguments. The findings challenge the conventional understanding of the dynamics of knowledge production and call for a greater attention to the pitfalls of the marketization of academic legal advice and scholarship. The national‐level interpretative power of major tax advisory companies is also an important building block for international network power.

The contemporary world continues to suffer from a number of social problems that are global in scope but impact the Global South disproportionately. While broad and coordinated policy responses to overcome these problems exist, such policies are not shaped solely by the political will to address the problems. On the contrary, their content largely depends on how societies in general and the social problems in particular are routinely explained and conceptualized. We refer to these as explanatory tendencies or paradigms of explanation. As complex problems always have multiple root causes with long causal chains, explanations of these causes necessarily involve some assumptions about relevant causalities. Typically, the main choice in explaining international politics relates to the extent to which social phenomena should be explained by domestic institutions, decisions and events. Social science in general has been noted to have a bias toward a "nationalist" approach to explanation [Beck, 2007; Brenner, 1999; Gore, 1993; Pogge, 2002]. This means treating the state as the primary and even sufficient object of analysis, so that problems are explained by the malfunctioning institutions and misinformed policies of states. Such explanatory biases become naturalized in everyday politics and social analysis [Amin, 2004]. While this has been widely discussed as an epistemological issue, the interplay between international organizations and explanatory tendencies has received less attention. The present article addresses this gap. We argue that explanatory tendencies and biases should not be treated exclusively as an epistemological matter. They need to be accompanied by an analysis of the role of international organizations as both influenced by an explanatory tendency and upholding it. Paradigms of explanation are reflected in the priorities and relative powers of international organizations, as their very structure can reflect particular explanatory tendencies. As an example, we will use the ascent and descent of the United Nations work on the power of multinational enterprises. ; Peer reviewed

In the past few decades, many sector‐specific case studies have been conducted on the use of consultants in the public sector. However, the overall picture of the qualitative changes facilitated by consultants remains fragmented, and a comprehensive framework on how "consultocracy" affects governance is lacking. This article shows how the increased use of consultants has impacted the operational logics of public administration and governance at large. Drawing from a large multisectoral case study from Finland as well as existing studies, a fourfold typology of how consultocracy shapes public administration is introduced. We argue that increased reliance on consultants contributes to the monopolization and privatization of public knowledge and ensuing dependencies, erosion of tacit knowledge, weakening of accountability, and strengthening of instrumental rationality. This research emphasizes the importance of understanding the links between these developments and the need to implement a comprehensive research agenda on consultocracy.

Intra-firm trade is an emerging issue. One of its key elements is the international shifting of profits, for example, through transfer pricing that big enterprises use to cross-subsidise their subsidiaries, often to avoid taxes. Accounting rules conceal much of the information about transfer pricing, reproducing secrecy and facilitating the use of administered prices. Given the prevalence of administered price setting, a significant amount of international trade cannot be meaningfully analysed as market transactions. This provokes questions about the validity of market assumptions in research on trade in particular and global capitalism more generally. Our specific contribution focuses on the role of the arm's length principle and the significance of cross-subsidisation and other forms of corporate planning in intra-firm trade. Under certain conditions, price planning by private corporations should be analysed as political rule within the economic sphere. Since the politics of the world economy is not merely related to governmental intervention, corporations should also be theorised as potentially political entities. Crossing the disciplinary boundaries between political economy and normative political theory, we suggest that the politicisation of intra-firm trade opens possibilities for creating more effective responses to price administration and for creating more democratic ways of governing the global economy. ; Peer reviewed

This paper contributes to recent discussions of corporate tax avoidance and global wealth chains. Drawing on multiple case studies, we outline the key strategies adopted by Finnish mining companies as they seek to lower their tax burden. After screening the accounts of the companies mining metallic ores in Finland, we provide an in-depth analysis of the tax avoidance arrangements at three of these mines. The mines were operated by two Canadian enterprises that utilized seven different tax avoidance arrangements. The multiple case study approach adopted in this paper is helpful in developing both quantitative and qualitative tax avoidance research, since our findings highlight major deficiencies of datasets commonly used in the dominant quantitative tax avoidance research. Our qualitative approach helps tackle some of the limitations imposed on tax researchers as a result of the considerable secrecy surrounding tax matters. In particular, we argue that the existing tax avoidance research has focused too much on statutory corporate income tax rates even though today, tax minimization relies mostly on specific tax incentives and other loopholes in tax laws. We argue that the arrangements we describe mirror a wider phenomenon where multinational enterprises exert societal power commonly associated with sovereign states. Crossing the disciplinary boundaries of accounting, political economy and tax law, we also contribute to the emerging research agenda on global wealth chains. We call for more attention to the intersections between accounting and tax law for understanding how enterprises can separate their value chains from the intra-firm flows of wealth. ; Peer reviewed