The selected cases

A set of three case studies was chosen to address the research questions: the making of the European chemical legislation called Registration, Evaluation, Authorisation and Restriction of Chemicals (REACH); the process of approval of Roche’s breast cancer drug Herceptin in Britain; and Shell’s restatement of its proven oil reserves to investors and regulators. They were considered particularly suitable for two reasons: firstly, they are all contemporary phenomena, having occurred in the 2000s, with one still ongoing; secondly, they are set in different institutional

structures, with a distinct mixture of interests, actors and tactics; finally, they display dissimilar outcomes. Each of these points will be briefly discussed.

Their recent time frame is of importance because, as it was argued in this chapter, the 1990s have witnessed a change in business representation towards a more reflexive and ‘cultural’ exercise: firstly, it was the moment of the turn from a reactive to a proactive approach; secondly, it marked the rise of an active and mediated civil society and the establishment of a ‘shareholder value’ ideology; thirdly, it was the moment in which different governance spaces started to gain recognition and power themselves. Therefore, cases happening before or very early in the 1990s would not have exhibited the same dynamics among actors and documented sources about interactions involving newcomers would not have been easily available. The fact that the cases are happening simultaneously (2002-2006), as well as the inclusion of an ongoing case, also allow for some comparison of modus operandi of actors or groups of actors and for analysis of the extent to which there is learning and strategic

adaptation.

The chosen time frame also permits better scrutiny of new arenas, from the increasingly important supranational governance mechanism of the European Union to late 1990s creation of bodies such as the National Institute for Clinical Excellence and the FSA. Giving the central concern of this work with the interplay between

actors and structures and whether and how the latter enables or constrains players, cases staged on or around these new arenas, displaying very different institutional structures, are essential for the probing possibly distinct ‘distributions’ of power and the role stories play in representing interests and, ultimately, negotiating power.

The diversity of arenas is linked to another desirable feature: a mixture of actors, interests and, therefore, stories. When different sets of actors are positioned together and ‘against’ each other, complexity reaches high levels but, while this poses problems to the researcher trying to make sense of it, it surely provides a rich picture of how actors are able (or not) to build consensus, and convincing stories to go with it. On the other hand, the effects of other actors’ moves and unintended consequences are more easily identified in cases where there are fewer protagonists. A combination of case studies involving large and small number of players would be ideal to probe whether agency can overcome structural biases and the role of stories.

A final desirable feature is the display of different results: winners, losers and inconclusive outcomes. As the interest here is to understand what make stories

powerful and weak, the selection of cases in which there was a clear winner or a clear loser should provides ground for comparison and the identification of some of the ‘common traits’ of successful and unsuccessful stories that, in turn, can help in the analysis of the less clear-cut episodes.

Another way of structuring this research would be using cases that take place in the same arena – for instance, the European Union – and involve the same actors over a period of time. The advantage would arguably be a higher replication factor and a more ‘like for like’ type of comparison, that in turn could lead to a deeper understanding of why stories are strong or weak in this particular setting. The reasons this was not deemed the best approach are two. Firstly, same arena and same actors can be a deceiving supposition, as different departments of an organisation (e.g. DG Environment or Enterprise in the European Commission) have different

relationships/biases regarding ‘external’ players (i.e. different structural relations of power) and even if actors, broadly defined, are the same (e.g. oil multinationals, trade unions and environmental NGOs) their policy interests vary from case to case and the opportunities for consensus or disagreement will vary accordingly. But even if the exact same actors were trying to represent themselves in the same policy area with similar requests, learning and adaptation would certainly take place, meaning subsequent episodes were not likely to be similar to the first one.

This is related to the second objection, which is the assumption of a law or logic waiting to be discovered. As argued before in this chapter, the aims of this work are not finding rules or recipes regarding story telling in business representation – something that corporate communications gurus may pitch to their clients – but trying to understand and explain the complex ways in which a successful story is built and power negotiated. This is not to say that underlying and identifiable

characteristics that make stories more likely to succeed are impossible to pinpoint – at the end of the day, this quest is implicit in the research question – but that these underlying and identifiable characteristics should be common to the art of building stories in complex settings, be it the European Union, the World Trade Organisation or Whitehall. In other words, instead of the idea of ‘all things being equal, there are rules’, this thesis is trying to argue that ‘all things being different, there are stories’. Stories are taken here as a common currency through which actors are being able to trade. Not every transaction will be the same, the value of the currency may vary from place to place and from time to time, but there are factors that make a currency to be perceived as strong or weak (e.g. inflation rates, level of taxes payable in that

currency etc). Both with real currencies and stories, these ‘factors’ are very much dependent on subjective perceptions and shared principles.

Therefore, a multi-case research design comprising different episodes, united by a hypothesis about the importance of stories, was considered to be the best option. A second step was to define criteria regarding the business actors that should be involved in the cases. Firstly, two preferred industries were chosen: oil and

pharmaceuticals. The reason for including corporations from these sectors is simple: if it is true that multinationals like the Swiss Nestle or American Nike have encountered problems to manage their image in the past years, some industries have had

systematic problems with their representation. Oil and pharmaceuticals have been struggling to come clean from a series of oil spillages, human rights violations and workplace safety issues, in the case of the former, and drug prices and product safety in the case of the latter. These are directly related to two points raised before in this chapter: the entrance of an organised civil society and its mediated action.

New York-based Harris Interactive, a market research company probing the reputation of 20 different industries with consumers since 1997, has found the pharmaceutical industry to be “the most volatile of any industry” - by 2004, it had gone from a net positive rating of 60 percent in 1997 to a net negative score of 4%. In

2006, time of the selection of the cases, pharma had recovered to 25% (just to plummet again in 2008) but the oil industry was at the bottom at the list with a negative score of 36%, where it still remains. Even when the judges are more

specialised, such as in the Fortune ranking of the World’s Most Admired Companies voted by businesspeople, only Johnson and Johnson is included in the top 20 from 2006 to 2008, with Exxon Mobil reaching the 18th place in its best year, 2007. This contrasts with the position of oil companies in the same magazine when the ranking is about size: Exxon Mobil, Royal Dutch Shell and BP are top five.

Give their size and reputation, these corporations are not only more likely to have established strong in-house communications teams but also more likely to be involved in less friendly public relations and policy making battles in national, supranational and global arenas. The desirability of different arenas, as discussed above, has also influenced the sampling. The unequivocal importance of the European Union as a legal jurisdiction and its prioritisation of consensus building as a basis for policy making put the European Commission/Parliament in the list. The importance of national politics, however, could not be ignored, inasmuch as many of the decisions that directly impact corporations, such as legislation, macro economic management of national markets and public purchases, are still in the hands of national governments. A case study featuring national governments and the decision making processes they put in place was consequently in order. The role of the stock market under the Anglo- American financialised capitalism, coupled with Froud et al.’s evidence of story telling as a management tool, on the other hand, called for a case involving corporations and their representation for the financial market.

The institutional characteristics of each one of the arenas, in turn, would influence the number and types of actors involved in the cases, as well as their power to influence the debates. The search for the most interesting case in the supranational arena, for instance, determined the inclusion of a third sector, the chemical industry, which has not as bad a reputation as oil and pharmaceuticals but it is also a frequent target for environmental NGOs, arguably the strongest and best organised among civil society groups. REACH, for its impact on trade to and from Europe, has also attracted a number of actors from industries and governments around the globe. This is by far the most complex of the case studies due to the great number of actors interacting, the very technical nature of the legislation and its long duration, with final policy details still ongoing.

The Herceptin case, albeit played at a national stage by local actors such as the British government and its National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE), pressure groups and other members of British civil society, indirectly involved the European Medicines Agency. It involved particular and increasingly influential members of the British voluntary sector, scientists and tabloid journalists, with very little visible interference of Roche, the Swiss giant producing the drug in question. The Shell case, a financial market crisis, is the most restricted of the cases not because there were fewer actors involved, since it attracted a variety of political actors who, in normal circumstances, are mere watchful spectators, but because the story was being constructed by a handful of actors. British investors and journalists were at the ‘discursive’ centre of this case.

Another selection criterion was media coverage. This is because, despite the very instrumental reason that media coverage helps the research process in itself by providing documentation, the media, as mentioned in the first part of the chapter, has been a crucial part of the mechanism of exposure of giant firms, working as an actor and arena that brings on board particular actors. The sample of case studies seem adequate on this basis because the media exposure is different in each of them, something that may allow interesting insights into its impact on outcomes: Herceptin is a highly mediated affair, with hundreds of articles in mainstream papers and tabloids; Shell also had ample coverage but mainly on financial pages; REACH, on the other hand, is virtually unknown to most part of the European population despite its impact on citizen’s daily lives.