Business is one of the major power centres in modern society. The state seeks to check and channel that power so as to serve broader public policy objectives. However, if the way in which business is governed is ineffective or over burdensome, it may become more difficult to achieve desired goals such as economic growth or higher levels of employment. In a period of international economic crisis, the study of how business and government relate to each other in different countries is of more central importance than ever.
These relationships have been studied from a number of different disciplinary perspectives - business studies, economics, economic history, law, and political science - and all of these are represented in this handbook. The first part of the book provides an introduction to the ways in which five different disciplines have approached the study of business and government. The second section, on the firm and the state, looks at how these entities interact in different settings, emphasising such phenomena as the global firm and varieties of capitalism. The third section examines how business interacts with government in different parts of the world, including the United States, the EU, China, Japan and South America. The fourth section reviews changing patterns of market governance through a unifying theme of the role of regulation. Business-government relations can play out in divergent ways in different policy and the fifth section examines the contrasts between different key arenas such as competition policy, trade policy, training policy and environmental policy.
The volume provides an authoritative overview with chapters by leading authorities on the current state of knowledge of business-government relations, but also points to ways in which this work might be developed in the future, e.g., through a political theory of the firm.

Professor David Coen is Professor of Public Policy at University College London. Prior to joining UCL he held appointments at the London Business School and Max Planck Institute in Cologne and was awarded a PhD at the European University Institute, Florence. In recent years he has been a Fulbright distinguished scholar at the Centre for European Studies, Harvard University and visiting fellow at Max Planck Institute, Cologne. His research is recently embedded in the development of models and processes of EU public policy and business government relations. Recent books include Refining Regulatory Regimes: Utilities in Europe (Edward Elgar, 2005) with Adrienne Hertier; EU Lobbying: Theoretical and Empirical Developments (Routledge, 2007); and Lobbying the European Union: Institutions, Actors and Processes (OUP, 2009) edited with Jeremy Richardson.
Professor Wyn Grant is Professor of Politics at the University of Warwick. He has written on government-business relations since the 1970s, including a path-breaking study of the CBI with David Marsh (1977) and a well-regarded book on Business and Politics in Britain. (1987, 2nd edition 1993). He has also written extensively on trade policy, agricultural policy, economic policy and environmental policy. He is a member of the executive committee of the International Political Science Association and was formerly chair of the UK Political Studies Association. His more recent research has been based on interdisciplinary cooperation with biological scientists in projects on biological alternatives to chemical pesticides and the management of cattle diseases.
Professor Graham Wilson is Professor of Political Science at Boston University and is Professor Emeritus of Political Science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison where he taught for twenty-five years. He was educated in the UK and began his career at the University of Essex. He has studied business and politics for the last thirty years and is the author of Business and Politics: A Comparative Introduction which has appeared in three editions. He has edited Governance and The British Journal of Political Science.