The Company Town: Private Power and Public Governance

• In Event: Political Economy and Local Democracy

Abstract

This paper explores the consequences of structural corporate power for local democracy in the United States, particularly as mediated by jurisdictional fragmentation and policy devolution to under-resourced local governments. By qualitatively examining the various forms of local governance in several historical “company towns,” I suggest that spatially-concentrated property ownership facilitated the private domination over public life within non-diverse regional economies. Classic labor histories have documented the oppressive employment relationship in these planned communities—including payment in scrip, regular threats of eviction, obstacles to unionization, and employer surveillance of private affairs. But few accounts have examined company towns as local governments: a legal means of achieving an effective merger between the public functions of local governance and private domination of the workplace. This paper aspires to (1) identify the sources and contours of this form of power, developed in part through historical case studies; (2) highlight the relationship between this form of power and jurisdictional boundaries, through the interactions between economic geography and jurisdictional fragmentation; (3) discuss the consequences for theories of local democracy, including by developing a set of normative recommendations for fiscal/regulatory federalism design.

Author

• Brian Highsmith, Harvard University