First, he validated our sense that the findings of our survey constituted a remarkable oversight. In particular, in an election year, I find it stunning that the huge numbers of people working on the American electoral system and presidential politics would be neglecting the corporate role in bankrolling politicians to such a degree. Our sentiments exactly. Asked to account for the corporate studies vacuum, Pegg suggests several explanations. Corporations are reluctant to share information that academics need to conduct their research, he points out, and information that is available tends to come from nongovernmental organizations with which many academics are not familiar.
Academics tend to reward theoretical inquiries over empirical investigations.
Corporate funding is available for some projects, but probably not for those that critically assess corporate crimes or corporate human rights violations. To check that the results of our survey were not a fluke, we did a similar search on all U.S. dissertations published in the last two years. The results were similar. We can't help but draw depressing conclusions from our surveys. One of the sources of corporate power is that corporations appear both everywhere and nowhere at the same time.