Business, power, and private regulatory governance: shaping subjectivities and limiting possibilities in the gold supply chain

To examine how private regulatory governance reproduces a market logic that always already circumscribes possibilities for radical change, we tarry with Michel Foucault’s notion of governmentality and his writings on power. We focus on two major initiatives created to regulate gold supply chains, subjecting their publicly released documents to a discourse analysis. This reveals subtle but tangible examples of how these initiatives discursively shape business preferences and possibilities for engaging with a social change agenda. Through a focus on how power circulating through these initiatives works to shape the identities and interests of business actors themselves, we contribute a new perspective to the literature on business, power, and private regulatory governance, one that highlights the ways through which these discourses both expand and limit business actors’ engagement in setting social agendas and the mixed and sometimes seemingly contradictory implications for the public interest.