The Business Corporation as a Political Actor

Ugur Aytac

I am currently an assistant professor at Utrecht University. Previously, I worked as a postdoctoral researcher in the ERC project “The Business Corporation as a Political Actor” at the Ethics Institute. I received my PhD in Political Theory from the University of Amsterdam. My research interests lie primarily in democracy, legitimacy, power & domination, the digital public sphere, and political realism. I research how varying conceptualizations of power and domination shape our normative judgments about the legitimacy of socio-political arrangements including states, economic institutions, and digital platforms. I have three main lines of research: i) Big Tech corporations’ powers over the digital public sphere and how to democratize them, ii) the political theory of the firm and worker resistance, and iii) how structural power asymmetries and ideological distortions influence the legitimacy of socio-political orders.