How private firms shape public outcomes from within the machinery of the state and global governance.
My research on tax havens, Big Tech, public affairs, and consultancy is united by a common question: how do private firms, lobbyists, consultants, and advisers shape public outcomes, often with less scrutiny than the public decisions they help formulate?
- I have examined the changing study and regulation of corporate power across academia, the United Nations, and other policy institutions. Recently, the article Rediscovering the Multinational Enterprise: The Rise and Fall of ‘Corporate Escape’ Studies, (with Rasmus Corlin Christensen, Review of International Political Economy, 2025), traced how the multinational enterprise disappeared from important currents of social-scientific analysis. This research provides the foundation for my book manuscript, Corporate Escape: Why Academics and Politicians Lose Sight of Business Power. The United Nations dimension of this work also connects with my related article on early UN initiatives Back from Oblivion? The Rise and Fall of the Early Initiatives against Corporate Tax Avoidance from the 1960s to the 1980s, published in UNCTAD’s Transnational Corporations in 2017.
- Consultocracy and Its Discontents: A Critical Typology and a Call for a Research Agenda (Governance, with Hanna Kuusela), 2019. This widely cited article developed a critical typology of governments’ reliance on external consultants and called for a more systematic research agenda on consultocracy. It built on our Finnish-language, peer-reviewed book on the same topic, published in 2013.
- In the early 2020s, I led a research project on the political consequences of the rise of public-affairs firms. The resulting Finnish-language, peer-reviewed book, co-authored with Mona Mannevuo and Niina Kari and published in 2022, received the Helsingin Sanomat Foundation Prize in 2024. I have since extended its key arguments in a chapter in The Oxford Handbook of Lobbying and its Regulation (2026).
- Making Tax Vanish: How the Practices of Consumer Goods MNC RB Show That the International Tax System Is Broken (Oxfam, 2017). This co-authored report for Oxfam GB examined the tax-planning arrangements of the health and hygiene company RB, now Reckitt, and its implications for public revenues in lower-income countries especially in Africa.
- Practice. From 2021 to 2025, I chaired Finnwatch, a Finnish civil-society organisation that investigates the global impacts of business activity and promotes responsible business conduct. Its work addresses corporate human-rights and climate impacts, tax responsibility, and the accountability of global value chains.