The risky business of research: the control of academic knowledge production and the racialised and gendered contours of corporate power

This article examines attempts to censor academic knowledge production and expertise on corporate power. It provides an ethnographically grounded way of illuminating one corporation’s attempts to control academic research as the company worked to maintain its hegemony in the face of a long history of public accusations of labour abuse. Reflecting on the author's own experience of negotiating fieldwork and publishing, the analysis reveals what antagonisms provoke corporate control of information, what social relations may ease corporate anxiety and what ultimately, regardless of these social relations, prompts corporations to protect themselves, often irrespective of the truth. In doing so, the article reveals the racialised, gendered and classed contours of corporate power and abuse.