More Than a Revolving Door: Corporate lobbying and the socialization of institutional carriers

Socialization processes in organizational theory

Berger and Luckmann defined socialization as ‘the comprehensive and consistent induction of an individual into the objective world of a society or sector of society’, portraying it as the main process by which individuals internalize seemingly objective values as their own, and the vehicle by which they are ‘taking over the world in which others already live’ (Berger & Luckmann, 1966, p. 150). As institutional knowledge is ultimately manifested through language, individuals undergo socialization by learning new, institutionally specific languages. These languages differ between spheres – ‘the language of the cavalry will become different from that of the infantry’ (pp. 158–9). Thus, socialization allows individual actors to make up personal ways of translating the language of new institutional spheres into the language of spheres they already know. Socialization provides ways to solve contradictions between conflicting bodies of knowledge; only in this way can new institutions ‘begin to have reality’ for them (p. 163). While complete socialization, entailing full identification of the individual and full symmetry between objective and subjective realities, is rarely witnessed in real life, most individuals go through multiple socialization processes in their lives – in the family, educational system, civil society engagement and careers.

DiMaggio and Powell (1983) cast socialization as one of the main mechanisms behind organizational isomorphism. Instantiated by the normative pressures of work life standardization and the professions, socialization is a key mechanism that makes individuals into carriers of institutional knowledge. Recruitment, or ‘filtering of personnel’, is a crucial instance of socialization allowing organizations to reproduce social patterns within and across sectors. Candidates that are similarly socialized will tend to ‘view problems in a similar fashion, see the same policies, procedures and structures as normatively sanctioned and legitimated, and approach decisions in much the same way’ (DiMaggio & Powell, 1983 p. 153). For people who have not received prior professional training, on-the-job occupational training will be more important. In short, socialization underpins and perpetuates the mental and cultural structures of the ‘iron cage of rationalization’ defining what is perceived as both possible and right.

Socialization theory has since been developed further in literature on organization culture. Here, it is seen as a peer-to-peer process of ‘learning the ropes’ of an organization, whereby the newcomer who enters an organization is dependent on getting behavioural cues from incumbents on how to act, dress and think in the new environment (Van Maanen & Schein, 1977). The strength of socialization is partially dependent on an organization’s ability to hold new members physically ‘captive’. For instance, in a survey of business school students, Schein (2003) found that students’ political views became increasingly aligned with the faculty’s the more time they spent in school. Another measure of the strength of socialization is how intensely an organization or sphere can make an individual commit behaviourally; having a new organizational member act in a certain way forces him or her to defend or at least relate to that practice morally. Such techniques of occupational socialization have been portrayed as powerful instruments for organizations to exert cultural control over their employees (Czarniawska & Kunda, 2010; Kunda, 2006).

But beyond the organizational level, work-life socialization is also an institutional endeavour. Among the most fundamental elements of socialization, Schein stresses, is individuals’ tuning in to the underlying ‘pivotal values’ of the institutional sphere to which the organization belongs. To organizations in the corporate sphere, pivotal values are ‘belief in a reasonable profit […], the free enterprise system and competition’ (Schein, 2003, p. 15), that is, values without which working in a for-profit business becomes virtually impossible. In an analogy, working in the political sphere assumes practical knowledge of regulatory work, but also underlying devotion to the principles of democracy and weighing different needs against each other to produce public good (see Brunsson, 1994). Such pivotal values are embedded in practices and routines; the act of selling things in a free market puts the seller in relation to the underlying institutional values of capitalism. From a socialization perspective, then, institutions are exacting social structures that require new members to learn new skills, but they also demand cultural adherence and loyalty in the form of shared worldviews, as expressed in language and identity. Entering a new institutional sphere is hence a simultaneously material and symbolic endeavour with the potential to transform an individual.

Despite the close relationship between institutions, carriers and socialization, and its prominent role in organizational culture studies, institutional analysts have recently paid scant attention to socialization. Indeed, there have been mentions of the socializing power of professional organizations (Greenwood, Suddaby, & Hinings, 2002) and the crucial role of educational institutions in serving as knowledge bases for carriers (Sahlin-Andersson & Engwall, 2002), but few studies have directly addressed the dynamics of socialization. In a rare exception, Battilana and Dorado (2010) return to the importance of organizational socialization in institutional processes. A comparison of socialization strategies opted for by two organizations working in the tension field between two institutional spheres – humanitarian development and finance – shows that extensive on-the-job socialization can help overcome conflict and tension between different institutions by providing cultural tools for integrating them both into a new, hybrid identity. This study also connects a socialization perspective to the concept of carriers, arguing that ‘because of their previous training, experience, and general exposure to the workings of organizations embodying existing archetypes, these hires are also likely to become carriers of the institutional logics that these archetypes incarnate’ (Battilana & Dorado, 2010, p. 1420).

To summarize, the role of individuals in transporting institutional ideas has been developed by the theoretical concept of carriers – actors who move between institutional spheres. But even the literature on institutional carriers has refrained from delving into carriers’ experiences and the socialization processes they may undergo. I argue that considering socialization dynamics bears great potential to enrich our knowledge on how ideas travel between institutions. The research question guiding this paper is therefore: What is the role of socialization of carriers in the translation of ideas? Below, I explore this question through the lens of one of the most institutionally charged and contested cases of institutional carriers: revolving door lobbyists.

The research context: Revolving door lobbying in Sweden

As mentioned above, movement between political and government offices and the corporate sphere has increased substantially in recent years in both the United States (LaPira & Thomas, 2016; Parker, 2009) and Europe (Draca, 2014; Pollack & Allern, 2014). But whereas in the US revolving-door lobbyists tend to work in niche lobbying firms, in Europe many find jobs in the burgeoning public relations (PR) industry.

In Sweden, the research context for this paper, PR consultancy has quickly become the most popular career choice for former politicians and clerks. While only 4% of the highest political appointees (cabinet members and political staffers) joined a PR company after leaving their government positions in 2002, 34% did so after the 2014 elections (Bergling, 2015). A survey of 153 public relations consultants revealed that 40% had either been working in government or for a political party previously (Garsten, Svallfors, & Rothstein, 2015). While in the 1990s the ‘revolving door’ was mostly known as a conservative phenomenon, ¹ the PR industry has increasingly become a popular job option among left-wing politicians also; almost the same percentage of people coming in to positions in the 2014 left-wing government came directly from jobs in the PR industry (Sundling, 2015). In other words, there is a sizeable group, of all political colours, moving between political appointments and PR jobs in Sweden today.

Data collection

The data consist of 25 semi-structured interviews with individuals who have, during their careers, worked both in the political sphere and in the PR industry. As a base of sampling, I used several media articles in which political ‘converts’ are regularly listed by party affiliation. An aggregation of four such published lists during the period 2003–2012 rendered a total of 419 names, with 166 single mentions. Most of them concerned people leaving politics for corporate lobbying work in the PR industry, but a few also included people who had returned to politics after a spell in PR as well as multiple ‘revolvers’, that is, people who have gone back and forth multiple times. I also read through background descriptions in the media of incoming governments’ members and staffers to detect corporate lobbyist backgrounds. In the text, the subjects of my study will interchangeably be referred to as respondents and ‘revolvers’, or even ‘returners’ when applicable.

The sample was drawn from the total aggregated list with a view to capturing a variety of characteristics. Double career experience was a primary condition for sampling. Also, I wanted a broad variety of party backgrounds. At the time of the first round of 15 interviews (2006) there were seven parties in the Swedish parliament, and the government was Social Democratic, supported by the Green Party and the Left Party. By the second round of 10 interviews (2012–2013), carried out by two research assistants, the parliament had one more party, the Sweden Democrats, and the government was a conservative alliance between the Moderates (Conservatives), the Liberal Party, the Centre Party and the Christian Democrats. In the complete list as well as the sample, all parties are represented except the Sweden Democrats. ² Respondents’ characteristics are listed in Tables 1 and 2.

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Table 1.

Political party affilation of respondents.

Party affilation	Total
Social Democrats (S)	6
Green party (Mp)	3
Left party (V)	2
Moderate (M)	5
Liberal People’s Party (L)	4
Centre Party (C)	4
Christian Democrats (Kd)	1
Total	25

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Table 2.

Respondents by career characteristics and gender.

From politics to PR	From PR to politics	Men	Women	Founder	Formal political mandate
24 (25)	11 (25)	18 (25)	7 (25)	9 (25)	9 (25)
	Of which returners:10

In Table 2, we see that by the time of the interviews, almost all respondents (24/25) had moved from politics to PR, and almost half (11) had moved from PR to politics. Only one respondent had started out in PR, without prior political experience, and then entered politics. ³ Most of the respondents worked in public affairs, a business area within PR mainly concerned with political advocacy and lobbying for large corporations and business organizations, in a variety of sectors. More than a third of respondents (9) had started their own PR agency, and as many had at one point been elected politicians; the rest were staffers and political experts. The sample size is small, but gender composition roughly corresponds to gender composition in the total population as proxied by the aggregate lists and by the percentage of ‘returners’.

By sampling ‘revolvers’ moving in both directions, I was able to reconstruct a movement cycle showing the movement from politics to PR, and potentially back to politics again. This design facilitates the mapping of characteristics of each phase of the transition and a more complete understanding of the travel and impact of ideas that are carried. Questions were adapted to the stage of transition that respondents were currently in at the time of the interview: respondents who had made the transition from politics to PR were asked about the skills that they brought to their new job, and about skills they had to acquire in order to perform their new job. Respondents currently working in the PR industry were asked about the practical tasks they carried out in their everyday work, areas where they felt confident and also what they found challenging in their new position. Those who had not returned to politics were asked whether they could imagine returning. ‘Returners’, that is, people who had returned from PR to politics, were asked about the skills they had acquired in the PR industry, whether and how they put them to use in the political sphere. All respondents, regardless of stage, were asked how they label and identify themselves professionally. Interviews were semi-structured, recorded and fully transcribed verbatim. An interview typically lasted between 45 minutes and 2.5 hours, averaging 1.5 hours.

Data analysis

The interview transcripts have been coded according to principles of thematic analysis (Braun & Clarke, 2006; Guest, MacQueen, & Namey, 2011), whereby patterns associated with the research question were examined in the material, aggregated and developed in several stages, allowing both deductive and inductive stages of coding. In the first stage, responses were simply categorized as applicable to one of the three stages of transition: from PR to politics, in the PR industry and, if applicable, back to politics. In the next reading, for each of these phases of transition in the empirical model, I coded for replies that directly accounted for the institutional knowledge carried: material skills such as personal networks or practical ‘know-how’ and also symbolic dimensions of institutional knowledge. As expressions of the broad code ‘symbolic institutional knowledge’, I count both claims of values and understandings (‘this is the way we do it’) and institutionally specific language (i.e. specific vocabularies, imagery and tropes). Identity claims, responding to the question ‘How would I describe myself professionally?’, could also be seen as an expression of respondents’ worldview, but as this element of identity is so significant in theories of socialization (see Berger & Luckmann, 1966) it has been coded separately. In line with my processual design, I paid special attention to any signs of changes in material and symbolic dimensions of institutional knowledge.

In addition to this more deductive coding, I then carried out a third, more inductive, round of coding. At this third stage, I read the material again, and this time I let themes emanate from the data. These were codes that did not fit neatly into any of the theoretically deduced codes but instead were gathered more on a ‘this is surprising’ criterion, resulting in codes that were later aggregated into higher-level codes of meaning (Corbin & Strauss, 2008). From reading and rereading interview transcripts and reiterating between the emerging themes and theory, it eventually became apparent that these responses were mostly about individuals’ strategies for managing institutional pressures of socialization, especially when these were at odds with their old institutional set of values from the political sphere. Analysing these inductive themes, it became apparent that they actually constituted a catalogue on how to resist, acquiesce with or negotiate such pressures, playing out in both the material and symbolic dimensions of revolvers’ lives. These findings are summarized below.

Bringing politics to the corporate sphere

As stated above, almost all respondents had gone from politics to PR. Perhaps not surprisingly, they largely confirm earlier research regarding skills transferred (see Makse, 2016; Etzion & Davis, 2008): respondents are highly aware that their political networks are a part of the deal, and that the PR industry’s clients are willing to pay for them. A senior consultant with a background as a central staffer says that leaving a government administration still in power was a conscious move on his part: ‘I was the first to leave [the government administration] under constructive circumstances. Of course, that created an enormous value on the market for me. That is, I had the contacts, and I knew the system’ (R20). Other respondents, without networks within the sitting government, report that they feel at a disadvantage as a result. Even so, general political expertise is widely marketable as it is, and it does not require extraordinary political prowess to be a good PR consultant: it is enough to know the political system, produce good text and have experience in handling media contacts. Respondent 4, who had been active in the youth wing of a conservative party, admits: ‘Politics was a good school for PR.’

Inside the PR industry – where political and corporate spheres meet

Once inside the PR firm, revolvers meet corporate customers for the first time. Although the work content itself does not offer any surprises, new revolvers are astonished to discover the commercial demand for what they consider to be basic knowledge. And it is precisely the gap between clients’ needs and their lack of knowledge that revolvers can fill, by making complex political reality comprehensible to action-oriented corporate managers:

What surprised me was that the knowledge was so pitiable outside politics. Knowledge about what mattered in political decision making and the process around it was so poor. That overwhelmed me somewhat. I thought these were things that everyone knew. But they didn’t. Which was good for me. (R19)

A press release by a consultant costs 15–20,000 SEK. The parties laugh; they do a couple every day. (R1)

Earlier work on politicization has suggested that interfaces where business and politics meet, such as multi-stakeholder cooperation projects and public–private partnerships, might function as ‘schools of democracy’ for the corporations involved; a place where they learn about the political process and conditions (Scherer & Palazzo, 2011). My findings suggest that revolving door lobbying also might constitute such a school, where former politicians act in the most concrete manner possible as teachers (Drutman, 2015) instructing corporate clients who wish to influence the political system. In line with Parker et al. (2013), ‘employability’ for revolvers seems very high to begin with, and this part of the new job comes at a relatively low learning cost.

But while revolvers entering the corporate sphere do not have to learn many new facts, their challenge lies on another plane. It is instead about acquiring an understanding of the new clients’ worldview, which is starkly at odds with the sphere they come from. One respondent describes the spheres as two worlds operating according to different logics:

Politics has a uniqueness and a special task, namely to synthesize all interests. That is really the uniqueness of politics, its mission in society, while corporations have very clear vested interests. […] And just that inability to see the task of politics, to weigh all interests, is an explanation for why it is difficult to understand each other. (R19)

To be able to communicate their expertise to clients, it is not sufficient to just deliver crude accounts of the political process; revolvers also need to adapt and adjust it, and put it into language that clients can understand. They are no longer generalists but experts, and corporate clients are not willing to pay for advice communicated in vague terms:

As a politician I used to be able to say ‘on the one hand, and on the other…’ But clients will not buy advisory services from someone who says that! They can say ‘on the one hand and on the other,’ but they ask me to answer: ‘What do you think?’ (R20)

Notably, this adjustment is not a universalization of the content of services into an objectified concept or work method, which scholars of translation have traditionally studied (see Rovik, 2002), but rather an adaptation of the carriers’ own demeanour, and the very language used.

Bringing the corporate back to politics: A corporate gaze on policy

Almost half (44%) of respondents have returned to politics after working in corporate lobbying. Swedish revolvers are mainly politically motivated; politics is where most of them want to be, and they happily return if they can (Selling, 2015). But although the returners in my sample in all cases returned to work for the same parties in which they had been active before joining PR, they report doing politics differently. One respondent, herself a revolver who now works as a campaign manager in her old party, says:

When these people come back with their views it can become much better, the level of competence is raised and the communication becomes sharper and better […] I’m doing this job that I’m doing now much better than I would have done five years ago. (R6)

But what does ‘better’ actually mean? Revolvers have surely gotten more practice in dealing with mass media. But the real gain, it soon becomes clear, concerns the multiple skills and insights gained from working in a corporate environment. Earlier research on the revolving door has focused on unique political know-how being in high demand in the corporate sphere (Parker, 2009; Parker et al., 2013; Svallfors, 2016a). But my findings show that the reverse is also true: the political parties hire back revolvers with corporate knowhow and new analytical skills that could be put to political use. A multiple revolver, who by the time of the interview was employed by a conservative party, points out that many of her colleagues in the party management – the deputy party secretary, the head of communications, the party leader’s chief of staff and the respondent herself – have all spent time in consulting. She describes her experience of corporate lobbying as having had a crucial effect on how she sees the world. She especially mentions how it has made her less naive when it comes to analysing corporations’ attempts to influence their political context:

When I started working at [a PR agency], then I could see how the debate and public opinion were orchestrated by one and the same company. […] We learned who our stakeholders were, who our friends were, how to get certain enemies to enter the arena by getting one of one’s friends to debate with them. In this way they created a debate that did not really exist. […] Having seen that, and then come back to politics, then you will not be as seduced by ‘Oh now there’s a big debate surrounding the company car taxation …’ Then you know that there is probably someone, somewhere who actually spins this. (R9)

This newly acquired ‘corporate gaze’ on policy is manifested in the import of corporate practices; one campaign manager reported using the common marketing technique of focus groups, but applied to potential voters instead of consumers. Another respondent reported using team management practices from the PR industry in his small left-wing party’s internal work. The returner cited in the introduction to this paper mentions marketing giant Procter & Gamble’s target group analyses as a role model in mapping and profiling of potential voters.

Just as revolvers bring political networks to corporate clients, returners bring new corporate networks back into politics, which they use in their daily political work to gain corporate perspectives on policy. One respondent claims he lunches at least once a week with former colleagues from the PR firm who have since moved on to various corporate and public organizations: ‘I want to know – how do people look at my party from the outside?’ (R16). Another respondent, with several sojourns in the PR industry behind him, draws on his vast corporate network within PR, advertising and marketing to discuss new ideas as he tries to popularize the public image of his own party:

I have my own reference groups with marketing directors, who also work with [brands quite similar to ours], more to bounce off concepts with. They work with very broad brands. Like experiences, trips, it can be clothes, consumer-oriented brands, not high-end… (R15)

Nested in these imports of new world views, practices and networks is the most striking theme among returners, which is symbolic in nature: how the moral institutional juxtaposition between corporate and political spheres, so apparently problematic for revolvers in the first phases of transition, appears at least partially dissolved. Transcending institutional boundaries is no longer discussed as problematic as they discuss politics. This shift, which is simultaneously cognitive and cultural, is clearly reflected in carriers’ use of language (see Berger & Luckmann, 1966). Through language, returners make comparisons that equate corporations and parties with each other, and they make ample use of corporate metaphors. Statements like ‘we produce politics’ or ‘our product can be purchased only once every four years’, comparisons of political elections to ‘one-day sales’ and claims that political parties are ‘production units’ for politics are prevalent in the material. When policy fails, it is because something essential has been ‘skipped along the production line’. One returner, who is otherwise quite critical of the PR industry, reports ‘efficiency’ as his most cherished take-away from PR.

In other words: the corporate knowhow, networks, language and worldviews carried by revolvers back into politics purportedly influence them and the policy processes that they engage in. Much as revolving door lobbying can function as a ‘school of democracy’ (Scherer & Palazzo, 2011) for corporate clients hiring politically versed consultants, it could also be theorized as a ‘school of corporate thinking’ for political appointees, where they learn much more about how corporations act and think than they would be able to in the political world alone.

Interestingly, socialization into a corporate sphere has also had a clear influence on respondents’ self-identification. Respondents, whether or not they have returned to politics, rarely describe themselves as ‘politicians’ or ‘PR consultants’. When asked to define themselves professionally, they instead come up with various labels that downplay essential differences between politics and PR, such as ‘an expert on public opinion, but a generalist in most things’, ‘an opinion-builder’, ‘an opinion-maker’, ‘an expert in social studies’ or even ‘a teacher of political science’. Perhaps the multiple-revolving respondent 14 best summarizes this fluent identity: ‘All my life I have had employers who sponsored my political interest.’

Analysis: Towards a model of socialization of institutional carriers

Although an unusually conspicuous case of institutional carrying, revolving door lobbying is certainly not the only example of professionals transcending institutional boundaries on a regular basis. Modern professionals stay for a shorter time in one job than in the past and often work in multiple sectors during their professional careers (Barley & Kunda, 2004; Svallfors, 2016b). Many of these moves are motivated by the need to move knowledge. Often, hiring people from a different institutional sphere is a way to get hold of knowledge that is not easily attainable otherwise, as organizations hope to adopt desirable traits from that sphere (see Brunsson, 1994). State agencies might want to become more efficient and hence employ carriers from the corporate sphere to reorganize them. Corporate organizations might want to gain more authenticity and so hire people from the non-profit world to provide this. Corporate law firms compete to hire young lawyers who have gone through tax authorities’ trainee programmes in order to import knowledge on regulation, and so forth.

My study suggests that viewing such moves as mere transactions of skills is largely misleading; carriers do not just carry things; they themselves are transformed as they move. Taking this inseparability of knowledge and carrier into account, the carrier herself becomes the product, as new skills, worldviews and identities become engrained in her. This element of embodiment, I argue, is crucial to much carrying, and it points to the importance of analysing it as a socialization process.

I have generalized my findings into a theoretical model detailing the socialization process that carriers undergo as they move between different institutional spheres. The model (Figure 1) consists of four distinct phases, mapping the gradual transformation of both practical and symbolic knowledge of the carrier. In the first phase, primary socialization, carriers are not yet carriers; they are active in the first institutional sphere into which they are deeply socialized (IS1). They know this institution inside out; in fact, extensive knowledge of IS1 is a prerequisite for the second phase, transition, in which the carriers move from IS1 to a second institutional sphere (IS2). This second phase is crucial, as it introduces novelty to the carriers, who get to meet a new sphere in the form of new organizational and institutional cues. In doing so, they also acquire a new perspective on IS1: for the first time, carriers begin to render explicit the tacit norms upon which their prior institution has rested, seeing it from the outside. In this phase, what in socialization theory are called ‘upending experiences’ (Schein, 2003) can occur – events that seem so culturally foreign to the individual that they cause her to question old assumptions about reality in a more fundamental way. Above, respondents described how they were stunned by their clients’ low level of political knowledge and how they were faced with situations that would have been unfathomable in their previous sphere. In this phase, transformative change already starts to happen, as carriers start the translation endeavour by adapting their prior knowledge into formats that fit IS2. But in contrast to earlier studies on carriers’ role in translation (Czarniawska-Joerges & Sévon, 1996; Rovik, 2002; Wedlin & Sahlin, 2018), this adaptation is not something that can be completely objectified into trademarked work packages or ‘lean’ charts, separate from the carrier. Instead, translation takes place as the carrier herself becomes transformed, adapting the way she speaks, thinks and relates, and perhaps even dresses. If she does not, she will not be understood by her new peers and clients, or perhaps not even hired in the first place.

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Figure 1.

Institutional carrying as a socialization process.

In phase III, re-immersion, the carrier has entered the new institutional sphere and starts to learn how to be an institutional actor at a deeper level – in Schein’s terms, ‘learning the ropes’ of IS2. As Battilana and Dorado (2010) show, if the organizational goal in this phase is to create stability and a new fixed hybrid, it is wise to recruit individuals with less institutional baggage from before. But for many carriers, as mentioned above, prior institutional knowledge is the deal itself; this is why they are hired. In these cases, the ‘tabula rasa’ strategy described by Battilana and Dorado (2010) is not an option: socialization of the already socialized becomes necessary and hence requires a meticulous balancing act on behalf of both carriers and organizations.

In the re-immersion phase, different ‘depths’ of socialization can be expected. Some carriers might try to resist socialization and completely detach from the new pressures, such as senior politicians coming into the PR industry expecting ‘politics as usual’ and not being able to adapt to the strict norms of salesmanship and profitability, or revolvers who use their political veto power to decline client projects too often. These people will not last long in IS2, as individuals normally have difficulty resisting the pressures of socialization and experience a strong need to relate to the social norms of the new context. When skills are inseparable from the carrier, conflict between opposing institutional pressures occurs, not between different types of carriers within the same organization, but inside the same person: the mind of the individual carrier becomes the arena where institutional battles are fought. In order to reconcile potential conflicts concerning skills, worldviews and identities between IS1 and IS2, carriers will hence develop socialization response tactics that allow them to reconcile institutional pressures from old and new institutional spheres while keeping a coherent narrative of who they are, what they do and why, becoming at least partially socialized into IS2. As a result, new hybridized carrier identities start to emerge, allowing the individual carriers to encompass both the new and the old institutional demands (see Pache & Santos, 2013).

The fourth and final phase, integration, happens if and when carriers return to their initial institutional sphere. They are now ‘institutionally bilingual’ and have an ability to see the sphere they enter anew from the inside and outside, simultaneously. In the case of revolving door lobbyists returning to politics, they come back with new networks, work methods and language from the corporate sphere that become integral parts of their political mission.

The model is an archetype considering only two spheres, but it is of course fully possible to imagine carriers going between several spheres. In that case, layers of institutional identities and knowledge will be added to the previous ones. Moreover, there is no limit to how many transitions may occur over the course of a carrier’s professional life, and carriers may change spheres multiple times – many of the revolving door lobbyists have indeed already revolved a second, third or fourth time. In those cases, the zigzag path in Figure 1 will take on the shape of a spiral, in which each hiatus provides the possibility for a potential shift of skills, mindset and identity. The point, however, is the same: the inseparability of carrier and knowledge requires us to study carrying efforts as transformational acts that can be both practical and symbolic in nature.

Practical implications of revolving door lobbying

Like all studies, this one raises new questions. One important question for future research is whether individual carriers’ transformation has any lasting, stable influence on the spheres between which they move. Carriers have repeatedly been theorized to drive society-level institutional isomorphic change (David, 2012; DiMaggio & Powell, 1983; Meyer, 1996). Moreover, carrying has the potential to blur institutional boundaries (Sahlin-Andersson & Engwall, 2002) and cause long-term loss of legitimacy for the institutions involved (Brunsson, 1994). Against the backdrop of isomorphic forces of carrying, and given the politically sensitive nature of the revolving door case, we should ask what consequences revolving door lobbying has for the spheres between which carriers move and, in the long run, for the societies in which it occurs (see Etzion & Gehman, 2018; Martí et al., 2008).

One obvious potential consequence is that it changes corporations. From a deliberative democracy point of view, corporate–political dialogue is not necessarily problematic (see Mäkinen & Kourula, 2012); as employers and taxpayers, corporations should be heard by decision-makers in the democratic discourse, along with individual citizens and other types of organizations. But the present study suggests that hiring former politicians could help give corporate clients disproportional influence. Especially considering earlier indications that revolving door lobbyists influence policy more efficiently than others (Baumgartner, Berry, Hojnacki, Leech, & Kimball, 2009; Lazarus & McKay, 2012), such a proposition should not be ignored.

Also, the revolving door has the potential to change politicians, and thereby policy. Even though my study does not compare policy proposed by returners with that proposed by non-returners, it suggests a proposition to be explored: that the disciplining power of socialization alters revolvers’ language, process skills and networks in a way that makes them carriers of corporatization (David, 2012). If that is the case, the revolving door has the potential to transform the political system from within, influencing both the content of policies and the way they are communicated. In the long run, politicians who talk and think about politics in terms of corporate production risk contributing to voter alienation.

Moreover, passing through the revolving door is more complex than previously theorized. The traditional political science narrative of the revolving door is that it provides an incentive for regulators – political money – to ignore voters’ wishes and instead pursue a self-serving agenda (Draca, 2014). This might be true. But the findings here point to the perils of seeing the revolving door solely from a transactional perspective, in which actors make rational choices to further their own material gain. In fact, the process is more similar to what has been described as ‘cultural capture’ (Kwak, 2014), a paraphrase of the more recognized term ‘regulatory capture’ used to denote the complex cultural process by which regulators actually change their mindset and identities as they socialize with corporate representatives. In many ways, the revolving door is an extreme case of such cultural capture, allowing politicians to become ‘captive’ not only by fraternizing with corporate actors but by becoming one of them. Hence, to any actor interested in understanding or even regulating the revolving door, considering the institutional and cultural conditions surrounding politics might be as important as minimizing bad economic incentives.