This is a truly excellent book, which should take the field of international political economy in promising directions. Firm Interests deserves a wide audience of political scientists, policymakers, economists, and scholars of management, public policy, and business–government relations. As a field, international political economy has, with a simple theoretical tool kit, produced some useful findings about the influence of firms' material realities on policy outcomes. Alas, the microfoundations of those findings have remained elusive, in part because even our best studies have tended toward stylization. At the risk of doing some violence to the now-rich literature on commercial policymaking, the norm has been to derive the preferences of firms on the basis of an economy's factor endowments or, alternatively, factors specific to import-competing industries. Some scholars, such as Michael Hiscox, have combined these material alternatives productively.

Yet there is so much more to the world and, in particular, so much of the world that continues to elude those baseline expectations derived from materialist theories. We can indeed make scientific progress by deducing preferences of organizations, including firms, from material structures. Alas, as scholars, we continue to be confounded by actual policy outcomes and, more interestingly, actual firms' preferences. Despite many similarities in the material realities faced by firms, “business lobbying,” Cornelia Woll observes, “differs fundamentally across sectors and countries” (p. xiii).

Woll's book is a wonderful contribution, which will help us to make better sense of how firms' managers decide what is best and, as well, how firms attempt to influence policies in their favor. “Firms,” Woll writes, “do not always know what they want from trade negotiations” (p. xi). For many of the most important questions in international political economy, our existing materialist theories are simply not good enough because they do not explain enough of the world. We can and should do better.

Woll has done better—much better—than existing scholarship by, first of all, doing something quite straightforward, if time intensive: She has engaged in impressive field research to find out what firms wanted and why. She has combined prodigious secondary research with primary interviews of many of the firms that participated in some of the most important trade debates of the past 20 years regarding service trade liberalization.

Instead of inevitability, Woll has found contingency. She uncovers the pervasive influences of regulatory and political arrangements, the identities of the firms, and managers' beliefs, as well as the institutional opportunities those managers discovered when they tried to influence policies. Surprisingly, she has found that, in general, firms supported service liberalization in both the United States and Europe. In particular, two chapters provide ample evidence to confirm her approach. The chapter on telecommunication services includes illuminating interviews that Woll conducted with lobbyists in Washington, DC, officials from the World Trade Organization secretariat in Geneva, executives from France Télécom in Paris, officials of the European Commission in Brussels, and representatives of the U.S. government. She has admirably included the reflections, some in real time and others retrospectively, of the very people who produced the commercial and regulatory outcomes about which others have only hypothesized from afar.

Woll's account is also theoretically sophisticated. In place of materialist theories that have advanced the field only so far, she develops a constructivist theory of firms' preferences and lobbying efforts. Building on the work of Jens Beckert and Mark Blyth, Woll emphasizes the pervasive “Knightian uncertainty” that firms face about how changes in trade policies will likely affect their profitability and survival. She employs the concept of Knightian uncertainty from economic sociology in a standard way: Rather than looking at a situation as defined by risk, in which agents can assign probabilities to outcomes, many firms' managers understand the world they inhabit as often defined by uncertainty of the sort described by the economist Frank Knight, whereby agents lack the information necessary to assign probabilities to possible outcomes. Business lobbying on trade policy evidently combines uncertainty about both the desirability of various strategies and the likely effects of emergent regulatory regimes. Following Beckert and Blyth, Woll argues that firms, like other agents, “rely on social devices to reduce uncertainty, such as traditions, networks, institutions, and the use of power” (p. 12).

In Woll's framework, firms' managers first define the identities of their firms; then, facing uncertainty, they adopt a strategy based on hypothesized means to reach desired ends. That strategy must, in turn, be tailored to the institutional environment faced by the firm. The analytical structure produces an intuitively plausible decision tree: All firms seek to survive, aiming at enhanced profitability or mere stability; to seek those goals, they may aim for the status quo, protection, or expansion; finally, those specific policies might be domestic regulation, subsidies, tariffs, patent law, or reciprocal liberalization.

I have only two modest complaints about a book that would otherwise be difficult to improve. First, it is somewhat austere. Chapter 2, “Business Interests in Political Economy,” includes dozens of insightful arguments to which many more pages could have been devoted. An excellent table on page 34 outlining how interests, preferences, and strategies of politicians, nation-states, and firms interrelate could, with elaboration, almost be a theory chapter on its own. The author's analysis of how variations in interests, preferences, and strategies connect to firms' identities, causal and normative beliefs, and the strategic environment is also fascinating, but only a few pages (pp. 35–38) are devoted to its explication. As a reader, I was eager to learn much more about her thoughts on these issues. Further development of Woll's agenda will, therefore, have to wait for her next book and the work of other scholars who build on the edifices she has begun to construct.

Second, it might be argued that having endogenized the preferences of firms, Woll has opened a managerial Pandora's box. After several decades in which scholars have been routinely exhorted to trade proper nouns for variables, her analysis emphasizes the specificity with which firms experienced economic and political change. Firms, like states, are also abstractions, however. Firms are organizations, legal entities, populated by individual decision makers. Future work in the research agenda she develops should, by her own acknowledgment, look within those firms as well.

These are minor criticisms of an outstanding book. Overall, Firm Interests should be widely read, admired, and embraced as a model of the next generation of constructivist international political economy scholarship. Woll's book shows how important are both field research and sophisticated, novel theorizing to the progression of our knowledge about how firms and governments relate to one another.