Professor Stephen Wilks
BA (Lancaster), PhD (Manchester), FCA
Extension: 3168
Telephone: 01392 723168
Professor of Politics
My long standing interest is in public policy, the core executive and what used to be called public administration. My work has migrated through industrial policy to government industry relations and on, since the early 1990s, to competition policy. More recently I have returned to one of my first research preoccupations which in the political power of business. I have been teaching a course on Business and Politics' which helps to formulate ideas for my prospective research based book on the Political Power of Business, a book that combines structural and instrumental accounts with an institutional analysis and a core concern with theories of political and economic democracy. The students on the course over the past three years have been a fascinating sounding board.
My other research and publication interests include corporate governance and I have an ongoing research project dealing with corporate governance in the public sector. This explores issues of agency independence as well as new public management. (See the December 2007 article in PAC).
The work on competition policy continues both as an academic interest and as a practical concern through my membership of the Competition Commission. My current inquiry deals with the holding by BSkyB of 17.9% in ITV. This is an interesting merger case and also the first 'media pluarilty' public interest case to be considered by the Commission. The academic work includes an article on European competition policy punblished in December 2007 in the European Competition Review and a work in progress paper on the reform of UK policy given as the CCP at UEA in November. This paper is being revised for publication but is available on request.
Forthcoming papers in 2008 include a paper at a competition conference at the University of Erlangen and a paper for Claus-Dieter Ehlermann's European Forum in Florence in June.
