The annual World Economic Forum in Davos this weekend will, in some people's eyes, gather together prime candidates for what have been called totalitarian corporations: ABB Asea Brown Boveri, AOL/Time Warner, BP Amoco, Du Pont, IBM, Suez Lyonnaise des Eaux and Volkswagen, among others.

Should we fear powerful, controlling mega-corporates in an era of mergers bounding by billions over each other?

This is a serious question. It is also one which too often seems capable of being answered only by lots of economic analysis and by armies of scaffolders performing complex feats of cultural deconstruction and reconstruction.

Meantime, many people actually managing businesses will smile wryly - or even have fits of laughter - at the idea of an all-knowing, tightly-controlled, and even more tightly-controlling, corporate management. Businesses, like a lot of other endeavours including government and media, often succeed despite all the chaos, the mediocrity, the messing and the nonsense.

For now, I want to offer some random quotes in a tiny sample of the business press that illustrate just how little controlled, and how absurd and unpredictable, a lot of corporate control turns out to be.

These are from the International Herald Tribune, where analysts and business managers seem a bit more pithy than here - or is it frank, foolish or simply better trained in the dark art of the soundbite?

The great big German-US company, Daimler Chrysler AG was reported to have sold more luxury cars in the US than American manufacturers last year. A brilliant bit of market planning and execution?

"We were surprised," said Juergen Hubbert, who runs Mercedes. "It was not our target to become number one." He couldn't even get a sales prediction right.

"My guess is that one and one will mean more than two," an Internet analyst at Merrill Lynch was quoted in relation to the EMI-Time Warner deal.

By the time you get to this level in business, you know what a person means when they say, "one and one equals more than two". It wouldn't make you think of tight control and predictability, though, more like logic going awry.

The head of AT&T, commenting on the Time Warner-AOL merger, grappled with the business of the Internet departing from ordinary, decent financial planning when he said, "Well, I happen to think that cash has value."

Now you know. This is another thing that ordinary people take as most plainly true, but at the higher, controlling, echelons, one can't be so sure any more. "I know that it's not `in' these days. But I believe in the end, cash will be king." Life has become a little psychedelic in the world of Internet stocks, a world where the head of AT&T sounds like a maverick asserting that cash has value.

In New York, the partners of the investment bank, Lazard Freres, are annoyed at being kept in the dark about the pay package of a new partner, Vernon Walters.

Mr Walters is a former political adviser to President Clinton. The news leaked out, however, that he was to be paid a $5 million (€4.8 million) salary, with a generous housing allowance and bonuses.

"Don't forget, he has absolutely no investment banking experience," said a former Lazards partner. This looks more like the theatre of the absurd than the march of totalitarian, all-controlling capitalism.

We also had the ordinary, boring business story of the chief executive of Dorling Kindersley in the UK resigning because the company invested too heavily in Star Wars merchandise for the Christmas market, and sales flopped. Dominating the market? Prescribing the toys our children will become obsessed with? If only, if only, the now ex-chief executive might say.

What else? Big, big mega-corp Procter and Gamble abandoned an acquisition with Waner Lambert and American Home Products which "could have been a blockbuster combination of technology, marketing and scale capabilities". What could have been. Leaks and speculation were blamed for creating "an environment where the discussions couldn't continue". Was this control too?

I could go on, citing example after example from only the daily business press to show the degree to which planning and control eludes corporate managers.

The case will then be put that there is something structural and inexorable about capitalist control, whatever the absurdities and unpredictabilities that individual companies struggle with. That is where the reams of analysis come in.

All I can add for now is that the more involved and detailed the data, the greater it seems to me the reliance that is placed on a prior ideology explaining what the data should mean.

There is, as yet, no world government; there is, as yet, no controlling world corporation; vigilance, human rebelliousness and free business competition will protect us from both.

Oliver O'Connor is editor of the monthly publication Finance. E- mail: ooconnor@indigo.ie