In the sense you will meet most in news and protest talk, corporatism is the power and influence that huge companies have — over jobs, over what we buy, over news, and over what the government does. It is not about one small shop. It is about the very big firms that can hire thousands of people, buy smaller companies, and sit in the room when laws are written. The word often carries a complaint: the companies are running too much of the show. It is fairly formal; you find it in essays and political talk, not in the kitchen. Though actually, older books use corporatism for something else, and that still matters in politics class. There it means a system where the state, the unions, and the business groups sit together as blocs and fix wages and rules — not “the companies win,” but “the big groups bargain.” Some European countries were described that way. So if you only learn “big companies have power,” you will misread those older pages. One word now carries two stories, and newspapers often use the newer, looser one.