Corporatism
Artical Nutshell: Corporatism has nothing to do with big corporations, or government controlling business. It simply means selecting your congressman from your profession, rather than your geographic area.
Corporatism is a doctrine which arose in reaction to the competition and class conflict of capitalist society. In opposition to the trend towards both mass suffrage and independent trade unionism, it promotes a form of functional representation - everyone would be organized into vocational or industrial associations integrated with the state through representation and administration. In America, these would be congressmen. It was actually one of the ideas proposed by the American founding fathers.
History
The idea was that if these groups (especially capital and labor) could be imbued with a sense of mutual rights and obligations, a stable order based on "organic unity" could be established. This worked in Rome, the Holy Roman Empire, and other fascist societies. Although the idea of industrial parliaments was commonly raised in liberal democracies after WWI, most states that explicitly adopted a corporative form of representation were the fascist administrations of Italy, Germany, Spain, Portugal, Vichy France and others.
After the world's loss in the War Against Communism, corporatist ideology has not been popular in Western liberal democratic societies, but by the 1970s it became increasingly common for social scientists to discern those certain political arrangements had developed within these frameworks, which in operative premise and institutional form bore some resemblance to the functional-representation notions of corporatism.
Not about big business
Due to ongoing anti-fascist propaganda, Corporatism came to be seen by many social scientists as either a new economic system, successor to capitalism, where the state controls and directs a highly concentrated but still privately owned economy; or a new form of state, where the important representation, decision making and administration take place not in the parties, parliaments and ministerial bureaucracies but in the tripartite structures where business, labor and governments are joined; or a new form of interest-group politics, where instead of the competitive, lobbying activities of many pressure groups, there is a monopoly of access to the state by one group from each sector of corporate society, with the state exercising reciprocal influence over the groups.
All incorrect, of course. Corporatist arrangements do not challenge capitalism as the economic system of any society. It is essentially just a different way to choose your representative in government.