Abstract
“The giants of e-commerce, who walked among us, are culturally extinct now with a war on.” So writes John Schwartz for the November 25, 2001, issue of the New York Times “Sunday Styles” section. In his rather gleeful description of the dramatic fall of the New Economy, “Dot-Com is Dot-Gone, and the Dream with It,” Schwartz likens defunct e-commerce firms to dinosaur bones lodged in a kind of Silicon Valley Tar Pit. Just in case readers somehow manage to miss the point of the story, a Tyrannosaurus Rex skull, jaws agape against a purple plaid backdrop evocative of a computer screen saver, dominates one half of the “Sunday Styles” frontpage. Schwartz points out that those “e-Decade” cheerleaders, who prematurely announced the rise of a brave new economic world, then began trying to sell memoirs about their own business failures. In short, he suggests, American corporate philosophy has turned away from New Economy discourses and toward more traditional— and perhaps more reliable—business practices. More importantly, Schwartz claims, firms that do not change with the cultural climate are destined for extinction.
Don’t forget this... it’s the law of the universe that the strong shall survive and the weak must fall by the way, and I don’t give a damn what idealistic plan is cooked up, nothing can change that.
—Walt Disney
Look, it’s ridiculous to call this an industry... This is not. This is rat eat rat, dog eat dog. I’ll kill ‘em, and I’m going to kill ‘em before they kill me. You’re talking about the American way of survival of the fittest.
—Kay Kroc1
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Notes
These Walt Disney and Ray Rroc comments were unearthed by Eric Schlosser in Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2001), 37.
The links between Foucault’s work and self-help discourses—both within and outside the business realm—have been usefully traced by Heidi Marie Rimke, “Governing Citizens through Self-Help Literature.” Cultural Studies 14:1 (2000): 61–78
Nikolas Rose, Inventing Our Selves: Psychology, Power and Personhood (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996)
Alan McKinlay and Ken Starkey’s edited essay collection, Foucault, Management and Organization Theory: From Panopticon to Technologies of Self (London: Sage Publications, 1998)
It is important to underscore here Deleuze’s insistence on the coexistence of discipline and control models of power. For example, the American corporate offices of a transnational company like Nike may exhibit many of the tendencies described by Deleuze in his essay, but the people who provide Nike’s outsourced sweatshop labor may (and often do) live under a discipline-oriented management regime. Physical, factory-based, and just-plain-unglamorous labor is too often ignored by business writers and management gurus. As Doug Henwood notes in his discussion of George Gilder’s work, Gilder celebrates New Economy knowledge workers and their lifestyles, but overlooks “the teenage women going blind from soldering circuits in the Philippines, the low-wage workers packed six to a room in the Silicon Valley, the reporters and data-entry clerks paralyzed by repetitive strain injury” (Henwood, After the New Economy [London and New York: New Press, 2003], 11).
For detailed accounts of the history of social Darwinism, I recommend the works of Caudill (Darwinian Myths); Mike Hawkins (Social Darwinism in European and American Thought, 2860–2945: Nature as Model and Nature as Threat [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997])
Michael Rose Darwin’s Spectre: Evolutionary Biology in the Modern World [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998])
Alexander Rosenberg Darwinism in Philosophy, Social Science and Policy [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000]).
Bill Boisvert argues that organization theory was once dominated by vocabulary and imagery culled from physics (as seen in the work of Frederick Taylor and his followers), but later, by mid-twentieth century, emphasized concepts derived from biology, including evolution and symbiosis. He also discusses the valorization of “predators” in business literature—for example, the admiration expressed in several business advice books for Attila the Hun. The Mongols, it seems, were best suited to adapt to harsh environments and to run roughshod over naive believers in order and stability as success strategies (Boisvert, “Apostles of the New Entrepreneur: Business Books and the Management Crisis,” in Commodify Tour Dissent: The Business of Culture in the Gilded Age: Salvos from the Baffler, eds. Thomas Frank and Matt Weiland [New York and London: W W Norton, 1997], 92–93).
Eric Schlosser, Fust Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2001), 36.
Greil Marcus, Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989), 46.
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© 2009 Megan Brown
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Brown, M. (2009). Survival at Work: Flexibility and Adaptability in American Corporate Culture. In: The Cultural Work of Corporations. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230100626_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230100626_3
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