Abstract
So far in this book, I have emphasized the strengthening of corporate influence in (and on) American culture, especially the way business values may exponentially expand the presence of work in people’s daily lives. The following have been noted in earlier chapters:
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The business world’s celebration of worker individuality and “freedom” operates in the service of corporate governance by leveraging aspects of employees’ identities, encouraging loyalty and creativity, and reducing possibilities for tension in the workplace.
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The value that corporations place on adaptability and flexibility means that work-related training can become boundless and constant.
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Companies’ interest in their workers’ physical health contributes to a process whereby people are groomed to be ideal employees: optimally productive, diligent, and free of non-work distractions.
She studies the simple formula: a pound of fat makes two pounds of soap, one of which will trade for the next pound of fat. A simple enough thing, and nothing can keep it from covering the earth.
—Richard Towers, Gain1
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Notes
Richard Powers, Gain (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998), 295.
For a firsthand account of the Pat Kehm case, see Kehm family attorney Tom Riley’s 1986 book, The Price of a Life: One Woman’s Death from Toxic Shock (Chevy Chase, MD: Adler & Adler, 1986).
Gilles Deleuze’s concept of “control society,” as defined in “Control and Becoming” (1990) and “Postscript on Control Societies,” 1990, Negotiations: 1972–1990, trans. Martin Joughin (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), also figures prominently in Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s Empire (Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press, 2000).
Swasy also argues that this internal competition may have serious health consequences for P&G employees: “A report on the top medical claims by P&Gers shows that three of the four top claims were stress-related, such as heart attacks” (Alecia Swasy, Soap Opera: The Inside Story of Procter & Gamble [New York: Times Books, 1993], 11).
For a longer discussion of Gain and risk theory, see Ursula Heise, “Toxins, Drugs, and Global Systems: Bisk and Narrative in the Contemporary Novel.” American Literature 74.4 (2002): 747–778.
As Fredric Jameson writes about capitalist globalization, “The system is better seen as a kind of virus... and its development as something like an epidemic (better still, a rash of epidemics, an epidemic of epidemics). The system has its own logic, which powerfully undermines and destroys the logic of more traditional or pre-capitalist societies and economies... But epidemics sometimes play themselves out, like a fire for want of oxygen, and they also leap to new and more propitious settings, in which the preconditions are favorable to renewed development” (Jameson, The Cultural Turn: Selected Writings on the Postmodern, 1983–1998 [London and New York: Verso, 1998], 139–140).
Oscar Schisgall provides a dubious description of the latter: “After extensive consultation with educators in many states, [P&G’s] educational services group—as part of its consumerism program—offered teaching aids free to teachers. Soon some 50,000 educators were using P&G teaching guides and films. One reason for the broad acceptance of the program was its noncommercial, objective tone. Emphasis lay on how new products are tested, on the importance of consumer reaction, and on the role of advertising behind a brand” (Schisgall, Eyes on Tomorrow: The Evolution of Procter & Gamble [Chicago: J. G. Ferguson Publishing, 1981], 275).
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© 2009 Megan Brown
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Brown, M. (2009). Everything to Gain: The Intensification of Corporate Progress, Presence, and Risk. In: The Cultural Work of Corporations. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230100626_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230100626_5
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