Abstract
Over the course of the previous chapters, I have traced the evolution of soft management theory from the birth of human relations as a reaction against Taylorism to Abraham Maslow’s work on selfactualization and synergy. I have explored the ways a range of writers and filmmakers have presented these theories and their implementation in the workplace as the occasion of significant shifts in the gendered meanings of work in America—shifts that find male workers recast as emotional consumers and female workers committed to a workaholic breed of self-actualization in the guise of liberal feminism. In the previous chapter I began to chart the outlines of corporate culture, the school of management theory that took hold in the 1980s, and which built on both the psychological insights of human relations and the emphasis on synergy and personal growth within the discourse of self-actualization. The remainder of this book examines depictions of corporate culture’s effects on American work, looking particularly at how the softness of this discourse has been presented as both a feminizing and racializing influence on American work and workers.
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Notes
For historical accounts of this reversal of American fortunes in the 1980s, see I.M. Destler, “U.S. Trade Policy-Making in the Eighties,” Politics and Economics in the Eighties, ed. Alberto Alesina and Geoffrey Carliner (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1991), 258–264;
Paul Krugman, The Age of Diminished Expectations: US. Economic Policy in the 1990s (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994), 137–154;
Robert Kuttner, The End of Laissez-Faire: National Purpose and the Global Economy after the Cold War (New York: Knopf, 1991);
and Lester Thurow, Head to Head: The Coming Economic Battle Among Japan, Europe, and America (New York: William Morrow and Co., 1992), 113–151.
Michael Crichton, Rising Sun (New York: Ballantine Books, 1993);
hereafter cited in the text. Tom Clancy, Debt of Honor (New York: Berkley, 1995); hereafter cited in the text.
William G. Ouchi, Theory Z: How American Business Can Meet the Japanese Challenge (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1981), 10. The connection between self-actualization and corporate culture is reflected in Ouchi’s explicit debt to Douglas McGregor’s concepts of Theory X and Theory Y (69).
Graeme Salaman, “Culturing Production,” Production of Culture/Cultures of Production, ed. Paul du Gay (London: Sage, 1997), 247.
Richard Tanner Pascale and Anthony G. Athos, The Art of Japanese Management: Applications for American Executives (New York: Warner Books, 1981), 125.
Thomas J. Peters and Robert H. Waterman Jr., In Search of Excellence: Lessons from America’s Best-Run Companies (New York: Harper & Row, 1982), 282.
Karel Van Wolferen, The Enigma of Japanese Power: People and Politics in a Stateless Nation (New York, Vintage, 1990), 8.
Kurt Vonnegut, Bluebeard (New York: Delacorte, 1987).
William Gibson, “The Winter Market,” Burning Chrome (New York: Ace Books, 1987), 117–141. In fact, Japan plays a prominent role in all of William Gibson’s work. His first novel, Neuromancer, opens in “Chiba City,” which Gibson imagines as an international center of (often illegal) technological innovation. The “decks” into which Gibson’s various protagonists “jack” are consistently represented as Japanese products, reinforcing Japan’s preeminence in the development and production of high-tech consumer items (New York: Ace, 1984). In the Matrix Trilogy this trajectory culminates in Mona Lisa Overdrive, where Gibson’s main character is a young Japanese woman, and a central organizing principle of the novel is the contrast between England and Japan as past and future economic superpowers.
Nicholson Baker, The Mezzanine (New York: Vintage, 1990), and Room Temperature (New York: Vintage, 1990).
Marge Piercy, He, She, and It (New York: Ballantine Books, 1991), 2.
Janice Radway, “On the Gender of the Middlebrow Consumer and the Threat of the Culturally Fraudulent Female,” South Atlantic Quarterly 93 (1994): 875.
Ian Buruma, “It Can’t Happen Here,” The New York Review of Books, April 23, 1992: 3.
Walter L. Hixson, “‘Red Storm Rising’: Tom Clancy Novels and the Cult of National Security,” Diplomatic History 17 (1993): 599–613.
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© 2009 Heather J. Hicks
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Hicks, H.J. (2009). “Sleeping Beauty”: Corporate Culture, Race, and Reality in Michael Crichton’s Rising Sun and Tom Clancy’s Debt of Honor. In: The Culture of Soft Work. American Literature Readings in the 21st Century. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230617919_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230617919_6
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