kevingillan.info — — — > corporations

Conservatives in power, vicious cuts applied to the welfare state while regressive taxes increase, police violence perpetrated against the poor against a background of declining legitimacy. Yes, the parallels between 2011 and 1981 are irresistibly suggestive of a political explanation for the British summer riots.

(more…)

In Times of the Technoculture, my old boss Frank Webster argued that current info society trends in the capitalist economy are largely the logical extension of trends that have been around more or less since the birth of capitalism. Specifically, Taylorism brought scientific management to the workplace, with surveillance and discipline hand in hand; but there were full on plans (through an organisation of engineers and capitalists called ‘The New Machine’) to take those advances in efficiency into the realms of politics and society where a (positive) form of social control was expected to make life generally more pleasant. Using the new information techniques to keep track of mass consumption they started to do market research and develop scientific principles of advertising. (ref: HC Link, 1932, The New Psychology of Selling and Advertising)

“In a paean to American productivism, David Potter suggests that ‘advertising [is] an instrument of social control’; it is, he continues, ‘the only institution which we have for instilling new needs, for training people to act as consumers, for alterning men’s values, and thus for hastening their adjustment to potential abundance’.” (Potter, 1954; quoted in Robins & Webster, 1999: 97)

So, here we have a claim that consumerism is not in any way natural, but needs to be inculcated, a belief in the coming abundance of capitalism, and a valorisation of the advertisers’ abilities to change people’s values, all wrapped up in one tidy quote! The ‘New Machine’ certainly has plenty of momentum, but now we’re beginning to realise that there really are limits to growth and market expansion we need some development akin to advertising for altering values and thus hastening their adjustment to potential scarcity – who’s going to take on that job? Could that be what Tesco are up to with the Institute for Sustainable Consumption Institute?

Paper presented to the European Sociological Association General Conference, Lisbon, September 2009.

Abstract:

The academic publisher Reed Elsevier also organised the world’s largest defence exhibitions. The exhibitions themselves have regularly met vibrant street protests, and from 2005 campaigners targeted the corporate organisers. A coordinated network of anti-arms trade activists, academics, medical professionals and institutional shareholders formed a multifaceted campaign that sought to persuade the corporation to change its behaviour on its own terms. After initial intransigence, Reed Elsevier divested itself of its defence sector activities in 2008.
On the basis of interviews with activists and corporate employees, this paper addresses two sets of questions about the Elsevier campaign. First, what are the components of a successful, corporate-focused campaign? Insights from the recently expanded literature on the outcomes of social movements will be tested against both facts of this case and the conscious strategy pursued by participants. I will argue that the movement outcomes literature continues to cope better with movements demanding state responses than those directed at corporations. Secondly, therefore, this paper examines a set of broader questions about the character of moral demands placed on corporate activity, and the way in which management discourses of corporate responsibility or citizenship partially constrains the response of relevant decision makers.

You can download the presentation slides from: Moral Business Presentation (ppt).

Presentation at Medsin Global Health Conference, University of Manchester, 29^th March 2009.

This talk was based on recent research into the campaign that persuaded Reed Elsevier to quit the defence sector. You can download the powerpoint slides here.