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California State University, Dominguez Hills
University of Wisconsin, Parkside
Created: September 6, 2004
Reviewed:
Latest Update: September 6, 2004
jeannecurran@habermas.org
takata@uwp.edu
The Death of a Thousand Cuts: Corporate Campaigns and the Attack on the Corporation.
- Introduction
Why I chose to share this reading.- Focus:
Main point of this reading.- Reading
Full identification of source for reading AND excerpt.- Concepts:
Concepts and Key Words.- Discussion
Discussion questions.- Conceptual Linking to Substantive Courses
What this has to do with our class.* * *
- I came across this review while checking out the National Lawyers Guild Progressive Links. The links were broken, but I somehow ended up at this review Mannheim's book. I don't have the book. I'll go hunt for it. But the review raises important issues I'd like you to consider. The Left and the poor tend to think of corporations as attacking. They have power, money, and they use it to meet their own agenda, certainly not ours. But the review suggests that Mannheim really sympathizes with the corporations, but has done some solid work on researching the history of such interchanges. What a great wway to locate both sides of this issues. Trust me, corporations don't have a corner on all the "bad guys." Lefties and the poor have their own share of "bad guys." That's one reason revolutions don't work; they usually just loose one set of "bad guys" on their "opposite numbers." No, I didn't read Trotsky on why revolutions don't work. Maybe when classes are over this semester.
- I would like you to try to take the perspective of a corporate executive "good guy" trying to understand the anti-corporate stance.
- left: social and political perspective that favors lessening the wealth gap, guaranteeing minimal standards of living to all citizens, generally opposes more prisons, in favor of restorative justice over punishment, in favor of safety nets, on the theory that sometimes "good" people do encounter "bad" luck and need help, as part of our general survival structure, not "charity."
- Leftie: Nickname for person with left perspective; should be used only by others with same perspective. NO name calling allowed. Respect the Other.
- "good guy:" In this context, person with no intent to harm others, be they fellow workers or fellow executives, whatever their position on the corporate-labor issue.
- "bad guy:" In this context, person with an agenda and/or unresolved anger, who wants to "get the Other guy." We mean by that that he/she intends to cause the Other a loss in wages, insult them, impute bad attitudes and personality traits to them. We're not talking "Star Wars" here.
- Manheim, Jarol B. The Death of a Thousand Cuts: Corporate Campaigns and the Attack on the Corporation. Mahwah NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2001. 362 pages.
Jarol Manheim, a professor at George Washington University, has produced a book that is unique, comprehensive, and utterly obscure. This is a history of the organized anti-corporate campaign that began with New Left activists in the 1960s, and today is increasingly sponsored by labor unions. It's not a general, continuous movement (although it could become one soon), but rather a series of nearly 200 campaigns against specific corporations over specific issues during the last 30 years. The worst nightmare of corporate public relations departments, the typical anti-corporate campaign throws it back in their faces, using some of the same mass-media techniques (the author calls it "strategic political communication"). A well-done campaign can have a devastating effect on a company's stock price.Manheim tries to be academically objective, but he also seems to sense that most of his readers will be professional PR hacks who are paid to know the enemy. The reader gets an occasional innuendo that hints at his distaste for the rabble (maybe we're just sensitive). But the book is so thoroughly researched, with so many concrete examples and so many names, that all is forgiven. This is first time we've seen the terms "power structure analysis" and "power structure research" in print in 25 years. It's been a long wait. ISBN 0-8058-3831-7
- The Regulatory Power of the Corporate Reputation: Corporations Confront Anti-Corporate Activism in an Era of Globalisation Working Paper: Centre for Risk Research, Shiga University, Japan. By Dr. Terry O’Callaghan, Centre for International Risk, School of International Studies, University of South Australia, Rm. 3-46, Way Lee Building, City West Campus. Backup. Austrailian literature tends to take a left perspective. the Mannheim book a right perspective. Bear that in mind as we develop arguments for our governance discourse on corporate responsibility to workers.
- How?
Things to be considered in answer.
- Why?
Things to be considered in answer.
- Do you think?
Some clue to what you were thinking about.
Conceptual Linking to Substantive Courses:
- Agencies:
Sample linking: Ways in which underlying assumptions of assimilation affect services offered and clients' ability to access and use those services. How does this reading illustrate the need for social agencies, for more generalized agencies, for what Bolman and Deal would call "leadership" AND "management"? How does this reading suggest ways in which we could be more effective in rendering help, and what is the reading's relationship to a "safety net" for those who need help?
- Criminal Justice:
Sample linking: Ways in which some groups are underrepresented in the unstated assumptions of our theories. How does this reading serve to illustrate adversarialism, mutuality, retribution, revenge, illocutionary understanding, the definition and operation of the criminal justice system?
- Law:
Sample linking: Extent to which laws are made on the assumption that we are all essentially assimilated to the dominant culture. How does this reading help us see the need for contextual readings in law? How does it relate to our natural instincts to seek some kind of natural law? What facts and principles does the reading offer for discourse that could clarify for Others validity claims presented by an Obscure Other?
- Moot Court:
Sample linking: Ways in which to make validty claims of harm understood by those who have never experienced many of the world's different perspectives. How can this reading enlighten our praxis in terms of different kinds of discourse, like instrumental, illocutionary, governance?
- Women in Poverty:
Sample linking: The culture of poverty and assimilation. How does the reading deal with our underlying assumptions about poverty, especially poverty of the exploited, the NOT- male? What does the reading suggest of the interrelationship between our society and its children, generally cared for by women, often poor?
- Race, Gender, Class:
Sample linking: The extent to which silence has been imposed by these affiliations so that domination and discrimination have entered our unstated assumptions in interpersonal relations and the structural context arising from them. What does the reading tell us about exploitation and alternative ways to deal with one another? What does it tell us about institutionalized -isms and our denial of complicity? What does it tell us about our common humanity?
- Religion:
Sample linking: The spiritual component. Humans are spiritual creatures, creatures that recognize moments that go beyond ourselves to God, Allah, Isis, Gaia, the Universe, or a deep sense of responsibility to create our own meanng. How does the reading fit into our ability, our need to create such meaning in life?
- Love !A:
Sample linking: What's the aesthetic link in this reading? How does it bring us closer to one another as humans? What does it tell us about our need for love, unconditional love, not rewards for doing well or being well, but caring and acceptance for being who we are?
