Filed under: Corporate Citizenship, Public Opinion | Tags: Corporate Citizenship, Corporate Reputation, CSR, film, Murdoch, News Corporation, pharmaceuticals, Public Opinion
So, the anti-corporate hysteria in Britain reaches new heights thanks to Murdoch and his evil empire. Funny that nobody would be better at goading the public and fuelling the outrage than News of the World.
The media and the public are all complicit in this, I think: everybody wants a simple story of good vs. evil with a villain and a few victims. The current scandal is like NOTW journalism at its finest.
I shared some slides on “corporate archetypes” in the U.S. last week – News International certainly fits the bill as malevolent megacorp, unaccountable and out of control. This is a strong theme in culture, one we all grew up with – especially in film: corporates are often the bad guys, never the good guys. Here are some examples:
Terminator
Part corporation, part computer – Skynet sends cyborgs from the future to kill an innocent mum, Sarah Conner. Here’s Skynet’s own corporate film:
It’s A Wonderful Life
Good guy George Carlin fights to prevent the bad-guy bankers from taking over the town. When people think of Bob Diamond from Barclays, they hear echoes of Mr. Potter, in this clip:
Erin Brokovitch
True story of an unemployed single mother taking on a multi-billion dollar corporation – and winning. Here she is, kicking ass in the boardroom:
The China Syndrome
A sinister conspiracy to cover up a nuclear accident – weirdly, released just 12 days before the Three Mile Island accident. Here’s the trailer:
Avatar
The fight to save a remote civilisation from RDA, a military-corporate entity run by Parker Selfridge. He’s an interesting villain – young and ambitious in an MBA type way. Here’s a profile of him:
The Constant Gardener
A widower tries to get to the bottom of his wife’s death – a “corporate murder” at the hands of a pharmaceuticals company. Here’s the trailer:
Total Recall
Arnie plays a hard-grafting construction worker who ends up in a battle with Rekall,Inc – a corporation with the technology to implant fake memories. Here’s their commercial,
So – big evil corporate, that’s a deep cultural archetype. Got it. The point here is not “oh poor corporates” – far from it: corporates have done much to deserve their reputation as bad guys. But that’s not the whole story: business can be a positive force in society – and those of us who want to be part of that need to realize there is some deep cultural resistance to this idea.
And what about the evil Murdoch Empire? I’m no fan of Murdoch, but the whole Punch & Judy show is Britain at its worst: a sanctimonious media, a meek and uncritical public, a pompous and ineffective House of Commons. If Murdoch has (/had) any power, it’s because it was given to him by desperate politicians, and a bored public in search of grubby entertainment.
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Conflating corporations with business is like conflating capitalism with the market economy. Humans can and have had one without the other, and the latter have existed for centuries — even millenia — without the former. People in the U.S. tend to use these terms interchangeably, or at least assume that one pre-supposes or requires the other, when in fact historically that simply isn’t the case.
Before you assume a need for (and benefits from) corporations, keep in mind that human society, economy, and culture existed long before corporations or capitalism, which are relatively recent inventions, and that many of the things that people assume come from corporations could just as easily come without them, if our society, economy, and politics were organized differently.
Assuming that our economy requires us to have corporations because that’s the way the economy you grew up in is organized is like assuming that we all need camels to get around because you grew up in a desert. Instead of assuming that what you see around you is the only way things can be, why not take a few minutes (or longer) and consider some alternatives — especially by viewing other societies around the world, and considering other periods in human history that might serve as alternative examples of economic organization …
Comment by CounterCorp July 28, 2011 @ 8:37 pmThanks for you comment. A very valid challenge – I realize I’m guilty of conflating “business” and “corporations”. I’m sure you could have gone further, in fact – corporations can even be anti-businesses, when they act in their own interests to stifle entrepreneurship and competition. Corporates can also be “anti market economy”, when the alliance of corporations and governments creates long-standing structural lock-ins for corporate interests, or when “too big to fail” prevents the selective power of the market from working.
I’m not seeking to defend corporates. I’m fully aware that the anti-corporate archetypes I’m writing about exist for good reasons. Many of the films I reference are based on or derived from actual events, after all. In the developing world, corporates have a long history of exploiting natural and human resources, inflicting considerable environmental damage and human suffering. However, governments have equally dubious histories, but it’s hard to be realistically anti-government. Many people have done evil things, but not many people would describe themselves as anti-people. Being anti-corporate seems to be simplistic.
Corporates can be the most effective mobilizers of change at scale. That’s the basic thesis here: if a large corporate decides, for example, that the worlds biggest watersheds are worth preserving, then they are capable of developing and implementing solutions, in collaboration with governments and NGOs, with a scale and speed that tends not to happen without them (e.g., work by PepsiCo and Diageo). Also, corporates can be effective catalysts of economic growth, driving small business growth as supply chains become embedded locally (e.g., enterprise development programs by Coca-Cola and SABMiller – and the latter is the first corporate to invest in South Sudan, which is welcomed by the new government there).
That’s my hope with this: that corporates will stop being demonized, and that most talented graduates will want to get involved, and be part of mobilizing corporate power to have a positive impact. The corporates I work with are increasingly aware of the need to give a full account of their role in society – and this gives me grounds for optimism. And it’s because of work by people like you, keeping on the pressure and the scrutiny. So, I’m very happy to discuss further. In the meantime, thanks again.
Comment by Jon Miller July 31, 2011 @ 2:51 pm“[G]overnments have equally dubious histories, but it’s hard to be realistically anti-government.” Really? A lot of people in the U.S. and even less democratic countries (Syria comes to mind, and much of Africa) seem to have no problem being anti-government.
As for corporations being “effective mobilizers of change at scale”, that’s largely if not exclusively a function of money — they have it (for reasons discussed below), whereas other groups such as non-profits don’t. The only other institution that can bring those kinds of financial resources to bear is the government. If we gave Chevron’s annual budget to an organization such as Greenpeace, the latter could mobilize change at scale, too (and probably a lot faster and more efficiently).
And the idea that corporations are particularly efficient catalysts of economic growth is vastly over-hyped and simply not borne out by empirical data — in much of the world, corporations actually limit the economic development that might otherwise take place, were local workers and businesses not limited to merely providing cheap resources at the bottom rungs of the corporate supply and value chain.
For example, coffee farmers have been providing raw beans to huge international corporations for over 100 years, yet most can barely subsist on the remuneration they receive, while the companies themselves make billions of dollars in profits. Indeed, corporations go out of their way to deliberately *not* assist in the development of other economies (and even ours), by forcing down wages and other input prices as low as they can in the name of higher profits and returns to shareholders.
This exploitation of resources (including labor) is the explicit business model of corporations — it’s in their DNA, so to speak. That is the great contradiction that those who would like to see corporations as a force for good cannot reconcile: Both things can’t be true at the same time …
Comment by CounterCorp January 30, 2012 @ 11:09 pm