Corporations and Cultural Studies

Abstract

About a decade ago, Gore Vidal wrote a piece for the New York Review of Books in which he posed as the champion of Louis Auchincloss. As I remember it, he was looking for an answer to an obvious question: Why were academic intellectuals and literary critics uninterested in the kind of power that permeated Auchincloss's fictional world of big business, law, and high finance? It was a rhetorical question, of course. Academic intellectuals typically scold themselves for not acting in and on what they call the sphere, where real political power and possibility presumably lie, but they proudly abstain from the corruptions of the so-called private sector, where hierarchies and profit motives seemingly shape all social relations. Whether scolding or abstaining, such intellectuals remain innocent in the original sense of the word: they remain outside a world in which causes have effects. The papers on corporate culture in this issue of Social Text are promising signs of recovery from this innocence. They suggest that we need to treat corporations as scenes of ideological struggle, as sources and bearers of cultural meanings as well as of professional solidarities, as institutions through which most working lives are shaped-and therefore as appropriate objects of cultural studies. Indeed, they suggest that the corporation is not even out there in a world that must be foreign to academia or, for that matter, to the hallowed public sphere. Each paper has its own way of suggesting these insights, but they converge, I think, on the notion that the cultural valence of corporations is at least as significant and complex as that of popular film or fiction; accordingly, they converge on the principle that corporate culture requires the kinds of close reading that are now used to interpret extracanonical and practices. But this is a principle that has regulated business history-the historiography of the firm-for quite some time. The texts that business historians have long studied are probably not as interesting or entertaining as those produced by Tom Peters; even so, they do reveal the corporation as a necessarily contested terrain, as a legal convention or social experiment that works only insofar as it registers, modulates, and makes productive the conflicts that once threatened (especially in the late nineteenth century) to devolve into armed class struggle. If the study of corporate