Rewriting the Death and Afterlife of a Corporation: Bethlehem Steel

Abstract

Various genres and media and their accounts of Bethlehem Steel’s history illustrate the relationality of its corporate personhood, and the consequent importance of labor and class conflict to critical corporate studies. The Steel’s death and afterlife also extend the field’s ability to see how the survivors of businesses gone bankrupt monumentalize an industrial past to imagine alternative futures in an age of casino capitalism.