American Business Culture Research Articles

Julio Moreno — Yankee Don't Go Home! Mexican Nationalism, American Business Culture, and the Shaping of Modern Mexico, 1920-1950

Left History features articles from a variety of theoretical approaches; these include feminist, marxist, and postmodernist deliberations on topics such as race, ethnicity, class, gender, sexuality, culture, the state, labour, the environment, theory, and method.

Yankee don't go home!: Mexican nationalism, American business culture, and the shaping of modern Mexico, 1920-1950

Yankee don't go home!: Mexican nationalism, American business culture, and the shaping of modern Mexico, 1920-1950

Diversity in the high-tech workplace: making engineers feel at home

Intel Corp.'s intercultural training for employees is described. The keystone of the program is a multicultural integration workshop, a one-day session where newly hired professionals get together with managers to identify the cross-cultural issues in the workplace that affect them directly. This is augmented by courses on American business culture, accent improvement, speaking under pressure, American idioms and vocabulary in the workplace, and technical and business writing.< <ETX xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">&gt;</ETX>

Andrew Carnegie and the Discourse of Cultural Hegemony

Can cultural change be explained as a function of discourse? A discourse is any language territory, whether a mode of thinking, talking or writing, which presupposes shared assumptions between its producer and consumer. This means that the relationship between language and ideology is dependent upon the nature of a particular discourse. This paper offers comments on this question with reference to the formation of the post-bellum American business culture and its ideology by examining the written works of one of its leading exponents, the industrialist Andrew Carnegie. Working from the assumption that this business culture was serving the interests of a new ruling group at the expense of subordinate Populist-Producer ones, does an evaluation of the business-man's discourse reveal how it helped create that ideological domination? Both Hayden White and Michel Foucault have claimed that culture can be explored by reference to the primary figurative modes of discourse, particularly the tropes of metonymy and synecdoche. Basic to this rhetorical approach to cultural formation is its assumption that ideology is a function of discourse, even though White, the most devoted practitioner of the theory of the poetic foundation of cultural practices, recognises Foucault's insight that discourse resides in the world and is bound up with property ownership, power and the imposition of force. Assuming that power is embedded in a dominant social formation, business spokesmen like Carnegie, working to maintain the authority of a particular class, did so through a range of discursive cultural practices that contended with others for dominance. In the Gramscian model of cultural change Andrew Carnegie was anorganic intellectualin as much as he functioned according to the interests of the newfundamentalclass of the wealthy industrial bourgeoisie.

From Ambushes to Golden Parachutes: Corporate Takeovers as an Instance of Cultural Framing and Institutional Integration

Ownership contests for control of large American corporations have become increasingly problematic and public with the advent of the takeover. This article examines the diffusion of this once innovation. Its focus is on the relationship between changing business practices and American business culture; more specifically, on how the processes of the normative framing of hostile takeovers facilitated their diffusion and legitimation, helping to recreate or sustain order despite the disruptions engendered by takeovers. Three eras in the diffusion of this deviant innovation are delineated. Each is characterized by a language and argot that serve to cushion the hard fact of status loss by acquired executives. Neither culture nor social structure is seen here to dominate this interactive process. The provision of incentives to remain within the institution while career goals and pathways are redefined constitutes a case study of institutional reintegration, within a subsystem of society seld...