Critics of Business

(See also Business and Society)

General Critical Reflections on Business
Workers Criticize Business
Business Portrayed in the Arts

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General Critical Reflections on Business

• Anti-Corporate Central ("This page is dedicated to the spirit of using my MBA training for the good of mankind, instead of evil. I want to let everyone out there know that it's okay to fear and despise increasing concentrations of power and influence by immortal, soulless corporations") (mike@web.net)
• Patrick J. Buchanan, The Great Betrayal: How American Sovereignty and Social Justice Are Sacrificed to the Gods of the Global Economy (New York: Little Brown, 1998)
• Corporate Watch ("web site dedicated to helping build greater democratic control over transnational corporations at the local, national and international levels. . . . designed to provide you--every day Internet users, activists, journalists and policy makers--with an array of tools that you can use to investigate and analyze corporate activity") (Transnational Resource and Action Center / Institute for Global Communications)
• Kevin Danaher, ed., Corporations Are Gonna Get Your Mama: Globalization and the Downsizing of the American Dream (Monroe, Maine: Common Courage, 1996)
• Arif Dirlik
  • After the Revolution: Waking to Global Capitalism (Hanover, N. H.: University Press of New England for Wesleyan Univ. Press, 1994)
  • The Postcolonial Aura: Third World Criticism in the Age of Global Capitalism (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1997), pp. 84-104, 186-219
• Alan Downs
  1. Beyond the Looking Glass: Overcoming the Seductive Culture of Corporate Narcissism (New York: AMACOM, 1997)
  2. Corporate Executions: The Ugly Truth About Layoffs--How Corporate Greed is Shattering Lives, Companies, and Communities (New York: AMACOM, 1995)
  3. "The Wages of Downsizing" (1996) ("Strip away the myths and what remains is an ugly truth: Management uses layoffs to lower wages and make a quick profit. Bypassing the hard work of strategic planning, executives increasingly take the shortcut of a layoff" (Mother Jones Interactive)
• The Dilbert Zone (Scott Adams / United Feature Syndicate, Inc.)
• "The Economy and Its Impact on the Religious Right" ("the great American middleclass is furious. . . . Increasingly it sees its wealth and societal ethic under attack from both a globalist and multicultural Meritocracy above it, and an amoral and destructive Underclass below it") (Institute for the Study of Religion in Politics)
• Thomas Frank and Matt Weiland, ed., Commodify Your Dissent: Salvos from "The Baffler" (New York: W.W. Norton, 1997)
• R. Buckminster Fuller, Grunch of Giants (New York: St. Martin's, 1983)
• Bennett Harrison and Barry Bluestone, The Great U-Turn: Corporate Restructuring and the Polarizing of America (New York: HarperCollins, 1988)
• Robert Kuttner, Everything for Sale: The Virtues and Limits of Markets (New York: Knopf, 1997)
• K. Lancaster and R.G. Lipsey, "The General Theory of the Second-Best," Review of Economic Studies 24.1 (Oct. 1956): 11-32
• Walter Russell Mead (Council on Foreign Relations), "The New Global Economy Takes Your Order" (1998) ("Over the next few decades, we could have a left-leaning economy that works best when policies espoused by the traditional left, including higher levels of government spending, are applied to it. Blue-collar workers will likely see some income gains, unions will have an easier time defending the interests of their members, and there will be better prospects for national projects such as helping inner-city residents enter into the economic mainstream.") (Mother Jones Interactive)
• Robert Reich, "Working Class Dogged" (1998) ("I wish I could be as optimistic as Walter Russell Mead about the future of today's nonsupervisory workers, but I can't") (Mother Jones Interactive)
• Richard Sennett, The Corrosion of Character: The Personal Consequences of Work in the New Capitalism (New York: W.W. Norton, 1998)
• Bruce C. Wearne (Monash U., Australia), "The Rhetoric of Diversity Salesmanship" (1997) (review essay on Bill Cope and Mary Kalantzis's 1997 Productive Diversity: A New Australian Model for Work and Management Annandale; "Post-modern rhetoric is alive and well in industrial relations in Australia. It has found its focus in diversity management a fast-growing and well-established approach to management theory for businesses and organisations of all sizes") (Sincronia)
• Langdon Winner (Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute), "Techne and Politeia: The Technical Constitution of Society"

Workers Criticize Business

(See also Labor Relations)

• My Boss is a "#!$#@!" ("Overworked? Underpaid? Stressed out? Had enough of the team, the mission, company values? Caught up in downsizing, rightsizing, optimizing?") (alotta.edu, Inc.)
  1. Layoff Scoreboard
  2. Statistics of Pain (stats and definitions of "unemployed," "new entrants," "temporary layoffs," "reentrants," etc.)
• Chris Carlsson, with Mark Leger, ed., Bad Attitude: The Processed World Anthology (New York / London: Verso / New Left, 1990) (writings and graphics from the San Francisco/Bay Area Processed World magazine, which in the 1980s followed up on the previous decade's New Left and anarchist movements by advocating anti-business and anti-IT critique, satire, sabotage, pranks, and slack; takes the viewpoint of the clerical underclass of the corporate order)
• Corp-Focus (moderated e-mail discussion list that "distributes the weekly column 'Focus on the Corporation,' co-authored by Russell Mokhiber, editor of Corporate Crime Reporter, and Robert Weissman, editor of Multinational Monitor magazine"; "reports and comments critically on corporate actions, plans, abuses and trends") (to subscribe, send an e-mail to listproc@essential.org with the following on one line: subscribe corp-focus [your name])
• The Corporation (parody of corporate newsletters; sample: "Quality Control Employees should return PERIODICALLY for new assignments. Failure to return will result in termination and dreams involving your junior high teachers")
• Disgruntled: The Business Magazine for People who Work for a Living ("magazine that combines news, feature, satire and commentary about the darker side of the world of work") (Daniel S. Levine, editor; Counterpoint Press, Inc.)
  1. Selected Articles:
  2. "A Call For A National Commission On Downsizing From The National Employee Rights Institute"
  3. Erika Schelby, A Bestiary for Business Adapted from the Fables of Aesop for Gentle Corporate Readers and Raiders: DOWNSIZING: An Aesop Fable Retold
  4. Brian S. McWilliams, A Conversation With Bruce Tulgan, Author of Managing Generation X: Bringing out the Best in Young Talent
  5. Daniel S. Levine, A Conversation With Martin Sprouse, Author of Sabotage ("Published in 1992, Sabotage is a collection of anecdotes from American workers in all types of jobs who tell their stories of how they used sabotage to get even, bring about change, supplement their too-small salaries or just shatter the painful boredom of their work")
  6. James Howard O'Leary, Tales of Corporate Horror (1992) (fiction)
  7. Alan Downs, Corporate Executions: The Ugly Truth About Layoffs
• Don's Boss Page ("the only web site designed to protect those surfing the net from their workplaces or schools"; puts up an image of a spreadsheet in your browser window; tips on "stealth surfing," etc.)
• Michael Moore, Downsize This (New York: Crown, 1996) (by the maker of Roger & Me film)
• Mike Parker and Jane Slaughter, Choosing Sides: Unions and the Team Concept (Detroit: Labor Notes / South End Press, 1988)
• Temp 24-7 (an online magazine and resource center for temp workers started in early 1998; the site has "attitude," as expressed in such features as "Temp Tales of Terror" and an interactive combat game named "Temps vs. Suits")
• Web Economy Bullshit Generator (Dack Ragus)
• Working Today (non-profit worker advocacy group that provides moral and practical support for downsized, laid-off, independent, and other workers)
  

Business Portrayed in the Arts (Overlaps with IT Portrayed in the Arts)

(This is a selection of creative works that engage powerfully or richly with the idea of business. Because the relation between works of art and the theme of business can be indirect, annotations are sometimes fuller than in other parts of this bibliography. Suggestions for this section are very welcome.)

• 19th Century
  • Charles Dickens
    1. Dombey and Son (1848) | e-texts
    2. Hard Times (1854) | e-texts
    3. Little Dorrit (1857) | e-texts
    4. Dickens Page (Mitsuharu Matsuoka, Nagoya U., Japan)
  • Elizabeth Gaskell, North and South (1855) | e-text | Gaskell Page (Mitsuharu Matsuoka, Nagoya U., Japan)
  • George Gissing, The Odd Women, 3 vols. (London: Lawrence & Bullen, 1893) (working women are lead characters) | e-text | Gissing Page (Mitsuharu Matsuoka, Nagoya U., Japan)
  • William Dean Howells
    1. A Modern Instance (1882)
    2. A Hazard of New Fortunes (1890)
  • Anthony Trollope, The Way We Live Now (1875) (leading male character is manufacturer) | Trollope Page (Mitsuharu Matsuoka, Nagoya U., Japan)
• Earlier 20th Century
  • Theodore Dreiser
    1. The Financier (1912)
    2. The Titan (1914)
    3. The Stoic (1947)
  • Executive Suite (Dir. by Robert Wise. Perf. by William Holden, Barbara Stanwyck and others. MGM, 1954. Running Time, 104)
  • Allen Ginsberg, "Howl" (1956) (esp. part II on "Moloch")
  • How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying (Dir. by David Swift. Perf. by Robert Morse and others. Mirisch Company, 1967. Running Time, 121)
  • Matewan (Dir. by John Sayles. Perf. by Chris Cooper and others. Cinecom Entertaining Group, 1987. Running Time, 132)
  • Modern Times (Dir. Charles Chaplin. Perf. Charles Chaplin and others. United Artists, 1936. Running time, 85; black and white) (the tramp caught in the gears of big-business technological rationality; compare the sociological analysis offered by cyberpunk science fiction)
  • Frank Norris
    1. The Octopus: A Story of California (1901) (novel on wheat farmers versus the Pacific and Southwestern Railroad)
    2. The Pit: A Story of Chicago (1903) (novel set in the Chicago stock exchange)
  • Upton Sinclair, The Jungle (1906; rpt. New York: New American Library, 1973) (James R. Beniger, p. 299: ". . . [Henry] Ford's idea for the assembly line owes its origin . . . [to] the overhead trolly introduced by Gustavus Swift in his Chicago meat-packing houses in the early 1880s. Ford first realized the larger control implications . . . from Upton Sinclair's best-selling exposé, The Jungle [p. 42], which describes the system in brutally graphic detail.")
• Contemporary
  • Brazil (Dir. Terry Gilliam. Universal / Embassy International, 1985. Running time, 131)
  • Christopher Buckley and John Tierney, God Is My Broker: How One Monk Saved His Monastery and Discovered the Seven and a Half Laws of Spiritual and Financial Growth (New York: Random House, 1998)
  • Pat Cadigan Home Page (Chris Fowler)
  • Cyberpunk: Initiated by such science-fiction writers of the '80s and '90s as William Gibson, Bruce Sterling, Pat Cadigan, John Shirley, and Neal Stephenson, cyberpunk has had an impact beyond the normal audience of genre fiction. This is partly because it uses "postmodern" narrative devices and characters to mold the "street"-world of its underlying genre conventions--detective, film noir, western, and other "pulp fictions"--to the contemporary world of information technology. But it is also due to the clarity of its conviction that populist street-culture in the near future must dance the "dance" (as Gibson puts it) with a corporate culture so powerful and omnipresent that it effectively replaces all other social and political institutions (governmental, educational, medical, etc.). Knowledge workers of the near future belong from cradle to grave to multinational corporate structures that provide everything from residential arcologies to law enforcement. As emblematized in the lifestyle that the street-hacker hero of Gibson's Neuromancer calls "biz," the culture of the near future is all a negotiation between small con men or hackers in popular culture and amoral corporate conglomerates. Information technology ("cyberspace") is the landscape on which this new gunfight at the OK Corral is fought without benefit of traditional standards of legitimacy. --A.L.
    • General Cyberpunk Resources
      1. CyberDrek Kulture (Gridpoint Nexus)
      2. Cyberpunk Page (quotes many brief definitions) (Henry W.Targowski; Mark/Space Interplanetary Review)
      3. Hyper-Weirdness: Cyberpunk and the New Edge Page
      4. Martin Irvine (Georgetown U.), Technoculture from Frankenstein to Cyberpunk (course)
    • Selected Criticism
      1. David Brande, "The Business of Cyberpunk: Symbolic Economy and Ideology in William Gibson," in Robert Markley, ed., Virtual Realities and Their Discontents (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1996), pp. 79-106
      2. Roger Burrows, "Virtual Culture, Urban Social Polarisation and Social Sicnece Fiction," in Loader (1997), pp. 38-45
      3. Andrew Ross, "Cyberpunk in Boystown," in his Strange Weather: Culture, Science, and Technology in the Age of Limits (London: Verso, 1991), p. 137-67
  • Pat Cadigan Home Page (Chris Fowler)
  • William Gibson
    • Neuromancer (New York: Ace / Berkley, 1984) (the canonical cyberpunk novel; its imagination of the transition from individual and "family" business to multinational corporations is particularly chilling)
      1. Search the Text of Neuromancer (case-sensitive search form; returns passages in context)
      2. Study Guide for William Gibson: Neuromancer (Paul Brians, Washington State U.)
      3. Po-Mo SF: William Gibson's Neuromancer and Post-Modern Science Fiction (Martin Irvine, Georgetown U.)
    • Burning Chrome (1986; rpt. New York: Ace, 1987)
    • Count Zero (1986; rpt. New York: Ace, 1987)
    • Idoru (1996; rpt. Putnam, 1996)
    • Mona Lisa Overdrive (New York: Bantam, 1988)
    • Virtual Light (New York: Bantam, 1993) (particularly interesting in its depiction of the patchwork survival of "obsolete" and "throwaway" culture on a future San Francisco bridge that has become an oasis in the midst of high-tech, corporate culture; "Its steel bones, its stranded tendons, were lost within an accretion of dreams: tatoo parlors, gaming arcades, dimly lit stalls stacked with decaying magazines, sellers of fireworks, of cut bait, betting shops, sushi bars, unlicensed pawnbrokers, herbalists, barbers, bars. Dreams of commerce, their locations generally corresponding with the decks that had once carried vehicular traffic. . . . ")
    • With Bruce Sterling, The Difference Engine (New York: Bantam, 1991) (set in the period of Charles Babbage and the nineteenth-century pre-history of the computer)
    • William Gibson Page (Patrick Ernzer)
    • William Gibson Page (includes news of Gibson's novel, Idoru) (Joe Foley)
    • The Yard Show (William Gibson Page) (William Gibson, Christopher Halcrow)
    • William Gibson's Alien III Script
    • "Agrippa (A Book of the Dead)" (text of the limited-edition, read-once/self-destroying, art-book poem)
  • Richard Powers, Gain (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1998)
  • Roger & Me (Dir. Michael Moore. Warner Bros. / Dog Eat Dog, 1989. Running time, 83)
  • John Shirley Page
  • Carl Steadman, Placing (a series of product "epiphanies" demonstrating the thesis that contemporary "placing" [product placements in movies, TV shows, and sporting events] "captures the essence of a new kind of selfhood for the '90s. No longer do people attempt to define themselves through the products they consume, best exemplified by the wanton excess and spectacle of the last decade. Instead, people define themselves in relation to the products that are ever-present in their everyday lives - they make meaning and significance of the multiple interdependences between themselves, others, and name-brand products. . . . Branding is corporate; placing is populist and personal")
  • Neal Stephenson
    1. Snow Crash (New York: Bantam, 1992)
    2. The Diamond Age (New York: Bantam, 1995)
       1. Diamond Age Page (Michaela Rhea Drapes)
          • Selected Links:
          • Stephenson Links
          • Summary of Novel
          • The Role of Hypertext in The Diamond Age
    3. Alan Liu, Brief Description / Review of Diamond Age
    4. Neal Stephenson Page (Mark/Space Interplanetary Review)
  • Bruce Sterling
    1. Crystal Express (New York: Ace / Berkley, 1989) (short stories set in Sterling's compelling "posthumanist" universe of "Shapers" versus "Mechanists")
    2. Holy Fire (New York: Bantam, 1996) (richly-textured, unpredictable imagination of a future dominated by the health-care industry; the sensibility of the female protagonist is particularly nuanced)
    3. ed., Mirrorshades: The Cyberpunk Anthology (New York: Ace / Berkley, 1986)
    4. with William Gibson, The Difference Engine (New York: Bantam, 1991) (set in the period of Charles Babbage and the nineteenth-century pre-history of the computer)
    5. Bruce Sterling Page (Kim Baumann Larsen / Molly Cumming, Rice Design Alliance) | Bruce Sterling Texts on the Net
    6. "Cyberpunk in the Nineties"
    7. The Hacker Crackdown
    8. "Twenty Evocations"
  • Victoria Vesna, et al. (U. California, Santa Barbara), Bodies, INCorporated (sophisticated multimedia, interactive online environment in which users construct virtual bodies and "incorporate" as part of an exploration of the interface between art and corporate zones. The site appropriates/parodies the legal licensing and liability language of corporate structures to provoke reflection on the boundaries between personal and corporate in the notion of "property")
    1. Project Description
    2. Sample Page
    3. Christopher Newfield (U. California, Santa Barbara), "Corporation H" (1997) (essay)
  • Wall Street (Dir. Oliver Stone. Perf. Michael Douglas and others. 20th Century Fox, 1987)