Evan Osborne - The Rise of the Anti-Corporate Movement: Corporations and the People who Hate Them

To Weymar and Victoria, for always asking such good questions.

And especially to Toyoko, my most important shareholder.

ix

On January 31, 2007, an odd incident occurred in Boston. The Cartoon Network, a cable channel devoted to animated shows, had engaged in a bit of guerrilla marketing by placing small devices at well-known locations around town. The devices had small lights showing a cartoon character from a new show they were seeking to promote and had visible wires to boot. To some citizens of a country consumed by fear of terrorism, they seemed potentially dangerous and thus caused inconvenience and even chaos in the city as police officers both sought to defuse them and sought to search for others possibly undiscovered. By the end of the day, the network's parent company, Turner Broadcasting System, had sheepishly informed the police that it was responsible. The mayor of Boston, Thomas Menino, was understandably upset about this waste of his police department's time and the anxiety that the stunt generated among city residents all day. But in the wake of the incident, he said, among other things, something very strange-that the incident was "all about corporate greed."

Let us stipulate that this action was, at best, selfish and foolish; someone at the Cartoon Network made a dumb and possibly criminal mistake. But Mayor Menino, a politician whose job depends on knowing what kind of language stirs or scares enough of the public to keep him popular, chose a surprising term-"corporate"-to describe what had happened. Either the incident fit comfortably into a mental model he was already using to think about how the world works or he suspected that talking that way would enhance his reputation with Boston voters. Whether chosen out of anger or careful consideration, his use of "corporate" in this manner is instructive. He could have spoken in terms of individual employees or of this company in particular or even just of plain old "greed," a sin as old as mankind. But he chose instead to say that the event was the fault of "corporate" malfeasance. That mindset-the turning of the word "corporate" into a generic adjective of scorn, and of corporations into the dominant force in society-is what this book is about.

The anti-corporate movement whose development it traces is no longer the province merely of disgruntled contrarians in the academy or people mourning the death of 1960s dreams. It is a growing movement that is increasingly influential in politics, particularly in the United States and Europe. Many of its most rhetorically gifted advocates do not simply believe that corporations frequently commit crimes, or need to be reined in, or that they are run by and for the rich. They believe something far larger-that corporations are driven by costly incentives mistakenly encoded into corporate law over a century ago and that the monsters these laws created have been driven inexorably to more and more control the world.

In the course of researching this book, I had many occasions to order one of the growing mass of anti-corporate books from my local book superstore. On one occasion, when telling a clerk the title of one of them, which suggested that corporations control the world, she (an employee herself of a major corporation) looked at me and, stating it more as fact than question, said "They do, don't they?" So simple, yet so complete as an explanation for why things are as they are-this is the new anticorporatism. The French have a wonderful phrase that is underused in English-idee fixe, which Merriam-Webster defines as "an idea that dominates one's mind, especially for a prolonged period." That, I think, is where we are. We live in a world of tremendous change-culturally, economically, politically. Change being as unsettling as it is, many find themselves in need of a comprehensive narrative to explain it all. And corporations, especially large ones, increasingly provide for many the sturdiest ground in which to plant their narrative.

Despite its rapid growth, hostility to corporations is a phenomenon that has seldom if ever been extensively studied. The purpose of this book is to provide for the reader with an interest in corporations and their role in the world a thorough and, I hope, fair guide to what anti-corporate thinking is, a history of where it came from, an exploration of the truth of its main claims (which, it is probably best to say right up front, I view skeptically), and some speculation on what might happen if it becomes sufficiently influential. In doing so, I hope to contribute to understanding of a movement that has expanded very rapidly relative to what we know about it.

Writing a book, even one written primarily for the sheer intellectual joy of it, is a very enjoyable but demanding task. There were many whose help and guidance were indispensable in bringing this book to fruition. The idea to write it came to me while I was at the Osaka University Institute of Social and Economic Research, and the research support they provide to their visiting scholars is outstanding. I am particularly grateful to Atsushi Tsuneki for his willingness to host an unknown scholar and to tolerate his eccentric research. I must also thank Jeff Olson and Nick Philipson at Praeger/Greenwood for helping shepherd the work of an inexperienced author through to completion, Vijayakumar Subramanian and (on short notice) Anne Beer for first-rate editorial work, and Ellen Geiger for helpful advice on publishing. I am also intellectually indebted to the reading group at the Raj Soin College of Business at Wright State University for discussing and helping me develop some of my thoughts in this book. Joe Petrick, Maggie Houston, and John Blair were particularly helpful in constantly holding me to account. Jeff Carlisle, Zach Selden, and Charles Wharton of The Policy Hut were selfless (and sometimes brutally honest) in their assessments of the work while it was in progress. My greatest intellectual debt is to the late Jack Hirshleifer, who impressed upon me the importance of making an argument accessible, of economics for understanding human behavior, and of the problem of understanding when people do and don't get along with one another. His patience, curiosity, and genius were always an inspiration.