Corporate Virtue (and Wal Mart)
Wal Mart's Good Work
Nobody can argue that today's mega-corporations do not do good things.
Wal Mart's "good works" campaign highlighted all of the ways the world's most profitable corporation contributes to our social and environmental well-being.
They give college scholarships to good kids who study engineering at Montana Tech.
They fund environmental education curricula for k-12 education (a convenient way to whisper your corporate narrative into the ears of children).
My question: does doing good work translate to being a good citizen? My answer: of course not.
Why? Because we can easily imagine a person who does good work and makes a show of it, but keeps other aspects of her life away from public scrutiny.
Patterns of behavior comprise one's character, not the stories one tells about one's character.
William James' notion of truth is useful here: truth happens to things, its not an inherent property of the thing itself. The truth about wal mart is not limited to the true stories they post on their web site. Truth transcends narratives about truth. Wal Mart's truth is what we can demonstrate by critical analysis of the documentary record.
Wal Mart's Corporate Web Site
The four main memes on Wal Mart's corporate web site are "company," "people," "community," and "environment." The public relations department has determined that these ideas ought to be emphasized on the corporation's public presence.
Wal Mart is a good company, made up of good people, a corporate citizen doing good things for the community and the environment. It's part of their corporate mythos, its their "corporate utopian narrative."(1)
The question is, in the real world, is Wal Mart a virtuous corporate citizen, or does Wal Mart have sociopathic tendencies? (2)
One would hope for virtue, given the corporation is a legal person with all of the rights and priveleges that come with personhood in the United States and abroad.
Most would grant that when you've been afforded all of the rights of a person you ought to act in for the good of the people--the "common good".(3)
You are, after all, constituted as a part of the civic body, the corpus, so the public interest is your interest too.
Moral Minimum
Doing the moral minimum is not a virtue. We don't say to our children, "Now, go out on that field and do as little as possible." When we're not encouraged to do all we can, we are encouraged to do what we can.
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NOTES
(1) See ECY v.1, "Blue Skies, Green Industry"
(2) See the documentary, "The Corporation"
(3) See Cliff Christians, "Common Good as First Principle"
Nobody can argue that today's mega-corporations do not do good things.
Wal Mart's "good works" campaign highlighted all of the ways the world's most profitable corporation contributes to our social and environmental well-being.
They give college scholarships to good kids who study engineering at Montana Tech.
They fund environmental education curricula for k-12 education (a convenient way to whisper your corporate narrative into the ears of children).
My question: does doing good work translate to being a good citizen? My answer: of course not.
Why? Because we can easily imagine a person who does good work and makes a show of it, but keeps other aspects of her life away from public scrutiny.
Patterns of behavior comprise one's character, not the stories one tells about one's character.
William James' notion of truth is useful here: truth happens to things, its not an inherent property of the thing itself. The truth about wal mart is not limited to the true stories they post on their web site. Truth transcends narratives about truth. Wal Mart's truth is what we can demonstrate by critical analysis of the documentary record.
Wal Mart's Corporate Web Site
The four main memes on Wal Mart's corporate web site are "company," "people," "community," and "environment." The public relations department has determined that these ideas ought to be emphasized on the corporation's public presence.
Wal Mart is a good company, made up of good people, a corporate citizen doing good things for the community and the environment. It's part of their corporate mythos, its their "corporate utopian narrative."(1)
The question is, in the real world, is Wal Mart a virtuous corporate citizen, or does Wal Mart have sociopathic tendencies? (2)
One would hope for virtue, given the corporation is a legal person with all of the rights and priveleges that come with personhood in the United States and abroad.
Most would grant that when you've been afforded all of the rights of a person you ought to act in for the good of the people--the "common good".(3)
You are, after all, constituted as a part of the civic body, the corpus, so the public interest is your interest too.
Moral Minimum
Doing the moral minimum is not a virtue. We don't say to our children, "Now, go out on that field and do as little as possible." When we're not encouraged to do all we can, we are encouraged to do what we can.
-----------------------------------------------------------
NOTES
(1) See ECY v.1, "Blue Skies, Green Industry"
(2) See the documentary, "The Corporation"
(3) See Cliff Christians, "Common Good as First Principle"
posted by Chad Okrusch at
4:34 PM
4 Comments:
Wal-mart's meme should be "race to the bottom." The important problems to pay attention to with wal-mart--the issues that matter to our long-term health--are systemic issues. Wal-mart directly effects the famlimies and communities is exploits, but its out-of-balance economic obesity effects worker compensation througout the globe. the minium wage is what wal-mart says it is. and, who does wal-mart answer to? no amount of scholarships and solar panels will make wal-mart accountable.
I was writing with a specific question n mind, one my professional ethics students asked: can corporations do good work? My answer, like yours Justin, is yes--BUT, good work doesn't translate to virtuous citizenship. Besides the obvious political economic disasters these externalizing machines create, they are morally reprehensible within the normative frameworks of most conventional (and all post-conventional) wisdom traditions.
Hey Chad,
I know.
How is it that our society (seemingly filled with virtuous citizens) can let wal-mart go on? Is it all just the cold logic of capital that keeps the working class with little choice but to look for the cheapest options and awards the owners and managers for wealth-at-any-means-necessary?
I think it is a more complicated mix of factors that includes the corporate takeover of the infosphere (to use your language!), the best public realations team in the world (former clinton staffers) , and a large segment of the public that knows its distructive to shop at Wal-Mart, but still does (maybe there is a post-modern way of explaining this).
I think it is also interesting to ask: why is there is so much public criticism of wal-mart in the current sphere of the mainstream press (I saw some in USA Today today!)? Perhaps its all the activist public relations campaigns?
http://walmartwatch.com/
http://www.commondreams.org/views05/1127-30.htm
talk soon--jf
WalMart is Butte's best source of organic foods--figure that one out.
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