110 THE CULTURE OF ECONOMYand difference that exist in business practices
that straddle several different cultural contexts.
Interesting new research questions about the
practices and relative success of this ‘cultural
work’ need to be investigated in a range of indus-
tries and locations.
It is becoming clear, however, that global
corporations increasingly and deliberately attempt
to create a set of myths and stories to constitute
an identifiable culture, as well as their practice of
developing and marketing ‘brand’ identities and
loyalties associated with particular lifestyles and
behaviour (Klein, 2000). In a fascinating glimpse
into the inner workings of Shell, Davis-Floyd
(1998) has told the story of how a Professor of
English, Dr Betty S. Flowers, was employed in a
consultant capacity to serve as the editor for the
myths that Shell was consciously creating, the
stories they wanted to write about the future as
well as the past. Backed up by international and
comparative data collected by a team of 20 eco-
nomists, Flowers produced a series of scenarios
to be used to teach managers tothink mythologically and causally, to see every major
local and world event as potentially located in a story,
and to make on the spot business and policy decisions
based on what they know that story would lead to if
allowed to play itself out. (1998: 142)Although Shell had used alternative scenarios for
future planning for decades, it was felt that they
had not been complex enough to encompass the
diverse set of circumstances that managers
increasingly had to face.
In her report, Betty S. Flowers defined corpo-
rate culture as myth and narrative, suggesting
that ‘a myth is a story that organizes experience
through telling something explicitly about mean-
ing – where we’re going, where we came from,
or who we are’ (Flowers in Davis-Floyd, 1998:
146). But stories that corporations and institu-
tions tell about themselves may, of course, fail as
well as succeed in their aim. Two recent studies
have illustrated the problems of continuing to
cling to orthodox liberal narratives with their
emphases on rational decision-making and com-
petitive behaviour in conditions of uncertainty
and rapid economic change. In a path-breaking
study, economic geographer Erica Schoenberger
(1996) analysed the decisions made by key
management figures in two classic US manufac-
turing firms (Rank Xerox and Lockheed) that
were losing their competitive edge throughout
the 1980s and 1990s. As she showed, the culture
of these firms and, especially, the socialization
of their key personnel prevented them fully
understanding the new economic circumstances
that were causing problems for their organization.The second example is economist Robert
Shiller’s (2000) analysis of the huge surge in
the value of new internet companies and the
hype that surrounded them at the end of the
1990s. Shiller’s analysis is condemnatory, demo-
lishing claims of a rational evaluation by investors
of the prospects for the new e-economy. Instead,
he insisted,the market is high because of the combined effect of
indifferent thinking by millions of people, very few of
whom felt the need to perform careful research on the
long-term investment value of the aggregate stock
market, and who are motivated substantially by their
own emotions, random attention and perceptions of
conventional wisdom. (2000: 2)This claim may be intended as criticism of the
general public rather than of Shiller’s profes-
sional economist peers or institutional investors,
but the infamous collapse a year or so earlier of
the US firm Long Term Capital Markets, headed
by Nobel laureate economists, had already
severely dented the reputation of neoliberal
approaches to risk and investment. The current
commentary accompanying the fall in the value
of high-technology shares tends to support
Shiller’s arguments about the emotional basis of
investment decisions.
It is interesting that, in the company of David
Harvey, that former bastion of neoliberal ortho-
doxy The Economist magazine suggested
recently that Das Kapitalwas a more accurate
guide to understanding the operation of capital-
ism in turn-of-the-millennium economies than
conventional economic texts. Marcus (1998) has
also linked earlier aggregate analyses of capital-
ism to the new interest in culture within corpora-
tions, arguing that this interest is a reflection of
the recent reminders through restructuring that
capitalism is, as Schumpeter argued, a process of
creative destruction. Marcus suggests thatthe double-edged quality of the term creative destruc-
tionitself captures well the ideological and cognitive
work that cultural discourse currently does for corpora-
tions: creativecounterbalances and gives positive value
to a process that is undeniably destructivewith consid-
erable human costs and displacements implied. (1998:
10, original emphases)Thus a rhetoric of cultural change is often
adopted by the very managers whose jobs will be
forfeited because of it. As I have argued through-
out this chapter, in capitalist societies the nature
of work and the characteristics of those who
labour for a living are neither fixed nor perma-
nent; the type of work undertaken, by whom and
under what conditions have undergone radical
shifts in the last decades of the twentieth century.3029-ch04.qxd 03-10-02 10:30 AM Page 110