Corporate culture serves as an ideological cover for risk-shifting management strategies

Evidence

The contradictions are, as Jean and John Comaroff (2000) point out, mutually reinforcing: the neoliberal assault on economic and social security (of which Walmart is a key agent) breeds new forms of social conservatism and reactionary politics as well as new forms of religiosity and fatalism. While “servant leadership” may seem like just one more example of Walmart’s idiosyncratic and disingenuous corporate culture, it is an intimate counterpoint to a managerial strategy that effectively transforms local store managers, as well as more senior company officials, into specialized “risk managers” – not merely suited bureaucratic automatons but finely honed, “naturally” selected (via the “market”) creative subjects who are able to “plug in” to Walmart’s logistical mainframe and work everywhere throughout the corporation to cut costs and maximize efficiency (Atkinson 2003; Wallgum 2007). As Rosen (2006) documents, managers at Walmart are themselves governed by stress, forced to meet ever-leaner criteria, constantly under both digital and cultural surveillance to ensure they never cease to cut waste, improve inefficiency and respond to local markets. Managers who cannot improve same-store sales year-overyear are fired, demoted or publicly shamed. — Max Haiven, Cultures of Financialization, 290

Categorization

• XREF: Comaroffs’ mutually reinforcing contradictions connect to deWaard’s cultural argument about finance colonizing everyday life — this passage shows the mechanism at Walmart’s managerial level. — connects to: Risk management is a mythological construct for manipulating cultural precariousness — Max Haiven, Cultures of Financialization, 234; Silicon Valley’s workplace utopia narrative concealed toxic corporate cultures — W. David Marx, Blank Space: A Cultural History of the…, 504; Corporate ideologies can make harming others seem appropriate (+3 more)
• SEED: Possible article angle: ‘servant leadership’ as a management ideology that externalizes risk onto middle managers while presenting itself as benevolent.

Broader Connections

• Silicon Valley’s workplace utopia narrative concealed toxic corporate cultures #expands (0.82) — W. David Marx, Blank Space, 504
• Business-ideology sociology reframed the factory as collaborative convivium #exemplifies (0.80) — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 2095
• Corporate ideologies can make harming others seem appropriate #expands (0.75)