TOP DRAWER BOOK REVIEW
by
HL Carpenter

 

Corporateering
by Jamie Court
322 pages; hardcover; $24.95
Jeremy P. Tarcher/Putnam, New York, 2003

Corporateer. Even before knowing the forward of this book was written by Michael Moore, you probably have a gut feeling this term describes something a bit less innocuous than, say, a mouseketeer.

Interestingly, mouseketeers aren’t mentioned by author Jamie Court, a California-based ‘consumer advocate’, even though he considers corporate marketing to children a form of corporateering.

What he does mention throughout Corporateering is lots of other instances where commerce is prioritized over culture. These acts range from commercial control of the media to takeovers of formerly regulated industries and judicial influence.

In an economy based on consumer spending, there’s no shock value (or book sales) associated with the realization that corporations are, or would like to be, involved in every aspect of your daily existence.

But Mr. Court wants you to be outraged by the consequences of that involvement, which he calls the commercialization of culture. His premise: when economics become the proxy for societal values, encroachments against individual freedoms abound.

This theme may resonate if you’ve ever been involved in a billing dispute, signed an arbitration clause in a contract or suffered through inane commercials in a movie theater. Business does seem to exert enormous control over all aspects of everyday life – and, as Mr. Court notes, protesting by withholding your dollars might not be effective in the modern environment of mega-conglomerates.

But Corporateering attempts to vilify corporations, which may not be the answer either. After all, companies are composed of individuals. And Mr. Court does manage to come up with a short list of six corporate executives whom he believes stand for better business practices. Perhaps engaging them, and others like them, in the effort to shine the light of reform on the ‘invisible hand’ of corporate power could yield more positive results.

Cooperative effort may be less exciting than inflammatory rhetoric, but sometimes those mouseketeering lessons turn out to be surprisingly effective.

 

Review originally published December 2004.