Creating the Corporate Soul: The Rise of Public Relations and Corporate Imagery in American Big Business - Hardcover

Marchand, Roland

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0520087194 ISBN 13: 9780520087194

Publisher: University of California Press, 1998

Synopsis

Over the course of the twentieth century the popular perception of America's giant corporations has undergone an astonishing change. Condemned as dangerous leviathans in the century's first decades, by 1945 major corporations had become respected, even revered, institutions. Roland Marchand's lavishly illustrated and carefully researched book tells how large companies such as AT&T and U.S. Steel created their own "souls" in order to reassure consumers and politicians that bigness posed no threat to democracy or American values.

Marchand traces this important transformation in the culture of capitalism by offering a series of case studies of such corporate giants as General Motors, General Electric, Metropolitan Life Insurance, and Du Pont Chemicals. Marchand examines the rhetorical and visual imagery developed by corporate leaders to win public approval and build their own internal corporate culture. In the "golden era" of the 1920s, companies boasted of their business statesmanship, but in the Depression years many of them turned in desperation to forms of public relations that strongly defended the capitalist system. During World War II public relations gained new prominence within corporate management as major companies linked themselves with Main-Street, small-town America. By the war's end, the corporation's image as a "good neighbor" had largely replaced that of the "soulless giant." American big business had succeeded in wrapping increasingly complex economic relationships in the comforting aura of familiarity.

Marchand, author of the widely acclaimed Advertising the American Dream (1985), provides an elegant and convincing account of the origins and effects of the corporate imagery so ubiquitous in our world today.

About this title

About the Author

Roland Marchand (1933-1997) was Professor of History at the University of California, Davis, and authored numerous works on American cultural history.

From the Back Cover

"Marchand's masterful study of the creation of the corporate image is a classic, to be put alongside his Advertising the American Dream. It will be essential reading for anyone interested in business, technology, consumer culture, and advertising in the twentieth century."―Jeffrey L. Meikle, University of Texas at Austin

"More than any other historian, Roland Marchand has illuminated the murky crannies of our nation's underculture, in the process showing us how much of our national mythology is both reflected in and created by such once-scorned arts as advertising and public relations. Creating the Corporate Soul is a magisterial baring of the American psyche fashioned by the grandfathers and godfathers of today's spin doctors. It ranks with such great business histories as Daniel Boorstin's The Americans: The Democratic Experience and Alfred Chandler's The Visible Hand."―Randall Rothenberg, author of Where the Suckers Moon: An Advertising Story

From the Inside Flap

"Marchand's masterful study of the creation of the corporate image is a classic, to be put alongside his Advertising the American Dream. It will be essential reading for anyone interested in business, technology, consumer culture, and advertising in the twentieth century."—Jeffrey L. Meikle, University of Texas at Austin

"More than any other historian, Roland Marchand has illuminated the murky crannies of our nation's underculture, in the process showing us how much of our national mythology is both reflected in and created by such once-scorned arts as advertising and public relations. Creating the Corporate Soul is a magisterial baring of the American psyche fashioned by the grandfathers and godfathers of today's spin doctors. It ranks with such great business histories as Daniel Boorstin's The Americans: The Democratic Experience and Alfred Chandler's The Visible Hand."—Randall Rothenberg, author of Where the Suckers Moon: An Advertising Story

Reviews

In a masterful display of research and perspicacity, similar to that found in his Advertising the American Dream, the late historian Marchand offers up his rendition of how the corporation gained its soul. From business image as a faceless entity under government and public siege in the late nineteenth century, he traces the evolution of spin doctoring and advertising to counteract such unfortunate utterances as Vanderbilt's "the public be damned." Examples are pulled from the (now) household-name variety of business, such as AT&T, Ford, GE, General Motors, and Heinz. Image making started with paternalistic employee welfare (e.g., cooking and sewing classes at NCR); it took shape with AT&T's human faces of telephone operators and linemen. It matured before and during World War II by way of corporate advertising, radio shows, movies, and world's fair exhibits. Surprisingly, there is no apparent indictment here of corporate communications. What's more, the author's theory about the different corporate personas is made real through extensive documentation as well as an extremely readable prose style. Barbara Jacobs

Edition details

• Publisher: University of California Press
• Publication date: 1998
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0520087194
• ISBN 13: 9780520087194
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 470