A definitive survey of Wal-Mart and the company’s worldview.
Comprehensive socioeconomic history of America’s largest corporation.
Wal-Mart employs two million people and operates 6,000 stores, “doing more business than Target, Home Depot, Sears Holdings, Safeway, and Kroger combined.” Historian and Wal-Mart authority Lichtenstein (History/Univ. of California, Santa Barbara; State of the Union: A Century of American Labor, 2003, etc.) writes that its success “has transformed the nature of U.S. employment, sent U.S. manufacturing abroad, and redefined the very meaning of globalization.” The author brilliantly situates his narrative within the context of world history and the global economy, creating a lucid, evenhanded text that often reads like a novel. Relying on scholarly and journalistic sources, including his own reporting and interviews, Liechtenstein reveals how Wal-Mart’s domination of the retail world stems from its ruthless efficiency of distribution and consolidation of control at its Bentonville, Ark., headquarters. He also demonstrates the company’s shrewd use of technological innovation—particularly satellite communications and the now ubiquitous bar code. The author is especially effective in his discussion of the geological and social landscape from which it grew and derived its crucially important and much-emulated corporate culture—the poor, mostly white, rural Ozark Mountains. In this region, women and minorities were discouraged from pursuing social mobility, businesses were hostile toward laws impeding customary labor arrangements—i.e., cheap hourly wages, untenable work schedules and enormously high turnover rates—and the forces of evangelical Christianity, while not officially embraced by Wal-Mart, worked in harmony with its small-town values of family and faith. Lichtenstein paints a convincing portrait of a multinational conglomerate willing to dehumanize people in its pursuit of profit, even as it tries to convince us that people are its No. 1 concern.
A definitive survey of Wal-Mart and the company’s worldview.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-8050-7966-1
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Metropolitan/Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2009
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A tedious case study of what can happen before, during, and after the shift of a desirable advertising account from one agency to another. In an effort to revive the company's flagging car sales, Subaru of America (SOA) put its sizable (albeit modest by auto- industry standards) account up for grabs during 1991. Drawing on the access granted him by SOA, Rothenberg (The Neoliberals, 1984) offers an exhaustive and ultimately exhausting rundown on a commercial mating dance. He also lards his fly-on-the-wall reportage with digressive takes on the history of big-league advertising and its dominant players. To some extent, these asides provide context for the author's evaluation of the work done by the survivor of SOA's screening process—Wieden & Kennedy, a so-called postmodernist shop based in Portland, Oreg., which made a name for itself as Nike's ad agency. Like many partnerships, the SOA/W&K alliance proved short-lived, contentious, and mutually frustrating. The association ended not with a bang but a whimper shortly after the agency's spots (duly approved by a Subaru management team that had been revamped in the interim) finished dead last in a USA Today survey of viewer reactions to commercials broadcast during the 1993 Super Bowl telecast. In reporting countless instances of high- stakes conflict and steering the episodic narrative up innumerable blind alleys, however, Rothenberg (who borrowed the book's title from an A.J. Liebling pensÇe on fortune) frequently loses track of his story. He doesn't even get around to detailing the background of SOA's Japanese owner (Fuji Heavy Industries) until near the end. As it happens, the parent organization's engineering-versus-styling bias informed many of the clashes over image that marked promotional debates at SOA during the early 1990s. Despite a few fine set pieces, this is an overlong, essentially pointless anecdote in which unsympathetic hucksters are pitted against one another—and the consuming public.
Pub Date: Nov. 2, 1994
ISBN: 0-679-41227-1
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1994
Sound insight, but not for beginners.
Ercetin and her co-authors offer a collection of essays and scholarly papers aimed at all types of organizations, hoping to inspire managers at all levels to assess and develop the organizational intelligence of their arena and, therefore, of their entire organization.
According to the author, organizational intelligence (OI), the ability to take in, analyze and respond to new information and changes, can determine the success or failure of an organization. Akin to the way a person’s IQ influences all aspects of life, an organization’s OI plays a role in everything, from employee satisfaction, to overall performance, to efficiency and streamlining. It is important that managers at every level–as well as the employees who determine actual workflow processes–are working toward a higher OI, whatever their sphere of influence. Toward this end, Ercetin and company put forth not only the concept of OI, but a scale for measuring it and instructions for applying that scale, as well as commentary on different applications for OI and metaphors for understanding its different aspects. Unfortunately, OI is a complex concept, and those who understand it well seem to speak a language different than that of the average employee or midlevel manager. That, combined with some English-language and/or translation difficulties, will make this book difficult for any novice to understand and thus extremely difficult to apply in a meaningful way. On the other hand, those with previous training in the language and concepts the book discusses will find interesting, compelling ideas for further inquiry. The authors explore different aspects of matter and liquid as a metaphor for OI and expand the usual concept of OI with their study of peace intelligence. It’s fascinating, but not straightforward or rudimentary.
Sound insight, but not for beginners.Pub Date: Feb. 23, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-4196-3582-3
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 27, 2010
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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