Abstract
Wal-Mart is America’s largest and most powerful retailer. It played a leading role in promoting some of the late-twentieth century’s most important changes in retailing, like global outsourcing, mechanization, the “big box” concept, and aggressive price competition. It also stands as a potent symbol of neoliberalism; the arguments used in Wal-Mart debates recur across a much wider range of partisan disagreements.
This topic elicits strong reactions, and these reactions are consequential. Perceptions of the retailer as a coercive, exploitative mega-corporation that destroys unions, small businesses, small town city centers, U.S. manufacturing jobs, and the environment can ultimately hurt sales, invite government regulation, or perhaps pave the way to anti-trust rulings. If lauded as a force that helps to sustain Americans’ high material standard of living, employ the unemployable, and secure America’s leading role in the global economy, then customers may continue shopping at Wal-Mart without a second thought. This perception can build constituencies who in turn help the company fight efforts to regulate, tax, or otherwise constrain the firm from doing what it wants to do.
Public image is a big concern in any big business, which is why they allocate considerable resources to public relations. Powerful firms will, on occasion, alter their behavior in response to public image concerns. This is a concrete example of the adage that “culture structures markets” or that “markets are embedded in a cultural context.” U.S. retailing—or virtually any market in any country—is not strictly shaped by market forces, like supply and demand. It is also shaped by what businesses and their practices represent in the minds of their major stakeholders (e.g., consumers, employees, investors, managers, voters, and policymakers).
Wal-Mart Wars is a book about the competition to sway public perceptions of and attitudes toward the retail giant. Rebekah Massengill develops this discussion through a case study of the competing messaging strategies used by Wal-Mart and Wal-Mart Watch (an anti-Wal-Mart advocacy organization) in their public communications battles during the 2000s. She explores how the company and its business practices are defended and attacked through appeals to their audiences’ moral reasoning and sentiments.
This is my understanding of how the book conceptualizes the process: both Wal-Mart and its major critic make different appeals to different constituencies (customers, workers, investors, regulators). The two sides define, or use messages premised on a definition of, broad moral principles to which people assent in name but may understand with nuanced differences. Massengill focuses on six moral principles, whose different definitions may lie at the foundation of partisan differences on economic issues: individualism and communalism, benevolence and thrift, and freedom and fairness. Although these sets of principles can be portrayed as in conflict, the author describes how both progressives and conservatives share some level of commitment to all of them in name. The difference is that when people think of these principles, they mobilize different concepts and theories that effectively paint Wal-Mart or its critics as good or bad (moral or immoral) social actors.
The messages used in both sides’ public communications campaigns personify the struggle’s stakeholders in ways that frame the firm as upholding or violating these principles. These personifications presumably sway people’s more instinctual or visceral reactions to the retailer, which plays a key role in whom people judge to be the protagonist and antagonist in these conflicts. The book examines various facets of these messaging strategies. For example, it probes why some messages are more effective than others, or the more nuanced details of how symbols can be formulated, altered, and fused with moral principles.
There were many likeable things about this book. It provides some effective ideal-types to help readers understand the worldviews and mental associations that might underpin pro- or anti-Walmart (and neoliberalism) constituencies. Massengill reasonably conveys a sensible, non-caricatured, accurate picture of conservative worldviews, something that is often not done well in sociology. If many sociologists see conflicts over symbols like Walmart with a perspective that is largely sympathetic to its opponents (like Wal-Mart Watch in this study), then they might enjoy a rich description of a worldview that probably seems foreign or nonsensical to them. Those who enjoyed George Lakoff’s study of partisan cultural differences in America may appreciate the additional antimonies that can be used to consider the differences between liberals and conservatives. Those who believe that the middle class is disposed to vote against their own economic interests may develop an understanding of how this (purportedly true fact) could happen without relying strictly on explanations that involve stupidity, ignorance, or mass manipulation.
This book has much to offer several audiences. Its argument that progressivism’s reliance on abstract categories in its moral argumentation may draw a reaction from those interested in progressive politics. Those who are interested in the mechanics of cultural change or persuasion may enjoy the book’s content analyses, which demonstrate concrete ways in which definitions of morality can vary, be tweaked, and be attached (or detached) to symbols, ideas, organizations, and people. It conveys how cultural markets are segmented and how cultural entrepreneurs can micro-target these segments to garner support for their causes. The book provides a good vehicle for some popular arguments in economic sociology (like “culture structures markets,” “markets are embedded,” “people do not act as homo economicus,” etc.), because it engages these types of ideas with sophistication and clarity. The book is very well written, which makes it well-suited to classroom discussion, particularly given the fact that so many students probably have personal contact with Wal-Mart and, possibly, preconceived positions on the topic. Finally, I found that the book’s discussion of moral thinking’s influence in economic politics prompted me to think about social scientists’ role in public debate and the complexities of juggling facts and values in the analysis of contentious economic problems. Others may have the same reaction.