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

By Roland Marchand

Book Overview

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.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0520087194
• ISBN13: 9780520087194
• Release Date: November 1998
• Publisher: University of California Press
• Length: 470 Pages
• Weight: 4.05 lbs.
• Dimensions: 10.5" x 1.8" x 7.8"

Customer Reviews

Well documented history of how corporations learned to create images for public consumption

This is an interesting work in business and cultural history. Roland Marchand documents the way corporations used (and developed) public relations to develop images of themselves in the public mind. This is really about the early decades and is quite fascinating. We see this today, certainly. For example, when some huge food conglomerate shows you some master chef each portion of the food they want you to buy, you are getting the same kind of treatment. It wouldn't do to show you the huge machines and food production lines that create these food products in vast quantities. No, they want you to think in terms of some impossibly personalized image. (Although recently I saw a television commerical for a breakfast cereal showing the machines making and packaging the food with some of the folks making it talking to the viewer about how great their product is.) While some may feel the author of the book is more hostile to corporations than is actually appropriate, I think he has done a fine job in presenting us with these historical images and insightful text that supports his thesis. I am certainly pro-business and conservative. However, I in no way want to pretend that corporations are caring and personal entities that have objects other than providing profits for their shareholders at heart. There are a great many philosophical issues that can be discussed about the duties of corporations, and I am willing to engage in those debates, but no one should mistake these entities for families or friends (or monsters or enemies, either). Corporations are artificial creations that we have created to provide goods and services efficiently and thereby returning profits to shareholders. This book documents how they create images that help them accomplish those purposes.