Gaining the status of personhood under U.S. law in 1886 grantedpreviously ponderous, corporate institutions a human face andfacilitated their identiWcation with a speciWc, individual male, gen-

erally the founder of the company or a charismatic CEO, a major trope ofcorporate ideology throughout the twentieth century. In the Wrst half of thecentury a close identiWcation between capitalists and corporations occurs,for example, in the cases of James Drummond Dole and Dole Foods alongwith Warren A. Bechtel and his company of the same name. Later in thecentury a novel form of branding emerges in which companies are legiti-mized by the name recognition of their CEOs; for instance, Dave Thomasbecomes synonymous with Wendy’s and Bill Gates with Microsoft. ForGeneral Electric (GE), Thomas Edison, the founder and earliest face ofGE, acts as a supplement to Jack Welch’s visage, the corporation’s faceat the end of the twentieth century. This corporeal identiWcation is of apiece with the founding myths of the American nation that articulate thefree-market economy with rugged individualism, coalescing into a kind of“entrepreneurial individualism.” Although the close identiWcation betweenCEOs and corporations has long been a feature of corporate ideology in theU.S., formulations of entrepreneurial individualism and corporate respon-sibility have shifted across the twentieth century. These changes might besurprising for those who understand there to be continuities within con-temporary forms of capitalism and their earlier embodiments. Expressionsof entrepreneurial individualism and corporate responsibility are linked tothe legal and representational trope of corporate personhood. At differenttimes across the last century this trope has been animated by varying andcontradictory degrees of concern for workers and the public on the part ofmanagement.

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For General Electric, the mid-century marks a shift away from a corpo-rate humanism to a corporate ethos that values a rapacious drive for proWtsunder its former Chief Executive OfWcer, Jack Welch. As GE managementmanuals from the 1950s reveal, company executives understood corporatepersonhood to mean that GE was a “corporate citizen,” who had certainobligations to advance a common good beyond the Wduciary responsibilityto shareholders for the maximization of proWts. While marked by the anti-communism that would later characterize the Cold War, this version ofcorporate humanism resonated with the New Deal and the creation ofsocial welfare programs. Yet, during Welch’s twenty-year tenure from 1981to 2001, this Wguration of corporate personhood as benevolent citizen istransformed into Marx’s nightmare metaphor of the vampire through thecompany’s drive to globalize its operations, increase market share, andreduce labor costs. Though it is tempting to present a historical rupture inthese two Wgurations of corporate personhood, assigning each to a clearlydelineated time period, contradictions within GE’s ideology during theWfties such as its insatiable appetite for growth, the desire to standardize allaspects of production, the professionalization of management, and the cor-responding ampliWcation of the importance of individual executives providethe precondition for the development of the late-twentieth-century corpo-rate vampire Wgure. Instead of envisioning the changes in GE’s ideology asthe replacement of one type of corporate personhood for another, it is moreaccurate to consider how the Wgure of corporate citizen from the Wftiesnourishes GE’s vampirish devastation of workers and communities underWelch’s leadership.

Within this framework, I want to acknowledge several methodologicaldifWculties. First, this chapter does not attempt to provide a comprehensiveoverview of GE’s ethos and policies since the company’s origins in 1892.1

My survey of GE literature is not exhaustive, limited as it is to several keytexts, written by GE executives, which I read as symptomatic of the com-pany’s ideology by contextualizing them within the contemporary businessliterature of their age. This latter move enables us to historicize the rela-tionship between capital and the nation-state, and chart moments of coop-eration, accommodation, and divergence between them. Changes withinGE’s conception of its national duties, then, signal larger shifts in the atti-tudes of industry to the nation-state. Second, I recognize that a potentialgap exists between GE’s earlier self-representation, particularly in its con-struction of the “corporate citizen,” on the one hand, and its material prac-tices toward workers, communities, and the environment, on the other. Ihave tried to supplement my analysis of the changing faces of GE with

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descriptions of its actual labor and environmental policies and practiceswhen appropriate.

Entrepreneurial Individualism andCorporate Personhood

Puzzling over Jack Welch’s apotheosis into a corporate godhead in light ofhis actual performance at GE, Rob Walker suggests that contemporary U.S.culture depicts CEOs “as almost single-handedly responsible for the goodfortunes of their companies.”2 Just as Welch is lauded for “reviving” GE,Walker points out that in the past Lou Gerstner was credited with resusci-tating IBM and Lee Iacocca with rehabilitating Chrysler. Such a singularfocus on the individual CEO reproduces the view, as Heather Zwicker notesin her contribution to this volume, that “entrepreneurial agents of capital”affect “large-scale change in the world” on the basis of their initiative andforce of personality, ignoring the ways that individual will is more com-plexly mediated by other agents and institutions in its translation to socialchange.3 This articulation of entrepreneurial individualism relies on twoprimary discursive strategies: a construction of the corporation as an ailingentity, encumbered by bureaucracy, entrenched management practices, andexcess manpower, and a representation of the CEO, in contrast, as a rebel,revolutionary, and even renegade, who jolts the corporation out of its dol-drums and electriWes it with fresh ideas and business practices (Walker). Boththese constructions, Walker cautions, must be scrutinized when assessingthe overall contributions of a particular CEO and judging a corporation’srecord.

It is worth considering the factors that have given entrepreneurial indi-vidualism such strong currency in today’s ideological landscape. Noting thatWelch’s predecessor at GE, Reg Jones, was also touted by “his peers asthe nation’s most admired and inXuential CEO,” Walker explains that “thewider public wasn’t that interested in such things back then” in the sameway as it is now. In the last two decades of the twentieth century, coincidingwith Welch’s direction of GE, business leaders have gained more promi-nence in North American mass culture for three reasons. First, business newsis ubiquitous, blanketing the public twenty-four hours a day with stock mar-ket Wgures on venues such as CNBC, CNN, and Fox News when previouslyit was relegated to the business section of print media or news segmentson speciWc companies. Second, the rise of technology companies in theeighties and nineties provided a pantheon of new, charismatic personalitiesfor public adulation; Microsoft, Apple, and Dell “appeared to come fromnowhere on the strength of visionary individuals whose entrepreneurial

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achievements were inspiring in a way few political Wgures could match”(Walker). And, third, the press often narrated business stories through the“prism of individuals” such as Iacocca, Gates, and Welch (Walker). The riseof the CEO celebrity has been accompanied also by an exponential increasein executive compensation: whereas in 1970 a CEO’s salary and bonus pack-ages weighed in at about $700,000, approximately twenty-Wve times theaverage salary of an American worker, by 2000, CEO salaries had toppedthe scale at about $2.2 million, nearly ninety times the average salary of anAmerican worker.4 The AFL-CIO calculates the average total compensa-tion for CEOs in 2008 to be $10.4 million.5 Given that the corporationtoday is a protean entity, often manufacturing multiple commodities andproviding numerous services in different sectors of the economy, the focuson individual CEOs enables narrative cohesion and facilitates easier con-sumer identiWcation with the corporation. GE, for example, owns morethan Wfty companies that deal with diverse products such as medical equip-ment, broadcasting, nuclear fuel, and insurance, to name a few. The focuson Jack Welch becomes a biographical metonym of corporate history, whichnecessarily truncates the complexity of GE’s operations while offering con-sumers an easily packaged narrative about the company.

The current infatuation with business leaders, when grafted onto thelegal status of corporations, presents a formidable face to those concernedwith corporate power, democratic decision making, and the local control ofresources and land. The status of corporations as a legal category helps usunderstand a recurring trope in representations of corporations as signiW-ers of exceptional, individual men. Although we might think of corpora-tions as inanimate economic units organized for amassing capital, in fact,under U.S. law, they are Wctitious people. Black’s Law Dictionary deWnes acorporation as “an artiWcial person or legal entity created by or under theauthority of the laws of a state.”6 The law treats this corporate persona as“distinct from the individual” shareholders “who comprise it,” having its ownpeculiar “personality and existence” (Black, 237). Accordingly, the corpora-tion acts “as a unit or single individual in matters relating to the commonpurpose of the association, within the scope of the powers and authoritiesconferred upon such bodies by law” (ibid.). The legal Wction of corporatepersonhood confers on corporations certain rights ordinarily associatedwith individuals, such as the right to sue and be sued, to make contracts, andto hold property in a common name.7 Whereas the personiWcation of cor-porations dates back to the Wfteenth century in British law, the antecedentto American law, the legal Wction of corporate personhood was establishedin the U.S. in an 1886 Supreme Court case, Santa Clara County v. Southern

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PaciWc, in which corporate lawyers bizarrely, but successfully, argued that cor-porations constituted persons under the Fourteenth Amendment, the legis-lative measure to guarantee full personhood to freed slaves.8 The acquisitionof personhood enabled corporations to contest government restrictions ontheir behavior and expand their rights, particularly in the 1970s when theSupreme Court issued a series of rulings giving corporations safeguardsagainst warrantless regulatory searches, Fifth Amendment double-jeopardyprotection, and the Seventh Amendment right to trial by jury.9 Other courtdecisions granted First Amendment rights to corporations including theright to political speech, commercial speech, and the negative free speechright not to be associated with the speech of others.10 These rulings haveenfeebled the impact of the Clean Air Act, the Occupational Safety andHealth Administration Act, and the Consumer Product Safety Act.

In addition to possessing these constitutional rights, given its capacityto transcend mortality, the corporation is legally endowed with uniqueattributes that defy the ontological condition of sentient beings. The “corpo-ration survives the death of its investors, as the shares can usually be trans-ferred,” Black’s Legal Dictionary explains, “Such entity subsists as a bodypolitic under a special domination” which is vested by the authority of thelaw “with the capacity [of ] continuous succession, irrespective of changesin its membership, either in perpetuity or for a limited term of years” (237).As a personality that can outlive its shareholders and exist in perpetuity,the corporation does not so much resemble the eternal, beneWcent divineas it does those ghoulish creatures of the night that periodically disturbthe living. Following Marx, we might note that the Wgure of the vampire isan appropriate metaphor for corporate personhood, the legal Wction of theembodiment of capital. In his description of the accumulation of surplus-value during the working day, Marx describes capital as a preternaturalbeing that preys ruthlessly upon others: “Capital is dead labour which,vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labour, and lives the more, themore labour it sucks.”11 As the embodiment of capital, corporations havethe Wduciary responsibility to their shareholders to singularly pursue proWtand accumulate surplus-value regardless of the social costs involved. Somerecent statistics on the global economy illustrate the horrifying, vampirishaspects of capital and the direct relationship between its engorgement andthe social evisceration and emaciation of the multitudes: while Wfty-two ofthe world’s largest one hundred economies are now transnational corpora-tions rather than nation-states, 2 billion people—approximately 40 percentof the world—live on less than two dollars a day, and half of these surviveon less than one dollar a day.12

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Articulating the legal status of corporations with entrepreneurial individ-ualism need not contribute to the deiWcation of the CEO that is operativein contemporary U.S. culture. Rather, it can be used to write alternativebiographies of corporations that narrate their impact on the world at largethrough their record of litigation. In The Corporation: The Pathological Pur-suit of ProWt and Power, Joel Bakan argues that corporate personhood is moreappropriately understood through the trope of pathological criminality as aninstitution that possesses “a psychopathic contempt for legal constraints.”13

Contending that decisions to comply with regulations are based on the bot-tom line for most corporations, he explains that executives weigh the penal-ties and probability of getting caught against the costs of compliance (80).Indeed, GE’s counsel, Philip Lacovara, admitted as much in his remarks tothe U.S. Sentencing Commission.

In the absence of substantial credit for voluntary disclosure, it is not in theorganization’s economic self-interest to search for and disclose offenses thatmanagement has been unable to prevent. . . . The economic disadvantages ofvoluntarily disclosing suspected misconduct may well discourage corporationsfrom reporting their suspicions or assessments to agency regulators and law-enforcement personnel.14

Lacovara’s admission is especially worrisome given that General Electric is, inBakan’s assessment, a “habitual offender,” compiling a record “that would bethe envy of even the most proliWc human criminal[s]” (75). Between 1990 and2001 alone, Multinational Monitor lists thirty-eight legal breaches for viola-tions including the contamination of soil and water; discrimination againstemployees who reported safety violations; defrauding the government in de-fense contracts; improperly testing aircraft parts for the government; designXaws in nuclear plants;15 money laundering and the illegal sale of Wghter jetsto Israel; deceptive light bulb advertising; unfair debt collection practices;overcharges on mortgage insurance; and deceiving consumers into purchas-ing new dishwashers after a recall for which a replacement part was available.16

“When corporations commit crimes,” William Greider points out, “theydo not wish to be treated as people, but as ‘artiWcial legal entities’ that can-not be held personally accountable for their misdeeds” (349). Individual cit-izens convicted of felonies forfeit their political rights, including the rightto vote and to hold ofWce; in contrast, when corporations commit crimes ordefy regulatory statutes, they are free to act as political agents and often con-tinue to inXuence public policy through their testimony at congressionalhearings or in their capacity as advisers to the White House on important

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issues of the day. When confronted with evidence of GE’s malfeasance, cor-porate ofWcials react with surprise or disavow these occurrences by blamingindividual rogue employees rather than holding culpable a high-pressuremanagement culture that strives to maximize proWts at any cost. Lacovara,for instance, analogized the corporation to a mid-sized city, claiming thatno city is free of crime. He observed: “It is entirely unrealistic to attributeevery act of a miscreant employee to the corporation’s directors and ofWcerson the theory that they ‘should have known’ what was happening” (quotedin Greider, 351).

The recognition that free speech and open debate are rights that shouldaccrue to everyone, including agents of concentrated power and economicprivilege, presents real challenges for democracy. Instead of reacting to theinstitutional realities of corporate power by “curtailing democratic rightsfor certain parties,” Greider urges that a better solution would be to admin-ister “the obligations of citizenship to corporations as forcefully as theyare applied to individuals” (348). Telling the story of GE by publicizing thedetails of its legal transgressions might be a step in this direction and couldrender a more complex understanding of the corporation than has been per-mitted by entrepreneurial individualism and the recent focus on Jack Welch(and now Jeffrey Immelt, GE’s current CEO).17

Thomas Edison as Signifier ofEntrepreneurial Individualism

For GE, the association between the individual and the corporation datesto its origins in 1892 as the result of a merger between the Edison GeneralElectric Company and Thomson-Houston Electric Company, when it wasclosely identiWed with one of its founders, Thomas Edison.18 This mergerwas perhaps more signiWcant to the development of modern industrial man-agement in the United States than earlier trusts had been, because it repre-sented the Wrst major consolidation of machinery-producing companiesor already integrated enterprises.19 “Where earlier trusts had been monop-olies of raw materials and/or their processing, General Electric excelled intechniques, embodied in its skilled work force, a large body of patents, andtalented engineers,” David E. Nye claims. “Such a dominance based onexpertise could be extended into new areas through the development of newproducts” (14). GE’s ability to diversify its products and services has con-tributed to its sustained success; it has the distinction of being the onlycompany in the Dow Jones Industrial Index today to have been listed inthe original index in 1896. The company’s early associations with ThomasEdison, coupled with its longevity, have made it an American icon. Edison

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