management and marketing savvy. The product development and marketingpractices of Cisco Systems, a key player in the penetration of Internet tech-nology into industries worldwide, exemplify this commodiWcation of corpo-rate “mindware,” as demonstrated by John Zuern’s analysis. And in HeatherZwicker’s account, the awarding by the U.S. of a major reconstruction con-tract in Iraq to the Bechtel Corporation represents a particularly worrisomeattempt to export American management to rebuild Iraqi infrastructure inan unlikely bid to rehabilitate U.S. standing in this war-ravaged region.

A number of the essays also explore how activists and academics areresponding to labor and environmental abuses, most notably S. Shankar’swork on Coca-Cola and its engagement with the global politics of thirston the Indian subcontinent. In her acknowledgments, Purnima Bose thanksa local labor organizer, who shared his GE Wles with her, creating a kindof intellectual collaboration. This collective project of amassing a dossieron any given corporation is an arduous undertaking. As Barbara Harlowsuggests in her essay, Ruth First’s initial work to produce a “corporateproWle” of De Beers, written long before globalization became such a focusof popular and scholarly discourse, may well serve as a model for the kind ofresearch now necessary to understand the workings and effects of corporateenterprises.

Taken together, individual corporate dossiers can highlight connec-tions across corporate enterprises that otherwise appear unrelated. ReadingShankar’s account of the devastating effects of Coca Cola’s attempt to con-trol water in India for the purposes of manufacturing soda, alongsideZwicker’s discussion of Bechtel’s interest in rebuilding the infrastructure ofIraq’s water system as a means of political and economic control reveals alarger movement of global capital, cutting across regions and nation-states,to privatize resources and effectively enclose the commons. Similarly LauraE. Lyons points to the increasing encroachment of the U.S. military onlands sacred to Native Hawaiians and into public institutions in Hawai‘i. Todiffering degrees and for diverse purposes, the chapters in this collectionnot only offer methodological insights into researching and resisting cor-porations but also frequently publicize the important contributions of thoseindividuals and organizations challenging speciWc corporate abuses.

Fetishism and Corporate Personhood

In Capital, Karl Marx scrupulously details the ways in which capitalistmodes of production obscure the social character of labor relations and con-ceptualizes “commodity fetishism” as the disarticulation of the commod-ity from the social conditions that produced it. Rather than act as a visible

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archive of human experience, which connects individuals through the pro-cess of exchange, the commodity acquires instead a mystical aura, “abound-ing in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties” insofar as the “socialcharacteristics” of labor are abstracted as “objective characteristics” andessential aspects of the products of labor themselves.32 If, as Marx believes,the commodity is the “basic cell” of capitalism, the corporation can beunderstood as a peculiar type of organism, whose structure is a totality ofinterdependent parts coordinated to produce commodities and services,along with amassing proWts. Yet, while having a determinate structure, thecorporation can also assume a ponderous, impenetrable form, unintelligi-ble to those outside its organizational reach, which seemingly renders itomnipotent and impervious to regulation. The present-day corporation isat once everywhere and nowhere. Its products and propaganda permeate oureveryday lives. And yet, when corporations are called upon to take responsi-bility or make reparations for the ill effects of their power, their very size andcomplexity mean that no single agent can be unambiguously isolated as theguilty party. In the last three decades the corporation has acquired the onto-logical status that Marx once claimed for the commodity; shrouded in mys-tique, the corporation has the power to transform, enhance, or devastatecommunities through its decisions and policies. As with the commodity, thispower has been abstracted from the actual social relations that inform thecorporation, both inside and outside its structure, and attributed to the cor-poration itself in a version of what we might call “corporation fetishism.”33

Paradoxically, however, the social characteristics of the corporation areoften displaced through its personiWcation as an individual subject, embod-ied in the Wgure of a charismatic CEO, who is generally male. The CEOfunctions as a metonym for the corporation and lends it a human face evenas its policies and practices may be quite deleterious for workers, con-sumers, and individuals who circle or stray within its orbit. Over the lastcentury the close identiWcation between the CEO and the corporation hasbecome common place in representing and marketing businesses. As theessays in this volume illustrate, such a corporeal identiWcation meldedJames Drummond Dole with his pineapple company, later renamed Dole;made Warren A. Bechtel the face of the Bechtel Corporation; promotedSir Harry Oppenheimer alongside the Anglo American Corporation; andpersoniWed General Electric in the Wgure of Jack Welch.

In the last several decades the humanization of corporations has beenfacilitated by the emergence of CEO biographies and autobiographies,which, since the 1980s and the publication of Lee Iacocca’s Iacocca: An Auto-biography, have gained in popularity and often Wnd their way onto the New

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York Times and other best-seller lists. Other such titles include Sam Walton:Made in America; Richard Branson’s Losing my Virginity: How I’ve Survived,Had Fun, and Made a Fortune Doing Business My Way published in 1998 andfollowed a few years later by the more reserved volume Sir Richard Branson:An Autobiography; Michael Bloomberg’s Bloomberg by Bloomberg; and JackWelch’s Jack: Straight from the Gut. Welch, whose memoirs and musings onWnancial success include numerous volumes, has yet to reach the level ofproduction of “The Donald,” whose books outnumber all the other CEOsand, of course, all include “Trump” in the title. The success of these biog-raphies, as measured in their wide dissemination and readership and nearconstant presence on best-seller lists, indicates the popularity of CEOs andtheir transformation into celebrities.

As Christopher Byron notes in Testosterone Inc.: Tales of CEOs Gone Wild,the emergence of the CEO celebrity was preceded by the use of celebrityspokespeople for corporations in the 1970s, when their appearance in adver-tisements nearly doubled as mass-market advertising became omnipresentand began to permeate many aspects of American life.34 While televisionand Wlm personalities such as Gregory Peck, James Garner, Dick Cavett,and Candice Bergen became spokespersons for different corporations,CEOs were not featured in advertisements for their corporations unless,like Frank Borman of Eastern Airlines, who was a former astronaut, theywere previously well known to the public (146). Lee Iacocca, who was Wredas president of Ford Motor Company and later employed by the ChryslerCorporation, became the Wrst prominent CEO celebrity when NBC fea-tured him in a prime-time television proWle (160). Two effects of the pro-gram were to market Iacocca as a business celebrity and to set the essentialbiographical terms of his iconography: his Italian, working-class, immigrantroots and his straight-talking vocabulary (160). Lee Iacocca became an iconof the “all-American guy,” what Byron describes as “a kind of John Wayneof big business” (160). The publication of his autobiography later that yearby Bantam Books catapulted him onto the best-seller lists, where he stayedfor years. “The publishing industry had never seen anything like the Iacoccaphenomenon,” Byron observes, “and agents rushed in to Wll the demand forwhat appeared to be a whole new genre of biography: the businessman ascelebrity. Books were soon emerging to celebrate Peter Ueberroth, VictorKiam, T. Boone Pickens, John DeLorean, and many others” (161).

The emergence of the CEO celebrity in conjunction with the legal sta-tus of corporations has crucially shaped the current tendency to equate andhumanize corporations by Wguring them through their CEOs. As PurnimaBose elaborates in her essay on GE, corporations are Wctitious people,

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deWned in U.S. law as “an artiWcial person or legal entity created by orunder the authority of the laws of a state.”35 This corporate persona is“distinct from the individual” shareholders “who comprise it,” and has itsown unique “personality and existence.”36 As a result, it can act “as a unit orsingle individual in matters relating to the common purpose of the associa-tion, within the scope of the powers and authorities conferred upon suchbodies by law.”37 A serious consequence of the legal Wction of corporate per-sonhood has been the conferral of rights ordinarily associated with individ-uals, including the right to sue and be sued, to make contracts, and to holdproperty in a common name.

The legal Wction of corporate personhood was established in the U.S. inan 1886 Supreme Court case, Santa Clara County v. Southern PaciWc, involv-ing jurisdiction over the assessment of taxes on the railroad’s property. In1866 an act of Congress granted Southern PaciWc public lands in exchangefor “facilitating the construction of the line, and thereby securing the safeand speedy transportation of mails, troops, munitions of war and publicstores.”38 The County of Santa Clara Wled suit against the railroad for fail-ure to pay back taxes. At issue in the case was whether the county or theState Board of Equalization had the proper authority to assess taxes onfences erected on Southern PaciWc’s territory. Ultimately Wnding in favor ofSouthern PaciWc, the Supreme Court decided that the railroad had beenimproperly assessed taxes on fences by the State Board of Equalization whenthe county should have been the taxing agent. Incredibly the court relievedSouthern PaciWc of its obligation to pay any of its taxes beyond those leviedon the disputed fences.

Given that Southern PaciWc’s back taxes were relatively modest (about$30,000 on property valued at around $30 million) and were owed to thecounty regardless of the identity of the assessor, Southern PaciWc’s will-ingness to engage in litigation with Santa Clara County is noteworthy. Itslawyers seem to have pursued the question of “personhood,” because underprovisions of the California State Constitution “bona Wde residents” of thestate could be exempt from some assessed taxes.39 In briefs presented beforethe Supreme Court and lower courts, Southern PaciWc’s lawyers argued thatcorporations constituted persons under the Fourteenth Amendment, thelegislative measure to guarantee full personhood to freed slaves.40 Yet,although this case is widely credited for establishing the legal Wction of cor-porate personhood, according to Thom Hartmann, the court opinion itselfdoes not contain a speciWc ruling granting corporations this status.41

The decision in Santa Clara vs. Southern PaciWc was handed down in aperiod before stenographers transcribed court proceedings, which were

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instead entrusted to court reporters who were well versed in law and com-manded a great deal of respect among judicial personnel.42 The court re-porter in this case, John Chandler Bancroft Davis, was a Harvard-educatedattorney and had served a number of political appointments, includingAssistant Secretary of State, Minister of Germany, and as a Court ClaimsJudge. The granting of personhood to corporations was not part of theactual decision but was inserted as a headnote by Davis. Though headnoteshave no legal standing, over the ensuing decades Davis’s headnote acquiredinterpretive force and established the precedent for corporate personhood.

That the legal challenge to establish that a corporation is a “person,”endowed with the rights enshrined in the Constitution, grew out of a taxcase involving railroad fences is not surprising considering the crucial rolethe railroads played throughout the nineteenth century in redeWning thecorporation from a quasi-governmental agency with public accountabilityto the corporation as a form of private property. Initially the incorporationof railroads allowed for the mobilization of both private and public fundsto underwrite the costs of new transportation systems and also recognizedthe need for public accountability. However, as William G. Roy explains inSocializing Capital, because many states were already greatly invested in thebuilding of turnpikes and canals, states relied heavily on private interests inbuilding rail systems. In return, “state government typically compensatedfor the lack of Wnancial support by granting charters with liberal provisionsand special privileges.”43 These privileges frequently included the rightof eminent domain, tax exemptions, limited liability, and later governmentguaranteed bonds to raise money so that “states could attract capital for thegeneral good by using state power to absolve investors of risk they wouldface in the private economy” (87). Roy notes that when “governmentsretreated from economic activism in the 1840s and 1850s, these railroadcompanies, now becoming major economic forces, retained many of theirspecial privileges but were freed of their earlier accountability” (86).

Increasingly, railroads looked to local governments for sources of fund-ing, and the power to include or exclude particular towns along routes gaveto the railroad companies a considerable bargaining chip. Unlike state gov-ernments who issued charters of incorporation and so “had a structuralcapacity to hold corporations accountable to the public, local governmentswere more likely to behave like private owners” motivated by maximizingproWts.44 Railroads, then, transformed the very notion of a corporation fromsomething that was chartered by the government for the public good to anincreasingly private entity. Laissez-faire attitudes, prevalent at the time,also aided this transformation by supplying practical and moral arguments

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that government is best when it interferes least with individuals, whetherthey are natural or artiWcial persons like corporations.

In the years following the 1886 case, corporations have used their legalstanding as persons to challenge government restrictions on their behaviorand expand their rights. This expansion of corporate rights was particu-larly pronounced during the 1970s, when corporations successfully arguedSupreme Court cases granting them protection against warrantless regula-tory searches, Fifth Amendment double jeopardy, and the right to trial bya jury guaranteed by the Seventh Amendment.45 The impact of the CleanAir Act, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration Act, and theConsumer Product Safety Act have been weakened by other court decisionsgranting First Amendment rights to corporations including the right topolitical speech, commercial speech, and the negative free speech right notto be associated with the speech of others.46 All these rulings have had anegative effect on democracy at the local level insofar as citizens often havelittle legal recourse to regulate corporations in their midst.

Moreover, as corporations increasingly exert inXuence on trade agree-ments between nation-states, the right of corporations to pursue proWtsunhindered by national interests is becoming the norm. Under the NorthAmerican Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), for example, foreign companiescan challenge decisions made by national and local governments in waysthat domestic corporations cannot: “As of 2001, there were at least 17 casesin which corporations had Wled a complaint against NAFTA signatoriesunder Chapter 11 provisions, most of these claiming economic losses relatedto environmental regulations.”47 The legacy of corporate personhood, then,has been not only to extend to companies the same rights granted to indi-viduals but also to maximize their ability to self-actualize, to realize theirgreatest proWt potential. While national sovereignty has not withered away,the ability of multinational corporations to inXuence state actions in waysfavorable to their business plans all too frequently prevails against the eco-nomic, cultural, and political interests of citizens.

Corporate Narratives and the Case Study

Little analytic leverage is provided by Wguring corporations through per-sonhood, whether as a legal Wction or in conjunction with a charismaticCEO. Against such Wgurations, the essays in this book propose alternativemethods of representing and understanding corporations that take seriouslycorporate self-representation, and that place these largely laudatory narra-tives against a backdrop of an ever weakening social contract. Each essayis instructive for offering a case study of a speciWc corporation tracing its

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