BE on brain-beaming
Hat tip to marxmail for this link.
http://www.bookforum.com/inprint/016_03/4340
Sept/Oct/Nov 2009
Positively Delusional
John Summers
Positive thinking should never be the same after Barbara Ehrenreich’s
Bright-Sided. But as Ehrenreich herself shows in a sketch of the
movement’s history, its theorists, hucksters, and practitioners have
thumbed their noses at reason ever since Mary Baker Eddy popularized New
Thought with the mind-over-matter healing doctrine of Christian Science.
Led by preacher Joel Osteen, motivational guru Tony Robbins, and
academic psychologist Martin Seligman, among many others, the national
cult of uplift abounding has lately generated subprime mortgages,
megachurches, and a “pink-ribbon culture” that promotes a
mind-cure-style approach to treating breast cancer: Maintaining a
positive outlook, Ehrenreich learned firsthand, is supposed to boost the
victim’s immune system.
Ehrenreich is a sharp and reliable student of the divided middle class,
as good as the American left can boast. In attacking the thick
irrationality of our public lives, Bright-Sided homes in on a
particularly salient line of argument—that positive thinking is not only
preposterous but pernicious: “The effort of positive ‘thought control,’
which is always presented as such a life preserver, has become a
potentially deadly weight—obscuring judgment and shielding us from vital
information. Sometimes we need to heed our fears and negative thoughts,
and at all times we need to be alert to the world outside ourselves,
even when that includes absorbing bad news and entertaining the views of
‘negative’ people. As we should have learned by now, it is dangerous not
to.” Positive thinking, the stepchild of Emersonian self-reliance, “has
undermined America.”
The thesis contains a paradox. Why should a movement committed in
advance to the notion that prosperity is largely a matter of
self-confidence flourish in times of institutional failure? Doesn’t
preaching a doctrine of attitude adjustment insult one’s intelligence in
a contracting labor market? In fact, Americans have always been great
dreamers. The 1930s, the heyday of success manuals, made best-selling
authors of idiots savants like Dale Carnegie, Walter Pitkin, Dorothea
Brande, Napoleon Hill, and other fools for good news and easy money. Let
Your Mind Alone!, cried James Thurber, in a 1937 collection of salvos
aimed at these writers’ contempt for social ethics. Then Norman Vincent
Peale published The Power of Positive Thinking in 1952, and all was lost.
The briskness and lucidity of the prose Ehrenreich deploys in reviving
the struggle for national sobriety might make it easy to miss her
erudition. Bright-Sided draws from a genre of radical social thought
that tries to understand the eclipse of the Protestant ethic and the
pursuit of wealth divested of morality. Ehrenreich nods to Donald
Meyer’s The Positive Thinkers (1965), still the best study of the
subject. But her argument also summons a number of other classic
examinations of the dubiously rational American character, such as the
portrait of “cheerful robots” climbing the corporate ladder in C. Wright
Mills’s White Collar (1951).
Ehrenreich shows how rationality has lost out in corporate management
since Mills’s day—but like him, she explains the ongoing appeal of
positive thinking as a consequence of alienation. Positive thinking, she
argues in fine left-wing fashion, is an ideology that sustains economic
inequality by isolating individuals from brute facts. For all its
nostrums, it has not made Americans any happier. Behind that tight smile
lies the despair of helplessness. Her antidote remains much the same as
the cure prescribed in the 1950s: “anxious vigilance,” “a certain level
of negativity and suspicion,” and “a relentless commitment to hard-nosed
empiricism.”
These admonitions are not likely to enlist already committed positive
thinkers, and Ehrenreich acknowledges the intrinsic difficulty of
reaching them: “It remains the responsibility of each individual to sift
through the received wisdom . . . and decide what’s worth holding on to.
This can require the courage of a Galileo, the iconoclasm of a Darwin or
Freud, the diligence of a homicide detective.” Certainly, given all that
is required, rationalists would do well to cultivate an empirically
grounded belief in the actual efficacy of “critical thinking.” Yet
Bright-Sided says nothing about politics. The hard form of positive
thinking is junk science, to be sure. The soft form, though, may offer
Americans a chance to participate vicariously in the national sport of
ambition.
Looking plainly at the environmental sources of breast cancer or the
scourge of global warming—“to always keep in view the specter of
injustice,”as Ehrenreich advises—is to raise the possibility that there
is nothing to be done by the powerless many, and much that will never be
done by the powerful few. To embrace critical thinking under the
illusion that it will make you happier is only to prepare for
disappointment. The positive-thinking movement appears to be held
together by deluded, isolated servants of the status quo. Meanwhile, the
status quo’s permanent opposition on the left knows its own
psychopathologies as resentment, anger, and moral vanity. Critical
thinking, no less than the positive kind, can hurt your brain.
John Summers is the author of Every Fury on Earth (The Davies Group, 2008).
rootlesscosmo:
The thesis contains a paradox. Why should a movement committed in
advance to the notion that prosperity is largely a matter of
self-confidence flourish in times of institutional failure? Doesn’t
preaching a doctrine of attitude adjustment insult one’s intelligence in
a contracting labor market?
I don’t get what’s paradoxical about the popularity of these doctrines in hard times. (Their popularity in times of prosperity, I think, is trickier to explain.) If someone’s troubles–out of work, can’t pay the rent, no health insurance–are just unfortunate consequences of the wrong attitude, then they can be cured, just by repeating the Couéist slogan (”Every day in every way I am getting better and better”) before the mirror every morning, or sending away for bits of glass, or following some other magic formula for success. Sometimes things pick up–they did around 1940–and the credit can be given to (and will certainly be claimed by) the magical practice; sometimes they don’t, in which case the unhappy customer must have been doing it wrong. (Similarly, the reason Utopian schemes fail is that the Founder’s instructions were somehow misunderstood or misapplied.) Positive Thinking catches suckers because millions of people feel miserable and want to feel better; it keeps on catching them because magic is by definition unfalsifiable.
Sure, critical thinking can hurt your brain. You were expecting a day at the beach?
2 September 2009, 9:25 pmld:
Cool, a working and teachable example of “unfalsifiability,” thanks!
3 September 2009, 7:42 amSteve:
The bogus bin is overflowing that’s for sure. Although it’s better to think positive then negative,
3 September 2009, 11:39 amdevelopment of will power, volition, initiative, etc is rarely discussed (or effectively taught) by the vast majority of purveyors of “think positive and all your desires, needs, and ultimately life’s luxuries will mysterious appear without pain or effort”.
Michael Anderson:
H.L. Mencken, the great cynic, called this the “Cult Of Hope”. Just off the top of my head, I can’t think of any captains of industry past or present who went in for this stuff, either. The reference to “…portrait of “cheerful robots” climbing the corporate ladder..”… made me think of IBM. Thomas Watson, the (past) chairman of IBM, got there by being a rapacious Capitalist, bulldozing every competitor that came up and, most repugnantly, renting punch card machines to the Third Reich.
There was a editorial @ NYT this A.M. that relates to this, about a letter from Eisenhower to a terminally ill veteran, circa 1958. Eisenhower, who was a corporatist as much as any, evidently read Eric Hoffer. A quote:
“He explained…that Hoffer “points out that dictatorial systems make one contribution to their people which leads them to tend to support such systems — freedom from the necessity of informing themselves and making up their own minds concerning these tremendous complex and difficult questions.” The authoritarian follower, Eisenhower suggested, desired nothing more than insulation from the pressures of a free society.”
We live in an institutional system, but the effect is the same. Mencken also wrote that most people prefer not to face the truth, and live behind a comforting “veil of illusion.” You can be “positive” and prosper to a degree in a system, but that does not make the system benign.
3 September 2009, 2:17 pmKim Sky:
again. The Rebel Sell by Joseph Heath & Andrew Potter
this book takes a good look at a whole set of ideas that have led us to on to self-help, positive thinking, the attack on rationality. simple living and the paradox of antimaterialism. etc.
3 September 2009, 8:31 pmRon:
I’m reading Life Inc right now, and there is a chapter that he begins talking about people buying into a seminar with Donald Trump on how to make money quickly, and once there they are pitched “systems” to help them, basically, take lists of people who have been struck by disaster and are likely to foreclose, and to buy their homes from them cheaply. Or something to that effect. Very convoluted stuff, but people were buying. Which people? People who had lost a lot, lost their homes, lost a job, people very down on their luck, and clinging to something to bring it back. They were, the author pointed out, the very demographic they were being pitched to target. And this “seminar” - which he describes as being more of a motivational cheerleading pitch for all of these other “systems” of wealth generation - was full of the kind of positive thinking cheerleading described here. Find the desperate, and dupe them. Network marketing is just one common place this is found. This hasn’t changed in a hundred years.
Nice article, I’ll be looking forward to this book.
3 September 2009, 11:15 pmStan:
The magic-thinking aspect of this phenom is related to people’s inability to tell the difference between semiotics and sorcery. “Minds” do, in fact, impinge pretty heavily on our material environment. But since this is a pretty widespread belief-trope, that “somehow, we can achieve mind over matter,” and one that is - in itself - harmless, we might make note that its point of reference (and this is the modernism/liberalism at its core) is always Me, the cult of self-esteem. This remains relatively invisible, because whatever your politics, or whether you even have a politics, the axiomatic shared assumption in this culture is that I am for Me. It’s even considered healthy, a peculiar self-help flip that has us telling the kids we care about to work on Me as one’s life-project, beginning with the mantra (or its kin) “I can accomplish anything I want.” We see tht sentence in this context, we think about the lie there… you certainly can’t accomplish anything you want, unless you adapt your wants to what you accomplish. But we miss the first word and the fact that this is the subject, “I.” This kind of personality hucksterism always dangles the suggestion of some future personal triumph; and so the basic assumption about the value and-or desirablility of individualism as the basis for our ethical lives remains an uncriticized ideology (thought-patterns that simultaneously reproduce and conceal relations of power).
I think Malcolm Gladwell has a book on “achievement,” called Outliers (haven’t read it yet), that debunks the idea that hard work and smarts will lead to achievement. His research apparently showed that hard work and smarts are necessary and extant ingredients in the lives of highly successful people, along with a good deal of luck in positioningbut… and this is a big but here, for every successful person, there are like a jillion hard working people with some kind of smarts who are left out when these niches of success are filled. Sounds simple, but it is an extremely subversive thesis, because it confirms the truth wrapped in the lie of “the meritocracy,” but it lays that big wrapper, the lie by omission, right next to it. And it does so without resorting to the polemical dishonesty of dismissing actual achievements or reducing them to simple social privilege (a common tactic by leftish ideologues that shuts down any reception by the vast number of people who have witnesses someone’s success -however defined- that did indeed employ some kind of smarts and hard work… I had some very succesful moments in the Army, and I studied and worked my ass off for them… but my position was de jure male and de facto white, so there were plenty of others who were left behind somehow along the way).
Barbara E wrote a book a while back about middle-class competition in the strange hybrid of today’s managerial-cheerleading-retail culture, where people were paying to go to courses for “personality makeovers” to make themselves more marketable. I just don’t know how much more slyly diabolical things can get than that. Commodification becomes a body-snatcher that turns us into glowing, smiling, boilerplate-string-doll sycophants.
4 September 2009, 5:07 amxavexgoem:
And then there’s the pinacle of this type of thought: The Secret and the “law of attraction”
From wiki, the process is:
1. Know exactly what you want.
2. Ask the universe for it.
3. Feel, behave and know as if the object of your desire is already yours (visualize).
4. Be open to receive it and let go of (the attachment to) the outcome.
Which, and I’m truly only guessing here, is a recipe for confirmation bias. What happens when you don’t get what you want? Did you not visualize hard enough? Did you not know exactly what you wanted? And then they’ll say that that sort of negative is what’s keeping you from getting what you want. And The Secret encourages this kind of thinking for cancer; that the cause of a cancer is from negative thinking. That the only reason (this isn’t stated, but it’s a pretty basic extrapolation) why people are suffering in Somalia is because they’re not thinking positively.
These types of self-help books encourages blind belief in lieu of the ability to change things, that wishing is enough to make the tools.
Lastly, this is a dualistic notion. Is negativity erased by positivity? Doesn’t one think positively in reaction to the possibility of negativity? Doesn’t that alone belie their thesis, if negativity is never really gone? This is an absurd train of thought…
4 September 2009, 9:09 amMichael Anderson:
Courtesy some of the Oregon Ferals—-”The Chasers War on Everything”, from Down Under—some comic relief on “The Secret”. The spirit (zeitgeist) of Satan doesn’t like getting laughed at…
Robert Heinlein and Larry Niven coined a word—TANSTAAFL—There Ain’t No Such Thing As A Free Lunch!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YNO97wUlKUk
Also recommended for comic relief—Frank Zappa, “Cosmic Debris”
4 September 2009, 3:28 pmSean:
@ Michael Anderson–
Mencken also called it “cargo cultists.” To understand that, you have to read Marvin Harris’s interesting study called “Cows, Pigs, Wars & Witches.”
I’ve always found Ehrenreich a bit boring, but if Summers is describing this latest work accurately, I think she may finally have left the realm of boring pedantry and hit upon something useful.
5 September 2009, 1:23 amMichael Anderson:
I understand the term “cargo cultists”….but looked it up on Wiki to make sure. It makes me wonder about our (Am-er-EEK-an?) mental state—I mean, I can see where we may be in enough of a state of “relative” ignorance to make this mentality an extremely large reality.
We live in a place where everything is available (Chuck Berry—”anything you want we got it right here in the USA”), and we are disconnected from where it comes from, i.e., there are kids who think milk comes from jugs or wax paper cartons, not cows; and there was that old TV commercial from the late 70’s advertising Grapes, where you had a stereotypical Joe Lunchpail kind of guy saying “who makes dese grapes, anyway?”. Talk about talking down to people…
Advanced technology [also] distances people from how things actually work, so we become, in a way, technological savages…using gadgets that we don’t have a clue as to how they work, but accepting the “cornucopia” of cheap food and material items blindly, and trying to (sort of) keep up with it. I sure like the computer as a tool….even when I want to throw it out the window when it turns on me.
Back to the aspect of “having it all”—-it is an impossibility! In order to get what you really want (and THAT can change over time), you have to give things up. An anecdote I remember—the great violinist Fritz Kreisler had finished a concert, and a member of the audience came up to him, gushing “I’d give my life to play as well as you do!”; to which Kreisler replied, “I did.” TANSTAAFL…
5 September 2009, 2:58 pmSean:
Michael — heh heh. Well done. Your comment’s 2d para reminded me of sentiments I read on homemade signs and bumper stickers in the region where I live. Sample: “If you disapprove of logging, stop using toilet paper.” HARUMPH. Please, save me from the overgeneral underanalysis… someone! I once wrote a note at my Frogbook page about the tactics of the logging industry in the region where I live — presently it’s a charade done to preserve roadcuts “for logging” so that the land may be “developed” with McMansions. But hey — don’t ever think of criticizing any aspect of logging if you’ve ever touched a piece of wood or pulp product. It’s just not fair! If I had a flag flying at my house, it would be at perpetual half-mast, mourning the death of critical thinking. But maybe I’m wrong there. Maybe it was never alive.
5 September 2009, 11:17 pmKim Sky:
Perhaps the metaphor for the 21st century — the cargo cult? or the 20th century for that matter.
To exist involves a leap of faith? No wonder we humans are susceptible to irrational ideologies. At best we might be rational in one small aspect of our lives, but you can guarantee that lots of ridiculous stuff is churning around inside of each and every human !!! And at this time in history, look at the multitude of ideas and things we must accept at truths.
The miracle is that we can actually communicate on so many different levels, and then teach and learn further. And sometimes find truth in the midst of centuries of irrational “truths” … like Christianity for example. Many a great thinker has participated and contributed to teachings that originated with that conglomeration of contradictions — the Bible.
Okay. Thanx to all for dialogue.
6 September 2009, 12:00 pmld:
I find it bizarre that Stan is endorsing an argument made by Gladwell of all people… and even more bizarre that I endorse Stan’s endorsement (in this case, anyway).
Sure, in corporate, state, and other bureaucracies, “scum floats to the top” to some extent… but “floating to the top” is not primarily about wholesale incompetents rising because of their personal connections or ascriptive characteristics (although, of course, the degree to which this is true depends on the particular bureaucracy in question). Rather, the people who move up are in large part those who embody and act out the “irrational rationality” of the bureaucracy, that is those who are endowed with a range of traits that are farther or closer to the “meritocratic” idyll, from a capacity to bootlick and cover your boss’ ass, to a willingness to work insanely long hours and bracket whatever ethical qualms you might have about the social utility of your work.
The real scandal, as Stan points out, is that for every person who achieves “success” in their field (however pathological or laudable), there are 10 or 100 similarly equipped people who don’t… because of the artificial scarcity of the slots near or at the top.
The “star system” in liberal-left academia is a prime example.
6 September 2009, 10:47 pmld:
I think I meant “rational irrationality,” not the converse…
6 September 2009, 10:51 pmld:
And my observations are nothing more than rather pedestrian Sociology 101… only in a culture so suffused with individualism (not to be confused with “individuality”) do they approach the status of a revelation.
6 September 2009, 10:58 pmMichael Anderson:
@ Id—read “The Peter Principle”; another book from the 70’s. The Peter Principle simply states that in hierarchical organizations, people rise to the level of their incompetence; that is, to a position where where they cannot dot their job effectively, and there they stay. Seems to be true, even on casual observation.
7 September 2009, 6:27 pmMark:
“Kim Sky:
again. The Rebel Sell by Joseph Heath & Andrew Potter
this book takes a good look at a whole set of ideas that have led us to on to self-help, positive thinking, the attack on rationality. simple living and the paradox of antimaterialism. etc.”
Having read it, I have to agree with many of the criticisms Derrick O’Keefe levels at The Rebel Sell. LINK
8 September 2009, 1:27 pmSean:
Id — was Stan endorsing Gladwell, or merely telling us what Gladwell said?
Anyone who reads Who is IOZ? can probably remember the very humorous take IOZ had on Gladwell’s latest. Gladwell is a bit of a kook, he reminds me of a cultural observer version of Andrew Sullivan, a person who takes newly contrary views because such contrary perspectives create a bit of a scandal and attract the attention of short-memory folks and other fairly-informed-but-not-deep-thinkers. Gladwell’s also a bit like George Lakoff in that he repackages the thoughts of others as if they are newly his.
None of that means I think Gladwell speaks falsely. It just means I think he’s fairly interesting but usually I can do better on my own, and others can and will and have done better on similar subjects. Ultimately, I agreed with IOZ’s comic take on Gladwell.
…………………
A lot of authors have observed these drifts in American culture, drifts that Kim Sky, Michael Anderson and others have noted above. Thorstein Veblen’s “Theory of the Leisure Class” talked about them, Russell Lynes’ “The Taste-Makers” talked about them, Christopher Lasch talked about them quite a bit in his surveys of American socio-economic trends. Paul Fussell lampooned them heavily in his books “Class” and “BAD: The Dumbing of America.” Robert Hughes talked about them more seriously in his book “Culture of Complaint.”
8 September 2009, 7:05 pmSean:
Here’s IOZ’s lampoon of Malcolm Gladwell, by the way:
http://whoisioz.blogspot.com/2009/08/ioz-interviews-malcolm-gladwell.html
8 September 2009, 7:09 pmKim Sky:
Dear Mark, Super-thanx for this review of “The Rebel Sell”
I’d never heard of sevenoaksmag.com — very impressive! As Seven-Oaks points out, Rebel-sell’s generalization of inner city poverty in Detroit is racist and unforgivable - a seriously good reason not to read the book.
But, affording the book a read, as I do with a right-wing journalists, say — just back from Iraq — I learned something.
I disagree with Seven-oaks analysis, that Rebel-Sell advocates Capitalism — Rebel-sell in no way advocates capitalism. Rebel-sell examines the kinds of interwoven aspects of many ideologies/practices that attempt to confront or refute capitalism, where these practices infact give strength to and enhance the capitalist state.
Much of the topics Rebel-sell has identified to re-think are important topics to be re-thought. That this book is perhaps a kind of rough-draft, as shoddy as it is, place to begin.
For me right now — I feel lost, I am at an intellectual impasse, I am unable to embrace an ideology/strategy and act. If you or anyone can recommend books addressing sociological topics — I would greatly appreciate the help.
Thanx again, Kim
10 September 2009, 7:57 pmSean:
Kim,
Here are a few that have changed my thinking, or confirmed that my observations on American capitalism’s huge, destructive flaws are correct:
The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture, by Wendell Berry
The True and Only Heaven: Progress and its Critics, by Christopher Lasch
The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are, by Alan Watts
Extraordinary Popular Delusions & the Madness of Crowds, by Charles MacKay
A Civil Action, by Jonathan Harr
The Buffalo Creek Disaster, by Gerald Stern
More than anything, I would suggest going to law school, because that’s where the machinery of American capitalism is given life and carved into timeless stone memorials. But one must go through the process skeptically, not with eyes of adoration and a heart of awe-filled respect.
11 September 2009, 9:35 amSean:
PS to Kim –
One doesn’t need to spend the $$$ to go to law school. One can self-teach with some guidance. If you’d like to head down that road, I’d be happy to serve as your guide/mentor. I enjoy teaching; I was a tutor in law school and have taught continuing legal education classes to admitted lawyers. We could easily do it by email correspondence or something similar.
11 September 2009, 9:44 amKim Sky:
the lawyer idea is nice.
yes, i am interested. let me know how to contact you.
chao, kim
14 September 2009, 11:11 pmSean:
Kim, hopefully Stan doesn’t mind me sharing my Facebook profile page URL. You can get my e-mail address at my Info section at F-book.
http://www.facebook.com/people/Sean-ONeil/1579664270
15 September 2009, 9:14 amJames:
from Scientific American, 2005-Jan, by Michael Shermer:
Quantum Quackery
A surprise-hit film has renewed interest in applying quantum mechanics to consciousness, spirituality and human potential
In spring 2004 I appeared on KATU TV’s AM Northwest in Portland, Ore., with the producers of an improbably named film, What the #$*! Do We Know?! Artfully edited and featuring actress Marlee Matlin as a dreamy-eyed photographer trying to make sense of an apparently senseless universe, the film’s central tenet is that we create our own reality through consciousness and quantum mechanics. I never imagined that such a film would succeed, but it has grossed millions.
The film’s avatars are New Age scientists whose jargon-laden sound bites amount to little more than what California Institute of Technology physicist and Nobel laureate Murray Gell-Mann once described as “quantum flapdoodle.” University of Oregon quantum physicist Amit Goswami, for example, says in the film: “The material world around us is nothing but possible movements of consciousness. I am choosing moment by moment my experience. Heisenberg said atoms are not things, only tendencies.” Okay, Amit, I challenge you to leap out of a 20-story building and consciously choose the experience of passing safely through the ground’s tendencies…
The film’s nadir is an interview with “Ramtha,” a 35,000-year-old spirit channeled by a woman named JZ Knight. I wondered where humans spoke English with an Indian accent 35,000 years ago. Many of the films’ participants are members of Ramtha’s “School of Enlightenment,” where New Age pabulum is dispensed in costly weekend retreats.
——————————-
from Salon, 2007-Mar-5, by Peter Birkenhead:
Oprah’s ugly secret
…The main idea of “The Secret” is that people need only visualize what they want in order to get it — and the book certainly has created instant wealth, at least for Rhonda Byrne and her partners-in-con…
Worse than “The Secret’s” blame-the-victim idiocy is its baldfaced bullshitting. The titular “secret” of the book is something the authors call the Law of Attraction. They maintain that the universe is governed by the principle that “like attracts like” and that our thoughts are like magnets: Positive thoughts attract positive events and negative thoughts attract negative events. Of course, magnets do exactly the opposite — positively charged magnets attract negatively charged particles — and the rest of “The Secret” has a similar relationship to the truth. Here it is on biblical history: “Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Joseph, Moses, and Jesus were not only prosperity teachers, but also millionaires themselves, with more affluent lifestyles than many present-day millionaires could conceive of.”
…Has Oprah ever done anything that didn’t leave people with mixed feelings?
And at what point do we stop feeling like we have to take the good with the craven when it comes to Oprah, and the culture she’s helped to create? I get nauseated when I think of people in South Africa being taught they don’t have enough money because they’re “blocking it with their thoughts.” I’m already sickened by an American culture that teaches people, as “The Secret” does, that they “create the circumstances of their lives with the choices they make every day,” a culture that elected a president who cried tears of self-congratulation at his inauguration, rejects intellectualism, and believes he can intuit the trustworthiness of world leaders by looking into their eyes. I’m sickened by a culture in which the tenets of the Oprah philosophy have become conventional wisdom, in which genuine self-actualization has been confused with self-aggrandizement, reality is whatever you want it to be, and mammon is queen.
7 October 2009, 10:48 pmMichael Anderson:
Corporatist positive thinking:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/20/business/20walmart.html?_r=1&th=&emc=th&pagewanted=print
My Initiation at Store 5476
By STEPHANIE ROSENBLOOM
DEPTFORD, N.J.
JUST after 9 on a rainy December morning, the employees of Wal-Mart Store 5476 gathered in the electronics department and arranged themselves in a circle. This 24-hour supercenter was still sleepy, with only a few customers steering carts slowly through the aisles of Christmas ornaments, Q-Tips and boxes of Toaster Strudel.
Suddenly, the soft electric hum of the store was pierced by the sound of nearly 40 workers shouting in unison: “Good morning, Vickie!”
Their eyes were on an assistant manager, Vickie Smith, as they clapped their hands twice, stomped their feet twice, pumped their fists twice, and topped it all off with a “Whoo-whoo!”
So began a 10-minute meeting that takes place three times a day, at the beginning of every shift, not only here at the Wal-Mart on Cooper Street in Deptford, but at every other Wal-Mart in the nation. That’s 4,200 stores, 12,600 meetings a day.
….ick, ick, ick…
20 December 2009, 12:25 pm