The Death of A Thousand Cuts: Corporate Campaigns and the Attack on the Corporation

by Jarol B. Manheim

Book Overview

A corporate campaign is an organized assault on the reputation of a company that has offended some interest group. Although corporate campaigns often involve political, economic, and legal tactics, they are centered around the media, where protagonists attempt to redefine the image--and undermine the reputation--of the target company. It is a strategy most frequently employed by unions but is also employed by special interests, such as environmental or human rights groups. Sometimes it is even employed by one corporation against another. It is a rapidly growing phenomenon that is still unknown to the general public, to most academics and journalists, and is rarely understood by the corporations that find themselves on the firing line.

The Death of a Thousand Cuts argues and demonstrates that corporate campaigns are a distinctive phenomenon whose manifestations are today ubiquitous in both the marketplace and the media. This volume examines, in considerable detail, the history, strategy, tactics, effects, consequences, and likely future directions of the corporate campaign and of its nonlabor-based cousin, the anticorporate campaign. The book is based on ample sources and methods, among them an extensive review and analysis of media coverage, news releases, previous scholarship, union publications, campaign materials, interviews and conversations with individuals who have experienced corporate campaigns, public presentations by labor leaders and others, correspondence, Internet postings, case law summaries, documents, videotapes, and other materials. Through original data and interpretation, this book adds context and integration to these materials thus giving them new meaning.
Key features of this outstanding new book include:
* A thorough and clear explanation of what a corporate campaign is and how it differs from other more mundane "public relations" campaigns.
* A detailed examination of strategies and tactics that includes their historical development. Some of the more high profile target companies in recent years include Coca-Cola, Microsoft, Caterpillar, Campbell's Soup, Federal Express, General Dynamics, Home Depot, International Paper, K-Mart, Nike, Texaco, Walmart, Starbucks, and UPS.
* Hundreds of examples that help explain such contemporary events as the anti-sweatshop movement on college campuses, the living wage movement, and the protests against the World Trade Organization, International Monetary Fund, and World Bank.
* A lengthy appendix contains abbreviated descriptions of nearly 200 corporate campaigns waged by labor unions and various advocacy groups since the idea of the corporate campaign was first developed in the 1960's.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0805838317
• ISBN13: 9780805838312
• Release Date: November 2000
• Publisher: Routledge
• Length: 384 Pages
• Weight: 0.40 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.0" x 6.0" x 9.0"

Customer Reviews

A book that deserves to be read

I picked up Manheim's book by chance during a visit to the United States and it was indeed a revelation.As a Ph.D student in communications, I have read my fair share of books but Manheim's volume is a standout.It is an extradordinary piece of scholarship the way he has tied all the different threads of this growing phenomenon together to give us a fairly sophisticated, yet extremely readable analysis of what we are seeing today. Though there have been the occasional article or monograph written on this area before, no one has traced the evolution of this concept so thoroughly or assembled such an impressive number of case studies about corporate campaigns.Apart from this, Manheim's book has a number of other strengths that make it quite compelling.As a communications scholar of some note,Manheim understably, devotes considerable time and attention to analysis of the communications strategies employed by the antagonists of a company. His discussion of the activist need to define "the moral high ground" is fascinating.Another strength is his discussion of codes of conduct and how activists use them against companies. Codes of conduct based campaigning by activists is not a terribly well understood phenomena within the corporate sector which is surprising given the proliferation of these charters, codes or compacts.The space that Manheim devotes to shareholder activism is also intriguing given the growing efforts of activists to target companies through key stakeholders such as institutional investors and the like.All of this marks Manheim's book as a must-have for anyone working in a corporation who is in a corporate affairs, public affairs, human resources, investor relations, marketing and especially higher management function.