After Corporate Paternalism

In this ethnographic study of post-paternalist ruination and renovation, Christian Straube explores social change at the intersection of material decay and social disconnection in the former mine township Mpatamatu of Luanshya, one of the oldest mining towns on the Zambian Copperbelt. Touching on topics including industrial history, colonial town planning, social control and materiality, gender relations and neoliberal structural change, After Corporate Paternalism offers unique insights into how people reappropriate former corporate spaces and transform them into personal projects of renovation, fundamentally changing the characteristics of their community.

Between the Civil War and World War I, David Leverenz maintains, the corporate transformation of American work created widespread desire for upward mobility along with widening class divisions. In his view, several significant narrative constructs, notably the daddy s girl and the daddy s boy, emerge at the intersection between paternalist practices and more democratic possibilities for self-advancement. From Mark Twain s Laura Hawkins in The Gilded Age to the protagonist of Theodore Dreiser s Sister Carrie and Willa Cather s Alexandra Bergson in O Pioneers!, Leverenz finds that the image of the daddy s girl constrains the emerging threat of the career woman even as it articulates the lure of upward mobility for women. In surveying the figure of the "daddy s boy," Leverenz examines tensions between young men s desires for upward mobility and older men s desires for paternal control. Paternalism Incorporated also addresses yearnings for individualism and paternalism in various critiques of the emerging corporation. Another chapter links honor and shaming to race in the philanthropic practices of Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller, framed with narratives by William Dean Howells, Booker T. Washington, and Jane Addams. After showing how a daddy s girl becomes a paternalist in Henry James s The Golden Bowl, Leverenz considers F. Scott Fitzgerald s Tender is the Night as paternalism s elegy, contrasted with the Shirley Temple film The Little Colonel."

In the early twentieth century, an era characterized by unprecedented industrial strife and violence, thousands of employers across the United States pioneered a new policy of labor relations called welfare work. The results of the policy were paternalistic practices and forms of compensation designed not only to control workers, but also to advertise the humanity of corporate capitalism to thwart the advance of legislated reform. In a burgeoning literature on the development of the U.S. welfare state, Andrea Tone offers a new interpretation of the importance of welfare capitalism in shaping its development.

This pioneering study of the interaction of family life and the factory system of industrial production focuses on the largest textile concern in the world at the turn of the twentieth century, the Amoskeag Corporation in Manchester, New Hampshire.

Guy Standing argues for a complex egalitarianism, in which basic income security is a right for all.

Tramps, lazy, cheaters. Expressions like these were widely used by several masters in view of the multiple forms of transgressions committed by slaves. This type of (dis) qualification gained an even stronger contour in properties controlled by religious orders, which tried to impose moralizing measures on the enslaved population. In this book, the reader will come across a peculiar form of management, highly centralized and commanded by one of the most important religious corporations in Brazil: the Order of Saint Benedict. The Institutional Paternalism built by this institution throughout the 18th and 19th centuries was able to stimulate, among the enslaved, the yearning for freedom and autonomy, 'prizes' granted only to those who fit the Benedictines' moral expectation, based on obedience, discipline and punishment. The "incorrigible" should be sold while the "meek" would be rewarded. The monks then became large slaveholders, recognized nationally as great managers. However behind this success, they had to learn to deal with the stubborn resistance of those who refused to peacefully surrender their bodies and minds, resulting in negotiations and concessions that caused disturbances, moments of instability and internal disputes.

The aim of this book is to explore and compare the welfare strategies of businesses, including the various forms of «paternalism», over two centuries and across a number of countries. Specifically, the book examines differentiation and variation among the social mindsets of companies. Business history inevitably involves the study of social policies, including analysis of the societal influence of companies and their response to workforce demands concerning living conditions. In this book, historical forms of patronage are considered (old paternalism), as well as structured social policies aimed at stabilizing and appeasing labour relations (new paternalism). Issues of «post-paternalism» are then studied, opening the door to an assessment of the differences between the various types of paternalism and an exploration of the «fad» of corporate social responsibility (CSR) or corporate social entrepreneurship (CSE). This concept, which gained prominence among transnational companies around the turn of the 1980s and the beginning of the third industrial revolution, involved the design of an entrepreneurial strategy to identify, analyse, organise, create and manage a venture to initiate sustainable and systematic socio-economic change.

This book explores how aging men struggled to sustain identities as workers, breadwinners, and patriarchs--the core ideals of twentieth-century masculinity--in the midst of increasing employer demands for the speed and stamina of youth in workplaces and the expansion of mandatory retirement policies in the age of Social Security.