Private democracy: on corporate theories of persuasion in public life

Private corporations have grown rapidly in numbers worldwide and their increasing power and involvement in human life needs to be more fully and critically understood. This ethnographic inquiry draws on studies of very large U.S. corporations, the work of Aristotle, Bacon, Bakhtin, and others to evoke an increasing use of rhetoric and self-consciously designed social organizations developed for profit by the private sector. Companies, it is shown, have historically and now theorize the social order, seek to totalize aspects of it, impose arbitrary orders, critique one another, and influence more effectively subsequent human behavior in the marketplace.