Community and Society Archive
Welcome to Community and Society where you will find the latest thoughts and reflections by CLAL faculty and associates on the changing nature of community and society in America today. What are the challenges and opportunities these changes represent for the Jewish people in America at the dawn of a new century? Every other week you will find a new article here.
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Markets and More?
By Shari Cohen
The power of brands, the marketing of lifestyles, the impact of corporations on
employees' sense of purpose and meaning, and the blurring of journalism, entertainment and
advertising are challenging the place of both government and religion in shaping the way
we form our loyalties, our commitments, and even our ethical positions. Surely any
discussion of religion in public life needs to address the inexorable reach of
commercialization into every aspect of human existence. We need to consider whether
shopping and working are replacing social activism, civic duty or religious ritual as the
boundaries between the roles of the customer, citizen, congregant and employee shift.
What this all means –either analytically or for the health of our public life -- is
not yet clear. We must start by acknowledging that this is a profound shift:
commercialization is becoming increasingly intertwined with our very sense of self. Its
impact is more far-reaching than government outsourcing to corporations, even in such
critical areas as education or social services, or than the corporate power over public
policy and mindsets that Marxists have long protested. While we have historically seen the
market as corrupting -- in contrast to government and religion, which lift us above
material interest -- we need to ask whether we could come to understand the market
differently. As corporations become more powerful, in many instances exceeding states in
size and influence, they are likely to be the location and mechanism not only for forging
common purposes, but also for effecting social change.
By looking at five main areas – the market’s monopolization of our time and
attention, its increasing role in creating our loyalties and identifications, its shaping
of our modes of thinking about individual choice, work’s place in our lives, and the
ways in which business might involve itself in critical aspects of social change – we
can begin to sketch the crucial implications of these trends for independent thought,
ethical sensibilities, collective action and human expression.
In his recent book, The Age of Access, Jeremy Rifkin points out that what
distinguishes the current “knowledge economy” from prior periods of capitalism
is the increasing reach of the market into the cultural sphere. Consumption has always
been a source of joy and pleasure in peoples’ lives, but the commodification of
nearly every relationship and interaction, facilitated by information technology's
extension of the scope of the market in both time and space, has produced a new phenomenon
with which we need to reckon. Rifkin calls this the “commodification of play,”
by which he means the “marketing of cultural resources including rituals, the arts,
festivals, social movements, spiritual and fraternal activity and civic engagement.”[i] This “experience economy” aims to provide not just
"stuff" – goods and services -- but access to higher purposes and
community. Examples of the marketing of experience are not difficult to find: the trend
towards museums as entertainment, with complete product lines associated with blockbuster
exhibitions; the incorporation of spiritual practices like yoga into commercial ventures
such as health clubs; hotels such as Las Vegas’ Bellagio, which replicates the
Italian city for which it is named; and malls constructing themselves as town squares.
The market’s reach would not be nearly so pervasive were it not for the increasing
sophistication of advertising techniques and of the technologies that convey commercial
messages. After all, advertising is all about linking products to higher meanings and
purposes such as beauty, love and transcendence. As Douglas Rushkoff argues in his recent
book, Coercion, corporations, thanks to sophisticated market data and research on
techniques of persuasion, are increasingly attuned to peoples’ longings, and
increasingly adept at offering their products as the fulfillment of those longings. This
is a refined version of a process that began early in our transition to a consumer
economy, he points out, as manufacturers and retailers sought to make shopping into a new
religion – complete with “atmospherics” devoted to simulating
quasi-religious environments.[ii] What's different now? Never before
have religion and public purposes been so little able to compete.
The market’s monopolization of ever greater spheres of time and attention raises
important questions: Should religious, civic and government leaders work to counter this
trend, which appears to make all human experiences into business transactions and has
enormous impact on how individuals form their opinions as citizens? How would they do
this? Must market pervasiveness necessarily be seen as antithetical to the public good?
Defenders of the market's contribution to the social good have long argued that capitalism
fosters new sorts of cross-cultural understanding and empathy. Clearly commercial places
like Starbucks or Barnes and Noble foster public discourse, albeit in a way different from
traditional cafes or public libraries, which demanded little or no money from their
patrons.
The market has captured more than our time and attention. It is increasingly shaping our
identifications, loyalties, and the basis for our communities. If loyalty was once to God
and then to the nation, now it is to Nike or Apple or Starbucks. It is not that any
individual brand is replacing the kinds of allegiances people have historically given
their countries, their tribes or their religions. No one, at least not yet, would fight
and die for IBM. But brands are resilient in the face of a trend towards the decline of
loyalties to institutions of all sorts. Unlike nations or religions, corporations demand
little in return from their customers.
At the same time, the lifestyles purveyed in places such as Niketown or DKNY are actively
succeeding in forging individuals’ sense of who they are. Even a rising interest in
spirituality has added to, rather than diminished, the power of brands, as corporations
appropriate religious or spiritual imagery. Aveda’s coffee-table style Book of
Rituals – which elaborates daily health and beauty rituals, all of which include the
use of Aveda products -- is a good example. And, as Michael J. Weiss pointed out in his
recent book, The Clustered World, consumption patterns “have become a force
more potent than race, geography, gender or ideology in shaping voter attitudes.”[iii]
More and more companies even go beyond shaping individual identities to create
“communities of interest” around products or around topics related to these
products, whether this is the Harley-Davidson community, or the community of people who
own Apple computers. Indeed, community life itself becomes a commodity. This is
particularly evident in on-line communities, such as I-Village.com and Blackplanet.com,
both of which are "selling" connection to other people -- around gender in the
first case, and ethnicity in the second. We can also see community for sale in places like
Celebration, created by Disney as a planned community to simulate older-style small towns,
and advertised as an antidote to suburban sprawl.
But to note that such communities are highly commodified does not necessarily imply that
they are not real, or that relationships generated there remain rooted merely in fleeting
mercenary transactions. Beliefnet.com, for example, is an interesting hybrid that
demonstrates some of the potentially positive effects of the marketization of
meaning-making. This for-profit, advertiser-funded, on-line magazine and community Web
site offers a vast spectrum of organized and not-so-organized religion all in one place.
It sells, among other things, religious and spiritual products – from books and CDs
to ritual objects, to candles and meditation mats. But though it commercializes religious
discussion and community, it also enables a type of cross-religious interaction. This is
due to the potential that Web interaction offers for anonymous, low-commitment
participation, and to the fact that the market does not privilege any particular religion,
except ones that sell. The Web site undermines the power of any single religion, and of
religious authorities, by giving users access to one another and to other traditions
without any sanction. This does not mean that power is absent on the site or that it
resides only in the hands of the users. The ultimate arbiters are the corporate backers of
the site and the site’s editors and "community managers" – who choose
content, and moderate and create the frameworks for on-line interactions. Still,
Beliefnet.com suggests how the market can create spaces for beneficial social interaction.
Does this mean we need new ways of thinking about the market's potential for elevating
purposes, even as we keep in mind its well-known corrupting potential? Does it offer a
glimpse into how our current understanding of the boundaries between what is civic and
what is commercial and what is religious might shift?
Even beyond corporate construction of loyalty, identity and community, the market -- the
metaphor or mindset of buying and selling -- has come increasingly to shape our
understanding of the exercise of free choice in both religious and civic life. In a recent
book called The Spiritual Marketplace, Wade Clark Roof demonstrates that baby
boomers increasingly approach their religious identities from a consumer perspective. This
means forging one's religious life as a consumer choice from among a range of
possibilities in the marketplace, rather than taking on one’s religion of birth.
Whether at a site such as Beliefnet, or in the spirituality section of Barnes and Noble,
or through multiple memberships in different religious institutions, or in spiritual
stores that offer a range of Eastern practices from massage to meditation, individuals are
circumventing religious authorities and hierarchical religious institutions as they search
for their own sense of religious or spiritual identity. How does this new sense of
individual empowerment affect the public sphere and our role as citizens? Frequent opinion
polls and the energy expended by candidates selling their policies suggest that this trend
affects party loyalty and voting as much as it does religious practice and sensibility. In
a world shaped by consumer mindsets, power resides in new places. This suggests that we
will need to rethink the fundamental social and political questions of accountability and
efficacy.
The workplace in a knowledge economy is another window into the profound impact of
increasing commercialization on how and where we connect to purposes larger than the self.
An outpouring of books on spirituality in the workplace, for instance, is symptomatic of
the increasingly important role that work plays as a locus of meaning and identification.
If work, rather than family or other arenas, is where people most seek and find their
sense of higher purpose, this means that employers come to function as arbiters of
employees’ spiritual lives and personal growth. Institutions such as Motorola
University, for instance, take responsibility for the continuing education of
Motorola’s employees, while attending to it in a corporate context. Corporate
retreats and leadership training programs draw upon spiritual techniques and ask employees
to speculate about the personal meaning they find in their work. Books like Reawakening
the Spirit in Work by Jack Hawley or A Spiritual Audit of Corporate America
by Ian Mitroff and Elizabeth Denton reflect a serious trend toward embracing spirituality
in the workplace, not just for the purpose of increasing profits, but for its own sake as
well. According to Hawley (writing in 1993), "The key questions for today's managers
and leaders are no longer issues of task and structure, but are questions of the
spirit."[iv] Indeed, many of the last decade's most lasting and
widespread new ideas about the pursuit of meaning have come out of the literature on
leadership and management in business. Might corporations increasingly outsource to
religious institutions for the purpose of employee development? Might religious leaders
find themselves employed in corporate settings rather than in churches or synagogues?
The magazine Fast Company, which has become the voice for "new economy"
businesses that see themselves as a revolutionary force in society at large, or the
"business for social responsibility" movement, also show how the boundaries
between work and cause, between the secular and the sacred, are shifting. Companies like
Ben and Jerry's or Working Assets base their business choices on criteria that include
social contribution as well as profit, thereby making business success a mechanism for
social change. They use the terminology of “spirituality” and “the
soul” in articulating their business practices and the ethic they hope to instill
among their employees. In addition, social change is an important part of the product they
offer to consumers. The "business for social responsibility" movement boasts
that 9-13% of investment assets under professional management use ethical and social
screening criteria. This raises a number of questions: Are companies such as Working
Assets filling a vacuum left by political activism or by politics itself? Are they
replacing street protests as a means of expressing political concerns?
As business becomes more of a social cause for some (either as employees, as entrepreneurs
or as consumers), we might increasingly see new combinations of market and ethical
concerns. This is particularly likely given the fast pace of technological change –
both in communications technology and in biotechnology – relative to the slow pace of
decision-making about governmental regulation. Even in companies not concerned with social
change per se, we might increasingly see a new type of ethical self-regulation.
The early Internet entrepreneurs understood that the choices they were making were going
to shape society in significant ways. Not only were their choices important for how
access, privacy and commercialization of the Internet would affect society at large, but
they also were coming to shape such legal and philosophical issues as the changing meaning
of property and our notions of authority. These entrepreneurs have had to grapple with
reconciling the values of hacker libertarianism, competitive entrepreneurship and
scientific collaboration.
Interestingly, religion might well have a role to play here. Biotech firms at the cutting
edge of genetic engineering have formed their own ethical advisory boards in anticipation
of emerging public concerns about the ethical implications of their work. Celera, the
company that led the way in mapping the human genome, took on the Center for Bioethics at
the University of Pennsylvania, which includes at least one rabbi and numerous ethicists
on its staff, for this purpose. Thus groupings of religious authorities and academic
ethicists, operating within corporate contexts, could come to take over the regulatory
role that government might no longer play. Other new combinations must be considered if we
are to think creatively about, and anticipate, new challenges.
Whether or not the amoral market could substitute in important ways as a generator of the
common good for either the religious sphere or the political sphere is yet to be seen.
However, without shifting our perspective about the likelihood of the market playing this
role, and reconsidering the changing boundaries between these spheres, we will not
understand the opportunities and constraints that these changes pose for developing
creative policies to address socially significant priorities. The chaos of urban sprawl
suggests that the market cannot be left to its own devices in the area of sustainable
development. What could turn out to be the unfettered development of powerful
life-altering technologies poses another critical challenge.
All these shifts, of course, require that those who see themselves as involved primarily
with religion and politics, not with commerce, begin to think about their roles
differently. How religious and political leaders understand the power and role of the
market will affect every aspect of their work - it will shape the way they think about
structuring their institutions, it will determine how they make their alliances, interpret
their mandate, preach to their congregants and campaign to constituencies. The debate
about church-state relations must, thus, be cast in much larger terms. At stake is the
social glue that holds us together as a society.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
[i] Rifkin, The Age of Access (New York: Jeremy P. Tarcher/Putnam,
2000), p. 7.
[ii] Ruskkoff, Coercion: Why We Listen to What ‘They’ Say
(New York: Riverhead Books, 1999), pp. 77-79.
[iii] Weiss, The Clustered World (New York: Little, Brown and Co.,
2000), p. 37.
[iv] Hawley, Reawakening the Spirit in Work (New York: Fireside, 1993),
p. 1.
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