Woke Capitalism
Description
Michael Rectenwald:
"A peculiar phrase recently introduced into the political lexicon by media cognoscenti describes a new corporate philosophy: “woke capitalism.” Coined by Ross Douthat of the New York Times, woke capitalism refers to a burgeoning wave of companies that apparently have become advocates of social justice. Some major corporations now intervene in social and political issues and controversies, partaking in a new corporate activism. The newly “woke” corporations support activist groups and social movements, while adding their voices to political debates. Woke capitalism has endorsed Black Lives Matter, the #MeToo Movement, contemporary feminism, LGBTQ rights, and immigration activism, among other leftist causes." (https://www.michaelrectenwald.com/essays/2019/4/10/libertarianisms-versus-postmodernism-and-social-justice-ideology)
Discussion
Paroxysms:
“Intersectionality and positionality, each grounded explicitly within identity and the body itself, have begun to replace the older languages of “merit” and “excellence” as ways in which people can justify their positions (and compete for relative status and priority) within corporate workplaces and institutions.34 If older management cultures now seem bloodless and dessicated, this is a new way of auditing activities and managing people (and encouraging people to manage themselves), one flushed with emotion, morality, and the strongly felt immediacies of identity and embodied experience. This new form of “inclusive capitalism,” in other words, seeks to ingest more and more of the moral and personal realms within its remit, to become “more real than real” to those who work within it. During the agonistic turmoil that swept through universities in the late 1960s, the campus arguably became “the world” for protestors, a “mini-homeland” in which the global transformations the campus movements desired could be enacted in miniature.35 Now, the professional-managerial workplace likewise comes to stand in for the global situation, and new procedures and initiatives are believed to “make a difference” to justice issues everywhere.
If the ethos of “bringing one’s whole self to work” had been gradually normalized within professional workplaces over the course of the 2000s and early 2010s, this was one of the consequences. Cadres now seek meaning at work by, to paraphrase Byung-Chul Han, “flooding the workplace with their intimacy.”36 In doing so, they try to make their identities, personal politics, and moral and emotional commitments relevant within their professions and to make their employers take notice of these deeply felt investments.37 Various forms of workplace activism—petitioning employers to take political stances or make official statements on social issues and current events, forming workplace affinity groups, or denouncing “resistant” colleagues via the new “activist workplace technologies” of the “open letter” or the hostile Slack channel—have become the practical means of realising this new vision of “meaningful work.”38 Each case represents a way of synchronizing the morally committed self with the wider corporate or institutional mission.
There are also some undeniable affinities between the corporate world and the “Post-New Left” and Critical Social Justice circles that many of these new discourses were adapted from. As Tara Isabella Burton observes, social justice culture has traditionally had a strong “blank-slate” ethos. Its adherents often possess a utopian conviction that old injustices can be addressed, existing power hierarchies overturned, and new realities manifested in the future if only the “right” rituals are performed and the appropriate “symbol sets” adopted for use.39 Clear resemblances exist between these ways of thinking and the simplified truths employed by corporate and institutional management. Managerial technologies like “continuous improvement” and corporate restructuring operate according to their own utopian logic, whereby cost-cutting or redundancies become the “one true path” to a better set of outcomes—“returning to surplus,” “meeting performance goals,” or “setting new benchmarks for competitors.”
We could, perhaps, see the new “moral infusions” seemingly arriving from outside the sphere of capital as a refurbishment of corporate “symbol sets,” a way of restating some of managerialism’s old arguments in new, more morally compelling terms. However, the affinities and congruences between critical forces supposedly external to capitalism, (such as contemporary progressive identity politics) and the ideologies internal to capitalism should make us ask whether any of these languages, social movements, or trends truly exist outside of the capitalist system. New ideas and language rituals sweep through contemporary progressive-left circles according to the same logics of novelty and product replacement that characterize consumer capitalism. Formerly right-wing libertarian ideas like open borders, meanwhile, find new leases of life on the ostensible far-left.41 And, as Marc James Léger points out (drawing on the work of Marie Moran), the way that “the concept of identity is deployed today is specific to the age of postwar consumer culture.”42 There may be no outside. We are all capitalists now, including (or perhaps even especially) anti-capitalists.”
(https://paroxysms.substack.com/p/the-2020-moment-and-the-new-spirit?)
The Contradictions of “Inclusive Capitalism”
Paroxysms:
"When capitalism’s representatives begin to speak in the same radical languages as those who have traditionally set themselves up in opposition to capitalism, this can have profoundly destabilising effects on observers. Like the operators of an obsolete radar set, capitalism’s left-wing critics risk losing their critical signal when they don’t acknowledge the role of cadres or capitalism’s abiding concern with the problem of its own legitimacy. They can end up hunting for the ghosts of capitalisms past rather than admit that capital is now to be found conducting its business (on the symbolic and representational levels at least) on a whole other set of frequencies.
For right-wing observers, who may have been entirely comfortable with how capitalism presented itself in its previous guises, capital’s turn towards equity, diversity, and inclusion has been similarly destabilising. Right-wing critics of “woke capitalism” evidently believe that the “new normal” can somehow be defeated using the techniques of right-wing populism. In episodes like 2023’s Bud Light/Dylan Mulvaney controversy, anti-woke activists have mobilized the consumer boycott as a means of “turning back the clock,” not acknowledging that the brands they were formerly loyal to now operate in wholly different financial environments.44 No less than some on the Left, and no matter how successful individual boycotts might be, these element of the Right are operating in an essentially nostalgic mode. They have emotionally attached themselves to a form of consumer capitalism that has not really existed in America since the War on Terror. At the same time, they misrecognize capital’s attempts to seek new markets and novel forms of corporate value by retreating into regressive, Cold War-style fantasies of “woke communism,” as though the C-suites of America’s largest corporations were now suddenly the sites of a new Bolshevik conspiracy.
It is important to acknowledge, in other words, that “inclusive capitalism” is still capitalism. Corporations are not solely interested in renewing their legitimacy with the public or mollifying their internal critics among the cadres (important as these concerns are). They also need to keep their brands up to date with current sensibilities, maintain or increase access to markets, and engage new audiences and consumers. In fact, the new inclusion policies of firms like Amazon Studios can be read in exactly these terms. Although, fitting the corporate mission to the moment, they present themselves in non-capitalistic, justice-oriented terms, these firms are fundamentally in the business of making sure that there are always fewer barriers to production and consumption. The point of these policies is to ensure (in principle at least) that Amazon accesses all possible talent streams and that all potential audiences are engaged. At the same time, these corporations are responding in quite self-interested ways to what they believe to be genuine market signals, such as what McKinsey terms the rise of the “inclusive consumer”—the 45% of Americans, “younger, female, and more racially diverse,” who told a survey firm in 2021 that “their social values now shape their shopping choices.”
New, ostensibly justice-oriented practices, like requiring diversity statements from prospective new hires in the progressive neoliberal university, meanwhile, simply become additional forms of audit culture. They represent an expansion of the existing repertoire of audit practices into new internal realms. Professional employees are now expected to display forms of “excellent” moral performance alongside all the other kinds of surveillant audit procedures and policies that the contemporary PMC workplace expects them to abide by. We could see this as a form of self-exploitation. Cadres internalize the always-accelerating dictates of audit culture and the perpetual pressures of workplace ideological conformity so that they become absorbed into the self and the personal profile. There, they express themselves in constantly evolving, anxiety-laden forms of etiquette or politeness—the self-disciplining imperatives to always “be kind,” “be a good person,” and check one’s privilege and language choices.
Beyond the individual workplace, a new, multi-billion dollar DEI/EDI industry is burgeoning, one that, in accordance with the way the new spirit of capitalism operates, takes “‘already-existing’ things whose legitimacy is guaranteed” (in this case, progressive moral commitments) and gives them “a new twist by combining them with the exigency of capital accumulation.”46 The contemporary market phenomenon of the ESG rating is another example of this same process, whereby environmental concerns are mirrored by capital and then “sold back” in the form of new financial products.
There are, however, risks involved for corporations in pursuing the “inclusive consumer” and following every shifting mood of their internal cadres. While it is, perhaps, unlikely to ever be repeated on the same scale, the Bud Light boycott does illustrate the potential financial costs involved for firms that appear to lose touch with the sensibilities of their core markets. The specific “profile” or emotional repertoire of cadres—their anxieties, fantasies, sensibilities, and ideological idiosyncrasies—are not generally speaking those of the wider public.48 Institutions that lose sense of that distinction, responding to the anxious internal signals of their cadres in the belief that they reflect sentiments in the world at large, can find themselves alienating their external stakeholders and audiences. Ingesting too much of the radical ethos can mean that brands and institutions end up mirroring some of the more off-putting qualities that have long plagued radical left-wing movements.49 Lecturing and sloganeering, dogmatism, and a subcultural contempt for ordinary people are not compatible with the long-term interests of brands and institutions that rely on the patronage of broad consumer or audience bases for their survival. Rather than substantial new audiences being engaged by these postures and sentiments, existing audiences may simply cease turning up.
There are also some wider and perhaps even more compelling contradictions in play between the forces of inclusion and those of financialisation, as well as the old imperatives of securing efficiencies and exploiting labour. The ambitious new inclusion policies at Amazon Studios, for instance, have no effect on how business is conducted elsewhere at Amazon. A recent report by Oxfam shows that, despite rhetoric from the firm about its supposedly “compassionate” managerial culture, American Amazon workers are routinely subjected to humiliatingly invasive forms of workplace surveillance and discipline, including a strict policy limiting bathroom breaks during “crunch periods” that has led to many of Amazon US’s distribution and warehouse workers developing urinary tract infections.50 Similarly, and despite the sometimes radically egalitarian rhetoric involved, many staff within the creative arts and industries are finding that their work sites are diversifying at just the point at which many are beginning to disappear altogether. In film and television production, ownership changes and financialisation are increasingly making the sorts of personnel transformations that Amazon Studios wants to introduce moot.
As Daniel Bessner has recently written,
"The new effective bosses of the industry—colossal conglomerates, asset-management companies, and private-equity firms—[have] not been simply pushing workers too hard and grabbing more than their fair share of the profits. They [are] stripping value from the production system like copper pipes from a house—threatening the sustainability of the studios themselves."
The business models of the asset-management and private-equity firms that now own much of the industry involve cutting their corporate assets down to the bone so that returns can be delivered to shareholders and the assets themselves can eventually be sold-on at a profit. For film and TV writers working in the studio system under this ownership regime, the result is a continual erosion of working conditions until the work itself eventually dries up for all but the most senior and well-connected staff.
As Bessner observes, “the precarity created by this new regime seems to have had a disastrous effect on efforts to diversify writers’ rooms.” One studio head told Bessner that there had been a general consensus during the 2010s that writers from more diverse backgrounds were needed in the industry. However, in practice, the equation of “equity” with a sort of class-blind, prestige-worshipping liberal progressivism had ensured that it was “the black or Latino person who went to Harvard” who was the one being hired. There were no appreciable numbers of new writers coming through from poor, working-class, or even state-university backgrounds. Now, he told Bessner, “writers’ rooms are more diverse just in time for there not to be any writers’ rooms anymore.”
Much of the pandemic-period discourse on “inclusive capitalism” (or the paths that might lead beyond capitalism) has been fundamentally nostalgic in nature. Critics of “woke capitalism” on the political right have acted as though they could eliminate the new, “inclusive” or therapeutic tendencies within corporations and institutions and return them to some idealized moment in the past (a “2006 of the mind,” perhaps). However, “disciplining” woke capital, beyond the introduction of the occasional symbolic piece of legislation like Florida’s ultimately unsuccessful “Stop-WOKE Act,” seems unfeasible in practice—as though whole “structures of feeling” distributed among entire classes of professional-managerial employees could somehow be abolished by fiat.
On the left, some of the discourse during the pandemic that predicted an impending “emancipation” from capitalism operated on a similarly ideal level. Attempts to refound industries, workplaces, and institutions on new, cadre-ish ethoses of care, “kindness,” or “wellbeing” belie the environment in which those workplaces and institutions now exist, one increasingly defined by the kinds of ownership-concentration, financialization, and rationalization trends currently gutting the American film and television business, as well as the return of inflation and the end of the period of historically low interest rates. The more favourable economic and labour conditions of the past, likewise, cannot be wished back into being by “resolutions,” “statements of solidarity,” or collective workplace sentiments, no matter how deeply and genuinely felt. The result of these external economic transformations is not simply a return to the status quo ante before the pandemic, but the significant acceleration of certain monopolizing trends that existed before the pandemic. The answer to Giorgio Agamben’s COVID-period question, “where are we now?”, then, seems to be: “further away than ever.”
(https://paroxysms.substack.com/p/the-2020-moment-and-the-new-spirit?)
Michael Rectenwald
1.
"my topic today is the “social justice” of U.S. for-profit corporations. Although regarded as new, I will show that “woke capitalism” is but a subset and recent type of a broader and longer-standing corporate ethos that I call “corporate leftism.” As it turns out, analyzing woke capitalism tells us a great deal about contemporary corporate capitalism, the contemporary political left, and the relationship between the two. It also recalls an earlier corporate leftism. (Woke capitalism also helps to make sense of the topic of my next book, Google Archipelago, a study of Big Digital — the mega-data services; media, cable, and Internet services; social media platforms; Artificial Intelligence (AI) agents; apps; and the developing Internet of Things. The Google Archipelago is not merely an amalgam of digital business interests. It operates and will increasingly operate as what the only redeemable postmodern theorist, Michel Foucault, called a “governmentality,” a means of governing the conduct of populations but also the technologies of governance and the rationality that underpins the technologies.)
Despite the initial backlash, Nike’s “Believe in Something” ad campaign featuring Colin Kaepernick — whose national anthem kneel-downs brought #BlackLivesMatter protest to the NFL — dramatically boosted Nike’s sales. The ad’s success supported Business Insider columnist Josh Barro’s theory that woke capitalism provides a form of parapolitical representation for corporate consumers. Given their perceived political disenfranchisement in the political sphere, woke capitalism offers representation in the public sphere.
With wokeness, Ross Douthat of the New York Times argues, corporations offer workers and customers rhetorical placebos in lieu of costlier economic concessions, such as higher wages and better benefits, or lower prices. Short of a socialist revolution, New York Congressional Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s Green New Deal seems unlikely to materialize.[6] Douthat suggests that woke capitalism works by substituting symbolic for economic value. The same gestures of wokeness may also appease the liberal political elite, promoting their agendas of identity politics, gender pluralism, transgenderism, lax immigration standards, sanctuary cities, and so on. In return, the woke corporations hope to be spared higher taxes, increased regulations, and antitrust legislation aimed at monopolies.
Meanwhile, at least one woke corporation appears intent on scolding its customers. I refer to Gillette and its “We Believe” ad. Like Nike, Gillette is a subsidiary of Proctor & Gamble. First posted to its social media accounts in mid-January 2019, the ad condescendingly lectures men, presumably “cishetero” men, about “toxic masculinity.” In the provocative ad, three men look into separate mirrors—not to shave but to examine themselves for traces of the dreaded condition. Voice-overs admonish men “to say the right thing, to act the right way.” Dramatizations of bullying, mansplaining, misogyny, and sexual predation shame bad men and enjoin a woke minority of men to “hold other men accountable,” or else face shame as well.
For Gillette, “shaving” now apparently means shearing away the characteristics associated with manhood now deemed pathological by the American Psychological Association[8]. To prevent the sudden onset or relapse of man-disease, self-groomers must exercise vigilance, scathing self-scrutiny, and unwavering determination. Even though their gender malignance has been “socially constructed,” men are responsible for immediately discerning and excising its outgrowths. The Gillette ad thus prescribes a new gender hygienics by which such brutes can “move upward, working out the beast,”[9] becoming “The Best a Man Can Get,” a newly-shorn animal, or rather a new kind of man shorn of animality.
Like the Nike Kaepernick ad, the Gillette “We Believe” ad provoked significant backlash. But parent company Proctor & Gamble’s executive response to the ensuing furor suggested that the corporation was willing to forgo profits for virtue points, at least for now. Jon Moeller, Proctor & Gamble’s CFO, told reporters that post-ad sales were “in-line with pre-campaign levels.” In advertising terms, in other words, the ad was a failure. Yet, Moeller viewed the expenditure as an investment in the future. “It's a part of our effort to connect more meaningfully with younger consumer groups," he explained, perhaps referring to those too young to sport the toxic stubble.
Unsatisfied with the above explanations, I still wondered how and why corporations assumed the role of social justice arbiters and how and why social justice came to be the ideology of major U.S. corporations. But before venturing my own theory, however, I’d like to retrace a history of corporate leftism, which will shed light on the relationship between leftism and corporatism.
Corporate leftism has a long history, dating at least to the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. I first recognized corporate leftism through the histories that documented the funding of the Russian and other socialist revolutions by leading U.S. capitalists and bankers. As Richard B. Spence boldly declares in Wall Street and the Russian Revolution 1905-1925, the term “socialist-capitalist” is not an oxymoron.
Spence was not referring to so-called “mixed economies” but rather to a false dichotomy, a mating of two supposed economic antinomies, socialism and capitalism. Understanding why the term is not an oxymoron does not necessarily depend upon the historical knowledge uncovered by Spence, and before him, by Antony C. Sutton — although, given that I am a historian, I found that this material revealing. But the apparent contradiction in terms is based on a mischaracterization of economic opposites and a failure to detect in the original name for the field of economics, namely “political economy,” the inherent possibility of such a conjunction. The real opposites are not capitalism and socialism but rather individual freedom versus centralized political control, whether statist or corporatist..
According to Sutton’s Wall Street and FDR (1975), “corporate socialism is a system where those few who hold the legal monopolies of financial and industrial control profit at the expense of all others in society.” For Sutton, “The most lucid and frank description of corporate socialism and its mores and objectives is to be found in a 1906 booklet by Frederick Clemson Howe, Confessions of a Monopolist.” In attempting to validate Sutton’s reference to Howe as the prototypical monopolist[15] or even corporate socialist, I was disappointed, but ultimately found the excursion rewarding.
Beginning with Spence’s Wall Street and the Russian Revolution 1905-1925, which had the same title as one of Sutton’s major books except for an added date range, I searched feverishly for “Howe” and “Confessions of a Monopolist.” (Actually, as is my wont, I searched electronic texts and the Kindle version of Spence, so my search produced nothing like a fever. But I am nostalgic for a past that I never knew, when in nineteenth century novels, the researches of fictional characters like Victor Frankenstein resulted in life-threatening frenzies.)"
2.
"In 2018, Ross Douthat of the New York Times introduced the phrase “woke capital.” Essentially, Douthat suggested that woke capitalism works by substituting symbolic value for economic value. Under woke capitalism, corporations offer workers rhetorical placebos in lieu of costlier economic concessions, such as higher wages and better benefits. The same gestures of wokeness also appease the liberal political elite, promoting their agendas of identity politics, gender pluralism, transgender rights, lax immigration standards, climate change mitigation, and so on. In return, woke corporations hope to be spared higher taxes, increased regulations, and antitrust legislation aimed at monopolies. Although woke capitalism alienates cultural conservatives, the Republican Party remains procorporate, making woke capitalism a win-win strategy for corporations.
Business Insider columnist Josh Barro suggested that woke capitalism provides a form of parapolitical representation for workers and corporate consumers. Given their perceived political disenfranchisement, woke capitalism offers them representation in the public sphere, as they see their values reflected in corporate pronouncements.
Others have suggested that corporations have gone woke only to be spared cancellation by Twitter mobs and other activists, that wokeness is a good “branding tool,” or that progressive shareholders also demand corporate activism.
But woke capitalism cannot be sufficiently explained in terms of placating coastal leftists, ingratiating left-liberal legislators, or avoiding the wrath of activists. Rather, as wokeness has escalated and taken hold of corporations and states, it has become a demarcation device, a shibboleth for cartel members to identify and distinguish themselves from their nonwoke competitors, who are to be starved of capital investments. Woke capitalism has become a monopoly game.
Just as nonwoke individuals are cancelled from civic life, so too are nonwoke companies cancelled from the economy, leaving the spoils to the woke. Corporate cancellations are not merely the result of political fallout. They are being institutionalized and carried out through the stock market. The Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) Index is a Chinese-style social credit score for rating corporations. Woke planners wield the ESG Index to reward the in-group and to squeeze nonwoke players out of the market. Woke investment drives ownership and control of production away from the noncompliant. The ESG Index serves as an admission ticket for entry into the woke cartels.
Research suggests that ESG investing favors large over small companies. Woke capitalism vests as much control over production and distribution in these large, favored corporations as possible while eliminating industries and producers deemed either unnecessary or inimical.
The investment approach of BlackRock Inc., the world’s largest asset manager; Vanguard, the second largest; and others lends credence to this interpretation. BlackRock and Vanguard are solidly behind stakeholder capitalism—the corporate ethos of benefiting “stakeholders” in addition to or in lieu of shareholders."
(https://mises.org/wire/woke-capitalism-monopoly-game)
The Origins of Woke Capitalism in a Baptist-Bootlegger Coalition Dynamic
Noah Carl:
"This alternative theory says that corporate entities coopted what was initially a fringe left-wing movement to further their own interests. Unlike the first theory, it posits a largely top-down process. In particular, some shrewd actors inside large corporations – you know, the ones that put LGBT flags in their logos during pride month – realised that woke pandering was an excellent way to earn brownie points with the Democrats, shift the conversation away from tax-and-regulate, and undermine working-class solidarity (by pitting white deplorables against oppressed “people of colour”). It was, in order words, a flanking manoeuvre – one designed to keep the left myopically focussed on identity issues.
As the conservative writer Steve Sailer has noted, banks and other large corporations may have “cynically conspired to divide and conquer economic leftism” as a direct response to the Occupy Wall Street movement in 2011. Note that Occupy protests were not confined exclusively to Wall Street; they eventually spread to college campuses, where they disrupted recruiting events for firms like Morgan Stanley. (Today, your typical recruiting event is probably a woke extravaganza, complete with LGBT lanyards and diversity pep talks). This version of the theory has the virtue of explaining why the antics of woke capitalism have become so much more conspicuous over just the last ten years.
We know that corporations’ support for left-wing causes is not sincerely motivated because of their inconsistency with respect to foreign versus domestic opponents of those causes. Tim Cook, the CEO of Apple, went out of his way to criticise an Indiana law that allows businesses to refuse certain kinds of services on religious grounds (e.g., cakes for gay weddings). However, he hasn’t bothered to criticise far more draconian laws in other countries where Apple does business (e.g., laws punishing homosexuality with death). Similarly, the NBA has done a great deal to promote Black Lives Matter (even arranging for the slogan to be stencilled on the court alongside its own logo). Yet when fans wanted to express support for the Hong Kong protests in 2019, they had their signs confiscated on the grounds that the such signs were “political” and therefore prohibited.
What’s more, the investigative journalist Lee Fang has uncovered cases in which large companies effectively bribed woke activists to portray their desired policies as beneficial to “communities of colour”. For example, Uber and Lyft paid nearly $100K to the firm of an NAACP leader, who campaigned in support of a controversial ballot measure that prevented delivery drivers from being classified as “employees” (thereby exempting them from most employee benefits). “Capital does not care about culture”, Fang argues. “When an oil company operates in Malaysia, it donates to Muslim groups; when the same firm needs to win a ballot measure in SF, they sponsor LGBT rallies and BLM orgs”.
Note: woke capital is not a conspiracy theory in the sense of positing clandestine meetings where CEOs sit around smoking cigars, and discussing how to bolster their market power using the theory of intersectionality (though this may not be too far from how things play out at Davos). What probably happened is that one or two firms independently discovered that woke pandering could be used to their advantage (Starbucks may have been an early innovator with its 2015 “Race Together” campaign, which suspiciously coincided with an EU tax scandal). Then, once a few others caught on, the practice spread through the sector via imitation."
(https://noahcarl.substack.com/p/wokeness-as-a-bootlegger-baptist)
Examples
Amazon Studios Inclusion Policy
Paroxysms:
“The new Amazon Studios Inclusion Policy announced precisely one year after the racial reckoning of 2020 reveals some of the contrasts between the old and new forms of corporate managerialism. Whereas corporate restructuring under an earlier managerial regime might have represented its “goals” and “targets” in purely financial terms (“growing market share” or “increasing profit margins”), Amazon’s new target culture was now expressed in the more holistic terms of justice and identity. The Inclusion Policy saw Amazon committing itself towards increasing diversity and equity across a range of identity categories in the films and TV series it would be commissioning in the future. It would, it announced, “seek out stories and storytelling that amplify voices across race, ethnicity, nationality, sexual orientation, age, religion, disability (including mental health), body size, gender, gender identity, and gender expression.”
In order for the company to do so, the Amazon Studios Inclusion Policy set some concrete and ambitious equity goals for future productions to meet:
• Each film or series with a creative team of three or more people in above-the-line roles (Directors, Writers, Producers) should ideally include a minimum 30% women and 30% members of an underrepresented racial/ethnic group. This aspirational goal will increase to 50% by 2024. • Casting actors whose identity (gender, gender identity, nationality, race/ethnicity, sexual orientation, disability) aligns with the character they will be playing. • Aiming to include one character from each of the following categories in speaking roles, with minimum 50% of these to be women: LGBTQIA+, person with a disability, and three regionally underrepresented race/ethnic/cultural groups. A single character can fulfill one or more of these identities. • Seeking at least three bids from vendors or suppliers on productions, one of which must be from a woman-owned business and one from a minority-owned business.
This policy effectively translates the Amazon Studios corporate mission into an entirely new moral language. Of course, management has always sought to create its own moral frameworks to safeguard decision-making. The point of justifying decisions in terms of numbers is to give “the agreed-upon figures” a specifically moral force, one that generates a “final picture” of “financial reality” and compels subordinates to obey.32 However, the way in which Amazon’s Inclusion Policy represents its new numerical goals effectively displaces them from the realm of commerce onto those of ethics and emotional “immediacy.”33 Profit and market share disappear in favour of a new, morally saturated set of targets, goals, and “aspirations.” Via this strategy, and by mimicking the sanctifying and emotionally laden language registers of the social justice movement, Amazon Studios is able to represent its core business in newly “meaningful” terms. The aspirational goals of “seeking out stories,” “amplifying voices,” creating authentic representations of marginalized groups, and faithfully mirroring a changing reality replace the rather less fashionable facts that Amazon Studios simply produces “content” and seeks to make a profit from it.”
(https://paroxysms.substack.com/p/the-2020-moment-and-the-new-spirit)
More information
- Douthat, Ross. “The Rise of Woke Capital.” The New York Times, 28 Feb. 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/28/opinion/corporate-america-activism.html.
- Barro, Josh. “There's a Simple Reason Companies Are Becoming More Publicly Left-Wing on Social Issues.” Business Insider, 1 Mar. 2018, www.businessinsider.com/why-companies-ditching-nra-delta-selling-guns-2018-2.
- Martinez, Gina. “Despite Outrage, Nike Sales Increased 31% After Kaepernick Ad.” Time, 8 Sept. 2018, http://time.com/5390884/nike-sales-go-up-kaepernick-a/.