Page 84 - Battleground The Media Volume 1 and 2

Brand ng the Globe |

By the twentieth century, the corporation had become the dominant type of
business organization throughout the world. In the United States today, for ex-
ample, while corporations account for only about 20 percent of all businesses,
they generate about 90 percent of all business income.
During the 1920s, Henry Ford led the development of the modern manufac-
turing corporation by introducing assembly-line production. This allowed cor-
porations to cut production costs and increase output. Manufactured products
became more affordable for an increasing number of people. By the 1920s, the
major industries in the United States that had evolved from clusters of small
companies were taken over by major corporations. AT&T dominated the tele-
phone industry; General Motors, Ford, and Chrysler produced the majority of
automobiles; and Westinghouse and GE controlled the electrical equipment
sectors. These competitive products were soon to be found around the world,
and export earnings were responsible for an increasing share of U.S. corporate
profits. It was not until after World War I that the United States began to emerge
as a major world economic power. At the same time as Europe was recovering
economically from the war and reestablishing its global trade through compa-
nies like Lever Brothers (soap and chemicals) and Royal Dutch Shell, the United
States was building up its economic strength through the expansion of its own
multinational corporations.

aDvErTising anD gLoBaLizaTion
Ben Bagdikian (1997) is one of the many who have recognized that advertis-
ing has always been a vital gear in the machinery of corporate power, arguing
that “it not only helped create and preserve dominance of the giants over con-
sumer industries, it also helped create a picture of a satisfactory world with the
corporations as benign stewards” (p. 131). In 1926, the president of the United
States, Calvin Coolidge, attributed the success of mass demand for products “en-
tirely to advertising” and noted that advertising “is a great power . . . part of the
greater world of regeneration and redemption of mankind” (p. 148).
While the Depression of the 1930s had a dampening effect on global in-
dustrial growth, the postwar boom from 1945 to 1960 saw the beginning of a
huge influx of American corporations into the international arena. U.S. cor-
porations like Coca-Cola, Colgate-Palmolive, Westinghouse, and General Mo-
tors built plants around the world. The Americans were soon joined in this
expansion by European and later Japanese multinationals. Only 7,000 multina-
tional corporations existed in 1970, but by 1994, their numbers had grown to
37,000 parent corporations—with over 200,000 affiliates worldwide. Multina-
tional corporations currently employ over 73 million people around the world,
and some are more economically powerful than many nation-states (Firth and
Mueller 2003).
Multinational corporations have been able to achieve extraordinary growth
during the twentieth century primarily because they had the assistance of mul-
tinational advertising agencies that assisted them in spreading the word about
“the good life” (based on acquisition of material goods) around the globe.