Page 183 - The Disneyization of Society

THE DISNEYIZATION OF SOCIETY

which commercial organizations draw on well-known cultural notions in terms of
time, place and ethnicity in order to theme commercial environments. That these
174 cultural idioms are representations that often contain distortions that have built
up over decades is not the key point in this connection. They serve as emblems
that are widely acknowledged in our culture and that are then commercially
appropriated. Commercially appropriated thematic narratives feed back into
culture and are reinforced by enterprise.
Equally, culture becomes more and more economically inflected when commer-
cial organizations create idioms that find their way into culture. These cultural
elements are representations that frequently sanitize and distort. Nowhere is dis-
tortion more apparent than in the frequent appeals to feelings of nostalgia con-
cerning a lost but revered time when life was supposedly more exotic, simpler or
more varied. As was noted in Chapter 2, such developments as the widespread use
in waterfront developments of images drawn from a partly constructed past of
mercantile and maritime adventure are an illustration of this trend. The fabricated
nostalgia that is commercially appropriated is one that occludes unpleasantness
and as such is with some justification referred to as ‘memory with the pain
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removed’. However, the fact that these cultural idioms are distortions is not the
main point for the present discussion, the more salient issue is that they are fab-
rications that are given form and which feed into our culture as representations of
what different times or places were like. They therefore add to our cultural stock of
misunderstanding.
A further aspect of the way in which culture becomes increasingly economically
inflected occurs in connection with merchandising, where items bearing
commercial logos come to infiltrate culture’s sense of what a souvenir is. Also, hybrid
consumption sites come to influence our sense of what constitutes a destination so
that destinations are increasingly seen as associated with shopping and eating.
In addition, we find that the very notion of culture has come to have a promi-
nent economic component. In Chapter 5, it was noted that one way in which
many management consultants and organizations have sought to enhance the
organizational commitment of their employees has been to ‘manage’ their organ-
izational cultures. In fact, this was only one rationale for the clarion call for
corporate cultural change in the 1980s and 1990s but it was a prominent one. The
notion that ‘companies with a record of outstanding financial performance often
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have powerful corporate cultures’ led to a fashion for managing cultures to make
them more distinctive that received a further boost from the growing use of TQM
initiatives where cultural change is a key ingredient. Some writers have expressed
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doubts about how far managed cultural change really makes an impact on
employees’ values and beliefs, as against their behaviour. 53 However, the more
crucial point is that the culture movement of the 1980s, which, because of its
affinities with TQM, has by no means disappeared, conveyed an image of ‘culture’
as something that has economic implications and which can be managed.