Cosmopolitan utopias and the global corporation

Robert Halsall, Robert Gordon University

In recent years there has been an increasing trend towards the invocation and depiction of cosmopolitan utopias in both global management texts and the inward and outward symbolism of the global corporations themselves. In some cases these utopian metaphors and symbols make express reference to the discourse of Enlightenment cosmopolitanism, by invoking notions such as the transcendence of parochialism and the embracement of universalism (e.g. Kanter 1995). In other cases, while not referring to the tradition of cosmopolitanism directly, texts clearly show indebtedness to elements of cosmopolitan thinking, albeit clothed in the rhetoric of ‘globality’, ‘multiculturalism’ or ‘intercultural’ perspectives (Ohmae 1990, 2000; Rhinesmith 1996). The purpose of this employment of cosmopolitan symbolism by global management texts and global corporations is, according to Garsten (2003) twofold: to depict the global reach and transcendence of boundaries of global managers and corporations, and to convince the public of their sensitivity to cultural differences. In the combination of these two aspects, then, the global corporation can be seen as an allegory of a cosmopolitan utopia which combines universalism and particularism.

This paper will attempt to deconstruct this utopian rhetoric, arguing that we should see this not as a utopia, but as a dystopia in which universality is achieved through the propagation of the ideology of global consumerism and the ultimate elimination of cultural difference, or as Sklair puts it, ‘whatever else might change or however social systems might diverge … people would all agree on one principle, namely the desirability of consuming more and more goods and services’ (2001: 255). In semiotic terms, the cosmopolitan signification of the global corporation evident in global advertising campaigns such as that by HSBC can be seen as what Goldman, Papson and Kersey (1996, 2003) refer to as ‘hyperdifferentiation’, the process through which the flooding of the mind with signifiers of global difference ultimately leads to ‘de-differentiation’, the invocation of a universal ‘family of man’ in which difference is transcended by the ability of the global corporation to encompass and cater for all differences in consumption style.

The paper will examine both the texts of management ‘gurus’ and what Fairclough and Thomas (2004) call ‘programmatic’ texts, those texts such as corporate websites and advertising campaigns which attempt to enact the utopian precepts of the gurus in concrete terms. The critical viewpoint from which ‘corporate cosmopolitanism’ will be addressed will be one founded on the ‘sphereology’ of globalization put forward in recent work by the German cultural theorist and philosopher Sloterdijk (1998, 2004, 2005), according to which it would be more appropriate to describe the current phase of globalization, of which the corporate cosmopolitan utopia is characteristic, not as cosmopolitanism, but as the creation of a ‘world interior of capital’ (Sloterdijk 2005) in which external space is interiorized in world of convenience, luxury and excess, a process in which the global corporation plays an important role.

References
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