Wal-Mart Wars

Wal-Mart Wars
Author: Rebekah Peeples Massengill
Publisher: NYU Press
Total Pages: 244
Release: 2013-03-25
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0814763332

Wal-Mart is America’s largest retailer. The national chain of stores is a powerful stand-in of both the promise and perils of free market capitalism. Yet it is also often the target of public outcry for its labor practices, to say nothing of class-action lawsuits, and a central symbol in America’s increasingly polarized political discourse over consumption, capitalism and government regulations. In many ways the battle over Wal-Mart is the battle between “Main Street” and “Wall Street” as the fate of workers under globalization and the ability of the private market to effectively distribute precious goods like health care take center stage. In Wal-Mart Wars, Rebekah Massengill shows that the economic debates are not about dollars and cents, but instead represent a conflict over the deployment of deeper symbolic ideas about freedom, community, family, and citizenship. Wal-Mart Wars argues that the family is not just a culture wars issue to be debated with regard to same-sex marriage or the limits of abortion rights; rather, the family is also an idea that shapes the ways in which both conservative and progressive activists talk about economic issues, and in the process, construct different moral frameworks for evaluating capitalism and its most troubling inequalities. With particular attention to political activism and the role of big business to the overall economy, Massengill shows that the fight over the practices of this multi-billion dollar corporation can provide us with important insight into the dreams and realities of American capitalism. Rebekah Peeples Massengill is a Lecturer in the Department of Sociology at Princeton University.

Wal-Mart

Wal-Mart
Author: Nelson Lichtenstein
Publisher: The New Press
Total Pages: 472
Release: 2016-02-02
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1595587462

A collection of essays that “do an incredible job of balancing the wonders and horrors of the force that is Wal-Mart” (Booklist, starred review). Edited by one of the nation’s preeminent labor historians, this book marks an ambitious effort to dissect the full extent of Wal-Mart’s business operations, its social effects, and its role in the United States and world economy. Wal-Mart is based on a spring 2004 conference of leading historians, business analysts, sociologists, and labor leaders that immediately attracted the attention of the national media, drawing profiles in the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, and the New York Review of Books. Their contributions are adapted here for a general audience. At the end of the nineteenth century, the Pennsylvania Railroad declared itself “the standard of the world.” In more recent years, IBM and then Microsoft seemed the template for a new, global information economy. But at the dawn of the twenty-first century, Wal-Mart had overtaken all rivals as the world-transforming economic institution of our time. Presented in an accessible format and extensively illustrated with charts and graphs, Wal-Mart examines such topics as the giant retailer’s managerial culture, revolutionary use of technological innovation, and controversial pay and promotional practices to provide the most complete guide yet available to one of America’s largest companies. “Like archaeologists who pick over artifacts to understand an ancient society, the scholars here [are] examining Wal-Mart for insights into the very nature of American capitalist culture.” —The New York Times “Stimulating perspectives on the world’s largest corporation.” —Publishers Weekly

The United States of Wal-Mart

The United States of Wal-Mart
Author: John Dicker
Publisher: Penguin
Total Pages: 216
Release: 2005-06-16
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1101143444

An irreverent, hard-hitting examination of the world's largest-and most reviled-corporation, which reveals that while Wal-Mart's dominance may be providing consumers with cheap goods and plentiful jobs, it may also be breeding a culture of discontent. It employs one of every 115 American workers. If it were a nation-state, it would be one of the world's top twenty economies. With yearly sales of nearly $260 billion and an average way of $8 an hour, Wal-Mart represents an unprecedented-and perhaps unstoppable-force in capitalism. And there have been few corporations that have evoked the same levels of reverence and ire. The United States of Wal-Mart is a hard-hitting examination of how Sam Walton's empire has infiltrated not just the geography of America but also its consciousness. Peeling away layers of propaganda and politics, investigative journalist John Dicker reveals an American (and, increasingly, a global) story that has no clear-cut villains or heroes-one that could be the confused, complicated story of America itself. Pitched battles between economic progress and quality of life, between the preservation of regional identity and national homogeneity, and between low prices and the dignity of the American worker are beginning to coalesce into an all-out war to define our modern era. And, Dicker argues, Wal-Mart is winning. Revealing that the company's business practices have been shaping American culture, including the nation's social, political, and industrial policy, The United States of Wal-Mart provides fresh insight into a controversy that isn't going away.

The Wal-Mart Effect

The Wal-Mart Effect
Author: Charles Fishman
Publisher: Penguin
Total Pages: 316
Release: 2006
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 9781594200762

An award-winning journalist breaks through the wall of secrecy to reveal how the world's most powerful company really works and how it is transforming the American economy.

To Serve God and Wal-Mart

To Serve God and Wal-Mart
Author: Bethany Moreton
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Total Pages: 391
Release: 2009-05-31
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 0674054296

This extraordinary biography of Wal-Mart's world shows how a Christian pro-business movement grew from the bottom up as well as the top down, bolstering an economic vision that sanctifies corporate globalization.

How Walmart Is Destroying America (And the World)

How Walmart Is Destroying America (And the World)
Author: Bill Quinn
Publisher: Ten Speed Press
Total Pages: 177
Release: 2012-12-12
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 0307814769

After carving up the once lovingly cared-for downtowns of Small Town America, Wal-Mart launched a frontal assault on mom-and-pop businesses all over the globe. With 1.5 million employees operating more than 3,500 stores, Wal-Mart is now the world's largest private employer. In this third edition of How Wal-Mart Is Destroying America (and the World), intrepid Texas newspaperman Bill Quinn continues the fight. Featuring detailed accounts of Wal-Mart's questionable business practices and the latest information on Wal-Mart lawsuits, vendor issues, and efforts to stop expansion, Quinn shows why Wal-Mart Stores, Inc., is arguably the most feared and despised corporation in the world. Whether you're a customer fed up with Wal-Mart's false claims, a vendor squeezed by strong-arm tactics, a worker pushed to increase the Waltons' bottom line, or a concerned citizen trying to save your hometown, this book will show you how to get Wal-Mart off your back and out of your backyard. BILL QUINN is a World War II veteran, retired newspaperman, and certified anti-Wal-Mart crusader. He lives with his wife, Lennie, in Grand Saline,Texas.

Working for Respect

Working for Respect
Author: Adam Reich
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Total Pages: 418
Release: 2018-07-24
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 023154782X

Walmart is the largest employer in the world. It encompasses nearly 1 percent of the entire American workforce—young adults, parents, formerly incarcerated people, retirees. Walmart also presents one possible future of work—Walmartism—in which the arbitrary authority of managers mixes with a hyperrationalized, centrally controlled bureaucracy in ways that curtail workers’ ability to control their working conditions and their lives. In Working for Respect, Adam Reich and Peter Bearman examine how workers make sense of their jobs at places like Walmart in order to consider the nature of contemporary low-wage work, as well as the obstacles and opportunities such workplaces present as sites of struggle for social and economic justice. They describe the life experiences that lead workers to Walmart and analyze the dynamics of the shop floor. As a part of the project, Reich and Bearman matched student activists with a nascent association of current and former Walmart associates: the Organization United for Respect at Walmart (OUR Walmart). They follow the efforts of this new partnership, considering the formation of collective identity and the relationship between social ties and social change. They show why traditional unions have been unable to organize service-sector workers in places like Walmart and offer provocative suggestions for new strategies and directions. Drawing on a wide array of methods, including participant-observation, oral history, big data, and the analysis of social networks, Working for Respect is a sophisticated reconsideration of the modern workplace that makes important contributions to debates on labor and inequality and the centrality of the experience of work in a fair economy.

The Wal-Mart Revolution

The Wal-Mart Revolution
Author: Richard K. Vedder
Publisher: A E I Press
Total Pages: 266
Release: 2006
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN:

Wal-Mart is under attack--from labor unions, urban planners, globalization critics, and community activists. Looking at Wal-Mart, the authors review conditions before and after Wal-Mart entered a local market and look more broadly at Wal-Mart's impact on wages, productivity growth and inflation. Vedder and Cox show that the retailer has been a force for good.

The People's Republic of Walmart

The People's Republic of Walmart
Author: Leigh Phillips
Publisher: Verso Books
Total Pages: 257
Release: 2019-03-05
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 178663516X

Are multi-national corporations like Walmart and Amazon laying the groundwork for international socialism? For the left and the right, major multinational companies are held up as the ultimate expressions of free-market capitalism. Their remarkable success appears to vindicate the old idea that modern society is too complex to be subjected to a plan. And yet, as Leigh Phillips and Michal Rozworski argue, much of the economy of the West is centrally planned at present. Not only is planning on vast scales possible, we already have it and it works. The real question is whether planning can be democratic. Can it be transformed to work for us? An engaging, polemical romp through economic theory, computational complexity, and the history of planning, The People’s Republic of Walmart revives the conversation about how society can extend democratic decision-making to all economic matters. With the advances in information technology in recent decades and the emergence of globe-straddling collective enterprises, democratic planning in the interest of all humanity is more important and closer to attainment than ever before.

The War on the West

The War on the West
Author: Douglas Murray
Publisher: HarperCollins
Total Pages: 358
Release: 2022-04-26
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0063162040

An Instant New York Times Bestseller! China has concentration camps now. Why do Westerners claim our sins are unique? It is now in vogue to celebrate non-Western cultures and disparage Western ones. Some of this is a much-needed reckoning, but much of it fatally undermines the very things that created the greatest, most humane civilization in the world. In The War on the West, Douglas Murray shows how many well-meaning people have been fooled by hypocritical and inconsistent anti-West rhetoric. After all, if we must discard the ideas of Kant, Hume, and Mill for their opinions on race, shouldn’t we discard Marx, whose work is peppered with racial slurs and anti-Semitism? Embers of racism remain to be stamped out in America, but what about the raging racist inferno in the Middle East and Asia? It’s not just dishonest scholars who benefit from this intellectual fraud but hostile nations and human rights abusers hoping to distract from their own ongoing villainy. Dictators who slaughter their own people are happy to jump on the “America is a racist country” bandwagon and mimic the language of antiracism and “pro-justice” movements as PR while making authoritarian conquests. If the West is to survive, it must be defended. The War on the West is not only an incisive takedown of foolish anti-Western arguments but also a rigorous new apologetic for civilization itself.