Paul Weaver uses rich ethnographic material and careful analysis to craft another clear picture of how big business fails America - news is largely a "front stage performance" (to borrow a phrase from Irving Goffman) that reflects little of what is actually going on. This excellent piece of participant observation research is equally revealing of the Corporate system of control based on editocracy, worker selection and socialization.

Paul Weaver's "Suicidal Corporation" (1988) was the first ethnography of the rhetoric of corporations that usurps the language of free market economics in order to disguise the fact that they are in reality creations of the state, and as such, behave just as bureaucratically as their parent; such is the nature of government. Further, a government-generated competitive business cycle is not a free market. We are being duped, and Weaver knows it.

Weaver's "News and the Culture of Lying" is a further investigation into why corporations pay lip service to free enterprise but practice big government, and how they pull that off.

Both of Weaver's books will interest any student of sociology or anthropology. His ethnographic case studies are good examples of doing the ethnography of corporations.

Lastly, Weaver's books deserve a place on everyone's shelf alongside George Orwell's "1984" and a DVD of "Fahrenheit 451".

An excellent, tell-it-like-is book about the mass media. It didn't receive nearly enough attention from reviewers or the general public. A couple of years ago, I planned on requiring my journalism students to read it but then found out it had just gone out of print. It should be reprinted.

"The final reason why the United States might convert to capitalism is that Americans are highly sensitive to the flaws of the corporate state, which are many, and powerfully attracted to the moral virtues of capitalism, which are profound"p252.
When I read Weaver's seemingly paradoxical statement above, I viewed it as a puzzling contradiction. Was there not consensus that the American economic system is dominated by capitalism? Why does Weaver say the U.S. might convert to capitalism? When has there been any other economic system in America other than capitalism and what is that? Weaver revealed that it is the corporate state which is that alternative and entirely antithetical to capitalist society.
Weaver, a former professor at Harvard University, related how he came to confront some startling revelations concerning corporations and their relationship to free enterprise only after participant observation at the Ford Motor Company. After becoming an insider, Weaver learned how corporations really work:
"Corporatism accepts private ownership of business but sees economic life as a mainly institutional activity that occurs under a bureaucratic supervision rather than in a free marketplace. It likes oligopoly and mistrusts competition. It accepts representative democracy but sees political life as a process dominated by economic, ethnic, and other interest groups rather than with individual citizens...What I witnessed at Ford was corporatism up close and personal - the doctrine of raw business advantage as seen from the viewpoint of the intended beneficiary". p183
There is nothing else on the subject of corporations fronting behind the rhetoric of the free market with this ethnographic richness. Weaver uses rich ethnographic material and careful analysis to craft a clear picture of the anti-capitalist corporation. This book is equally revealing of the origins and history of the corporation - it is theoretically a creature of the state and therefore behaves like a bureaucracy rather than a market organization. In short, government and their corporations are the problem. Free enterprise is the solution.
This book belongs on the shelf with Berliner and Biddle's "The Manufactured Crisis" and Miller's "Capitalism: An Ethnographic Approach".