Manheim, Jarol B. The Death of a Thousand Cuts: Corporate Campaigns and the Attack on the Corporation.

Raphael, Chad

Manheim, Jarol B. The Death of a Thousand Cuts: Corporate Campaigns and the Attack on the Corporation. Mahwah, NJ/London: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2001. Pp. xvii, 362. ISBN 0-8058-3831-7 (hb.) $39.95.

Corporate campaigns, pioneered by American labor unions in the 1970s, have become a permanent feature of the political communication landscape. These campaigns entail widespread and coordinated efforts to disrupt a company's relationships with its stakeholders and prevent it from doing business as usual. Campaigns may be brought for economic motives, by unions seeking better compensation or working conditions for members, or even by corporate competitors in search of advantages in the marketplace. Campaigns may also stem from political grievances, such as environmental groups' recent campaign that convinced Home Depot to stop selling old growth wood in its stores. Tactics go well beyond the traditional strike or demonstration, extending to multiple secondary targets that can apply pressure to the corporation. These tactics may include litigation, complaints to regulatory agencies, shareholder resolutions, boycotts, and negative publicity about the company's financial situation, product quality and social responsibility.

Jarol Manheim, of George Washington University, offers the first book-length treatment of the history, strategy and conduct of corporate campaigns in the political communication literature. A specialist on strategic communication in politics, Manheim writes insightfully if not sympathetically about corporate campaigns and those who launch them.

The first three chapters of the book make a historical argument, attributing the rise of corporate campaigns to four enabling factors. Manheim maintains that campaigns, like all strategic communication, rely on the social scientific revolution in applied research on political behavior and communication of the 1950s, which offered the tools for devising strategy and measuring its impacts. A second factor is the rise of campaign professionals in public relations, polling and political strategy, who carry out much of the research, design and implementation of campaigns. In addition, Manheim traces early corporate campaigns to specific activists and organizations in the New Left, who understood the corporation to be the significant actor on the political scene, and who turned their critique on particular firms' behavior rather than on capitalism itself. Finally, he presents the corporate campaign as a response to the waning power of labor unions, offering an alternative to traditional organizing methods that reflects labor's need to win support from other corporate stakeholders to succeed.

Chapters 4 through 7 describe the growth of labor and non-labor campaigns since the 1970s, illustrated with examples throughout. Here, Manheim identifies the major labor, religious, community organizing, women's, and environmental organizations that have launched corporate campaigns. He also discusses efforts organized by corporations themselves to target competitors, such as the alliance of high technology firms that supported anti-trust regulation of Microsoft in the 1990s. These chapters also contrast the goals and resources of labor and non-labor campaigners, noting, for example, that non-labor opponents tend to be more politically motivated and bring a wider range of demands because these groups have less stake than unions in preserving a company to provide jobs for their members. Because non-labor groups tend to enjoy fewer resources, their campaigns are generally more sporadic and media-dependent, relying especially on the Internet.

The remaining nine chapters discuss the conduct of corporate campaigns. Manheim describes how practitioners research vulnerabilities suggested by a company's relationships with stakeholders, its market position and structure. He lays out the criteria used to decide whether to begin a campaign and to develop strategy. Separate chapters cover campaigners' techniques for reaching key secondary targets--financial institutions, customers, employees, and government.

Manheim then turns to communication proper, showing how almost every action taken by a campaign is meant to communicate with targets, funders, or publics. He discusses how campaigners craft messages that aim to persuade stakeholders it is in their self-interest to support the campaign's goals, and outlines recurring themes that portray the corporation as violating widely-held values. He breaks down the roles played by various stakeholders in transmitting the campaign's message, noting those that can be especially effective in legitimizing it (employees, whistle blowers), mediating and distributing it (financial and industry analysts, the mass media), and so on. A separate chapter considers the importance of the Internet for contemporary campaigns.

Manheim concludes by foreseeing more issue-oriented "metacampaigns," such as those against use of sweatshop labor and globalization, which employ corporate campaign tactics but do not focus narrowly on a single company. These metacampaigns, he argues, have become the main means of rejoining labor and the left since the 1960s.

The book boasts eight pages of color photos and graphics plus numerous black and white figures depicting examples of campaign communication and strategy. Two appendices, totaling thirty-five pages, list labor and non-labor campaigns from 1974 to 1999. Endnotes follow each chapter and the book is fully indexed.

--Chad Raphael

Santa Clara University