The Masses Must be Educated!--The (Mis)Management of Business and Human Rights Populism

 

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One of the most interesting turns in the organization of economic activity, at least within liberal democratic and post-colonial environments, has been the development of a rhetoric for, an ideology of, and a set of working models that can be drawn upon by economic enterprises that seek not merely to comply with law and the expectations of the market, but also  to actively participate in the management of social change. This turn is especially significant, since it appears to bend  markets further into socio-political spaces in ways that mimic the sensibilities of Marxist-Leninist systems in which there has always been a strong intuition that markets and economic activity are tools that must be deployed to advance political and ideological objectives. The great difference, of course, is that in Marxist-Leninist systems that toolkit is at the disposal of the vanguard party and operationalized through its administrative apparatus, which includes but is not centered on markets--that is on the mechanisms through which individualized private choices are usually realized in everyday life.  

The outward manifestation of this turn may be best understood by the imperative of political agendas driven by particular end goals--the masses must be educated!

 In the liberal democratic and post-colonial camps, this task has traditionally been the domain of the state (at least in modern times) through its control of the education system (as contentious as its content and objectives may be from time to time) especially targeting the young  who must be socialized as completely as possible for insertion into political and labor markets. But it has also been the domain of private actors--civil society, social, affinity group, and religious collectives--who target the (more or less adult) masses not for socialization, but for the normalization of particular ways of looking at the world, of preferred systems of right and wrong, and of specific objectives  the plausibility f which within dominant ideological systems might somehow be constructed.

The object of all of this mass education especially by private actors is usually to manage the way in which the masses approach interaction with and accountability from the state for specific outcomes (e.g., gender equality, social welfare programs, consumer protection, etc.) and also for setting the normative  baseline (e.g., social justice, limits on exercises of state power, development and protection of rights, etc.)  But in diffuse power systems (like those in liberal democratic and post-colonial political spaces), the masses are educated to be deployed against other critical social, economic, and religious actors.  In the economic sphere, mass education is the means by which mass action can be rationalized (expectations and desires cultivated along principled grounds) and action undertaken against targeted actors to conform behavior to mass expectation (the boycott, pressure on the state to "do something" and the like). 

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What the generations-long movement from corporate social responsibility to responsible business conduct and norm-compliance based accountability founded on a corporate responsibility to respect human rights and other international norms has appeared to produce is not merely a strong taste for compliance, but also a desire for entities, once the object against which educated masses were deployed, to become a source of mass education in their own right. In effect, a long process of core normative changes in the way in which society imagines the role and function of economic activity--from inward facing and profit generating and risk bearing; to outward facing and impacts generating and risk controlling-- has transformed the expectations built into permitted collective economic activity from one that is passive with respect to the construction and implementation of political and social ideologies and objectives, to one in which the enterprise is now expected to embed those ideologies and expectations into its production and market behaviors. That change, in turn, changes the way understands the source and management of mass education in liberal democratic and post-colonial spaces--or at least puts it in a different light.  

Elite consensus now appears to have been moving from "the masses must be educated" to the new imperative--the masses must be educated by the enterprise! 

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That, perhaps, is the single greatest consequence of the movement that, officially at least, culminated in the endorsement of the UN Guiding Principles for Business and Human Rights, around which these new imaginaries of the enterprise as a n agent of vanguard socio-political change can now be advanced. In the United States, and especially since the social upheaval that occurred in in the wake of the murder of George Floyd, U.S. enterprises have becme more active agents of the social justice movement that became more centered in elite discourse after that time (Companies Taking A Public Stand In The Wake Of George Floyd’s Death ("Numerous companies have made public statements against racism and injustice and announced donations and other displays of support since the death of George Floyd unleashed protests across the United States starting on May 26th.") also here and here). But this merely marked a substantial point of public recognition for a tendency that had already begun to shape enterprise culture with respect to race, ethnicity, and identity issues--the core of what appeared to make up the public face of social justice discourse in the US . This had been identified by some since 2015 as "woke capitalism" and so identified constructed as a point against which other forms of woke capitalism could be developed in opposition (Woke Corporate Capitalism: What is the antidote to this “corporate wokeness” infiltrating our largest American companies?). However one described it or its history--and however one posited a values core to be protected--the die had been cast: enterprises would now be expected to educate the masses.

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It is at this point that contemporary economic enterprises  have begun to realize one of the consequences of any responsibility to educate the masses through their production, in their operations, and through their markets: there is, in market economies, a market in education for the masses.  And while it is clear that the masses must be educated, in liberal democratic and post colonial spaces (unlike Marxist-Leninist spaces) the markets for educators remains quite robust.  Enterprises, indeed, have entered a quite crowded market--already well populated by traditional educators--civil society, religious, identity group, political, and other organizations--whose business model is indeed founded on the ability to successfully project an education onto the masses and then deploy that educated mass as an instrument for attaining more concrete socio-political results. More significantly, the range of education broad enough--indeed as broad as the tolerated political spectrum--to ensure sometimes substantial conflict in the principles, morals, and objectives of the education proffered to and made available for consumption by the masses. While that has been a well understood element of the business model of the so-called non-profit sector, it is somewhat alien to what had been the profit sector. 

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The consequences are not yet apparent (but short term reaction see here), but the effects have been well reported. Two insights perhaps are worth noting.  The first is the way in which corporate mass education can produce enormously vibrant counter-education that targets the mass educating enterprise.  That was in effect  the effort by Anheuser-Busch to consider rolling out a mass education campaign (in the form of solidarity building) around its Bud Light Brand. What started as a mild affirmation campaign targeting the politics of social justice and inclusion was rapidly transformed into a battle among competing visions for cultural production in social relations in which the Bud Light brand became an incarnation of a socio-political contest over the meaning and application of human rights through markets. The episode will likely be carefully studied by all key stakeholders.  The other involved the development of Trans friendly clothing marketed by Target. That also produced a counter mass movement--in both cases transforming the market (for products) into a marketplace in which products became the semiotic embodiment of contested approaches to mass education and cultural, socio-political expectations to be manifested by patterns of consumption.  This also will be carefully studied.That, perhaps, is the most profound lesson of this transformation--the reality that production, and especially the objects and services produced, now acquire a double character: they are at once a physical manifestation of a thing in itself (a can of beer) and also are a manifestation of socio-political allegiance (one is drinking ideas as well as beer). 

But the bottom line: the political education of the masses through markets and by economic actors does, indeed, may contribute to substantially changing the meaning and function of economic activity.  On the one hand, it puts markets and people at the center.  One consumes not just products and services but their meaning and signification. It continues the transformation of consumption from a voluptuary exercise to a manifestation of ideology and politics--and thus aids in the transformation of economic actors from producers to goods and services to active agents of politics and ideological embedding. Perhaps the change makes obvious what had been the dual realities of markets all along.  On the other hand, the centering on the ideological role of production and its connection to organs of political authority may substantially reshape the way way production is understood and its costs and value calculated. One cannot speak as much about profit (or value added) as an inward calculus--it may now have to be re-calibrated to include the socio-political profit of such production and (appropriate) consumption. Nonetheless the now more formally circumscribed role of economic actors in the education of the masses (as part of the value added of production), and in the political interactions between producers and consumers of goods and services, will continue to reshape the landscape of production in ways that can hardly be anticipated.

Additional thoughts follow.

 

 

This is an age of education.  The masses, especially, must be educated.  And thus educated, deployed to do their duty (a) in the form of democratic participation (liberal democratic and Marxist-Leninist style); (b) as participants in markets; (c) in the production and consumption of information; (d) in their social relations beyond state and market; and (e) in their life long projects of self-actualization either for their own benefit or for that of some collective or other. But those who manage such education must be carefully screened and properly monitored so that an appropriate education may be bestowed on its objects--willingly or not. Indeed, the ignorant cannot know the depth of their darkness until brought carefully to the light of a knowledge carefully curated for them by those well trained in that task. 

All of this has been the bread and butter of Enlightenment collectives (whether Enlightenment came with the action of a guillotine (axe, sword or bullet), through the witnessing of the gospel of such enlightenment within the mechanics of colonialism, at the point of a revolutionary bayonet, or more commonly within spaces in which children are confined and educated at the instance of bureaucrat, merchant, or priest. Ancient history, to be sure.  Humanity has spent millennia refining these compulsions--and developed quite profound philosophies around them. So, why should we care?

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The answer  is that in the current era education has become merely a technology of the management of a populism--or of the performance of a populism--that has become the center of the structural operating system of politics, economics, self- and collective actualization, and even, to some extent, of religion. The masses must be educated because all such sub-systems have now, in the language of Chinese Marxist-Leninism, put the people at the center.  The masses vote for the wielders of political authority in liberal democracy; they are a central consultative object-element of Socialist democracy. The idea of the perfection of market information are central principles for both theories of efficient markets based welfare maximizing structures, as well as for its protection through--for example, consumer protection principles. The ummah and the magisterium remain vibrant subjects of interest to religion--as does the congregation.  

All systems are, to some extent, connected with or the expression of a populism which sits at the center of the organizational theories of social relations. The term populism, though used deliberately is also deliberately ambiguous.  It has a historical meaning (narrowly referencing a short lived mass political movement in the United States at the end of the 19th century); a more generalized meaning in the form of a referent for bottom-up or mass movements in general (anarchic in the sense of an absence of leadership) or traditionally structured within some sort of hierarchy. Since the middle of the last century it has become a Janus like term--signifying both a (positive) turn, a general reference of anti-establishment mass movements generally from the left; or a (negative) turn, as a general referent for delusional mob action. If anti-establishment is meant to be the populist expression of a super-ego, then its id is represented by the irrational and its Rasputin. The terms and their use, though, must be understood in this light as exposing the influence of the left in linguistic politics since the defeat of fascism in 1945, and influence that might be deemed to have taken a demagogic turn itself from the beginning of this century. 

While one might suppose that mass movements are organic and a natural part of the landscape of social relations.  It might, and certainly since the Enlightenment it might be understood rationally, as the product of a complex mass of external forces, the most useful of which (for purposes of social control) is education--that is in the transmission of information and in the manner of training in proper response to information stimulus on the collective body. It follows that education, of course involves both input (data), analytics (understanding what data means), and judgment (the action or inaction required as a consequence of the product of analytics).  One speaks here, then,  not merely of information--that is of the responsibility to make and keep the masses informed. Rather one speaks here to the responsibility to curate the way in which the masses receive, understand, and act on information in the service of a broader (or sometimes of a more specifically targeted) world view. To educate the masses means--and both religion and Leninists best articulate this from wildly different starting points--to teach the masses how to see, and therefore how to judge and act on what is seen, or with respect to matters of a more abstract nature about which they can or must be informed.  "He who is a thorough teacher takes things seriously—and even himself—only in relation to his pupils" (Nietzsche, Beyond Good & Evil ¶ 63).

It would follow that the management education have assumed a central role in the operationalization of political, economic, moral, and social systems.  So understood, the current manifestation of thus impulse is worth a careful consideration for two reasons.  One, of course is targeted for lovers of contradiction--the compulsion of mass education belies the self-actualization principles of most political ideology. The second suggests that the politics of such mass education creates instruments equally available to those with the power to use them irrespective of ideology.  It seems everyone, now, in the age of the populist, can be in the business of education.  And education, to underscore the core point here, is at the center of the operation of collective systems in this post-global age. And thus populism has itself become an element of the manifestation and disciplining of collective populism through systems of education tied to organizing and world rationalizing ideologies. 

No good or bad reason; just right reason.

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And in the current age the constitution and injection of right reason into and for the masses has become the central element of politics--not just the politics of public governance, but of the governance of economic, social, cultural, and religious relations--in the current era. This is particularly apparent in the emergence of populism and education in the field of business, sustainability, and human rights. Populism and human rights have a long history in the economic sphere--though one that has aligned with the times (here). In the form of boycott, it manifests  popular action against a private target (mostly) respecting offending conduct undertaken (or not taken). Sometimes, especially from the first half of the 20th century, it sometimes manifested national xenophobia against the economic actors of either a national enemy or of states that mistreat sectors of their population with a tie to the boycotting population (eg the 1905 Chinese boycott of US goods for mistreatment of Chinese migrants to the US), which when normalized as state policy transformed itself into contemporary state sanctions regimes. 

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In the classical era education and populist action (boycott) serves several intertwined functions.  First it is a means of exerting power within the domain of markets. Second it serves as a means of disciplining entities that have failed in their responsibilities. But modernity has permitted a transformation that inverts the relationship between the education of the masses and their deployment towards the ends to which such education is directed. Education comes in as a means of directing boycott to its proper targets.  Populism-education was unidirectional--the targets are enterprises; the educators are either the state or more likely civil society, labor or its academic appendages); and the tactic was the instrumentalization of consumer power; and the objectives were social change directed at the targeted enterprises or the systems that privileged their operation. This was the essence of the great consumer boycotts of the apartheid regime in South Africa, and the boycott of lettuce and grapes through the efforts of Cesar Chavez and the United Farm Workers in 1960s California. There are many more instances that grew from the late 1950s through the end of the century. 

What has changed, especially after the endorsement of the UN Guiding Principles for Business and Human Rights, was the direction of education and the purpose of boycott. The rise of the corporate responsibility to respect human rights coincided with the movement toward the governmentalzation of the enterprise with respect to monitoring and compliance with national policy touching on human rights, as well as the shift (if slow and tenuous) toward the privileging of impact of corporate activity and away from a singular focus on the internal cost to produce goods and services offered for consumption.  In this context, the enterprise, along with civil society, assumed a role as educators of the (consuming) masses. And as educators of consuming masses they had an obligation to use their products and services to align popular conceptions of right reason with the development and marketing of products and services. The responsibility to respect human rights, then, transformed the enterprise form a net object of populist action, to a net producer and a shaping agent of such action.  That is, the corporation  understood that its role was not merely to conform to populist opinion (to the extent it is formed by those with authority--or market power), but also to join their mass perception shaping forces in educating the masses. 

And that education would have to conform to the dominant notions of political culture in the place in which corporate activity occurs.  In the United States that re-education focused on what has come be be called social justice issues. That was sometimes translated into the language of brand activism, sometimes corporate social justice activism (eg here).  The objects are similar-to use brand or product power to align business purpose with social justice goals, and in the process to "bring consumers along" through product based campaigns.

Corporate Social Justice is a reframing of CSR that centers the focus of any initiative or program on the measurable, lived experiences of groups harmed and disadvantaged by society. CSR is a self-regulated framework that has no legal or social obligation for corporations to actually create positive impact for the groups they purport to help. Corporate Social Justice is a framework regulated by the trust between a company and its employees, customers, shareholders, and the broader community it touches, with the goal of explicitly doing good by all of them. Where CSR is often realized through a secondary or even vanity program tacked onto a company’s main business, Corporate Social Justice requires deep integration with every aspect of the way a company functions. (Lily Zheng, "We’re Entering the Age of Corporate Social Justice," Harvard Business Review 2020 )

By the start of the third decade of this century, many believed that corporate and social justice objectives aligned, and that so aligned, they converged with consumer expectations. 

As many as 70 percent of consumers want brands to take a stand on social and political issues. That’s a 66 percent increase from 2017, according to Sprout Social’s 2019 #BrandsGetReal survey. . . Tiffany Apczynski, Vice President, Public Policy and Social Impact at Zendesk, explained in an interview that businesses’ historic attitude of staying removed from social justice issues is behind the times. Consumers are more likely to purchase from companies that take a stand on causes that align with their values, and more importantly, companies have power to make a difference. Even if it’s helping to take baby steps toward a larger solution. In fact, 67 percent of consumers say brands are raising awareness around just causes, and 62 percent believe brands are educating them on important topics. (6 companies tackling social justice and inspiring customers (2020); see also here)

But, it appears, the masses sometimes will not be led--or better, the price of leading the masses may well be measured by the cost of resistance in the form of the very boycotts that had, in another guise been used against companies in an earlier age.  Where once such populist consumer agitation was used against companies for their failures to align their operations with social justice objectives, today companies run the risk that such populist consumer agitation will be used against them precisely because they aligned their operations with social justice objectives that might be highly contested within a society. Corporate CSR risk now includes the risk that political agitation and mass education at the forefront of social transformation will instead transform them from economic to social and political actors that fund their operations through the selling of goods and services. Corporations, in effect, will sometimes face the choice of privileging their social justice objectives or their economic objectives (eg here). Leading the masses toward a curated collective self-actualization grounded in economic transactions--one buys products or services and one is educated in the goals of social justice, can sometimes be a quite risky business.

That, certainly, was spectacularly documented in the recent arc of the story of efforts by the manufacturers of Bud Light beer to educate its consuming masses respecting social justice and inclusion issues for the LGBTQ+ community. That, in turn, was centered on a marketing-as-education campaign that would have featured a social influencer of some prominence.  

Bud Light has been dethroned as the nation’s top-selling beer in recent weeks, a data analytics company said, a sign that the backlash the brewer received from conservatives over its relationship with a transgender influencer may be taking a toll. . .The shift follows a conservative-led boycott against Bud Light that started after Dylan Mulvaney, a transgender influencer, posted a video on Instagram on April 1 promoting a Bud Light contest. Bud Light’s share of retail sales has dropped about three percentage points since the boycott began. Sales began to dip after commentators and celebrities on the right began to protest. Anheuser-Busch, the maker of Bud Light, later announced the departure of two marketing executives, but the company’s attempt to backtrack drew further criticism, this time from liberals and members of the L.G.B.T.Q. community.The controversy has spotlighted the challenges brands and retailers like Adidas and Target have faced in marketing to L.G.B.T.Q. consumers in a polarized political environment. (J Edward Moreno, "Bud Light Is No Longer America’s Top-Selling Beer After Boycott," New York Times (14 June 2023))

Enterprises now appear, at east at the margins, to be responding to the risk--by making choices. One approach is not unexpected--to move transformation below the popular line of sight (Lily Zheng, "To Avoid DEI Backlash, Focus on Changing Systems — Not People," Harvard Business Review 2022). Of course, one is changing people--through systems.  And that process of mass education will neither go unnoticed nor uncontested. Others bring in a more interactive approach to bring people along (eg here).

Nonetheless, what emerges is the reshaping of the meaning of production and the signification of the goods and services produced.  These no longer have meaning in and as themselves--a can of beer is no longer a liquid meant for consumption.  It is now an act of ingesting an ideology or consuming the politics and morals of a service. That will change everything as it becomes more and more accepted as the reality of human interactions.