Content area
Full text
Nelson Lichtenstein, ed., Wal-Mart: The Face of 21st Century Capitalism (New York: New Press 2006)
THIS BOOK IS THE outcome of a conference convened in anticipation of the entry of Wal-Mart "Supercenters" into the southern California market. There is reason to be wary of collections based on conference proceedings - hastily written papers cobbled together under a looselydefined theme - but this book is a clear exception. It encompasses twelve polished papers organized around a central and salient question: does Wal-Mart represent the "template" for the 21st century capitalist firm?
In his introduction, Nelson Lichtenstein makes the case that Wal-Mart, just like General Motors before it, constitutes a new model of the capitalist firm. The quantitative dimensions are staggering: annual sales of over $300 billion, 5,000 stores, and 1.5 million employees worldwide. It imports more goods from China than the United Kingdom and is the largest private sector employer in Canada, Mexico, and the us. Qualitatively, its impact can be found in its labour policies, its application of information technology to centralize control over inventories and global supply chains, its reorganization of the urban landscape, and its redefinition of the culture of consumerism. Subsequent papers take up various aspects of this argument and, to the volume's credit, offer differing views on WaIMart's uniqueness.
Susan Strasser emphasizes the historical continuity from earlier retailers to Wal-Mart. Chain stores like Sears, Woolworth's, and A&P lured households away from shopkeepers down the street on much the same business model (fixed prices, rapid turnover, and low overhead) and also made use of new technologies (such as modern accounting methods) to alter the system of distribution. Not surprisingly, then, opposition to early mass merchandisers, based on their poor working conditions, the concentration of wealth that mass marketers represented, and the need to sustain local economies, carried many of the same...