Act I - Theatres of Action
Scene 8 - Disney
By David M. Boje, Ph.D. November 13, 2001
ACT 1 - Theatres of Action; Scene 8 - Disney
The Walt Disney Company is Theatre of Capitalism, par excellence. It has concentrated,
diffuse, and integrated spectacles. Disney is circus-like and its theatrical elements of commerce
are quite spectacular (Benjamin, 1999: 43). Disney is diffuse spectacle in its spreading
phantasmagoria, being replicated the world over, not just in exporting Disney Theme Parks to
Japan or Europe, but also in the way that many cities, airports, and suburbs are becoming theme
parks.
Disney's Theatres of Capitalism is production, distribution, and consumption is a key player on
the global stage of western capitalism. We are spectators to the metamorphosis of late
capitalism, the interpenetration of post-industrialism with postmortem culture. We are being
Disneyfied. Disney Theatre is the new business role model for all corporations to combine
post-industrial and postmortem. This new Theatrics of Capitalism is the trilogy of spectacle,
carnival, and festival. It is also the major revolution of our times, the global Disneyfication of
capitalism, what we call the new Theatre of Capitalism. Disneyfication is defined as the
conduct of business and consumption in such a way that the "real world" is becoming more and
more like a theme park (Disneyfication, 1998).
Disneyland is a world that's safe and entertaining; a world where there are no
unpleasant surprises and where everything is sanitized. But Disneyfication takes
away the life and variety of the real world. In the Disney world, everything, [and]
everywhere is the same.
SANITIZE: to take away problems, to make something clean and harmless
VARIETY: many different kinds of things
CONSUMERISM: (n) the habit of buying more and more things
Disneyfication of nature, global, safety, a more sanitized history, Mid-west politics and sex
mores, colonized mind, appropriation of traditional culture for postmortem fashion, as the
world grows more like a theme park.
Disney is where executives go to learn Theatre, to mix integrated spectacle showmanship in the
marketplace, with attracting business by erecting carnivalesque theme park attractions, and
with investing corporate culture in festive characters like Mickey Mouse and Goofy, and even
with providing a space of play where "guests" can be both actor and spectator (spectator) on the
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corporate-administered stage. Every management and business text covers reviews Disney,
most applaud its creative genius, entrepreneurship, strategy, and creativity.
Disney University is a place where business executives, seek to imitate Walt Disney's empire
building, to follow the American entrepreneurial dream for Kansas City cartoonist to empire
builder. The following excerpt from a transcript of a stockholders' meeting shows Eisner
invoking the Disney legend (Boje, 1995):
The concentrated spectacle begins this way. In 1923, Walt arrived in Hollywood with
drawing materials under his arm, $40 in his pocket, and a dream. Waiting for him at
Union Station was his brother Roy, who would dedicate his life to making Walt's dream
come true. Together with their wives, Lilly and Edna, working alongside them at night
around the kitchen table, they struggled to keep a tiny studio alive.
These executives go to Disney to learn how to manage the concentrated synergies of
production, consumption, and distribution, between people who are "guests" of the
show, employees who are recruited to perform as "cast members," and the
merchandising of story characters by transforming them from cartoon or film, into CD,
toys, and rides in networked corporate profit centers. Every corporate logo can be
embroidered on T shirts; every fashionable product or celebrity endorser can be part of
a film, a children's book, or a video game. This is surface of the "synergistic" strategy
of Disneyfication. At a deeper level, Disneyfication is the transformation of traditional
culture into postmortem culture products.
Executives come to Disney University to learn surface-level "synergistic strategy" of
more integrated spectacle, how to have a hit film, manufacture toys and garments
related to that film, move the theme to TV shows on its corporate-owned station, set up
a ride in its theme park, and sell the wares in its stores and parks.
But just as the question of the Wicked Witch in Sleeping Beauty ("Mirror, mirror on the
wall who is the fairest of them all?") has more than one answer, there are contrary
theatrical performances and conflicts among the fragmented audiences turned critics,
about what constitutes authentic and ethical Walt Disney corporate Theatre, across all
its Magic Kingdom stages. In this chapter, we look at the dynamic complexity and
chaos effects of synergistic strategies of mixing many types of Theatres of Capitalism
on the global stage. If we just apply Theatre to managing and organizing the
transnational corporation, we can end up with a naive political and economic complicity
that marginalizes critical approaches to Theatre. More critical postmortem approaches
to Theatre, we will examine include the Tamara Theatre invention of John Krizanc. We
begin with simple synergy, as Disney transforms its corporate enterprises into networks
of Theatre, into Tamara. Disney Theatre includes a less public stage of operations, the
global subcontracting to third world factories, which distribute to consumers. Disney's
Theatres of Capitalism mixes the world of postmortem consumers who seem to care
little about sweatshop practices with postindustrial supply chains, who seem to prefer
contracts with sweatshops.
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In terms of change, there is a self-organization happening to Disney and among the critics that
network to protest corporate strategy, as well as the network of the Theatres of Capitalism. As
an organizing metaphor, I would like to define this network as, "Tamara Theatre." Consumers
are networking with workers in the Third World and in the theme parks of US, France, Japan,
and next is China, to bring about a change in Disney's Theatres of Capitalism. Mickey Mouse
rules the world; next to McDonald’s Mickey is the most recognized cultural symbol of
globalization.
In Global Disneyfication, a few media companies besides Disney, such as Time-Wamer,
Bertelsmann, Murdoch control the Theatres of Capitalism. This includes what we watch, read,
and hear is the new postmortem popular culture controlled by a few transnational corporations.
In the Theatres of Capitalism, Disneyfication is a force of dark revolution on the world stage.
Cartoons and movie stares become spectacularly exciting technologies for theme parks, video
games, and toys. The products are glamorous exports that replace the production consumed by
traditional culture. Disneyfication also mines stories and practices of traditional culture that
can be rendered Disney story characters. Global Disneyfication is the culture wars, the battle to
retain authentic culture, in a time of postmortem culture mania. And it is Tamara Theatre.
Tamara Theatre - Disney operates in what I call "Tamara" Theatre (Boje, 1995). Tamara
Theatre puts the audience in a special relationship with an experimental fiction and with a
special networking of stages, accomplished by wandering audiences chasing actors. In this,
Tamara, is like the real life of any corporation, we can not be in all the meeting rooms
simultaneously, nor does each manager or worker network together the same sequence of
theatrical moments, characters, dialog, and script, each day. Each day we try to figure out what
the Theatre means, and why we play the strange roles, though we resist at every entrance.
Tamara is the name of a play written by John Krizanc (198 1/1989), first performed at Strachan
House in Trinity-Bellwoods Park, Toronto, Ontario, Canada on May 8, 1981.
Tamara is postmortem Theatre. It is not modem Theatre, in which you sit in stationary seats
and passively watch actors enter and exit a single stage. Manguel (1988: 1-2) gives us a
starting definition of traditional modem theatrics:
Theatre, the representation of events "as if they happened before your eyes"
begins with the convention of all spectacle: a division of reality. One space
allotted to the audience, the passive viewer, seated to observe; another to the play,
the actors, moving to perform.
In Tamara Theatre, you do not sit down, there are multiple stages, and you are seduced
into more of a spectactor rule than is the case in modem Theatre. As spectator you observer
yourself acting, trying to figure out which actors to chase. As one scene closes,
several others begin simultaneously in several, and sometimes a dozen other rooms.
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Cover of Tamara Journal's First Issue in 2001; Drawing provided with permission
of Rodney Injhan
I first attended the play Tamara when it was presented at il Vittoriale degli Italiani in
Hollywood, California in 1992, and have written about it ever since. When attending the
Tamara play, I followed the chauffeur from the kitchen to the maid's bedroom; there she met
the butler, who had just entered the drawing room. As they completed their scene, they each
wandered off into different rooms, leaving the audience, myself included, to choose whom to
follow. As I decided which characters to follow, I experienced a very different set of stories
than someone following another sequence of characters. No audience member gets to follow
all the stories since the action is simultaneous, involving different characters in different rooms
and on different floors. At the play, each audience member receives a "passport" to return
again and again to try to figure out more of the many intertwined networks of stories. Tamara
cannot be understood in one visit, even if an audience member and a group of friends go in six
different directions and share their story data. Two people can even be in the same room and -if they came there by way of different rooms and character-sequences -- each can walk away
from the same conversation with entirely different stories (Boje, 1995).
In Tamara Theatre, a dozen characters unfold their stories before a walking, sometimes
running, audience. Instead of remaining stationary, viewing a single stage, the audience
fragments into small groups that chase characters from one room to the next, from one
floor to the next, even going into bedrooms, kitchens, and other chambers to chase and
co-create the stories that interest them the most. If there are a dozen stages and a dozen
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storytellers, the number of story lines an audience could trace as it chases the wandering
discourses of Tamara is 12 factorial (479,001,600).
Tamara Theatre is a metaphor highlighting the plurivocal interpretation of organizational
Theatre, a distributed and historically contextualized meaning network -- that is, the meaning of
events and characters depends upon the locality, the prior sequence of stories, and the
transformation of characters in the wandering discourses that network stages, events and
people.
Theatre has eclipsed storytelling, harnessed its power, as a more embodied form of institutional
memory. In previous work, I defined a "storytelling organization" as collective storytelling
system in which the performance of stories is a key part of members' sense-making and a
means to allow them to supplement individual memories with institutional memory" (Boje,
1991 a: 106). Theatrics is more that storytelling, it is endemic to and reconstructs and
reterritorializes capitalism. We do not just do capitalism, we manage, produce, distribute and
accumulate spectacle, and sometimes co-opt the carnival of resistance, and good play festive
play into the enterprise.
Finally, there is also indeterminacy about each character in postmortem Theatre. In the
postmortem Theatre, each character can exhibit multiple personalities, and the complexity for
the spectator, is not only deciding who to follow from stage to stage, but to watch for changes
in persona. One thinks one is following a chauffeur, who in one discourse changes the rules
and becomes a spy disguised as a chauffeur and who then becomes an aristocrat pretending to
be a spy pretending to be a chauffeur. Now, in his love affair with the maid, is he indeed in
love with the maid, is he using her to spy on the aristocracy, or is he toying with her as an
exploitable subject? (Boje, 1995). Tamara Theatre is entrapment, since spectators focus on the
maze of story, character, and stage choices, while forgetting they are complicit in civic
responsibility, as the Fascism of the Mansion and its scripted scenes, stares back at us (Boje,
2001d). And, this is why John Krizanc included Tamara de Lempicka as one character among
many who had the cultural preeminence to have a voice, but she elected not to use it. Like us,
she sold her art to the highest bidder. Tamara did not bother to render spectacle commentary.
I wrote about the complexity of Tamara in 1993 (with Robert Dennehy) and, again, in 1995 in
an Academy of Management Journal article, but it is only recently that I came to understand
that the content of the play was about our complicity as witness to fascism; we are witnesses,
answerable for our silence to the spectacle in which we are complicit. I am not saying Disney
is fascist, or that all Theatres of Capitalism are fascist. Each is unique in con-scripting control
and resistance.
Disney is Tamara Theatre; Disney is a global mansion with Theatre performed in every
enterprise, and activist-spectators chasing executives from nation to nation, and scandal to
scandal. But, since no one can be on every simultaneous stage at once, many "truths" float
freely. There are as many "truths" for Disney and its critics as there are different experiential
possibilities in the Magic Kingdom. Ironically, in the many rooms, on it’s many stages, in the
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Disney Empire, no one truth gets established for long without being challenged. As the number
of challenges increases and as disparate interest groups network, there is greater effect.
We know there is going to be another controversy and it can pop up anywhere at anytime.
While there is a multiplicity of perspectives on Disney, there are enough watchdogs (and witchhunts) to put behavioral and strategic constraints on Disney strategy. Everything does not go
down well with the shareholder, consumer, ecology, and labor boycott groups. And some
reviews of Disney theatrics have more media-power and more staying power.
"Tamara " is also the name of an artist, Tamara de Lampikita.
In an Academy of Management article (Boje, 1995) I began the task of applying the
postmortem theatrics of Tamara to Disney, or Tamara-land. I became so captivated by its
possibilities that in 2001 1 began a journal called Tamara (Journal of critical postmortem
organization science). I even wrote a Tamara manifesto (Boje, 2001d).
Between 1996 and the founding of the Tamara journal, I wrote some 40 articles, book chapters,
and conference presentations, and a 100 web pages to make sense of Nike as Tamara-land. I
wanted to understand why my children were so addicted to the Nike Swoosh logo, that it had to
appear on their clothing, or they could not go to school. I am proud to say that my youngest
son Raymond, just two days ago, declined the Swoosh, and bought some thing different. "Dad,
I went to four shoe stores in New York, and all they carried was Nike, Adidas, Reebok and
New Balance. I am trying again tomorrow." One less sleeper, one more conscious capitalist.
The Capitalism Theatre of spectacle is colonizing and appropriating festival and carnival social
spaces. Each part of people's bodies and social lives had to be "polished, groomed and
controlled" (Fjellman, 1992: 305). Theatre is control of capitalism. This incessant colonizing
and appropriating of our bodies, our private and every social space raises problematic questions
about Theatres of Capitalism. Where are the festive and carnival spaces in which people are
free to immerse themselves in imaginative and creative theatrical spaces that are free from the
Disney-like Theatre of Capitalism? How does Spectacle Theatre produce and distribute the
impulse to surround ourselves with fetishes that will make us good little consumers? Where do
we go to not celebrate Disney-like heroes of materialism? Can we rediscover the Theatre of
festivals materially, spiritually, and socially linked to Nature? Can we rekindle the Dionysian
carnivalesque resistance to Apollonian spectacles of power and domination? There is a strange
synergy among Disney Theatres, and important transitions from one script of production to
another in Disney Tamara.
Synergy: from Happy Family to Unhappy Tamara Theatre - To some this synergy strategy
by Disney is hyper-consumerism, a synergy that exploits any experience and every-thing.
Disney, for many activists, is the author of hyperreality but is still the modernist story machine
(i.e. a theme park run on conveyor belts) and in some cases uses feudal labor in Asian factories.
Disneyland is a modernist Theatre-machine where people pay to stand in lines and ride on
conveyor belts and wheeled carts that follow prescribed cycle times as they view in storyboard
sequence particular images of small town, turn-of-the-century, Middle America, and walk or
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ride between movie sets and corporate exhibits. The good characters win and the bad ones lose
but never curse. Rage against the global machine is growing. A number of union and
fundamentalist groups, for example, in the last decade accuse Disney Corporation and its
executives of erosion of family-centered and conservative corporate values since Michael
Eisner took over from Walt Disney (and Walt's son-in-law, Ron Miller). Disney theatrics was
at one time built around the theme of a family, where Walt was the paternal parent-CEO,
women were the “girls" and cartoonists and joke writers the "boys” (Shows, 1979).
Even though Walt fired people according to his mood and will and paid wages considered low
by industry standards, his studio managed to avoid unionizing the artists. He did this by selling
himself as father to the "boys" -- his term for the male animators, storymen, and gag writers -and "girls," his term for the women doing the inking and repetitive drawing work. He sold his
employees the story of being "one big happy family." He reinforced the family metaphor by
encouraging his boys and girls to bring in their relatives to work for the "Disney family." Boys
were strongly reprimanded and even fired for cursing in front of the girls. Families require
loyalty to the "self-proclaimed father figure to a staff he had personally selected, whose
members he insisted were more like a family than employees" (Eliot, 1993: 87). Family
members worked all hours of the day and night for their paternalistic hero. It is interesting, as
Eliot points out, that although Walt could drink on the job, curse, and have facial hair, these
freedoms were not extended to his "family members." By the time the number of family
members had swelled to over 1,000 for work on Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, they were
lined up in a good Tayloristic-design, four boys to a row of desks and rows of girls in other
rooms in the overcrowded studio.
In earlier work, (Boje, 1995) I describe how Walt used the corporate-family theatrical script to
contest unionization. For example, on May 29, 1941, 293 employees went on strike. The
Disney studio's public image as "one big happy, harmonious family" was shattered by 1,000
picketers and pursued by media stories of dysfunction: unfair salaries, poor work conditions,
and a parochial code of behavior. Walt's employees were growing increasingly skeptical of the
family metaphor. The employees also challenged the practice of recruiting women to take
work at lower pay than men received. Babbitt, for example, saw his $300-a-week salary as
inequitable in comparison to that of his assistant, who only received $50. Finally, at a meeting
at the Roosevelt Hotel, 50 percent of the Disney animators signed Cartoonist Guild union cards.
Walt threatened to fire anyone who attended any outside union-organizing meetings. He
refused to recognize the union, even after the cards were signed. Walt ended his plea for his
boys and girls not to go on strike with these words: "Don't forget this -- it's the law of the
universe that the strong shall survive and the weak must fall by the way; and I don't give a
damn what idealistic plan is cooked up, nothing can change that" (Holliss & Sibley, 1988: 43).
Walt got even with organizers; Walt had pictures taken of the strikers on the picket lines and
taped them to the wall; he testified before the House Un-American Activities Committee to
shatter the careers of Arthur Babbitt and David Hilberrnan, who had led the 1941 strike at the
studio. Walt also systematically fired everyone who engaged in the strike over the next decade
(Eliot, 1993: xxii, 265). Walt Disney even had the historical record altered by seeing to it that
all references to Babbitt were purged from the Disney archives I studied (Boje, 1995). To this
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day, one can question the "happy family" veneer of Disney under the leadership of its current
CEO, Michael Eisner. With the opening of the theme parks, the Disney Theatre revised its
script, from "happy corporate family" to "happy cast members and guests in the show."
Enter - corporate Theatre - I want to make a point, corporations can present themselves as
"family" and/or as "putting on a show." Both are forms of Concentrated Spectacle Theatre. At
Disney, both co-existed, but not peacefully, from the 1940s to the 1980s. "When Disneyland
employees went on strike in the mid- 1 980s, it was as much over the two conflicting contexts
of interpretation -- whether work was to be seen as drama or family -- as anything else"
(Eisenberg & Goodall, 1993: 39).
Corporate family is a version of concentrated spectacle, a system of oppression. For example,
Walt used "family" characterizations (and tropes) as Theatre, following the 1941 strike. His
intimidation tactics included having his "ever-faithful girls" report to work in skimpy bathing
suits to audition for full-length live-action features that would no longer require the animation
work of the boys. This was Walt's Theatre of power, enacted to demonstrate his paternalistic
and corporate power. Before, Walt shifted from a "family" script to a "play or Theatre" script,
in the decade following the strike; Walt downsized the animation department and laid off or
fired every single person who went out on strike.
The Theatre script accomplishes a different kind of script than the family theme. In the Theatre
metaphor you "perform in the show" (not work), employees are "cast members" (not
employees), "wearing costumes" (not uniforms), playing their "roles" (not jobs) to “guests" (not
consumers) for "box office concerns" requiring a "smile and a clean looking haircut." In
contrast, the "family" metaphor highlighted the "concerned parent" (not an executive) who
"takes care of the children" (not the employees), as well as the "brothers and sisters" (not
departments or divisions).
Multiple Theatres - Disney combines premodern, modem, and postmortem worlds in its
production, distribution and consumption of the theatrics of show. Premodern folklore, mostly
from Europe, is de-authored, revised, and re-authored by Disney Corporation, and resold as
Disney product; Disney story factories replace copies of Carroll's "Alice in Wonderland" with
the Disney Versions. The Disney story machine used science and technology to simplify
stories (e.g., "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs" and "Pinocchio") from Germany and other
European countries to conform to Walt's vision of Middle America as expressed in
Fantasyland, Frontierland, and Adventureland, and, posthumously, Toontown.
"The image of smiles (friendly, fun, courteous) being manufactured (e.g., the products of a
rigid assembly-line factory) establishes the tensions of a cultural dialogue among Disneyland
workers" (Eisenberg & Goodall, 1993: 125). This tension was more containable in the U.S.
and Japan work force, than in France. French workers at EuroDisney met the Theatre metaphor
with cynicism and resistance; consumers also resisted (In the US that resistance is growing
more problematic for Disney management). Part of the consumer resistance stems form the
way premodern literature is rewritten, and ancient architecture appropriated by Disney.
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Out of premodern medieval times, Disneyland has its own Magic Castle; an architectural mix
of cartoon-like buildings is a postmortem walk about Theatre; each world in Disney contains
rides that are little more than modem factories with conveyor-belts to transport passengers
through a theatrical experience. To most people, Disney is heaven come to earth, a "living
Theatre" where you purchase and consume "fun," and where you act the character who gets
away from the daily rut of contemporary American life and says "I'm going to Disney!"
The Theatres of Capitalism adapt their repertoire of performances, scripts, and characterizations
to fit with local culture. Concentrated spectacle permeates Disney. There are concessions to
Japanese culture, for example, Main Street U.S.A., an exhibit at Disneyland and Disney World,
has been replaced by a World Bazaar, the robot President Lincoln has been replaced by a robot
crane, Mickey Mouse has more stylish image, and non-Japanese employees are not allowed to
wear name tags so that the gaijin can be distinguished from the Japanese (Boje, 1995). Not all
cast members have nametags. The nametag marginalization of ‘Others,’ especially Koreans, is
not unlike the ways blacks are marginalized to non-show positions in U.S. Disney theme parks
(Van Maanen, 1992: 23). Blacks, Asians, and Native Americans do not play Snow White. To
work at Epcott food courts, you must have a birthright in the country's cuisine, and look the
part.
Yet, the revisions to Disney Theatres of Capitalism, to its formula script for synergy, and to
strangely out of context characters and exhibits are resisted by those schooled in Disney ways.
They want "authentic" and "real" Disney Theatre. The revisions are slower in Japan, where the
Tayloristic queuing, automated movements of masses of people, and batched rides and
assembly line processes are more a part of the fun than they are at EuroDisney.
EuroDisney has revised its legends, changed its parks, and upgraded the Victorian capitalistic
values that are "signed into" its American-exports theme parks and into the modernist aspects
of the Disney enterprise as a whole. But, for many revisions is not enough.
To others there is a dark side to postmortem Disney theatrics that calls for revolution, not
revision (Elliot, 1993, Boje, 1995). The entertainment spectacle creates a supernormal stimuli
event that is bigger than life, and more compelling than reality. Disney, is more real than real;
more real than American life, and has become the metric of family and corporate life, of
production by imagineering, and hyper-consumption by material-accumulation of spectacle
theatrical experiences as purchased-fun.
Disney’s concentrated spectacle diffuses globally. Its more diffused spectacle meshes
fragmentation and specialization in the global economy. As Disney is exported to the world,
Disney becomes the universal standard for business. Disney reaches into every nook and
cranny (Debord, 1967: #64). For example, since Epcott Center opened, and visitors experience
the cuisine of Mexico, Italy, and other countries, they go to Mexico City or Venice, and are
disappointed if that cuisine does not taste or is not served the same way Epcott-Disney food
tasted. What has been the result? Disney becomes the standard of "authenticity" and
restaurants around the world, wanting to attract the tourist who went to Epcott, change their
services and cuisine to equal Disney. Not only business but spirit, since for many, the journey
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to Disney occupies new spiritual and religious space, once obtainable by pilgrimages to
Compostella, Guadalupe, and Jerusalem.
Indeed, a colleague of mine here at Yale discovered that it was in traveling to the
Dioramas of the Life of Jesus on the "Holy Mountains" of northern Italy in 1919
that a young Walt Disney got the idea for the animated statues that formed the
core of Disneyland. The transition is complete; the generation that will form the
first decades of the new millennium knows more about the "Lion King" than the
"Kingdom of God" (Penna, 1999: 1).
Disney synergy is also the dark side of the modernist Theatres of Capitalism. Disney combines
aspects of the concentrated and diffuse forms in the fatalism of global capitalism, where
resistance if futile. Disney is Fetishism at its penultimate; it is in industrial machine covered in
postmortem garish architecture designed to draw the sucker into the carnival, by parading a few
festive clowns in a Light Parade; Disney appropriates both spectacle and carnival, harnessing
them to the surplus-value creating machine.
EuroDisney, has its special French touches, such as admission of the national origins of the
various European children's stories used as themes, but what is more interesting is how the
Europeans have resisted Disney managerial controls. Europeans do not like fast-food
restaurants with tables and chairs bolted to the floor. French intellectuals refer to EuroDisney
as a "cultural Chernobyl" and call Disney employment "gum-chewing jobs," a reference to the
low pay, low skill, and rapid turnover. French women employed by Disney were infuriated by
the dress code stating that "appropriate undergarments be worn at all times, without transparent,
wild colors, or fancy designs" and that "Skirts must be 4 cm above the knee" (Van Maanen,
1992: 27). Lawsuits were filed against and eggs hurled at Eisner to protest Disney's
nonnegotiable contract clauses. Van Maanen makes a point most relevant to storytelling
organization theory: the well-defended story that "Disney creativity and imagination" were
unbeatable and that Disney's management never backed down helped to contain the contract
squabbles just described.
Behind the Theatre of fantasy world, are Theatres of Terror, such as the factories in China and
Haiti, sweatshops employing mainly young workers. Disney pays off big for executive
compensation, but is cheap when it comes to pay not only in garment factories in Third World
nations. In the U.S., Walt Disney opened his own animation and art schools on studio grounds
to attract enough low-wage apprentices to keep the cost of production to an absolute minimum.
The theme parks keep pay to a minimum, by recruiting students on college campuses who want
a line on their resume in return for minimum wage.
Disney executive compensation and alleged sweatshop labor practices continue to draw union
activist attention. As chief executive officer of Walt Disney, Michael Eisner earned $203
million from salary and stock options in 1993, which amounts to $97,600 per hour. In 1996,
Michael Eisner's salary amounted to $8.7 million, plus an additional $181 million in stock
options. This brought his total compensation of 1996 to over $189.7 million, or $101,000 an
hour. By 1998, Eisner was pulling down $576 million a year (Goozner, 2001). Compare this
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to a Haitian worker producing Disney's popular Pocahontas doll for eleven cents an hour,
which is half of Haiti's pitifully impoverished minimum wage (National Labor Relations, 1997,
National Labor Committee, 2000). After the union and other activist protests about the
disparity of Eisner and Haitian work wages, those factories migrated to even cheaper labor
pools in China and Vietnam. In Vietnam, for example, "seventeen year-old women work 9 to
IO hours a day, seven days a week, earning as little as six cents an hour in the Keyhinge
factory, making giveaway promotional toys--especially Disney characters for McDonald's
Corporation (National Labor Committee, 2000). Other Disney contract-factory workers, are 17
year old girls making Disney toys seven days a week, for 17 cents an hour (Boje, 2001c).
Disney, even in Walt's day paid less than scale for its cartoonists, writers, and performers.
That legacy for extracting the most money to the executive, while paying the least possible
amount to workers, continues. A simple popcorn cart worker, making the minimum wage in
Florida, California, France or Japan earns over a million dollars a year for Disney executives
and other shareholders (more in the U.S., a bit less in France and Japan where pop corn is less
fashionable). A Disney theme park is a factory, with people-conveyor belts, assembly lines for
mass entertainment, where workers are called "actors" and perform live on "stage" always
dressed in "costume" putting on the "show." Disney Theatre is for many guests, a festive stage
with music shows and cartoon costumed-characters, as well as a very safe and tame place to
play games of carnival with relatively safe risk.
Disney Theatre is synergistic combination of folkloric tales adapted to cartoons and
architectures, modem factory systems of people-moving, and postmortem illusions. The
postmortem Theatre allows the speculator to become, for a few moments, an actor on the stage.
Disney Theatre depends upon you becoming spectator, taking a less passive role in the
consumption of your fun. You can wear a mask, join a street Theatre scene with Mickey
Mouse, or climb a tree made of plastic and vinyl leaves. Yet, mostly you stand in line, waiting
in the queue, for your turn on the conveyor belt. "Disneyland functions as an 'imaginary effect'
concealing that reality no more exists outside than inside the bounds of the artificial perimeter"
(Fjellman, 1992: 301).
The Disney communications and entertainment industries, from Touchstone Pictures, Disney
Studios, to ABC are literally stamping the psyche of the world community with values and
iconic images. But, given the diversity of values in the world, attaining universal appeal is
increasingly difficult to sustain. For example, what is fun to some guests is for others, the
material values of fetish hyper-consumerism, over-consumption, and the death of family
values. As Disney synergizes its family values legacy of Walt Disney cartoons and fun-loving
children in safe risk, theme parks and family-accommodating resort hotels with other Disney
ventures, such as Touchstone Pictures and ABC programming, chaos can ensue.
What is obvious from a review of Disney in the news is that the synergy strategy gets into
increasing trouble each year because of the emergence of higher orders of phenomenal
complexity (Boje, 2000a, Letiche, 2000). At issue in complexity theory is the idea that the sum
is greater than the parts. This translates to a possible stock effect in the combination of protests
that is not discernable in the analysis of any one action. A growing number of boycott groups,
11
from the Christian right to Labor and anti-sweatshop activists on the left are attempting to
affect Disney consumer's consumption habits and investor's choices of corporate stock. This is
partially accomplished by staging web and street protests that are negative to Disney's
reputation: "the most significant consequence of a negative corporate reputation is the adverse
effect on share price and market capitalization" (Nakra, 2000: 35). My thesis is that while no
one protest is having measurable impact, the combined effect of an informal network of affinity
groups is having a strategic and financial impact on Disney (Boje, 2001c).
This is not always a happy synergy. Disney is also being boycotted by religious groups:
Catholic League, several Baptist and Charismatic groups, Church of God of Cleveland,
Tennessee, Assemblies of God, The International Church of the Foursquare Gospel and The
Presbyterian Church in America. Disney products are perceived as violating church doctrine
and fundamentalist ethics.
Disney is walking the razor's edge between courting traditional family entertainment values and
reaping the income niches in global capitalism special interest groups find problematic. For
example, a Disney subsidiary, Hollywood Records, produces songs by heavy metal singer
Danzig, whose music features satanic themes, according to information provided by American
Familty Association of Texas (I 997). A pension fund group wants Texas schools to dump
Disney stock over this. Christian fundamentalist groups have recently networked together to
boycott Disney films, books, tapes, TV, and theme parks over family values concerns (Boje,
2001c). In addition, in separate efforts, anti-sweatshop groups as well as a myriad of cultural
groups who have been offended by Disney in one way or another are boycotting. Disney to
these groups, but not to the public at large, is the corporate equivalent of Dr. Jekyll and Mr.
Hyde. And if any of the charges and allegations sticks to the image of Disney, then we can say
that this corporation risks tumbling into the abyss. In response to this risk, Disney must spend
corporate advertising dollars to re-erect its image as a socially responsible and friendly
company.
At the same time, Disney develops products for audiences with different family values than Old
Walt. On April 30th 1997, 42 million people in America watched "Ellen come out of the
closet" a half-hour "family oriented" comedy that airs on ABC, a Disney owned company. The
synergy of Disney family fun with ABC, brings up the issue of corporate censorship.
For example, Disney buys ABC and uses it to promote its films and cartoons, but at the same
time, ABC's documentaries on issues such as theme park security run the risk of being pulled if
they reflect badly on Disney" (Fahy, 2000: 115).
If such charges persisted and caught the attention of the FCC, then Disney risks the same fate
as Microsoft (to be broken up).
The phenomenal complexity of the fragmented spectators expecting different things for
Disney's Theatres of Capitalism is intensifying (Boje, 2001c, Letiche, 2001). As the number of
groups boycotting Disney increases, Disney is not able to make a move in its global corporate
empire without drawing itself into yet another controversy. For example, Disney is being
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boycotted by anti-homosexual groups, a kind of "Gay McCarthyism." First, Disney extended
company benefits to the same-sex partners of its homosexual employees. Second Disney hosts
an annual Gay and Lesbian day celebration at the Magic Kingdom. Third, Disney books
(Hyperion Press), movies (Touchstone & Miramax), animated moves (in "The Little Mermaid"
a scene depicts a priest becoming noticeably aroused while presiding over a wedding), and TV
(ABC) has more gay and lesbian characters than its rivals.
In the Theatrics of Capitalism, the CEO's leadership style and the corporate strategy can be
perceived as bad Theatre. Disney, for example, is being boycotted by pro-family values groups
(e.g. Focus on the Family and American Family Federation). They each contend that Disney
since Eisner is seen as encouraging a life style, which founder Walt Disney, would never have
staged in his entertainment empire. Spectators are becoming politically correct theatrical
reviewers. The family values police monitor each Disney movie and TV episode looking for
any scene, character, or dialog that violates their partisan ethical code. For example, in a scene
from " Who Frained Roger Rabbit" Jessica Rabbit is ejected from a crash while riding in the
taxi, and in the scene, she has no panties. In another well-publicized incident, "Disney hired
Victor Salva, a convicted child molester, to direct its movie "Powder".
Disney has become such complex Theatres of Capitalism, that it manages to offend almost
every cultural group, thereby offsetting the exploitative effect of synergy. Disney is being
boycotted by African Americans who allege, "Disney Pictures has yet to create animated films
featuring Aftican-American characters (other than having them portray animals)."1 Others say
Disney is "an insidious ethnocentrism," "infantilization of the world's cultures," "Africans who
stare minstrel-like," and an "imperialist mentality of the late nineteenth and early twentieth
century" (Van Maanen, 1992: 10-12). Disney is also being boycotted by a coalition of ArabAmerican organizations for an exhibit at Florida's Epcot Center. The coalition alleges the
Israel Exhibit "distorts fact and history by presenting Jerusalem as the capital of Israel."2
Finally, Disney is being boycotted by Native American groups for its portrayal of Native
Americans as seen in the movie "Pocahontas."3
Disney theatrics, the synergy of different Theatres for different audiences is increasingly hard
to manage. It is getting so that at every Disney venture there is protest. Disney Theatres of
Capitalism are subject to complex adaptive forces, emergent processes of protest, selforganizing networks of labor and family value monitor groups. A simple act in one part of the
system has unintended consequences in another.
Global Disneyfication is changing the Natural World. When our conference group took a back
stage tour of the Disney theme park in Orlando Florida, the Disney guide said, "you see all this
[pointing to the land], there was nothing here before Disney." He did not know that many of us
were stanch environmentalists, and preferred the ecology of the swamp to the Disneyfication of
Nature. There is an estranged relationship between Theatres of Capitalism and Nature.
Disneyfication presumes Nature can be improved upon with clever technology, robotic
animals, trees with vinyl leaves, etc. Some people are not ready to turn every State Park and
every work of Nature into a theme park. Toys-mart, for example, was a majority-owned Walt
Disney Company in Burbank, California that caught much media heat for the proposed sale of
13
its customer list (Rosencranz, 2000). In another example, environmental groups decided to
protest a Disney $800 million wildlife park in Florida, while another group complained there
were not as many animals as they expected if this was Africa:
Investigators examined whether federal law had been violated in the recent deaths
of cheetahs, hippos and rhinos at the park. The probe cleared Disney, but that
didn't stop a small contingent of picketers from waving signs. Disney rivals,
meanwhile, began calling the park "Minimal Kingdom," because a few visitors
said they didn't see as many animals wandering through the recreated African
savanna as they had expected (Orwall, 1998: BI).
Disney Theatre, as a social and economic system, is in a constant state of change and increasing
in complexification. Knowing the parts of the Disney-synergy system, listing its different
Theatres of global operation, its scripts, the metaphoric labels of the "show," does not allow us
to predict the next outburst of complexification. This is a Theatre that adapts to its changing
environment, and the achromous effects of the networking across its theatrical stages. Disney
Capitalist Theatre performs on the very edge of chaos, seemingly minor issues combine across
many stakeholder groups to create ripple effects that can become major news controversy that
accompanies nearly everything Disney does these days, and triggers boycott groups with
conflicting agendas for what Disney should do, across the spectrum of liberal and conservative
interests. In short, the protest movements operate separately due to value-differences, but
combine in dynamic collective networks of action to produce proverbial butterfly effects to
Disney corporate Theatre that turns synergy advantage into systemic opportunities for disaster.
Theatres of Capitalism have capitalist-intended as well as unintended consequences for
production, consumption, and distribution on the global stage.
Global Disneyfication - Disneyfication is defined as turning the capitalism of production,
distribution, and consumption into a theme park, where employees are recruited as smiling and
robotic cast members, consumers are recast as guests, and even vendors perform in this show
according to a theatrical script. Disneyfication of corporate Theatre is being mimicked in the
theatrics of other corporations. Disneyfication is more than just corporate Theatre; it is a
consumer Theatre, in which consumers are guest and spectators in the show. Some guests are
in material costumes with mask, cape, and musket. Others, do not sport a material costume but
are coaxed, seduced, or just willing play their role, and become unpaid performers in the show.
Spect-actors are more or less conscious observers of their own performance in that show. This
enrollment of employees and consumers as cast members (spectators) places the Theatres of
Capitalism onto the increasingly global stage of postmortem culture. By postmortem culture
we mean the fast-food restaurants such as McDonalds, the shopping malls with theme park
rides, cyber-cafes where we are cast into a virtual role, city centers that imitate Disney to be
more economically vital, as well as the Las Vegas casinos and cruise ships that mimic
Disneyfication.
These are examples of the "new means of consumption" in the theatrics of our postmodern
society that has taken its play onto the global stage. You can see this in Walt Disney Company
entering into a distributive relationship with networks of corporations from other countries to
14
initiate theme parks in Europe and Japan. The newest wave of Global Disneyfication is plans
for a $2.7 billion Hong Kong theme park.
Earlier this month, Hong Kong's Chief Executive Tung Chee Hwa, flanked on
either side by Mickey and Minnie Mouse, announced plans to commit $2.7 billion
of public tax revenues to a Disney theme park to be built in northern Hong Kong.
The project, to be completed in 2005, is expected to attract tens of thousands of
mainland Chinese consumers seeking American-style amusement in exchange for the
gratuitous spending made famous by Disney parks.4
As Disney theme parks in Japan, US, and Europe are threatened by cheaper alternatives, such
as Universal Studios, Six Flags, or Wet and Wild, China is an option for expansion. Cheaper
forms of entertainment, such as movies, videos, and Nintendo games are alternatives to actually
going to a Disney theme park. Increasingly families who attend theme parks, spend as much or
more time and money in resort hotels adjacent to the parks; many kids, after seeing Mickey and
taking a few rides, just want to splash in the hotel pool. Consumers have a short attention span,
"been to Disney, done that." A new Chinese emergent middle class has not yet been Disneyfied
and is eager to experience the Disney magic. In the post-11 world of the war on terrorism, the
encroachment by Americana postmortem consumerist culture of a nation's identity is a much
more serious and dangerous investment for any transnational corporation (McDonald's, Nike,
Coca-Cola, and others). Is China willing to be Disneyfied, to change its Moa cultural
revolution into postmortem culture? Cultural protectionists are not confined to Afghanistan,
and resist postmortem culture; the way Ludites resisted the industrial revolution, with violence
and terror that was met by state violence and terror. The Theatres of Capitalism are undergoing
a revolutionary transformation, as in the example of China, a flood of postmortem consumer
culture means sweeping changes throughout China's emerging markets, and changes habits of
consumption and production, in ways that are theatrical.
Global Disneyfication is the new revolution in the Theatrics of Capitalism, where networks of a
diverse product manufacturing, sweatshop subcontracting, television, movie, video, book,
music, etc. form transorganizational centers, becoming a world of theme parks. As we have
seen in this scene, that synergy opens up opportunity for wealth accumulation by these
networks of corporations, but brings with it the challenge of emergent forces of chaos and
complexity. One such force is the postmortem networking of quite different organizations,
interest and advocacy groups that use street Theatre to enroll consumers, producers, legislators,
and others as spect-actors in shows of resistance. In the marriage of postindustrial capitalism
(supply and distribution chains among fin-ns) with postmortem culture (the Disneyfication,
production, and distribution of icons of culture for their mass consumption and the resistance
networks of street Theatre) - we have a powerful Theatre of Capitalism, unlike any that has
come before in the history of economics and the world. And it is sometimes a very violent
Theatre, where the state and the people are on the street, and embodying a role in street Theatre
or in the policing of that Theatre can get a cast member or spectator killed.
Global Disneyfication finds some strange manifestations. For example, "Royal Canadian
Mounted Police, an institution rooted in Canadian history, sold the licensing rights of the
15
Mountie image to the Disney Corporation. Now, Mickey Mouse has the exclusive rights to
stamp the Mountie likeness all over its merchandise, capping a glaring set of Mickey ears on
the heads of Canadian government."5
Global Disneyfication has colonized not only corporate and consumer spaces, but education is
becoming entertainment. Making our universities into Disneyland turns education into
edutainment. This trend is not entirely an imitative of Disney theatrics. Entertainment Theatre
also takes place in cyber, video, Internet and TV spaces that are not owned by Disney. Disney
is imitated widely. If a corporation can sanitize Nature (make trees out of plastic, keep animals
away from forest-entertainment customers), turn consumption of a product or service into a
Theatre, it can find increased market for its good. If a firm can recruit people to be cast
members instead of employees, that role change is also a difference in wages, benefits, and
rights of employment. It can be a role that is more fun, but also be one that pays less, and
means you have to conform to the script (say these lines), and to the dress codes (wear these
costumes) and to a robotic mentality (smile or be fired). These changes in corporate theatrics
are said to be "good for business," for increasing customer service, loyalty, and creating more
commitment to the firm by both cast members (employees) and guests (consumers).
As Disneyfication takes a global stage, and as imitators emerge, there is a strange colonization
of the kinds of Theatre performed by corporations on the global stage. Our domestic lives,
work lives, and social lives are increasingly theatrical. We the planet-dwellers are recruited
into Disney roles. One's living room can become a theme park, an entertainment center, for
those who accumulate all the necessary spectacle electronic wizardry.
Global Disneyfication is paradoxical in the way it brings us into a "common" space of Theatre
shared in theme park memories, watching the same TV drama (Nixon's Watergate, Roots OJ
Simpson, Rodney King, Clinton's Monica-gate, Gulf War, Ellen, Survivor, September 1 1, War
on Terror). Yet, the other side of the "common" Theatre is a Theatre that divides and separates.
Not everyone can afford the computer or TV to join into the common entertainment experience
of the spectators.
The uncommon spaces of Theatre. Disneyfication may be turning ownership of the
commons over to corporate control. The Walt Disney Company has had its eye on America's
public lands at least since the Sierra Club beat back their bid for a massive ski resort at Mineral
King in the High Sierra, twenty some years ago. This time around, with a lot of careful
planning and years of hard work, their goal is clearly to gain access to profit-making
opportunities on all of America's public lands.6
A walk in the woods may require a ticket purchased from an entertainment company.
Disney's minions, for example, have plans to take over federally owned land administered by
the Forest Service, the Bureau of Land Management, the Park Service and the Fish & Wildlife
Services. A new Disney protest movement has formed. Protest groups in dozens of western
states are spending their weekends handing out literature at popular trailheads.
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Global Disneyfication means the rapid disappearance of cultural diversity in national and
global society of the spectacle. Instead of art history, cultural tourism becomes one more trip to
Fantasyland. Instead of going to Egypt we head to King Tut's tomb in the Luxor in Las Vegas.
As Global Disneyfication unfolds and reterritorializes cultures around the world, we will lose a
lot of its cultural variety. The choices are fewer, between a Mickey Mouse, Nike, Jansport
backpack, or don't show up to school. Some Arab and Asian countries have been restricting the
import of postmortem culture books, films, and toys. But they are losing the fight to stem the
public appetite to be Disneyfied, McDonaldized, and Las Vegasization. WTO and Multilateral
Treaty on Investment (M.A.I.) agreements between nations limit the governmental power to
control cultural imports. Traditional culture is a rare commodity, able to be appropriated by
this trilogy, in the new Theatres of Global Capitalism.
Transition to Scene 9, McDonalds - Disney is not the only corporation that has become the
role model of the Theatres of Capitalism. Next, we look at McDonalds Corporation, which has
different theatrics, but one that invites as much critical review and protest by a myriad of
postmortem consumer, labor, environmental, and anti-globalization groups and organizations.
Disneyfication, McDonaldization and Las Vegasization constitute the trilogy of the Theatres of
Capitalism, a marriage of postindustrial and postmodern capitalism that changes consumerism
by making theatrics of entertainment our postindustrial revolution. In our next scene we see
how Theatres of Capitalism utilize entertainment in the production, distribution, and
consumption.
1
Retrieved September 11, 2000, from the World Wide Web: http://www.laker.net/webpage/african.htm
Retrieved September 11, 2000, from the World Wide Web: http://www.muslims.org/webnews/messages/97.html
3
For more information, refer to the web site for the Rankokus Indian Reservation http://www.powhatan.org
4
Reuters Press Release (1999) http://www.solarius.com/dvp/dlhk/announcement-reuters021199.htm See Photo
with Minnie at http://postphoto.scmp.com/hongkong/1315455.stm
5
Lee, Joey (2001) It’s a small world after all. Unpublished web site at
http://www.ams.queensu.ca/canasia/disney.htm
2
6
Burns, Melinda & Barry Bortnick (1998). Los Padres National Forest's day-use fees are a big
controversy. News Press Release 7/5/98. The controversy is with Alasdair Coyne, an Ojai
resident and a founder of Keep the Sespe Wild who opposes Disney. On web at
http://www.wildwilderness.org/docs/sb_press.htm
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