WAL-MAO: THE DISCIPLINE OF CORPORATE CULTURE
AND STUDYING SUCCESS AT WAL-MART CHINA
David J. Davies∗
Wal-Mart, the world’s largest company, is famous for being nimble and
flexible despite its size, constantly evolving through innovation and reliance
on cutting-edge technology in transportation logistics and sales across a global
network.1 One afternoon in the summer of 2005, Steve,2 a 27-year-old store
manager at a Chinese Wal-Mart, offered a different perspective on the
company’s success, one that emphasized its corporate culture. This culture, as
every employee knows, is described formally in company training and
depicted on posters and images displayed on the retail stores’ office and
breakroom walls. Wal-Mart’s culture, Steve explained, is a comprehensive
system that fosters positively-motivated employees and creates a unique work
environment as the foundation of the company’s global success. During our
conversation, he further offered a remarkable ideological lineage for the
∗
1
2
Portions of this paper were first presented on the panel “China and the ‘End of History’:
Critical Perspectives on Culture, Government and Civil Society” organized by Gary
Sigley at the Fourth Annual International Convention of Asia Scholars held in Shanghai,
20-24 August 2005. Thanks to Laurie Duthie, Andrew Kipnis, Nelson Lichtenstein, Saul
Thomas, Luigi Tomba, Jonathan Unger and two anonymous reviewers at The China
Journal for their very helpful comments and valuable feedback on various drafts of this
paper. I also benefited from the insightful questioning of students in my study-abroad
seminar, Made in China: The Cultures of Economic Transformation.
A number of recent essays examining Wal-Mart’s technological innovations can be found
in Nelson Lichtenstein (ed.), Wal-Mart: The Face of Twenty-First-Century Capitalism
(New York: New Press, 2006). Its social and economic effects are explored in Charles
Fishman, The Wal-Mart Effect: How the World’s Most Powerful Company Really
Works—and How It’s Transforming the American Economy (New York: Penguin Press,
2006). In the United States, negative descriptions of Wal-Mart have focused on its antiunion activities, its reliance on low-wage labor and discriminatory hiring practices, and
environmental impacts. Liza Featherstone, Selling Women Short: The Landmark Battle for
Worker’s Rights at Wal-Mart (New York: Basic Books, 2004); Al Norman, The Case
against Wal-Mart (St. Johnsbury: Raphel Marketing, 2004).
As noted below, it is common practice at Wal-Mart China for employees to use English
names. Since employees, in effect, use pseudonyms while at work, I have chosen to give
them new ones to offer a measure of anonymity.
THE CHINA JOURNAL, NO. 58, JULY 2007
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THE CHINA JOURNAL, No. 58
creation of that culture—assuring me quite matter-of-factly: “Sam Walton
studied Mao Zedong Thought for five years before he opened Wal-Mart”.
Chairman Mao’s ideology, Steve explained, had inspired the corporate
culture designed by Wal-Mart’s founder. Walton, like Mao, had been born in a
poor rural area and started from a base of committed colleagues. Ignoring
large urban areas, he built an organization by consolidating power step by step.
Only later did Walton, like Mao, move into cities and on to other countries
using the revolutionary strategy of “the countryside encircling the city”.
Today, Steve pointed out, Wal-Mart practices a kind of egalitarian
management style among colleagues based on “servant leadership” not so
different in tone from “serving the people”. The company’s emphasis on the
security and stability of full-time employment, with bureaucratic grievance
processes, was similar to the guaranteed “iron ricebowl” of state socialism.
Didn’t Wal-Mart, like Mao, emphasize honesty as most important? Didn’t
Wal-Mart even have its own dance demonstrating loyalty to the corporation?
Even our conversation occurred beneath one of the many Walton images
around the store, his hand raised in a benevolent wave reminiscent of the
Chairman.
The books that Steve and one of his colleagues offered as the source of
their knowledge of Sam’s five-year study do not mention anything about it
either in their English versions or Chinese translations.3 Apparently Walton
never did read Mao. The relationship appears to be myth, in the
anthropological sense, circulating among some Chinese Wal-Mart
management.4 The lack of a historical relationship notwithstanding, Steve’s
claim certainly had explanatory value—accounting for similarities between
Wal-Mart’s corporate culture and his understanding of the Chinese socialist
period.
This paper draws on Steve’s “Wal-Mao” link as a metaphor for examining
the localization of Wal-Mart’s corporate culture in China. Based on data
collected from interviews, store tours, informal conversations and
observations with current and former Wal-Mart managers at two stores in
China from 2004 to 2006, it examines the ways in which the company’s
corporate culture is translated, expressed, formally presented and enforced as a
3
4
Both thought they had read about the connection in The Wal-Mart Decade. This reference
has been difficult to confirm because there are at least two different books available in
China titled The Wal-Mart Decade, translated into Chinese as “Wal-Mart Dynasty”
(Woerma wangchao). The first appears to be the official translation of Robert Slater’s
(Luobaite Silaite) Woerma wangchao (Wal-Mart Dynasty) (Beijing: CITIC Publishing
House, 2003). The second also appears to be a translation of a book by Licha Hamoer
(Richard Hammer?), but I have been unable to locate a corresponding book in English.
Licha Hamoer, Woerma wangchao (The Wal-Mart Decade), trans. Mo Wei (Tianjin:
Tianjin Kexuejishu Chubanshe, 2004).
Cf. the work of Claude Lévi-Strauss. Claude Lévi-Strauss, “The Structural Study of
Myth”, in his Structural Anthropology (New York: Basic Books, 1963), pp. 202-12.
WAL-MAO
3
means of disciplining behavior among management in China. 5 As a
disciplinary structure, the “culture” rationalizes the day-to-day activities of
individual employees across the transnational retailer’s thousands of stores. It
is formally expressed in a Chinese context, however, in a moral language and
tone in dialogue with Chinese associations of wenhua (᭛࣪), or culture, and
the historical precedents of state enterprise culture under Mao. Correct
practice of corporate culture claims to result in personal transformation and
professional success and, at the same time, contribute to Chinese society more
generally.
After a slow start in the late 1990s, in the past few years Wal-Mart’s retail
operations have been expanding aggressively in China—from 43 stores in
2004 to a projected 300 stores by the end of 2010. A significant challenge to
this growth is hiring, training and retaining new retail employees. The
projected growth necessitates adding nearly 3000 managers, 100,000 office
staff and an additional 100,000 store employees within the next four years.
The unending need for new staff makes Wal-Mart a relatively secure
employer in China.
The success of this dramatic expansion depends on mid-level
management—a group of Wal-Mart employees often not considered in the
critical examinations of Wal-Mart in mainstream academic and popular
studies that have attracted so much recent media attention in the West. In
China, Wal-Mart managers consider themselves part of the Chinese “white
collar” (bailing ⱑ 乚 ) working class—a new class of private corporate
functionaries that has emerged as China has been integrated into the global
economic system. As “white collar” professionals they carry the dreams of
future prosperity and global cosmopolitanism and are the subjects for whom
the Reform period offers the most opportunity.6 They are also heavily invested
5
6
The initial data for this paper were gathered from a Wal-Mart store during a visit in 2004,
and two longer periods in conjunction with an undergraduate study-abroad seminar in
2005 and 2006. During an extended research period in the spring of 2006 I collected data
from an additional Wal-Mart store and from some of Wal-Mart’s competitors. The data
include both formal and semi-formal presentations of Wal-Mart’s culture and participant
observation at social events. As a private corporation, Wal-Mart has strict rules for dealing
with outside inquiries for information. Members of Wal-Mart’s management, however,
are generally proud of their corporate culture, confident in their work, and willing to talk
about it. In one manager’s words, “we can talk about culture, but please don’t ask me
about numbers”. Specific numbers in this paper were thus either provided by former
employees or estimates given by competitors, or are cited from the literature. None of the
“numbers” in this paper were provided by current employees of Wal-Mart, China.
Laurie Duthie, “White Collars with Chinese Characteristics: Global Capitalism and the
Formation of a Social Identity”, Anthropology of Work Review, Vol. 26, No. 3 (2005), pp.
1-12. Lisa Hoffman examines the aspirations of these professionals, economic competition
and links to nationalism in what she describes as “patriotic professionalism”. Lisa
Hoffman, “Autonomous Choices and Patriotic Professionalism: On Governmentality in
Late-Socialist China”, Economy and Society, Vol. 35, No. 4 (2006), pp. 550-70.
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THE CHINA JOURNAL, No. 58
in corporate culture discourses both as a means of doing their job and as a
pathway to future success.
Beginning with a brief discussion of corporate culture and enterprise
culture under Mao, this essay summarizes how Wal-Mart’s corporate culture
is deployed in its Chinese retail stores. Like the pre-reform period’s “work
unit” (danwei ऩԡ) culture, Wal-Mart’s corporate culture is presented as a
comprehensive “way of life” that unites employees’ work performance with
personal and social morality. As store managers explain, they subject
themselves to the culture because of the stress and uncertainty of China’s
freewheeling (and often corrupt) market economy and in reaction to
mainstream discourses that seek to demystify the sudden appearance of
wealthy and successful entrepreneurs. Wal-Mart’s culture is seen as a reliable
shortcut to “studying success” (chenggongxue ៤ ࡳ ᄺ ). “Wal-Mao”, this
essay argues, is a useful metaphor for examining how corporate culture is
presented, taught and policed as Wal-Mart localizes in China. In addition, it
suggests ways that corporate culture articulates global and local aspects of
transnational corporate power and influence, as it evokes utopian aspirations
not so dissimilar from the Maoist ones that preceded them.
“Corporate Culture” and the Ideal Modern Workplace
A cursory search through both English and Chinese business literature yields
hundreds of books and articles published on the subject of “corporate culture”.
In these books, the concept of “culture” is used routinely either as shorthand
for the unique character of an organization—its “brand”—or to summarize
normative expectations for valued behavior within the organization. Asserting
a “culture” assumes that organizations have different values and orientations
within the larger socio–economic system outside of strict business. As
“corporate”, however, the values and behavioral expectations are formally
codified.
The concept of culture referenced in this business literature is
fundamentally different from the concept as commonly deployed by
anthropologists. The latter see culture as a negotiated symbolic system that
emerges in historical time rather than as a system of behavioral “software”
available for managerial adjustment. Allan Batteau argues that corporate
“organizational cultures” establish regimes of “goal-oriented instrumental
rationality” concerned with imposing order for strategic ends. They do this by
imposing “cultures of rationality, inclusion, command and authority” while
simultaneously eliciting “cultures of adaptation and resistance” among
members.7
While corporate cultures work toward distinct ends, they depend on the
language, meanings, myths and values of culture in an anthropological sense,
as it has emerged over historical time, to communicate their vision of order,
establish boundaries, focus resources and promote the enterprise’s success.
7
Allen W. Batteau, “Negations and Ambiguities in the Cultures of Organization”,
American Anthropologist, Vol. 102, No. 4 (2001), pp. 726-40.
WAL-MAO
5
“Semantically”, Batteau writes, “they circumscribe order; poetically they
imagine motivation”. 8 Corporate culture, in other words, draws upon the
poetic associations and meanings of the larger socio–cultural context to
communicate its messages of organization.
In a Chinese context, even the term “corporate culture” (qiye wenhua ӕϮ
᭛ ࣪ ) evokes associations with the history of previous attempts at
modernizing through culture. For much of modern Chinese history, the
category of culture has been a central concept for orienting correct behavior,
imagining order and circumscribing the Chinese nation. It is a foundational
category central to thinking about modern social transformation and has a long
history stretching from the late Qing debates about modernization, through the
May 4th period, through the Cultural Revolution, to the present.
Comprised of the characters for “writing” (wen ᭛) and “transformation”
(hua ࣪), the word “culture” indicates the social transformations that take
place when one becomes literate. As Angela Zito observes, these
transformations involve social hierarchies and ways of being human. 9 The
correct education of the behaviors and values of various “new cultures” have
been indicators and metrics for modernity as well as for marking boundaries
and justifying revolutions. 10 Discussion of what constitutes an appropriate
culture and how to spread it through education has been seen as key to
achieving a number of goals, from “saving the nation” to struggling for
socialism or realizing the nationalist dream of “wealth and power” (fuqiang ᆠ
ᔎ).
During the last half of the 20th century, culture was tied to national
modernizing projects through the state enterprise system and its “work
units”—an ideal modern workplace that merged work, housing and social
welfare together into a single site of both material and social production.
While Cold War–era scholarship on work units took them as uniquely
Communist institutions, a flurry of recent work links work units to preCommunist national political, economic and social trends. 11 These studies
suggest that the system emerged as an urban organizational strategy designed
to rationalize social behavior, inculcate nationalist ideology, enculturate new
8
9
10
11
Allen W. Batteau, “Negations and Ambiguities in the Cultures of Organization”, p. 726.
Angela Zito, Of Body and Brush: Grand Sacrifice as Text/Performance in EighteenthCentury China (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1997), p. 58.
Glen Peterson, Ruth Hayhoe and Yongling Lu (eds), Education, Culture and Identity in
Twentieth-Century China (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2004).
Morris Bian, The Making of the State Enterprise System in Modern China (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 2005), pp. 2-16; David Bray, Social Space and Governance in
Urban China: The Danwei System from Origins to Reform (Stanford: Stanford University
Press, 2005); Mark W. Frazier, The Making of the Chinese Industrial Workplace: State,
Revolution, and Labor Management (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002);
Duanfang Lu, Remaking Chinese Urban Form (New York: Routledge, 2006); Xiaobo Lü
and Elizabeth J. Perry (eds), Danwei: The Changing Chinese Workplace in Historical and
Comparative Perspectives (Boulder: M. E. Sharpe, 1997).
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THE CHINA JOURNAL, No. 58
national subjects, and organize economic production for state economic
development.
Thinking about work units also provided opportunities for imagining a
modern utopian space—one confident in the power of rational planning to
shape behavior and ideology. 12 Work unit culture made moral claims to
remake its members. 13 The enterprise system also became central to the
Chinese government’s exercise of political power and a primary source of the
urban resident’s identity. As David Bray argues:
It would be no great exaggeration to contend that the danwei is the
foundation of urban China. It is the source of employment and material
support for the majority of urban residents: it organizes, regulates, polices,
trains, educates, and protects them; it provides them with identity and
face; and, within distinct spatial units, it forms integrated communities
through which urban residents derive their sense of place and social
belonging.14
During the most radical political periods associated with Maoism, work units
were both nationalist tools of nation-building and organizational units for
political action, ideological work and the struggle for socialism.
If urban danwei were a primary structure of the “new culture” of China’s
revolutionary modernity, then perhaps in contemporary China’s era of global
modernity, as private corporations emerge as the source of spectacular wealth
and international attention, they are the new locations for inculcating new
cultures—corporate ones. Such a proposition is not surprising given the fact
that the Reform period was not established by asserting a comprehensive
program, but informally in opposition to the Mao period by “crossing the river
by feeling stones” (mo shitou guohe ᩌ⷇༈䖛⊇) or other similar slogans.
The mythical lineage that finds the roots of Sam Walton’s corporate
culture in the fertile ideology of Mao Zedong Thought speaks to these
associations. “Corporate culture” is in dialogue with both culture, as a
category of social change, and the historical legacy of the organizational
culture of the “work unit” as a place where culture and work were united.
Steve’s assertion of a “Wal-Mao” relationship was shorthand for a variety of
12
13
14
David Bray traces the roots of the work unit’s institutional form to the imagination and
planning of other utopian modernist projects in 19th-century Europe and America and
later in the Soviet Union. David Bray, Social Space and Governance in Urban China.
Similarly, Duanfang Lu analyzes the way that the built environment of urban China was
reconstructed to meet the idealized vision of a modern utopian space. Duanfang Lu,
Remaking Chinese Urban Form.
Henderson and Cohen describe the way that work units struggled to balance the promise
of Maoist egalitarianism with the hierarchical authority of the work unit leaders. This was
primarily accomplished through a conception of the unit leaders that emphasized their
moral character to lead. Gail E. Henderson and Myron S. Cohen, The Chinese Hospital: A
Socialist Work Unit (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1984), pp. 140-45.
David Bray, Social Space and Governance in Urban China, p. 4.
WAL-MAO
7
Wal-Mart tactics, control mechanisms, policing and morality that resembled
his understanding of the ethos of enterprise culture under Maoism.
Wal-Mart Culture
In his corporate history of Wal-Mart, Robert Slater provides an introduction to
the corporate culture created by Sam Walton and expressed formally in its
retail stores.15 According to Slater, the most elementary form of Wal-Mart’s
culture consists of “three basic beliefs”:
1. Respect for the individual
2. Service to the customers
3. Striving for excellence.
To this are added “ten rules of business” written by Sam Walton himself:
1. Commit to your business
2. Share your profits with all your associates, and treat them as partners
3. Motivate your partners
4. Communicate everything you possibly can to your partners
5. Appreciate everything your associates do for the business
6. Celebrate your success
7. Listen to everyone in your company
8. Exceed your customer’s expectations
9. Control your expenses better than your competition
10. Swim upstream.
Walton added two more guidelines for daily employee conduct. The “tenfoot rule” mandates that “any time an employee comes within ten feet of a
customer the employee is to look the customer in the eye and ask if he or she
requires help of any kind”. The “sundown rule” stipulates that employees are
“expected to answer requests by sundown on the day the requests are
received”.16
Sam Walton intended that the foundational “beliefs” and “rules” would
create an exciting and motivational atmosphere among store employees. The
atmosphere was predicated on the ideal of each employee being aware and
living out the corporate culture in dealings with other employees and
customers. Walton believed that, if the employees felt good, then it would be
easy “to make customers feel good being at Wal-Mart”—giving customers the
impression of a warm, caring and personal “hometown” relationship.17
This corporate culture is shared across Wal-Mart’s stores globally. In fact,
as its international division formally explains it, the success of Wal-Mart’s
continued global growth depends on correctly moving and adapting this
culture across national, regional and local differences:
Despite obvious cultural and business challenges, Wal-Mart International
has experienced success because of its ability to transport the company’s
15
16
17
Robert Slater, The Wal-Mart Decade (New York: Portfolio, 2003).
Robert Slater, The Wal-Mart Decade, pp. 54-55.
Robert Slater, The Wal-Mart Decade, p. 45.
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unique culture and effective retailing concepts to each new country. The
division makes a concerted effort to adapt to local cultures and become
involved in the local community. Associates respond to customer needs,
merchandise preferences and local suppliers. By serving each hometown
in the same way, Wal-Mart International has realized significant growth
with potential for much greater development worldwide [italics mine].18
Wal-Mart’s neutral language of cultural localization certainly suggests a
benign exchange process. Culture, however, is used in this passage in two
different senses—the corporation has a culture of “concepts”—ideas, methods,
values—for operation, while the “local cultures” have needs and preferences
to be served. Only by reducing local cultural difference to “preferences” or
tastes is it possible to assert the contradictory claim to “serve each hometown
in the same way”—to be the hometown supplier to local communities globally.
The “transport” of Wal-Mart’s corporate culture to China certainly appears
successful to Joe Hatfield, who until 2006 was the head of Wal-Mart’s
operations in Asia. In a 2005 interview with Time Magazine, Hatfield spoke
of his Chinese employees in glowing terms, adding: “The culture of Wal-Mart
is stronger in China than anywhere else in the world”. 19 Certainly the
principles of Wal-Mart culture are expressed clearly and ubiquitously at WalMart stores in China. Asking a frontline Wal-Mart employee about “Wal-Mart
culture” (woerma wenhua ≗ᇨ⥯᭛࣪) often elicits a prompt recitation of the
“three beliefs”, “ten rules” and the other guidelines.
During my first formal visit to a retail store, Frank, a Wal-Mart regional
manager, introduced Wal-Mart by gesturing to the crowded management
office wall next to which we were standing, exclaiming, “This is our culture!”
Affixed to the wall were four posters with various images and text that Frank
told me would explain everything I needed to know about the company.
Outside in the hall near the staff changing rooms was an even larger “culture
wall” (wenhua qiang ᭛࣪๭) with further examples and explanations of the
key aspects of Wal-Mart’s corporate culture. 20 Together this collection of
posters presented the primary aspects of Wal-Mart’s global corporate culture
as localized in China.
Concepts are never simply translated cross-culturally, however, but are
subject to recontextualization in new cultural milieus. The posters demonstrate
how Wal-Mart’s concepts have taken on Maoist overtones in contemporary
China.
18
19
20
walmart.com, International Operations: Global Strategy, Local Focus (Wal-Mart.com,
2007; available from http://www.walmartstores.com/GlobalWMStoresWeb/navigate.do?
catg=369, accessed 19 March 2007.
Dorinda Elliott and Bill Powell, “Wal-Mart Nation”, Time (27 June 2005), p. 38.
Exchanges similar to my initial conversation with Frank occurred in subsequent visits with
three different managers at two different Wal-Mart stores. Initial questions about
corporate culture elicited a reference to the formal expression of the corporate culture on a
“culture wall”.
WAL-MAO
9
Sam Walton and Chairman Mao hand-wave
The largest poster featured the benevolent fatherly image of Sam Walton.
Dressed in a dark formal suit and conservative burgundy tie, his corporate
image was softened by the simple working-class Wal-Mart baseball cap sitting
slightly askew high on his head in rural American style. An everyday red,
white and blue Wal-Mart employee nametag was pinned over his heart.
Walton’s right hand is raised in a partial wave of greeting and his face has a
muted expression of pleasant indifference. The conventions of such a posture
are strikingly familiar to the religious images of the bodhisattva, Guanyin or
even Jesus Christ. Drawing on more recent imagery, Walton’s pose is eerily
similar to the images of Mao Zedong that circulated during the Cultural
Revolution, hand raised in greeting at the top of Tiananmen gate, wearing his
own symbol of unity with the masses—the armband of the Red Guard.
By itself, the image of Walton might only be a curiosity and not
extraordinarily remarkable. Like all images, however, its significance
intensifies through reproduction. At one store I counted no less than five
copies of the image in employee work areas, overlooking workers in the
company cafeteria and hung along the employee entranceway leading into the
store. Two additional copies were hung in public shopping areas. These were
not different images of the founder in different poses, but reproductions of the
exact image—which appears to be the only image of Walton in circulation at
Wal-Mart China. 21 Beneath Walton’s image, in handwritten Chinese
calligraphy, as if penned by the founder himself, was written, “pride comes
21
The use of this image also extends to Wal-Mart’s China website and can be found next to
the “ten rules of business” at: http://www.wal-martchina.com/walmart/culture.htm,
accessed 31 May 2007.
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THE CHINA JOURNAL, No. 58
from outstanding performance” (zihao laizi chuse biaoxian 㞾䈾ᴹ㞾ߎ㡆㸼
⦄).22
To the left of Walton’s image are the “ten rules of business”. In Chinese,
however, the mundane tone of “ten rules” is replaced by “ten laws” (shige faze
कϾ⊩߭) or “ten great laws for success of the cause” (shiye chenggong de
shi da faze џϮ៤ࡳⱘक໻⊩߭). Similarly, the tone and associations of the
translated laws shift from what might be glossed in English as a “language of
marketing” to a Chinese vocabulary tinged with distinctly “revolutionary”
connotations.
Rule number one, for example, which in English is “commit to your
business”, in Chinese says “be loyal to your cause” (zhongyu nide shiye ᖴѢ
Դ ⱘ џ Ϯ )—a phrasing linguistically evoking other “great and glorious
causes” (weida er guanrongde shiye ӳ໻㗠‫ܝ‬㤷ⱘџϮ) of recent Chinese
history. 23 Rule number three in English speaks with the business tone to
“motivate your partners”. The Chinese uses the word jili (▔ࢅ), to impel or
inspire, a word used often in military examples of improving morale or in
revolutionary-era party propaganda to inspire the struggle toward Communism.
In English, rule number five asks employees to “appreciate the work that
fellow employees do for the business”. The Chinese translation, however,
replaces the simple congratulatory connotations of “appreciate” with ganji (ᛳ
▔), a feeling of heartfelt gratitude and indebtedness.
Rather than simply “controlling expenses” as rule number nine asserts, the
Chinese entreats employees to jieyue (㡖㑺) “economize” or “be thrifty”—a
term familiar during Communism’s lean years in the 50s and 60s when
Chinese citizenry were asked to “use less water” (jieyue yongshui 㡖㑺⫼∈)
or “use less electricity” (jieyue yongdian 㡖㑺⫼⬉) for the greater good of
production. Finally, in rule number ten where Walton challenges employees to
“swim upstream”, the Chinese presents a similar phrase, to “go against the
current” (niliu 䗚⌕), but adds an injunction in literary language to “forge new
paths” (pi xijing 䕳䐞ᕘ) and to “not stick to conventions” (moshou chenggui
๼ᅜ៤㾘).
The point here is not to overstate the Chinese rules as dramatically
different from their English originals, but to indicate the different poetic
associations. The space between the original English and Chinese translation
allows for a localization of meaning that defies a transparent term-for-term
translation. Together, the “ten laws” present the corporate culture in language
and associations reminiscent of revolutionary Communism and the many lists
of rules for proper conduct articulated by the party. The “ten laws”, for
example, are similar both in form and content to rules such as the Red Army
22
23
“Performance” in English contains both associations of efficacy or accomplishment of
work and the acting, showing or expression of a particular behavior. The term biaoxian,
which I have translated here as “performance”, has the associations of the latter
meaning—the outward expression of a particular behavior.
My translation, of course, plays with the polysemy of shiye, which can mean cause,
enterprise or business.
WAL-MAO
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Code of Discipline’s Three Main Rules of Discipline and Eight Points for
Attention (sandajilü, baxiangzhuyi ϝ໻㑾ᕟˈܿ乍⊼ᛣ), which stipulate
obeying orders, frugality, interacting with others fairly and being honest in
these interactions.
Honesty and caring between employees is, furthermore, evoked by the
“ten laws” through the formal use of tongren (ৠҕ) as a translation for
“associates”. A fairly common term in Taiwan and Hong Kong, in Mainland
China it is not as common as tongshi. While both Chinese terms may be
translated into English as “colleagues”, the latter term tongshi ( ৠ џ )
emphasizes sharing common work, while the former tongren connotes shared
humanity or morality between people.24 An assistant Wal-Mart store manager
explained that, unlike tongshi, which is just a “co-worker”, tongren means
“hearts united” (xinlianxin ᖗ䖲ᖗ) for a common cause or vision.
Historically ren (ҕ), or “benevolence”, foregrounds the ethical qualities
of personal relationships, and implies that they are properly constituted by
subduing oneself to the proper social rituals of human interaction. The
emphasis on work or morality implied by tongshi or tongren has displaced the
common socialist era the term for “comrade”, tongzhi ( ৠ ᖫ )—someone
sharing a common will or desire.
The formal moral tone between “colleagues” (tongren) is reinforced in the
language of the “gift policy” posted to the right of Sam Walton’s image. A
rule throughout the Wal-Mart Corporation, this policy establishes that the
giving of gifts and interactions of personal relationships is opposed to the
rational function of the business between the company and its suppliers. It
does so through a moral injunction against corruption. Given China’s giftgiving culture and the role of human relationships in doing business, the “gift
policy” is a rule that is especially emphasized in the China operations.25 It is
also the most thoroughly explained:
No matter if one is a staff member whose duty is large or small, no
one may, for his or her own personal benefit, accept any gift, tip,
compensation, sample or anything that appears to be a gift. This is a basic
principle of this company.
24
25
The associations of the term tongren seem to be inconsistent across age groups and
regions. While younger workers seem familiar with the term, no doubt from working in
foreign corporations, the older generation seems to associate it with ren. A colleague of
mine from Beijing described the associations of tongren as reminding her of the Chinese
four-character phrase yishitongren (ϔ㾚ৠҕ), which carries connotations of pan-human
benevolence and equality that have a moral tone deeper than the fairly neutral term
“colleagues” in English.
Interestingly, the emphasis on social relationships that Mayfair Yang describes as
emerging in opposition to state power during the Mao era is repositioned in opposition to
Wal-Mart’s own corporate culture. Mayfair Mei-hui Yang, Gifts, Favors, and Banquets:
The Art of Social Relationships in China (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press,
1994).
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These gifts may include: tickets for entertainment activities,
commission paid in cash or products, a discount given to any staff
member, sample products, travel paid for by a supplier, holiday gifts or
other such gifts. Any staff member who receives gifts such as those
outlined above is requested to please return it at the expense of the other
party.
Treating a guest to dinner is also a type of gift. If there is a need to
have dinner with a supplier, staff from this company and the supplier
should each pay their own costs.
The principles outlined above are to be followed by all staff members
of Wal-Mart and Sam’s Club. If you learn of an individual who makes
any request for personal remuneration from a supplier, please directly
inform a high-level company leader.26
Nearby two smaller individual posters described the “ten-foot rule”,
modified in China to the “three-meter principle” (sanmi yuanze ϝ㉇ॳ߭),
and “the sundown principle” (riluo yuanze ᮹㨑ॳ߭). The posters did not
explain either of these parts of Wal-Mart’s corporate culture in great detail. It
is, however, fascinating that, taken together, the two principles require that
employees submit to a ritual of social interaction—appearing both engaged
and friendly to customers regardless of underlying feelings. The ideal image
of smiling workers and smiling customers evoke a “capitalist realism” perhaps
not so distant in effect from the ruddy-cheeked workers smiling from socialist
propaganda images. One Wal-Mart store even has mounted a full-length
mirror near the employee lockers with the question “Are you smiling today?”
written above, so that employees can “check their smiles” before heading out
onto the sales floor.
A final poster of Wal-Mart’s corporate culture, which appears to be unique
to China, features the image of Joe Hatfield and outlines the “three basic
beliefs”. The “beliefs” are translated into Chinese as jiben yuanze (෎ᴀॳ߭),
or basic principles, implying a morality or rules for living. Above Joe
Hatfield’s image, the value of these principles is explained:
These [principles] are not simply rules for a style of work, but are “a kind
of way of life”: we must take these convictions and dissolve them into
every hour and every minute of our lives, embody them as colleagues and
work together in the process of serving our customers.
The culture formally codifies behavior for the corporation’s daily
operations. They represent the company’s rules in a voice that borders on the
religious—perhaps betraying a relationship to the southern rural American
roots of Wal-Mart’s corporate culture. The ten “rules for business” translated
as “laws” (faze ⊩߭) might even be translated more appropriately in English
as “ten commandments”. Posting the commandments as guidelines for thought
and action are not an unfamiliar American Christian practice. Joe Hatfield’s
26
Unless otherwise noted, all translations are my own.
WAL-MAO
13
call to take the basic principles as a “way of life” embodied through service to
others certainly echoes Protestant Christianity’s emphasis on demonstrating
belief through “living a Christian life”. These observations support Nelson
Lichtenstein’s observation that Protestant Christian values infuse the discourse
of American Wal-Mart stores. “Like the mega-churches, the TV evangelists
and … motivational seminars”, he writes, “Wal-Mart is immersed in a
Christian ethos that links personal salvation to entrepreneurial success and
social service to free enterprise”.27
And yet, in a Chinese context, corporate cultural values have a different
poetic cast—one with distinctly Chinese associations. The wenhua scripts a
harmonious exchange among colleagues and between employees and
customers. It projects a moral system onto relations typically considered
exclusively economic. Thus, one does not need to believe in the principles and
rules as a necessary precondition for them to be efficacious. Loyalty to the
cause is demonstrated through their daily practice.
Invoking “loyalty”, “inspiration” and “frugality” and “forging new paths”
relies on the image of Walton and is authorized by the success of his legacy.
At one Wal-Mart store, images of the founder were accompanied by a display
of “corporate spirit” (qiye jingshen ӕ Ϯ ㊒ ⼲ )—translated, compiled and
posted quotations from Walton. Printed in plain white lettering on a solid blue
background and authorized by a copy of Walton’s own signature, the
individual “Wal-quotes” were placed on the walls of the employee entrance.
Staff ascending and descending the employee staircase from the city streets to
the store pass nearly a dozen quotations and four images of the founder as they
arrive and depart their work shifts each day. A selection of the quotations read:
Strive to make customers return to shop at our store … only through this
can we reap profits. Ensure the satisfaction of the customer, and they will
continually patronize our store.
Do not allow yourself to land in an unchangeable predicament.
Listen to staff suggestions; they can come up with the best ideas.
Make us work together as one to do our very best to market our products.
Be grateful for every single thing our staff does for the company.
Outstanding product marketers are able to guarantee a supply of product
on hand to sell at all times.
27
Nelson Lichtenstein (ed.), Wal-Mart: The Face of Twenty-First-Century Capitalism, p. 18.
Lichtenstein also observes how Christian references infuse Don Soderquist’s description
of Wal-Mart’s corporate culture in his book, The Wal-Mart Way. Don Soderquist, The
Wal-Mart Way: The Inside Story of the Success of the World’s Largest Company (New
York: Nelson Business, 2005). The relationship between Wal-Mart’s corporate culture and
Protestant Christianity is a compelling topic for further research, especially in the context
of China’s reform-era religious revival. Cf. Richard Madsen, “Chinese Christianity:
Indigenization and Conflict”, in Elizabeth J. Perry and Mark Selden (eds), Chinese Society:
Change, Conflict and Resistance, 2nd Edition, (New York: RoutledgeCurzon, 2003), pp.
271-88.
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Only by concerted efforts to reduce costs are we able to lower prices to
the best of our ability.
We must achieve true honesty.
The difference between the competition and us lies in that we pay
attention to cultivating staff consciousness about the products.
To be more frugal with our expenses than our competitors is to fight for
competitive superiority.
It might be easy to dismiss the formal expression of a Wal-Mart “culture”
as corporate propaganda designed to create the appearance of care where none
exists. In other words, the “rules and beliefs” might be nothing more than a
ploy to cover up a “deeper” corporate reality. Without denying this view, I
suggest the possibility that the “rules and beliefs” have another use. Taken
together they assert a system in which emphasizing the morality of correct
behavior marks company membership—membership that is valuable among
the predominantly young managerial workforce at a time where the rules for
success in Chinese society are uncertain and in flux.
The extent to which the corporate culture defines membership was
illustrated to me by an exchange between some managers one evening as a
group gathered for dinner. A member of the local Wal-Mart purchasing team,
King, had been visiting the store and was invited to dinner by some store
managers. He was a relatively new employee hired away from one of WalMart’s competitors. Other colleagues chided him about this and indicated his
status as someone not entirely acculturated into the company, and perhaps
morally suspect, by referring to him as the “half-bandit” (bange tufei ञϾೳ
ࣾ )—using the derogatory term for the traitorous Nationalists during the
Chinese civil war. When I asked King about the exchange he replied that even
after months of working at Wal-Mart he was linglei (঺㉏), a different type of
person from them—an “outsider”.
Jane Collins and others have observed that transnational corporations have
ruptured the bond of place that has historically linked consumers to
producers.28 In China, of course, such an observation might be extended to
include the reform-era reconfiguration of work and living spaces, and the
social rules for work and production once unified under the concept of the
work unit. As Michael Dutton suggests, the end of the work unit is a
precondition of the “placelessness” that has come to mark the reform era.29
The codified moral instructions communicated through the “culture” posted
on the management office’s walls certainly assert a community and define
membership as they project a moral system onto employment relations
typically considered only economic—providing a place and a corresponding
28
29
Jane L. Collins, Threads: Gender, Labor, and Power in the Global Apparel Industry
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003).
Michael Dutton, Streetlife China (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 2122.
WAL-MAO
15
new subjectivity amid the uncertainty of the present. When Frank directed me
to the formal displays and proudly proclaimed that “it” was Wal-Mart culture,
he was certainly speaking confidently and sincerely and without a trace of
irony. Like nearly all of the other managers I met, he was at some level a
believer, and the more I learned about his personal life, the more convinced I
became that only some element of commitment, loyalty or belief could explain
his cheerful disposition in the face of an unbelievable workload far from his
family.
This corporate membership, not unlike the forms that preceded it,
represents itself as a total “way of life” that is affirmed through participation
and enforced through a variety of surveillance techniques. It is the corporation
as “way of life” and the utopian aspirations for ideal sociability and shared
goals to which an association like “Wal-Mao” speaks.
“My Wal-Mart”: Corporate Culture as a Way of Life
“My Wal-Mart” is a popular slogan across the Wal-Mart corporation. The
subject to whom the “my” refers is left open, permitting the slogan to speak
broadly. Among employees the slogan asserts a claim of employee ownership,
while it also suggests the individual attention to satisfaction that each
customer can expect. In both cases, that Wal-Mart is “mine” as opposed to
“someone else’s” sets an expectation for loyalty and commitment to the
company. “My Wal-Mart” unites each individual employees’ performance
with the success of the company even as it claims to satisfy individual
consumers’ desires at the lowest possible cost. Wal-Mart’s corporate website
projects this image through the stories of satisfied customers and postings
through which individual employees speak of how “my Wal-Mart” took care
of them in tough times or taught them new skills.30
At Wal-Mart, China, many employees wear a small “My Wal-Mart”
(wode woerma ៥ⱘ≗ᇨ⥯) lapel pin. The pin provides the slogan in both
English and Chinese—foregrounding the large Chinese characters for “my”
(wode ៥ⱘ) and the large English word “Wal-Mart”, leaving the remaining
Chinese and English words in the background. The effect makes the pin
appear to read “wode Wal-Mart” a hybrid of both Chinese and English. At the
top of the pin, in very small lettering, a question asks “Whose Wal-Mart is it?”
The pin has two stars and is printed in the familiar American red, white and
blue—adding, however, just a dash of gold, perhaps making the color scheme
more similar to the Chinese national flag.
Managers frequently highlight the extent to which individual employees—
especially frontline employees—demonstrate the spirit of ownership to which
a slogan like “My Wal-Mart” speaks. Staff members, for example, frequently
design product displays, model for store advertisements and suggest new
customer service techniques and ways to improve product sales. On a tour,
Frank proudly showed off a huge airplane suspended from the ceiling above a
30
A selection of such narratives, many of which explicitly thank “my Wal-Mart”, can be
found at: http://www.walmartfacts.com/lifeatwalmart/, accessed 31 May 2007.
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product display that had been fashioned by employees from cardboard
advertisements. They had creatively borrowed two floor fans to place under
the wings as “jets” and had used a small ceiling fan as a propeller in the
plane’s nose.
A year later, the same store featured a display for a brand of mosquito
repellent consisting of enormous Chinese characters fashioned out of product
boxes suspended from the store ceiling. For managers, the creations—paper
airplanes and big characters—were more than just advertisements; they were
concrete examples of the worker creativity and initiative that flourish within
Wal-Mart culture. They were symbolic indications of the freedom of
expression and participation that Wal-Mart employees enjoyed. That they
were also cobbled together from makeshift parts demonstrated frugality.
While the displays were certainly invited by the corporation, just as models
are solicited for advertising, the exact shape and form of the work was decided
freely through the employees’ face-to-face work.
At all of their stores, Wal-Mart uses face-to-face techniques to solicit
worker input. Perhaps the most regular technique is the morning meeting held
on the sales floor prior to the workday. Unlike the typical arrangement of
similar meetings in Chinese companies, where management stands facing the
workers in a military formation to do morning exercises and communicate
important information, the Wal-Mart floor meetings are convened with
management standing in a circle for discussion. When the manager speaks, he
moves to the comparatively more vulnerable center of the circle to address his
colleagues. At floor meetings managers of specific departments are praised for
positive sales, confronted for lagging performance and encouraged to suggest
improvements. More generally, faces, in the form of photographs, are posted
regularly on management boards and checkout lanes, on sale products
“sponsored” by a specific employee incentive, on performance boards posted
near breakrooms, and on worker name badges. Responsibility for specific jobs
and their resulting successes and failures is always tied to a specific face.
The metaphor used commonly to describe the effect of the face-to-face
meetings, voluntary participation and individual responsibility in store culture
is that Wal-Mart is a “family”. Together Wal-Mart’s strong culture, its
demanding work schedule and the young average age of employees result in
an insular workforce where, as one manager observed, employees rarely like
to deal with people outside of Wal-Mart and “take the store to be their family”.
The culture is so strong that it creates, in Steve’s words, a “fundamentally
different mode of thinking” from other organizations—especially local
Chinese ones. Similarly to a family, he added, everyone has a unique role but
they look out for one another, care for one another and show concern for the
whole unit’s welfare and success.
At Wal-Mart China, however, one could argue that many employees have
little choice but to “take the company as their family”, as it creates so many
dependencies and demands so much from a young workforce. Without
exception, every one of the two-dozen or so managerial staff at the store level
with whom I have interacted for the past three years is under 35 years old—
WAL-MAO
17
the vast majority are in their late 20s. They were hired by Wal-Mart
immediately following school and a few even worked their way up through
the store hierarchy.
The break-neck speed of Wal-Mart’s expansion in China has required that
managers constantly be posted to new locations. When I met Steve, for
example, he had just moved from south China; less than a year later he had
moved again. The store had seen three different managers in three years, as
seasoned managers were moved around to open new stores or aid at other
stores. The work is so time-demanding that few managers seem to move
beyond the immediate store vicinity and their residence. Given that all the
managers I met were from distant cities and “outsiders” in the communities
where they worked, it is not surprising that they would rely on the paternalistic
security of the store as their family. One hard-working store manager who
married within the Wal-Mart family has been separated from his wife for
nearly three years as both took training and managerial positions at two
different stores. The manager hopes that further expansion at Wal-Mart will
enable himself and his wife to be united if multiple stores get built in the same
city.
If the store is a family, however, it is not thought of as a “Chinese family”
with a rigid hierarchy but as the flexible, more egalitarian arrangement
between “individuals” thought of as characteristic of American families. As
Steve explained, “Chinese here at Wal-Mart live an American lifestyle and
many readily take in American culture in their work habits, their individual
lifestyle and their honesty”. Employee work habits were, he explained, laid
out in a very structured and ordered way, with each individual’s
responsibilities clearly described. As the training manuals and management
materials attested, there was a plan to the work. This plan, however, was not
the final word for every employee; “just like in America”, Steve pointed out
that each employee can speak directly to any other employee—including a
superior. He was proud that as a manager he was not immune to criticism. He
explained:
Before, at my old job, I had to listen to my boss and follow his
instructions, but here [at Wal-Mart] any worker can talk to me. Working
at Wal-Mart we practice egalitarianism (pingdengzhuyi ᑇㄝЏН) … for
example, nobody calls me Manager Wu, they call me Steve. This is
practicing the aspect of American culture of freedom and equality and
respect for the individual … the female staff especially are really not used
to this. This really is completely an American lifestyle.
Emphasizing the egalitarian nature of work at Wal-Mart, every manager
that I met has at some point or another commented on the fact that store
managers do not even have their own offices, but share an office with the
entire management team. When they were not working on managerial tasks in
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the office they were expected to be out on the floor among the employees and
customers.31
Among female employees, the structured nature of Wal-Mart’s culture
provides a measure of protection from sexual harassment or discrimination.
One female store manager, Sonja, agreed that women at Wal-Mart were more
protected than in the workplaces of Chinese competitors. Wal-Mart has
promoted a number of female employees to the store-manager level and in
China there does not appear to be the same kind of gender imbalance noted
until recently in American stores.32 Of course, female employees face other
challenges. Many managers have commented on the tremendous stress that
female leaders face in their relationships and marriages, where male partners
might not be tolerant of long work hours or the conflicting commitments of
the Wal-Mart “family”.
Steve, Mark, two assistant managers and even the relatively new employee
King all expressed the opinion at various times that “Wal-Mart culture is
American culture” in the sense that it emphasizes individual lifestyles. This
gives Wal-Mart, as a “way of life”, an association with an aura of urban—or
even global—cosmopolitanism.33 As Steve expressed it to me, “Traditionally
Chinese don’t want to leave home, but Wal-Mart employees travel to different
cities and the company allows transfers between stores”. Wal-Mart offered
movement between large Chinese cities, and it seemed that advancement
generally occurred with moves to other locations. Moving from large city to
large city to open new stores, to ascend management ranks and to gain new
responsibilities is an exciting prospect for young employees.
Initially I thought that the mobility of Wal-Mart management might have
been intentionally instituted as a means to limit the formation of relationships
that might lead to corruption. Mark told me, however, that similar movement
takes place at Wal-Mart stores in the US and is one of the only means for
advancement in Wal-Mart’s strict corporate hierarchy. Certainly, however, the
regular movement of employees does have the useful side-effect of creating a
primary affiliation with the corporation at the expense of local relationships.
All of the managers I met at Wal-Mart stores in China commented on the
difficulty of constantly getting used to new locations. One even commented
that he had been in his current location for over two years and did not have a
single friend outside of Wal-Mart.
Wal-Mart’s global reach presents opportunities that certainly amplify this
excitement. Every year, Wal-Mart China sends Chinese employees to stores in
31
32
33
Contrast this lack of offices to Lisa Rofel’s description of the spatial separation of
management offices and the shop floors which reinforced hierarchy and provided privacy
from the gaze of the workers during the Mao Period. Lisa Rofel, “Rethinking Modernity:
Space and Factory Discipline in China”, Cultural Anthropology, Vol. 7, No. 1 (1992), pp.
93-114.
Liza Featherstone, Selling Women Short.
Pheng Cheah and Bruce Robbins (eds), Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling Beyond the
Nation (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998).
WAL-MAO
19
the United States for management training. Chinese managers who go to
“study abroad” in the US learn about the larger corporation and the culture
that founded it. Mark, a manager who had studied abroad in a small
midwestern town for a year, explained that he returned to China with a deeper
understanding of Wal-Mart’s American culture and of life in small towns. He
was impressed with the friendliness of American employees, but also
surprised at how much more hard-working Chinese employees were. He was
grateful, however, that Wal-Mart had given him a great opportunity to
improve his English—a valuable skill for communication and advancement.
Even for managers and frontline workers who do not travel abroad, a
significant moment of acculturation into the company—making Wal-Mart
“mine”—begins with naming. Wal-Mart’s company policy stipulates that all
Chinese employees are identified by English first names. If they do not have
an English name when they join Wal-Mart, employees are “named” by their
managers during training when they join the community of the global retailer.
While frontline workers, most of whom speak little English beyond what they
might have picked up in school, do not seem to use the English names in
casual conversation, among managers the use of English names is much more
common. A few managers even joked with me that they don’t know their coworker’s Chinese names.
In her recent examination of the use of English names at foreign
corporations, Laurie Duthie has argued convincingly that the practice of
English naming is a marker of professional status—marking a worker’s
position as a “modern Chinese” working in a global economy. 34 Certainly
when a group of Wal-Mart managers eats together in public, or converse with
one another in the store, the sound of English names interrupting the flow of a
Chinese conversation mark them as individuals who can negotiate a
transnational workplace.
“My Wal-Mart”: Corporate Cultural Discipline
The positive description of “My Wal-Mart” as a “family-like”, egalitarian,
free corporate culture that emphasizes the value of the individual while
fostering a spirit of cooperation is not simply savvy marketing. Attentive,
smiling employees and cooperative, hard-working managers express the
corporate culture on the sales floor. Store workers compete for sales, share
ideas and comment at face-to-face meetings about performance and
contributions to the store. Mark was grateful that Wal-Mart rewarded his loyal
work with a “study abroad” opportunity. Steve seemed genuinely pleased with
the cosmopolitan mobility of being a manager. Sonja felt comparatively
protected by the company’s rule-driven corporate system that provided her
with a dependable work environment.
34
.
Laurie Duthie, “The Chinese Meaning of English Names: Shanghai’s Business
Professionals and Western Naming Practices”, China Study, Vol. 2 (Fall 2005), pp. 49-73.
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Yet, to focus exclusively on Wal-Mart’s corporate culture as it is formally
presented would map marketing onto reality too closely—confusing the neat
strategies of corporate culture with the messiness of culture as it is negotiated
in daily life. One would not want to take the formal expression of an ideal
corporate culture as proof of an “actually existing Wal-Martism”. Behind,
under and around the assertion of corporate culture are a variety of “side
effects” that render the workforce visible, coerce compliance and monitor
workers.
English names are a useful example of such a side effect. While English
names are embraced—if mostly by the management—as markers of Wal-Mart
identity, they are more than simply markers of global cosmopolitanism.
According to one manager, all corporate correspondence is expected to take
place in English. E-mails within the company system, for example, are written
in English and signed by the English names of the employees, followed by
either initials for the store location or the store number. The use of English
names makes the Chinese managers visible to the international company,
opening up the entire workforce to monitoring by English-speaking managers
and corporate computer systems.
While taking an English name, receiving training or going abroad may be
formal examples of “My Wal-Mart”, the slogan has another, less formal usage
that comments upon these “side effects”. At times, “My Wal-Mart” is invoked
as sardonic commentary on the way the corporation individuates, isolates and
disciplines individual managers.
One evening over dinner, for example, King described how the manager of
a nearby Wal-Mart store, Paul, was not doing well. He had moved up through
the company to be a store manager, but had remained a poor leader. He was
loyal to Wal-Mart, but the culture had made him too dependent and concerned
with protocol or with offending subordinates. As a result, Paul had become a
good part of the corporate machine, but not an effective leader. “That’s my
Wal-Mart”, King said sarcastically—implying that Wal-Mart was not Paul’s,
but that Paul had become Wal-Mart’s. The company discipline had made Paul
a good follower, but had robbed him of the ability actually to make
independent decisions that would make the store competitive.
“My Wal-Mart” was also invoked to describe store purchasing. While
most of Wal-Mart’s major competitors have a great deal of local control over
purchasing, more than half of the goods at Wal-Mart are purchased centrally
for distribution countrywide. According to a former employee, Carrefour, one
of Wal-Mart’s main competitors, permits local stores to purchase up to 90 per
cent of goods locally, reflecting local markets and local tastes. If more than
half of the goods at a Wal-Mart store are purchased centrally, the brands and
styles might be from areas unfamiliar to local customers and thus not sell well.
Regardless of the fact that local managers have little control over purchasing,
their effectiveness is measured by how much they sell. King described it thus:
Wal-Mart just pays attention to the system, and not the people. But
seriously, we should ask, does the system manage people, or should the
WAL-MAO
21
people manage the system? [Wal-Mart] is like an ostrich with its ass in
the air and its head in the ground … the culture is too closed … Wal-Mart
can be too insular, seeing the world like a frog from the bottom of a well.
And this has a huge impact on the ability to be competitive.
The employee summed up his frustration by saying, “That’s my WalMart!” He used the corporate slogan to describe the way that the company
held individual managers responsible for performing despite a corporate
culture that shackled their decision-making.
Mark, a store manager, described the feeling as being caught between
“rules and reality”. It was a situation compounded further by the fact that WalMart’s strict corporate rules do not permit employees to accept gifts or have
dinner with their vendors. He could not even have dinner with government
officials, and “you know what China is like, everything is done over dinner! If
a supplier asks me out for dinner, I tell them ‘I am sorry, but I cannot. Our
company does not permit it’”. This can make Wal-Mart appear very strange in
the eyes of other companies.
The primary things over which store managers have control are the
employees’ behavior and the customers’ experience at the retail stores.
Managers cut costs whenever possible, but a primary goal is growing a
customer base through offering a good shopping experience and the best
possible service. Corporate culture is the primary means by which this
experience may be controlled. Management insists that the culture cannot be
demanded of employees; rather, employees must be convinced through
effective education and modeling of behavior. In an earlier time one might be
temped to use the concept of propaganda work. Store managers are expected
to be the standard bearers of the corporate culture at the stores—the corporate
cadres of “Wal-Mao”—modeling the behavioral expectations of the
organizational culture for one another as well as the approximately five
hundred employees and outside contractors who work at an average retail
outlet. The success of Wal-Mart’s expansion, as managers explain it, is a
cultural challenge, depending on them to model, teach and spread the
organizational culture. They are the ones ultimately held responsible for
constantly monitoring every aspect of store function.
An extreme example of monitoring is the technological innovation that
“pushes” hourly store data to store managers’ cell phones. Every hour
throughout the day until 11:00pm, an hour after the store closes, store
managers are notified of the volume of sales, number of customers, average
total purchase and other information. The hourly data stream reminds the
manager constantly of the ultimate sales goal. A cellphone message beep at
the top of the hour is followed by a quick glance and an emotional response. A
sunny weekend day might elicit a contented smile—indicating many
customers and a high sales volume—while a rainy cold weekday might elicit a
sigh and a comment to the effect that, “I am going to need an explanation to
give my boss in the morning”.
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That a store manager would even comment on needing an explanation to a
superior for low sales on a rainy day speaks to the extent that store managers
are watched by their superiors. Regional managers are sent regular electronic
updates on store sales. This monitoring, however, does not only come from
above. Managers are made most visible to their subordinates, as described
explicitly in Wal-Mart corporate culture and directly enforced through
methods, such as telephone hotlines, that are used to report ethical violations.
As signs at the entrance of stores assert proudly, Wal-Mart practices
“servant leadership” (gongpu lingdao ݀ Қ 乚 ᇐ ). This leadership style
features an inverted leadership pyramid placing the store manager at the
foundational “apex” followed by assistant managers and other managers
above them. At the top are the “lowest” levels of managers. While the sign
does not have room for a complete illustration, accompanying text indicates
that the mass of workers is even higher and that the mass of customers is at the
top. The sign illustrates the manager’s important role of “balancing” the
pyramid from the crucial tipping point at the very bottom. From this servant
position, the manager must “provide workers the opportunity for success”.
The inverted pyramid image—putting the masses at the top—and the
appeals to “serving” both customers and workers is strikingly evocative. It is
similar to the appeals of the revolutionary new class hierarchy and the role of
the post-revolutionary party leadership to “serving the people”. The
similarities were not lost on Steve, who provided them as evidence of the WalMao connection mentioned at the beginning of this essay. A middle-aged
friend of mine, who I accompanied on a shopping trip to the Wal-Mart store
even described the language of “servant leadership” as a kouhao (ষো)—or
slogan, reminiscent of the revolutionary past.
Although the “servant leadership” poster is a formal statement to
customers and employees about Wal-Mart’s values, it does provide workers
and customers with a measure of power to make claims on managerial
performance. As standard-bearers for the corporate culture, if managers do not
perform the role of “servant leader” sufficiently or follow the “laws”
stipulated by corporate culture, employees have a moral claim to criticize
them and seek redress.
A poster hung next to Walton’s “ten laws” articulates this moral claim
most clearly. The notice, “Worksite Standards for Moral Behavior” (gongzuo
changsuo xingwei daode guifan Ꮉ ԰ എ ᠔ 㸠 Ў 䘧 ᖋ 㾘 㣗 ) provides a
telephone hotline and e-mail address for reporting ethical violations to WalMart’s ethics office in China or directly to the US. The hotline is clearly
intended to catch serious violations of unethical behavior such as
embezzlement, corruption or gift-giving. It does, however, also open the door
for allegations of behaviors broadly defined as “harassment” (saorao 偮ᡄ) or
“discrimination” (qishi ℻㾚). Because the hotline is anonymous, employees
may use it to complain about any managerial behavior, no matter how small.
While individual personality may mitigate an assertion of the rights to
complain, serious or regular complaints by employees are investigated and
some managers commented that it chills their effectiveness. This is especially
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true when compared to the cutthroat tactics of the local competition. In fact,
more than one manager commented that Wal-Mart is so forgiving that it is an
“iron ricebowl” (tiefanwan 䪕佁⹫). Even in official store tours, managers
describe how difficult it is to get fired from Wal-Mart. One manager offered
an example, describing that he could not demand workers take shorter smoke
breaks for fear that they would complain; instead, he had to “convince them”
that it was not in their best interests, or the store’s best interest, for them to
take more than the allotted time.
Poor job performance is only dealt with though proper education and
mentoring. The only behavior that will get an employee terminated
immediately consists of a chengshi wenti (䆮ᅲ䯂乬)—an “honesty problem”.
As Steve explained to me, honesty was the foundation of Wal-Mart’s work.
Trust in this honesty is paramount and:
Just as long as one does not have an “honesty problem” there is no
problem. If a staff member is having a problem with their work, or is not
performing well, we can teach them and train them. Just as long as they
do not have an honesty problem.
“Honesty problems” typically involve theft, offering kickbacks, or
violations of the gift policy. The designation of this category is intriguing
because it distinguishes between a physical component of work performance
and a component of morality. While the system comes to the aid of an
underperforming co-worker, an “honesty problem” speaks of something
“deeper” in the quality of a person that might not be possible to resolve. The
threat of consequences for honesty problems is greater in Chinese Wal-Marts
where, unlike the United States, a majority of employees are full-time and
have a larger investment in the corporation. Furthermore, Wal-Mart invests
considerable time and resources training each employee in Wal-Mart’s culture
of customer service.
“Honesty problems” tend to be rare and it appears that the “iron ricebowl”
of Wal-Mart employment has an exceedingly low turnover. Two employees
described cases where employees who had left the company later returned
seeking their old jobs. Both mentioned that after being with Wal-Mart for a
while they were “not adapted” (bushiying ϡ䗖ᑨ) to life and work in another
company on the outside—an effect of the workplace-as-lifestyle of “My WalMart”.
“Studying Success”: From Mao Zedong Thought to Sam Walton Theory
In an original book by a Chinese author that analyzes Wal-Mart’s retail
strategy, Fangmeng Tian describes its corporate culture as “perfect” because it
emphasizes and respects the individual, “thereby training the staff with a spirit
of sacrifice and team spirit”. The success of Wal-Mart’s cultural training is a
Wal-Mart spirit which Tian argues is a source of labor stability, and its
recognition of workers reduces “labor turnover”. An important lesson of Wal-
24
THE CHINA JOURNAL, No. 58
Mart culture, he argues, is that the company must be responsible for its
workers and that in return they will be loyal to it.35
The organization’s culture dictates that its success depends on each
individual comprising it. Wendy expressed this best during a conversation: “It
is just like our nametags say: ‘our people make the difference’”. The Chinese
translation of that claim, however, is much more ambitious: “Our colleagues
produce the extraordinary” (women de tongshi chuangzao feifan ៥Ӏⱘৠџ
߯ 䗴 䴲 ޵ ). In other words, the corporation creates, trains or empowers
individuals who carry out extraordinary work, unlike other more mundane
organizations. Such statements make claims that Wal-Mart employees are
fundamentally of superior quality compared to average people. Indeed, job
advertisements for Wal-Mart employees stipulate that they seek “individuals
of outstanding quality”.
In another book describing Wal-Mart’s retail strategy, Wang Xianqing
describes “Wal-Mart people as different from the masses”. This difference, he
argues, comes from the incredible success of a model of corporate culture that
creates outstanding “loyalty”, an ethic of “hard-work”, and a “spirit of group
unity”.36
And yet the advantages of the ideal system of “My Wal-Mart” come at the
price of individuals subjecting themselves to a burden of supervision and
discipline that also extends out from the company into their personal lives. As
the sardonic readings of “My Wal-Mart” suggest, the system is emphasized
over the individual. Despite the sacrifices, conversations with managers
suggest that the opportunity to learn the “culture” of the successful global
retailer is considered partial compensation for the high demands placed on
employees’ personal lives, and for the low wages they are paid compared to
their competitors.
Taking the comments of Wal-Mart management and the secondary
literature on Wal-Mart’s successful corporate culture together, one must
conclude that Wal-Mart creates “high quality people”. The formal presentation
of Wal-Mart culture suggests clearly that correct practice will improve an
individual’s “quality” or suzhi ( ㋴ 䋼 ). Even the “negative” aspects of
corporate discipline are seen as important to train oneself for competition in
the marketplace.
In contemporary Chinese corporate life the level of an individual’s suzhi
may be referred to when rationalizing decisions about hiring, explaining work
behavior, or channeling aspirations for future success. It is significant,
however, that while suzhi is an important category of evaluation and speaks to
a broad range of situations, there is no social agreement as to the specific
means by which one may successfully increase one’s quality. This ambiguity
35
36
Fangmeng Tian, Woerma lingshou fangfa (Wal-Mart’s Retail Method) (Beijing:
Zhongguo Shangye Chubanshe, 2002), pp. 25-26.
Xianqing Wang, Woerma lingshou fangfa (Wal-Mart’s Retail Method) (Guangzhou:
Guangdong Jingji Chubanshe, 2004). pp. 65-66.
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25
permits suzhi to be used to classify people without offering a dependable
means for social mobility.37
This ambiguous relationship between “quality” and “success” has fueled a
cottage industry of Chinese publications that define quality, and suggest how
to increase it to achieve success. This genre of “studying for success”
(chenggongxue ៤ࡳᄺ) dissects the lives of the famous and successful to
arrive at underlying rules or principles of behavior to be emulated.38 Similar to
Communist era models like Chen Yonggui, Lei Feng, Dazhai or Daqing, these
individual and corporate successes are raised as examples to be emulated.
Not surprisingly, Sam Walton is often discussed as a successful
entrepreneur to be emulated. In one such book, Walton is described as a
success story with “enlightening” lessons for contemporary Chinese who seek
success.39 He was, we are told, a “high quality ordinary person” from a poor
family who built his empire slowly and was “not eager for instant success or
profit”. Long Shuai writes, “The contemporary success that Wal-Mart has
reaped originated in its founder Sam Walton who was never content with the
status quo and was highly dedicated to his cause”.40
Shuai offers an image of Walton as an average “man of the people” who
even after becoming rich never changed his fundamental personality. He
remained frugal. He was always on the move, and his management style
involved frequent interaction with his employees. Walton succeeded because
he was farsighted and established clearly-defined and attainable goals.
“Furthermore, Sam Walton did not make the mistake that countless losers
have made by being too eager for instant success”.41
Working at a successful foreign corporation like Wal-Mart is a shortcut to
“studying success” where the quality control of corporate training, rigorous
management, and cosmopolitanism intersect conveniently with assumptions
for improving one’s competitive “quality” on the market. What could be more
desirable, after all, than working at a company where the employees claim to
37
38
39
40
41
See Ann Anagnost, “The Corporeal Politics of Quality (Suzhi)” Public Culture, Vol. 16,
No. 2 (February 2004), pp. 189-208; Børge Bakken, The Exemplary Society: Human
Improvement, Social Control, and the Dangers of Modernity in China (New York: Oxford
University Press, 2000); Andrew Kipnis, “Suzhi: A Keyword Approach”, The China
Quarterly, No. 186 (2006), pp. 295-313.
Examples include: Liguang Zhang, Zuoren jueding yisheng chengbai (Behaving Correctly
Decides the Success or Failure of One’s Life) (Beijing: Zhongguo Shangye Chubanshe,
2005); Zhongli Zhang, Chenggongzhe de sishisige xinfa:chenggong bushenmi (Forty-Four
Rules of Successful People: Success Is Not Mysterious) (Tianjin: Tianjin Kexuejishu
Chubanshe, 2005); Zhiqing Zhang and Jieyun Zhang, Chenggongshu: gaosuzhi rencaide
moshi yu suzao (The Tree of Success: Models of High-Quality Talent) (Beijing: Dizhen
Chubanshe, 2005).
Long Shuai, Suzhi jueding chengbai (Quality Determines Success or Failure) (Chengdu:
Sichuan Wenyi Chubanshe, 2005), pp. 188-97.
Long Shuai, Suzhi jueding chengbai, p. 193.
Long Shuai, Suzhi jueding chengbai, p. 197.
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THE CHINA JOURNAL, No. 58
“produce the extraordinary?” Even the moral language of discipline, anticorruption and loyalty of Wal-Mart’s corporate culture resonates with the
moral overtones of self-cultivation found in suzhi.42
In effect, corporate culture, in the case of Wal-Mart, becomes an engine of
transformation that is not only economic but socio-cultural. Rachel Murphy
suggests that suzhi discourse enables the Chinese state to shift from welfare
support to an emphasis on helping citizens to improve their “quality”. 43 If
private global corporations are one path for improving that quality, then
private corporations become another tool for the transformation of China into
a “strong nation”.
Conclusion
Seeing the corporation and the successful adaptation of its culture to the host
country as the latest in a lineage of revolutionary claims to transform Chinese
society might offer a means to understand the startling lineage that links the
inspiration for Wal-Mart’s corporate culture to the thought of Mao Zedong.
On a basic level, the Wal-Mao myth ties together a number of superficial
similarities and poetic associations between the way that Wal-Mart culture is
deployed in a Chinese context and the formal presentation of revolutionary
culture. The myth also short-circuits the post-Mao lineage of Reform to tap
directly into the legacy of Chairman Mao himself—potentially making Sam
Walton the heir to Mao Zedong thought and Wal-Mart a revolutionary force.
It speaks to utopian dreams of success by uniting corporate culture and daily
routines with the goals of national development, prosperity and equality.
Interestingly, “Wal-Mao” also offers its own critique of the Reform era by
providing a system that seems preferable to the unknown rules of wealth
generation and rampant corruption of the relatively “chaotic” system of
capitalism outside Wal-Mart’s doors. Its culture asserts a corporate moral
behavior that makes confident claims to transform its employees, to model
behavior for customers and thereby to influence Chinese society at large.
These fervent claims for the corporation and its mission are surely a kind
of revolutionary “utopian capitalism” that often bears an uncanny resemblance
to the utopian socialism which preceded it. It is a future of low prices and
smiling faces where profit is secured by order and workers are disciplined for
the greater good of capital. Good customer service becomes the practice of
morality and if everyone is of proper quality, the system will be stable with
plenty of consumption to go around. The corporation is one which intends to
“serve the people” with a new “mass line” of high-volume sales.
Wal-Mao is a metaphor for examining the localization of Wal-Mart’s
transnational corporate culture in China. It resonates poetically with a wide
spectrum of language, activity and experience with Wal-Mart’s corporate
42
43
Andrew Kipnis, “Suzhi: A Keyword Approach”, pp. 306-10.
Rachel Murphy, “Turning Peasants into Modern Chinese Citizens: ‘Population Quality’
Discourse, Demographic Transition and Primary Education”, The China Quarterly, No.
177 (2004), pp. 1-20.
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culture. Wal-Mart, however, is a relative newcomer to the Chinese retail
market. While it is a powerful company globally, within China there are still
many larger and more influential companies, both Chinese and foreign-owned.
As a result, the details of “Wal-Mao” may be unique to Wal-Mart, China.
Nevertheless, the case examined here suggests that corporate culture can
speak to the transformations of reform-era Chinese society and the new
regimes of moral self-making. The creative ways that corporate culture
formally imagines order and disciplines behavior makes it an heir to the
danwei in uniting correct culture with modern production.