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Nikki Mandell, Polly Reed Myers. Capitalist Family Values: Gender, Work, and Corporate Culture at Boeing., The American Historical Review, Volume 121, Issue 3, June 2016, Pages 974–975, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/121.3.974
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Polly Reed Myers writes that “this book began with a single box at the Boeing Historical Archives that was marked ‘Women at Boeing’” (xi). This trove of documents included surveys and transcripts of oral interviews, conducted in advance of the firm’s seventy-fifth anniversary in 1990. With her curiosity piqued, Myers set out to uncover that history. She soon learned that Boeing leaders canceled the anniversary book project because of female employees’ “candor, and the unsettling view of workplace dynamics they provided” (96). Myers’s own investigation then shifted to consider the factors that produced the inequities and dissatisfaction exposed by women at Boeing. She found that “gender … workplace culture … economic currents and technological developments … are linked,” with workplace culture forming the central link in this chain (xii).
Myers argues that “Boeing’s corporate culture emerged as a key strategy for negotiating change and maintaining corporate power” (25). Through most of the twentieth century (1930s–1990s), company leaders fostered a corporate culture grounded in what Myers describes as a family metaphor. In contrast to histories that analyze how American corporations projected familial paternalism in their bid to control labor relations, Myers finds that Boeing leaders introduced familial fraternalism in order to project a sense of employment stability in an industry that routinely experienced wide fluctuations. Boeing’s fraternal corporate culture upheld an unequal, hierarchical workplace by ensuring “opportunities for [heterosexual] white male workers to have steady employment with access to mobility, fraternal networks, and a long-term career” (6). This normative fraternal corporate culture gave way in the 1990s under the competitive pressures (aka profit opportunities) of neoliberal capitalism. Boeing leaders abandoned the rhetoric of fraternalism in favor of a neoliberal rhetoric of teamwork. Although the teamwork metaphor implied equality, in practice it has produced a new way to sanction inequality. Unlike the fraternal family metaphor, which asserted a corporate obligation to employee welfare in exchange for employee loyalty to the company, the teamwork metaphor upheld a corporate obligation to shareholders only and cast employees as fully replaceable individual actors.
