I’ve been writing for weeks and weeks about co-ops, authentic exchange
and commerce, the practice of openness and business models, and other
related topics. Between the crashing economy, my ongoing contemplation
of open source, and a new project that I’m almost ready to announce,
thinking about the substance of economies and the power of economies to
define other aspect of our social experience has seemed really
appealing. And it has been.
I came across this article by Jason
Stoddard
a while back, and I’ve realized that I would be remiss in these posts,
if I didn’t somehow tie it into writing and science fiction, and
Stoddard’s post provides a great hook into this connection. He’s also,
basically spot on right.
Interestingly, the beginning of this series grew out of my experiences
reading Kim Stanley Robinson’s “Mars Trilogy,” which spent a lot of
time (particularly in the last two volumes) contemplating corporations
and capitalism. Indeed, in the Mars books, Robinson posits what some
readers (without careful examination) might think of as the typical
“evil mega-corporations.”
Though I think he succeeds at avoiding the traps of having as villains
“scheming business people in suits,” by making sure that none of the
executives appear in the stories. The closest we get to having a
“corporate villain,” is a character who allies themselves with the
corporations for personal advancement. The result is that, the
corporations lumber around, always doing the wrong thing, always getting
in the way of the main characters, but they never loose the extra-human
nature of being corporations.
Maybe that’s part of the problem with writing fiction about
corporations. Fiction tends to revolve around people and social systems
of comprehensible complexity and corporations are shaped and steered by
a great number of people, and there’s too much complexity in
corporations to really capture accurately in fiction.
While Stoddard’s argument (Corporations exist to make money, they’re
not evil by nature) is factually true and good advice to anyone writing
‘corporate drama’ fiction, I think writers (and the rest of us) might
benefit from thinking about some other “nitty gritty” aspects of
corporations. Just because corporations may be “generally a bad thing
in the world,” difficult to write about, and “not simply evil for the
purposes of fiction” nonetheless I think it is important to think about
the social/political effect corporations and to write about them in
fiction.
The following list is rough, and incomplete, and I encourage you all to
help me out in comments!
- Corporations have a few overriding drives: to grow, to make profit
(both by minimizing expenses and by increasing revenue), and to
continue to exist. All actions and strategies undertaken by
corporations should make sense in context of one or more of these
drives.
- Corporate cultures are largely self selecting, so “radicals” in
corporate settings are really unlikely, either because they’re likely
to leave or because their self-interest eventually falls in line with
the company’s interest.
- Corporations employ huge numbers of people, but we can assume that the
number of people at any given company doing things that support the
main mission of a company but that aren’t “the thing the company
does.” Phyisical Plant “things,” clerical tasks, human resources,
“infrastructure,” operations/financial tasks, internal legal work,
and so forth. Probably as much as a quarter or a third of the staff
probably falls into one of these categories.
- Corporations are rarely unilateral. Ever. They have many operations,
many projects, many divisions, and thus can be resilient to things
changing “around them.” This also means that coorporations are less
likely to take umbrage at potentially threatening individuals and
companies, than a single individual would in a similar situation.
- Career advancement, in companies or elsewhere, generally happens to
some greater or lesser extent by moving horizontally between companies
rather than “through the ranks.”
- The bigger the corporation the more specialized the roles of the
workforce would tend to be.
- For the most part, I think it safe to assume that most corporations
don’t have a great deal of “classified” information, or information
that’s heavily embargoed. This comes as a great blow to conspiracy
theorists, but secrets are hard to keep with regards to projects that
a lot of people need to know about, and if all the other things we
know about corporations are true (size, attrition, etc.) “great
secrets” are unlikely to remain great secrets for long.
In light of all these things I think there are a lot of opportunities
for realistic story telling, but it’s not always so straight forward.
In anycase, I look forward to thinking about this some more with you.