Customer Reviews

The Death of a Thousand Cuts: Corporate Campaigns and the Attack on the Corporation

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I picked up Manheim's book by chance during a visit to the United States and it was indeed a revelation.

As a Ph.D student in communications, I have read my fair share of books but Manheim's volume is a standout.

It is an extradordinary piece of scholarship the way he has tied all the different threads of this growing phenomenon together to give us a fairly sophisticated, yet extremely readable analysis of what we are seeing today.

Though there have been the occasional article or monograph written on this area before, no one has traced the evolution of this concept so thoroughly or assembled such an impressive number of case studies about corporate campaigns.

Apart from this, Manheim's book has a number of other strengths that make it quite compelling.

As a communications scholar of some note,Manheim understably, devotes considerable time and attention to analysis of the communications strategies employed by the antagonists of a company. His discussion of the activist need to define "the moral high ground" is fascinating.

Another strength is his discussion of codes of conduct and how activists use them against companies. Codes of conduct based campaigning by activists is not a terribly well understood phenomena within the corporate sector which is surprising given the proliferation of these charters, codes or compacts.

The space that Manheim devotes to shareholder activism is also intriguing given the growing efforts of activists to target companies through key stakeholders such as institutional investors and the like.

All of this marks Manheim's book as a must-have for anyone working in a corporation who is in a corporate affairs, public affairs, human resources, investor relations, marketing and especially higher management function.

In "The Death of a Thousand Cuts," Jarol Manheim paints an interesting picture of the anti-corporate forces that taunt big business seemingly on a daily basis. The title is an intriguing choice, and a highly accurate one in that the damage done to corporations by the adversarial groups Manheim reviews inflicts a painful, but slow, "death" on the corporate images of those the groups target.

Manheim presents a very informative history of how the anti-corporate movement, mostly from the perspective of the labor union, came to be, tracing its development back through the socialist roots of the 1960s radical group, Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and showing how that group's ideologies and protest methods were adapted to serve the functions of labor protest, as well as that of the modern adversarial NGO in its battle against big business.

For anyone interested in the workings of anti-corporate protest, this book will certainly serve to enlighten.