Corporate Colonization (Ch. 20)

I found Stanley Deetz's theory of corporations colonizing their values into every life very interesting. Deetz believed that large corporations had the ability to shape people's beliefs, and then went further and examined how the decision making process was conducted within these large corporations. Deetz discovered that as long as society thought of communication as the "transmission of information" we will only continue to allow corporations to have dominion over society. When people use corporation jargon as a way of expressing certain decisions or ideas regarding various issues in daily life, they are unaware of the fact that they are using corporate language. I find this interesting because I'm sure none of us realize how much power large corporations have on us. Even if they are known for a famous phrase that is immediately picked up in our society, we are still allowing them to have some sort of power over us. Because of this, corporations can feed us certain bits of information that we will accept because we have kind of blocked our own rational thinking. I can kind of understand where Deetz is coming from. For the company I work for, one of our "quotes" if you will is "Empowering the Maverick." What we mean by this is empowering the maverick by producing an annual film festival for independent film makers, and also by giving them the opportunity to have their films distributed with our ongoing distribution label. We pride ourselves in finding filmmakers with an original vision that's fresh and provocative-not something you would normally see. I can now see that with the various pieces of information I have learned fromthis company, I now apply it to my life when I make decisions on what movies to go see, or when I consider different relationships with people, because now I look for originality within a person's personality, and not just the same old thing.