SLSL Intro: "rock 'n' roll will never die" meets "the meta-Elvis"

[William Zantzinger]

--- Dave Monroe <davidmmonroe at yahoo.com> wrote:
> From Thomas Frank, The Conquest of Cool: Business
> Culture, Counterculture, and the Rise of Hip
> Consumerism (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1997), Ch. 1,
> "A Cultural Perpetual Motion Machine: Management
Theory and Consumer Revolution in the 1960s," pp. 1-33
...

The other minor disappointment is that Frank doesn't
explore the broader importance of studying the
powerful. Why is it that "business history has been
largely ignored" by cultural historians and most
others? The reason is that to even acknowledge the
existence of ruling and controlling classes is
politically taboo and in many circles brings immediate
red-baiting and charges of conspiracy mongering. 


>From a Review By Christian Parenti 

http://www.sfbg.com/lit/reviews/cool.html

Nope.  Typical Guardian crap. 

It's not taboo to acknowledge the existence of a
ruling class. In fact, this was the focus of business
history for decades. Moreover, business history
originally emerged to study the development of big
business as an institution and its focus was on the
biographies of ruling class businessmen. In an effort
to distinguish the elements that caused success from
those that produced failure, business history focused
on the ruling class. Pynchon read this kind of
business history (Robber Barons). These histories
provide material for his fictions from the SL tales to
GR.

Under the influence of Alfred Chandler, the genre
shifted to the study of organization itself, rather
than the personalities of specific businessmen, i,e., 
_The Visible Hand_

Labor...business cycle...the theory of
organization.... 

Anyway, a cool book and very useful...of course
everyone knows Fruitopia but they don't know that its
Coke and they sure don't know about the bus.

Forest, Forest Gump.  

Fixing a hole where the rain get in...



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