Act I - Theatres of Action - NMSU College of Business



Act I - Theatres of Action

Scene 8 - Disney

By David M. Boje, Ph.D. November 13, 2001

ACT 1 - Theatres of Action; Scene 8 - Disney

The Walt Disney Company is Theatre of Capitalism, par excellence. It has concentrated, diffuse, and integrated spectacles. Disney is circus-like and its theatrical elements of commerce are quite spectacular (Benjamin, 1999: 43). Disney is diffuse spectacle in its spreading phantasmagoria, being replicated the world over, not just in exporting Disney Theme Parks to Japan or Europe, but also in the way that many cities, airports, and suburbs are becoming theme parks.

Disney's Theatres of Capitalism is production, distribution, and consumption is a key player on the global stage of western capitalism. We are spectators to the metamorphosis of late capitalism, the interpenetration of post-industrialism with postmortem culture. We are being Disneyfied. Disney Theatre is the new business role model for all corporations to combine post-industrial and postmortem. This new Theatrics of Capitalism is the trilogy of spectacle, carnival, and festival. It is also the major revolution of our times, the global Disneyfication of capitalism, what we call the new Theatre of Capitalism. Disneyfication is defined as the conduct of business and consumption in such a way that the "real world" is becoming more and more like a theme park (Disneyfication, 1998).

Disneyland is a world that's safe and entertaining; a world where there are no unpleasant surprises and where everything is sanitized. But Disneyfication takes away the life and variety of the real world. In the Disney world, everything, [and] everywhere is the same.

SANITIZE: to take away problems, to make something clean and harmless

VARIETY: many different kinds of things

CONSUMERISM: (n) the habit of buying more and more things

Disneyfication of nature, global, safety, a more sanitized history, Mid-west politics and sex mores, colonized mind, appropriation of traditional culture for postmortem fashion, as the world grows more like a theme park.

Disney is where executives go to learn Theatre, to mix integrated spectacle showmanship in the marketplace, with attracting business by erecting carnivalesque theme park attractions, and with investing corporate culture in festive characters like Mickey Mouse and Goofy, and even with providing a space of play where "guests" can be both actor and spectator (spectator) on the corporate-administered stage. Every management and business text covers reviews Disney, most applaud its creative genius, entrepreneurship, strategy, and creativity.

Disney University is a place where business executives, seek to imitate Walt Disney's empire building, to follow the American entrepreneurial dream for Kansas City cartoonist to empire builder. The following excerpt from a transcript of a stockholders' meeting shows Eisner invoking the Disney legend (Boje, 1995):

The concentrated spectacle begins this way. In 1923, Walt arrived in Hollywood with drawing materials under his arm, $40 in his pocket, and a dream. Waiting for him at Union Station was his brother Roy, who would dedicate his life to making Walt's dream come true. Together with their wives, Lilly and Edna, working alongside them at night around the kitchen table, they struggled to keep a tiny studio alive.

These executives go to Disney to learn how to manage the concentrated synergies of production, consumption, and distribution, between people who are "guests" of the show, employees who are recruited to perform as "cast members," and the merchandising of story characters by transforming them from cartoon or film, into CD, toys, and rides in networked corporate profit centers. Every corporate logo can be embroidered on T shirts; every fashionable product or celebrity endorser can be part of a film, a children's book, or a video game. This is surface of the "synergistic" strategy of Disneyfication. At a deeper level, Disneyfication is the transformation of traditional culture into postmortem culture products.

Executives come to Disney University to learn surface-level "synergistic strategy" of more integrated spectacle, how to have a hit film, manufacture toys and garments related to that film, move the theme to TV shows on its corporate-owned station, set up a ride in its theme park, and sell the wares in its stores and parks.

But just as the question of the Wicked Witch in Sleeping Beauty ("Mirror, mirror on the wall who is the fairest of them all?") has more than one answer, there are contrary theatrical performances and conflicts among the fragmented audiences turned critics, about what constitutes authentic and ethical Walt Disney corporate Theatre, across all its Magic Kingdom stages. In this chapter, we look at the dynamic complexity and chaos effects of synergistic strategies of mixing many types of Theatres of Capitalism on the global stage. If we just apply Theatre to managing and organizing the transnational corporation, we can end up with a naive political and economic complicity that marginalizes critical approaches to Theatre. More critical postmortem approaches to Theatre, we will examine include the Tamara Theatre invention of John Krizanc. We begin with simple synergy, as Disney transforms its corporate enterprises into networks of Theatre, into Tamara. Disney Theatre includes a less public stage of operations, the global subcontracting to third world factories, which distribute to consumers. Disney's Theatres of Capitalism mixes the world of postmortem consumers who seem to care little about sweatshop practices with postindustrial supply chains, who seem to prefer contracts with sweatshops.

In terms of change, there is a self-organization happening to Disney and among the critics that network to protest corporate strategy, as well as the network of the Theatres of Capitalism. As an organizing metaphor, I would like to define this network as, "Tamara Theatre." Consumers are networking with workers in the Third World and in the theme parks of US, France, Japan, and next is China, to bring about a change in Disney's Theatres of Capitalism. Mickey Mouse rules the world; next to McDonald’s Mickey is the most recognized cultural symbol of globalization.

In Global Disneyfication, a few media companies besides Disney, such as Time-Wamer, Bertelsmann, Murdoch control the Theatres of Capitalism. This includes what we watch, read, and hear is the new postmortem popular culture controlled by a few transnational corporations. In the Theatres of Capitalism, Disneyfication is a force of dark revolution on the world stage. Cartoons and movie stares become spectacularly exciting technologies for theme parks, video games, and toys. The products are glamorous exports that replace the production consumed by traditional culture. Disneyfication also mines stories and practices of traditional culture that can be rendered Disney story characters. Global Disneyfication is the culture wars, the battle to retain authentic culture, in a time of postmortem culture mania. And it is Tamara Theatre.

Tamara Theatre - Disney operates in what I call "Tamara" Theatre (Boje, 1995). Tamara Theatre puts the audience in a special relationship with an experimental fiction and with a special networking of stages, accomplished by wandering audiences chasing actors. In this, Tamara, is like the real life of any corporation, we can not be in all the meeting rooms simultaneously, nor does each manager or worker network together the same sequence of theatrical moments, characters, dialog, and script, each day. Each day we try to figure out what the Theatre means, and why we play the strange roles, though we resist at every entrance. Tamara is the name of a play written by John Krizanc (198 1/1989), first performed at Strachan House in Trinity-Bellwoods Park, Toronto, Ontario, Canada on May 8, 1981.

Tamara is postmortem Theatre. It is not modem Theatre, in which you sit in stationary seats and passively watch actors enter and exit a single stage. Manguel (1988: 1-2) gives us a starting definition of traditional modem theatrics:

Theatre, the representation of events "as if they happened before your eyes" begins with the convention of all spectacle: a division of reality. One space allotted to the audience, the passive viewer, seated to observe; another to the play, the actors, moving to perform.

In Tamara Theatre, you do not sit down, there are multiple stages, and you are seduced

into more of a spectactor rule than is the case in modem Theatre. As spectator you observer yourself acting, trying to figure out which actors to chase. As one scene closes,

several others begin simultaneously in several, and sometimes a dozen other rooms.

[pic]

Cover of Tamara Journal's First Issue in 2001; Drawing provided with permission

of Rodney Injhan

I first attended the play Tamara when it was presented at il Vittoriale degli Italiani in Hollywood, California in 1992, and have written about it ever since. When attending the Tamara play, I followed the chauffeur from the kitchen to the maid's bedroom; there she met the butler, who had just entered the drawing room. As they completed their scene, they each wandered off into different rooms, leaving the audience, myself included, to choose whom to follow. As I decided which characters to follow, I experienced a very different set of stories than someone following another sequence of characters. No audience member gets to follow all the stories since the action is simultaneous, involving different characters in different rooms and on different floors. At the play, each audience member receives a "passport" to return again and again to try to figure out more of the many intertwined networks of stories. Tamara cannot be understood in one visit, even if an audience member and a group of friends go in six different directions and share their story data. Two people can even be in the same room and -- if they came there by way of different rooms and character-sequences -- each can walk away from the same conversation with entirely different stories (Boje, 1995).

In Tamara Theatre, a dozen characters unfold their stories before a walking, sometimes running, audience. Instead of remaining stationary, viewing a single stage, the audience fragments into small groups that chase characters from one room to the next, from one floor to the next, even going into bedrooms, kitchens, and other chambers to chase and co-create the stories that interest them the most. If there are a dozen stages and a dozen storytellers, the number of story lines an audience could trace as it chases the wandering discourses of Tamara is 12 factorial (479,001,600).

Tamara Theatre is a metaphor highlighting the plurivocal interpretation of organizational Theatre, a distributed and historically contextualized meaning network -- that is, the meaning of events and characters depends upon the locality, the prior sequence of stories, and the transformation of characters in the wandering discourses that network stages, events and people.

Theatre has eclipsed storytelling, harnessed its power, as a more embodied form of institutional memory. In previous work, I defined a "storytelling organization" as collective storytelling system in which the performance of stories is a key part of members' sense-making and a means to allow them to supplement individual memories with institutional memory" (Boje, 1991 a: 106). Theatrics is more that storytelling, it is endemic to and reconstructs and reterritorializes capitalism. We do not just do capitalism, we manage, produce, distribute and accumulate spectacle, and sometimes co-opt the carnival of resistance, and good play festive play into the enterprise.

Finally, there is also indeterminacy about each character in postmortem Theatre. In the postmortem Theatre, each character can exhibit multiple personalities, and the complexity for the spectator, is not only deciding who to follow from stage to stage, but to watch for changes in persona. One thinks one is following a chauffeur, who in one discourse changes the rules and becomes a spy disguised as a chauffeur and who then becomes an aristocrat pretending to be a spy pretending to be a chauffeur. Now, in his love affair with the maid, is he indeed in love with the maid, is he using her to spy on the aristocracy, or is he toying with her as an exploitable subject? (Boje, 1995). Tamara Theatre is entrapment, since spectators focus on the maze of story, character, and stage choices, while forgetting they are complicit in civic responsibility, as the Fascism of the Mansion and its scripted scenes, stares back at us (Boje, 2001d). And, this is why John Krizanc included Tamara de Lempicka as one character among many who had the cultural preeminence to have a voice, but she elected not to use it. Like us, she sold her art to the highest bidder. Tamara did not bother to render spectacle commentary.

I wrote about the complexity of Tamara in 1993 (with Robert Dennehy) and, again, in 1995 in an Academy of Management Journal article, but it is only recently that I came to understand that the content of the play was about our complicity as witness to fascism; we are witnesses, answerable for our silence to the spectacle in which we are complicit. I am not saying Disney is fascist, or that all Theatres of Capitalism are fascist. Each is unique in con-scripting control and resistance.

Disney is Tamara Theatre; Disney is a global mansion with Theatre performed in every enterprise, and activist-spectators chasing executives from nation to nation, and scandal to scandal. But, since no one can be on every simultaneous stage at once, many "truths" float freely. There are as many "truths" for Disney and its critics as there are different experiential possibilities in the Magic Kingdom. Ironically, in the many rooms, on it’s many stages, in the Disney Empire, no one truth gets established for long without being challenged. As the number of challenges increases and as disparate interest groups network, there is greater effect.

We know there is going to be another controversy and it can pop up anywhere at anytime. While there is a multiplicity of perspectives on Disney, there are enough watchdogs (and witch-hunts) to put behavioral and strategic constraints on Disney strategy. Everything does not go down well with the shareholder, consumer, ecology, and labor boycott groups. And some reviews of Disney theatrics have more media-power and more staying power.

"Tamara " is also the name of an artist, Tamara de Lampikita.

In an Academy of Management article (Boje, 1995) I began the task of applying the postmortem theatrics of Tamara to Disney, or Tamara-land. I became so captivated by its possibilities that in 2001 1 began a journal called Tamara (Journal of critical postmortem organization science). I even wrote a Tamara manifesto (Boje, 2001d).

Between 1996 and the founding of the Tamara journal, I wrote some 40 articles, book chapters, and conference presentations, and a 100 web pages to make sense of Nike as Tamara-land. I wanted to understand why my children were so addicted to the Nike Swoosh logo, that it had to appear on their clothing, or they could not go to school. I am proud to say that my youngest son Raymond, just two days ago, declined the Swoosh, and bought some thing different. "Dad, I went to four shoe stores in New York, and all they carried was Nike, Adidas, Reebok and New Balance. I am trying again tomorrow." One less sleeper, one more conscious capitalist.

The Capitalism Theatre of spectacle is colonizing and appropriating festival and carnival social spaces. Each part of people's bodies and social lives had to be "polished, groomed and controlled" (Fjellman, 1992: 305). Theatre is control of capitalism. This incessant colonizing and appropriating of our bodies, our private and every social space raises problematic questions about Theatres of Capitalism. Where are the festive and carnival spaces in which people are free to immerse themselves in imaginative and creative theatrical spaces that are free from the Disney-like Theatre of Capitalism? How does Spectacle Theatre produce and distribute the impulse to surround ourselves with fetishes that will make us good little consumers? Where do we go to not celebrate Disney-like heroes of materialism? Can we rediscover the Theatre of festivals materially, spiritually, and socially linked to Nature? Can we rekindle the Dionysian carnivalesque resistance to Apollonian spectacles of power and domination? There is a strange synergy among Disney Theatres, and important transitions from one script of production to another in Disney Tamara.

Synergy: from Happy Family to Unhappy Tamara Theatre - To some this synergy strategy by Disney is hyper-consumerism, a synergy that exploits any experience and every-thing. Disney, for many activists, is the author of hyperreality but is still the modernist story machine (i.e. a theme park run on conveyor belts) and in some cases uses feudal labor in Asian factories. Disneyland is a modernist Theatre-machine where people pay to stand in lines and ride on conveyor belts and wheeled carts that follow prescribed cycle times as they view in storyboard sequence particular images of small town, turn-of-the-century, Middle America, and walk or ride between movie sets and corporate exhibits. The good characters win and the bad ones lose but never curse. Rage against the global machine is growing. A number of union and fundamentalist groups, for example, in the last decade accuse Disney Corporation and its executives of erosion of family-centered and conservative corporate values since Michael Eisner took over from Walt Disney (and Walt's son-in-law, Ron Miller). Disney theatrics was at one time built around the theme of a family, where Walt was the paternal parent-CEO, women were the “girls" and cartoonists and joke writers the "boys” (Shows, 1979).

Even though Walt fired people according to his mood and will and paid wages considered low by industry standards, his studio managed to avoid unionizing the artists. He did this by selling himself as father to the "boys" -- his term for the male animators, storymen, and gag writers -- and "girls," his term for the women doing the inking and repetitive drawing work. He sold his employees the story of being "one big happy family." He reinforced the family metaphor by encouraging his boys and girls to bring in their relatives to work for the "Disney family." Boys were strongly reprimanded and even fired for cursing in front of the girls. Families require loyalty to the "self-proclaimed father figure to a staff he had personally selected, whose members he insisted were more like a family than employees" (Eliot, 1993: 87). Family members worked all hours of the day and night for their paternalistic hero. It is interesting, as Eliot points out, that although Walt could drink on the job, curse, and have facial hair, these freedoms were not extended to his "family members." By the time the number of family members had swelled to over 1,000 for work on Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, they were lined up in a good Tayloristic-design, four boys to a row of desks and rows of girls in other rooms in the overcrowded studio.

In earlier work, (Boje, 1995) I describe how Walt used the corporate-family theatrical script to contest unionization. For example, on May 29, 1941, 293 employees went on strike. The Disney studio's public image as "one big happy, harmonious family" was shattered by 1,000 picketers and pursued by media stories of dysfunction: unfair salaries, poor work conditions, and a parochial code of behavior. Walt's employees were growing increasingly skeptical of the family metaphor. The employees also challenged the practice of recruiting women to take work at lower pay than men received. Babbitt, for example, saw his $300-a-week salary as inequitable in comparison to that of his assistant, who only received $50. Finally, at a meeting at the Roosevelt Hotel, 50 percent of the Disney animators signed Cartoonist Guild union cards. Walt threatened to fire anyone who attended any outside union-organizing meetings. He refused to recognize the union, even after the cards were signed. Walt ended his plea for his boys and girls not to go on strike with these words: "Don't forget this -- it's the law of the universe that the strong shall survive and the weak must fall by the way; and I don't give a damn what idealistic plan is cooked up, nothing can change that" (Holliss & Sibley, 1988: 43).

Walt got even with organizers; Walt had pictures taken of the strikers on the picket lines and taped them to the wall; he testified before the House Un-American Activities Committee to shatter the careers of Arthur Babbitt and David Hilberrnan, who had led the 1941 strike at the studio. Walt also systematically fired everyone who engaged in the strike over the next decade (Eliot, 1993: xxii, 265). Walt Disney even had the historical record altered by seeing to it that all references to Babbitt were purged from the Disney archives I studied (Boje, 1995). To this day, one can question the "happy family" veneer of Disney under the leadership of its current CEO, Michael Eisner. With the opening of the theme parks, the Disney Theatre revised its script, from "happy corporate family" to "happy cast members and guests in the show."

Enter - corporate Theatre - I want to make a point, corporations can present themselves as "family" and/or as "putting on a show." Both are forms of Concentrated Spectacle Theatre. At Disney, both co-existed, but not peacefully, from the 1940s to the 1980s. "When Disneyland employees went on strike in the mid- 1 980s, it was as much over the two conflicting contexts of interpretation -- whether work was to be seen as drama or family -- as anything else" (Eisenberg & Goodall, 1993: 39).

Corporate family is a version of concentrated spectacle, a system of oppression. For example, Walt used "family" characterizations (and tropes) as Theatre, following the 1941 strike. His intimidation tactics included having his "ever-faithful girls" report to work in skimpy bathing suits to audition for full-length live-action features that would no longer require the animation work of the boys. This was Walt's Theatre of power, enacted to demonstrate his paternalistic and corporate power. Before, Walt shifted from a "family" script to a "play or Theatre" script, in the decade following the strike; Walt downsized the animation department and laid off or fired every single person who went out on strike.

The Theatre script accomplishes a different kind of script than the family theme. In the Theatre metaphor you "perform in the show" (not work), employees are "cast members" (not employees), "wearing costumes" (not uniforms), playing their "roles" (not jobs) to “guests" (not consumers) for "box office concerns" requiring a "smile and a clean looking haircut." In contrast, the "family" metaphor highlighted the "concerned parent" (not an executive) who "takes care of the children" (not the employees), as well as the "brothers and sisters" (not departments or divisions).

Multiple Theatres - Disney combines premodern, modem, and postmortem worlds in its production, distribution and consumption of the theatrics of show. Premodern folklore, mostly from Europe, is de-authored, revised, and re-authored by Disney Corporation, and resold as Disney product; Disney story factories replace copies of Carroll's "Alice in Wonderland" with the Disney Versions. The Disney story machine used science and technology to simplify stories (e.g., "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs" and "Pinocchio") from Germany and other European countries to conform to Walt's vision of Middle America as expressed in Fantasyland, Frontierland, and Adventureland, and, posthumously, Toontown.

"The image of smiles (friendly, fun, courteous) being manufactured (e.g., the products of a rigid assembly-line factory) establishes the tensions of a cultural dialogue among Disneyland workers" (Eisenberg & Goodall, 1993: 125). This tension was more containable in the U.S. and Japan work force, than in France. French workers at EuroDisney met the Theatre metaphor with cynicism and resistance; consumers also resisted (In the US that resistance is growing more problematic for Disney management). Part of the consumer resistance stems form the way premodern literature is rewritten, and ancient architecture appropriated by Disney.

Out of premodern medieval times, Disneyland has its own Magic Castle; an architectural mix of cartoon-like buildings is a postmortem walk about Theatre; each world in Disney contains rides that are little more than modem factories with conveyor-belts to transport passengers through a theatrical experience. To most people, Disney is heaven come to earth, a "living Theatre" where you purchase and consume "fun," and where you act the character who gets away from the daily rut of contemporary American life and says "I'm going to Disney!"

The Theatres of Capitalism adapt their repertoire of performances, scripts, and characterizations to fit with local culture. Concentrated spectacle permeates Disney. There are concessions to Japanese culture, for example, Main Street U.S.A., an exhibit at Disneyland and Disney World, has been replaced by a World Bazaar, the robot President Lincoln has been replaced by a robot crane, Mickey Mouse has more stylish image, and non-Japanese employees are not allowed to wear name tags so that the gaijin can be distinguished from the Japanese (Boje, 1995). Not all cast members have nametags. The nametag marginalization of ‘Others,’ especially Koreans, is not unlike the ways blacks are marginalized to non-show positions in U.S. Disney theme parks (Van Maanen, 1992: 23). Blacks, Asians, and Native Americans do not play Snow White. To work at Epcott food courts, you must have a birthright in the country's cuisine, and look the part.

Yet, the revisions to Disney Theatres of Capitalism, to its formula script for synergy, and to strangely out of context characters and exhibits are resisted by those schooled in Disney ways. They want "authentic" and "real" Disney Theatre. The revisions are slower in Japan, where the Tayloristic queuing, automated movements of masses of people, and batched rides and assembly line processes are more a part of the fun than they are at EuroDisney.

EuroDisney has revised its legends, changed its parks, and upgraded the Victorian capitalistic values that are "signed into" its American-exports theme parks and into the modernist aspects of the Disney enterprise as a whole. But, for many revisions is not enough.

To others there is a dark side to postmortem Disney theatrics that calls for revolution, not revision (Elliot, 1993, Boje, 1995). The entertainment spectacle creates a supernormal stimuli event that is bigger than life, and more compelling than reality. Disney, is more real than real; more real than American life, and has become the metric of family and corporate life, of production by imagineering, and hyper-consumption by material-accumulation of spectacle theatrical experiences as purchased-fun.

Disney’s concentrated spectacle diffuses globally. Its more diffused spectacle meshes fragmentation and specialization in the global economy. As Disney is exported to the world, Disney becomes the universal standard for business. Disney reaches into every nook and cranny (Debord, 1967: #64). For example, since Epcott Center opened, and visitors experience the cuisine of Mexico, Italy, and other countries, they go to Mexico City or Venice, and are disappointed if that cuisine does not taste or is not served the same way Epcott-Disney food tasted. What has been the result? Disney becomes the standard of "authenticity" and restaurants around the world, wanting to attract the tourist who went to Epcott, change their services and cuisine to equal Disney. Not only business but spirit, since for many, the journey to Disney occupies new spiritual and religious space, once obtainable by pilgrimages to Compostella, Guadalupe, and Jerusalem.

Indeed, a colleague of mine here at Yale discovered that it was in traveling to the Dioramas of the Life of Jesus on the "Holy Mountains" of northern Italy in 1919 that a young Walt Disney got the idea for the animated statues that formed the core of Disneyland. The transition is complete; the generation that will form the first decades of the new millennium knows more about the "Lion King" than the "Kingdom of God" (Penna, 1999: 1).

Disney synergy is also the dark side of the modernist Theatres of Capitalism. Disney combines aspects of the concentrated and diffuse forms in the fatalism of global capitalism, where resistance if futile. Disney is Fetishism at its penultimate; it is in industrial machine covered in postmortem garish architecture designed to draw the sucker into the carnival, by parading a few festive clowns in a Light Parade; Disney appropriates both spectacle and carnival, harnessing them to the surplus-value creating machine.

EuroDisney, has its special French touches, such as admission of the national origins of the various European children's stories used as themes, but what is more interesting is how the Europeans have resisted Disney managerial controls. Europeans do not like fast-food restaurants with tables and chairs bolted to the floor. French intellectuals refer to EuroDisney as a "cultural Chernobyl" and call Disney employment "gum-chewing jobs," a reference to the low pay, low skill, and rapid turnover. French women employed by Disney were infuriated by the dress code stating that "appropriate undergarments be worn at all times, without transparent, wild colors, or fancy designs" and that "Skirts must be 4 cm above the knee" (Van Maanen, 1992: 27). Lawsuits were filed against and eggs hurled at Eisner to protest Disney's nonnegotiable contract clauses. Van Maanen makes a point most relevant to storytelling organization theory: the well-defended story that "Disney creativity and imagination" were unbeatable and that Disney's management never backed down helped to contain the contract squabbles just described.

Behind the Theatre of fantasy world, are Theatres of Terror, such as the factories in China and Haiti, sweatshops employing mainly young workers. Disney pays off big for executive compensation, but is cheap when it comes to pay not only in garment factories in Third World nations. In the U.S., Walt Disney opened his own animation and art schools on studio grounds to attract enough low-wage apprentices to keep the cost of production to an absolute minimum. The theme parks keep pay to a minimum, by recruiting students on college campuses who want a line on their resume in return for minimum wage.

Disney executive compensation and alleged sweatshop labor practices continue to draw union activist attention. As chief executive officer of Walt Disney, Michael Eisner earned $203 million from salary and stock options in 1993, which amounts to $97,600 per hour. In 1996, Michael Eisner's salary amounted to $8.7 million, plus an additional $181 million in stock options. This brought his total compensation of 1996 to over $189.7 million, or $101,000 an hour. By 1998, Eisner was pulling down $576 million a year (Goozner, 2001). Compare this to a Haitian worker producing Disney's popular Pocahontas doll for eleven cents an hour, which is half of Haiti's pitifully impoverished minimum wage (National Labor Relations, 1997, National Labor Committee, 2000). After the union and other activist protests about the disparity of Eisner and Haitian work wages, those factories migrated to even cheaper labor pools in China and Vietnam. In Vietnam, for example, "seventeen year-old women work 9 to IO hours a day, seven days a week, earning as little as six cents an hour in the Keyhinge factory, making giveaway promotional toys--especially Disney characters for McDonald's Corporation (National Labor Committee, 2000). Other Disney contract-factory workers, are 17 year old girls making Disney toys seven days a week, for 17 cents an hour (Boje, 2001c). Disney, even in Walt's day paid less than scale for its cartoonists, writers, and performers.

That legacy for extracting the most money to the executive, while paying the least possible amount to workers, continues. A simple popcorn cart worker, making the minimum wage in Florida, California, France or Japan earns over a million dollars a year for Disney executives and other shareholders (more in the U.S., a bit less in France and Japan where pop corn is less fashionable). A Disney theme park is a factory, with people-conveyor belts, assembly lines for mass entertainment, where workers are called "actors" and perform live on "stage" always dressed in "costume" putting on the "show." Disney Theatre is for many guests, a festive stage with music shows and cartoon costumed-characters, as well as a very safe and tame place to play games of carnival with relatively safe risk.

Disney Theatre is synergistic combination of folkloric tales adapted to cartoons and architectures, modem factory systems of people-moving, and postmortem illusions. The postmortem Theatre allows the speculator to become, for a few moments, an actor on the stage. Disney Theatre depends upon you becoming spectator, taking a less passive role in the consumption of your fun. You can wear a mask, join a street Theatre scene with Mickey Mouse, or climb a tree made of plastic and vinyl leaves. Yet, mostly you stand in line, waiting in the queue, for your turn on the conveyor belt. "Disneyland functions as an 'imaginary effect' concealing that reality no more exists outside than inside the bounds of the artificial perimeter" (Fjellman, 1992: 301).

The Disney communications and entertainment industries, from Touchstone Pictures, Disney Studios, to ABC are literally stamping the psyche of the world community with values and iconic images. But, given the diversity of values in the world, attaining universal appeal is increasingly difficult to sustain. For example, what is fun to some guests is for others, the material values of fetish hyper-consumerism, over-consumption, and the death of family values. As Disney synergizes its family values legacy of Walt Disney cartoons and fun-loving children in safe risk, theme parks and family-accommodating resort hotels with other Disney ventures, such as Touchstone Pictures and ABC programming, chaos can ensue.

What is obvious from a review of Disney in the news is that the synergy strategy gets into increasing trouble each year because of the emergence of higher orders of phenomenal complexity (Boje, 2000a, Letiche, 2000). At issue in complexity theory is the idea that the sum is greater than the parts. This translates to a possible stock effect in the combination of protests that is not discernable in the analysis of any one action. A growing number of boycott groups, from the Christian right to Labor and anti-sweatshop activists on the left are attempting to affect Disney consumer's consumption habits and investor's choices of corporate stock. This is partially accomplished by staging web and street protests that are negative to Disney's reputation: "the most significant consequence of a negative corporate reputation is the adverse effect on share price and market capitalization" (Nakra, 2000: 35). My thesis is that while no one protest is having measurable impact, the combined effect of an informal network of affinity groups is having a strategic and financial impact on Disney (Boje, 2001c).

This is not always a happy synergy. Disney is also being boycotted by religious groups: Catholic League, several Baptist and Charismatic groups, Church of God of Cleveland, Tennessee, Assemblies of God, The International Church of the Foursquare Gospel and The Presbyterian Church in America. Disney products are perceived as violating church doctrine and fundamentalist ethics.

Disney is walking the razor's edge between courting traditional family entertainment values and reaping the income niches in global capitalism special interest groups find problematic. For example, a Disney subsidiary, Hollywood Records, produces songs by heavy metal singer Danzig, whose music features satanic themes, according to information provided by American Familty Association of Texas (I 997). A pension fund group wants Texas schools to dump Disney stock over this. Christian fundamentalist groups have recently networked together to boycott Disney films, books, tapes, TV, and theme parks over family values concerns (Boje, 2001c). In addition, in separate efforts, anti-sweatshop groups as well as a myriad of cultural groups who have been offended by Disney in one way or another are boycotting. Disney to these groups, but not to the public at large, is the corporate equivalent of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. And if any of the charges and allegations sticks to the image of Disney, then we can say that this corporation risks tumbling into the abyss. In response to this risk, Disney must spend corporate advertising dollars to re-erect its image as a socially responsible and friendly company.

At the same time, Disney develops products for audiences with different family values than Old Walt. On April 30th 1997, 42 million people in America watched "Ellen come out of the closet" a half-hour "family oriented" comedy that airs on ABC, a Disney owned company. The synergy of Disney family fun with ABC, brings up the issue of corporate censorship.

For example, Disney buys ABC and uses it to promote its films and cartoons, but at the same time, ABC's documentaries on issues such as theme park security run the risk of being pulled if they reflect badly on Disney" (Fahy, 2000: 115).

If such charges persisted and caught the attention of the FCC, then Disney risks the same fate as Microsoft (to be broken up).

The phenomenal complexity of the fragmented spectators expecting different things for Disney's Theatres of Capitalism is intensifying (Boje, 2001c, Letiche, 2001). As the number of groups boycotting Disney increases, Disney is not able to make a move in its global corporate empire without drawing itself into yet another controversy. For example, Disney is being boycotted by anti-homosexual groups, a kind of "Gay McCarthyism." First, Disney extended company benefits to the same-sex partners of its homosexual employees. Second Disney hosts an annual Gay and Lesbian day celebration at the Magic Kingdom. Third, Disney books (Hyperion Press), movies (Touchstone & Miramax), animated moves (in "The Little Mermaid" a scene depicts a priest becoming noticeably aroused while presiding over a wedding), and TV (ABC) has more gay and lesbian characters than its rivals.

In the Theatrics of Capitalism, the CEO's leadership style and the corporate strategy can be perceived as bad Theatre. Disney, for example, is being boycotted by pro-family values groups (e.g. Focus on the Family and American Family Federation). They each contend that Disney since Eisner is seen as encouraging a life style, which founder Walt Disney, would never have staged in his entertainment empire. Spectators are becoming politically correct theatrical reviewers. The family values police monitor each Disney movie and TV episode looking for any scene, character, or dialog that violates their partisan ethical code. For example, in a scene from " Who Frained Roger Rabbit" Jessica Rabbit is ejected from a crash while riding in the taxi, and in the scene, she has no panties. In another well-publicized incident, "Disney hired Victor Salva, a convicted child molester, to direct its movie "Powder".

Disney has become such complex Theatres of Capitalism, that it manages to offend almost every cultural group, thereby offsetting the exploitative effect of synergy. Disney is being boycotted by African Americans who allege, "Disney Pictures has yet to create animated films featuring Aftican-American characters (other than having them portray animals)."[i] Others say Disney is "an insidious ethnocentrism," "infantilization of the world's cultures," "Africans who stare minstrel-like," and an "imperialist mentality of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century" (Van Maanen, 1992: 10-12). Disney is also being boycotted by a coalition of Arab-American organizations for an exhibit at Florida's Epcot Center. The coalition alleges the Israel Exhibit "distorts fact and history by presenting Jerusalem as the capital of Israel."[ii] Finally, Disney is being boycotted by Native American groups for its portrayal of Native Americans as seen in the movie "Pocahontas."[iii]

Disney theatrics, the synergy of different Theatres for different audiences is increasingly hard to manage. It is getting so that at every Disney venture there is protest. Disney Theatres of Capitalism are subject to complex adaptive forces, emergent processes of protest, self-organizing networks of labor and family value monitor groups. A simple act in one part of the system has unintended consequences in another.

Global Disneyfication is changing the Natural World. When our conference group took a back stage tour of the Disney theme park in Orlando Florida, the Disney guide said, "you see all this [pointing to the land], there was nothing here before Disney." He did not know that many of us were stanch environmentalists, and preferred the ecology of the swamp to the Disneyfication of Nature. There is an estranged relationship between Theatres of Capitalism and Nature. Disneyfication presumes Nature can be improved upon with clever technology, robotic animals, trees with vinyl leaves, etc. Some people are not ready to turn every State Park and every work of Nature into a theme park. Toys-mart, for example, was a majority-owned Walt Disney Company in Burbank, California that caught much media heat for the proposed sale of its customer list (Rosencranz, 2000). In another example, environmental groups decided to protest a Disney $800 million wildlife park in Florida, while another group complained there were not as many animals as they expected if this was Africa:

Investigators examined whether federal law had been violated in the recent deaths of cheetahs, hippos and rhinos at the park. The probe cleared Disney, but that didn't stop a small contingent of picketers from waving signs. Disney rivals, meanwhile, began calling the park "Minimal Kingdom," because a few visitors said they didn't see as many animals wandering through the recreated African savanna as they had expected (Orwall, 1998: BI).

Disney Theatre, as a social and economic system, is in a constant state of change and increasing in complexification. Knowing the parts of the Disney-synergy system, listing its different Theatres of global operation, its scripts, the metaphoric labels of the "show," does not allow us to predict the next outburst of complexification. This is a Theatre that adapts to its changing environment, and the achromous effects of the networking across its theatrical stages. Disney Capitalist Theatre performs on the very edge of chaos, seemingly minor issues combine across many stakeholder groups to create ripple effects that can become major news controversy that accompanies nearly everything Disney does these days, and triggers boycott groups with conflicting agendas for what Disney should do, across the spectrum of liberal and conservative interests. In short, the protest movements operate separately due to value-differences, but combine in dynamic collective networks of action to produce proverbial butterfly effects to Disney corporate Theatre that turns synergy advantage into systemic opportunities for disaster. Theatres of Capitalism have capitalist-intended as well as unintended consequences for production, consumption, and distribution on the global stage.

Global Disneyfication - Disneyfication is defined as turning the capitalism of production, distribution, and consumption into a theme park, where employees are recruited as smiling and robotic cast members, consumers are recast as guests, and even vendors perform in this show according to a theatrical script. Disneyfication of corporate Theatre is being mimicked in the theatrics of other corporations. Disneyfication is more than just corporate Theatre; it is a consumer Theatre, in which consumers are guest and spectators in the show. Some guests are in material costumes with mask, cape, and musket. Others, do not sport a material costume but are coaxed, seduced, or just willing play their role, and become unpaid performers in the show. Spect-actors are more or less conscious observers of their own performance in that show. This enrollment of employees and consumers as cast members (spectators) places the Theatres of Capitalism onto the increasingly global stage of postmortem culture. By postmortem culture we mean the fast-food restaurants such as McDonalds, the shopping malls with theme park rides, cyber-cafes where we are cast into a virtual role, city centers that imitate Disney to be more economically vital, as well as the Las Vegas casinos and cruise ships that mimic Disneyfication.

These are examples of the "new means of consumption" in the theatrics of our postmodern society that has taken its play onto the global stage. You can see this in Walt Disney Company entering into a distributive relationship with networks of corporations from other countries to initiate theme parks in Europe and Japan. The newest wave of Global Disneyfication is plans for a $2.7 billion Hong Kong theme park.

Earlier this month, Hong Kong's Chief Executive Tung Chee Hwa, flanked on either side by Mickey and Minnie Mouse, announced plans to commit $2.7 billion of public tax revenues to a Disney theme park to be built in northern Hong Kong.

The project, to be completed in 2005, is expected to attract tens of thousands of mainland Chinese consumers seeking American-style amusement in exchange for the gratuitous spending made famous by Disney parks.[iv]

As Disney theme parks in Japan, US, and Europe are threatened by cheaper alternatives, such as Universal Studios, Six Flags, or Wet and Wild, China is an option for expansion. Cheaper forms of entertainment, such as movies, videos, and Nintendo games are alternatives to actually going to a Disney theme park. Increasingly families who attend theme parks, spend as much or more time and money in resort hotels adjacent to the parks; many kids, after seeing Mickey and taking a few rides, just want to splash in the hotel pool. Consumers have a short attention span, "been to Disney, done that." A new Chinese emergent middle class has not yet been Disneyfied and is eager to experience the Disney magic. In the post-11 world of the war on terrorism, the encroachment by Americana postmortem consumerist culture of a nation's identity is a much more serious and dangerous investment for any transnational corporation (McDonald's, Nike, Coca-Cola, and others). Is China willing to be Disneyfied, to change its Moa cultural revolution into postmortem culture? Cultural protectionists are not confined to Afghanistan, and resist postmortem culture; the way Ludites resisted the industrial revolution, with violence and terror that was met by state violence and terror. The Theatres of Capitalism are undergoing a revolutionary transformation, as in the example of China, a flood of postmortem consumer culture means sweeping changes throughout China's emerging markets, and changes habits of consumption and production, in ways that are theatrical.

Global Disneyfication is the new revolution in the Theatrics of Capitalism, where networks of a diverse product manufacturing, sweatshop subcontracting, television, movie, video, book, music, etc. form transorganizational centers, becoming a world of theme parks. As we have seen in this scene, that synergy opens up opportunity for wealth accumulation by these networks of corporations, but brings with it the challenge of emergent forces of chaos and complexity. One such force is the postmortem networking of quite different organizations, interest and advocacy groups that use street Theatre to enroll consumers, producers, legislators, and others as spect-actors in shows of resistance. In the marriage of postindustrial capitalism (supply and distribution chains among fin-ns) with postmortem culture (the Disneyfication, production, and distribution of icons of culture for their mass consumption and the resistance networks of street Theatre) - we have a powerful Theatre of Capitalism, unlike any that has come before in the history of economics and the world. And it is sometimes a very violent Theatre, where the state and the people are on the street, and embodying a role in street Theatre or in the policing of that Theatre can get a cast member or spectator killed.

Global Disneyfication finds some strange manifestations. For example, "Royal Canadian Mounted Police, an institution rooted in Canadian history, sold the licensing rights of the Mountie image to the Disney Corporation. Now, Mickey Mouse has the exclusive rights to stamp the Mountie likeness all over its merchandise, capping a glaring set of Mickey ears on the heads of Canadian government."[v]

Global Disneyfication has colonized not only corporate and consumer spaces, but education is becoming entertainment. Making our universities into Disneyland turns education into edutainment. This trend is not entirely an imitative of Disney theatrics. Entertainment Theatre also takes place in cyber, video, Internet and TV spaces that are not owned by Disney. Disney is imitated widely. If a corporation can sanitize Nature (make trees out of plastic, keep animals away from forest-entertainment customers), turn consumption of a product or service into a Theatre, it can find increased market for its good. If a firm can recruit people to be cast members instead of employees, that role change is also a difference in wages, benefits, and rights of employment. It can be a role that is more fun, but also be one that pays less, and means you have to conform to the script (say these lines), and to the dress codes (wear these costumes) and to a robotic mentality (smile or be fired). These changes in corporate theatrics are said to be "good for business," for increasing customer service, loyalty, and creating more commitment to the firm by both cast members (employees) and guests (consumers).

As Disneyfication takes a global stage, and as imitators emerge, there is a strange colonization of the kinds of Theatre performed by corporations on the global stage. Our domestic lives, work lives, and social lives are increasingly theatrical. We the planet-dwellers are recruited into Disney roles. One's living room can become a theme park, an entertainment center, for those who accumulate all the necessary spectacle electronic wizardry.

Global Disneyfication is paradoxical in the way it brings us into a "common" space of Theatre shared in theme park memories, watching the same TV drama (Nixon's Watergate, Roots OJ Simpson, Rodney King, Clinton's Monica-gate, Gulf War, Ellen, Survivor, September 1 1, War on Terror). Yet, the other side of the "common" Theatre is a Theatre that divides and separates. Not everyone can afford the computer or TV to join into the common entertainment experience of the spectators.

The uncommon spaces of Theatre. Disneyfication may be turning ownership of the

commons over to corporate control. The Walt Disney Company has had its eye on America's public lands at least since the Sierra Club beat back their bid for a massive ski resort at Mineral King in the High Sierra, twenty some years ago. This time around, with a lot of careful planning and years of hard work, their goal is clearly to gain access to profit-making opportunities on all of America's public lands.[vi]

A walk in the woods may require a ticket purchased from an entertainment company.

Disney's minions, for example, have plans to take over federally owned land administered by the Forest Service, the Bureau of Land Management, the Park Service and the Fish & Wildlife Services. A new Disney protest movement has formed. Protest groups in dozens of western states are spending their weekends handing out literature at popular trailheads.

Global Disneyfication means the rapid disappearance of cultural diversity in national and global society of the spectacle. Instead of art history, cultural tourism becomes one more trip to Fantasyland. Instead of going to Egypt we head to King Tut's tomb in the Luxor in Las Vegas. As Global Disneyfication unfolds and reterritorializes cultures around the world, we will lose a lot of its cultural variety. The choices are fewer, between a Mickey Mouse, Nike, Jansport backpack, or don't show up to school. Some Arab and Asian countries have been restricting the import of postmortem culture books, films, and toys. But they are losing the fight to stem the public appetite to be Disneyfied, McDonaldized, and Las Vegasization. WTO and Multilateral Treaty on Investment (M.A.I.) agreements between nations limit the governmental power to control cultural imports. Traditional culture is a rare commodity, able to be appropriated by this trilogy, in the new Theatres of Global Capitalism.

Transition to Scene 9, McDonalds - Disney is not the only corporation that has become the role model of the Theatres of Capitalism. Next, we look at McDonalds Corporation, which has different theatrics, but one that invites as much critical review and protest by a myriad of postmortem consumer, labor, environmental, and anti-globalization groups and organizations. Disneyfication, McDonaldization and Las Vegasization constitute the trilogy of the Theatres of Capitalism, a marriage of postindustrial and postmodern capitalism that changes consumerism by making theatrics of entertainment our postindustrial revolution. In our next scene we see how Theatres of Capitalism utilize entertainment in the production, distribution, and consumption.

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[i] Retrieved September 11, 2000, from the World Wide Web:

[ii] Retrieved September 11, 2000, from the World Wide Web:

[iii] For more information, refer to the web site for the Rankokus Indian Reservation

[iv] Reuters Press Release (1999) See Photo with Minnie at

[v] Lee, Joey (2001) It’s a small world after all. Unpublished web site at

[vi] Burns, Melinda & Barry Bortnick (1998). Los Padres National Forest's day-use fees are a big controversy. News Press Release 7/5/98. The controversy is with Alasdair Coyne, an Ojai resident and a founder of Keep the Sespe Wild who opposes Disney. On web at

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