Wal-Mart, of course, is red state to the core. It is a Republican firm, certainly among the top managerial ranks, whose political contributions in 2000 and 2004 flowed almost exclusively to George Bush and his party. But the red state character of Wal-Mart is about a lot more than electoral politics, just as modern conservatism represents far more than allegiance to any single political party. Wal-Mart has proven remarkably successful in propagating a distinctive brand of Christian entrepreneurialism and faux egalitarianism well beyond its southern roots. The company prides itself on its corporate culture, but the resonance of that ideology arises not from its uniqueness, but from the way that Wal-Mart executives have played a systematic role in translating a Reagan- era conservative populism into a set of ideological props that legitimize Wal-Mart’s hierarchical structure and insulate most employees from other calls upon their loyalty.
The ideological culture projected by Wal-Mart has several interwoven components, some not all that different from the welfare capitalism pioneered by paternalistic firms, including Pullman, Heinz, and National Cash Register, in the years before World War I. The first theme is that of family, community, and a corporate egalitarianism that unites $9 an hour sales clerks with the millionaires who work out of the Bentonville corporate headquarters. Wal-Mart’s small-town communitarianism is usually identified with the persona of Sam Walton, famous for his Ozark twang, shirtsleeve dress, and the aging pick-up trucks he drove around Bentonville. Walton strove mightily, and often successfully, to project Wal- Mart as the embodiment of a more virtuous and earthy enterprise. Despite the technological sophistication of the Wal-Mart infrastructure, Walton derided computer-age expertise and instead celebrated hard work, steadfast loyalty and the mythos of small-town America as the key that has unlocked success for the corporation and the individuals who labor within it.
Walton and other executives institutionalized this imaginary social construction with an adroit linguistic shift. They labeled all employees “associates,” routinely used first names in conversation and on badges, and renamed the personnel department the Wal-Mart “people division.” Associates who perform below par are not disciplined, but rather “coached.”
Even more important than this faux classlessness is the Wal-Mart culture of country, faith, and entrepreneurial achievement. Large U.S. firms have always linked themselves to a patriotic impulse and not only in times of war or crisis. In the 1950s General Motors sought to sell its lowest priced car with a jingle that told working-class consumers to “See the USA, in your Chevrolet. America’s the greatest land of all!” Wal-Mart has been even more intent on such a linkage, beginning with its abortive “Made in the USA” advertising and purchasing campaign of the late 1980s to its contemporary efforts celebrating the guardsmen and troops—many former Wal-Mart employees—who are serving in the Middle East. But overt U.S. nationalism has its limits in a firm dedicated to international expansion. As Don Soderquist, Wal-Mart’s chief operating officer during most of the 1990s, told associates, “We have pride in our country, and they have the same pride in theirs. What’s transferable is the culture of Wal-Mart, making people feel good, treating them right.”
Soderquist, the foremost articulator of the Wal-Mart culture, wrote in his 2005 memoir, The Wal-Mart Way, “I’m not saying that Wal-Mart is a Christian company, but I can unequivocally say that Sam founded the company on the Judeo- Christian principles found in the Bible.” Actually, Walton took his Presbyterian identity rather lightly, and unlike Soderquist, who has contributed heavily to Arkansas evangelical churches, the company founder thought profit sharing schemes and Ozark high jinks more central to the Wal-Mart ethos than do contemporary executives. But Soderquist is right in emphasizing the extent to which Wal-Mart exists within a cultural universe that is Protestant (Christian in contemporary parlance) even if corporate officers never declare this evangelical sensibility to be a component of the Wal-Mart culture.
But it is there. Like the mega-churches, the TV evangelists, and the Zig Ziglar motivational seminars, Wal-Mart is immersed in a Christian ethos that links personal salvation to entrepreneurial success and social service to free enterprise. Wal-Mart publications are full of stories of hard pressed associates who find redemption, economic and spiritual, through dedication to the company. Selfless service, to the customer, the community and to Wal-Mart, will soon reap its own reward. The telephone company, the old AT&T, also once declared itself devoted to “universal service,” to projecting the “voice with a smile,” but Wal-Mart’s invocation of this imperative has a decidedly less secular flavor. The 1991 Sam’s Associate Handbook declared that Wal-Mart “believes management’s responsibly is to provide leadership that serves the associate. Managers must support, encourage and provide opportunities for associates to be successful. Mr. Sam calls this ‘Servant Leadership.’” That phrase, with its subtle Christian connotation, has increasingly appeared in Wal-Mart publications and spread to a growing number of company vendors. When H. Lee Scott was being groomed to take over the company, Joe Hardin, a former Sam’s Club executive, then CEO of Kinko’s, praised Scott, “Lee is a great Wal-Mart person. He is someone who has grown up in the culture, and he openly communicates and listens to other people’s ideas. He is a true servant leader who knows how to build a team....”
It is one thing to formulate a distinctive corporate culture, but it is quite another to preserve and reproduce that set of ideological and organizational structures when Wal-Mart built stores and distribution centers outside its home territory. But Wal-Mart has succeeded. In the 1970s and 1980s the com pany did not leapfrog into the rich but culturally alien suburban markets, but expanded like molasses, spreading through tier after tier of rural and exurban counties. Although Wal- Mart was opening or acquiring hundreds of stores, the average distance of a new store from Bentonville was but 273 miles in the late 1970s. Moreover, Wal-Mart recruited executive talent almost exclusively from the South Central states— the Company’s two most recent CEO’s are graduates of Southwest Missouri State University and Pittsburg State University in Kansas—and when Wal-Mart did put its stores beyond a hard drive from Northwest Arkansas, its high degree of centralization insured that the Bentonville ethos would not be diluted. Wal-Mart’s fleet of corporate jets enables many regional managers to live in Bentonville, even as they administer a far-flung retail territory. Like the yearly extravaganza in Fayetteville, the weekly Saturday morning show and tell puts the top brass, scores of middle managers, and a selected group of lesser folk together in a ritualized setting that may be “quaint and hokey” but which a visiting Fortune reporter avers “makes the world’s largest enterprise continue to feel as small and folksy as Bentonville. And what ever makes Wal-Mart feel smaller and folksier only makes it stronger. Or scarier.”
Wal-Mart’s real business takes place not in Bentonville, but in thousands of discount stores and supercenters. Here the essential corporate cadres are the managers and assistant managers. They are responsible for meeting the sales targets and expense ratios that Bentonville’s computers relentlessly put before them each week. The Wal-Mart corporate culture may smooth their way, but the job of the manager, sometimes the only salaried employee in the store, and his assistants, is essentially labor management, conducted with more sticks than carrots, more actual sweat than inspirational speeches. It is difficult, with long hours, and uncertain career prospects.
In the early 1980s Wal-Mart faced a recruitment crisis. With more than a hundred new stores opening each year, Wal- Mart had to hire or promote upwards of a thousand managers or management trainees during the same time frame. The company faltered. Recruitment from within meant the promotion of a lot of women, and that ran headlong into those Wal-Mart family values that tilted toward small town patriarchy. Of course, the company’s sexism had its own logic. The feminist revolution had barely reached middle America, which meant that the kind of women who worked for Wal-Mart were still largely responsible for rearing the children, putting dinner on the table, and taking care of grandma. Most were not about to pick up stakes and move to a distant town in order to move up Wal-Mart’s short and unpredictable managerial ladder. But if Wal-Mart promoted them into management in their hometown store, then they were likely to be poor disciplinarians.
How were they to “coach” old friends and relatives who had once shared gossip in the break room?
So Wal-Mart looked to the universities to recruit a new generation of managers. But here they faced another problem. Few freshly minted MBAs were going take an arduous $25,000 per year assistant manager job, and even the undergraduate business majors at the big schools became frustrated when they found that Wal-Mart had little use for their accounting and marketing skills. The solution was to search for a fresh cohort of management trainees in the denominational colleges and the branch campuses of the state universities, where diligence, Christian culture, and modest career expectations were already the norm. Wal-Mart wanted the B and C students, the organization men, the undergraduates who were the first in their family to take college courses. They wanted young men, and a few women, who could fully commit to the Wal-Mart ethos and the corporate culture.
Wal-Mart sent recruiters to small middle South colleges, worked with established organizations like the Distributive Education Clubs of America, and advertised on cable, at local military bases, and in area churches. However, Wal-Mart would soon recruit as many as a third of its management trainees from the ranks of a dynamic new group, Students in Free Enterprise (SIFE), which claimed a presence on more than 700 U.S. campuses by the end of the century.
SIFE was and remains an ideological formation that propagandizes on behalf of free market capitalism within the conservative Christian world nurtured at places like College of the Ozarks; John Brown University in Siloam Spring, Arkansas; Southwest Baptist University in Bolivar, Missouri; Drury University in nearby Springfield; and La Sierra University in Riverside, California. Like Wal-Mart, which put several of its top executives on the SIFE board and funded hundreds of faculty as Sam Walton Free Enterprise Fellows, SIFE has not celebrated a neo-liberal world of naked self-interest and Darwinian struggle. Unlike Wall Street’s Gordon Gekko, SIFE does not preach that greed is good. Instead the organization, which was revitalized by Wal-Mart in the early 1980s, has prepared students for entry-level management posts by linking the collegiate quest for self-esteem and humanitarian good works to an ideology of market capitalism and career advancement. Thus the SIFE statement of principles declares: “We believe that the best way to improve the lives of others is through Free Enterprise practiced morally.” Propagated successfully, this was just the kind of philosophy needed to generate the devoted, youthful cadre Wal-Mart wanted to staff its ever-expanding retail empire. And it was enough to earn this “student” group a place on the official Wal-Mart web site.
SIFE is highly centralized and hugely ambitious. It is a “missionary organization,” observed one Sam Walton Fellow, whose annual convention taps into some of the same enthusiasms that energize the larger Wal-Mart conclaves. The SIFE board largely replicates the set of firms with the largest stake in the Wal-Mart supply network, plus a few specialty retailers, like Walgreens and Radio Shack, that do not compete directly with the Bentonville monarch. As Wal-Mart expands abroad, so too does SIFE, which now claims campus “teams” at more than 600 foreign schools. Sam Walton Fellows are now mentoring young people in free enterprise education in the republics of the former Soviet Union, in South Africa, throughout Britain and Western Europe - where Wal-Mart is trying to establish a bigger footprint - and above all in East Asia, which is truly capitalism’s most dynamic frontier.
Nelson Lichtenstein teaches U.S. Labor History at the University of California, Santa Barbara. This abridged version of the lead article in his collection Wal-Mart: The Face of Twenty-First Century Capitalism (New Press, November 2005) appears with permission. Responsibility for editing is ours alone.