Many current debates in American life concern the moral dimensions of market activities. This dissertation uses one such current debate - controversy over the giant retailer Wal-Mart - to explore how different moral worldviews inform discourse about economic issues. Drawing on literatures in the sociology of culture, economic sociology, as well as an emerging sociology of morality, the central question of this analysis concerns the ways in which competing social groups use common cultural resources to create different, and even conflicting, moral worldviews through their discourse.;To this end, I analyze text materials, press releases, website content, and media articles created by Wal-Mart along with its chief adversary, Wal-Mart Watch, during the period 2005-2006. I find that both sides of the Wal-Mart debate invoke the moral dialectics of thrift and benevolence, freedom and fairness, and individualism and community. Yet they apply these values in such different ways that they ultimately create two separate discursive worldviews. Wal-Mart's supporters prioritize the family as the main unit of reference in their discourse, and build around it a moral worldview in which the market is fair, and thus individuals and their families need only equal access to its institutions to be able to benefit from its bounteous provisions. Full participation in capitalist America - and its commonplace trope of the American dream - is accomplished by the yin and yang of thrift and consumption, a paradox which is reconciled by Wal-Mart and its mantra of everyday low prices.;To the contrary, Wal-Mart Watch repeatedly censures Wal-Mart for its alleged selfishness and monopolistic perversion of market freedom. Wal-Mart's size and scale, for these activists, threatens various forms of freedom such that it renders the marketplace inherently unfair to entire classes of people - particularly women, African-Americans, and small business owners who are forced out of business by Wal-Mart's relentless bottom line. The mirror image of Wal-Mart's focus on the Gemeinschaft of family, Wal-Mart's most public detractors make scarce mention of families in lieu of a focus on larger Gesellschaft categories such as the worker, the taxpayer, and the citizen - all of whom are deprived of revenue and freedom due to Wal-Mart's allegedly poor care and provision for its employees.;The final portion of the dissertation analyzes how these moral claims are represented in the media over time, analyzing a sample of 1400 articles that mention Wal-Mart in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and USA Today during 2000-2006. I find that claims made during this time period evolve into a largely constrained discourse that increasingly frame critiques of Wal-Mart as concerns about workers' issues. I similarly find that claims about group-based concerns (such as those of workers and/or taxpayers) were the most common kind of claims used when media articles mentioned controversies over Wal-Mart. At the same time, examining media coverage of particularly controversial issues also reveals that moral claims appear with surprising frequency, particularly because the media makes increasingly frequent reference to Wal-Mart's tarnished public image even as it paradoxically emphasizes the company's virtue of thrift.
展开▼
