We already know that Wal-Mart is the biggest retailer. (If it were an independent nation, it would be China's eighth-largest trading partner.) We also know that it is maniacal about low prices. (Some economists say it has single-handedly cut inflation by 1 percent in recent years, saving consumers billions of dollars annually.) We know that its labor practices have come under attack. (It charges its workers so much for health insurance that about one-third of them do not have it.)
But the more than 250 sociologists, anthropologists, historians and other academics who gathered at the University of California on Monday for a conference on Wal-Mart came looking for more than the company's vital statistics. Like archaeologists who pick over artifacts to understand an ancient society, the academics were examining Wal-Mart for insights into the very nature of American capitalist culture. As Susan Strasser, a history professor at the University of Delaware, said, "Wal-Mart has come to represent something that's even bigger than it is."
Indeed, with US$256 billion in annual sales and 20 million shoppers visiting its stores each day, Wal-Mart has greater reach and influence than any retailer in history. "In each historical epoch a prototypical enterprise seems to embody a new and innovative set of economic structures and social relationships," said Nelson Lichtenstein, a history professor at the University of California. "These template businesses are emulated because they have put in place, indeed perfected for their era, the most efficient and profitable relationship between the technology of production, the organization of work and the new shape of the market."
In the 19th century, he said, the standard-setting company was the Pennsylvania Railroad; in the mid-20th century, it was General Motors; and in the late 20th century, it was Microsoft. Today's prototypical company, he declared in opening the conference, is Wal-Mart, which, he said, rezones American cities, sets wage standards and even conducts diplomacy with other nations.
"In short, the company's management legislates for the rest of us key components of American social and industrial policy," Lichtenstein said.
Wal-Mart has created a very different model from General Motors, he added, noting that GM helped build the world's most affluent middle class by paying wages far above the average and by providing generous health and pension plans. Lichtenstein said GM's wage pattern spurred other companies to raise compensation levels, while Wal-Mart's relatively low wages and benefits -- its workers average less than US$18,000 a year -- were doing just the opposite.
The company's pay scale and hard-nosed labor practices, said Simon Head, a fellow at the Century Foundation and author of The New Ruthless Economy: Work and Power in the Digital Age (Oxford University Press, 2003) mean that "Wal-Mart is certainly a template of 21st-century capitalism, but a capitalism that increasingly resembles a capitalism of 100 years ago." He added, "It combines the extremely dynamic use of technology with a very authoritarian and ruthless managerial culture."
Wal-Mart declined to send a representative to the conference. "We were invited to attend, but we passed," said Sarah Clark, a company spokeswoman. "The agenda looked pretty biased against Wal-Mart."
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