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| Walt Disney, Mickey Mouse and Cinderella Castle |
Crane and Matten spent the last 5 days in Disney World Orlando. Which had nothing to do with recent fatherhood or anything like that.
Who would have guessed: it was the venue of this year’s Academy of Management Annual Meeting – the biggest conference of management academics in the world, which
takes place every August – in five of the Disney Hotels in Orlando.
As if this is not ironic enough, listen to the title of this
year’s conference: ‘Capitalism in Question’! Whaow. Questioning capitalism in
Disneyworld – for some a joke, for others hypocritical, for most of us simply
absurd.
But wait a second. Once I arrived there, it took me only a few
hours to think that Minnie & Mickey’s world is actually the best place to
understand what is wrong with contemporary global capitalism. And, I love to
add, nothing like what you would expect to be a capitalist experience;
I rather had vivid deja-vu’s to my frequent visits to communist East Germany
before the wall came down in 1989.
To begin with, the treatment Disney gives you as a consumer
is rather dismal. I did not have a single meal where I did not had to join a
long line. Even if you reserve a table, you are still kept waiting for a good
half hour. Where i stayed (Coronado Springs) there was not much choice to
begin with. Just one restaurant, and one snack bar. The latter had some 15
items on the food menu – but every lunch we could just chose between two types
of pre-packed sandwiches. So, by and large, a pretty socialist experience. Bars
closed at midnight sharp, and off it was to bed, just in the same way as you
had to rush to checkpoints at midnight when visiting relatives in East Berlin
back in the day.
The inefficiency was just hilarious. Even my welcome package
arrived by UPS just in time on my return back to home…
The GDR claimed to be the worker’s paradise
(‘Arbeiterparadies’), just about the same as Disneyland tells us everywhere
that we are in the ‘Happiest Place on Earth’. Trained to be happy, wishing you
a ‘magical day’ each and every second – the Disney ‘cast members’ (no workers
here) have to push that message and play that role 24/7. Of course it’s mostly
fake – and with dismal wages most of these actually rather nice people feel more
like ‘mouse trapped’.
Slightly spooky is the extreme focus on security: tight
controls and ID-ing at every (gated, of course) entrance. One colleague wanted
to just walk between the different conference hotels; no such thing: all of
them are heavily fenced in. He was warned that stepping off the main paths
would immediately call security to the scene – so he joined the lines for the
shuttle buses between hotels.
Now, I could rant on like that. The interesting question is
what this all has to do with capitalism. It struck me, that at the end of the
day, going to Disneyworld for five days of conferencing gives you a flavor of
what it would look like if our life would be completely controlled by private
corporations.
Its worth looking into the outline of the Conference to
understand what we are talking about: Here is what it says:
“Three features differentiate capitalism from previous economic systems in history: (a) market competition among profit-driven firms, (b) wage employment within these firms, and (c) limited government over them.”
The result is rather surprising: the actual ‘capitalist’
experience resembles life in ‘communist’ times. Of course I know that East
Germany (or the Soviet block in the cold war) was more a state capitalist
system, but still. Disney – once you are there – gave me snippets of a
socialist experience.
Including the ‘regime critique’. How I enjoyed ranting about
the place with my colleagues – in the flesh, on facebook or in other ways of
making fun of the ‘jail’ in which we all felt trapped. Someone even wrote a
little manifesto! Anonymously of course, Disney might share it with the NSA
maybe?
It was great for the spirit. Back to the cold, free world
out there, I kind of miss it already. Just in the same way ‘Ostalgie’ crept up
to many of my fellow countrymen after the fall of the iron curtain…
DM
Photo by gwaar, reproduced under the Creative Commons License
