"Sleeping Beauty" Corporate Culture, Race, and Reality in Michael Crichton's Rising Sun and Tom Clancy's Debt of Honor
Over the course of the previous chapters, I have traced the evolution of soft management theory from the birth of human relations as a reaction against Taylorism to Abraham Maslow's work on selfactualization and synergy. I have explored the ways a range of writers and filmmakers have presented these theories and their implementation in the workplace as the occasion of significant shifts in the gendered meanings of work in America shifts that find male workers recast as emotional consumers and female workers committed to a workaholic breed of self actualization in the guise of liberal feminism. In the previous chapter I began to chart the outlines of corporate culture, the school of management theory that took hold in the 1980s, and which built on both the psychological insights of human relations and the emphasis on synergy and personal growth within the discourse of self actualization. The remainder of this book examines depictions of corporate culture's effects on American work, looking particularly at how the softness of this discourse has been presented as both a feminizing and racializing influence on American work and workers.