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Wal-Mart Wars

Moral Populism in the Twenty-First Century
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Wal-Mart is America's largest retailer. The national chain of stores is a powerful stand-in of both the promise and perils of free market capitalism. Yet it is also often the target of public outcry for its labor practices, to say nothing of class-action lawsuits, and a central symbol in America's increasingly polarized political discourse over consumption, capitalism and government regulations. In many ways the battle over Wal-Mart is the battle between "Main Street" and "Wall Street" as the fate of workers under globalization and the ability of the private market to effectively distribute precious goods like health care take center stage. In Wal-Mart Wars, Rebekah Massengill shows that the economic debates are not about dollars and cents, but instead represent a conflict over the deployment of deeper symbolic ideas about freedom, community, family, and citizenship. Wal-Mart Wars argues that the family is not just a culture wars issue to be debated with regard to same-sex marriage or the limits of abortion rights; rather, the family is also an idea that shapes the ways in which both conservative and progressive activists talk about economic issues, and in the process, construct different moral frameworks for evaluating capitalism and its most troubling inequalities. With particular attention to political activism and the role of big business to the overall economy, Massengill shows that the fight over the practices of this multi-billion dollar corporation can provide us with important insight into the dreams and realities of American capitalism.
C o n t e n t s Acknowledgments ixPreface xiiiPart 1 Why Should We Care about the Wal -Mart D ebate ?1 Constructing Moral Markets 32 Contextualizing the Wal-Mart Wars 19Part 2 Competing Frameworks for Market Moral ity3 Individuals and Communities 454 Thrift and Benevolence 775 Freedom and Fairness 115Part 3 Market Moral ity in Med ia and P o l itics6 How Wal-Mart Wins the War of Words 1537 Moral Populism in the Twenty-First Century 175 Appendix: Methodology 189Notes 195Bibliography 205Index 215About the Author 225
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