Meaty, Beaty, Big and Monopolistic: The Story of General Motors

Corporate Social Responsibility reporting has grown increasingly in importance for companies in terms of portraying themselves as good corporate citizens. However, when confronted with a major corporate crisis that evoked an extensive loss in stakeholders’ trust, it remained unclear, how to further deal with the need for CSR communication without presenting oneself as exceedingly hypocritical. In the course of this study, the questions of how and to what extent crises cause change in a corporation’s CSR rhetoric were addressed. Therefore, the utilization of the rhetorical dimensions of logos, ethos, pathos, cosmos and autopoiesis as well as the amount of negative disclosure in the CSR reports of the world’s leading automobile companies (Toyota, General Motors, Volkswagen) were analyzed, one year before and one year after they had maneuvered themselves into a corporate crisis. The rhetorical analysis revealed that the distinctive context of each case (including the corporations’ responsibility for the crisis) dictated the rhetorical adjustments of the CSR reporting after the crisis. Moreover, it could be shown, that when reporting on the crisis cause itself, corporations tend to apply the dimension of ethos more frequently to counter the audience’s potential perception of their hypocrisy.

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GOODES v GENERAL MOTORS HOLDENS' PTY LTD

Victorian Reports ◽

10.25291/vr/1972-vr-386 ◽

1972 ◽

Vol [1972] VR ◽

pp. 386-393

Keyword(s):

General Motors

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How Important is the Financial Control System in M-Form Firms? The Evolution of a Monitoring and Control System in General Motors from the 1920s to the 1970s

SSRN Electronic Journal ◽

10.2139/ssrn.2401556 ◽

2014 ◽

Author(s):

Deepanshu Mohan

Keyword(s):

Control System ◽

General Motors ◽

Financial Control ◽

Monitoring And Control ◽

Monitoring And Control System ◽

And Control

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Merging Traffic

10.1093/oso/9780190882082.003.0006 ◽

2018 ◽

Author(s):

Mark Slobin

Keyword(s):

African American ◽

Auto Industry ◽

General Motors ◽

Musical Life ◽

United Auto Workers ◽

Folk Revival ◽

Auto Workers ◽

The Media ◽

The 1950S ◽

Special Case

This chapter surveys the institutions and movements that brought together the city’s musical life with the aim of merging disparate styles, trends, and personnel. First comes the auto industry, based on archival sources from Ford and General Motors that show how the companies deployed music for worker morale and company promotion. The complementary work of labor follows, through the United Auto Workers’ songs. Next comes the counterculture’s musical moment in the age of the folk revival and the artist collectives of the 1950s–1960s. Motown offers a special case of African American entrepreneurial merging of musical talent and style. The chapter closes with a look at the media—radio and newspapers—with their influential role in bringing audiences together, through music, in a city known for segregation, oppressive policing, and occasional outbursts of violence.

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GM: Sloan’s My Years With General Motors

10.1093/oso/9780198825395.003.0002 ◽

2018 ◽

Author(s):

Paul Brooker ◽

Margaret Hayward

Keyword(s):

Policy Making ◽

General Motors ◽

Efficient Production

Sloan’s classic management-text memoir and more recent sources reveal his use of all six rational methods during his 1920s enhancement of General Motors. The key methods were, first, his emphasis on innovative adaptation, which restructured General Motors into multiple operating divisions; second, his emphasis on strategically calculated marketing, which pioneered annual model changes, automobile styling, and style-based advertising; third, his emphasizing of institutionalized deliberation through a multi-tiered committee system to enhance policy-making. CEO Sloan’s use of these rational methods resulted in General Motors becoming the world’s largest industrial corporation, with more than half a million employees, and having its methods copied by competitors. Finally, there is a description of the rivalry between his and Henry Ford’s corporations and approaches, resulting in Sloanism’s administrative rationality defeating Fordism’s focus on efficient production.

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