A central premise of this study is that contemporary art, along with other cultural products, functions as a currency of both material and symbolic value for corporations, and in a different way, for their senior executives, in Western capitalist democracies of the late twentieth century. Although most of the empirical data in this study takes the company as the unit of analysis, corporations are not just abstract concepts, but commercial institutions run by men (and few women) with their distinctive social traits and aspirations. On the basis of this research, coupled with other findings, it is evident that the initiatives and leadership of the chief executive/chairman, or in the case of professional firms, the senior partner(s), is the single most important determinant in any form of corporate arts intervention.^^ These top executives, "an élite within an élite,"
in particular those overseeing large corporations, are often reported in the media as having great or even "mad" passions for art. Their close involvement in corporate arts ventures can not be conceptualized as purely incidental, but rather has to be understood as a locus of social distinction to which their élite status and class aspirations are anchored. Corporate intervention cannot accordingly be fully appraised without addressing both these interrelated elements.
The theory of "cultural capital" developed by the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu is conceptually useful for understanding the system of taste and value, of which contemporary art is part, within the general structure of political, economic and social formations. Bourdieu’s main interest in the arts is arguably as a form of hegemonic ideology, in which the transmission of the arts from generation to generation serves to preserve and reproduce the dominant position of a dominant class. Cultural capital, his widely influential concept, thus serves as an "instrument of domination, "i*
Second, the social relations between economic capital and cultural capital, which he rigorously constructed and argued at the level of individuals, can be equally applied to economic entities such as companies without modification. Obviously, none of the companies in the study can venture into the cultural arena without a substantial accumulation of economical capital. In other words, the prospect for businesses to build up cultural capital, not unlike individuals, can only be realised through their economic power.
Nevertheless what Bourdieu means by "cultural capital" has to be modified, to some extent, and specifically delineated here in the analysis of corporate "taste. " This is partly because when he speaks of "cultural capital," he sometimes means the knowledge of and familiarity with various artistic styles and products, while at other times he refers to the prestige and social value which are often conferred on those who have shown such competence. Nor are the ways in which he uses the term throughout his numerous works always consistent; sometimes it is interchangeable with other terms such as "symbolic capital" or "social capital. As it is extremely difficult to conceptualise how a commercial company as an entity can master and demonstrate artistic competence in the
way Bourdieu argues, this analysis will be more concerned with cultural capital in the second sense, namely the social status and value that accrue to a company engaged in cultural practices. Yet unlike the bourgeois/petit bourgeois in Bourdieu’s analysis, the commercial enterprise in this study actually owns the means to materially appropriate the works of art, as evidenced by their enormous art collections. The term "cultural capital," thus, refers to this form of ownership as well as to the material appropriation of symbolic objects.
But there is an obvious limit in applying a Bourdieuian conceptual apparatus in our research. Although the material interests that companies and individual members of society own or control, and the material conditions under which they have to operate, may be similar, the concept of class structure and formation of which Bourdieu speaks, and which is fundamental to his reading, is not readily applicable to an understanding of the corporate domain. The dichotomised schema of the dominant and the dominated, and their associated cultural practices and social distinction, has thus limited use here in the analysis of companies.
This may have more to do with the state of social science research than with the impossibility of pursuing a similar line of inquiry. As companies had never entered into the cultural sphere as social agents in such a collectively dominant way as they did in the 1980s, they have yet to be seen as an object of inquiry in terms of their economic positions, social relations and cultural practices, except for a few case studies in which attempts have been made to explore exceptionally notorious in sta n c e s.A p p a re n tly when social scientists address the issue of market capacities of companies, and/or their domination, they limit their comments to the economic activities and positioning of companies. Interestingly enough, it is in journalistic writing that a possible interpretation of companies’ social advancement in their arts endeavours is often perceived and articulated.
In contrast to the individual level, where the relationship between economic wealth and cultural capital is freely interchangeable, and where the accumulation of cultural capital serves specifically to reproduce and consolidate the position of the dominant class, the
purpose of business’ efforts to secure cultural capital is not as straightforward. One cannot simply speak of the domination of companies in the same way as one can of a ruling class. In other words, what is being dominated in the case of businesses is oblique. There are different levels and forms of domination. The economic strength of a company in the marketplace is a form of domination over other competitors, but companies are also dominant in our consumer society, in particular the multinationals, in the sense that they exert a profound influence over our living space, they influence the political process, and they circumscribe our individual choices.
It is in maintaining this influence that the accumulation of corporate cultural capital makes economic sense. The material and symbolic exchange in the case of corporate art collections is an obvious and direct one, but in most instances what companies acquire from their arts participation is quantitatively less tangible. Alert to their symbolic standing in people’s (consumers’) minds, companies utilise the arts, replete with their social implications, as another form of advertising or public-relations strategy, or to adopt the jargon of corporate culture, to go in for "niche marketing": a way of striving to gain an entrée into a more sophisticated social group through identifying with their specific tastes. It is in this locus of vested interests that the pursuit of cultural capital as a means to economic ends, or the conversion of cultural capital into an economic one, assumes its most transparent, and sometimes politically pernicious, form. The Philip Morris Companies, for instance, after some thirty years of cultivating and accumulating "cultural capital," was able to cash in by calling on eminent arts institutions to "lobby" on its behalf against anti-smoking legislation in 1994 in New York, a matter we are to deal with
in more detail in Chapter 4.
If the application of the concept of "cultural capital" in corporate analysis is in need of further research and refinement, it is less so in the case of top executives. On this individual level, Bourdieu’s concept of cultural capital provides a useful analytical tool, particularly in conjunction with Max Weber’s notion of the status group, and contemporary writings by the American sociologist Paul DiMaggio and other scholars who have explored the subject of corporate elites in relation to the political economy of capitalism.
These high-powered grey-suited men, to paraphrase DiMaggio’s description of cultural capitalists, are the "cultural managerial capitalists."** They are not traditional capitalists in the sense that the majority of them do not make their wealth from industrial enterprises as those of the nineteenth century did. Unlike those earlier capitalists and their "inheritors," these chairmen/chief executives are professional managers who emerge through the so-called "managerial revolution."*^ Their power within the corporation is thus achieved through their corporate position rather than family lineage. But they are capitalists nevertheless in two senses. At the top of the corporate ladder, they are the managers of large capital, and thus in turn often have substantial vested interests in the company’s profits such as "stock option" plans and year-end bonuses. Nor are the managerial interests necessarily distinguishable from ownership interests; profit maximisation is still the primary concern of these managers, according to various research findings.
As family capitalism has declined in the twentieth century, so has the archetype of the nineteenth-century magnate art patrons, those cultural capitalist so capably analysed in DiMaggio’s essay. The cadre of new cultural managerial capitalists referred to in this study is therefore the byproduct of an incomplete transformation of family capitalism to institutional capitalism and their uneasy coexistence in business community today.^* People such as David Rockefeller, the grand persona of the tycoons of a bygone era, who, as chairman of the Chase Manhattan Bank, initiated a corporate art collection for the Bank in the United States in the ’60s, represent therefore a transitional phase of this transformation.^^
The majority of the chairmen/chief executives I am referring to do not enjoy family inheritance in the way Rockefeller did. But they are nevertheless the individuals who possess substantial volumes of different forms of capital in the terms of Bourdieu’s analysis. Despite the relative availability of universal higher education since the Second World War in Britain and the United States, and despite a number of "up-from-nowhere" achievers, the world of top corporate management continues to be dominated by an economically privileged, and thereby socially and educationally prominent, class in both c o u n t r i e s . T h e s e executives, more often than not, come from an upper-class
background and have been educated in public schools and the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge in Britain, or their counterparts in America, leading preparatory schools and Ivy League Universities. They share with each other the directorships of various corporations; they are not only active in business associations and exclusive social clubs, but also the trustees of charitable and cultural institutions throughout the c o u n t r y . I n other words, like those earlier entrepreneurs, the corporate élites strive to maintain and consolidate their dominant position and status within the corporate and social life through an intricate web of economic/social networks and relationships. Engaging the companies they oversee in the arts and in cultural activities is part and parcel of this strategy.
This raises the whole question of social status and the values that artistic/cultural products signify in advanced capitalist society. Art has long been patronised by those with power and status in society, and artistic products have thus always functioned as a status symbol as well as objects with market value. To quote Paul DiMaggio: "they [cultural goods] are consumed for what they say about their consumers to themselves and to others, as inputs into the production of social relations and identities. Although "status distinction," according to Max Weber, is not always linked to "class distinction," they are evidently identical in this i n s t a n c e . T h i s is particularly true in the sense that these corporate elites, through the mediation of the popular press, intentionally or unintentionally, have cultivated the image of being art patrons — of being late twentieth- century Medicis. They visit galleries, tour artists’ studios and buy at the main auction houses, and all this on top of their already extremely demanding schedules. They do so as if it is a specific style o f life in full public view, and above the shabby cut-and-thrust of the business world.
This phenomenon in which the business elites utilise their corporate location as an extension of their personal interest is not, of course, a mere speculation. An empirical study of the corporate giving economy of Minneapolis/St. Paul conducted by Joseph Galaskiewicz argues that it serves not only to improve the company’s marketplace position, but also to create and maintain businessmen’s position within their élite c i r c l e s . T h e universality of the situation has prompted Americans to coin a term for it: they call it "incorporated pocketbook." But within the hierarchical power structure
of a corporation, this is taken as a given. It is not to be challenged, certainly not in public, if the chairman spends a couple of million pounds to refurbish his suite in accordance with his taste and style, as happened in the case of an American bank in London.^* It is only, and very infrequently, to be challenged in such celebrated cases as that of Armand Hammer’s art scandals in America, in which top executives were investigated in court in connection with their arts projects, where the true nature of their involvement received public exposure.