Journal 3-8 Max Bardowell 3-17-08

Amway: Company or Cult?

Answer to Last Week’s Question: While circumstances surrounding Brownie Wise’s removal from Tupperware are unclear, there seems to have been some trouble with her bookkeeping and finances that lead to irreconcilable differences between her and Earl Tupper, the owner of Tupperware. Unfortunately for her, Wise had no official contract with Tupperware. A soon as a year after her termination other company employees either didn’t know who she was or hadn’t heard from her in months. It was almost as if she had been erased from the collective memory of Tupperware. Creepy.

In several follow up questions to last week’s activities involving the Tupperware documentary, the Amway Company was mentioned. Upon further research it can be seen that Amway’s advertising, sales methods, and organization closely resemble that of Tupperware. There was also a strong opinion within the research I found that Amway and its employees resemble a cult organization, also similar to Tupperware. Amway’s followers certainly resemble religious zealots in some senses, as they are devoted to their company, its products, and the promise of a comfortable retirement to their core, attending seminars and conferences mirroring religious revivals, where the only difference is the absence of any divinity or religious code except the company values. More successful members of Amway get to present their stories of finding wealth through Amway at these seminars, bearing an uncanny resemblance to a testimony from a converted individual. Still, some of these connections are more transparent than others, and Amway could possibly be just another company that attempts to instill the corporate values of loyalty and trust to their employees through these team building group activities. However, the connections are there, and, as cult techniques have proven to be very effective unifiers in the past, I would not put it beyond Amway to try some of them out. Again, these techniques aren’t necessarily negative until a company takes them too far.

Question: What are the products that Amway sells?

Journal 3-7 Max Bardowell

Tupperware: Company or Cult?

Answer to Last Week’s Question: I could not find the exact origin of the term institutionalized prison. However, I believe it is simply a term that developed overtime as the symptoms of its manifestation developed as well. The effects prompted the label itself.

In Monday’s debate over the Tupperware documentary, the idea was presented that the Tupperware sales division could be considered a cult of sorts, evolving into an organization staffed by obsessive, devoted followers not by the company's choice, but by circumstance, or quite possibly in light of Tupperware’s overwhelming success, by providence. Their sales staff lived and breathed for the company, and this is what largely ensured that the Tupperware name would live on as the brand name for all things plastic within the kitchen.

The similarities that Tupperware sales shared with cult organizations are striking. The three most prevalent were the salespeople themselves, the rallies, and finally the iconic leader, Brownie Wise. The sales people were utterly devoted to selling Tupperware, not only due to their loyalty to the company, but also due to the great sense of personal pride that came with being a member of such a close-knit community. Once recruited, they would travel thousands of miles, relocating their entire families, just to secure a job with Tupperware, and once on staff they religiously attended the rally meetings, learning the Tupperware anthems and values in the process. The system closely mirrored that of an initiation. In the documentary, the former employees consistently and nostalgically pressed that their time spent at Tupperware was the greatest time of their life. Many broke down in tears.

The final and most clinching evidence comes in the form of Brownie Wise herself. Her persona, her methods, her close network of advisers, her followers, and her image, dripping with charisma and regality, all reeked of the single projection: cult leader. While this was seemingly unintentional, it did not go overlooked by Wise. The Tupperware sales group idolized her, and she used that for her own ends. While she helped the company more so than any other individual, she squandered her power and resources, another symptom of a cult leader. Still, she catapulted Tupperware to its past status, and kept it there for a great many years.

But is the cult methodology bad? Yes and no. It unifies and voices the company’s values more effectively than any other means, apparently even PR and HR gurus use cults as guides for their company’s image and department organization. However, they must beware of the many weaknesses of the cult organization, as they can bring down a company, just as they did with Tupperware.

Question: What ultimately brought about Brownie Wise’s removal from Tupperware?

Here is an old Tupperware infomercial. Notice their revolutionary advertising techniques.

Journal 3-6 Max Bardowell 3-3-08

Institutionalized Prisons

Question: The smart board is designed and manufactured by SMART Technologies who have 20 years of product design expertise. SMART is the industry pioneer in interactive whiteboards and other collaboration tools.

• http://smarttech.com/

We are a society built upon a system of punishments and rewards, and this fundamental fact can define how we interact both socially and politically far more readily than any other system. It is a reactive system, and thus begins with an action, whether positive or negative, that results in either a punishment or reward depending on the morality of the action itself. For instance, if you rob a bank you will be punished in proportion to your crime, as this follows the system’s protocols. However, if you perform well at work, you will be rewarded with a promotion or simply your monthly salary, as this to follows the standards of the system. It is a fairly basic system and leaves little room for interpretation, but unfortunately this fact could also hold the system’s most grievous flaw: redundancy.

We can become lost in this repetition of punishment and reward, as many parents learn early on as their children quickly become unresponsive to certain levels of punishment. This closed loop system leaves no room for growth and teaching, as the children become adapted to this crime/ punishment system so thoroughly that it becomes an ineffective deterrent. But this problem has evolved and grown far beyond the boundaries of the home. It now infects our penal system. At every level of our penitentiaries we find the phenomenon known as “institutionalized prisons”, where the prisoner knows the prisoner’s life for so long that they rely on the institution to define the structure of their lives. Drug dealers will simply allow themselves to be caught, as they find the punishment they receive is low enough that there is no need to risk their lives to avoid it. Criminals who commit a felony crime serve their time dutifully and then are thrown back to the streets with no job training and no one left to hire them. They turn back to the only thing they know- crime. It is a viscous cycle, nothing but a cruel and unusual punishment existing in broad daylight.

Still, we cannot have murders and criminals loose in society without having paid their debt to the nation, thus the catch- 22 forms; how do you punish an individual enough to influence his conscious decision making process without pushing him to become an institutionalized inmate. The solution begins with the addition of rehabilitation procedures to the penal system, where inmates will receive job training, education, and psychological aid in their recovery. The solution begins when we stop viewing prisoners as “convicts” and begin to see them as people.

Question: What is the origin of the term institutionalized prison?