Your Call Is Very Important to Us: Advertising and the Corporate Theft of Personhood

Richard Hardack's book explores how corporations appropriate the rights and identities of people, shaping our culture and relationships. He connects various topics to show how corporate personhood allows corporations to impersonate and displace actual people. The book highlights the pernicious role and effect of advertising in our daily lives and integrates pressing issues in the U.S., such as the privatization of the public sphere, wealth and rights polarization, corporate power, influence, and monopoly, and the descent of political debate and policy into the language of advertising, branding, and entertainment.

Format: Hardback
Length: 376 pages
Publication date: 15 May 2023
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

Richard Hardack's groundbreaking exploration of corporate appropriation of rights and identities reveals the far-reaching consequences of corporate America's quest for dominance in our culture. Hardack challenges the notion that corporations are merely economic entities, highlighting their profound impact on our economy, identities, and relationships. Through a wide-ranging study, he connects various topics, including advertising, pop culture, representations of nature, science fiction, legal history, colonization and slavery, and the desire for transcendence. Hardack demonstrates how corporate personhood, the idea that corporations are people, allows corporations to impersonate and displace actual individuals. He also offers a novel reassessment of the pernicious role and effect of advertising in our daily lives. The book addresses pressing issues in the U.S., such as the privatization of the public sphere, wealth and rights polarization, unchecked corporate power, influence, and monopoly, and the descent of political debate and policy into the language of advertising, branding, and entertainment. Hardack treats the assumptions that foster corporate personhood as both cause and effect, driver and symptom, of a series of transformations in U.S. society. By awakening readers to this foundational way corporations infiltrate most human activities and interactions, Hardack empowers them to better understand and safeguard themselves against systemic changes to the American economy, culture, and politics.

Weight: 714g
Dimension: 436 x 235 x 33 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9781538177730