http://www.uwsp.edu/geo/courses/geog100/WhyCorpsSubvert.htm. Corporate Rules of Behavior
Jerry Mander, a successful advertising executive suggests 11 rules that describe corporate behavior, and which inherently degrade our environment and capitalist societies. In essence these rules are (after Montague, 1995):
1. The Profit Imperative: Profit is the ultimate measure of all corporate decisions. It takes precedence over community well-being, worker health, public health, peace, environmental preservation or national security. The profit imperative and the growth imperative are the most fundamental corporate drives; together they represent the corporation's instinct to "live."
2. The Growth Imperative: Corporations live or die by whether they can sustain growth. This fuels the corporate desire to find and develop scarce resources in obscure parts of the world.
3. Competition and Aggression: Corporations place every person in management in fierce competition with each other. Anyone interested in a corporate career must hone his or her abilities to seize the moment. Corporate ideology holds that competition improves worker incentive and corporate performances and therefore benefits society.
4. Amorality: Not being human, corporations do not have morals or altruistic goals. So decisions that may be antithetical to community goals or environmental health are made without misgivings. Corporations, however, seek to hide their amorality and attempt to act as if they were altruistic. Corporations tend to advertise the very qualities they do not have in order to allay negative public perceptions. When corporations say "we care," it is almost always in response to the widespread perception that they do not care. And they don't. How could they? They don't have feelings or morals.
5. Hierarchy: Corporate law requires that corporations be structured into classes of superiors and subordinates within a centralized pyramidal structure. This hierarchical form also characterizes the military, the government and most institutions in our society. The effect on society is to make it seem natural that we have all been placed within a national pecking order. Some jobs are better than others, some lifestyles are better than others, some neighborhoods, some races, some kinds of knowledge. Men over women. Westerners over non-Westerners. Humans over nature. That effective, non-hierarchical modes of organization exist on the planet, and have been successful for millennia, is barely known to most Americans.