WALMART AND THE CRITICAL APPROACHBY: EMILY GILBERT

ARTICLE SUMMARY

• After providing the opportunity for customers to provide feedback of their shopping experience (via online survey), Walmart noticed a trend of dissatisfaction of there customers within all their stores across the country

ARTICLE SUMMARY

• Some of the most common complaints included: dirty bathrooms, empty shelves, endless checkout lines and impossible-to-find employees.• Leaving only 16% of

Walmart stores were meeting the companies “customer service goal”.

ARTICLE SUMMARY

• This dissatisfaction showed up where it truly mattered. New store opening sales have fallen fell for five straight quarters. Along with this, the company’s revenue fell for the first time in its 45-year run of being a public company.

ARTICLE SUMMARY

To alleviate this problem, executives came up with a “revolutionary” (in Walmart standards) idea.

The idea?

Pay workers more, training them better and offer better opportunities for advancement

ARTICLE SUMMARY

• The results of this “Walmart revolution”, have been promising. In early 2016, proportion of Walmart stores started hitting their targeted customer-service ratings.

• This caused a rebound effect to 75 percent.

• In other words, sales are on the rise, again.

THE CRITICAL APPROACH

• Some of the most important roots of the critical theory can be found within the works of Karl Marx• Karl Marx (an intellectual of the 19th century), reviewed the relationship between owners and workers (within a capitalistic society).

CRITICAL APPROACH • Marx theorized that there was

an natural imbalance in owner/worker relationship

• This imbalance would cause workers to rise up and revolt against the capitalist system

• A “critique” of this relationship in balance would lead to a revolution because it revealed fundamental truths of the human condition

CRITICAL APPROACH

The Most important concept when studying the Critical Approach?

• A sample of the Sources of Power in Organizations: • Formal authority• Control of scarce resources• Use of organizational structure, rules, and

regulations• Control of decision processes • Control of knowledge and information• Control boundaries • Ability to cope with uncertainty • Control of technology

Power!!!

CRITICAL APPROACH ”Power” (within the critical approach) can be

broken into three parts: Pluralist, Unitarist, and Radical

CRITICAL APPROACH

• Means of Production: Actual work processes

• When owners/managers have control over workplace processes & technologies the result will bean alienated and oppressed workforce.

Control of Means and Modes of Production• Modes of production:

Economic conditions that underline production process.

• The way a society is organized to produce goods and services

CRITICAL APPROACH

IDEOLOGY • Ideology Structures: our thoughts and

Controls interpretations of reality (Miller 103).“

• Involves assumptions that are rarely questioned

• Can influence our behaviors• Tied to the Systems of power and

domination

HEGEMONY • “Process in which dominant group

leads another group to accept subordination as the norm (Miller 103)."

• Manufactured consent: employees willing to adopt and reinforce hierarchical power structures

What are the outcomes of these controls and processes?

CRITICAL APPROACH

Main Goal of the Critical Approach?

Emancipation:Or “the liberation of people from

unnecessarily restrictive traditions, ideologies, assumptions, power relations,

identity formations, and so forth that inhibit or distort opportunities for autonomy, clarification of genuine needs/wants, and thus greater and

lasting satisfaction (Miller 106)”

CRITICAL APPROACH AND WALMART

• It was obvious that Walmart’s way of Controlling the Means and Modes of production was not working in favor for their sales.

Negative Modes/Means

Of Producti

on

Distorted customer views of treatment of employees

Apprehension to buy products= lower sales

CRITICAL APPROACH AND WALMART

• Walmart came to the ”realization” that in order to improve customer satisfaction/sales they must first look at their employees; arguably the “front line” of customer service

• Emancipation (or liberation of employees) occurred.

Emancipation: • Higher wages • Proper training• More opportunities

for advancement

A happy/ willing employee Better

customer service

Happy customers and more sales

CRITICAL APPROACH AND WALMART

Ideology and Hegemony applied to this article: • Walmart’s Ideology before Emancipation: Keep prices low at all

cost. This approach wasn’t questioned by executives until sales dropped • Walmart’s Hegemony: Workers were not willing to “artificially

constant” through these norms. They showed resistant (counter-pressure) by giving presenting poor customer service skills.

CRITICAL APPROACH AND WALMART

Although the resistance (in this instants) wasn’t collective (i.e. strikes, boycotts, large-scale social movements), it was obvious that the

employees were naturally performing a “counter pressure”

Examples of counter pressure include: Lower customer service standards, lack of motivation to complete job description, and overall

less motivation

CRITICAL APPROACH AND WALMARTControl of Organizational Discourse: a real-life example within

the article. • Walmart is breaking down dominant power structures by

giving willing employees the chance to move-up in the company

• Garrett Watts, a 22-year-old newly promoted customer service manager at a store in Fayetteville. “There’s a stigma with it. It used to be, if you worked at a Walmart, it was the equivalent of a fast-food restaurant.”

• “I wanted something that wasn’t a stopgap, but could be a real career,” Mr. Watts said. He has set his sights on one of the $48,000-a-year assistant store manager jobs.

QUESTIONS FOR FURTHER DISCUSSION

• How is ideology related to hegemony in regards to Walmart's hierarchal structure?

• How do you fight power imbalances without putting your job at risk? Specifically for a company Walmart, where these jobs can be replaced by almost anyone.

• How can the feminist approach be applied to this article? How are women treated differently at Walmart?

Works Cited Irwin, N. (2016, October 15). How Did Walmart Get Cleaner Stores and Higher Sales? It Paid Its

People More. Retrieved October 17, 2016

Miller, K. (1999). Organizational communication: Approaches and processes. Belmont, CA:

Wadsworths Pub.