Business Culture, Counter Culture, and the Rise of Hip Consumerism.

Here's to the crazies," Oscar-winning actor Richard Dreyfuss shills in the latest Apple commercial. A montage of rebels, the ad pays homage to those brazen mavericks who have "challenged the status quo" and extended the bounds of possibility. Einstein, King, Gandhi, Branson, Isadora Duncan, Ted Turner - rewind that, please. Branson? He's the CEO of the Virgin Group of companies. Ted Turner, mogul of CNN? Correct me if I'm wrong, but aren't they the status quo?

The ad suggests just how untrammeled the cultural authority of corporate business is at the end of the twentieth century. In the nineties - the 1890s, that is - the names of Morgan, Carnegie, or Rockefeller were as revered among the cigar-smoking classes as those of Gates, Geffen, or Murdoch are among their health-conscious descendants. Yet the robber barons also moved millions to join unions, form farmers' alliances, and vote for radical parties; strike the railroads and the coal mines; create a progressive tradition and preach a social gospel; and otherwise resist the nailing of America to a cross of gold. Today's barons have recast themselves as democrats, philanthropists, revolutionaries. They "empower" us, they "provide" us with jobs, they even "rebel" for us, encouraging our every "creative," "rule-breaking" act of material consumption as an assault on the Bastille of "conformity."

How did corporate Bourbons become our model Jacobins? Thomas Frank tries to explain in his brilliant, polemically charged, though ultimately unsatisfying account of business culture in the 1960s. A contributing reporter to the Nation, In These Times, and other periodicals, Frank is also the editor of the Baftler, a Chicago-based journal that features some of the most biting and well-written cultural criticism of the present day. The key move in Frank's study - one that also turns out to be its key weakness-is to look at business rather than the "counterculture." Taking us into boutiques, boardrooms, and executive suites, Frank chronicles two contemporaneous transformations: the "Creative Revolution" in advertising and the "Peacock Revolution" in the menswear industry. Rejecting a straightforward "cooptation thesis" - the increasingly conventional wisdom that business "stole" an authentically oppositional movement against consumer capitalism-Frank argues that business itself anticipated and embraced the vaunted "counterculture" with the open arms of "hip" and "cool."

The story begins in the gray-flanneled 1950s. Advertising then was, Frank tells us, a downright dreary business, staffed with ulcerated, creatively inhibited timeservers, and constricted by a corporate culture that dictated deference to clients and a rigid imaginative conservatism. Full of happy families enraptured by their standardized commodities, the imagery of postwar advertising was, in Frank's words, "fatuous in the extreme" - and, more to the point, "transparently so to much of the audience it aimed to persuade." The menswear industry was a similar dullard's paradise, marked by sartorial blandness and threatened by declining sales of suits, jackets, and trousers.

But along came an energetic band of visionaries advancing an in-house critique of corporate culture every bit as pungent as the more celebrated attacks on mass culture by David Riesman, William H. Whyte, and Vance Packard. (Frank usefully reminds us that criticism of mass culture was "if not populist, enormously popular.") Emboldened by new management theories that celebrated "flexibility" and "empowerment" and demonized hierarchy and bureaucracy, and determined to break the creative and accumulative shackles of "conformity" and soulless routine, admen in agencies such as DDB and BBDO overthrew the three-martini culture by challenging clients and founding the apparently free-wheeling symbolic order that now defines American advertising. Their counterparts in menswear (especially the young turks at Gentleman's Quarterly) sparked a parallel rebellion in numerous design offices. The new breed's genius lay in directly incorporating public disgust with commercialism and consumerism into advertisements, conjuring "hip" as a cultural alchemy that converted the gold of popular skepticism into the dross of accelerated consumption. From the now-classic Volkswagen ads to the "Pepsi Generation" campaigns, the masters of "hip" addressed desires for freedom, novelty, and variety as matters, not of political and creative power in the workplace, but of purchasing power in leisure time. "Alienated by the conformity and hypocrisy of mass society?" as Frank cracks at one point - "Have we got a car for you!" In offering itself as the antidote to business routine, business transformed "the strategies of consumerism, the ideology by which business explained its domination of the national life."

Even more significant, the corporate avant-garde prefigured the "counterculture's" attacks on inflexible organizations, manners, and morals. The new managerial ideologies antedated countercultural and New Left calls for "participatory democracy," while the irreverence and irony extolled by the new advertisers preceded the "new morality" of self-fulfillment and open-ended commitment. "Admen looked at the counterculture and saw themselves," Frank observes, and even hailed the young hipsters as comrades in a cultural revolution.

Thus, far from demolishing capitalism, the moral revolution of the 1960s inaugurated a new phase in its cultural history, with consumption repackaged as "rebellion" and daily life choreographed as a "self-perpetuating pageant of workplace deference and advertising outrage." In an age of layoffs, weak unions, and the hypermobility of capital, "hip" is the latest souped-up cultural vehicle of corporate authority, "the public philosophy of the age of flexible accumulation." It vanquishes dissent by absorbing and defusing it - find your own road in a Saab, do some "independent thinking" with our investment firm - and deals with the memory of historical and contemporary injustice by removing it from the shelves of the cultural storehouse. It dictates, Frank notes, that we inhabit a cultural landscape strewn with liberated prudes, horrified church ladies, and healthy hedonists whose counterfeit resistance-through-consumption merely augments and ratifies the wealth and power of business.

Frank's portrayal of cooptation is now fairly common on the Left; indeed, it has a rather old and venerable pedigree, extending from Malcolm Cowley's account of Greenwich Village bohemianism in Exile's Return (1934) down to Herbert Marcuse's notion of "repressive de-sublimation." Yet by eschewing the bogus populism of business elites to focus on their moral and symbolic power, Frank makes an important contribution to the cultural history of the 1960s. He also provides a needed (if not altogether original) corrective to "cultural studies" mavens who see "subversion" in every market-researched epater of the bourgeoisie.

Still, in his laudable eagerness to "hold the beloved counterculture to the harsh light of historical and economic scrutiny," Frank blinds himself to its variety, complexity, and endurance. It's all too common to remember "the counterculture" as a morass of sexual and pharmaceutical self-indulgence, and it's all too easy and misleading to yoke it to moral and intellectual lightweights like Timothy Leary, Jerry Rubin, and Charles Reich. But there was more, much more, to the "counterculture" than Frank's Day-Glo caricature suggests. There were many regions in that still largely uncharted historical terrain - communal living, organic farming, and ecological awareness, to name a few - and they housed more genuinely provocative minds than Reich - Theodore Roszak, Ivan Illich, and E. F. Schumacher, to name a few.

These three pointed toward technologically decentralized, ecologically sensitive, and spiritually informed ways of life. They indicted the culture of consumption, not so much for its inequality and "materialism," but more for its fostering abstracting and utilitarian practices toward ourselves and the rest of creation. Surely, much of their vision of "the simple life" has been commodified into nutribars and Birkenstock sandals. But some kind of "simplicity" - one which, like the asceticism of old, aims at restoring a genuine love and pleasure in our relation to the material world - remains an indispensable source of freedom from the tyranny of cool.

Eugene McCarraher, when not drinking coffee at Starbucks, teaches history at the University of Delaware.