<p>This dissertation examines the rise
of the country’s largest beef processor, IBP, Inc., during the late-twentieth
century and its effect on laborers, farmers, business, and the communities in
which it operated. Though scholars have cited IBP’s technological advances as
the reason for the company’s success, I argue that IBP’s unique public
relations approach that manufactured the consent of local communities to pay
comparatively low wages, provide tax breaks, and in the instance of cattle
producers defend IBP’s right to “free enterprise,” provided it with a
competitive advantage. From 1960 through the 1980s, the meatpacking industry
endured a revolution stemming from IBP’s ability to maintain enough community
consent to gain large market shares and draw down substantial profits.</p>
<p>Yet gaining and keeping consent was not easy, nor was
it linear. At one point or another all of these entities opposed IBP on a
myriad of fronts, but their early cooperation aided in creating a corporate
juggernaut that often limited their economic or political power. For IBP’s
part, the company’s founders and subsequent executive managers fostered a
masculine, individualistic sense of corporate capitalism, which I refer to as
cowboy capitalism. Executives painted themselves as farm boys and cowboys, as
renegades who were bringing hard work and plain talk to the inefficient
meatpacking industry. This conservative, bootstrap mentality played well in the
Siouxland region of the Northern Great Plains, where IBP began. Just as
corporate success is aided by community consent, rescinding consent creates
challenges for the company that can temporarily cause a decline, or at the very
least roadblock to company growth. Though founders, managers, and key
innovators gain critical and laudatory attention for their role in growing
American capitalism; extended community support in terms of governmental and
non-governmental actors rarely have been the focus of a corporate study. It is
community consent, both active and latent, governmental and non-governmental,
that supported the cowboy capitalism IBP deployed to start a revolution.</p>
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:purdue.edu/oai:figshare.com:article/12656900 |
| Date | 05 August 2020 |
| Creators | Michelle M Martindale (9127097) |
| Source Sets | Purdue University |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Text, Thesis |
| Relation | https://figshare.com/articles/thesis/COWBOY_CAPITALISM_AND_THE_IBP_REVOLUTION_HOW_THE_MEATPACKING_INDUSTRY_CHANGED_AMERICA_1960-1990/12656900 |
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