Word: disdain
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...wrong. As long as I don’t sound like a dumb bunny in my tutorials, and as long as I don’t engage in any terribly conspicuous consumption, I am able to remain relatively anonymous, status-wise. Indeed, there’s far more disdain on this campus for Final Club members and coke-dealing socialites (populations which, I suppose, probably have a good deal of overlap with the legacy sector, but I digress) than for people like...
...Japan, the homeland of Sony, Toyota and Toshiba, manufacturing is still widely regarded as the only honorable industry. Organic growth is esteemed above all, and many large companies still disdain the idea of mergers and acquisitions. To this day, there has never been a successful hostile takeover in Japan. Horie looked to smash these conventions. Rather than expanding slowly over many years, he discovered he could generate outsized growth by rapidly acquiring smaller, financially weaker prey, typically using Livedoor stock as the currency. He cobbled together an empire by purchasing no less than 50 firms, often with the help...
...however easy it may be to understand, the global culture of distrust and disdain has disturbing implications. In Western Europe, for example, naysayers impede needed economic reforms. Government officials know they must implement sweeping policy changes to make their economies more competitive, but leaders who want to effect change must be concerned with the social consequences and their own reelection prospects. "We have to make strategic choices in the context of a strong questioning of our institutions and traditional systems of representation," says Sophie Boissard, a senior French civil servant who is establishing a policy-strategy unit for Prime Minister...
...however easy it may be to understand, the global culture of disdain is one fraught with risk. To be sure, it gives a voice to people run over by the people who run things. But taken to an extreme, distrust gnaws away at some of the fundaments of modern society. Why vote, if all politicians are charlatans? Why work, if all companies are crooked? Today "anyone with a beef can start a conspiracy theory," says Frank Furedi, a sociology professor at Britain's University of Kent, who argues that deference to traditional authorities is being replaced by reverence...
...positions of authority could have come as early as World War I, with its senseless slaughter of a generation of European men. She quotes two lines of a poem by Rudyard Kipling: "If any question why we died,/ Tell them, because our fathers lied." Whatever its roots, today's disdain has implications for companies beyond their corporate image. Watts points out a big conundrum for firms today: traditional forms of advertising and marketing are proving far less effective than in the past, as skeptical consumers stop believing what the ads tell them. "We appear to be spending more and getting...