Arenas of Character Work

This chapter examines how institutional environments elicit and shape character work. Their reputed characters help or hinder players in a range of strategic arenas. This chapter explores the founding of nations, mobilization for war, corporate public relations, protest movements, elections, and legal proceedings for the nuances of character work in each of them. The media and politics often intersect, especially to stoke outrage through the identification of villains. Rumors, scandals, and gossip affect characters in subtle and sometimes sudden ways. The character work in these public arenas shows how much is at stake in the politics of reputation and blame.

Introduction

Public characters, especially the main versions of heroes, villains, victims, and minions, represent central building blocks in the reputations of groups and individuals. Character work is devoted to crafting familiar images, especially of strategic players and even more especially of political players, that influence audiences primarily by suggesting the emotions they are supposed to feel about the characters. The characters are defined along two dimensions: as weak or strong and as moral or immoral. Public characters are often found in stories, but they are also created through visual images. In an era of corporate public relations, carefully orchestrated electoral campaigns, and social media, character work has never been more influential—or more ignored.

Fifty Shades of Green

Chapter 2 attends to the role played by “moral offsets” and what socialpsychologists term “moral self-licensing” in intertwined stories of ecopiety and consumopiety in the nottotally unrelated realms of both popular erotic fiction and corporate public relations messaging.Reading across platforms, this chapter teases out various portrayals of environmental “sin” and “virtue,”juxtaposing the corporate public relations practice of “greenwashing” with the “eco-pious” storying of CEO and philanthropist protagonist Christian Grey in the popular mass-market romance Fifty Shades of Grey. As critics/activists use social media to organize and voice objections both to the corporate practice of public relations “greenwashing” and to the romanticized representations of abusive power in Fifty Shades, these protesters wield digital technologies as tools of narrative interruption and contestation. Their citizen interventions and “transformative works” of media offer insight into the participatory dynamics of what the chapter argues is an emergent environmental economy of virtue as mediated through popular culture.

Du Pont Turns 150: Corporate Culture as Public Culture

This article details the ways in which the executives of Du Pont used the chemical company’s 150th-anniversary festivities in 1952 and its associated sponsored media as an opportunity to explicitly link the history of the company with the history of the nation. This was an attempt to legitimatize the company’s existence and its ultraconservative worldview, espouse free trade, and fight antitrust litigation. This article explores the conflation of private and public history in Du Pont-sponsored anniversary materials to illustrate how corporate public relations meant for private corporate consumption reverberated into a shared American public culture.