No Logo (1999) by Naomi Klein (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naomi_Klein and http://www.naomiklein.org/main) employs journalistic savvy and personal testament to detail the insidious practices and far-reaching effects of corporate marketing. It also looks at the powerful potential of a growing activist sect that may alter the course of the 21st century.
First published before the World Trade Organization protests in Seattle, this is an infuriating, inspiring, and altogether pioneering work of cultural criticism that investigates money, marketing, and the anti-corporate movement.
As global corporations compete for the hearts and wallets of consumers who not only buy their products but willingly advertise them from head to toe – witness today’s schoolbooks, superstores, sporting arenas, and brand-name synergies – a new generation has begun to battle consumerism with its own best weapons. In this provocative, well-written study, a front-line report on that battle, we learn how the Nike swoosh has changed from an athletic status-symbol to a metaphor for sweatshop labour, how teenage McDonalds workers are risking their jobs to join the Teamsters, and how culture jammers utilize spray paint, computer-hacking acumen, and anti-propagandist wordplay to undercut the slogans and meanings of billboard ads.
No Logo will challenge and enlighten students of sociology, economics, popular culture, international affairs, and marketing. This book is not another account of the power of the select group of corporate Goliaths that have gathered to form our de facto global government. Rather, it is an attempt to analyze and document the forces opposing corporate rule, and to lay out the particular set of cultural and economic conditions that made the emergence of that opposition inevitable.
512 pages in Fourth Estate Publishing paperback edition
ISBN 978-0007340774
Naomi Klein