Having delved briefly into the Amway Corporation, I have attempted to trace a story through the sometimes confusing and elusive world of this thing called Amway. As the corporation sells its soaps and many other products, the company also offers itself as a unique and embracing product, one that promises to offer not only financial success, but also social and personal fulfillment.
In seeking to understand this organization, I have attempted to highlight the ways in which Amway seeks to form a totalizing organization that incorporates divergent public and private realms of its distributors. As Amway upholds this particular form of organization, the community that emerges out of this system can perhaps best be described as a private domain&emdash;exclusive, the "Amway family"&emdash;where pressure to conform to Amway's political and moral ideology is exerted upon both the private lives of distributors as well as how they will or will not vote in upcoming elections. Amway does not offer public stock (except through their Asia Pacific and Japanese affiliate companies), and they closely guard and shield their production process even while they claim to give back the tools of production to distributors. Amway's ambiguous and contradictory character points to the fact that Amway attempts to resurrect the mythic values of the United States and holds itself up as the guardian of the free market enterprise system; yet, by its very nature it is deeply embedded in the post modern moment. It represents a relatively new organizational form that is historically situated in the transition to mature consumption-based societies. Amway is clearly dependent upon selling and/or marketing goods and services, but just as critically it must continuously recruit new people into the business so that it may maintain a captive market of consumers who will continue to purchase (and perhaps eventually sell) products produced and promoted by Amway. Thus the Amway phenomenon reflects more generally, and is consistent with, wider economic and social shifts, specifically Post-Fordism and the transition of investment capital overseas.
Through media texts, The Amway House, and various other sources, I have sought to reveal the ways in which Amway's ideology and socio-economic ideals come to infuse these sites of knowledge production and diffusion. In capturing the charismatic moment in such social spaces as the rallies, seminars, and motivational tapes, Amway endeavors to solicit new recruits who will themselves carry the message to others. In crafting a unique niche within the wider global economy, Amway has been able to fashion and promote a particular form of consumption, evangelistic consumption, that attempts to incorporate varying, and often conflicting, social, political, and economic realms of human life. The consequences of this integration pose intriguing questions the answers to which require that we examine the underlying socioeconomic fears and/or needs on which movements like Amway have been able to capitalize. Indeed, Amway is only one of many prosperous and diverse direct selling companies in the marketplace today. This fact, notwithstanding, I have suggested that one possible explanation of the Amway phenomena may relate to a more central question of how we come to make meaning in the late 20th Century world in which we live. Given the perfusion of free market economic ideology/structures now being imposed upon the economies of the world (voluntarily or by generously coercive "help" from the IMF and the World Bank), this issue will continue to challenge observers to look at how fundamental shifts in economic structures will in turn affect individual and group identities and/or ways of making personal meaning in a rapidly changing world. These shifts from a production-based society to one grounded in consumption, (a transition increasingly affecting even the most isolated people and cultural groups), will necessarily introduce significant cultural and social change.
Amway may prove an interesting and useful site of inquiry in seeking to better understand the ways in which consumption comes to be mediated by different cultural and people groups in the midst of a rapidly changing global economy and the continued politico-economic hegemony of the United States. With Amway's ever-increasing push into foreign markets, we must ask ourselves how this organization, which literally means "The American Way," develops and markets itself within very diverse social and politico-economic contexts. For example, even though the product line is relatively the same as that in the USA, Amway Japan has consistently been a strong and growing market for Amway. How can Amway grow in such a context when it apparently does not attempt to market products that would seem to be more appropriate to the market? Indeed, in France they continue to market SATANIQUE ® shampoo in spite of the fact that no French speaker could miss the curious devilish label that the shampoo bears so blatantly. And yet, such questions are increasingly relevant in the present age of global capital. Perhaps Amway's marketing strategy is ideally suited to confront rapid technological and economic changes.
The apparent success of Amway notwithstanding, I have lingering critical suspicions about how Amway's economic success is hinged to their political involvement. That is, given the close and enduring ties between Amway and right wing religious and political movements, I am concerned over the affinity between Amway's particular business and social system and the greater interests of U.S. economic and political global policy generally. The two are by no means at odds. Granted, Amway is by no means a major global economic actor on the scale of such giant corporate interests as those of the arms industry, the oil and gas industries, Microsoft, etc. And yet, I believe it would be wrong to write off Amway as a powerful social force. Amway operates in a completely different manner than most business enterprises that are not as overtly dependent upon the active and willing participation of a large and active distributor force. Indeed without its distributors Amway would likely be unable to compete with cheaper and more convenient forms of production and retail (for the consumer that is). However, Amway presently counts among its ranks over 2 million distributors located across the globe and interconnected by the lines of sponsorship and product distribution. While Amway Japan and Amway Asia Pacific Ltd. differ somewhat from the main Amway organization (the two companies offer public stock for example), the founding families own a majority of company stock as well as holding the main company in the private hands of the two founding families. Thus, Amway has at its fingertips, if you will, a significant political if not social force that could and has been used to mobilize support around particular issues and candidates. In effect, Amway walks a razor's edge of sorts between corporate enterprise and a sectarian religious/economic/social movement.
While I had formerly never heard of this organization, I now find myself still intrigued by it. Indeed, as the preceding discussion has made apparent, many questions continue to gnaw at me and beckon further research. Specifically, how does this Amway Sales and Marketing system get translated once it crosses the border outside of the United States? In particular, as the Amway market continues to grow in Latin America&emdash;coinciding quite significantly with the rapid rise of Protestantism in many of these countries and the continued dominance of free-market capitalism&emdash;to what groups does this organization appeal? And, given the devotion Amway pays to free enterprise, how might the Amway system simply reinforce dominant class and ethnic structures? In light of Amway's political involvement, these and other questions would seem to be of particular importance both in regard to Latin America, as well as in Amway markets generally, and provide interesting and significant subjects for further research.
To: WORKS CITED