Finding Family in the Cigarette Factory: How Employee Newsletters Build Culture and Community around Deadly Products

• In Event: 50220 - Section on Organizations, Occupations, and Work Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Table 20: Workplace Belonging

Abstract

How do cigarette makers motivate over a million employees to manufacture the world’s leading preventable cause of death? This article examines how Lorillard Tobacco Company uses organizational culture to maintain morale, compliance, and control inside its factories. One way the Newport maker has aligned employees to the mission is by publishing internal magazines that portray cigarette making as a virtuous enterprise. Through extensive archival research into confidential documents disgorged through litigation, rhetorical analysis of The Lorillard Informer employee magazine using large language models, and interviews with current and former employees, this study identifies three strategies by which managers have reframed the company’s harmful impacts. This inward turn of persuasion, I show, plays a crucial role in helping workers reinterpret their fragmentary contributions to societal harm as positive or even noble, even when the collective endeavor conflicts with their own welfare and ethics. I conclude by highlighting how employee magazines, as simple yet powerful means of internal persuasion, enable cultural managers to normalize harmful products for those most intimately involved in making them.

Author

• Daniel Akselrad, Stanford University