How do cigarette makers motivate over one million workers to make, market, and legally defend a product causing the deaths of eight million people worldwide, each year? And how, more broadly, have corporate malefactors sought to build strong community, a sense of belonging, and emotional attachment around the drudgeries required to fulfill their stated missions? These questions concern the cultures of motivation inside corporations—the myriad tools and techniques by which organizations use rhetoric, visual culture, and ideology to communicate in ways that move workers to action. To answer them, this dissertation project uses historical and ethnographic methods to study three key areas of tobacco industry operations—production, marketing, and litigation—to help us better understand the ways organizations normalize certain beliefs, decisions, environments, and behaviors that often conflict with an individual worker's own welfare, class interests, goals, and values. Understanding these firms' cultures, above all, can help us better understand why these workers wake up each morning and tend to their jobs, in ways that can shed light on the forces driving those in adjacent fields to manufacture other harmful products (opioids, asbestos, guns, sugar, and silica, among others).
