Wal-Mart uses ‘cultlike’ student group to funnel managers into patriarchal corporate culture
A “cultlike” business group funnels college students into Wal-Mart’s management ranks and helps the retail giant maintain its conservative, patriarchal culture, according to a former insider who recounted his experience in a new memoir.
Curtis DeBerg, an accounting professor at California State University-Chico, said Students In Free Enterprise — now known as Enactus – recruits management candidates for Wal-Mart by hosting rigged contests and other events aimed at business students.
“When you go to a SIFE event … the biggest booth of all is Wal-Mart,” DeBerg told Salon. “All of these young people, dressed in their USA ties and their matching lapel pins, as they’re walking by the booth, [there are] the recruiters for Wal-Mart.
The retailer’s vendors – who DeBerg claims are strong-armed into funding the student organization – also recruit employee candidates at the events, which students attend at their own expense.
“It’s the low-cost way to recruit very good managerial talent that has already swallowed the servant leadership Kool-Aid,” DeBerg told the website. “Shoot, I’ll take $5,000 less a year, as long as I’m on the track to become the store manager or the district manager. You know, there’s nothing wrong with that — unless Wal-Mart continues to pay sh*t wages.”
DeBerg, who is promoting his forthcoming book, How High Is Up?: The Rise, Fall, and Redemption of a Sam M. Walton SIFE Fellow, said he became involved with the organization in 1993 to help his students gain real-world experience before graduation.
“My first big shock was how conservative and how Christian this organization was, even as it was