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Corporate Legitimacy and Advertising: British Companies and the Rhetoric of Development in West Africa, 1950–1970

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 December 2011

Stephanie Decker
Stephanie Decker
Affiliation:
STEPHANIE DECKER is lecturer in International Business at the University of Liverpool Management School.
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Abstract

Development, modernity, and industrialization became dominant themes in corporate advertising in Africa in the 1950s and remained prevalent through the following two decades while many African nations were gaining independence. British businesses operating there created a publicity strategy that couched their presence in less developed countries in terms of a commitment and a positive contribution to the progress of the new states. Eventually, British companies tried to “Africanize” their corporate image through these campaigns.

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Articles
Information
Business History Review , Volume 81 , Issue 1 , Spring 2007 , pp. 59 - 86
Copyright
Copyright © The President and Fellows of Harvard College 2007

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References

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28 Larkin Studios featured heavily in a recent three-part documentary on the history of British animation shown on BBC3, Animation Nation, especially in the first part on advertising, “The Art of Persuasion.”

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53 Assertive poses cannot be equated with a “decolonized” representation of Africans. Indigenous photography shows different poses from colonial imagery and corporate advertising. For an introduction to the debate, see Maxwell, Anne, Colonial Photography and Exhibitions: Representations of the “Native” People and the Makings of European Identities (London, 1999), 13–14Google Scholar; and the criticism by Haney, Erin Leigh, “If These Walls Could Talk! Photographs, Photographers and Their Patrons in Accra and Cape Coast, Ghana, 1840–1940” (Ph.D. diss., School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, 2004), 182–213Google Scholar.

54 Of course there had been criticism of foreign multinationals before the 1970s, most notably Chief Awolowo's motion for nationalization in the Nigeria parliament in 1961. His party had already become the focus of foreign business criticism during decolonization. See Tignor, Capitalism and Nationalism at the End of Empire, 239–41.

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