Monoculture Rhetorical Analysis

The culture that a society adopts, while seemingly innocent and thought to not play a factor into much of anything, ends up affecting every facet of the lives of its citizens. America has recently adopted a culture that is centered on money, and it’s this economic culture that has drastically changed the way work, education, and creativity is viewed by society and those who run it—or at least that is what F.S. Michaels argues in “Monoculture: How one story is changing everything.” One of his first arguments is one that focuses on how the enactment of the economic story has altered the mindset companies have towards work and how this mindset has affected the relationship between the employee and the employer, “The economic story tells us corporations compete in a global market as part of a global economy…one way a company can compete efficiently is to have a more flexible workforce—to be less tied to its employees. Since labor costs represent a major expense to most companies, hiring employees when there’s work and laying them off when the work slows down can help firms stay competitive…if the company has work so will you. If not, you probably won’t either.” (Michaels 23). Michaels argues that due to our economic culture companies only care about their revenue—their bottom

This focus on monetary returns has changed the purpose of education: educating people for a specific job not educating people for the acquirement of knowledge; because this is what leads to innovation— what drives the economy forward and keeps the country