Industrial Pioneerism in the Beehive State: Rio Tinto and the Corporate Persona

Abstract

Contributing to organizational rhetoric, environmental communication, and persona criticism, this paper offers the corporate persona as a heuristic for mapping the rhetorical forces of corporate rhetors in a networked era of rhetoric and subjectivity. Giving the rhetor presence where there is absence, the corporate persona is a single image of a multiple subject implied by discursive and extra-discursive networks. I show how mining giant Rio Tinto Kennecott (RTK), which owns the Bingham Canyon Copper Mine outside of Salt Lake City, uses places, spaces, and objects—including a visitor’s center, a suburban community, a soccer stadium, and a natural history museum—to create a pioneer persona that is tied to cultural memories of the Utah Deseret. RTK’s persona is illustrative of how corporations are networked subjects that can adapt their very selfhoods to meet different exigencies while evading singular responsibilities.

Keywords:

• Agency
• Corporate Rhetoric
• Persona
• Rio Tinto
• Subjectivity

Acknowledgments

This paper was accepted for presentation at the 106th National Communication Association’sCommunication and Critical/CulturalStudies Division in Indianapolis, IN. The author is grateful for the feedback provided by Kevin DeLuca, Ed Hinck, Jeff Mehltretter Drury, George (“Guy”) McHendry, Jr., and Emma Bloomfield at various stages of this essay’s production. Thanks also to U of L’s Commonwealth Center for the Humanities, director John Gibson, and all of the faculty fellows for their tremendous support of this work in 2020-2021.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. While pioneerism may be particularly meaningful to Mormon populations, it is simultaneously a term for conquest and erasure. As an icon of the frontier myth, pioneerism not only perpetuates, but ideologically necessitates, “the erasure of indigenous peoples and other ‘nonwhites,’” while celebrating the “triumph” of (white) civilization, community, and democracy (Stuckey, 2011, p. 232–233). RTK’s localized persona is thus inseparable from Utah’s “selective historical traditions” of white colonialism (Furniss, 1997: p. 7).

2. If the first persona is the speaker; the second, the implied auditor; the third, the negated audience; the fourth, the invisible and “collusive” audience; and the null, strategic silence from extra-discursive conditions; the corporate, and arguably fifth, persona is the affective singularity of a multiplicitous actor-network that most directly challenges the first persona’s hegemony of the Cartesian “I.”

3. KUC also appropriated cultural values of pioneerism when it owned the BCM (1903–1989). For instance, in a 1956 advertisement, entitled “Still Pioneering,” KUC is carrying out the legacy of pioneer families by continuing to “do the impossible!” It says, “By following the pioneer tradition of meeting problems with faith, planning and hard work, Kennecott is still building for the future—for continued copper production that means much to the prosperity of Utah and its people” (Utah Copper Division, Kennecott Copper Corporation, 1956, Box 1, Folder 6).