Daniel Akselrad, PhD

Daniel Akselrad, PhD, is a postdoctoral fellow at the UCSF Center for Tobacco Control Research and Education and the UCSF Center to End Corporate Harm. His research uses historical and ethnographic methods to examine organizational ideology and culture, the sociology of scientific knowledge, infrastructures of atrocity, and legal-rhetorical culture. He received his PhD in Communication from Stanford University, where his dissertation, Machinery of Motivation: Big Tobacco’s Corporate Culture Playbook, with support from Stanford’s Institute for Research in the Social Sciences (IRiSS), earned the Nathan Maccoby Award for outstanding doctoral research. Taking the global cigarette industry as a case study, this dissertation shows how, in extreme cases, corporations use cultural management strategies to persuade workers to reimagine the manufacture of harmful products as positive or even noble, even when the collective endeavor conflicts with their own welfare and ethics. Daniel’s work during the fellowship will draw on documents revealed through whistleblowing and litigation to advance a cultural studies approach to corporate harm, examining climate denialism, scientific disinformation, organizational symbolism, and the legal tactics of tobacco’s litigators.