From Head Shops to Whole Foods: The Rise and Fall of Activist Entrepreneurs

Business is not the first thing that comes to mind when one thinks about the countercultural movements of the 1960s. But in From Head Shops to Whole Foods Joshua Clark Davis makes a compelling case that the businesses he examines provide a useful vantage point on the counterculture while also allowing a new perspective on today's business. The book is framed around two neologisms: “activist entrepreneurs” and “participatory economics.” Davis claims that activist entrepreneurs introduced “products that promoted progressive and radical politics as well as cultural pluralism,” “conceived of their storefronts as political places,” and “reconceptualized processes of doing business by promoting shared ownership, limited growth, and democratic workplaces” (p. 4). Davis focuses on four types of businesses: African American bookstores, head shops, women's businesses, and natural food stores. While the heart of the book is in the period between 1965 and 1975, Davis puts each of these activist entrepreneurs into a larger context. African American book shops had roots dating back to the period of abolition; women's businesses can be seen in the early twentieth-century suffrage shops; and health food dated to the nineteenth century with Sylvester Graham and John Harvey Kellogg. Davis also argues that 1950s critiques of capitalism provided an important intellectual underpinning for these entrepreneurs.