Amusement, Inc.
Disneyland’s Corporate Apparatus and the Making of the Theme Park
- In press
The second of two books on Disneyland. Where Disneyland and the Rise of Automation followed the machines, Amusement, Inc. follows the corporation: the research-and-development apparatus, the industrial partners, and the management thinking that turned a Cold War company’s ideas about operations into a new kind of place, the theme park.
Publishes 16 March 2027.
From the publisher
In Amusement, Inc., Roland Betancourt tells the deep history of Disneyland from its conception to its construction and reveals how it set the precedents that created the modern theme park. To transform an animation studio into a theme park company, Betancourt shows that Disney took its most significant lessons not from other amusement parks of the time but from corporations like General Motors, marshaling funds to systematize the constellation of principles, practices, and structures that defined American Big Business during the 1950s and 1960s. By using these principles to construct a heroic image of the large-scale corporation, Disneyland acclimated Americans to the rhythms and values of corporate capitalism, rendering the corporation’s apparatus synonymous with “the good life” in postwar America. Drawing on extensive archival research, Amusement, Inc. reframes the invention of the theme park, offering a new history of how corporate practices shaped the spaces of leisure and entertainment that have defined contemporary American culture.
Description courtesy of Duke University Press.
Praise
Endorsements
The ‘Happiest Place on Earth’ is much, much more than that. As this terrific book shows, Disneyland is the result of an entertainment-industrial complex of mapping, traffic, aerial technology, and multiple forms of research and design, all in the interests of postwar leisure and the development of the Disney corporation.
Eric Smoodin, author of Paris in the Dark: Going to the Movies in the City of Light, 1930–1950Like a tour guide from the future, Roland Betancourt reveals the corporate logic behind every ride, attraction, and experience at Disneyland since its inception. A history of the theme park as an organizational unit rather than as a world apart, the book overflows with scholarly gems; the conceptual history of ‘imagineering’ alone is revelatory. To understand how comprehensively the ‘corporate apparatus’ has shaped American culture, read Amusement, Inc. now.
Reinhold Martin, Professor of Architecture, Columbia University
