Corporate colonization refers to the unobtrusive ways corporate meanings, instrumental logics, and managerial values come to dominate the ways we understand, think, and act in everyday life. Influenced by Deetz's seminal work Democracy in an Age of Corporate Colonization (1992), the concept of corporate colonization arises from a concern about where social meanings arise, who is participating in the creation of meaning, and how understandings of everyday social reality and individual identity become normalized and treated as self-evident and unproblematic. Concern for corporate colonization arises when corporations replace other social institutions as the primary source of meaning production to understand and participate in everyday life. Specifically, Deetz (1992) argues, "the extent of the modern corporate encroachment into nonwork life and transformation of other institutions might properly be called a 'colonizing' activity" (pp. 17-18). As corporations became a more prevalent institution in society, they emerged as an increasingly significant site where meanings of the world and the self are produced and reproduced. Deetz explains that "major national and international corporations have frequently, wittingly and unwittingly, replaced religious, familial, educational, and community institutions in the production of meaning, personal identity, values, knowledge, and reasoning" (p. 17). With corporations becoming recognized as a primary meaning making institutions - concern becomes focused on the ways strategic corporate reasoning and logics invade and overcome the wide variety of alternative meanings that could potentially guide everyday life. As such, corporations become recognized as colonizers of everyday ways of knowing and being, and corporate colonization emerges as a term directly referring to the varied subtle ways corporate meanings shape understandings of the everyday world and self-identities in relation to that world.