Sentence:  This book is a study of <WSD>co-optation</WSD> rather than counterculture, an analysis of the forces and logic that made rebel youth cultures so attractive to corporate decision-makers rather than a study of those cultures themselves. In doing so, it risks running afoul of what I will call the <WSD>co-optation</WSD> theory: faith in the revolutionary potential of "authentic" counterculture combined with the notion that business mimics and mass-produces fake counterculture in order to cash in on a particular demographic and to subvert the great threat that "real" counterculture represents. 
Meaning of the word marked with <WSD> tags:  A co-opting: an absorption or assimilation.