Dinah Rajak
(University of Sussex)
Jessica Sklair
(QMUL)
Stream:
Displacements of Power
Location:
Julian Study Centre 0.01
Sessions:
Tuesday 3 September, -, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Global capital as a local challenge: the anthropology of corporations.
Panel A12 at conference ASA19: Anthropological Perspectives on Global Challenges.
This panel seeks to advance the anthropology of corporations by discussing ethnographic work on the nature, constitution and purpose of corporations in society.
Long Abstract:
Processes of globalisation and privatisation have moved corporations to the centre of people's social, economic, and political lives. This panel seeks to advance the anthropology of corporations by discussing ethnographic work on the nature, constitution, and purpose of corporations.
The corporation is an elusive social form. It is an assemblage of capital, labour, resources, and institutional arrangements. But it is also an entified 'person' that can act on its own. How do anthropologists make sense of the ambiguous nature of the corporation? We invite papers that examine the people, practices, processes and institutional arrangements that constitute corporations, and study corporations in their multiple manifestations - from the boardroom to their local entanglements with the social, political, legal, and cultural environment.
We also invite papers that discuss the insights the anthropology of corporations can provide to our understanding of the purpose of the corporation in society. How are its responsibilities understood, inside and outside the corporation? And how do those understandings fit in, or clash, with the political and legal definition of the purpose of the corporation?
The anthropology of corporations is the study of large and often powerful institutions, which suggests a parallel to the anthropology of the state. Should and/or can we apply the theoretical and conceptual insights developed in the analysis of the state to ethnographic research into the nature, constitution, and purpose of (private) corporations?
With this panel, we seek to bring together anthropologists studying corporations, to take stock and further this emergent field of anthropological enquiry.
Based on fieldwork with a Dutch currency consultancy firm and its partners, this paper explores the notion of 'efficiency' at the intersection of social regulation and alternative economies.
Paper long abstract:
This paper explores how efficiency-a seemingly universal economic narrative-is made portable into the realm of an 'alternative economy' via the efforts of Qoin, an alternative currency consultancy firm in the Netherlands. Though often analysed as grassroots alternatives to global financial practice, alternative currencies in North-West Europe are by and large professionally designed and instituted via cross-sectoral partnerships of private enterprises, public sector organisations, and local government branches. For the 'currency consultants' aspiring to re-invent money in European cities, corporate standards, action, and agency are the backbone whereupon ideals, expectations, and visions of society are articulated. I choose to focus specifically on efficiency because it is a central concept in neoliberal capitalism; yet the notion itself is rarely critically examined in either economic anthropology or the anthropology of corporations. The ethnography of Qoins 'currency model' provides an instance of how the work of economic rebellion becomes entwined with, yet not necessarily co-opted by, logics of market efficiency. The alternative currency is actively promoted to policy-makers as a tool of social regulation. It aims to create 'efficient communities' by [1] creating an institutional structure for cross-sectoral collaboration and [2] stipulating particular desired behaviour from citizens. What emerges is a different ontology of efficiency: rather than being predicated on self-responsibilising individuals and values of competition, the social efficiency Qoin aims for means cooperation on various levels.
The goal of the paper is to elaborate on the ergosystem of a production plant that is part of a multinational corporation. In particular, I will focus on the specificities of the sociotechnical assemblage and how it shapes the nature of work at the plant.
Paper long abstract:
In the paper I will refer to the ethnographic research I conducted between 2015 and 2016 in a production plant located in the Lower Silesia Province, in south-western Poland. The company in question is part of a global corporation in which the working environment can be viewed as a type of an "ergosystem": a special network of dependencies, relations, and negotiations, which includes both human and non-human actors. The everyday working experience is determined by an extensive information and IT infrastructure, consisting of sensors, programs, and networks that determine communication, managerial practices (including technologies of the self), production processes and the way workers approach their everyday tasks and challenges. Computers gather, store and partially analyze enormous amounts of data which is used to control, discipline and shape the behavior of people, materials, products, and machines. The goal of the paper is to elaborate on the specificities of that sociotechnical assemblage.
Based on a PhD research carried in Khartoum, the capital region of the Sudan, this paper provides an ethnographic account of how urban development corporations are agents of urban spaces reconfiguration.
Paper long abstract:
Tuti, a river island located at the junction of the blue and the white Niles in Greater Khartoum the capital region of the Sudan. The island is one of the very old neighbourhoods in Khartoum, where most of the population are extended families and they form a unique social fabric. Recently, the island is undergoing different processes of urban refurbishing, led by Khartoum state planning authorities collaborating with national and transnational urban development corporations. Tuti Island Investment Company is one of the leading corporations on the island and it played a significant role in the implementation of a master plan to transform the island from the rural eye of Khartoum, to one of the important business and touristic districts in the capital region. Based on my doctoral thesis fieldwork on Tuti Island, I want to present an Ethnographic account of how urban development corporations can be agents of the socio-physical restructuring of urban spaces.
Human resource professionals in Zambia's mines manage multiple interfaces, between management and employees and between foreign investors and government regulators. Their work reveals both the tensions created by mining corporations and the mediating work that makes mining capitalism possible.
Paper long abstract:
Anthropological scholarship on mining capitalism has moved beyond a singular representation of mining as enclaved production to examine the political and social entanglements of mining corporations in the communities and countries where their mines are found. However, this shift in scholarship remains partial. Except for staff of corporate social responsibility departments, the people responsible for managing mining company entanglements with the wider society are often overlooked. In this paper, I relate the experiences of Zambian human resource (HR) professionals working in industrial copper mines in Zambia, managers mediating between foreign corporations and the domestic labour market.
HR managers in Zambia's mines work in a sector that has seen great change since the pre-1990s era of state-led industrial paternalism. Since the liberalisation of labour laws, weakening of trade unions and the sale of the mines to private investors, more precarious employment conditions predominate, with frequent retrenchments, reliance on subcontracting, and prevalence of fixed and short-term contracts. In this context, HR professionals straddle the line between mining corporation and society, acting as gatekeepers to opportunities, overseeing disciplinary procedures, and managing relations with trade unions, government regulators, and other political representatives. Mining corporations rely on the knowledge, social capital, and emotional labour of HR professionals to secure industrial peace and make mining capitalism work. The role of HR professionals highlights how mining corporations rely not just on their access to resources in the ground but their ability to embed their financial power within the fabric of the society in which they are investing.
This paper is about the simultaneity of temporal limitation and spatial dominance of global value chains in the extractive industries. It discusses the role of the simultaneity for the everyday negotiation of responsibility.
Paper long abstract:
Coal is a finite, non-renewable resource but open-pit coal mines are of an impressive material spatiality. This paper is about the resulting simultaneity of temporal limitation and spatial dominance of global value chains in the extractive industries. In particular, it discusses the role of the spatial-temporal order of a coal mine for the negotiation of responsibility.
I develop the hypothesis that a mining company transforms the finitude of coal into a specific temporality. That temporality determines the manner in which the 'Social Team' of a mining corporation engages with the local communities. The day to day, mundane relations between the corporations and local communities are channelled through the omnipresent references to the closures of the coal mines on the part of the former. Through the making of the temporality the corporate form dissolves as a subject of responsibility. My exploration of the negotiation of responsibility is to be situated in recent anthropological work on modern time in capitalism.
My contribution is based on participatory observation undertaken with a Colombian mining company that is fully integrated into a global value chain in 2017.
This paper, based on ethnographic fieldwork inside the corporation, examines the sense of 'corporate vulnerability' that permeates the ethos of a contested mining corporation. It contributes to the line of work in the anthropology of corporations which explores the corporate response to critique.
Paper long abstract:
Whereas the processes by which local communities and social movements seek to challenge corporate power have been studied extensively, the ways in which corporations respond when their power is challenged remain underexamined. How do corporate actors understand the societal opposition to their activities? How do they respond? To what extent does anti-mining activism shape the behaviour of mining corporations? In this paper, I examine how a gold mining multinational responds to the contestation of its projects in Colombia. Based on fieldwork inside the corporation, I highlight the sense of vulnerability and 'victimhood' which I found to permeate the ethos in the corporate offices: the sense that the corporation is a victim of anti-mining activism, a lack of government support, and legal instability. Corporate victimhood, I argue, is a defence mechanism of capital, which inspires the vehement defence of the corporation in the heated local and national debates on mining. This logic serves strategic purposes, but it is not merely instrumental, nor is it a deliberate strategy. My fieldwork reveals corporate victimhood is more ambivalent: in addition to serving an instrumental role, it is also genuinely felt and believed. This ambivalence, the coexistence of the instrumental and the genuine, I argue, is a central tenet of the defence of capital and the process by which, in the face of contestation, corporations seek to consolidate and sustain their power.
This paper explores how efforts to assure a social license to operate of an extractive corporation in the Colombian coal sector are built on both hard and soft security practices. As these practices work in a continuum they become productive of corporate sovereignty and reconfigure social contracts.
Paper long abstract:
Based on ethnographic fieldwork from the coal sector in the northern Colombia this paper addresses the way extractive corporations work to create consent and assure 'a social license to operate' (Prno and Slocombe 2012). The paper argues that in attempting to create consent, the corporation, through the assistance of different security practices and 'managers of consent', gradually become a local sovereign (Barkan 2013). 'Managers of consent' covers actors that work to protect the corporation, which include key employees of the corporations, state agencies, interest organizations, NGOs and certain public 'experts'. The configuration of corporate sovereignty happens as the corporation attempts to shape certain imaginaries of the past and the future, fund health services, infrastructure, education and build public spaces and take on a 'democratizing' role through dialogue roundtables and training of civil servants. Alongside these 'soft' expressions of security comes the use of private and public security forces, secret intelligence work as well as divide and conquer techniques. In the paper it will be discussed how these hard and soft dynamics - working in a continuum - are productive for expressions of political subjectivities (Schramm and Krause 2011) and social contracts, different from the formal-legal definitions of these. The paper argues that what 'managers of consent' present as being dialogue, sustainable development and responsible mining, are in practice different technologies of governance that make people embody certain conducts that function as securing the wellbeing of the company. Combined with a complex assemblage of security actors corporate sovereignty is being established.
has 1 download
1