The "managerial revolution," or the rise of management as a distinct and vital group in industrial society, might be identified as a major development of the modernization processes, similar to the scientific and industrial revolutions. Studying "transnational" or "global" corporate management at the post-millennium moment provides a suitable focal point from which to investigate globalized (post)modernity and capitalism especially, and as such this book offers an anthropology of global capitalism at its moment of crisis. This study provides ethnographically rich descriptions of managerial practices in a set of international corporate investment projects. Drawing also on historical and statistical data, it renders a comprehensive perspective on management, corporations, and capitalism in the late modern globalized economy. Cross-disciplinary in outlook, the book spans the fields of organization, business, and management, and asserts that now, in this period of financial crisis, is the time for anthropology to yet again engage with political economy.
List of Figures List of Tables Preface Acknowledgements Introduction: Investment Projects, Capitalism, and Crisis Cultural analysis of corporate and capitalist organization Hydro investment projects and the reproduction of relations At the crossroads of production and finance capital Contextualizing the study within Hydro Organization of the book PART I. CONSTRUCTION AND CULTURES OF CREATION Chapter 1. Situating "Global Corporate Management" Hydro's ambiguous position Investment projects as "global assemblages" Economic anthropology revisited Managing man The neoliberal triumph and tragedy Extending anthropological discovering Chapter 2. Managing in the Middle Kingdom: Three Investment Projects in China Technologies, art and truth Counterfeiting and strategic secrecy The GM relay The Mercedes and the carriage Circulating safety - dodging danger The carriage cum Mercedes Social organization and construction Reverse culture crash Cultural encounters From socio-technical to ontological truth Chapter 3. Presencing Projects: A Social Reality of Construction The tragedy of big projects Keepers of gold and processes of "structuring" The ambience of enabling Projects as situated potentiality A set of propositions The imagination bank PART II. HIGH FINANCE AND CONTEMPORARY CRISIS CAPITALISM Chapter 4. The Turn to Enchantment: Investing in Projects Decision Gate Four CROGIism: Inventing finance control Blaruss-blues The surge of "shareholder value" "Scientific management", collaboration and democratization Projects as a cultural idiom Chapter 5. Wagging the Dog: The Financialization of Sociality Hydro's financial transformation The "stock options carnival" "Options" in a moral economy A neoliberal dismantling of democratic capitalism? "Financial weapons of mass destruction" Managing "financial risk" in projects Chapter 6. Money Manager Capitalism and Reverse Redistribution Financialization and international economic relations Qatalum "money magic" The dance of debt The "ancien regime" reinvented Financial neo-imperialism Radical reverse redistribution PART III. IN GOOD COMPANY? Chapter 7. Directors and Directions of Creation Reprise and review Hydro and the right kind of globalization Anti-market capitalism Financial entification Qualifying capitalism Incarnations of a different nature Chapter 8. Managing in a Total Context of Crisis Managing, reasons and rationalizations Mixed regimes of rationality The medium-range view: Levels in capitalism Deep crisis in contemporary capitalism Downfall or a phoenix for the future? A tragedy or triumph of the commons? Appendix Bibliography Index
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