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.
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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.
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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
Blåruss-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 régime” 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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“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.” · International Journal of Anthropology
“… the book is a piece of extensive scholarship, full of insights that repay the reader's close attention." · Journal of Political Power
“This is an extraordinary book, huge in every way, one man’s personal synthesis of the world we live in, as seen through his own experience of Norway’s largest business corporation and much, much more. The book and the author have a lot going for them. There are few in-depth anthropological studies of global corporations. Scandinavian anthropology is enjoying a boom and this is reflected in the present study. The author is well-versed in German sources and is open to a very wide range of philosophy, critique, journalism, anthropology and social science.” · Keith Hart, Goldsmiths College, London
“[T]his book is a gem. I like it very much…an excellent blending of genres, approaches and disciplines, fused together by an essentially anthropological perspective. It tells a global story through a number of local intermediations of the most significant Norwegian company, Hydro.” · Stewart Clegg, University of Technology, Sydney
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Produktdetaljer
ISBN
9781782380658
Publisert
2013-03-01
Utgiver
Vendor
Berghahn Books
Vekt
408 gr
Høyde
229 mm
Bredde
152 mm
Aldersnivå
UP, 05
Språk
Product language
Engelsk
Format
Product format
Heftet
Antall sider
284
Forfatter
Biographical note
Emil A. Røyrvik is a social anthropologist and senior research scientist at SINTEF Technology and Society, Scandinavia’s largest independent research organization. The book has been written also in his capacity as postdoctoral fellow at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU), Department of Social Anthropology. His research focuses on ethnography and anthropological theory in the context of knowledge work, organizational and managerial culture, and aspects of contemporary economic and cultural globalization.