Suchergebnisse

High performers: the making of financialized subjects -- Evaluating humans: financial rationality and practices of performance-related pay -- Reducing costs: shared service centers, labor, and the outsourcing rationale -- Training value: the moral and political project of selling consultancy -- Client sites: liminality, modernity, and performances of expertise -- Building a paradise: post-Mao visions of transformation -- Conspicuous ethicizing: corporate culture, CSR, and corporate subjectivity

AbstractIn Dalian Software Park, China's centre for IT‐enabled outsourcing and offshore services, knowledge workers find themselves on the 'assembly line' of information processing, carrying out highly routinized, de‐skilled, and poorly paid work for which they are vastly overqualified. Following the recent attention to culture and personhood in studies of global capitalism, I argue that these knowledge workers are motivated by two forms of cosmopolitanism: corporate cosmopolitanism, the capacity to reconcile the supra‐territorial values of 'global' corporate culture with local values; and nationalist cosmopolitanism, whereby individual workers see the performance of cultural openness as a way of contributing to China's national project of modernization. As well as providing a rare account of cosmopolitanism in the workplace, this article demonstrates the significance of cosmopolitanism for the global economy. The pursuit of cosmopolitanism creates a productive friction between individual projects of self‐making, corporate projects of disciplining labour, as well as national projects of pursuing modernity and development.

Bringing together contributions from anthropology, sociology, religious studies, and philosophy, along with ethnographic case studies from diverse settings, this volume explores how different disciplinary perspectives on the good might engage with and enrich each other. The chapters examine how people realize the good in social life, exploring how ethics and values relate to forms of suffering, power and inequality, and, in doing so, demonstrate how focusing on the good enhances social theory. This is the first interdisciplinary engagement with what it means to study the good as a fundamental aspect of social life