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Corporate Memory: Historical Revisionism, Legitimation and the Invention of Tradition in a Multinational Mining Company
In: Political and legal anthropology review: PoLAR, Band 37, Heft 2, S. 259-280
ISSN: 1555-2934
In the world of neoliberal corporate capitalism the corporation is commonly represented as both asocial and ahistorical, as little more than the sum of its shareholders. But even within volatile capital markets, the need to project a corporate image of stability and confidence makes the narrative and performative aspects of corporate practice increasingly important. In Anglo American, one of the world's largest mining companies, that story has been told as much through the reinvention of a South African past as through the vision of a 'global future' making foundational myths, tradition and, not least, nostalgia vital corporate assets. Such corporate mythologizing—and the invention of corporate tradition—equips the 'corporate citizen' with both memory and moral self. This article argues that narratives of corporate virtue play a key role, not as the antithesis to the logic of capitalism nor as a company's conscience, but as the warm‐blooded twin to the business of mineral extraction and the mechanism through which Anglo American's economic and political hegemony in South Africa is legitimated.
A New Scramble for Africa: imperialism, investment and development edited by R. Southall and H. Melber Scottsville, South Africa: University of KwaZulu-Natal Press, 2009. Pp. 439, £33.95 (pbk)
In: The journal of modern African studies: a quarterly survey of politics, economics & related topics in contemporary Africa, Band 50, Heft 1, S. 171-173
ISSN: 1469-7777
'HIV/AIDS is our business': the moral economy of treatment in a transnational mining company
In: The journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, Band 16, Heft 3, S. 551-571
ISSN: 1467-9655
This article is concerned with the moral economy of HIV treatment in a transnational mining company. Based on multi‐sited ethnography in the world's third biggest mining company, I explore how relations between employer and employee are being transformed as a result of corporate HIV programmes, creating connections between the personal realm of sexual conduct and family life and the political economy of global corporate capitalism. I argue that corporate social responsibility serves as a mechanism through which the company consolidates its authority over a particular field of society, in this case its workforce, conflating the exigencies of human care with the interests of capital.RésuméLe présent article concerne l'économie morale du traitement du VIH au sein d'une société minière internationale. Sur la base d'une ethnographie multi‐site de la troisième société minière mondiale, l'auteur explore la manière dont les relations entre employeur et employé se transforment sous l'effet des programmes de lutte contre le VIH mis en place par l'entreprise. Ils créent des liens entre le domaine personnel du comportement sexuel et de la vie familiale et l'économie politique du capitalisme mondialisé. L'auteur avance que la responsabilité sociale de l'entreprise est instrumentalisée par celle‐ci pour renforcer son autorité sur un secteur particulier de la société, en l'occurrence sa main‐d'œuvre, télescopant ainsi les exigences humanitaires du soin et les intérêts du capitalisme d'entreprise.
Aspiring Minds: 'A Generation of Entrepreneurs in the Making'
In: Sociological research online, Band 27, Heft 4, S. 803-822
ISSN: 1360-7804
This article examines how corporate, state and donor interests have converged in attempts to craft South Africa's youngsters into an army of entrepreneurs as the last frontier for creating growth in a post-job world. We investigate the apparatus designed to engineer this entrepreneurial revolution and the actors hoping to seed enterprising aspirations in school-age kids. Our ethnographic findings show that while the ideology of entrepreneurial education enrols kids in anticipation of an entrepreneurial future, it falls short of both its enticing promise and its transformative intentions. As enterprise education fails to deliver on the New South African Dream, we argue, the aspirations it propagates withers, generating disaffection rather than a generation of entrepreneurial subjects faithful to the neoliberal creed of making it on your own.
Speculative futures at the bottom of the pyramid
In: The journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, Band 24, Heft 2, S. 233-255
ISSN: 1467-9655
AbstractCelebrated as creative, flexible catalysts of inclusive capitalism, urban youth are central to bottom‐of‐the‐pyramid (BoP) models of development, which set out to repurpose the jobless as entrepreneurs in the making. We explore the multiple (at times conflicting) temporalities – the practices, technologies, and representations of time – which figure in a BoP initiative offering entrepreneurial opportunities to unemployed youth in Nairobi's slums: from the invocation of clock‐time discipline to the professional time of entrepreneurial subjectivities and the enchantments of the not‐yet. But the appeal of BoP, we suggest, does not turn either on the here‐and‐now of survival or on an impossible pipe dream of prosperity, but rather resides firmly in the medium term: a foreseeable future of modest desires, which nonetheless remain tantalizingly just out of reach for most. By examining how these temporal conflicts play out in attempts to fashion a cadre of self‐willed, aspiring entrepreneurs, we reveal the limits to entrepreneurial agency, and the contradictions inherent in the mission of (self‐)empowerment through enterprise upon which the ideology of inclusive markets is built.
The Anthropology of Extraction: Critical Perspectives on the Resource Curse
In: The journal of development studies: JDS, Band 53, Heft 2, S. 186-204
ISSN: 0022-0388
The Anthropology of Extraction: Critical Perspectives on the Resource Curse
In: The journal of development studies, Band 53, Heft 2, S. 186-204
ISSN: 1743-9140
Remaking Africa's Informal Economies: Youth, Entrepreneurship and the Promise of Inclusion at the Bottom of the Pyramid
In: The journal of development studies, Band 52, Heft 4, S. 514-529
ISSN: 1743-9140
Remaking Africa's Informal Economies: Youth, Entrepreneurship and the Promise of Inclusion at the Bottom of the Pyramid
In: The journal of development studies: JDS, Band 52, Heft 4, S. 514
ISSN: 0022-0388
Credit Apartheid, Migrants, Mines and Money
In: African studies, Band 73, Heft 3, S. 455-476
ISSN: 1469-2872
The Romance of the Field?
In: The Anthropologist and the Native, S. 445-470
The anthropology of corporate social responsibility
In: Dislocations volume 18
Remote (Dis)engagement: Shifting Corporate Risk to the 'Bottom of the Pyramid'
In: Development and change, Band 52, Heft 4, S. 878-901
ISSN: 1467-7660
ABSTRACTUntapped markets are often deemed institutional voids, terra incognita ripe with economic possibility. The conversion of institutional voids into viable markets has become the ambition of many corporations today, which view marginal and under‐served areas such as urban slums as opportunities to achieve the dual aims of market growth and poverty reduction, particularly through 'bottom of the pyramid' (BoP) programmes. This article examines how firms manage institutional voids and the consequences of these approaches for workers through a case study of a BoP 'route to market' programme designed by a global food manufacturer in Kibera, Africa's largest slum, located in Nairobi. Instead of engaging with Kibera by upgrading informal markets or generating formal employment, the corporation focused on harnessing existing informal systems through composite arrangements of NGOs, social networks and informal enterprises, a strategy the authors term 'remote (dis)engagement'. The article describes the logics and outcome of this strategy of formal engagement with informal markets, concluding that the BoP business model depends on 'gig practices' of flexibility, irregular work and insecurity to realize the much‐heralded 'fortune at the bottom of the pyramid'.
The resource curse: what have we learned from two decades of intensive research
In: The journal of development studies, Band 53, Heft 2, S. 175-309
ISSN: 1743-9140
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