Suchergebnisse

"Globalisation - the global movement, and control, of products, capital, technologies, persons and images - increasingly takes place through the work of organizations, perhaps the most powerful of which are multinational corporations. Based in an ethnographic analysis of cross-cultural social interactions in everyday workplace practices at a subsidiary of an elite, Japanese consumer electronics multinational in France, this book intimately examines, and theorises, contemporary global dynamics."--BOOK JACKET

Contemporary work by 'corporate ethnographers', as employees of businesses, offers a refreshing perspective on Anthropology's 'crisis of representation' and its extensions—from neo-colonial concerns and reflexivity, to para-ethnographic and recursive approaches—that are increasingly characterized by complicit relations between ethnographers and their informants/'collaborators'. This article focusses on the history and politics of ethnographers' positionality in field research and the analytic products of, and audiences for, their work. It contrasts the often confounded labor of 'anthropologists of business' with that of 'corporate ethnographers', who work for businesses, while highlighting that, for both, the 'studying up' (Nader 1974 [1969]) methodology required for research at business sites disrupts assumptions surrounding the politics of traditional ethnographic fieldwork. Tracing shifts in core interests across general Anthropology, it is argued that close attention to new sitings and circumstances of fieldwork—including studying up in businesses—could productively drive reconsiderations of methodology, ethics and, therefore, epistemology in Anthropology.In this context, corporate ethnographers, who are often formally trained in Anthropology, are specifically encouraged to analytically engage with the problematics of their perhaps-awkward complicities with their employers. It is suggested that, alongside the work of anthropologists of business, corporate ethnographers—should they choose to do so—are well-positioned to assist in exposing the black box of the culture(s) of secrecy through which the work of corporations intimately penetrates modern life.

Where lived experience of surroundings is shifting, visceral, and immersive, interpretation of social spaces tends to be static and remote. "Space" and "place" are also often analyzed without grappling much (if at all) with the social, political, and historical roots of spatial practice. This volume embarks upon the novel strategy of focusing on movement as a way of understanding social spaces, which offers a means to get beyond biases inherent in the social science of space. Ethnographic studies of social life in settings as varied as nomadic Mongolia and island Melanesia, as distinct as contemporary Tokyo and war-torn Palestine, challenge Western assumptions about the universality of "space" and allow concrete understanding of how life plays out over different socio-cultural topographies. In a world that is becoming increasingly "bounded" in many ways - despite enormous changes wrought by technological, ideological, and other social developments - Boundless Worlds urges a scholarly turn, away from the purely global, toward the human dimension of social lives lived in conditions of conflict, upheaval, remapping, and improvisation through movement