The Allure of Capitalism

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.

Emil A. Røyrvikis a social anthropologist and senior research scientist at SINTEF Technology and Society, Scandinavias 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.

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

• Hydros 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 safetydodging 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

• Hydros 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