Enacting the Corporation - by Marina Welker (Paperback)

About the Book

"What are corporations, and to whom are they responsible? Anthropologist Marina Welker draws on two years of research at Newmont Mining Corporation's Denver headquarters and its Batu Hijau copper and gold mine in Sumbawa, Indonesia, to address these questions. She shows how, against the backdrop of an emerging Corporate Social Responsibility movement and changing state dynamics in Indonesia, people enact the mining corporation in multiple ways: as an ore producer, employer, patron, promoter of sustainable development, religious sponsor, auditable organization, foreign imperialist, and environmental threat. Rather than assuming that corporations are monolithic, profit-maximizing subjects, Welker turns to anthropological theories of personhood to develop an analytic model of the corporation as an unstable collective subject with multiple authors, boundaries, and interests. Enacting the Corporation demonstrates that corporations are constituted through continuous struggles over relations with--and responsibilities to--local communities, workers, activists, governments, contractors, and shareholders"--

Book Synopsis

What are corporations, and to whom are they responsible? Anthropologist Marina Welker draws on two years of research at Newmont Mining Corporation's Denver headquarters and its Batu Hijau copper and gold mine in Sumbawa, Indonesia, to address these questions. Against the backdrop of an emerging Corporate Social Responsibility movement and changing state dynamics in Indonesia, she shows how people enact the mining corporation in multiple ways: as an ore producer, employer, patron, promoter of sustainable development, religious sponsor, auditable organization, foreign imperialist, and environmental threat. Rather than assuming that corporations are monolithic, profit-maximizing subjects, Welker turns to anthropological theories of personhood to develop an analytic model of the corporation as an unstable collective subject with multiple authors, boundaries, and interests. Enacting the Corporation demonstrates that corporations are constituted through continuous struggles over relations with--and responsibilities to--local communities, workers, activists, governments, contractors, and shareholders.

Review Quotes

"Marina Welker provides an alternative mode of analysis that avoids the usual tropes without losing sight of the complexities and contradictions revealed through ethnographic fieldwork."-- "American Anthropologist"

About the Author

Marina Welker is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Cornell University.