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 i...

Buy Now From Amazon

Product Review

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.


Similar Products

Liquidated: An Ethnography of Wall Street (a John Hope Franklin Center Book)Mining Capitalism: The Relationship between Corporations and Their CriticsLeviathans at the Gold Mine: Creating Indigenous and Corporate Actors in Papua New GuineaCoca-Globalization: Following Soft Drinks from New York to New GuineaA Brief History of NeoliberalismSweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern HistoryBrick Lane: A NovelThe Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist RuinsUnearthing Conflict: Corporate Mining, Activism, and Expertise in Peru