ATS3199 Cultures of the corporate world

In this unit, students explore one of the central dichotomies of contemporary human life: corporations are non-human entities that are playing a more and more significant role in human activity, and few lives are not influenced by them. At the same time, corporations rely for their existence on humans, and ideally should provide benefits to human lives. The central questions of this unit examine this problem: in a world defined by human relationships, how do corporations figure in social activity? Relying on anthropological analysis of corporate activity in western and non-western settings, the unit examines what corporations mean for human sociability, focussing on: the differing forms and meanings of corporations across cultures; the changing relations between humans and corporations, and their implications for understandings of human subjectivity; debates about what kinds of responsibility can be attributed to these non-human entities; different forms of speech and language used by corporations; how corporations benefit from ethnographic analysis; the ways in which social facts such as kinship and gender shape and are shaped by corporations. Drawing on ethnographic case studies as well as anthropological theorising, the unit approaches corporations not as givens, but as social products that can be compared to other cultural forms.