Anthropology Inc.
Conveners: Colin Filer and James Weiner, Resource Management in Asia-Pacific Program, Australian National University
Most anthropologists would probably agree with Joel Bakan’s assertion that the modern corporation is a pathological monster. However, there seems to be an increasing variety of circumstances in which corporate executives engage anthropologists as employees, consultants or advisers; and even those anthropologists who eschew this kind of engagement still find themselves working as employees, consultants or advisers in organisations (including universities) that increasingly behave as if they were corporations. In this session we aim to address the following questions:
How, when, where and why do corporate interests value the products of anthropological research?
Is there anything distinctive about the pattern of anthropological engagement with ‘real’ corporations as opposed to other corporate forms of organisation?
How does the process of engagement with real corporations or their corporate shadows affect the theory and practice of our discipline?
In what sense, and with what effects, is the discipline itself being corporatised, both within and beyond the walls of the Ivory Tower?
Abstracts
Patrick Kilby, School of Archaeology and Anthropology, Australian National University - Combining Corporate Expectations with People’s Needs: Hewlett-Packard’s Social Investment Program in Asia
John Burton, Resource Management in Asia-Pacific Program, Australian National University - Anthropology, Ethics, and Corporate Social Responsibility in Australia and the Southwest Pacific
Todd Harple, Intel Corporation - What’s it to ya’: Ethnography in and out of the Corporate World
Colin Filer, Resource Management in Asia-Pacific Program, Australian National University - Anthropologists as Serial Offenders: Scandalous Engagements with the Ok Tedi Mine in Papua New Guinea
Laurence Goldman, ExxonMobil - Between Connivance and Complicity: How I Learnt to Apply Product
