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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.
List of contents
List of Illustrations
List of Abbreviations
Acknowledgments
Note on Pseudonyms and Quoted Sources
Introduction
1. “We Need to Newmontize Folk”: A New Social Discipline at Corporate Headquarters
2. “Pak Comrel Is Our Regent Whom We Respect:” Mine, State, and Development Responsibility
3. “My Job Would Be Far Easier If Locals Were Already Capitalists”: Incubating Enterprise and Patronage
4. “We Identified Farmers as Our Top Security Risk”: Ethereal and Material Development in the Paddy Fields
5. “Corporate Security Begins in the Community”: The Social Work of Environmental Management
6. “We Should Be Like Starbucks”: The Social Assessment
Conclusion. “Soft Is Hard”
Notes
Bibliography
Index
About the author
Marina Welker is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Cornell University.
Summary
What are corporations, and to whom are they responsible? This book 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.
Additional text
"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."
