berghahn New York · Oxford

Contents

Preface

Introduction: Seeing Management Abstractly
James G. Carrier

Chapter 1. The Production of Management and the Disappearance of the Manager in MBA Education
Andrew Orta

Chapter 2. Management’s Hidden Realm
James G. Carrier

Chapter 3. Writing Managers and Management: Anthropology’s Last Repugnant Other?
Michael M. Prentice

Chapter 4. Against Collaboration: The Ethics of Studying Corporate Management
Felix Stein

Chapter 5. Management in the Flow of Culture
Greg Urban

Chapter 6. Not every Culture has Management, but every Management Has Culture
Heung Wah Wong

Chapter 7. Life in the Head Office: Material Metaphors of Management
Emil A. Røyrvik

Chapter 8. Venture Capital Investors as (Asset) Managers
Johannes Lenhard

Afterword: For an Anthropology of Management
Stefan Leins

Index

Unraveling Management

Its Institutions, Practices and Beliefs

Edited by James G. Carrier

Afterword by Stefan Leins

226 pages, 2 ills., bibliog., index

ISBN 978-1-80539-692-5 Hb Published (March 2025)

eISBN 978-1-80539-693-2
web ISBN 978-1-80539-693-2

Details

“This is a very exciting and very timely book on a topic that is long overdue in anthropology…there’s a rare consistency in the ensemble of chapters even when they are quite different in content.” • Juan Del Nido, University of Cambridge

Management is everywhere. Schools teach it and professional organisations counsel about it. Books and articles are written for managers and about them. Management is usually understood in terms of styles of management, management policies and successful management but few tend to think about management in an abstract sense. This book addresses this gap and provokes us to think seriously about this assumed entity. It does so in various ways, by treating management as an institution, as an object of study, as engaged with culture in different ways and as laden with conflicts.

James G. Carrier has taught, researched and written on aspects of economy in Papua New Guinea, the United States and the United Kingdom. He has co-edited several volumes including After the Crisis: Anthropological Thought, Neoliberalism and the Aftermath (Routledge, 2016) and Ethical Consumption: Social Value and Economic Practice, with Peter G. Luetchford (Berghahn Books, 2014).

Subject: Political and Economic Anthropology Applied Anthropology Sociology

Area:

LC: HD31.2 .U57 2025

BISAC: BUS041000 BUSINESS & ECONOMICS/Management; SOC002010 SOCIAL SCIENCE/Anthropology/Cultural & Social; SOC026040 SOCIAL SCIENCE/Sociology/Social Theory