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The State of Culture Theory in Southeast Asian Corporations
Organizer: Marina Welker, Cornell University
Chair: Jerome Whitington, U.C. Berkeley
Discussant: Mary M. Steedly, Harvard University
“Culture,” Mary Steedly argued in 1999, “is increasingly viewed as an attribute of the state – an object of state policy, an ideological zone for the exercise of state power, or literally a creation of the state – whereas the state itself is comprehended in ways analogous to totalizing models of culture.” For Southeast Asian corporations, “culture” is also the subject of intensive knowledge gathering practices and management interventions. Internally, executives seek to manage cultural difference and engage in self-reflexive projects of diagnosing and reforming internal culture. Externally, corporations sponsor rituals and marketing executives attempt to access and alter the desires of consumers. This panel asks what culture theories obtain within Southeast Asian corporations, what practices these theories support, and what unintended consequences they may entail. While culture may be seen as an attribute of the corporation and as a zone for the exercise of corporate power, corporations are no monoliths, and culture is still invoked to explain arenas of human behavior that elude capitalist rationality. During discussion, we invite reflection on the implications corporate theories of culture may hold for social scientists' uses of the culture concept.
Islamic Ethics and Spiritual Economy in Contemporary Indonesia
Daromir Rudnyckyj, University of Victoria
This paper examines the convergence of the global religious resurgence and economic globalization through the concept “spiritual economy.” Drawing on eighteen months of ethnographic research, the majority of which took place at Krakatau Steel in Banten, the paper analyzes a moderate Islamic spiritual reform movement active in nationalized companies, government bureaucracies, and private enterprises in contemporary Indonesia. Participants in spiritual reform consider the separation of religious ethics from economic practice as the root of Indonesia’s economic crisis because this disjunction resulted in rampant corruption, inefficiency, and a lack of discipline at the workplace. The paper analyzes efforts to inculcate Islamic ethics in combination with western management knowledge that was expected to enhance economic productivity, reduce endemic corruption, restore relations between unions and management, and prepare employees of state-owned enterprises like Krakatau Steel for privatization. This paper develops the concept spiritual economy to comprehend the convergence of the global religious resurgence and economic globalization. Spiritual economy captures the articulation of these two distinct domains, which are expected to create a new disposition toward oneself, one’s work, and one’s collectivity. Self-discipline, accountability, practices of affect, and entrepreneurial action are conceived of and enacted as Islamic ethics that should inform one’s conduct both within and outside the workplace. Thus, spiritual economy describes a contingent assemblage of religious and economic rationalities. This assemblage captures the interaction of western management knowledge, a discursive tradition of Islam, and changing state and transnational development prerogatives.
Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh City: Christmas and the Spectacle of Middle Class Consumption in Urban Southern Vietnam
Ann Marie Leshkowich, College of the Holy Cross
On Christmas Eve, the always-bustling downtown area of Ho Chi Minh City becomes even livelier. Beneath the sparkling lights strung across boulevards and balconies, thousands of motorcycles, many carrying families of four or five, circle past Ho Chi Minh’s statue, the theater, upscale hotels, the People’s Committee Building, and Notre Dame cathedral. Many riders stop to gape at the spectacle and to purchase snacks, noisemakers, balloons, trinkets, and Santa Claus outfits from pushcart vendors. Others hire itinerant photographers to commemorate the moment. Some will return home to receive presents delivered by a motorbike-riding Santa. While a small minority of the revelers will attend Catholic mass, Christmas for most is a secular holiday centered on family, consumption, and urban spectacle. Why has Christmas become so popular in urban southern Vietnam? This paper suggests that Christmas reflects both corporate and middle class desires to craft a Vietnamese consumer culture celebrating wealth, youth, and the nuclear family. Two decades of economic reform have produced a growing business sector aggressively marketing new modes of consumption. Corporate enthusiasm for Christmas has been more than matched, however, by middle-class urbanites who see the holiday as an alluring means to participate in a modern global cultural form. Free from the obligations to extended kin and ancestors that accompany traditional Vietnamese holidays such as Tet, yuletide festivities enable middle classes to celebrate heterosexual romance, to indulge children’s material desires, and to suspend the anxieties that can otherwise surround spectacular displays of wealth in a late socialist society.
Mining Culture Theory in Sumbawa
Marina Welker, Cornell University
Managers from Newmont Mining Corporation’s copper mine in Sumbawa conceptualize the culture of local village residents in conflicting ways, believing villagers lack “indigenous culture” but possess “cultural traditions.” Corporate officials advocate respecting and perpetuating certain Sumbawan traditions, while regarding others as obstacles to development. In this paper, I examine the culture theories and knowledge practices that underpin opposing corporate understandings of Sumbawan culture. The view that Sumbawans are not indigenous, for example, hinges on popular, state, and advocacy depictions of indigeneity. Newmont officials develop their understanding of the cultural significance of gold to Sumbawans with knowledge formulated by corporate anthropologists in other parts of the world, such as Ghana. I conclude by examining the political ramifications of corporate apprehensions of Sumbawan culture, focusing on the denial of Sumbawan land rights, mechanisms of corporate-village interaction, and the mining enterprise itself.
Culture as a Managerial Concept in Lao Hydropower Development
Jerome Whitington, University of California, Berkeley
A key aspect of managing the effects of a new hydropower project in Laos has been for the transnational firm to deploy new livelihood strategies compatible with Lao villagers' culture. At the same time, citing a "culture" of dependency on the socialist state, the hydropower company has also used a range of techniques to encourage villagers' "ownership" of the proposed livelihood changes. The socialist state's prior interest in maintaining subsistence agricultural practices was found to be inadequate within a new global environmental regime. In practice, "ownership" tactics have come to dominate an environmental management strategy meant to make villagers accept responsibility for changing their own lives. Thus while acknowledging some basic need for cultural compatibility, the company has instead targeted a different kind of culture meant to instill a disposition of responsibility and entrepreneurial proclivity among people whose lives were damaged by the hydropower project. Based on ethnographic work within the company and among villagers, this paper details the reasons why the firm found it important to emphasize villagers' responsibility, and the tactics through which a neoliberal culture of responsibility was deployed to augment and override corporate sensitivity to Lao culture. A practical concept of culture with a much shorter temporal horizon than a concept of ethnicity was put to use by the corporation. Brought strangely within the fold of what Aihwa Ong would call the company's graduated sovereignty, villagers were disciplined around a novel work ethic of global portent.