Tag: flexible labor

Indian Software Engineers and the Power of Algorithms  

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A review of Virtual Migration: The Programming of Globalization, A. Aneesh, Duke University Press, 2006.

Virtual MigrationA. Aneesh first coined the word algocracy, or algocratic governance, in his book Virtual Migration, published by Duke University Press in 2006. He later refined the term in his book Neutral Accent, an ethnographic study of international call centers in India (which I reviewed here), and in subsequent work in which he preferred to use the term algorithmic governance. What is algocracy? Just as bureaucracy designates the power of bureaus, the administrative structures within large public or private organizations, algocracy points toward the power of algorithms, the lines of code underlying automatic expert systems, enterprise software solutions and, increasingly, artificial intelligence. Power and authority are increasingly embedded in algorithms that inform and define the world of automated teller machines, geographical positioning systems, personal digital assistants, digital video, word processing, databases, global capital flows, and the Internet. In Virtual Migration, Aneesh made the distinction between three types of organizational governance: the bureaucratic mode (rule by the office), the panoptic mode (rule by surveillance), and the algocratic mode (rule by code). Each form of governance corresponds to different technologies, organizations, and subjectivities. This classification is loosely connected to Max Weber’s classical distinction between three types of legitimate authority that characterize human societies, especially as they evolve from simple to more complex social organizations built upon shared norms, values, and beliefs. The German sociologist called these three types charismatic authority, traditional authority, and rational-legal authority. Charismatic authority comes from the personal charisma, strength, and aura of an individual leader. The legitimacy of traditional authority comes from traditions and customs. Rational-legal authority is a form of leadership in which command and control are largely tied to legal rationality, due process of law, and bureaucracy. Proposing the new concept of algocracy raises many questions. Is the rule of code perceived as legitimate, or how is the issue of legitimacy displaced by a new form of governance that doesn’t rest on human decision? How does this lack of human agency affect the functioning of democratic institutions? Does it have an effect on social asymmetry, inequity, and inequality? What are the intersections between algocracy and surveillance (the panoptic mode) and organizational design (the bureaucratic mode)?

What is algocracy?

But first, it is important to understand that algocratic governance is a sociological concept, grounded in the standard methodologies of social science. It is not a computer science concept, although software engineers and scientists deal with algorithms on a daily basis. Nor is it a philosophical notion that an intellectual builds out of thin air in his or her cabinet. Sociology has a long tradition of theory-building that goes through the steps of observation, categorization, and association. Participant observation is one type of data collection method typically used in qualitative research and ethnography; it constitutes the golden standard in anthropology and several branches of sociology. Other methods of data gathering include non-participant observation, survey research, structured interviews, and document analysis. Based on the collected dataset, the researcher makes generalizations from particular cases, tests the explanatory power of concepts, and builds theory through inductive reasoning. In contrast to Neutral Accent, Virtual Migration is not based on participant observation but was conducted through a qualitative methodology the author characterizes as critical, comparative, and exploratory. Aneesh conducted more than a hundred interviews with Indian programmers, system analysts, project managers, call center workers, human resource managers, and high-level executives, including CEOs, managing directors, and vice-presidents, both in India and in the United States. He also observed shop floor organization and work processes in twenty small, mid-size, and large software firms in New Delhi, Gurgaon, and Noida. The conceptualization of algocracy came to him through a simple observation. When an Indian dialer in a call center answers the phone or fills in the “fields” on a computer screen, these actions are constrained by the underlying computer system that directs the calls and formats the information to fill in. The operator “cannot type in the wrong part of a form, or put the address in the space of the phone number for the field may be coded to accept only numbers, not text; similarly, an agent cannot choose to dial a profile (unless, of course, they eschew the dialer and dial manually). The embedded code provides existing channels that guide action in precise ways.”

In order to come to this epiphany, Aneesh had to immerse himself in fieldwork and grapple with questions that connect the local and the particular to wider transnational trends. The context provides some understanding of the challenges the researcher was facing. The rise of the Indian IT industry was boosted by the so-called Millennium Bug, also known as Y2K: approaching the passage to the year 2000, there was widespread fear that the “00” date that would start from the last midnight of 1999 could cause computers to malfunction, since they might interpret it as the 00 for 1900. India’s fledging IT companies sensed the opportunity and offered their services.They sent software specialists onsite to fix the computer systems of large US corporations, and operated from a distance through increased bandwidth and Internet cable links. This was also a time when outsourcing and offshoring of service activities became an issue in the United States. The transferring of jobs from the United States to countries with lower labor standards and environmental protection became a dark symbol of globalization. The effect of international trade and global economic integration on workers’ rights, human rights, and the environment was hotly debated. In Seattle during December 1992, four days of massive street protests against the World Trade Organization turned the city into a battle ground. Globalization was attacked from the right and from the left. The nativist right criticized the loss of manufacturing jobs and the tide of immigrants that were flooding American cities, disrupting the social fabric and diluting national identity. The social justice left denounced the erosion of workers’ rights in the US and the prevalence of child labor and over forms of exploitation in the Global South. One type of work, the staffing of call centers responding to American customers from places in India or other locations, came under the focus of the news media. The same forces that had destroyed manufacturing jobs and put blue-collar workers on the dole were also affecting the service sector and threatening white-collar workers. For some observers, like the journalist Thomas Friedman, the world was becoming flat. Something was definitely happening, but social scientists lacked the tools and datasets for interpreting what was going on. New concepts were needed.

Body shopping and virtual migration

In their analysis of globalization, economists have shown that commercial integration and foreign direct investment reinforce each other, thus being complements rather than substitutes. Aneesh started his research project from a similar question: “Initially I began inquiring whether online services were replacing on-site work, making the physical migration of programming labor redundant.” During further investigations, especially interviews, he realized that the situation was a bit more complex. In a typical situation, “a firm in India might send two or three systems analysts to the client’s site in the United States for a short period, so that they might gain a first-hand understanding of the project and discuss system design. These systems analysts then help to develop the projects in India while remaining constantly in touch with their client, who can monitor the progress of the project and provide input. Once the project is over, one or two programmers fly back to the United States to test the system and oversee its installation.” Aneesh then made the distinction between two types of labor: body shopping, or embodied labor migration; and virtual migration, or disembodied labor migration. Both practices are part of the growing transnational system of flexible labor supply that allows Indian firms to enter into global supply chains and achieve optimal result. Virtual migration does not require workers to move in physical space; body shopping implies migration of both bodies and skills. In body shopping, Indian consultancy firms “shop” for skilled bodies: they recruit software professionals in India to contract them out for short-term projects in the United States. At the end of the project, programmers look for other projects, usually from the same contractors. Some of them start looking for a contractor based in the United States and attempt to secure a more lucrative placement. The ultimate goal is to switch their visa status from the H-1B work visa to the Green Card: body shopping allows Indian workers to pursue the American dream.

Contrary to standard perceptions, “the biggest advantage of hiring contract labor is not low short-term costs; it is flexibility, and the resulting reduction of the long-term costs of maintaining a large permanent workforce.” With a widespread demand for programming labor in different organizations, software professionals are well-paid workers. They are both “expensive and cheap” for American corporations to hire. They allow the receiving company to trim its workforce, take these temporary workers into service only in times of need, and economize on long-term benefits—social security, retirement contributions, health insurance, and unemployment insurance—that must be provided to permanent employees. Contractual employment allows American companies to implement just-in-time labor and to decouple work performance from the maintenance of a permanent workforce. In the case of virtual migration, they can also achieve temporal integration and work in real time, round-the-clock, in a seamless way: “Since the United States and India have an average time-zone difference of twelve hours, the client may enjoy, for a number of tasks, virtually round-the-clock office hours; when America closes its offices, India gets ready to start its day.” The temporal sequencing of work across time zones allows corporation to “follow the sun” and gain a competitive advantage by dividing their work groups and assignments between India and the United States. But time integration is not as easy as it sounds: coordination is a complex business, and lots of valuable information get lost during the workload transmission from one team to the other. Temporal dissonance may also occur when an Indian team is obliged to work at night to provide real-time response to American clients, like in the case of call centers. Like Aneesh illustrated in his subsequent book Neutral Accent, people who perform nightly live in two worlds, straddled between time zones, languages, and cultural references. Night work alters circadian rhythms and put workers out of phase with their own society: “there is a reason why night work has another name—the graveyard shift.”

Algocracy is not algonomics

In writing Virtual Migration, Aneesh’s ambition was to disentangle sociology from economics, showing that they can take different and sometimes opposed perspectives on the same phenomenon. An economist would ask whether migration and trade are complementary or substitute, and look at trade data and labor statistics to test hypotheses. He would try to differentiate between short-term losses and long-term gains, showing that job displacements and layoffs caused by transnational economic integration is more than compensated by gains in productivity and increased activity. Aneesh warns against the danger of conflating the economic and the social where the social is often assimilated to the economic. Virtual workers or Indian programmers who engage in the body shopping trade are not only economic agents; their location of choice is not only motivated by economic interest. During interviews, “programmers continually long for the ‘other’ nation: they miss India while in the United States and miss the United States when they are back in India.” It is not only an opposition between material versus more social and emotional longings: “we also find high-level executives who enjoy material luxuries in India such as chauffeur-driven cars, plush houses, and domestic help at home and yet still try to maintain their permanent residency in the United States.” Similarly, discussions on organizational networks tend to be economistic, focussing on possible efficiencies, competitive advantage, coordination, and relative transaction costs for corporations. But for Aneesh, the language of “networks” often obscures relations of power and governance in the emerging regime. As he explains, “algocracies are imbued with social ideas of control as well as formal logic, tracing their roots to the imperatives of capital and code.” Computer programming has emerged as a form of power that structures possible forms of action in a way that is analytically different from bureaucratic and surveillance systems. Enterprise software systems developed by Indian firms are not merely the automation of existing processes. They also “produce the real” by structuring possible forms of behavior and by translating embodied skills into disembodied code.

One of the characteristics of algocratic governance is to reduce the space needed for deliberation, negotiation, and contestation of the rules and processes that frame actions and orient decisions. As Aneesh could observe on shop floors and in call centers, “work is increasingly controlled not by telling workers to perform a task, nor necessarily by punishing workers for their failure, but by shaping an environment in which there are no alternatives to performing the work as desired.” Programming technologies have gained the ability to structure behavior without a need for orienting people toward accepting the rules of the game. Software templates provide existing channels that guide action in precise ways: all choices are already programmed and nonnegotiable. This guidance suggests that algorithmic authority does not need legitimacy in the same sense as was used in the past. Max Weber’s three types of legitimate power supposed human agency on the part of the bearers of authority and for those under their command. But as authority is increasingly embedded in the technology itself, or more specifically in the underlying code, governance operates without human intervention: human agency disappears, and so does the possibility to make authority legitimate. This is not to deny that programming is done by someone and that human agents are still in charge of making decisions. Yet programming also becomes fixed and congealed as a scheme, defining and channeling possible action. Automation, or the non-human operation of a process, is not a problem in itself. It becomes a matter of concern when automated algorithms enter into certain areas where it is important for the space for negotiation to remain open.

AI alignment

Artificial intelligence brings the power of algorithms to a new level. The critics addressed to AI are getting more and more familiar. AI systems are non-transparent, making it almost impossible to identify the rules that led them to recommend a decision. They can be biased and perpetuate discrimination by amplifying the racial or gender biases embedded in the data used for training them. They remain arbitrary from the individual’s perspective, substituting the human subject with changing behavioral patterns and data scores. AI lacks human qualities like creativity and empathy, limiting its ability to understand emotions or produce original ideas. Surveillance powered by AI threatens individual privacy and collective rights, tipping the balance in favor of authoritarian states and oppressive regimes. In a not-so-distant future, artificial general intelligence (AGI) systems could become “misaligned”—in a way that could lead them to make plans that involve disempowering humanity. For some experts, AGI raises an existential risk that could result in human extinction or another irreversible global catastrophe. The development of AI has generated strong warnings from leaders in the sector, some of whom have recommended a “pause” in AI research and commercial development. What I find missing in discussions about AI security and “AGI alignment” is the lack of observable facts. We need empirical observations and field research to document the changes AI-powered algorithms bring to work processes, organizational structures, and individual autonomy. We also need to explain what algorithms actually do in concrete terms by using the perspectives of people from various cultures and backgrounds. Only then will we be able to balance algorithmic governance with countervailing forces and ensure that democratic freedoms can be maintained in the age of the rule by code.

Chinese Women Students in Australia

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A review of Dreams of Flight: The Lives of Chinese Women Students in the West, Fran Martin, Duke University Press, 2022.

Dreams of FlightReading Dreams of Flight made me reexamine my preconceptions about Australia, China, and university studies abroad. When I was a graduate student in France back in the early 1990s, I didn’t identify Australia as a land of opportunity for academic studies. In the disciplines that I have studied, Australia is (or was) a scientific backwater, an outlier when compared to North America or Western Europe. I don’t trust university rankings that much, but last time I checked Australian universities ranked quite low in terms of research output, number of Nobel Prizes, well-identified schools of thought, or emerging paradigms. I was under the impression that an academic career in an Australian institution was a second- or third-best choice for aspiring scholars who failed to land the position of their dreams in North America or in Europe. Spending more than a decade in East Asia made me revise that opinion. I have met many Asian scholars for whom Australia was definitely on the academic map. For a prospective graduate student in South Korea, in Taiwan, or in South-East Asia, pursuing a degree in Australia, applying for a faculty position, or doing research as a post-doctoral student in an Australian university are serious options to consider. Australia’s attractiveness is not only linked to geographical proximity. Language, lifestyle, natural environment, diasporic presence, and academic freedom in well-funded research universities also weigh in the decision for an academic destination. Besides, the international students who form the focus of Dreams of Flight—a cohort of about fifty young Chinese women that the author follows across the full cycle of international study between 2012 and 2020—did not wish to pursue an academic career in science or in the humanities. Their ambition was to acquire a degree in a practical field such as accounting, finance, or communication and media studies, to broaden their horizon by getting an experience of living and studying abroad, and to follow a career marked by international mobility and promotion opportunities. Australian universities could build on these expectations to attract a growing number of students from China: in December 2019, just before Covid, there were over 212,000 Chinese students studying in Australia. Students from China represented the largest proportion of international students, while Australia was the third foreign destination for Chinese students after the United States and the United Kingdom.

Study in France, Study in Australia

Reading that higher education in Australia is also a commercial venture wasn’t really a surprise for me. In my previous posting as cultural counsellor at the French Embassy in Hanoi, I was involved in managing a Study in France programme and in attracting Vietnamese students to French educational institutions. Australian universities were clearly our direct competitors. La Trobe University had an admission office and a partnership program within Hanoi University, while RMIT was the first completely foreign-owned university granted permission to operate in Vietnam, delivering Australian degrees for a hefty tuition fee. But even with this experience in mind, I personally don’t like to think of academic studies abroad as a field ruled by competition and marketization. For France, attracting foreign students is a matter of public policy, not market development: it is a way to promote our model and our values, to uphold the position of French as an international language, to train potential recruits for French multinational firms or research labs, and to build long-lasting influence through a network of alumni who will keep a close connection to France. This assumes, of course, that foreign students will adhere to the values conveyed through education and living abroad, that they will practice French in the classroom (where courses are increasingly taught in English) and in everyday life, and that they will keep a positive attitude toward France after their study period (remember that Ho Chi Minh and Pol Pot both worked and studied in France.) Unlike many universities in Australia, in the US or in the UK, French universities and Grandes Écoles offer high-quality training without imposing unaffordable tuition and fees. In fact, the French government offers many foreign students a benefits programme that reduces tuition fees to almost nothing. Although this is not the case for every institution of higher education, these fee structures are still lower than other universities in Europe, let alone Australia or North America. This is not always the best selling point among prospective students and their families: especially in Asia, quality comes at a price, and what is low-priced tends to be perceived as low-quality. But in countries like Vietnam, the affordability of studies in France, coupled with the known quality of French curricula, was clearly a strong argument to attract students to France and to persuade them to study French in our cultural institutes located in Vietnam’s four main cities.

Australia has a different approach to attracting foreign students. Australia has been recognized as having “the most organized and aggressive international recruitment and marketing strategy” for its universities abroad, and yet the central government has little involvement in higher education promotion. Universities, and in some respects provinces, are in charge of attracting foreign students to Australia and building an image of academic excellence and cosmopolitanism. They compete among themselves and against foreign education institutions for private income from international students, with the students themselves conceptualized essentially as consumers. To attract new students and maximize revenue, they maintain a network of commercial education agents abroad, organize student fairs and promotion events, open offices on the campus of partner universities, and sign agreements with local institutions. They use marketing strategies to target the public and divide the market into various segments: the cohort of young students studied by the author, who belong to the “post-90” (jiuling hou) generation, were more likely than the previous generation to be female, to study business and management as opposed to sciences or engineering, to start studying at the bachelor’s level, and to apply for permanent resident permit after their studies. The selling points for studying in Australia increasingly focus on urban lifestyle, natural scenery, food and beverage, and opportunities for tourism. International student offices at Australian universities emphasize the quality of students’ live & learn experience. They offer a range of support, advice and information about housing, daily life, and job opportunities. The objective is to create value and maximize consumer experience, not to promote a particular model of democracy and use education as a policy instrument. If exposure to daily life in Australia makes student acquire a taste for freedom and democratic ideals, so much the better. But studying in Australia is responding to economic rationality, not to the logic of a sovereign state. The education sector is Australia’s third export market after agriculture and mining. It generates indirect revenues by contributing to nation branding, tourism, and export promotion. If anything, dependence on Chinese student income was construed as a problem, especially at the end of the period studied by Fran Martin. Excessive market concentration affects product quality and exposes producers to increased political risk.

Preconceived ideas

As Fran Martin writes in her preface, “the young Chinese women whose stories are told in this book represent the human face of this marketization of education.” I was surprised by the description of their social background as middle class: they were the (often only) daughters of middle-rank party cadres, local officials, small business entrepreneurs, or corporate executives, who could afford to pay tuition fees and living expenses abroad. By comparison, in Vietnam, studying abroad remains the preserve of the elite or the upper middle class, and parents are making huge sacrifices to send their children abroad. Even in France, where secondary education is mostly state-led and university tuition fees are very low, sending one’s child to study abroad is a tough financial decision, and most French students content themselves with a one-year mobility in a different European country under the Erasmus student exchange program. Getting a degree in the United States, in Australia, or even in post-Brexit United Kingdom is out of the financial reach of most French families. The huge number of Chinese students abroad (over 700 000 in 2019) made me realize how rich China has become, and how devoted Chinese parents are to the education of their children. A related surprise was to read that for these young urban Chinese women, Melbourne and other Australian cities felt provincial and underdeveloped. Words like Mocun (“Melvillage”) and TuAo (“native Oz”) disparage the cultural and economic backwardness of Australia as a whole, while complaints about the nation’s backward infrastructure and early shop closing times were frequent among Chinese students. For some students, the village-like living conditions in Melbourne felt safe and friendly, while other complained against the unfriendliness of the locals, the unavailability of jobs in non-Chinese-run businesses, the ethnic concentration of Chinese students and migrants in clustered urban areas and housing, and racism and violence in public places. The dream of immersing oneself in the local culture and to get to know local people often ended in disillusion and fear. Indeed, many respondents in the study found that they had left China only to arrive in a subworld populated by Chinese friends, Chinese landlords, Chinese classmates, Chinese flatmates, Chinese bosses, Chinese media, and Chinese businesses. Everyday verbal interactions were held mostly in Mandarin, and the city was experienced as a sociospatial network of connected clusters.

Another preconceived idea I had about China was that increased openness through foreign travel and studies abroad might change Chinese society for the better and steer its citizens toward more liberal attitudes on the political and social fronts. This is a delusion I share with many people in the West: the notion that exposing young Chinese people to our ideas and values will make them think and behave more like us and will turn China as a whole into a responsible stakeholder on the global scene. In France, international education is recognized as a significant tool of soft power, a mechanism of attraction and persuasion. Through student exchange programs and cultural institutions such as Alliance française and Campus France, countries convey particular cultural, social, educational and political images of themselves abroad. These not only enhances their global visibility and influence but also their ultimate goal to reach and win the hearts and minds of people worldwide. It seems hard to deny the fact that internationalized higher education, with its cross-cultural and multi-national exchange activities, lays the ground for an intensified cross-border dialogue, contributes to a greater understanding between countries as well as enhances international cooperation. Education as a global phenomenon attracts people, and generates interest in the languages and cultures of other places. But Australia doesn’t seem to make such assumptions. For Australians, education is a lucrative business, not a policy tool, and promotion efforts focus on short rather than long term objectives. If anything, the increased number of Chinese students in Australian universities, and their dependence on partnership agreements with China, are perceived as a threat to academic freedom and domestic sovereignty. After Fran Martin completed her study, it was announced that Australia’s federal government was to shut down Chinese learning centers, known as Confucius Institutes, after the latter has been suspected of functioning as a plank of the Chinese Communist Party’s propaganda. In 2021, Human Rights Watch published a report entitled How China’s Long Reach of Repression Undermines Academic Freedom at Australia’s Universities, giving voice to students and academics who felt forced to self-censor their views about the human rights abuses of the communist regime in China. Cases of nationalist outbursts and peer harassment have been reported among Chinese students abroad, making true the Chinese regime’s assertion that “leaving the country is more effective than a hundred patriotic education classes.”

Competing models of identity

This is not to say that international education had no effect on the Chinese students who responded to Fran Martin’s questions or discussed together on their WeChat group. The author identifies two competing models of identity among the young Chinese women from the post-90 generation: neoliberal-style enterprising selfhood, and neotraditionalist familial feminity. The first one values mobility, individual freedom, cosmopolitanism, professional orientation, gender equality, and consumerism. The second one prefers stability, family orientation, filial piety, collective discipline, job security, and traditional gender roles. Studying abroad accompanied a shift from the second to the first model. Contacted a few years after the study, women in the focus group were more likely to be unmarried, independent, focused on their professional career, following a flexible life course, and geographically mobile. They valued professional ambition, cultural reflexivity, and leisure consumption. All were not able to translate international studies into higher-status jobs in the private sector, in China or in Australia, and a significant number experienced downward social mobility. Some remained in Australia, navigating the state immigration regime and accumulating points in pursuit of permanent resident status while doing odd jobs in precarious conditions. Other graduates returned to China and faced gender-based discrimination in their job searches, competing with a large number of haigui returnees and having less guanxi than those who had stayed behind. Most of them delayed marriage and childbearing, with the risk of falling behind the gendered life script of marrying before their late twenties and becoming shengnü, or “leftover women.” The other model of gender neotraditionalism also retained its influence, in alliance with family structures and the modern apparatus of the socialist state. Pressures to marry and have children on a fixed schedule were difficult to escape, and heteronormativity weighed on some women who had developed same-sex leanings while in Australia. In political terms, Chinese students abroad tended to manifest expressions of “long-distance nationalism” and “patriotism from afar.” Faced with “insults to China”, the ethics of national representation demands that one make counterclaims to defend the national honor against hostile outsiders: “A son never complains that his mother is ugly; a dog never complains that its household is poor.” But nationalist feelings were also complicated by time spent abroad: the author observes a growing tendency to distinguish patriotism (aiguo) from attachment to the party or government, as well as a growing appreciation of the heterogeneity of Chinese identity. As she observes, “national feelings on the move are characterized by multiplicity, mutability, and ambivalence.”

Interestingly, the only institutions who really care about the subjectivities of Chinese students in Australia and who want to win their “hearts and minds” are proselytizing churches and religious sects. Among evangelical churches in the West (and in South Korea), China is seen as a new frontier for Christianity, a continent ripe for mass conversion and heavenly salvation. Some churches selectively target foreign students in evangelizing strategies: their personal alienation, disorientation, and insecurity resulting from their immersion into an unfamiliar environment make them easy targets for street preachers and door-to-door missionaries. The church to which there are drawn acts as a “service hub” for foreign students, providing spiritual comfort and material orientation as well as free language classes, outdoor excursion opportunities, and a quick way to meet new friends. In France, where secularism is part of the national identity, proselytizing has a bad image in the general public. It is perceived as undue influence and foreign meddling: evangelicals are routinely characterized as “Anglo-saxon,” and Seventh-Day Adventists or Latter-Day Saints are categorized as “cults.” By contrast, I was surprised to read that Chinese students had a rather positive image of proselytizing churches; despite being warned against “heterodox cults” (xie jiao) in their home country, they were curious about what they perceived as part of the cultural foundation of Western societies, and were favorably impressed by the selflessness and genuine sympathy of Christian missionaries. Some Chinese women used Bible-study classes and Pentecostal church sermons as a type of introspective self-cultivation and self-improvement, not necessarily leading to long-term religious engagement. For others, the church became the center of their social activities and spiritual life. For many Chinese students drawn to religious activities, churches were one of the few places where conversation and friendship with locals could occur. The LDS (Mormon) Church is not allowed to proselytize in China, but it trains its missionaries in Mandarin and tasks them with targeting Chinese citizens abroad in order to expand the faith into Chinese communities. For other churches as well, returnee converts may appear as an efficient means of spreading the faith in China while complying to the strict limitation imposed by the communist authorities on their activities. For the author, “churches’ provision of social services to international students raises some questions when considered in relation to ‘education export’ in Australia”: she sees it as “neoliberal privatization” and “outsourcing” of welfare services that ought to be provided by the secular state. She notes that the LDS Church and Pentecostal megachurches promote “deeply conservative positions on gender identity, (hetero)sexuality, and marriage.” But she also acknowledges the limitation of academic approaches when it comes to religious affects and expressions of faith: “the affective experience of immersion in religious scenes—even in the scholarly guise of ethnographic observation—tends to elude the clinical grasp of academic analysis.”

Market research

I wish I had with me a similar book about Vietnamese students abroad when I was posted at the French Embassy in Hanoi, covering the education sector. In our efforts to attract Vietnamese students to France, we were more or less walking in the dark. We had no market research reports, no focus group results, no customer satisfaction surveys, no communication strategy. When we organized a Study in France fair in a big hotel in Hanoi and in Ho Chi Minh City, we were overwhelmed by the number of young Vietnamese who showed up to gather information. We did invest resources to create and sustain a network of Vietnamese alumni: they were our best salespersons, and often took an active role in attracting their junior peers to the same institutions and programs from which they had graduated. A private philanthropist, who was particularly fond of elite institutions such as Ecole Polytechnique, played a tremendous role in attracting the best and the brightest Vietnamese students to France through a scholarship program. The “bourses de l’ambassade” (scholarships at the graduate level) were also very sought after, and a process was designed to guarantee the total independence of student selection. For many students, the French language was a barrier, as most courses in France were taught in French, but it was also an incentive to enroll in French language classes in Vietnam and develop a deeper engagement with French society. In our efforts to attract Vietnamese students to France, we stood halfway between economic rationality and the logic of a sovereign state. Higher education was not identified as a business sector that could generate revenue and contribute to economic growth, but as a tool of national influence and soft power. We were in competition with other foreign destinations or domestic programs, but we tended to present the Study in France experience as unique and special, not as a competitive option amongst many. Of course, a book like Dreams of Flight is not a market research report or an exhaustive survey of Chinese students in Australia. The insights it generates are, in my view, more relevant for public policy than for private sector development. In this way, it confirms my preconception that studies abroad should not be left to market forces and wealth considerations.

Love With Chinese Characteristics

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A review of Dreadful Desires: The Uses of Love in Neoliberal China, Charlie Yi Zhang, Duke University Press, 2022.

Dreadful DesiresIn Dreadful Desires, Charlie Yi Zhang advocates “a new approach” and “a different perspective” on love and neoliberalism in contemporary China. As he describes it, “My study integrates the discursive with the ethnographic and combines grave scrutiny of political economies and empirical data with upbeat examinations of popular cultures.” His grave and upbeat essay documents how a neoliberal market logic permeates expressions of love and aspirations for a good life, and how a fiercely competitive conjugal market, polarized gender relationships, and residency-differenciated precarities in turn produce willful subjects who are ready to sacrifice their well-being to maximize the interests of the state and capital. Its content and writing style also reflect his personal background and professional training. Having left China in his late twenties to pursue an academic career in the US, Zhang returned to his homeland for a few months of fieldwork in 2012 in order to complete his PhD in gender studies at Arizona State University. He was subsequently hired by the University of South Dakota to teach global studies to undergraduate students for two years, then landed a job as Associate Professor in Gender and Women’s Studies at Kentucky University, where he completed his book manuscript. During his graduate studies, his sociology professor taught him “how to combine different methodologies into [his] unique voice.” He claims to have developed “a novel theoretical and methodological approach” that builds an “epistemic ground for fundamental change.” His ambition is no less than “to lay the foundation for better futures” and “to develop a different understanding of global neoliberalism and to transform the current system.” His book is published in the Thought in the Act series edited by Erin Manning and Brian Massumi, two Canadian theoreticians working at the intersection of philosophy and art critique.

Methodology and theory-building

Zhang’s methodology is far from unique in cultural studies and social science. He uses the standard anthropological method that relies upon informal conversations, focus group discussions, and direct observations collected in two Chinese cities, Hai’an and Wuxi, located in the Jiangsu province north of Shanghai. The first is a county-level city of one half-million inhabitants that encompasses rural areas and industrial zones on the south-western shores of the Yellow Sea; the second is a prefecture-level city of more than five million people in the southern delta of the Yangtze River with a rich history of silk weaving and artistic expression. During his four months of fieldwork, Zhang interviewed over a hundred rural migrants and local farmers or workers, men and women, asking questions about love, family life, and aspirations for the future. He “spent considerable time in the homes and dormitories of [his] informants” and at “various locations of production, such as construction sites, factories, small workshops, family mills, and farms.” He also participated in “nonproductive activities such as family dinners, birthday parties, weddings, festival celebrations, and mundane chores.” There are only two chapters, however, that are organized around his analysis of field data. The remaining three chapters, two of which were published in academic journals in earlier versions, offer a commentary on cultural productions and events, namely the sixtieth-anniversary ceremony of the regime’s founding in 1949, a popular TV reality show titled If You Are the One, and an analysis of middle-aged women’s passion for danmei fictions featuring same-sex relations between beautiful young men, based on a sample of sixteen fans. These chapters are written in the ethnographic tradition that combines factual description and abstract theorizing. Although he quotes data on China’s economic development and social transformation taken from the popular press and expert reports, Zhang does not use quantitative methods, structured questionnaires, or comparative case studies.

It is on the theoretical front that Zhang displays more originality and novelty. To quote from the introduction, he takes “a feminist intersectionnal approach to interrogate and untangle the mechanism that the Chinese state relies upon to define and redefine the affective parameters of desire and intimacy in binaristic terms of gender, class, sexuality, and ethno-race.” He also takes a “queer of color critique approach […] to foreground power relationships and engage the becoming aspects of the machinery to interrogate its speculative manipulation of affective ecologies.” He borrows from Judith Butler’s playbook the idea that “gender is intentional and performative” and that anatomical sex, gender identity, and embodied performance do not always align. He is attuned to the thinking of Sara Ahmed, Lauren Berlant, and Brian Massumi, who have developed new ways of articulating affective economies to neoliberalism. Ahmed allows him to present a “postorthodox Marxist perspective” in which affect is viewed as a different form of capital, which “does not reside positively in the sign or commodity, but is produced only as an effect of its circulation.” Berlant is another important source of inspiration: a dithyrambic endorsement on the book’s back cover advances that “Zhang offers to do for love in China what Lauren Berlant, in Cruel Optimism, does for hope.” As for Massumi, also associated with the affective turn in cultural studies, Zhang borrows his model of affective temporality that conflates an anticipatory present, a promisory future and a virtualized past. All three authors allow him to address “the theoretical lacunae that leaves affect, emotions, and feelings fatally underdiscussed in scholarly examinations of neoliberal subject and world making.”

The borderless Loveland and the difference-making machinery

Zhang’s distinctive contribution to social theory is to build a bridge between emotional affect and calculative reason, between love and neoliberalism. He brings affect theory to bear on political economy reasoning and geopolitical considerations. Specifically, love and aspirations for the good life are used strategically by the state to obtain acquiescence and participation in a polarized market economy. Class disparities and gender differences are exploited by the authoritarian state to recreate competition from within and to serve capital’s productive ends. Zhang also proposes a vast array of idiosyncratic concepts and neologisms to make sense of the entaglement between reason and affect in neoliberal China. He situates his ethnography in “the borderless Loveland,” an “affectsphere” or “fantasmatic lovescape” that shapes people’s love and caring capacities in order to harness China’s national interest with the transnational interests of capital. The Loveland is to be understood as a topological notion, not a geographical concept, as the author draws “a speculative topography of the everyday sensibilities.” The Loveland extends its reach beyond mainland China; it is alternatively presented as “borderless” or within boundaries that are “indeterminate” or “expansive.” Zhang’s creative use of topology extends to the concepts of biopolitics and biopower borrowed from Michel Foucault. The first, assimilated with calculative reason and state power, follows a top-down, vertical axis; while the second, located on the immanent plane of affects, circulates horizontally. Feminist scholarship complicates this two-dimensional diagram by introducing a “multilayered and multifaceted architecture” where domination and resistance are “multidirectional and multidimensionnal.” These overlapping layers consist of gender, class, ethno-race, and sexuality. The assemblage of these orthogonal coordinates and multiple dimensions give shape to what the author calls the “difference-making machinery,” a polarizing mechanism that pits disenfranchized groups against another to allow for their compound exploitation by the nation-state and multinational corporations. This neoliberal machinery “integrates the borderless Loveland into the regulatory biopolitical system to drive and sustain China’s marketization and reintegration into the global economy.”

Dreadful Desires documents two different moves: the colonization of love and sentiments by the market and the state, and the way “lovable and love-able” subjects in turn uphold the functioning of the market and the expansion of the state’s interests. The encroachment of a neoliberal logic upon the emotional lifeworld of Chinese citizens is illustrated by the TV date game show If You Are the One, a copycat of a British TV reality show with added Chinese characteristics. The crass materialism of female participants is illustrated by the attitude of one young woman who, asked by a male suitor if she would “like to go out for a ride on my bicycle”, bluntly answers: “I would rather be crying in a BMW car!” In the show as in real life, it is standard for a Chinese woman to evaluate a potential male partner’s worth and accomplishments by asking him questions about his educational background, job, salary, amount of savings in the bank, ownership of property and cars, and so on. Indeed, having an appartment, a luxury car, a hefty savings account and a high-paying job has replaced the “four big items” (si dajian) that prospective grooms were supposed to possess under Maoist China: a bicycle, a sewing machine, a wristwatch, and a radio. A new kind of masculinity has emerged, which valorizes entrepreneurship, business acumen, and material possessions. As for women, the requisites placed upon them are no less stringent. The “three good girl” (sanhao nüsheng), a honorary title for meritous students under Maoism, used to designate girls with good morality, good learning, and good health. Now women have to respond to superlative standards of attractiveness, including breast size and leg length; hold glamorous jobs in the service sector; and be ready to carry out expanded family duties to support their husband, in-laws, and future children. These impossible requiements are exerting a heavy toll on Chinese masculinities and feminities. The amount of cash and gifts exchanged in a wedding ceremony can result in lifelong debt for the average family. Migrant workers working on construction sites or women in textile factories stand ready to sacrifice their health and well-being in the hope of a better future, if not for them, then at least for their children. But the dream of a good life is forever deferred: “the harder they try, the more they are alienated from their homes.”

Xi Jinping’s love and peace ideology

The Chinese state is complicit in the exploitation of labor by capital and the reproduction of oppositional differences out of the intersection of class, gender, and sexuality. It fuels the construction boom that sacrifices migrant workers on the altar of economic development and excludes them from the cities they have helped build. It pits categories of labor and gender roles against each other, while repressing nonnormative forms of intimity in the name of “homepatriarchy”—a portmanteau word that combines heteronormativity, male privilege, state authoritarianism, and home ownership. For Zhang, internal migrations and the hukou system of residence registration play the role that racial segregation occupies in racially-divided America or in South Africa under apartheid. Hukou registration gives access to education, medical care, basic life insurance, and other social services. It considerably enhances the value of a prospective bride or groom on the marriage market; bachelors lacking the urban residence permit must work harder and save more to improve their marriageability, or find a bride from a poorer area of China or a less-developed country such as Vietnam. To be sure, the socialist state run by the Chinese Communist Party cannot condone class hierarchies and labor exploitation. New regulation on TV dating shows now mandates diversity of participants and equality of treatment—even though the guy with the biggest property portfolio still gets the girl. Drawing upon Marxist-Leninist ideology, the party-state extolls the eradication of class differences and the liberation of China from exploitation and oppression; but in the choreographied extravaganza of the sixtieth anniversary ceremony, gender difference reemerges in the celebration of the post-reform era as a way “to conceal the new class structure and class differentiation.” The figure of Xi Jinping, construed as a benevolent father and a good husband to the nation, reinforces the patriarchal nature of the regime. The party-state offers love and harmony as a solution to internal developments and external challenges; but in the eyes of the author, “China’s love-gilded cosmopolitan dream proves no less pernicious than the hate-filled paranoia stoked by incendiary nationalists” such as Donald Trump in the United States.

Is Charlie Yi Zhang a Marxist? He shows little interest for the historical Marx, noting only his endorsement of normative heterosexualiy as the foundation for human and societal development. He prefers to borrow from Petrus Liu a “queer Marxist approach” that rejects “inclusion as a mode of social redress.” He retains from Marxism and radical thought the role of crisis and contradictions in fostering political upheaval and social change. The “difference-making machinery” is ripe with contradictions and fault lines, the first being the “contradictory needs of freewheeling capital and the border-making nation-state.” Zhang uses the concept of apparatus that he borrows from Marxist thought; but whereas for Louis Althusser apparatuses were an emanation of the state and reflected its repressive or ideological functions, Zhang refers to “a fantasmatic apparatus of desire and intimacy” that draws people to “work hard, dream big, and die slowly.” Like Marx, Zhang also believes that the role of critical theory is not just to interpret the world, but to change it. His declared goal is “to find a place where the subalterns can survive and to help lay a foundation for long-run transformation.” Exposing the dissonance between promise and fulfillment in the “borderles Loveland” is bound to send shockwaves to the system, shattering the “life-sustaining fantasy” on which it is built. His economy of affects places contradiction and change solely on the side of the reproduction of capital, neglecting entirely the relations of production and the reproduction of labor that form the bedrock of Marx’s thought. Indeed, borrowing from Sara Ahmed’s “economic model of emotions” where capital and affect are the sole factors of production and reproduction, he completely ignores labor as the primary scene of class antagonism and alienation. The only form of labor that is acknowledged in this affect-dominated economy is emotional labor. Indeed, this neglect of “hard labor” that characterizes postmodern political economy reflects the disengagement of the younger generation of Chinese men and women, who shun factory or construction work in favor of lower-paid jobs in the service sector.

The cultural unconscious

To simplify Zhang’s thesis, love in China is shaped by the market, and the market in turn is moved by love, while the party-state sustains this dynamics by accentuating polarization in society. Charlie Yi Zhang is not the first one to raise the issue of love and sentiments in post-Mao China. Yan Yunxiang wrote a splendid ethnography on Private Life Under Socialism: Love, Intimacy, and Family Change in a Chinese Village, while Lisa Rofel used her extended fieldwork in a Chinese silk factory to write about Other Modernities: Gendered Yearnings in China after Socialism. These two ethnographies are based on solid empirical ground, cross-generational historical depth, and a broad-ranging critique of the meaning of modernity and social change during transition from socialism to the market. They have become classics in the anthropology literature, and allow us to understand the evolution of Chinese masculinities and feminities through experience-near concepts and thick descriptions. By comparison, Dreadful Desire is relying on more shallow observation and thinner engagement. The author attempts to compensate the limited time spent on the field with ambitious efforts at theorizing and conceptualizing, drawing from a broad range of authors and subdisciplines. But the experience-far concepts and philosophical metaphors like the “borderless Loveland” and the “difference-making mechanism” taught me more about the context of academic production on North American campuses than on the travails of migrant workers and urban citizens in Xi Jinping’s China. There is a cultural unconscious at work in the emphasis put on “the pursuit of happiness,” the possibility of a “new birth of freedom” that the author experiences while moving to the US, the protestant urge to publicly confess one’s personal background and life expectations, and the belief in the transition from a love-inpaired present to a “love-enabled future.” The proliferation of differences, gendered or otherwise, that the author attributes to a Chinese ideological state apparatus, better characterizes in my view the scissiparity reproduction of ever-increasing subfields of cultural studies and the multiplication of gendered, classed, sexualized, and ethno-racialized categories brought forth by identity politics on American campuses.

The Moral Economy of Management Consulting in China

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A review of Best Practice: Management Consulting and the Ethics of Financialization in China, Kimberly Chong, Duke University Press, 2018.

Best PracticeThere was a time, not so long ago, when the “China Dream” was to make China more like the West. Foreign multinational companies were invested with a transformative mission: they would teach the Chinese how to do business the modern way. They would bring with them practices of good corporate governance, increased productivity, and organizational efficiency. Global consulting firms were at the vanguard of this transfer of management knowledge. They opened shop in China to ride the wave of globalization, and they applied to Chinese firms the tried-and-true management techniques that had made their fortune in the West. Best Practice: Management Consulting and the Ethics of Financialization in China is a product of such times. As part of her PhD in anthropology, the author spent sixteen months of fieldwork during 2008-2009 in a global management consultancy operating from Dalian, Beijing, and Shanghai. The firm’s mission was to provide services to Chinese companies, including Chinese state-owned enterprises, in order to help them achieve their digital transformation and become viable capitalist entities. The anthropologist’s conclusion is that Chinese state capitalism proves remarkably compatible with the logic of shareholder value maximization, which she describes as financialization. Consulting firms are in the business of making financial capitalism come true, and they do so by creating ethical subjects whose moral outlook and cultural norms are made commensurate with the cultural values of finance. I take a different perspective. I believe the original China Dream was a delusion, which led the West to sell the Chinese the rope with which they will try to hang us. The corporate practices and ethical values that financial capitalism promotes are incompatible with state capitalism as it operates in China. The recent wave of CEO arrests, company delistings from the New York Stock Exchange, governmental clampdown on tech firms, and negation of minority shareholders’ rights are just the first instantiations of a repressive trend that will make China less and less like the West.

Getting access

Multinational companies are notoriously difficult for anthropologists to observe and rarely grant authorization to do fieldwork. Kimberly Chong is proud of getting access and of studying up the corporate ladder. But did she? The consulting firm she boasts of cracking open let her enter through a side door, and allowed her only minimal access to its clients. She spent one year in Dalian teaching English and providing soft skills training to the employees of the shared service center where the firm was outsourcing its back-office operations worldwide. She succeeded in moving to the front office in Beijing as an unpaid external contractor, and she was able to interview consultants and to follow them to client sites where they were supervising the introduction of new IT systems in Chinese companies. She then spent a few weeks as a junior employee in the Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) division of the firm’s China practice. Considering her limited access and lack of prior experience, the amount of information she was able to gather on the internal workings of the consulting firm is no small feat. She compares her achievement to Karen Ho’s ethnography of a Wall Street investment bank, published in 2009 by Duke University Press. In Liquidated (which I reviewed here), Karen Ho was able to show how investment bankers tend to project their own experience onto the economy by aspiring to make everything “liquid” or tradable, including jobs and people. In her own ethnography, Kimberly Chong shows how consultants embody the same values of “best practice” and high performance that they use to reshape corporate China in their own image. The ethos of outsourcing, cost-cutting, and business process engineering, which they apply to Chinese companies, also defines the inner workings of the consulting firm.

Best Practice can be read at two levels. On the one hand, it is an ethnography of a global consulting firm which applies uniform techniques in its own management and in the expertise it sells to its clients. On the other hand, Kimberly Chong shows how these best practices are adapted to the Chinese context and how they help to shape moral subjects in post-Mao China. The first aspect makes Best Practice a contribution to the booming field of critical management studies. The consulting industry has a bad image among anthropologists and ethnographers, and indeed in the eyes of large segments of society. Consultants are accused of peddling false dreams and empty recipes or, in the words of a popular critique, they “borrow your watch to tell you the time.” They are often at a loss of describing what they do and what constitutes their field of expertise. Some can be very cynical about it: “Management consultancy is a scam,” says one consultant. Others insist on the intangible value they create by standardizing business processes and promoting the diffusion of best practice. A seasoned consultant can often devote time and expertise to a project that staff employees would be unable to implement on their own. They can also help bring new life to organizations that are stuck, or shift resources to help companies grow or move in a different direction. Kimberley Chong describes her socialization into the profession: “I became proficient in their jargon of acronyms and buzzwords, and could quickly put together a PowerPoint presentation, complete with animation.” But she kept her critical distance and did not adhere to the ideology of the profession. For her, “the power of management consultants, who continue to be hired in spite of their failure to deliver on their promises, derives from their capacity to naturalize the moral actions of restructuring and other forms of intervention as purely economic or technocratic.”

The culture of performance

But global consulting firms do not operate in a vacuum. Context matters, and the purportedly “global” managerial concepts of efficiency and productivity are interpreted and negotiated by Chinese employees in very distinctive ways. Chinese consultants who failed to adhere to the tenets of performance management were said to put the enterprise at risk for failing to inculcate the required mind-set among their Chinese clientele. Observations suggested that knowledge-based industries in China were afflicted by a problem of insufficient corporate professionalism, and that Chinese employees lacked the social norms and dispositions of global work. How else to explain the high turnover rate, the opportunistic behavior, the lack of personal accountability, the attempts to game the system of managing by numbers, and the inapplicability of performance management tools that plagued the consultancy’s inner workings in China? Many assumed the problem was with “Chinese culture” or with the inheritance of a socialist work ethos. As Kimberly Chong notes, “culture in this setting is a far cry from the conceptions of culture familiar to anthropologists. Here it is something that can be managed and controlled.” Culture is deployed as a tool for producing financial value and for shaping Chinese workers into good corporate subjects who will think and behave in accordance with global business norms. But Chinese employees’ conception of culture tended to differ from the one dictated by the management consultancy. Their stated ideal was the development of suzhi, a term often translated as “human quality” that describes a person’s moral characteristics and its capacity to contribute to the nation as a whole. Particularly in state-owned enterprises, consulting was sold as a means of increasing the quality of employees rather than reducing the number of staff on payroll—even if the unavowed goal was to downsize and lay off redundant staff.

IT-enabled outsourcing and downsizing was one of the ways in which consultants sought to improve organizational performance. By decomposing tasks, formalizing processes, and measuring results, consultants were able to measure each employee’s contribution to the firm’s financial results and to divest the activities that did not contribute sufficiently to the company’s bottom line. But the rules of management by results, financial metrics, and the integrated IT solutions that consultants brought to performance extended far beyond outsourcing and offshoring. Kimberley Chong was able to observe the use of management tools at several stages of the business process. Most of her observations relate to human resource management and the optimization of employees’ performance. The evaluation of each individual’s performance, and the setting of yearly goals and targets, consumed a lot of time and energy. But she also describes staff training in “crafting value propositions” (selling consultancy work to clients) and the deployment of CRM and ERP software—respectively, consumer relationship management tools and enterprise resource planning systems designed to monitor real-time productivity. In doing so, she notes three surprising facts. First, new measures and management systems were all tied to total shareholder return or TSR: the maximization of shareholder value (the company’s share price) was the overarching goal espoused by all consultants, and the single-minded focus of the consulting company was to improve financial performance. Second, the management tools on which the consulting firm relied were not proprietary: they were bought off-the-shelf from other consultancies or adapted from recent management fads, from the Balanced Scorecard to the Change Tracking Map or the Employee Engagement Dial. The use of acronyms tended to obfuscate the trivial notions on which these standard tools were based and that formed the bread-and-butter of consultancy work. Third, key notions or metrics were left undefined or were conspicuously absent from the firm’s official literature. All consultants knew their evaluation rested on their “billability,” or ability to generate cash-flow, but the notion, like the amount of the overall compensation package, was never publicly discussed. Despite all the talk over employee engagement and motivation, turnover figures or satisfaction rates were never disclosed.

Performative management

Performance is a key concept in Best Practice, and consultancy work was performative in at least three distinct meanings of the word. As in performance evaluation or the design of high-performance organizations, performance is used as a synonym of financial results and the creation of shareholder value. The focus on performance is exclusive of any other form of personal commitment or collective endeavor: even charity activities—under the label of corporate social responsibility—have as a stated goal the strengthening of commitment and engagement of employees, which is measured by their contribution to the firm’s financial results. Performance is also a show, a game that people play or a story that a group of actors tell on the stage. “Appearing more efficient” is the reason why SOEs undertook the considerable investment of installing ERP systems to signal to investors that they had the managerial equipment identified with a modern corporation. This embodied performance depends heavily on context: among private clients, consultants had to look always busy and motivated by profit, while in state-owned enterprises they could be more lax and take long naps or give each other neck and shoulder massage. The performance of consultants reflects not only profit maximization and global norms of efficiency, but also cultural values and a shared sense of morality. But the expertise of management consultants is performative in another meaning: it “has the power to make its theories and descriptions of the world come alive in new built form, new machines and new bodies.” Management concepts and tools don’t just reflect particular ways of thinking; they also create ways of thinking, and make the world imagined by management consultants come true. This is the thesis that Karen Ho developed in her book Liquidated: financial assets and people were made liquid and tradeable, which meant, in the end, dispensable or constantly running the risk of being liquidated. Kimberly Chong uses a related concept: management consulting develops cultures of conmensuration, through which new economic imperatives, forms of value, and power relations are legitimized and naturalized. The job of management consultants is to make corporate culture commensurate with profit maximization. Likewise, financial capitalism is made commensurate with existing logics of Chinese development and post-Mao modernity. Through commensuration, consultants create a structural relation between two different entities.

In the Chinese context, did management consulting succeed in making the world of financial capitalism come true? Yes and no. As with socialism, capitalism in China comes up with Chinese characteristics. As the author reminds us, “the state remains a dominant market actor and guiding force for capitalism in China.” Financial results and profitability are not seen as exclusive of state goals, but rather as a means of advancing the public good and of shaping “quality people” with high suzhi. Chinese consultants embody this mix between private corporate ethics and public nationalist values. Most of them are haigui or “sea turtles,” which designates people who go overseas for educational and professional purposes but then return to China as entrepreneurs or to work in waiqi, or foreign companies. They are fully westernized in terms of personal habits and work ethos, drinking coffee rather than tea and sending their kids to international schools, but are also motivated by strong sentiments of love and fidelity toward the Chinese nation. Even if they weren’t, the heavy hand of the state is never far away to remind them of their liminal position. Kimberly Chong notices a senior executive who conspicuously displays a poster with all the leaders of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in his office. She does not seem to be aware that all companies, including waiqi, have to accommodate within themselves the functioning of a cell of the CCP. The state apparatus, controlled by the Party, has to decide on the contracting to a foreign consulting company the task of preparing state-owned enterprises for public listings on overseas stock exchange. As mentioned above, this task is largely performative: becoming a listed company requires not only a focus on profits and the share price, but also the appearance of transparency, accountability, and efficiency that will convince foreign investors to join the game. But the Party’s leadership can always put an end to the performance of foreign consultants, and change the rules by which the game has to be played.

Maximizing suzhi

Such change was slowly emerging when Kimberly Chong was doing her fieldwork, and is now fully apparent. The goal of the party-state is not to maximize profits or to create value for shareholders. An alternative goal would be to maximize suzhi or “human quality”–as defined by the state, and based on the instruments of social control and collective discipline. Other corporate goals might include assuming world leadership in key economic sectors, developing self-reliance and minimizing dependence on Western technologies, or achieving post-Mao visions of “building a paradise” and achieving socialist modernization. These state goals are only partly compatible with the maximization of shareholder value, and are particularly detrimental to minority shareholders’ rights—the metric by which the efficiency of a financial system is evaluated in the academic literature on law and finance. The Chinese state has proven its readiness to sacrifice economic efficiency when its core interests were at stake, and to destroy shareholder value on a grand scale in order to regain control of vast swathes of the economy. The time since Kimberly Chong completed her research has also seen a sharp increase in the use of data to develop new forms of state surveillance and social control. Foreign consulting companies were originally allowed to enter the Chinese market in order to spread the use of information technology systems and data management tools. The corporatization of state-owned enterprises required a radical overhaul of managerial practices, while new firms in the private sector benefited from the influx on best practices and cutting-edge technologies. As the author notes, ERP systems and human resource management tools are designed to standardize working practices and act as a system of surveillance, documenting where, when, and how long each employee spends on any one task. But the rise of artificial intelligence and data mining technologies have vastly increased the possibilities of managing by data. Due to the size of the population, the lack of protection of privacy rights, and the innovative spirit of a new breed of entrepreneurs, Chinese companies like Huawei, Baidu, Alibaba, Tencent, and Xiaomi have become world leaders in information technologies, competing head-to-head with the American GAFA formed by Google, Amazon, Facebook (now Meta), and Apple. Under the strong monitoring of the party-state, new forms of data management and surveillance capitalism with Chinese characteristics might play the role formerly devoted to foreign consultants and Western IT leaders.

From Hot Line to Help Line

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A review of Neutral Accent: How Language, Labor, and Life Become Global, A. Aneesh, Duke University Press, 2015.

Neutral AccentAt the turn of the twenty-first century, China became identified as the world’s factory and India as the world’s call center. Like China, India attracted the attention of journalists and pundits who heralded a new age of globalization and documented the rise of the world’s two emerging giants. Foremost among them, Thomas Friedman wrote several New York Times columns about call centers in Bangalore and devoted nearly half a book, The World is Flat, to reviewing personal conversations he had with Indian entrepreneurs working in the IT sector. He argued that outsourcing service jobs to Bangalore was, in the end, good for America—what goes around comes around in the form of American machine exports, service contracts, software licenses, and more US jobs. He further expanded his optimistic view to conjecture that two countries at both ends of a call center will never fight a war against each other. An intellectual tradition going back to Montesquieu posits that “sweet commerce” tends to civilize people, making them less likely to resort to violent or irrational behavior. According to this view, economic relations between states act as a powerful deterrent to military conflict. As during the Cold War, telecom lines can be used as a tool of conflict prevention: with the difference that the “hot line,” which used to connect the Kremlin to the White House, has been replaced by the “help line” which connects everyone in America to a call center in the developing world. The benefits of openness therefore extend to peace as well as prosperity. In a flat world, nations that open themselves up to the world prosper, while those that close their borders and turn inward fall behind.

Doing fieldwork in a call center

Anthropologists were also attracted to Asian factories and call center to conduct their fieldwork and write ethnographies of these peculiar workplaces. Spending time toiling along with fellow workers and writing about their participant observation would earn them a PhD and the launch of a career in an anthropology department in the United States. Doing fieldwork in a call center in Gurgaon near New Delhi came relatively easy to A. Aneesh. As a native Indian, he didn’t have much trouble adapting to the cultural context and fitting in his new work environment or gaining acceptance from his colleagues and informers. His access to the field came in the easiest way possible: he applied for a position in a call center, and after several rounds of recruitment sessions and interviews he landed a job as a telemarketing operator in a medium-sized company fictitiously designated as GoCom. He had already completed his PhD at that time and was an assistant professor at Stanford who took a one-year break to do fieldwork and publish research. He even benefited from the support of two research assistants while in New Delhi. There was no special treatment for him at the office floor, however. He started as a trainee alongside newly-hired college graduates, attending lectures and hands-on sessions to get the proper voice accent and marketing skills, then moved to the call center’s main facility to work as a telemarketer doing the night shift. He engaged in casual conversations with his peers, ate with them in the cafeteria where lunch was served after midnight, conducted formal interviews with some of them, and collected written documents such as training manuals and instruction memos.

What makes Aneesh’s Neutral Accent different from Friedman’s The World is Flat? How does an ethnographic account of daily work in an Indian call center compare with a columnist’s reportage on the frontiers of globalization? What conclusions can we infer from both texts about the forces and drivers that shape our global present? Is there added value in a scholarly work based on extended field research as compared with a journalistic essay based on select interviews and short field visits? And what is at stake in talking of call centres as evidence of a globalised world? As must be already clear, the methods used by the two authors to gather information couldn’t be more different. Aneesh’s informants were ordinary people designated by their first name—“Vikas, Tarun, Narayan, Mukul, and others”—who shared their attitudes toward their job, their experience and hardships, their dreams and aspirations. The employees with whom the author spent his working nights were recent college graduates, well-educated and ambitious, reflecting the aspirations and life values of the Indian middle-class. By contrast, Friedman associated with world-famous CEOs and founders of multi-million-dollar companies. They shared with him their worldview of a world brought together by the powerful forces of digitalization and convergence, and emphasized that globalization must have “two-way traffic.” To be true, Friedman also tells of his visits to a recruiting seminar where young Indians go to compete for the highly sought-after jobs, and to an “accent-neutralization” class where Indians learn how to make their accents sound more American. To distantiate himself from the arm-chair theorist of globalization, he emphasizes his contacts with “real” people from all walks of life. But he never pretends that his reportages amount to academic fieldwork or participant observation.

The view from below

The information collected through these methods of investigation is bound to be different. One can expect office workers to behave cautiously when addressed by a star reporter coming from the US, along with his camera crew, and introduced to the staff by top management for his reportage. The chit-chat, the informal tone, the casual conversations, and the mix of Hindi and English are bound to disappear from the scene, replaced by deference, neutral pronunciation, and silence. The views channeled by senior executives convey a different perspective from the ones expressed on the ground floor. As they confided themselves to Aneesh, employees at GoCom expressed a complete lack or pride about their job and loyalty for their company. They were in for the money, and suspected GoCom of cheating employees out of their incentive-based income. Their suspicion was not completely unfounded, and the author notices several cases of deception, if not outright cheating, regarding the computation of monthly salaries. Operators were also encouraged to mislead and cheat the customer through inflated promises or by papering over the small print in the contract. Turnover was high, and working in a call center was often viewed as a temporary position after college and before moving to other occupations. While Friedman is interested in abstract dichotomies, such as oppositions between tradition and modernity, global and local, rich and poor, Aneesh focuses on much more mundane and concrete issues: the compensation package, the commute from home, or working the night shift.

Indeed, night work is a factor that goes almost unnoticed in Friedman’s reportage, while it is a major issue in Neutral Accent. “Why is there a total absence, in thought and in practice, of any collective struggle against the graveyard shift worldwide?” asks the author, who explains this invisibility by corporate greed, union weakness, and the divergence between economic, social, and physiological well-being. He documents the deleterious effects of nocturnal labor on workers’ health, especially on women who suffer from irregular menstruation and breast cancer risk. He notices the large number of smokers around him, as well as people who complain about an array of anxieties without directing their complaints on night work per se. The frustration and discomfort of working at night is displaced to other issues: the impossibility to marry and start a family—although night work is also used by some to delay marriage or run away from family life—and the complaint about commute cabs not running on time. Indeed, what Thomas Friedman and other reporters see as a valuable perk of the job, the ability for young employees to travel safely to and from work thanks to the chauffeured car-pool services provided by the call centers, ends up as a source of frustration and anguish due to the delay and waiting time occasioned by the transport. Nocturnal labor affects men and women differently; Indian women in particular feel the brunt of social stigma as “night workers,” leading some of them to conceal their careers while looking for marriage partners, or alternatively, limiting their choice of partner to men in the same business. While the lifting of restrictions on women’s right to work at night was justified by gender neutrality, the idea of being neutral to differences carries with it disturbing elements that feminist critique has already pointed out.

Being neutral to differences

Neutrality, or indifference to difference, also characterizes the most-often noticed trait of Indian call centers: the neutralization of accent and the mimetic adoption of certain characteristics such as the Americanization of the first-names of employees who assume a different identity at work. Aneesh points out that neutral accent is not American English: during job interviews, he was asked to “stop rolling your R’s as Americans do,” and invited to speak “global English,” which is “neither American nor British.” As he notes, “such an accent does not allude to a preexisting reality; it produces it.” Accent neutralization is now an industry with its teaching methods, textbooks, and instructors. Call center employees learn to stress certain syllables in words, raise or lower their tone along the sentence, use colloquial terms with which they may not be familiar, and acquire standard pronunciation of difficult words such as “derogatory” or “disparaging,” which they ironically note in the Hindi script. Some employees are repeatedly told that they are “too polite” and that they should not use “sir” or “madam” in every sentence. For Aneesh, “neutralization allows, only to a degree, the unhinging of speech from its cultural moorings and links it with purposes of global business.” Mimesis, the second feature of transmutation, reconnects the individual to a cultural identity by selecting traits that help establish global communication, such as cheerfulness and empathy. Employees are told to keep a smiling face and use a friendly voice while talking with their overseas clients. But despite their best efforts, some cultural traits are beyond the comprehension of call center agents: “The moment they start talking about baseball, you have absolutely no idea what’s going on there” (the same could be said regarding Indian conversations about cricket.)

Aneesh uses neutralization and mimesis as a key to comprehending globalization itself. They only work one way: as the author notes, “there is no pressure, at least currently, on American or British cultures for communicative adaptation, as they are not required to simulate Indian cultural traits.” But Western consumers are also affected by processes at work in the outsourcing and offshoring of service activities. Individual identities and behaviors are increasingly monitored at the systemic level in numerous databases covering one’s credit score, buying habits, medical history, criminal record, and demographics such as age, gender, region, and education. Indeed, most outbound global calls at GoCom were not initiated by call center agents but by a software program that used algorithms to target specific profiles—demographic, economic, and cultural—in America and Great Britain. Artificial intelligence and predictive algorithms, only nascent at the time of the author’s fieldwork in 2004-2005, now drive the call center industry and standardize the process all agents use, leaving little room for human agency. Data profiles of customers can be bought and sold at a distance, forming “system identities” governed by algorithms and embedded in software platforms that structure possible forms of interaction. Identities are no longer fixed; they keep changing with each new data point, escaping our control and our right of ownership over them.

Global conversations

We cannot judge The World is Flat and Neutral Accent by the same criteria. The standard to evaluate a journalistic reportage is accuracy of fact, balanced analysis, human interest, and impact over readers. Using this yardstick, Friedman’s book was a great success and, like Fukuyama’s End of History, came to define the times and orient global conversations. The flattened world became a standard expression animated with a life of its own, and generated scores of essays explaining why the world was not really flat after all. Many Indians credited Friedman for writing positively about India and often echoed his views, claiming that the outsourcing business was doing wonders for the economy. Others critiqued the approach, saying the flat world was just another word for underpaying Indian workers and denying them the right to migrate and find work in the US. By contrast, Aneesh’s book was not geared to the general public and, apart from an enthusiastic endorsement by Saskia Sassen on the back cover and a few book reviews in scholarly journals, its publication did not elicit much debate in the academic world. In his own way, Aneesh paints a nuanced picture of globalization. Where most people see call centers as generating cultural integration and economic convergence, he insists on disjunctures, fault lines, and differentiation. The “help line” is not just a tool to connect and erase differences; it may also create frictions and dissonances of its own. A world economy neutral to day and night differences; a labor law that disregards gender disparity; work practices that erase cultural diversity; digital identities that exist beyond our control: neutralization is a force that affects call center agents and their distant customers much beyond the adoption of global English and neutral accent as a means of communication.

Set, Set, Set, Set, Set, Set

Etienne RPLeave a comment

A review of Garbage Citizenship: Vital Infrastructures of Labor in Dakar, Senegal, Rosalind Fredericks, Duke University Press, 2018.

Garbage CitizenshipIn 1990, Youssou N’Dour, Senegal’s most famous musician, released an album titled Set. The main song had the following line: Set, set oy. Ni set, set ci sa xel lo, ni set ci sa jëff oy… I had no idea what it meant, but in her book Garbage Citizenship, Rosalind Fredericks provides translation and context: Cleanliness, oh cleanliness. Be clean, pure in your spirit, clean in your acts… The injunction to be clean and to make clean (set setal in wolof), repeated in the song’s chorus, echoes the rallying cry of a grassroot movement in which young men and women set out to clean the city of Dakar from its accumulating garbage, substituting a failing urban waste infrastructure and denouncing the corruption of a polluted political sphere. Labelled as an exemplary case of participatory citizenship and youth mobilization, the movement was captured by political clientelism and made to serve the neoliberal objectives of labor force flexibility and public sector cutbacks. At the height of the movement in 1989, Dakar’s mayor made a shrewd political calculus to recruit youth activists into a citywide participatory trash-collection system. Their incorporation into the trash sector was facilitated by a discourse of responsibility through active participation in the cleanliness of the city. They became the backbone of the municipal waste management system and remain included in the sector’s labor force to this day. The history of the Set/Setal movement is only one of the case studies that Rosalind Fredericks develops in her book. The author finds the same activists who spontaneously took to the streets to clean up Dakar in 1988-89 having moved into low-pay positions as trash workers in a reorganized infrastructure that used derelict garbage trucks and often delayed payment of salaries. Together with their labor union leaders, they staged another kind of public protest in 2005-07: the garbage strike, supported by Dakar inhabitants who brought their household dumpings to the main arteries of the capital and piled them for all politicians to see. Other cases studied by the author include a NGO-led, community-based trash collection project in a peripheral neighborhood mobilizing voluntary women’s labor and horse-drawn carts, and the functioning of a trash workers’ union movement affirming the dignity of labor through discourses of Islamic piety.

Governing through disposability

Garbage Citizenship is a book with high theoretical ambitions. It purports to make “theory from the South” by detailing the transformation of trash labor in contemporary Dakar. The book challenges the notion that African cities represent exceptions to urban theories, and reveals the complex mix of clientary politics, social mobilization, material things, and religious affects unleashed by neoliberal reform. It makes a novel contribution to urban studies by emphasizing the human component of infrastructure, the material aspects of municipal work, and the cultural embeddedness of human labor. Gender, ethnicity, age group, and religious affiliation come to the fore as particularly consequential shapers of sociopolitical community and citizenship practices. Inspired by new currents in critical theory loosely defined as “new materialisms,” Fredericks treats trash infrastructure as vibrant, political matter and emphasizes its material, social, and affective elements. She complements the political economy of neoliberal reforms and urban management in Dakar with a moral economy of filth and cleanliness through which social relations and political belongings are reordered. Although it is by definition dirty, trash work can be seen simultaneously as a process of cleaning and purification. The Islamic faith as it is practiced in Senegal offers an alternative discourse to the technocratic vision of good governance and efficient management that is imposed by development agencies upon Dakar’s municipal services. To sum up the book’s contribution, Garbage Citizenship develops a three-pronged critique of neoliberalism, of participatory development, and of the “materialist turn” in social science scholarship. Let me expand on these three points.

First, Garbage Citizenship offers a critique of neoliberalism grounded in social science theory and ethnographic observation. Such critique has become standard in the anthropology literature, where the logic of structural adjustment imposed by multilateral institutions and global capital is described as wreaking havoc on local livelihoods and state-supported social services. Privatization, the shrinking of public budgets, the retreat of the state, and flexibilization of labor have unleashed intense volatility in the management of urban public services and, more specifically, in the garbage collection sector in Dakar. As one of the first African countries to undergo structural adjustment, Senegal was a test case for experimenting with various formulas of public-private partnership, labor de-unionization, technological downscaling, and participatory development. The chronology of neoliberal reforms shows that structural adjustment is unmoored from political forces: the “neoliberal” president Abdoulaye Wade operated a renationalization of the waste management sector facing mounting debts and collection crises, while Dakar’s Socialist mayor Mamadou Diop orchestrated the retreat of municipal services through flexibilization of the formal labor force and the mobilization of community-based efforts for collection. What makes Garbage Citizenship’s critique different from other denunciations of neoliberalism is its empirical focus on the way that state power is materialized in everyday infrastructure, and on how life under neoliberalism is experienced daily by municipal workers and citizens alike. Garbage often stands in as the quintessential symbol of what’s wrong in African cities. The challenge of managing trash, in other words, acts as a potent metaphor for the African “crisis” writ large. Garbage Citizenship raises questions about the material and symbolic “trashing” of the continent by grounding them in the everyday politics of trash labor and governing-through-disposability. Through garbage strikes and illegal dumping of waste, Dakar’s residents mobilize the power of waste as both a symbol of state crisis and an important terrain on which to battle for control of the city.

Treating people as infrastructure

Another basic recommendation of neoliberalism, indeed of standard economics, is that labor be substituted to capital in countries with an abundant labor force and limited access to financial resources and technology. Fredericks describes how this substitution of labor to capital operates in concrete terms: through the devolution of the burdens of infrastructure onto precarious laboring bodies—those of ordinary neighborhood women and the formal trash workers themselves. The analysis illuminates how urban infrastructures are composed of human as much as technical elements and how these living elements can help make infrastructures into a vital means of political action and a tool for the formation of collective identities. The greatest burden of municipal trash systems was devolved onto labor: workers were furnished with little equipment for collection, if any at all, and existing materials were allowed to degrade. Municipal employees engaged in constant tinkering and bricolage work to keep the garbage collection trucks running. Some parts of Dakar, such as the posh central districts of Plateau and Médina, were well served by state-of-the-art French equipment operated by international companies selected through opaque bidding processes. The poorer and more populous parts of the city had to rely on second-hand garbage trucks that often broke down or were left completely off the collection grid, with ruinous effects for people’s health and the environment. Waste collection is hazardous work, and workers in the garbage sector bear the brunt of labor’s deleterious effects in the form of endangered lives and damaged health. Governing-through-disposability makes laboring bodies dispendable and orders urban space along a logic of making clean and letting dirty. By substituting labor to equipment and treating people as infrastructure, the neoliberal state treats people as trash.

Second, Garbage Citizenship provides a critique of developmentalism, a theory that is sometimes presented as a gentler substitute to neoliberalism. Developmentalism emphasizes the human aspects of development. It asserts that state bureaucrats become separated from politicians, which allows for the independent and successful redevelopments of leadership structures and administrative and bureaucratic procedures. It promotes community-driven development as a solution to the disconnect between the population and public service providers. Critics often point out that developmentalism is linked to depolitization: it treats development as an anti-politics machine, and rests on the assumption that technocratic fixes can alleviate austerity measures in the face of widespread unrest and social dislocation. For Fredericks, garbage is a highly political matter. Dakar’s garbage saga is inseparable from the evolution of national politics, with the decline of the Socialist Party under Abdou Diouf from 1988 to 2000, Abdoulaye Wade’s alternance and his failed dream of an African renaissance from 2000 to 2012, and the consolidation of state power under president Macky Sall. It is also emmeshed in municipal politics. Dakar’s Socialist mayor Mamadou Diop used the Set/Setal movement to reward and recruit new Party members from the ranks of the youth. Creating new jobs was explicitly based around a political calculus that traded patronage with enrolment into municipal work. The community-based trash system was touted as an important demonstration of the mayor’s commitment to youth and to an ideal of participatory citizenship. Participants remember the “Journées de Propreté” (Days of Cleanliness) as overt Socialist Party political rallies. Under President Wade, the trash management system became the locus of a power struggle between the municipal government and state authorities. The sector saw eight major institutional shake-ups, and equipments constantly changed hands while workers received only temporary-contract benefits and day-labor pay rates. Upon taking office, Macky Sall announced his intention to dissolve Abdoulaye Wade’s new national trash management agency and relocate Dakar’s garbage management back into the hands of local government. The municipality found an agreement with the labor union, and workers won formal contracts and higher salaries.

The perils of community

Community participation and women’s empowerment are a key tenet of developmentalism and have been adopted by aid agencies as a new mantra conditioning their support. For Fredericks, we need to unpack these notions of community, participation, and empowerment. Often imagined as unproblematic sites of tradition and consensus, communities are produced through systems that harness the labor of specific members as participants and mobilize the “glue” of communal solidarity. Empowering some people often means disenfranchising others, and interferes with existing relations of power based on gender, ethnicity, and local politics. In the case under study, ENDA, a well-established NGO, partnered with leaders from the Lebou community in the neighborhood of Tonghor, on the road to Dakar’s airport, to establish an off-the-grid garbage collection system based on horse-drawn carts and the work of “animatrices” charged with educating neighborhood women on how to properly store, separate, and dispose of their garbage. The project resonated with a vision of community-driven development using low-tech, environment-friendly solutions that even poor people can afford and can control, and that can be replicated from community to community. But the analysis finds that the ENDA project produced an elitist, ethnicized image of community and that women were subjected to dirty-labor burdens as the vehicule of these development agendas. The “empowered” animatrices, drawn from the Lebou ethnic group, were not remunerated for their services and had no choice but to participate out of a sense of obligation to their communities, as enforced by the power and authority of community leaders. The village elders explicitly chose the animatrices using “social criteria” from respected but poor Lebou households, and used the project to their own ends in order to reinforce their autonomy from the Dakar municipality. The neighborhood women whose garbage practices were being monitored often came from a disenfranchized ethnic group and were stigmatized for their “unclean” habits and filthy condition. They were often the least willing and able to pay the user fee for garbage collection, and had to resort to the old practice of burying their waste or dumping it on the beach by night. In the end, the project was terminated when garbage began to accumulate in the collection station near the airport, attracting hundreds of circling birds and the attention of national authorities.

As a third contribution, Garbage Citizenship makes an intervention in the field of critical theory. The author notes the recent resurgence of materialist thinking in several disciplines, and intents to provide her own interpretation of the role of inanimate matter and nonhuman agencies in shaping social outcomes and policy decisions. Garbage grounds the practice of politics in the pungent, gritty material of the city. It forces politicians to make or postpone decisions, as when trash strikes and collection crises choke the capital’s main arteries with piles of accumulating dump. A toxic materiality is a central feature of trash politics: garbage’s toxicity manifests itself by its stench and rot that make whole neighborhoods repellent and attracts parasitic forms of life such as germs and rodents. To borrow an expression from Jane Bennett, trash is “vibrant matter” in the sense that it becomes imbued with a life of its own, straddling the separation between life and matter and making discarded things part of the living environment. Garbage also participates in the “toxic animacies” identified by Mel Chen who writes from the same perspective of vital materialism.  This vitalist perspective emphasizes the relational nature of material and social worlds and the intersecting precarities they engender. Trash renders places and people impure through threats of contagion: as anthropologist Mary Douglas underscored in her book Purity and Danger, discourses about dirt as “matter out of place” produce social boundaries and thereby structure and spatialize social relations. According to Fredericks, governing-through-disposability is a particular modality of neoliberal governance, determining which spaces and people can be made toxic, degraded, and devalued. It makes visible, smelly and pungent the invisible part of society, the accursed share of human activity, the excessive and non-recuperable part of any economy which must be discarded and cast away. The Mbeubeuss municipal landfill, where waste accumulates in open air, is the monstrous shadow of Dakar, a grotesque double that reveals the obscene underbelly of taken-for-granted urban life. But it should be pointed out that Garbage Citizenship is not a work of critical theory: Fredericks is not interested in building theory for its own sake, and she uses vital materialism, toxic animacies, and symbolic structuralism as tools to show how the power of waste is harnessed to different ends in specific conjunctures.

Islam is the solution

What’s new in Frederick’s new materialism is that it doesn’t treat religion as an ideological smokescreen or as the opium of the people. The author underscores the particular importance ascribed to purity and cleanliness as an indispensable element of the Islamic faith. The Set/Setal movement, with its call of making clean and being clean, drew from a religious repertoire and strove to cleanse the city in a literal sense, in terms of sanitation and hygiene, but also morally in a fight against corruption, prostitution, and general delinquency. No longer waiting for permission or direction from their elders, young men and women took ownership of their neighborhoods and bypassed the power of marabouts and the Muslim brotherhoods who had traditionally channeled support toward local and national political authorities. Youth activists, some of them educated, had never imagined of working in garbage as their profession But the stigma attached to being a trash worker and doing dirty labor was overruled by the spiritual value attached to cleanliness and purity, which saw the task of cleaning the city as an act of faith, a calling even akin to a priesthood. A materialist reading of religion emphasizes religious work as bricolage. Fredericks describes the art of maintaining dignity and pride in an environment of impurity and filth as a piety of refusal. This conception of “material spirituality” includes  religious faith in the social and affective components of infrastructure. The piety of refusal also offers a language through which management decisions can be contested and the value of decent work is reaffirmed. Waste workers in Dakar harness the power of discourses of purity and cleanliness as a primary weapon in the fight for better wages and respect. In Fredericks’s interpretation, Islam offers a potent language with which to critique Senegal’s neoliberal trajectory and assert rights for fair labor. This politics of piety emphasizes Islam as the solution, but not in the sense that the Muslim Brotherhood and proponents of political Islam understand it: the demands put forward by trash workers and their union leaders are articulated with a Muslim accent, but only to emphasize the dignity of life and the decency of labor. In the context of urban waste management and unionized mobilization, Islam may provide the language for constructively contesting neoliberal austerity.

Global Production Networks and the Ideology of Seamlessness in Modern Filmmaking

Etienne RPLeave a comment

A review of Media Heterotopias: Digital Effects and Material Labor in Global Film Production, Hye Jean Chung, Duke University Press, 2018.

Media HeterotopiasIt takes a lot of people to make a movie. It also takes a diversity of production sites, technologies, and product or service providers. The list of names, locations, companies, and generic technologies that were instrumental in making a movie are listed in the closing credits. A full set of credits can include the cast and crew, but also contractors, production sponsors, distribution companies, works of music licensed or written for the movie, various legal disclaimers, such as copyrights and more. Nobody really pays attention to this part, except for the theme song playing at full blast and the occasional traits of humor interrupting the credits scroll. These closing credits allow the spectator to make the transition between the world of fiction and the real world, and to put an end to the suspension of disbelief that made him or her adhere to the on-screen story. For Hye Jean Chung, who teaches cinema studies in the School of Global Communication at Kyung Hee University in South Korea, the spectator’s disregard for credit attributions is part of an operation of denial and erasure: denial of the work that went into making a movie, and erasure of the production sites and collaborative networks that increasingly place film production into an international division of labor. The ancillary bodies and sites of labor are erased from the film’s content and only appear in the end credits; but they somehow creep back onto the screen during the movie as well, producing what she calls “spectral effects” or traces that are rendered invisible and disembodied but that still haunt the movie like a ghostly presence. Taking on from Michel Foucault’s concept of heterotopia, she defines “heterotopic perception” as a mode of criticism that is sensitive to these spectral effects, and “media heterotopias” as a digitally enhanced audiovisual realm of representation that superimposes different layers of realities, spatialities, and temporalities.

Assembling a collection of movies from the Asia-Pacific region 

These spectral effects and media heterotopias are particularly, though not exclusively, perceptible and legible in movies that use computer graphics, special effects, and digital technologies. Of the nine films that the author comments upon, six (Avatar, Oblivion, Interstellar, The Host, Godzilla, Big Hero 6) make heavy use of CGI and digital effects, while others use digital reediting (Wong Kar-wai’s Ashes of Time Redux) or animated sequences (Jia Zhangke’s The World). Only Tarsem Singh’s The Fall ostensibly insists on on-location filming (in more than 20 countries) and lack of special effects in its spectacular visuals. The conceptual framework proposed by Media Heterotopias is therefore amenable to many different kinds of movies, from Hollywood blockbusters to art-house films, from adventure fantasies to science-fiction flicks. A common thread running through this selection is the focus on Asia, as many of these films were shot or produced in Asia-Pacific; but the author insists that this book is not an area studies project, and she resolutely places her analysis in a transnational or global perspective. The focus of Asia-Pacific is thereby a reflection of the on-going trend that affects movie production and consumption as well as many other industries: the shift to a new center of gravity that includes East Asia and the western shores of the Americas, and that transforms the historical Eurocentric or Atlantic domination into a thing of the past.

Although Hye Jean Chung doesn’t identify herself as a Marxist scholar, her work is very much preoccupied with issues of capital accumulation, surplus value extraction, and commodity fetishism. Against a tendency to treat films as texts and material conditions as irrelevant, she reminds us that movies are made by real people engaged in a division of labor in which value created by some is appropriated by others. Theoretically, she situates her film studies in the legacy of Michel Foucault by picking up his concept of heterotopia. According to Foucault, the cinema itself (as a building) is an heterotopia in its ability of allowing several overlapping spaces to exist. A cinema theater is a room with a two-dimensions screen where a three-dimensions world is able to exist. Heteropias in cinema (films) are therefore increasing the amount of overlapping worlds and thus question the status of reality of any of those worlds. Another important if yet more implicit reference of the book is Jacques Derrida’s Specters of Marx, where the heritage of Marxism is reclaimed by a new materialism acknowledging the haunting presence of ghosts and spirits. By being attentive to spectral effects and ghostly presences, Media Heterotopias offers a kind of spectral critique or hauntology that places human labor and production processes squarely at the center of media theory. 

The effacement of labor and the ideology of seamlessness

As many critics have pointed out, the world has been fundamentally altered by digital technologies. Our perception of reality itself is changing at a fast pace. Time is no longer a moving arrow flowing from past to present and toward the future: temporal linearity is now supplanted by intensive time, for which the only meaningful distinction is that of real time and delayed time. Digital technologies also transform our conception of space: they abolish the distinction between real space and virtual space, merging the two into a new augmented reality where digital signaling is ubiquitous. These new spatio-temporal formations have a strong impact on production and labor, and movie production is no exception. Nonlinear digital workflows are replacing linear production processes with a simultaneous collaborative workspace. Digital platforms such as video conferencing, instant messaging, and online file sharing allow massively parallel processes of collaboration to take place. To expedite and streamline the work process, the creative labor of digital film production is dispersed across geographically diverse companies in global production pipelines. Formerly disparate stages of preproduction, production, and postproduction are increasingly becoming fused with one another in a collaborative space. 

Globalization has developed an ideology of seamlessness: borders are no longer a barrier to the free flow of goods, capital, and images; and production processes are integrated into global value chains operating just-in-time and without friction.  For Hye Jean Chung, this fetishizing of a seamless integration conceals the actual living bodies and physical sites of labor that provide the material conditions of transnational activities. These bodies and locations are often firmly anchored to their national territories and regional infrastructures, with the cultural and geopolitical characteristics that are attached to them. The world isn’t flat, but a lot of work, including ideological work, goes into the task of making it appear as flat and frictionless. Similarly, both digital aesthetics and digital production processes partake in an ideology of seamlessness. Digital cinema produces a seamless effect when computer generated figures and sceneries are smoothly integrated with real actors, actual landscapes, and practical sets. By erasing material traces, visible joins and seams from the various stages of digital processing, the final product is made to look flawless and natural, even though digital images are composed of multiple layers of heterogeneous time and space. The photorealistic aspect of CGI makes it easy to suspend disbelief and create a pure spectacle of illusory seduction. This propensity toward the illusion of seamlessness has always been part of cinema’s attraction; but digital technology allows to make all traces of labor-intensive production invisible and well-hidden. Only remnants remain, coming back in the movie screen to haunt it as a spectral presence.

Self-referentiality and structural homologies 

In some cases, the ideology of seamlessness provides the material for the film story. This is particularly the case in science fiction movies, even when they are critical of capitalistic processes or technological developments. James Cameron’s Avatar offers a simplistic denunciation of technology-driven imperialism and an apology of a holistic, nature-centered, culturalistic worldview. But the heavy dependence on CGI and digital effects as well as the film’s reliance on global production and distribution networks contradict the explicit message of the movie. Who should we trust, the Na’vi and their natural utopia untainted by human technology, or the visual effects that replicate the mixing of human and alien DNA performed by Pandora’s greedy aggressors? Avatar treats body as media; migrating to a different body is reflexive of the digital filmmaking process itself. Another structural homology between movie content and filmmaking process is the act or cultural or geographical appropriation. Film commentators noted that each article of Na’vi clothing and jewelry was handmade and woven by a team of New Zealand costume designers. They underscored that the “alien” culture of Pandora was actually based on the indigenous Polynesian cultures of the Pacific Islands: for instance, the Na’vi gesture of touching foreheads is directly borrowed from the Māori’s traditional greeting, the hongi. Such acts of cultural appropriation go unnoticed or are even praised to illustrate the film’s cultural deftness. But it is doubtful whether Māori communities or other South Pacific Islanders received any benefits from these borrowings. Geographical borrowings, such as location shootings in fragile ecosystems or in scenic landscapes, are even more pernicious: they leave in their trail a legacy of environmental devastation, and often open the way for mass tourism and commercial exploitation of nature, as in the Pandora tours and Avatar-themed Na’vi wedding packages that are offered in the sites where some of the movie scenes were shot.

Another form of geographical exploitation consists of making a landscape alien, as in the science fiction movies Oblivion and Interstellar that were shot using real locations in Iceland. In these films, Iceland functions as an in-camera special effect by providing the image of a primitive or post-apocalyptic landscape that is then mixed with computer-generated imagery. Again, it is doubtful whether Icelanders received any benefit from the inclusion of their country’s natural assets as raw material in global value chains. As Hye Jean Chung notes, “certain sites of production develop as centers or nodes of production pipelines, whereas others are relegated to satellite sites of production or peripheral industries that provide human labor and natural resources to this centralized core that upholds and reinforces Hollywood’s hegemony.” Films like The Host or Godzilla however show that hegemony can be de-centered and that nations are in competition over the definition of a global imaginary. The composite body of The Host’s monster crosses genres and territories: although firmly anchored in the cultural specificity of Korean cinema, it cannot be interpreted “neither as a transplant of Hollywood’s conventions into a Korean background nor as a transfusion of Korean culture into Hollywood’s standards.” The monster, envisaged by director Bong Joon-ho as an imagined vision of “Korean-ness,” is in reality produced by a mix of Korean and non-Korean labor and technologies; and the film is itself a blend of heterotopic genres, from science fiction and monster movies to action films, family drama, political satire, and comedy. The 2014 Hollywood’s version of Godzilla, too, mixes imaginaries and straddles boundaries across the Pacific Ocean. Created by merging cross-border bodies and assets in both narrative and production spaces, it mobilizes a postwar Japanese myth born out of the atomic bomb and projects it on a global scale. The monster functions as a floating signifier, whose hybridity enables multiple national identities and transnational imaginaries to coexist. But the Hollywood’s production didn’t kill the indigenous gojira franchise: in Japan, the US-made monster was criticized as “out of shape” and as having a neck “like an American football’s athlete’s,” while the story lacked the denunciation of atomic warfare and the social critique that the Japanese versions developed.

Heterotopia is not only what movies make of it: it is inscribed in sites and territories, in imaginaries and aspirations. Theme parks like the World Park in Beijing and the Window of the World Shenzhen feature scaled-down replicas from various parts of the world; they offer the opportunity to travel abroad while staying at home. For the local migrants who work in these parks however, like the characters of Jia Zanke’s movie The World, the cosmopolitan lifestyle they showcase remains an simulacrum. Jia’s film deconstructs the transnational fantasy embedded in the World Park by revealing the various forms of uninspiring work that is necessary in producing and maintaining the illusion of cosmopolitanism. The characters’ lives are mediated by technology. They constantly send text messages on their cell phones and watch at digital video screens. Their dreams and fantasies, figured by animated sequences that punctuate the film, are made of simulated artifacts and reconstructions, as fake and artificial as the world they inhabit or the characters they are asked to impersonate. Big Hero 6 features another form of heterotopia in the hyperrealist scenes and cityscapes of “San Fransokyo”, a fictional metropolis that integrates the cultural iconography of Tokyo into the urban geography of San Francisco. This form of techno-Orientalism, reminiscent of the futuristic city displayed in Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner, is indexed on a cultural reality: the role Asian migrants have played in shaping San Francisco, a city that is now heralded as the capital metropolis of the Asia-Pacific century. In Big Hero 6, which was produced as a Disney franchise, East meets West in a virtual space rendered seamless by transpacific collaborations in the field of computer graphics and creative urban design.

From post-Marxist analysis to new materialism

What does heterotopic analysis bring to the field of cinema studies? First, it brings together two strands of film critique that are often developed separately: content and context, internal versus external critique, semantic interpretation or industry analysis, the viewer’s perspective or the point of view of the producers. As Hye Jean Chung convincingly demonstrates, the border between the two realms is porous: the ideology of seamlessness erases all traces of human labor and technical work from within the movie, but reality creeps back into the film’s narrative, making the seams apparent and the labor traceable. Many movies, especially but not exclusively in science fiction, are self-reflexive about the filmmaking process and the technological tools used in film production. Analyzing the film’s content also offers a perspective on how it was conceived and developed. Second, Media Heterotopias offers a post-Marxist analysis of the global division of labor in cultural and creative industries. The author often refers to the long work hours, tight schedules, night shifts, physical migration, or sedentary confinement along complex networks of transnational collaboration. Value accumulates at the most capitalistic points of the value chain, while other parts of the production pipeline are submitted to ruthless labor exploitation or imperialistic appropriation of cultural and natural assets. As a third point, I see this book as a contribution to the literature on new materialism. The materiality of geographical location, physical labor, and industrial practices is put alongside processes of dematerialization and digitalization, giving rise to a new kind of mediated materiality. The layered nature of digital imagery makes it an assemblage of heterogeneous time-spaces, a composite of physical and virtual elements that give rise to spectral effects and phantomatic presence. Reality is what comes back to haunt us when the real has been dissolved into digital fictions.

Observing the Tribes, Rites, and Myths of Wall Street

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A review of Liquidated: An Ethnography of Wall Street, Karen Ho, Duke University Press, 2009.

Karen HoIn her ethnography of Wall Street, Karen Ho offers a powerful metaphor by way of a title. “Liquidated”, the book’s title, echoes the memorable advice of Andrew Mellon, US Treasury secretary in the early 1930s, as reported by then President Herbert Hoover: “Liquidate labour, liquidate stocks, liquidate farmers, liquidate real estate! It will purge the rottenness out of the system. High cost of living and high living will come down. People will work harder, live a more moral life.” This advice, of course, only deepened the Great Depression, and its failure led to the adoption of Keynesian policies and massive state intervention. Which confirms the late Michael Mussa’s diagnosis that “there are three types of financial crises: crises of liquidity, crises of solvency, and crises of stupidity.”

“You are fired!”

Liquidity means different things to different people. For the bond trader, liquidity is a fact of life. An asset has to stay liquid if it is to be sold without causing a significant movement in market price and with minimum loss of value. Money, or cash, is the most liquid asset, but even major currencies can suffer loss of market liquidity in large liquidation events. When even safe assets are considered high risk, flight-to-liquidity might generate huge price movements and lead to a panic. For an investment banker, liquidity refers both to a business’ ability to meet its payment obligations, in terms of possessing sufficient liquid assets, and to such assets themselves. If a business is unable to service current debt from current income or cash reserves, it has to liquidate some assets or be forced into liquidation. For ordinary people, being liquidated means to lose a job, which in the US can happen on a brutal basis: you pack your personal items in a box and go. But even then, there are differences: for a banker, the line “you are fired!” means it is time to return the calls of headhunters, while for a CEO liquidation often comes with a hefty severance package or golden parachute.

Liquidation therefore provides a meaningful metaphor of how Wall Street operates. According to Karen Ho, liquidity is part of investment bankers’ “ethos” or “habitus”. Borrowed from French social scientist Pierre Bourdieu, these two concepts refer, first, to the worldview, and second, to the set of dispositions acquired through the activities and experiences of everyday life. They are the result of the objectification of social structure or “field” at the level of individual subjectivity. By using these concepts, Karen Ho’s goal is to demonstrate empirically how Wall Street’s subjectivities, its specific practices, constraints, and institutional culture, exert powerful systemic effects on US corporations and financial markets. Investment bankers live in a world where jobs are highly insecure, and they get paid for cutting deals or trading assets. They tend to project their experience onto the economy by aspiring to make everything “liquid” or tradable, including jobs and people.

When Wall Street takes over Main Street

Downsizing, restructuring and layoff plans are not only business decisions based on economic rationality and abstract financial models: they are the predictable outcomes of a peculiar corporate culture that values liquidity above all else. It is important to note that the people heralding downsizing and job market flexibility themselves experience it firsthand. Investment bankers are constantly subjected to boom and bust cycles and to waves of restructuring, even during bull markets (before writing her PhD dissertation, Karen Ho did a stint at Bankers Trust and lost her job when her team was dismantled). They live their professional life with an updated CV at hand, and are constantly solicited by headhunters and placement agencies. By pushing deals and reengineering corporations, they are projecting their own model of employee liquidity and financial instability onto corporate America, thereby setting the stage for rounds of market crises and layoffs.

While no terrain is considered off limits for modern anthropology, Wall Street is not usual territory for doing fieldwork. As Ho notes, you cannot just pitch your tent in the lobby of JP Morgan or on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange and observe what is going on. Chances are, security guards will throw you out in the matter of an hour. Besides, you won’t be able to gain much relevant information, as a lot of what goes on in corporate banking happens behind close boardroom doors or as the result of abstract computer models. Negotiating access to the field is always an issue for anthropologists. In the case of Wall Street, the difficulty is compounded by the culture of secrecy and the strict control over corporate information exerted by financial institutions.

Getting access to the field

In addition, bankers are in a position of power relative to anthropologists. They can humble the apprentice social scientist with their cock-sure assertiveness and technical jargon. For an anthropologist, the challenge of “studying up” and researching the power elite is very different from the issues raised by “studying down” distant tribes or dominated social groups. The way Karen Ho went around this problem of access was pragmatic and opportunistic. She first landed a job in an investment bank to familiarize herself with the field. She then used her university connections, former colleagues and network of contacts to gather as much information as she could. Her field methods included structured interviews, casual conversations, and participant observation at banking events such as industry conferences or recruitment forums. She finally ordered her data into a narrative that described, in true anthropological fashion, the tribes, rites and myths of Wall Street.

Investment bankers form an elite tribe. They are the leaders of the pack, the smartest guys in the room. Their culture emphasizes smartness, hard work, risk taking, expediency, flexibility, and a global outlook. They look down on Main Street corporate workers, whose steady, clock-watching routinization produces “stagnant”, “fat”, “lazy” “dead wood” that needs to be “pruned”. They are the market vanguard of finance-led capitalism, and perceive themselves as exerting a useful economic function. They hang around in the same places: gourmet restaurants, uptown watering holes, week-ends in the Hamptons, and jet-set vacations in exotic locations. Investment bankers form distinct sub-tribes or “kinship networks”: they are the “Harvard guys”, or the guys from Yale, Princeton, or Stanford. Individual employees are not only known and referred to by their universities but are also seen as more or less interchangeable with others from their school. The investment bank is organized into a strict pyramid, with the overall dominance of the “front office” over the “back office” and the hierarchy between analysts, vice presidents, and managing directors. Few new hires ever make it to MD status: Wall Street functions as a revolving door, where organizations are constantly restructured and reconfigurated.

Tribes, rites, and myths

Karen Ho explores several rites that define investment bankers’ corporate culture: the recruitment process, the integration into the firm, closing a deal, getting promoted, negotiating a bonus, and hopping from job to job in an industry that applies a “strategy of no strategy.” Smart students from Ivy League universities do not choose Wall Street as much as there are chosen along a natural path that makes investment banking the only “suitable” destination. They go through several rites of initiation that ingrain in them a sense of superiority, hard work, and professional dedication. Most of Ho’s informants experienced an initial sense of shock at the extraordinary demands of work on Wall Street, though over time, they began to claim hard work as a badge of honor and distinction. A tremendous amount of energy is spent in determining compensation via end-of-year bonuses. As they themselves acknowledge, bankers do it for the money, and the amount they earn determines their sense of self-esteem and their position in the corporate hierarchy.

Bronislaw Malinowski, as quoted by Karen Ho, writes that “an intimate connection exists between the word, the mythos, the sacred tales of a tribe, on the one hand, and their ritual acts, their moral deeds, their social organization, and even their practical activities, on the other.” The myths of Wall Street are the lessons taught in business schools and financial theory courses: the superiority of shareholder value and the relentless pursuit of profit maximization. These myths of origin are not always coherent. Investment bankers and consultants in the sixties heralded diversification and growth in unrelated sectors, before moving to a new mantra of “core business focus” and downsizing. Breaking up the conglomerates they helped assemble in the first place created a whole new source of profit for bankers. Similarly, stockholders were once described as fickle, mobile, and irresponsible in relation to corporate managers. The shareholder value revolution inverted the picture, and financiers pressured companies and their managers for profits and dividend payments. These “sacred tales” taught in business schools are also myths of legitimization: for Wall Street, the role of bankers is to create liquidity, to “unlock” value that is trapped in the corporation and to allocate money (as in the takeover movement) to its “best” use.

Making ethnography mandatory reading for MBA students

Karen Ho’s ambition is to offer a “cultural” theory of corporate finance. In her view, strategy is produced by culture, and “the financial is cultural through and through.” She constantly emphasizes the fact that investment bankers actively “make” markets, “produce” relations of hegemony and “create” systemic effects on US corporations through their corporate culture and personal habitus. Wall Street narratives of shareholder value and employee liquidity generate an approach to corporate America that “not only promotes socioeconomic inequalities but also precludes a more democratic approach to corporate governance.” Of course, it can be argued that culture does not explain everything, and that Karen Ho’s perspective in turn only reflects the views of a particular tribe: that of the cultural anthropologist. There is also the fact that Liquidated focuses on yesterday’s battlegrounds: the focus is on corporate equity and M&A, which were the high-profile areas everyone could see, while the dark pools of CDOs and over-the-counter derivatives were left completely off the hook. The book was completed in 2008, and the subprime crisis is only alluded to in a coda. But despite these obvious limitations, Karen Ho’s book provides a salutary perspective on the banking world, and should be made mandatory reading for any MBA student or financial PhD before they embark on their master-of-the-universe carrier. Maybe investment banks should also do well to hire their in-house anthropologist.

The Cultural Anthropology of Asia-Pacific Modernity

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A review of Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logics of Transnationality, Aihwa Ong, Duke University Press, 1999.

Flexible CitizenshipIn Flexible Citizenship, Aihwa Ong describes how industrializing states in Southeast Asia and border-crossing citizens of Chinese descent respond differently to the challenge of globalization. Borrowing from the French philosopher Michel Foucault, she uses the term “regime” to refer to knowledge/power schemes that seek to normalize power relations. The three regimes that are considered are the regime of Chinese kinship and family, the regime of the nation-state, and the regime of the marketplace. These regimes and their associated logics of subject-making, of governmentality, and of capital accumulation, are characterized by the twin forces of flexibility and transnationality. The book explores the phenomena that are shaped by these two forces: mobile capital, business networks, migrations, media publics, zones of graduated sovereignty, and triumphant Asian discourses.

Flexibility and transnationality in the Chinese diaspora

According to Benedict Anderson, rephrasing a basic tenet of Foucaldian studies, “the dreams of racism actually have their origin in ideologies of class, rather than those of nation.” Not so in China: the embrace of the authoritarian Asian model of modernity, the crucial role of overseas Chinese in China’s development, and the encounter with global capitalism have reinvigorated racial consciousness and its implications for the integrity of the national territory. The resurgence of Chinese racial consciousness overseas, stimulated by the reemergence of China on the world stage and by the economic activities of diasporean Chinese, cannot be dissociated from the racial pride that feeds China’s imaginary community. Meanwhile, it is important that the term “Chinese” not be invoked in such ways as to become automatically and at all times the equivalent of the People’s Republic. There is an ever growing pluralization of Chinese identities, as illustrated by the figures of transnational subjects that form the focus of this study: the multiple-passport holder; the multicultural professional who is able to convert his social capital across borders; the business executive who can live anywhere in the world, provided it is near an airport; the “parachute kids” who are dropped in Southern California to acquire an American college education that is almost a requisite for global mobility.

These international managers and professionals adopt a market-driven view of citizenship: they seek legal residence and citizenship not necessarily in the states where they conduct their business but in places where their families can pursue their dreams. The art of flexibility, which is constrained by political and cultural boundaries, includes sending families and business abroad, as well as acquiring dual citizenship, second homes, overseas bank accounts, and new habits. Among overseas Chinese, cultural norms dictate the formation of translocal business networks, putting men in charge of mobility while women and children are the disciplinary subjects of familial regimes. These norms that generally valorize mobile masculinity and localized feminity shape strategies of flexible citizenship, gender division of labour, and relocation in different sites.

Sites of graduated sovereignty

Despite frequent assertions about the demise of the state, the issue of state action remains central when it comes to the rearrangements of global spaces and the restructuring of social and political relations. In Southeast Asia, governments seeking to accommodate corporate strategies of location have become flexible in their management of sovereignty, so that different production sites often become institutional domains that vary in their mix of legal protections, controls, and disciplinary regimes. As Asian postdevelopmental states seek to maintain their competitiveness and political stability, they are no longer interested in securing uniform regulatory authority over all their citizens. The low-wage export-processing zones, the illegal labour market, the aboriginal periphery, the refugee camp, the cyber corridor, and the growth triangle are the new sites of graduated sovereignty, whereby citizens in zones that are differently articulated to global production and financial circuits are subjected to different kinds of surveillance and in practice enjoy different sets of civil, political, and economic rights.

Aihwa Ong’s essay is historically dated: her narrative takes place between China’s repression of the Tiananmen mass protests of 1989 and the turbulence of the Asian financial crisis of 1997. It encompasses political milestones such as Hong Kong’s return to Chinese sovereignty and the demise of the Soeharto regime in Indonesia; cultural phenomena like the rise of Star TV and other pan-Asian medias or the birth of Asian studies in the curriculum of American universities; economic developments such as the burgeoning production networks of multinational firms in Southeast Asia or the increased visibility of Asian presence in California; and ideological debates such as Huntington’s thesis of a clash of civilizations or the promotion of Asian values as an alternative to the West’s hegemony. The emergence of China as an economic superpower provides the background to all these trends.

But the book doesn’t take into account other developments that have transformed the region’s cultural and political fabric since its date of publication. The economic centre of gravity of East Asia has moved further from Southeast Asia to the Chinese mainland. China now complements its economic power with a new political assertiveness. Nationalist claims have been given a new virulence through the development of internet discussion forums. Issues of transnationality and border crossing have taken a new salience since September 11: once valorized as the emergence of a cosmopolitan class, they now tend to be associated with risk and threats to national security. And the politics of race in the USA has been transformed and redefined by the election of a president who claims roots on three continents.

Fault lines in a multi-sited ethnography

Against this background, we can now detect some fault line in Aihwa Ong’s analysis. History is left out of the picture, and the snapshots captured by her analysis are situated into a kind of undefined present. Because she considers that most historians entertain the “grand orientalist legacy,” she rejects the historical method of building truth claims through a patient investigation of archival materials. Instead, she builds her ethnographic analysis on the most transient of sources: articles in popular magazines, casual conversations with random informants, TV images watched in hotel rooms, and media coverage of political debates.

She rejects the notion of fieldwork that, until recently, formed the hallmark of anthropology as a discipline, and substitutes to it the standard approach of cultural studies: a blind reverence to Foucault and his concept of power; a fixation with issues of race, class, and gender; and a romantic denunciation of capitalism that comes plastered with the label of political economy. Compared to the sophistication of her theoretical apparatus, her ethnographic knowledge base is rather thin, and her descriptive narrative uses the clichés found in the popular literature. Judge by the following quote: “On a palm-fringed hillock stands the Kuala Lumpur Hilton, where attendants in white suits and batik sarongs rush forward to greet well-groomed Malay executives wielding cellular phones as they step out of limousines. Women in silk baju kurong (the loose Malay tunic and sarong), dripping jewelry from their ears and necks, saunter in on their way to fancy receptions.”

Anthropology is a constantly evolving social science. While I acknowledge the positive aspects brought by new theoretical perspectives and innovative notions of what counts as ethnographic material, I don’t fully subscribe to the new directions that the discipline has taken, as exemplified by this book.

Ghost in the Shell

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A review of The Soul of Anime: Collaborative Creativity and Japan’s Media Success Story, Ian Condry, Duke University Press, 2013.

the-soul-of-animeIn my opinion, The Soul of Anime should be read in business schools. It provides a wonderful case study of a particular industry, and it can teach management practitioners many things about globalization, creative industries, and flexible labor. Unlike what is stated in the book’s subtitle however, the story of Japanese anime is not a success story. As Ian Condry states in the introduction, “in terms of economic success, anime seems more of a cautionary tale than a model of entrepreneurial innovation.” Judged from a management perspective, the anime industry is in many ways a case of failure: a failure to globalize, a failure to create value on a sustained basis, and a failure on the side of market participants to reap profits and secure employment. But management can learn from failures as much than it can learn from success stories. What’s more, the anthropological perspective adopted by the author points towards a different theory of value creation: for cultural content industries, value is not synonymous with profits, and the relation between producers and consumers cannot be reduced to monetary transactions and economic self-interest. This is the intuition that the founders of anthropology developed when they analyzed trading relations among primitive tribes in terms of gift-giving and reciprocity; and this is the conclusion that this modern anthropology book reaches when it describes the popular success of this particular case of industrial failure.

A failed success story

Why didn’t anime transform itself into a profit-making machine for Japanese media groups? Why didn’t studio Ghibli—the producers of Princess Mononoke and Spirited Away—develop into a franchise akin to Walt Disney’s? Why didn’t stories based on manga series—the main source of inspiration for Japanese anime—give birth to blockbuster movies the way that Marvel Comics did? For all its popular success and—in the case of Ghibli production—critical acclaim, Japanese anime production remains in many ways a cottage industry. The studios in which the author of The Soul of Anime did his fieldwork, with names such as Gonzo, Aniplex, and Madhouse, are small-scale operations that continuously stake the house on their next production. Even the biggest players such as Studio Ghibli, Production I.G. and Toei Animation are limited in size and do not generate extraordinary profits. As Ian Condry describes it, a studio can employ anywhere from fifteen to a few hundred people, and relies heavily on local freelance animators as well as offshore production houses located in South Korea, China, and the Philippines. Like other segments of the Japanese industry, the anime sector has been “hollowed out”: by some estimates, 90 percent of the frames used in Japanese animation are drawn overseas.

The work that remains in Japan is not very well-paid and is precariously flexible. Long hours are the norm, and many animators work freelance, moving from project to project, often without benefits. Visiting a studio is more like entering the den of a manga production house, with papers piling up everywhere and people working frantically on deadlines, than witnessing the cool working environment of a high-tech start-up. Indeed, manga stories provide most of the content later developed in anime movies, and the two worlds are closely interconnected. Osamu Tezuka, the creator of Astro Boy otherwise known as the “god of manga,” used to quip that manga was his wife, while animation was his mistress. Like manga, anime now attracts a cult followership across the globe, and fans are present on every continent. They often start to watch anime from a very young age: by some estimates, 60 percent of the world’s TV broadcasts of cartoons are Japanese in origin. Despite its global reach, the anime industry failed to give rise to corporate giants that could have become global actors. Even Studio Ghibli’s biggest overseas success, Spirited Away, which won an Academy Award for Best Animated Feature, scored much less on the international box office than U.S animated productions of much lower quality. Mamoru Oshii’s cult film Ghost in the Shell reached number one in DVD sales in the United States in 1996, but failed to generate profitable spin-offs and lucrative sequels. Toei Animation’s original ambition to become the “Disney of the East” has failed egregiously.

The Galapagos syndrome

In a way, the failure of anime to globalize is just another case of the Galapagos syndrome: many globally available products take a local form in Japan, a variant that is sometimes more advanced and attuned to the local ecosystem, but which diverges from global trends. This isolation from the global market acts as a form of protectionism, allowing species to develop in unique ways, but leaves Japanese companies ill-prepared for global competition. Although cultural content industries such as manga, anime, video games, music, and films are being promoted by Japanese authorities for their ability to attract foreign audiences, the fact is that creators, drawers and scenarists mostly have a domestic audience in mind when they design their stories. The scorecards that manga readers send to weekly magazines to rate their favorite episodes is a case in point: it makes manga scenarios highly receptive to the reactions of the public, as unpopular series are discontinued and only the most popular manga stories survive and evolve according to their readership’s taste. But the system also makes manga series dependent on the whim of a group of core fans or otaku that do not necessarily reflect the national public, let alone global audiences. Copyright and intellectual property rights may also be an issue: Japanese companies reap hefty profits on the domestic market where IPR protection is strong, but are pilfered in neighboring countries through copycats, illegal downloading, and video streaming. Yet another argument that explains anime’s parochialism is that the global slot of blockbusters and megahits is already occupied by American productions, leaving only the niche markets of national cinema and sub-culture.

There are many reasons anime didn’t go global the way Walt Disney did. But perhaps we are using the wrong yardstick. Perhaps the value that anime generates belongs to a different class that is more diffuse and evanescent. As Ian Condry notes, “so much of what makes media meaningful lies beyond the measures of retail sales, top-ten lists, and box-office figures.” Anime cannot be gauged solely by examining what happens onscreen or by how it is marketed by studios. Instead of analyzing the cultural content of particular series or the business strategies of anime producers, Condry looks at the role of fans, the circulation of anime series and the dynamics between niche and mass market. He shows how the unexpected turnaround from failure to success for the Gundam franchise was linked to the energy of amateur builders of giant “mecha” robots and fans forming “research groups” into “Minovsky Physics”, an invention from the sci-fi series. He follows hard-core fans in sci-fi conventions, cosplay contests, and other fairs where amateurs distribute home-made manga and otaku videos. He focuses on fansubbing, the translation and dissemination of anime online by fans, which is governed by complex rules that are not always hostile to copyright protection. He considers how people can express strong affection or “moe” for virtual 2D characters with and sees it as “pure love” with no hope for a reciprocal emotional payback. This is a multi-sited ethnography, based on participant observation or “learning by watching” (kengaku), in which the author attempts to assess how value arises through the social circulation of media objects.

Follow the soul

Economists follow the money; anthropologists follow the soul, the energy, the mana. In his classic study of the Kula trade among the Trobriand islanders, Bronislaw Malinowski described the complex rules by which shell necklaces and trinkets circulated around a vast ring of island communities to enhance the social status and prestige of leaders. Kula valuables never remain for long in the hands of the recipients; rather, they must be passed on to other partners within a certain amount of time, thus constantly circling around the ring. French anthropologist Marcel Mauss, author of The Gift, reconceptualized this analysis of the Kula trade to ask: ”What power resides in the object given that causes its recipient to pay it back?” His answer was that Kula objects were invested with a certain property, a force binding the receiver and giver that he called the ‘hau’ or life-force. Another Polynesian notion that Marcel Mauss used was the ‘mana’: a form of a spiritual energy or charisma which can exist in places, objects and persons. Applying these notions to the Japanese context, we can say it is the ‘hau’ of anime that makes fans devote some of their time to give back to the community of anime lovers through writing subtitles or designing cosplay costumes. By summoning the ‘soul’ of anime, Ian Condry reconnects with some basic concepts of the discipline, and renews the inspiration of two of the great founders of anthropology. Both Bronislaw Malinowski and Marcel Mauss tried to build theories of exchange and the economy that went beyond monetary transactions and the economic interest of rational individuals. We find that same attention on how energy flows, reputations accumulate, and people collaborate in the production and circulation of anime.

Management scholars can also learn a lot from reading this modern anthropology book. The concept of ‘co-creation’ used by management scholars and sociologists is close to the ‘collaborative creativity’ used by Ian Condry to describe emergent structures of creative action in which both anime studios and fans play an important role. Similarly, “platforms” are a hot topic in management studies. Business scholars see platform industries as embodied in technologies that allow open collaboration and value creation on an unprecedented scale. Economists see platforms as multi-sided markets having distinct user groups that provide each other with network benefits. Rather than viewing technologies or markets as the platform, the anthropologist draws our attention on the circulation of emotions and meanings that define and organize our cultural space. Observing script meetings for a particular children TV series, Condry describes how a logic evolving around ‘characters’ and ‘worlds’ form the basis on which anime scripts are constructed and evaluated. Characters and worlds are trans-media concepts: they make a particular design or atmosphere move across media and circulate among people. They attract and connect, without being tied to any particular story or media. A well-known example is Hello Kitty, a character which exists independently from any storytelling and which has become an icon of a world of cuteness or ‘kawaii’. But characters are ubiquitous in Japan: they advertise anything from government agencies to city wards, and ‘character designer’ is a popular profession among the young generation.

From niche to mass market

Anime is often considered as the land of otaku, the realm of geeks, the kingdom of nerds. It is segmented into different categories or sub-genres, and a series’ appeal is generally limited to one single age group, as even the biggest successes very seldom straddles generations. It is, in essence, a niche market. Very seldom can it hope to reach a mass audience. But as Condry argues, the path from niche to mass may first involve jumps from niche to niche. Indeed, this might be the key to a more accurate definition of mass: to see it as network of niches acting in unison. The notion of “media success” often hinges on a movement from something small-scale that expands to become large-scale, yet niche has a chance in the context of global popular culture, free downloads, and viral videos. This is a new world after all, a world where the music video of an obscure rap singer from South Korea can be viewed over 2.5 billion times on YouTube, or where a gore movie such as The Machine Girl, whose schoolgirl heroin has a machine gun grafted to her amputated arm, can feature among the most often downloaded films on some media sharing platforms. Management should better pay heed to the otaku out there—or, in Steve Jobs’ words, “to the crazy ones, the misfits, the rebels, the troublemakers, the round pegs in the square holes… because the ones who are crazy enough to think that they can change the world, are the ones who do.”

Ian Condry also redefines what we mean by social media. As he remarks, “today, media forms are more than something we simply watch, listen to, or consume; media is something we do.” Social network services like Facebook or Twitter have demonstrated that media could be a platform for participation as much as an object of consumption. What makes “social media” new is not the technology as much as the idea that media is not something to consume from a Network (like ABC) but something we participate in through our (small “n”) networks. Social network services or SNS make real what is virtual by making virtual what is real. In other words, Facebook-like platforms project onto the virtual world structures of relations between people and objects that form the basis of our day-to-day interactions; and by doing so, SNS show the materiality of the invisible bonds that connect components of the real world. Social media has helped put back the social into the media; but as the story of anime illustrates it, the social has been there all along. Anime’s success as a media form relies on the feedback loops between producers and audience. This brings us back to the energy around anime, which arises through its circulation and the combined efforts of large number of people. We might think of this collective energy as a kind of soul. The social in the media is what the anthropologist calls the soul. It is like a ghost in the shell: it animates real and virtual bodies, it moves across media platform and licensed goods, it makes energy flow from producers to consumers and back again. Anthropology is a very useful means of capturing these dimensions of our social reality that are ghost-like and often spirited away, because fieldworkers can gain access to that which is most meaningful to people through persistent engagement and critical questioning. This is why, in my opinion, anthropology should be taught in business schools.