CALL FOR PAPERS
American Anthropological Association
2007 Annual Meeting in Washington, DC

Subjects Incorporated: Theorizing Corporations and Agency in Global Capitalism

Organizers: Elana Shever, University of California, Berkeley Csilla Kalocsai, Yale University

Anthropologists increasingly study the effects of corporations at particular sites or on specific populations, yet they have given insufficient attention to theorizing the kind of actors that corporations have become in contemporary global capitalism. In order to question presentations of corporations as unified and autonomous subjects, this panel seeks to bring together scholars whose ethnographic research intimately engages corporations in order to think about corporate subjectivity and agency in innovative and critical ways. This panel will thus examine the processes through which possibilities for corporate agency, and realizations of corporate subjectivity, are generated, secured, and transformed in the new political economy.

Focusing our ethnographic lens on corporations throughout the world, we ask: are corporations central players in globalized dramas; the effects of capitalist processes; assemblages of actors, materials and governing techniques; reified legal fictions; discursive manifestations of branding and advertising; or are they better theorized in other terms? How do our informants understand the corporate entities with which they interact as employees, consumers, shareholders, advisors, citizens and neighbors? How does the relationship between corporate, state and other actors inform how we think about corporations? Furthermore, what are the intellectual, political and ethical implications of how we theorize corporate agency and the role of corporations in the contemporary world?

Interested scholars should submit a paper abstract up to 250 words to Elana Shever esr@berkeley.edu or Csilla Kalocsai at csilla.kalocsai@aya.yale.edu by March 15, 2007.