Blueprints, Judgment, and Perseverance in a Corporate Context

Abstract

This article draws on my experience as a member of the five-person International Advisory Group to the governments of Chad and Cameroon and the president of the World Bank on the Chad-Cameroon Oil Development and Pipeline Project (2001–2009) and as advisor to the Corporate Lives project. It addresses the problematics, for an academic anthropologist, of exercising judgment and perseverance in relation to corporate blueprints as the project developed over time. In three main parts, the article addresses our anthropological literature on ethics and involvement over time, offers examples of midstream dilemmas arising in the project, and lays out the responses of colleagues to my probing about the determinants of “hanging in.” The main purpose is to offer examples of ethnographic and ethical issues as they may arise in the increasingly complexly corporatized world on which the Corporate Lives project has focused attention and discussion.