Company brokers: Human resources managers in foreign mining projects in the Congolese Copperbelt

Abstract

Based on ethnographic research between 2016 and 2018, this article examines the role of Congolese HR managers working for the transnational companies that have developed new mining projects in DR Congo’s copperbelt over the past two decades. Drawing inspiration from the anthropological literature on brokerage, the analysis proposes to study this category of middle managers as company brokers, who derive power from their ability to control access to jobs in foreign companies and who take on an active role in the organizational changes that new investors put in place. In developing this line of analysis, the article’s aim is to understand how mining capitalism is mediated from within foreign companies. In this view, mining projects are not only negotiated by brokers in the local political arena, they are themselves co-produced by the local workers they employ.