Corporate Lives: New Perspectives on the Social Life of the Corporate Form

Abstract

Corporate Lives: New Perspectives on the Social Life of the Corporate Form is the third Wenner-Gren Symposium to be published as an open-access supplement of Current Anthropology (CA). This supplementary issue is based on a symposium of the same name that was jointly sponsored by the foundation and the School for Advanced Research (SAR) and was held on the SAR campus in Santa Fe, New Mexico, August 21– 27, 2008 (fig. 1). The symposium was organized by Damani J. Partridge (University of Michigan), Marina Welker (Cornell University), and Rebecca Hardin (University of Michigan), who are also the guest editors for this issue. All three are younger scholars who are at the forefront of the emerging field of corporate anthropology. Corporations are described in the guest editors’ introduction to this supplementary issue (Welker, Partridge, and Hardin 2011) as one of the dominant institutions of our time. Corporations simultaneously shape and are shaped by humans at all levels of society and in sometimes surprising contexts. The relevance of corporations to modern life was accentuated for the symposium participants by the economic crisis that unfolded in 2008 at the time of the “Corporate Lives” meeting. Although the symposium was planned well in advance of this crisis, this serendipitous convergence brought home to all participants the relevance of the meeting and the importance of anthropology to the study and analysis of all aspects of the corporate experience. As a major result of the meeting, the guest editors advocate for “fresh anthropological research into the nature of the corporate form and the experiments in social organization it opens up, the material and symbolic power of corporations over human and environmental life, how countermovements to capitalism are reshaping the corporate ethics and governance, and the contested internal nature of corporations” (Welker, Partridge, and Hardin 2011). The “Corporative Lives” symposium was an innovative