Best Practice: Management Consulting and the Ethics of Financialization in China - Softcover

Chong, Kimberly

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1478000880 ISBN 13: 9781478000884

Publisher: Duke University Press Books, 2018

Synopsis

In Best Practice Kimberly Chong provides an ethnography of a global management consultancy that has been hired by Chinese companies, including Chinese state-owned enterprises. She shows how consulting emerges as a crucial site for considering how corporate organization, employee performance, business ethics, and labor have been transformed under financialization. To date financialization has been examined using top-down approaches that portray the rise of finance as a new logic of economic accumulation. Best Practice, by contrast, focuses on the everyday practices and narratives through which companies become financialized. Effective management consultants, Chong finds, incorporate local workplace norms and assert their expertise in the particular terms of China's national project of modernization, while at the same time framing their work in terms of global “best practices.” Providing insight into how global management consultancies refashion Chinese state-owned enterprises in preparation for stock market flotation, Chong demonstrates both the dynamic, fragmented character of financialization and the ways in which Chinese state capitalism enables this process.

About this title

About the Author

Kimberly Chong is Lecturer of Anthropology at University College London.

Review

“Despite the significance of financialization in shaping global capitalism, its implementation and operationalization within corporations are often taken at face value. Scholars across disciplines have long recognized the need for an ethnographic account of management consulting to better understand how the cultural values of finance are translated into nonfinancial organizations. Kimberly Chong's ethnography of financialization in China is therefore compelling, insightful, and most welcome.” (Karen Ho, author of Liquidated: An Ethnography of Wall Street)

“Kimberly Chong provides a fascinating ethnography of the critical role that management consultants play in restructuring capitalist economic activity in China. Her book presents a convincing set of arguments both for how consultancy firms produce financialized subjects and why an ethical basis is needed for this work. It will provoke wide-ranging, interdisciplinary debates about how to assess financialization and its effects on everyday work.” (Lisa Rofel, coauthor of Fabricating Transnational Capitalism: A Collaborative Ethnography of Italian-Chinese Global Fashion)

Edition details

• Publisher: Duke University Press Books
• Publication date: 2018
• ISBN 10: 1478000880
• ISBN 13: 9781478000884
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 264