Enacting the Corporation

An American Mining Firm in Post-Authoritarian Indonesia

Marina Welker

• Publisher: University of California Press
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN:
  9780520282308
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9780520957954
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Cultural & Social Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

What are corporations, and to whom are they responsible? Anthropologist Marina Welker draws on two years of research at Newmont Mining Corporation's Denver headquarters and its Batu Hijau copper and gold mine in Sumbawa, Indonesia, to address these questions. Against the backdrop of an emerging Corporate Social Responsibility movement and changing state dynamics in Indonesia, she shows how people enact the mining corporation in multiple ways: as an ore producer, employer, patron, promoter of sustainable development, religious sponsor, auditable organization, foreign imperialist, and environmental threat. Rather than assuming that corporations are monolithic, profit-maximizing subjects, Welker turns to anthropological theories of personhood to develop an analytic model of the corporation as an unstable collective subject with multiple authors, boundaries, and interests. Enacting the Corporation demonstrates that corporations are constituted through continuous struggles over relations with—and responsibilities to—local communities, workers, activists, governments, contractors, and shareholders.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• List of Abbreviations
• Acknowledgments
• Note on Pseudonyms and Quoted Sources
• Introduction
• 1. “We Need to Newmontize Folk”: A New Social Discipline at Corporate Headquarters
• 2. “Pak Comrel Is Our Regent Whom We Respect”: Mine, State, and Development Responsibility
• 3. “My Job Would Be Far Easier If Locals Were Already Capitalists”: Incubating Enterprise and Patronage
• 4. “We Identified Farmers as Our Top Security Risk”: Ethereal and Material Development in the Paddy Fields
• 5. “Corporate Security Begins in the Community”: The Social Work of Environmental Management
• 6. “We Should Be Like Starbucks”: The Social Assessment
• Conclusion: “Soft Is Hard”
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index