In this episode, Xinyan Peng interviews Kimberly Chong about her book Best Practice: Management Consulting and the Ethics of Financialization in China. Dr. Chong speaks about how management consulting emerges as a crucial site for considering how corporate organization, employee performance, business ethics, and labor have been transformed under financialization. Effective management consultants, Dr. Chong finds, incorporate local workplace norms and assert their expertise in the particular terms of local culture and society, 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 the reform era, Dr. Chong explains both the dynamic, fragmented character of financialization, and how ‘global’ management consultants perform their expertise in the particular terms of China’s national project of modernization.
References:
Bogdanich, Walt, and Michael Forsythe. (2022). When McKinsey comes to town: The hidden influence of the world’s most powerful consulting firm. Doubleday.
Boyer, Dominic, and George E. Marcus. (2021). Collaborative anthropology today: A Collection of Exceptions. Cornell University Press.
McDonald, D. (2014). The firm: The story of McKinsey and its secret influence on American business. Simon & Schuster.
Ortner, S. B. (2016). “Dark anthropology and its others: Theory since the eighties.” HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory, 6(1), 47-73.
Host: Xinyan Peng
Guest: Dr. Kimberly Chong
Research Assistant: Wenzhao Chen
Audio Editor: Seyma Kabaoglu
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (51.2MB)
In this episode, Xinyan Peng interviews Dr. Mike Prentice, who is currently a Lecturer in Korean Studies at the School of East Asian Studies at the University of Sheffield. Dr. Prentice has been trained as a linguistic and cultural anthropologist, and his research broadly focuses on genres and technologies of communication, organizations and corporations, and work and labor cultures in contemporary South Korea. Dr. Prentice’s book Supercorporate: Distinction and Participation in Post-Hierarchy South Korea, examines a central tension in visions of big corporate life in 21st-century South Korea: should corporations be sites of fair distinction or equal participation? As South Korea distances itself from images and figures of a hierarchical past, Dr. Prentice argues that the drive to redefine the meaning of corporate labor echoes a central ambiguity around corporate labor today. 
Dr. Caroline Schuster is Associate Professor at the School of Archaeology and Anthropology; as well as Co-Director of the Australian National Centre for Latin American Studies at the Australian National University. Dr. Schuster’s research interests include value, credit and debt, development policy and NGOs, finance and climate change, gender and kinship with a regional focus on Latin America. Her first book, Social Collateral: women and microfinance in Paraguay’s smuggling economy (University of California Press, 2015) is an ethnographic account of microcredit and collective indebtedness in Paraguay’s triple-frontier with Argentina and Brazil. Her forthcoming book is a graphic novel titled Forecasts: A story of weather and finance at the edge of disaster, along with the illustrators Enrique Bernardou and David Bueno. Her work has been published in a number of journals, including Cultural Anthropology, American Ethnologist, Political and Legal Anthropology Review, and Development and Change, to name a few. 
Dr. Taylor C. Nelms is an anthropologist and ethnographer with fifteen years of experience studying money, technology, and banking in the United States, Latin America, and around the world. He is currently the Senior Director of Research at the Filene Research Institute, an independent, non-profit think tank focused on consumer and cooperative finance, especially credit unions. At Filene, Taylor manages a team of researchers and a portfolio of partnerships with leading scholars to pursue research that explores people’s changing economic lives and the business of financial services. Before joining Filene, Taylor worked as a Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of California, Irvine, where he received his PhD in Anthropology. He also holds degrees from the University of Cambridge and Ohio State University.
A cultural anthropologist, Dr. Tami Navarro is Assistant Professor of Pan-African Studies at Drew University. She is a founding member of the Virgin Islands Studies Collective (VISCO) and a member of the Editorial Board for the journal Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism. Dr. Navarro is co-host of the podcast, “Writing Home: American Voices from the Caribbean” and the Co-director of the Transnational Black Feminisms working group at Columbia University. She is the author of Virgin Capital: Race, Gender, and Financialization in the US Virgin Islands (SUNY Press 2021) which has been recognized by the Association for Feminist Anthropology and the Society for Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology.