Frontiers of Capital: Ethnographic Reflections on the New Economy (review)

The New Economy: this peculiar phenomenon, hailed by some as a radical restructuring of economic processes and vilified by others as a deceptio visu akin to the South Sea Bubble, is generally considered to have had its funeral around 2001. Its former heralds have been its pallbearers too, resting now (though not necessarily in peace) in the common graveyard of past corporate delusions. Companies like Enron, WorldCom, and the many dotcoms which once winged public imagination have haunted in ghost-like fashion the courts of law (and the media) in the past years.

The distinctions between heralds of a new economic era, con men, pallbearers, and spectral appearances have never been more blurred than in the case of the New Economy. It is precisely this lack of clear cut boundaries, as well as the feeling that that era’s inheritance is still with us, which fascinate social scientists. However, fascination with what are taken to be new phenomena and the desire to explore their depths are often accompanied by the concern that the available theoretical and methodological tools are inadequate for such exploration.

This volume gives voice both to fascination and concern: it aims at exploring various facets of the New Economy (understood as synonymous with globalization), while introducing new conceptual tools and questioning standard qualitative methodologies as adequate bases for such an exploration. With this, some features of this book have already been hinted at: it is a collection of eleven essays, accompanied by an editorial introduction and a postscript, exploring with qualitative tools (participant observation, interviews, discourse analysis) a set of industries considered to be at the core of the New Economy.

Of the eleven contributions, organized in two parts (“Circuits of Knowledge” and “New Subjects, New Socialities”), three examine financial markets, two the media and entertainment industries, two corporate life, two urban dynamics, one the software industry, and one youth as a cultural category. The majority of the authors, as well as the editors, are cultural anthropologists; a few contributions come from sociologists and cultural geographers.

The ratio among topical categories indicates that financial markets are perceived to be the real frontier of capital; in addition to the essays dealing with online professional trading, the decision-making process of the Federal Reserve System’s Open Market Committee, and the settlement system of the Bank of Japan, a fourth deals with networks of women professionals from the financial services industry. The new frontier, here, is not so much financial markets — they are at least as old as Western capitalism — but the heightened public and academic awareness of their importance, coupled with their increased impact at world scale, supported, among others, by trading automation.

The worldwide expansion of financial trading, as well as of corporate activities, raises a whole series of issues about corporate cultures, skillfully explored in the essays of Caitlin Zaloom and Aihwa Ong. While the traders observed by Zaloom project representations of their competitors as endowed with specific properties based on myths about national and/or class characters, Ong’s Western managers promote values of submission to collective authority which clash with the individualistic values of their Chinese counterparts. Max Weber’s well known thesis about rationalization processes is turned upside down: Western corporations promote rather traditional values, countered by Chinese managers with hyper-rational attitudes.

This expansion of capitalist exchanges at a global scale is one of the major themes of this volume, present in explorations of the entertainment industries (music and sports), as well as in the transformation of urban spaces known as “gentrification.” In contrast to the financial services industry and to corporate life, which seek to impose globally standardized practices, the entertainment industry ticks according to the logic of simulating resistance to the mainstream. Protest is given the shape of illusion and incorporated into a global marketing system; in doing this, the entertainment industry operates on the principle of globally distributed local variability, or, as Paul Silverstein puts it...