Making Global MBAs: The Culture of Business and the Business of Culture by Andrew Orta (review)

Andrew Orta. Making Global MBAs: The Culture of Business and the Business of Culture. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2019. 256 pp.

Making Global MBAs is an ethnography of the production of the managerial subjects of contemporary capitalism in elite business schools and MBA programs in the United States. The book is a welcome addition to the expanding anthropological literature on capitalism. Although it "draws on interviews and observations conducted between August 2006 and January 2017" (20), the book relies heavily on descriptions of events that took place prior to the 2008 financial crisis. Orta gives a short overview of some of the changes that business schools have instituted after the financial crisis, but it is worth noting for the sake of readers hoping to get an ethnographic sense of those changes that they are not reflected in the ethnography itself. Orta argues that "on the face of it, the timing of these events [i.e. the financial crisis] was not kind to this project" (20), but framed differently, the fact that his ethnography analyzes the culture of business schools prior to the financial crisis can be an advantage because some of the key insights that Orta makes about this culture—e.g., that it socializes students to reduce complexity, make quick decisions based on this reduced complexity, and take risks—can provide the basis for a productive discussion about the reasons for the crisis.

The book highlights three key dimensions of the production of managerial subjects in business schools. First, MBA students learn to adapt themselves both to the normative ideals and practices of fast-paced business management, as well as to the demand for reducing complexity as the basis for making decisions under tight time constraints. Second, they are socialized to view international business through the prism of reified cultural differences that represent both challenges and potential rewards for the cosmopolitan managerial subject who can manage across those differences. Lastly, they learn to make decisions and bear risk under the same conditions of uncertainty that they are likely to encounter outside of school as future managers.

The book is divided into seven chapters. Following the introductory chapter, Chapter 2 provides a description of the pedagogical practices by means of which students are socialized into the fast-paced managerial life. MBA programs attempt to provide a boot camp-like intensity and learning environment in the course of which students undertake ritualized performances of quick decision-making based on reduced complexity. They cultivate "a communicative habitus" (32) by learning to prepare executive summaries of complicated situations and to present them as if they were giving a presentation to a board of directors or shareholders. They learn what Orta calls "a basic grammar of compression and commensuration" (35) by means of which diverse national business contexts can be compared along two-dimensional graphs and charts. Chapter 3 provides a historical context for the rise and expansion of business schools in the United States, whereas Chapter 4 provides a historical context for the rise and expansion of the culture concept in business studies. This concept became more prominent following the push toward international business in the 1980s, which created the demand for people who can manage across physical and cultural space. Visions of global standardization gave way to international business defined by local cultural differences that can have an economic impact both as challenges for business and as untapped value. The notion of the ideal manager who can balance "standardization with the nuances and niches of localization" (92) is anchored in this historical context. This act of balancing, however, requires "distillation" or reduction of entire cultures into commensurable and reified dimensions.

Chapter 5 analyzes the short-term study abroad program that many business schools offer, which functions as a training ground for cultivating this type of ideal manager. Short-term study abroad programs provide students "an experiential 'executive summary' of frontier spaces of capitalist potential" and the opportunity...