Emil A. Røyrvik 
The Allure of Capitalism [EPUB ebook] 
An Ethnography of Management and the Global Economy in Crisis

List of Figures
List of Tables
Preface
Acknowledgements

Introduction: Investment Projects, Capitalism, and Crisis

• Cultural analysis of corporate and capitalist organization


• Hydro investment projects and the reproduction of relations


• At the crossroads of production and finance capital


• Contextualizing the study within Hydro


• Organization of the book

PART I. CONSTRUCTION AND CULTURES OF CREATION

Chapter 1. Situating “Global Corporate Management”

• Hydro’s ambiguous position


• Investment projects as “global assemblages”


• Economic anthropology revisited


• Managing man


• The neoliberal triumph and tragedy


• Extending anthropological discovering

Chapter 2. Managing in the Middle Kingdom: Three Investment Projects in China

• Technologies, art and truth


• Counterfeiting and strategic secrecy


• The GM relay


• The Mercedes and the carriage


• Circulating safety—dodging danger


• The carriage cum Mercedes


• Social organization and construction


• Reverse culture crash


• Cultural encounters


• From socio-technical to ontological truth

Chapter 3. Presencing Projects: A Social Reality of Construction

• The tragedy of big projects


• Keepers of gold and processes of “structuring”


• The ambience of enabling


• Projects as situated potentiality


• A set of propositions


• The imagination bank

PART II. HIGH FINANCE AND CONTEMPORARY CRISIS CAPITALISM

Chapter 4. The Turn to Enchantment: Investing in Projects

• Decision Gate Four


• CROGIism: Inventing finance control


• Blåruss-blues


• The surge of “shareholder value”


• “Scientific management”, collaboration and democratization


• Projects as a cultural idiom

Chapter 5. Wagging the Dog: The Financialization of Sociality

• Hydro’s financial transformation


• The “stock options carnival”


• “Options” in a moral economy


• A neoliberal dismantling of democratic capitalism?


• “Financial weapons of mass destruction”


• Managing “financial risk” in projects

Chapter 6. Money Manager Capitalism and Reverse Redistribution

• Financialization and international economic relations


• Qatalum “money magic”


• The dance of debt


• The “ancien régime” reinvented


• Financial neo-imperialism


• Radical reverse redistribution

PART III. IN GOOD COMPANY?

Chapter 7. Directors and Directions of Creation

• Reprise and review


• Hydro and the right kind of globalization


• Anti-market capitalism


• Financial entification


• Qualifying capitalism


• Incarnations of a different nature

Chapter 8. Managing in a Total Context of Crisis

• Managing, reasons and rationalizations


• Mixed regimes of rationality


• The medium-range view: Levels in capitalism


• Deep crisis in contemporary capitalism


• Downfall or a phoenix for the future?


• A tragedy or triumph of the commons?

Appendix
Bibliography
Index

Emil A. Røyrvik is a social anthropologist and senior research scientist at SINTEF Technology and Society, Scandinavia’s largest independent research organization. The book has been written also in his capacity as postdoctoral fellow at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU), Department of Social Anthropology. His research focuses on ethnography and anthropological theory in the context of knowledge work, organizational and managerial culture, and aspects of contemporary economic and cultural globalization.