Incarnation Inc. Managing Corporate Values

Abstract

This article describes the substantial efforts put into creating and managing a comprehensive 'value-based' corporate culture and identitybuilding program, and reflects on how both the making and the reception of the programme can be understood in light of the three main ways of talking about value/s (economic, moral, meaning). Through the program's use of technologies of production and enchantment, including the magic of advertising, the argument unfolds the program's processes of valuation through both making visible and creating social relations. The article explores valuation as social practices involved in representation and signification. It argues that the preoccupation with making value visible in an industrial production company is symptomatic of the contemporary 'economy of signs', and that resistance towards these efforts shows that valuation in this context is considered more as accurate representation than as signification.

CORPORATE SOCIAL RESPONSIBILITY AND THE PARADOXES OF STATE CAPITALISM: Ethnographies of Norwegian Energy and Extraction Businesses Abroad

“…The case of Norsk Hydro, to which we now turn, exemplifi es this particular Nordic approach to CSR. And as I have elaborated upon extensively elsewhere (Røyrvik 2013a), Hydro also exemplifi es the major struggle, duality, and ambivalence between the two opposing conceptualizations of the corporation as an inherently societal actor versus the shareholder-value view. Norsk Hydro was created in 1905, the same year that Norway gained its independence, and has arguably been the most important locomotive in the develop-ment of Norway as an industrial nation.…”

“…The argument is based on extensive multisited ethnographic (partly collaborative) work during an eight-year period with the globalized aluminum corporation, Norsk Hydro, forming the basis of an ethnographic extended case study using Hydro as the ethnographic point of departure for a cultural critique of globalized capitalism (Røyrvik 2013a). The chapter investigates how core ideas and practices that can be associated with the Nordic model play out in their foreign operations in the authoritarian state of China, focusing on issues related to workplace democratic ideals and socially responsible operations.…”

“…While Bower and Paine (2017) dissect the fl aws in this argument related to the view of shareholders as the owners of the company (they are owners/holders of shares, not owners of the company) and managers as their agents, this doctrine nevertheless developed into both principal-agent theory and the surge of shareholder value that during the last forty years of neoliberalization has become dominant and has transformed the purposes of business to a large extent in line with the Friedman doctrine (Ho 2009;Røyrvik 2013a;Bower and Paine 2017).…”

“…Norsk Hydro was created in 1905, the same year that Norway gained its independence, and has arguably been the most important locomotive in the develop-ment of Norway as an industrial nation. While being a cornerstone in the Norwegian social democratic industrial state, from 1999 Hydro turned seriously toward a shareholder-value orientation (Lie 2005: 424-33) and transformed into what I describe (Røyrvik 2013a) as a hybrid organization, positioned ambivalently but with considerable balancing capacity, with one foot in each of the two opposing paradigms conceptualizing the corporation.…”

Collective economic actors

“…It is amenable to the kind of anthropological research done in small-and mediumscale societies and local communities, although global corporations often require multi-sited research (e.g. Garsten 1994;Oliveira 2013;Røyrvik 2013;Stull 2017). The possibility of using anthropological research from community ethnographies to understand corporations did not escape the attention of popular business writers (Deal and Kennedy 1982;see also Ouchi 1981;Pascale and Athos 1981).…”