This article examines a range of writings on advertising. It shows that advertising has been written about as instrumental to an emerging capitalistic market, touted as a flamboyant lifestyle in autobiographical tales of charismatic advertising leaders, depicted as a coercive tool of...

How can we imagine and perform an anthropological practice with business, that is, not from a distanced perspective but through a mutual infolding and engagement? How might such an arrangement then be exemplary for novel economic experiments of the kind anthropologists often describe? Reflecting...

This text briefly depicts the history of an encounter between anthropology and organization theory in the Anglo-Saxon literature in the period 1990-2010 as seen by an organization scholar. In focus are some stable characteristics and some changes in this relationship, against the background of...

Classically, anthropology supplied a cultural critique, by contrasting the Noble Savage to contemporary institutions and exposing the effects of structures of authority. This understanding of humanity was expanded a hundred years ago by Boas’s embrace of cultural and linguistic variety within...

The premise of this article is that the expansive domain of business, as expressed in its market-transaction based, organizational, and institutional forms, has influenced the development or “making” of anthropology as a discipline and a profession for the better part of a century (i.e.,...

This article investigates the global ‘retail revolution’ through the path chosen by key people in the Norwegian trade network called Technical Supplies Partner (TSP). The story is told from the perspective of a single entrepreneur working closely together with an A-team of fiercely...

The foundation of a functioning welfare state is a tax system that is widely accepted and considered to be fair and legitimate. How and by what means a tax collecting agency interprets the laws are thus seen to have an impact on taxpayers’ willingness to pay. This article addresses the various...

Focusing on the "fictions2 between the ethnographer and her informants, this article deals with the delicate chemistry of fieldwork through an account of three field studies. The first explores power struggles in a bank in Marseilles; the second looks at issues related to political and economic...

This article outlines the contours of the scholarly debate on ‘Chinese capitalism’ in Southeast Asia. This multidisciplinary domain is business- and entrepreneurship-oriented, and concerns the ethnic Chinese who have migrated from Southern China to Southeast Asia and have come to play a...