Best Practice: Management Consulting and the Ethics of Financialization in China

by Kimberly Chong

In Best Practice Kimberly Chong provides an ethnography of a global management consultancy that has been hired by Chinese companies, including Chinese state-owned enterprises. She shows how consulting emerges as a crucial site for considering how corporate organization, employee performance, business ethics, and labor have been transformed under financialization. To date financialization has been examined using top-down approaches that portray the rise of finance as a new logic of economic accumulation. Best Practice , by contrast, focuses on the everyday practices and narratives through which companies become financialized. Effective management consultants, Chong finds, incorporate local workplace norms and assert their expertise in the particular terms of China's national project of modernization, while at the same time framing their work in terms of global “best practices.” Providing insight into how global management consultancies refashion Chinese state-owned enterprises in preparation for stock market flotation, Chong demonstrates both the dynamic, fragmented character of financialization and the ways in which Chinese state capitalism enables this process.

Genres: Anthropology, China, Business

264 pages, Paperback

Published November 16, 2018

Reviews

[versarbre]

corporate practices under global financialization; very solid ethnography of the business world.

[Yisu Z. · Rating 3 out of 5]

跟踪了一家位于大连的国际咨询公司一年，把best practice 总结为『回收知识』的一种表演性行动，也不是不行，可能是案例特殊呢？但不能用这来形容整个职业。