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Gilbert, Paul and Dolan, Catherine (2020) 'Mutuality Talk in a Family-Owned Multinational: Anthropological Categories and Critical Analyses of Corporate Ethicizing.' Journal of Business Anthropology, 9 (1). pp. 19-43.

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Abstract

This article draws on work carried out as part of a collaboration between an elite business school and a family-owned multinational corporation, concerned with promoting ‘mutuality in business’ as a new frontier of responsible capitalism. While the business school partners treated mutuality as a new principle central to an emergent ethical capitalism, the corporation claimed mutuality as a long-established value unique to their company. Both interpretations foreground a central problem in recent writing on the anthropology of business/corporations: the tension between the claim that economic life is always embedded within a moral calculus, and the shift towards increasingly ethical behaviour among many corporations. Further, recent work in the anthropology of business rejects normative evaluations of corporate ethicizing. When corporations lay claim to ethical renewal, but maintain a commitment to competition and growth, then anthropologists must balance a sympathetic engagement with corporate ethicizing, and critical engagement with growth-based strategies.

Item Type: Journal Article
Keywords: competition, corporate ethics, fairness, family business, growth, mutuality
SOAS Departments & Centres: Departments and Subunits > Department of Anthropology & Sociology
ISSN: 22454217
Copyright Statement: © The Author(s) 2020. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 License that allows others to share the work with an acknowledgement of the work's authorship and initial publication in this journal: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/legalcode
DOI (Digital Object Identifier): https://doi.org/10.22439/jba.v9i1.5958
Date Deposited: 09 Jan 2020 11:21
URI: https://eprints.soas.ac.uk/id/eprint/32115
Funders: Other

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