Making Global MBAs

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Andrew Orta offers an important addition to the anthropological study of neoliberalism by doing an ethnography of one of the bellies of the beast, MBA programs. He persuasively shows how business schools teach their students to deal with culture in ways that are both patterned and reductive. Finally anthropologists have a thoughtful and enormously productive lens on how neoliberalism reproduces its logics by distorting a classic anthropological concept—culture." —Ilana Gershon, author of Down and Out in the New Economy: How People Find (or Don't Find) Work Today  "Andrew Orta has found in the globalization of US MBA programs an extraordinary method for analyzing contemporary capitalism. The cultivation of risk, “good enough” cultural knowledge, horizons of difference, and the production of global managers emerge not only as features of the global economy. They are also the touchstones of the MBA’s personal identities. Orta offers a brilliant retelling of classic anthropological concerns in his transit of some of the freshest international venues for engaging the problem of culture, economy, and capital."—Rudi Colloredo-Mansfeld, coauthor of Fast, Easy, and in Cash: Artisan Hardship and Hope in the Global Economy "In this book, which is at once an ethnography of MBA programs and an analysis of the culture of neoliberal capitalism, Andrew Orta brilliantly shows how professional education, which is explicitly imagined as ‘practical’ instead of ‘theoretical, ’ is in fact deeply theoretical. The MBA curriculum, inculcating the ‘soft skills’ of contemporary business, produces students proficient in routines and rituals that both presuppose and bring to life the world of global business as a total social fact, including the cultural premises upon which it relies. In carefully managed study-abroad trips, MBA students sally forth to explore a global world of difference, but their interest is trained on differences that can be easily marketed—even as they are welcomed home, and onto the corporate job market, as intrepid global explorers." —Richard Handler, author of Critics against Culture: Anthropological Observers of Mass Societies