The Corporate System of a Globalized Firm: From integrated management to shared vision

GINIGER, NURIA

New Orleans

Congreso; 109th American Anthropological Association Annual Meeting; 2010

AAA

<!-- /* Style Definitions */ p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal {mso-style-parent:""; margin:0cm; margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:12.0pt; font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman";} p.Default, li.Default, div.Default {mso-style-name:Default; mso-style-parent:""; margin:0cm; margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; mso-layout-grid-align:none; text-autospace:none; font-size:12.0pt; font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; color:black;} @page Section1 {size:612.0pt 792.0pt; margin:70.85pt 3.0cm 70.85pt 3.0cm; mso-header-margin:36.0pt; mso-footer-margin:36.0pt; mso-paper-source:0;} div.Section1 {page:Section1;} --> In recent decades, the sale of national companies in Argentina to large multinational corporations has concentrated managerial power in the production process and in the reproduction of communities.  Conforming to global practices, foreign managers have introduced more sophisticated tools for controlling the workforce and exercising power in the society. Such measures constitute true corporate systems of labour discipline, involving the construction of hegemony at the ideological level among workers, corporate managers and shareholders, and civil-political officials Corporate systems share in common a neoliberal commitment to free markets for labour and other inputs in production and sale of their product.  They may vary according to their particular location, its history in relation to the experience of the workers and the community in which they are placed, and their relation to the state, but predominant patterns shared globally prevail because of the corporate system imposed in the local setting. In my case study of the Argentinian Steel Company, I analyze the reconfiguration of labour management practicers following its sale and incorporation as a global firm, Acindar.  The company, founded by a traditional business-man, Arturo Acevedo, had been established for more than 50 years in a city in the province of Santa Fe, Argentina. Following its sale less than a decade ago to multinational capitalist interests, labour policies are reconfigured in order to resolve the confrontation between workers, who bring a long history of struggles and collective organization to this situation and argentinian managers.  In the consequent struggle, the new ownership developed increasingly sophisticated labour relations in the context of union action.  As I demonstrate in my ethnography, union action is not always a simple response to these management tools.  What I discovered in the interaction was a fetishization of the corporate system of control in the company’s discourse in the face of the collective strategy of workers.  This process of corporate fetishization is the thesis of my doctoral work, in which I pretends to contribute to an understanding of how the fetishization of the corporate system developed in the context of the collective strategies of workers.