Best Practice: Management Consulting and the Ethics of Financialization in China 9781478002376

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best practice

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Best Practice management consulting and the ethics of financialization in china

kimberly chong

duke university press | Durham and London | 2018

© 2018 Duke University Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of Amer­i­ca on acid-­free paper ∞ Text design by Julienne Alexander Cover design by Matthew Tauch Typeset in Minion Pro by Westchester Publishing Services Library of Congress Cataloging-­in-­Publication Data Names: Chong, Kimberly, [date—] author. Title: Best practice : management consulting and the ethics of financialization / Kimberly Chong. Description: Durham : Duke University Press, 2018. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: lccn 2018008216 (print) | lccn 2018010129 (ebook) isbn 9781478002376 (ebook) isbn 9781478000693 (hardcover : alk. paper) isbn 9781478000884 (pbk. : alk. paper) Subjects: lcsh: Business consultants—­China. | Business ethics—­China. | Financialization—­Moral and ethical aspects—­China. Classification: lcc hd69.c6 (ebook) | lcc hd69.c6 c474 2018 (print) | ddc 001—­dc23 lc rec­ord available at https://­lccn​.­loc​.­gov​/­2018008216 Cover art: Friendship Square, Dalian, China. Photo by Tony Vingerhoets / Alamy Stock Photo.

Contents

Acknowl­edgments Introduction

vii 1

1 High Performers: The Making of Financialized Subjects

35

2 Evaluating ­Humans: Financial Rationality and Practices of Performance-­Related Pay

64

3 Reducing Costs: Shared Ser­vice Centers, ­Labor, and the Outsourcing Rationale

91

4 Training Value: The Moral and Po­liti­cal Proj­ect of Selling Consultancy

110

5 Client Sites: Liminality, Modernity, and Per­for­mances of Expertise

131

6 Building a Paradise: Post-­Mao Visions of Transformation

151

7 Con­spic­u­ous Ethicizing: Corporate Culture, CSR, and Corporate Subjectivity

172

Conclusion Notes references Index

193 203 221 241

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Acknowl­edgments

many ­people have made this book pos­si­ble, not least the ­women and men of the management consultancy that I pseudonymously refer to as Systeo. In an environment that makes a virtue of efficiency and being busy, Systeo employees of all se­niorities took time out to explain their work. In addition to their patience and enthusiasm, the research benefited hugely from their help in expanding my access within the consultancy. As any ethnographer of organ­izations knows, getting clearance for entry is just the first step—­access is constantly being renegotiated once you are inside. Having research subjects who make it their personal mission to ensure that you see as much pos­si­ble, who find ways to get you involved in the day-­to-­ day life of the organ­ization, and who offer you a place to stay should you need it was a dream I could not have hoped for. Their warmth and generosity ­were not restricted to the working context. Although I do not focus on con­ sul­tants’ personal lives, I greatly appreciated the invitations to dinner, the theater, and the shopping mall. Through ­these experiences I gained a much richer insight into management consulting and the meaning of such work in the context of con­temporary, state-­capitalist China. I also gained friendship. Thanks must also go to my friends in Dalian who between them seemed to know ­every man­ag­er in the software park, and who gave me the vital contacts that opened up the field. They shared my passion for ­doing institutional fieldwork, and rallied around me when it seemed impossible. Without them, the PhD proj­ect on which this book is based would have turned out very differently. I express my sincere gratitude to the institutions that have funded this research. My doctoral research was supported by a studentship awarded by the Economic and Social Research Council. A research grant from the Institute of New Economic Thinking enabled me to revise the dissertation into a book. At the London School of Economics (lse) my supervisors Stephan Feuchtwang and Laura Bear provided a wealth of intellectual stimulation

and guidance during the PhD and thereafter. Stephan’s enduring enthusiasm for this proj­ect, and his faith in my capacities as an anthropologist, have helped me overcome the many challenges of fieldwork and writing. I thank Laura for always pushing me to draw out the contradictions of financialization and the connections between the everyday practices of expertise I was observing and the production of global economic forms. Her comments have helped me make the most of my field data and realize the value of my contribution. Since my PhD, I have benefited hugely from lively exchanges with many scholars working in the anthropology of finance and global capitalism and cognate disciplines of sociology, critical management studies, and accounting. I have been lucky to find an informal mentor in Kate Zaloom, who has provided invaluable support, not just through her constructive criticism but also with her advice on navigating the academic ­career path. I must also thank Janet Roitman, Martha Poon, Mike Power, David Stark, Jane Guyer, Marilyn Strathern, Lotta Björklund Larsen, Catherine Dolan, David Tuckett, and Rebecca Empson. A special mention goes to Horacio Ortiz; I only met him a ­couple of years ago, yet our discussions have significantly influenced my approach and the argumentation of this book. Through invited pre­sen­ta­tions and workshops at New York University, the New School, the University of Sussex, the lse, the University of Westminster, the University of St.  Andrews, University College London, and L’École des Mines, I have received a wealth of comments, which have undoubtedly had a g­ reat impact on the final manuscript—­thanks to all who shared their thoughts. I have also benefited greatly from the four anonymous reviewers of the book, whose comments have helped me strengthen my key arguments and refine the manuscript in so many ways. Though not a formal writing group, the British Library Lady Sociologists have provided the intellectual and emotional sustenance—­typically over lunch—­that have surely promoted productive writing stints in the reading rooms. I also wish to thank my peers at the lse, especially Miranda Sheild Johansson, Cathrine Thorleifsson, Aude Michelet, Luca Pes, Elizabeth Frantz, and Katie Dow. I am grateful to Ruben Andersson for his close readings of early drafts; he taught me a lot about writing, especially for a broader audience. I would also like to thank the staff at Duke University Press. My editor Ken Wissoker has believed in this proj­ect right from the beginning, and viii 

Acknowl­e dgments

made the journey through multiple rounds of peer review as smooth and productive as pos­si­ble. I have appreciated his critical yet sympathetic eye, and his constructive suggestions for improvement. I express gratitude also to Olivia Polk for pulling the manuscript together in preparation for production, and to Christine Riggio for her supreme efforts on the artwork program. Outside of Duke, credit must go to Anisha Peplinski for her fantastic job of adapting my fieldwork materials into publishable illustrations. Fi­nally, I thank my loved ones. Thank you to my ­brother, Laurence Chong, one of my loudest supporters, for his companionship, his jokes, and his optimism. I am enormously indebted to my ­mother, Lum Weng Bik, not least for the childcare that meant I could complete two rounds of manuscript revisions during maternity leave. Certainly, I have had moments of doubt along the way, but her unwavering belief in my ability has helped see this book to completion. She taught me from an early age never to shy away from asking the big questions, the awkward questions, that we should question authority and how the world works. Th ­ ese lessons have stayed with me and animated my own investigation and critiques of global capitalism. I hope I can pass on t­hese lessons to my son, Howie Chong-­ Daw, whose early appearance in the world delayed the completion of this book or gave me a ­little more time to work on the manuscript, depending how you see it. Fi­nally, I express my deepest gratitude to my partner, Henry Daw, for always being t­here, for taking t­hings away from me so I could focus, and for giving t­ hings to me so I could thrive. Crafted with the nourishment of his love, patience, and kindness, this book is dedicated to him.

Acknowl­e dgments  

ix

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Introduction

“some ­people are visionaries, ­others are operators. I’m a client guy.” So says John Scott, the chief executive of Systeo, a global management consultancy. The closest you could get to a corporate rock star, John travels the world with an entourage—­his leadership team and a bevy of assistants—­ and has an army of loyal fans who track his movements online through his “Johnny on Tour” home page. ­These fans are none other than Systeo’s own employees. In the spring of 2009 he was due to make an eagerly anticipated visit to China. For weeks I had heard rumors about his inspirational talks, how they flowed with wisdom, insight, and humor, his power­ful voice and magnetic charm redolent of evangelical preachers. Unsurprisingly, the event, styled as a “town hall meeting,” was packed. Con­sul­tants, ju­nior and se­nior, expatriate and Chinese, filled the ballroom of a five-­star ­hotel in Beijing’s central business district, their attention fixed on their Svengali. John believes the w ­ hole world is moving east. “China is the place to be!” he tells the audience. “When I first started out all I wanted to do was make a difference. If I was to start again I would start in China.” The audience broke into applause. More than just cheap pop­u­lism and motivation-­ speak, John’s comments reflected the growing importance of the region for management consulting. He reassures the employees that Systeo ­will not be a casualty of the financial crisis that had, at the time, gripped the global economy. In fact, “it’s an opportunity for us to take market share from our competitors.” To do this, “we need to sell seven billion dollars’ worth of stuff e­ very quarter . . . ​last quarter we did sell six billion worth of stuff, in the worst economic conditions.” Stuff. A word so short, so casual, so innocuous, and arrestingly opaque. Headlines such as “nhs [National Health Ser­vice] ‘has no idea what £300m of management consultancy buys’ ” draw attention to the colossal sums—of public money, no less—­that are spent on con­sul­tants, while communicating

a lingering doubt over their expertise.1 Social commentators depict management consultancy as nothing more than a hollow per­for­mance of expertise, or as one author put it, “a con.”2 The specter of deception is echoed in London’s West End where the critically acclaimed play Enron has thrust the darkest days of consulting, quite literally, into the limelight, almost ten years ­after the American corporate g­ iant of the same name collapsed. In short, we find that consulting is reduced to l­ittle more than an expensive package of corporate hype and moral deviance in popu­lar narratives. But this explanation tells us ­little about the role that management consulting plays in the con­temporary global economy. The likes of at&t, Ford Motor Com­pany, nasa, and the bbc, huge cap­i­tal­ist firms as well as well-­known nonprofits, have all at some point hired management con­sul­tants, but for what exactly?3 What do management consultancies do? And how do they do it? John’s failure to define consulting—­“stuff ”—­was not a one-­off. “Does your ­mother understand Systeo?” This is the question posed to newly hired con­sul­tants, bold type on an other­wise blank screen, the first frame of a short film played in their induction session. The ­human resources man­ag­er stops the film, turns to the puzzled ­faces, and says, “Work at Systeo involves many abstract concepts so it’s difficult to explain [it] to other ­people.” The film resumes, showing a series of con­sul­tants drawn from offices around the world struggling to describe their everyday work to their nearest and dearest. The last con­sul­tant is none other than John Scott. He c­ an’t answer the question ­either. Deciphering the object of consulting—­“what management consultancies do”—is not just a ­matter for external inquiry. It is also presented within the consultancy as a dilemma that employees must learn to circumnavigate. By showing one Systeo employee a­ fter another fudge through such a seemingly straightforward question, the film prepares new staff for what ­will be a recurrent experience—­alienation from their ­family and friends. Even chief executive John Scott is unable to explain to his ­mother, and by implication anyone ­else, what Systeo does, underscoring the point that this is not a dilemma that fades with experience. Rather, “enlightenment” is achieved through a repositioning of the analytical lens. John looks straight at the camera, pausing with a smile, before inviting fresh-­faced con­sul­tants to “think about the nature of what we do—­that is, in fact, what we do.”

2 

Introduction

I gained access to a global management consultancy in Dalian, a port city in northeastern China, a place that many ­people ­will have never heard of, let alone consider to be an appropriate place to study consulting. Chicago, the birthplace of the consultancy and home to the headquarters of many of the world’s most famous consultancies, would be a more obvious starting point.4 I went to Dalian ­because it is China’s it-­outsourcing capital, where one can find many of the big names in software development, as well as technology and business consulting. My original plan was to conduct research inside the offshore platforms that had proliferated in recent years. I was interested in the forms of rationality that can be found in, and that inform the operations of, ­these high-­tech workplaces.5 Many impressive ethnographic accounts of China’s manufacturing sector already existed, but similar research into China’s knowledge economy was thin on the ground. As a doctoral student in anthropology at the London School of Economics I hoped to provide a timely description of how Chinese high-­ tech workers ­were adapting to the new social and cultural pressures that came with China’s transition to a market-­oriented economy. I was particularly fascinated by scholarly observations suggesting that knowledge-­based industries in China ­were plagued by a prob­lem of insufficient corporate professionalism, and that Chinese employees lacked the social norms and dispositions of global work.6 For six months I networked relentlessly, with the hope of eventually securing institutional access to conduct long-­term, embedded fieldwork. I spent my days interviewing professionals who worked in Dalian’s software parks, and my nights socializing at clubs and bars frequented by the expatriate overseers of global companies. Expatriates’ penchant for hard liquor meant that I learned to hold my drink while sounding out fieldwork opportunities. I also learned to cast the fieldwork net widely. Karaoke parties, trips to the fish market, meetings at Starbucks, all featured in my diary. I would go to an event if I even vaguely suspected that I would meet ­people who worked in technology or outsourcing, each time hoping for that one serendipitous introduction that would open doors. Eventually my efforts started to pay off. Four months ­after I arrived I had meetings lined up with several software vendors and technology companies. However, each negotiation for entry resulted in more or less the same set of outcomes. My pitches would be favorably received by man­ag­ers in Dalian, but weeks ­later,

Introduction  

3

when I had already convinced myself that access was in the bag, I would be refused by an authority situated higher up the chain of command, in Beijing, Shanghai, or headquarters located abroad. The most commonly stated reason for rejection was “client confidentiality,” though I suspected that security-­paranoid technology firms ­were also concerned about potential corporate espionage. One by one I crossed off the names of high-­tech companies, some world famous, o ­ thers less familiar, that had operations in Dalian. In January 2008 I found myself facing the prospect of jettisoning institutionally based fieldwork. I had approached no fewer than six companies—­ all of them had rejected my request for access. Every­thing rested on the final pitch I had lined up. It was to a global management consultancy, Systeo.7 At the time Systeo was my least preferred option, mainly b ­ ecause it was not, strictly speaking, a high-­tech com­pany. I worried that I would not be able to fulfill my primary research aim of examining how local rationalities—­ whether of late socialism or Confucianism—­interacted with the rationalities of global high-­tech work. I wanted to research an organ­ization that was explic­itly involved in the production and propagation of information technology. Management con­sul­tants, in my eyes, ­were all smoke and mirrors, fancy Power­Points and corporate speak. I was not entirely wrong. But what I did not realize then was how management con­sul­tants ­were deeply implicated in the spread of information technology systems and the it-­ enabled outsourcing of ser­vices. Accessing Systeo would not compromise my research agenda. It would broaden it. I had been introduced to Systeo by an En­glish teacher from the United Kingdom. We met at a Gaelic football tournament, of all places. He was one of several expatriate language trainers and “cross-­cultural experts” living in Dalian, who w ­ ere hired to iron out the wrinkles in professionalism that apparently beset global companies. Th ­ ese prob­lems ­were typically narrated as emanating from culture—­the disruption posed to corporate culture by local norms and values, and cross-­cultural misunderstanding between “East” and “West.” This En­glish teacher correctly anticipated that the prospect of ­free En­glish instruction, not to mention the cultural expertise of an anthropologist who could lend a “fresh pair of eyes” to their internal management pro­cesses, would be highly attractive in this context. ­After my successive rejections, I was overjoyed and a l­ittle shocked to be granted approval to carry out twelve months of fieldwork, a period that 4 

Introduction

would eventually be extended. It was agreed that in exchange for access I would edit communications and other internal documents, as well as give En­glish classes. I would be based inside the com­pany’s “shared ser­vice center,” where their back-­office operations took place. However, this was not their only offshore platform in Dalian. Systeo also ran centers dedicated to “business pro­cess outsourcing” and “it application outsourcing” in the city. I was intrigued by the dif­fer­ent kinds of outsourcing—­perhaps ­these would engender dif­fer­ent rationalities of operation? I hoped to carry out fieldwork in t­ hese sites as well. But that old chestnut, “client confidentiality,” reared its ugly head again. Unlike the shared ser­vice center, ­these other centers w ­ ere not directed to internal operations but to external business; thus, I would need permission from Systeo’s clients to enter t­ hese spaces, almost certainly an impossible ask. Although I was initially disappointed, this led to an impor­tant realization that would animate the rest of my fieldwork: outsourcing was not merely a way of trimming internal costs; outsourcing was also a ser­vice to be sold. In the last twenty years, t­ here has been a dramatic rise in the number of organ­izations that have hollowed out their key business functions. Every­ thing but frontline ser­vices is carried out in low-­wage ser­vice centers in the global South. While the revolution in information and communication technologies (icts) facilitates such orga­nizational change, it is management con­sul­tants who actively promote such structures. The offshore platforms I had come to study could not be separated from the practices of consulting. it-­enabled outsourcing was one of the ways in which con­ sul­tants sought to improve orga­nizational per­for­mance. Management con­sul­tants are more than Power­Point wizards; I had obtained access to actors who have very profound effects on orga­nizational structures and working practices, actors with the power to redirect flows of ­labor and capital, and thus shape economic forms. It did not make sense for my study to focus solely on outsourcing. My study needed to look at the vari­ous ways, of which outsourcing is just one, that con­sul­tants claim to create value. What are the orga­nizational forms and managerial practices that con­sul­tants propagate? What is the role of technology? What are the discourses of worth and productivity through which con­sul­tants legitimize their interventions? To answer t­hese questions I needed to get out of the shared ser­vice center and into the front office, where I could observe and interview con­sul­tants. Introduction  

5

This book is an ethnographic account of management consulting, based on sixteen months of fieldwork inside the China arm of Systeo, a leading global management consultancy that specializes in the implementation of it management systems and outsourcing ser­vices. It draws on participant observation and interview-­based data with con­sul­tants and back-­office workers, as well as my own reflexive insights from being a liminal member of the consultancy. I describe my pathway from En­glish trainer to Systeo contractor, and how this transformation, from adjunct to employee, conferred multiple vantage points from which I observed and analyzed my object of ethnographic inquiry: the expertise of con­sul­tants. As well as accessing some of Systeo’s front offices in China, I was also permitted to follow consulting teams to “client sites,” their clients’ organ­izations, where con­sul­tants spend most of their time. The overarching aim of the book is deceptively ­simple: to answer the questions of what con­sul­tants do and how they do it. One con­sul­tant I met during fieldwork described consulting as taking the “best practices of clients, using them internally to find out what works, and then selling ­these onto our [other] clients.” I was stunned to hear this. It was not just what she said, but also the candid manner in which she described consultancy as the pro­cess of recycling knowledge, originally obtained from their clients, for profit.8 This comment would suggest that con­sul­tants, who are hired by most large organ­izations at one time or another, are creating institutional convergence. Scholarly accounts have similarly observed that con­ sul­tants, far from creating managerial innovations, are in the business of standardizing orga­nizational practice (Wright, Sturdy, and Wylie 2012). Best practice, it would seem, is both a trope for elevating con­sul­tants’ expertise and a narrative that legitimizes the creation of cookie-­cutter organ­izations. Which leads us to the question: Is Systeo, a global management consultancy, seeking to make Chinese business practices conform to standards already established in Eu­rope and North Amer­i­ca? Throughout my fieldwork I found a recurrent tension between the aims of a global management consultancy, to standardize orga­nizational practice, and the practicalities of consulting in China. This was a tension that played out internally as well as in relation to their Chinese clients. Many expatriates posted to China shared a perception that Systeo’s China arm—­specifically its mainland Chinese employees—­failed to conform to the com­pany’s global norms, standards, and pro­cesses. This failure to implement best practice within 6 

Introduction

the consultancy seemed to threaten the very epistemological basis on which con­sul­tants claimed to possess expertise. If they could not ensure that best practice prevailed within Systeo, how could they sell it externally? This epistemic rupture would provide the fertile ground upon which I could investigate what con­sul­tants do. Focusing on the knowledge practices of consulting, this book seeks to show how con­sul­tants produce and legitimize their expertise. Inspired by an anthropological approach that stresses how global capitalism is always produced through local actions, discourses, and meanings,9 I show how Chinese employees employed at this global management consultancy draw on local tropes of modernity to understand and explain their apparently global expertise. Best practice might nominally refer to the standardization of business praxis, but it is narrated, sold, and legitimated by recourse to locally relevant and historically specific discourses. This is not to say that consulting in China is a diluted version or an exceptional instantiation of consulting proper. Rather, it is precisely b ­ ecause con­sul­tants’ expertise is so slippery and difficult to describe that ­there is a need to find systems of meaning that resonate with their clients, which in China include many large state-­owned enterprises (soes). In contrast to depictions of management consultancy as technocratic practice, I argue that management consultancy is the business of creating ethical injunctions. It is the work of moralizing and legitimating what is “best” ­under the aegis of financialization, and thus engenders the production of ethical remits, proj­ects, and anchors that inform social action. One of the ways this is achieved is through practices that bring new social realities into being. Commonly held notions of expertise, which suggest that experts must have demonstrable skill and a specialized body of knowledge, cannot adequately explain the work of con­sul­tants and their remarkable ability to sell their “wares.” Instead, we find that the expertise of management con­sul­tants is performative. According to geographer Nigel Thrift, managerial knowledge, which at its most basic level is concerned with the minutiae of interaction and ­human be­hav­ior, is performative in the sense that embodied per­for­mances of this knowledge are required for its authentication (Thrift 2005, 96). In addition, he suggests that the prescriptive character of reflexive managerial knowledge is such that it “has the power to make its theories and descriptions of the world come alive in new built form, new machines and Introduction  

7

new bodies” (Thrift 2005, 11). This second notion of performativity bears close resemblance to sociologist Michel Callon’s thesis of performation. Writing specifically about economic models, Callon argues that economics “performs, shapes and formats the economy, rather than observing how it functions” (Callon 1998b, 2). This thesis has been taken up with gusto in social studies of finance, where scholars have demonstrated how financial equations and trading algorithms work not to represent but to intervene in the social real­ity of financial markets.10 Management con­sul­tants also produce models—­those that are actually used in business—­practical models that do not necessarily correspond to economic or management theory as taught in universities.11 In so d ­ oing, they play an impor­tant role in shaping everyday business realities. For ­these models ­don’t just reflect par­tic­u­lar ways of thinking; they also create ways of thinking. Often depicted as the ultimate knowledge workers, con­sul­tants produce forms of knowledge—­ business concepts, ideas, and theories. ­These are epistemological tools of modeling social real­ity, which create the legitimacy for orga­nizational change. How ­these models acquire traction—­the techniques of abstraction, calculation, and persuasion that are utilized, the forms of social discourse and value registers they engage—­features centrally in the analy­sis. By analyzing how knowledge is created, and how epistemological interventions are staged, this book shows how management con­sul­tants are connected to the practices of valuation and new logics of worth that have accompanied the financialization of corporations and everyday life. It is argued that management consulting is concerned with the creation of cultures of commensuration, through which new economic imperatives, forms of value, and power relations are legitimated and naturalized. This book, which provides the first portrait of management consulting in China, also shows how management con­sul­tants are implicated in pro­ cesses of social and economic transformation in con­temporary China. I suggest that Systeo is in the business of performing financial capitalism. Unlike in the United States and Eu­rope, in China management consultancy is still in its infancy, with major firms opening offices only in the last twenty years. In this period China has shifted away from a system of socialist planning to become a flourishing, market-­oriented economy with growing global stature. Management con­sul­tants have played a key role, installing the technologies and imparting the managerial techniques that have seen Chinese state firms transformed into financial entities. 8 

Introduction

Management Consultancy and China’s Proj­ect of Modernization

Since China’s turn t­ oward a market economy, modernization has been the stated goal of the Chinese government, whose legitimacy is intimately connected to the rising prosperity of what is now the world’s second largest economy. Initiated by Deng Xiao Ping’s program of “reform and opening” (gaige kaifang)—­institutional reform and the opening of China’s economy to foreign investment—­which began in 1978, China’s transition from a socialist command economy to one based on market princi­ples has involved wide-­scale restructuring. At first the changes w ­ ere muted, focused not so much on creating a market economy but rather on the efficient functioning of the planned economy. However, economic volatility together with growing po­liti­cal instability pushed the Chinese government to opt for a rather dif­fer­ent tack from the mid-1990s. ­After Deng Xiao Ping’s tour of foreign-­invested enterprises in the special economic zones located in the southern provinces in 1992, ­there was a shift ­toward explicit market reforms and radical restructuring, which involved active participation in the global economy as a means of stimulating growth and increasing employment. Not just in terms of opening its doors to multinationals, which have rushed to relocate vast swaths of their global production chains to China, but also by outsourcing the job of domestic industrial restructuring to foreign institutions. Po­liti­cal scientist Edward Steinfeld argues that China is pursuing its goal of modernization not by developing its own unique institutional framework, but by adhering to the rules set by the advanced industrial West. His argument rests on conceptualizing globalization as the organ­ization of production hierarchies across national borders, that is, networked production. This definition sits in contrast with the popu­lar view that globalization is more or less approximate to the dramatic expansion of trade and competition that has served to decimate old hierarchies between developed and developing nations and to produce a so-­called flat world (Friedman 2005). For Steinfeld, the staggering growth experienced since the mid-1990s is a direct result of the decision to integrate China’s economy into an already established global system of networked production, enabled by the alignment of norms and practices that come with “institutional outsourcing”—­ “the ceding to a third party . . . ​the power to define key societal institutions” (Steinfeld 2010, 25). Introduction  

9

His account is a timely alternative to the usual explanations of China’s spectacular economic growth, which take as their point of departure the supposed anachronism of a strong state and liberalized markets.12 Vari­ ous authors have sought to exceptionalize the instantiation of capitalism in post-­Mao China, principally on the basis of culture and the specific context of local practices or late development. In contrast, Steinfeld reminds us of the influential role of Western cap­i­tal­ist institutions in shaping China’s economic infrastructure and transition to a cap­i­tal­ist economy.13 He goes so far as to say that China, in some spheres, “directly tied itself to foreign rules and rule-­making authorities” (Steinfeld 2010, 44), giving the examples of China’s accession to the World Trade Organ­ization (which took place in 2001) and the listing of soes on overseas stock exchanges. The latter is of par­tic­u­lar relevance. In 1994, the Com­pany Law was passed, providing a framework for converting soes into the ­legal form of the corporation (Naughton 2006, 201). Then, ­under the policy of “grasping the large and releasing the small” (zhua da fang xiao), which was a­ dopted in 1997, China’s largest soes ­were corporatized in a wave of initial public offerings that continues ­today, requiring a radical overhaul of managerial practices. According to Steinfeld, this was accomplished by hiring overseas-­trained Chinese man­ag­ers as a means of importing the requisite expertise in financial management needed to run a publicly listed global enterprise (2010, 34). He does not mention the deployment of foreign management consultancies, an omission that is particularly con­spic­u­ous given his stated emphasis on institutional outsourcing. Although consultancies disclose their associations with Chinese soes,14 they have so far escaped the attention of the many scholars who write about China’s economic development.15 If we look at the recent history of Systeo’s business, and specifically where its business is expanding, it is apparent that the marketization of China’s economy and accompanying economic restructuring has created a new market for consultancy. Systeo is looking to move more and more of its head count to China in order to keep up with the increasing demand for consulting ser­vices. This demand comes not only from Chinese soes and private Chinese companies, but also from the multitude of multinational companies that have set up production in the “workshop of the world” following China’s opening up. They too are companies of significant scale and wealth, making them ideal customers for technology-­based consulting, which is known to be lengthy in duration and thus expensive in cost. 10 

Introduction

Systeo’s clients include the corporatized soes in the strategic industries of energy, banking, and communications, known collectively as the country’s “National Champions.” ­These are also some of the world’s largest corporations, rivaling the likes of Walmart and Apple in terms of market capitalization.16 However, the extent to which corporatized Chinese soes operate as public companies in ser­vice to their shareholders is still in question. In another research proj­ect, I found that fund man­ag­ers from the United States and Eu­rope who invest in China frequently articulated concerns about Chinese soes in par­tic­u­lar (and Chinese public companies more generally).17 As one fund man­ag­er put it, he was concerned that ­these entities w ­ ere “employment agencies of the [Chinese] state,” that is, that t­hese ­were still, in some ways, socialist rather than cap­i­tal­ist institutions. Elsewhere, commentators have articulated a related fear that t­ hese behemoths operate with a distinctly “Chinese” management ethos, which circumvents the established norms and practices of global capitalism.18 In summary, ­there is still considerable anxiety outside China that Chinese companies are operating according to their own historically and culturally informed ethics. Perceptions that Chinese companies are not fully disposed to Western financial capitalism, and thus not in the ser­vice of shareholders, can make ­these entities very unpredictable and risky in the eyes of long-­term investors. Systeo plays a vital role in making t­ hese entities into v­ iable investment targets. It has been argued that “[public] companies can use consultancies as part of their communication strategy ­towards investment analysts,” to convince them that “management is committed to improving shareholder value.”19 By shaping the objectives, the pro­cesses, and the operations of Chinese soes, Systeo helps to create a narrative that ­these entities are professionalized, modernized entities with “good management.” That is to say, having an American management consultancy rather than, say, a Chinese consultancy (the latter being considerably cheaper), refashion ­these organ­ izations and disseminate managerial expertise can be read as an attempt to dismantle culturalist accounts of Chinese capitalism and thus aid the external perception that Chinese soes are investable.20 The argument that Systeo is shaping a cultural as well as a material proj­ect of transformation is buttressed by the fact that its business of consultancy is premised on global convergence and standardization. For Systeo, consulting is the job of making corporate China converge with an already established institutional framework and cultural form of global capitalism. Introduction  

11

The very fact that Chinese soes have hired Systeo, a global management consultancy with headquarters in the United States, to overhaul their management practices is indicative of the kind of capitalism that is being instantiated in China. However, it should also be noted that in other aspects corporatization in China is not practiced as it is in North Amer­ i­ca or the United Kingdom. Le-­Yin Zhang (2004) has pointed out that in China only a third of all shares are classified as tradable for a publicly listed com­pany. For soes, the remaining two-­thirds are owned by the Chinese state, making it the majority shareholder. According to Zhang, this has severely limited the potential disciplinary effects of public listing, and goes some way to explain the failure to yield improved efficiency (Zhang 2004). Elsewhere, Richard McGregor, former Beijing bureau chief of the Financial Times, has argued that the role of the Chinese Communist Party has been underestimated, and that it “deliberately downplayed its role in [corporatized soes’] operations” (2010, 47) and that beneath the veneer of market-­oriented regulation the Chinese Politburo still retains control (2010, 46). However, McGregor’s observations also seem to indicate that the rigors of stock market discipline are being imposed. He notes that one of China’s largest soes—­PetroChina—­restructured its organ­ization for the main purpose of increasing share prices. In China, as in North Amer­i­ca, large numbers of workers are being laid off.21 He says: “In the pro­cess of repackaging itself to sell a portion of its shares to foreign investors, the [PetroChina] group shed one million staff and the ministry dis­appeared altogether, leaving the com­pany with ­little direct oversight from the government” (McGregor 2010, 61). Despite the importance of economic stability for the ccp to maintain its po­liti­cal legitimacy, it has not maintained paternalist employment structures—­the cradle-­to-­grave welfare system known as the “iron rice bowl” that existed prior to market reforms. The iron rice bowl was gradually dismantled in the post-­Mao reform period, marginally in the 1980s and more comprehensively in the second phase of reforms, reaching nationwide implementation through the L ­ abor Law of 1994 (Lee 2007).22 In China, the shift to privatization and corporatization has led to the kind of restructuring and changes in employment practices that have characterized the shift from welfare capitalism to neoliberalism in the Anglo-­American world.

12 

Introduction

Mediating Managerial Thought

Systeo promotes a range of orga­nizational and managerial practices, many of which could be described as fads or fashions—­knowledge products with a limited shelf life and questionable efficacy. Indeed, such a charge—­that they trade in baseless management ideas—­has been levied at management con­sul­tants writ large (Fincham and Evans 1999). It is impor­tant to note, however, that the practices and techniques con­sul­tants propagate also bear the traces of much older, more developed areas of management thought. This is, in part, b ­ ecause modern management—­the kind that is applied to complex organ­izations—­has evolved hand-­in-­hand with the expansion of the consulting industry (Kipping 2002). Many eminent management thinkers practiced as con­sul­tants. For them, consulting work was not an adjunct to theorizing, but often the means through which theory developed. In this re­spect, management differs considerably from more “pure” academic disciplines; far from being sullied by practical application, management theories are produced through, and in tandem with, practical application. ­There is a common perception that management consulting began with, and consists of, advising top-­level management on strategy and organ­ ization, a myth that was purportedly spread by James O. McKinsey and James Bowker to benefit their own consulting firm, McKinsey and Co. (Wright and Kipping 2012). In fact, the roots of management consulting lie in industrial engineering. It emerged with the development of scientific management at the end of the nineteenth ­century. Typically associated with the pioneering work of Frederick Winslow Taylor, scientific management evolved through practical concerns about how best to improve the efficiency of the shop floor. Taylor eschewed formal higher education for an apprenticeship with Midvale Steel Com­pany, where he became deeply concerned with the prob­lem of “soldiering”—­workers who, fearing that increased output might lead to layoffs, would deliberately limit output. Part of the prob­lem, according to Taylor, was that management did not know what constituted a “fair day’s work,” and thus could not judge w ­ hether or not workers’ productivity was reasonable given the demands of their tasks. The solution would come through “scientific” princi­ples, applied not only to the development of work but also to the se­lection of personnel. Key features of his method ­were the subdivision of the production pro­cess, rouIntroduction  

13

tinization and standardization of tasks, the use of systematic observation and mea­sure­ment to calculate optimal production speeds, and target setting. Taylor also favored a clear separation between the planning and execution of tasks. ­Mental work was the domain of man­ag­ers; workers meanwhile suffered increasing alienation and disengagement from the very activities they ­were responsible for carry­ing out. Taylor’s techniques ­were pop­u­lar­ized and disseminated through his publications, including the best-­selling book The Princi­ples of Scientific Management, and also by consulting to industrial companies and offering to remodel their production pro­cesses according to his system. Indeed, Taylor has been described as the “grand­father” of management consulting,23 though leading firms of this initial period of management consulting ­were founded by other figures in the scientific management stable. Usually trained as industrial engineers, t­hese figures set up and rapidly expanded consultancies that promoted similar yet competing approaches to Taylorism. They ­were all, nonetheless, focused on improving the efficiency of the ­labor pro­cess. Hence the labeling of ­these con­sul­tants as “efficiency experts.” Scientific management dominated managerial thought u ­ ntil the 1930s, when, in the midst of welfare capitalism, the alienating and dehumanizing aspects of technical rationalization came u ­ nder scrutiny (Wren and Be­­ deian 2009). It was superseded by humanistic and behavioristic approaches that focused on worker motivation and satisfaction.24 Most well known is the ­human relations (hr) school, which emphasized the importance of normative forms of control: “the idea that man­ag­ers could more effectively regulate workers by attending not only to their be­hav­ior but to their thoughts and emotions” (Barley and Kunda 1992, 364). The roots of ­human relations can be traced to the infamous “Hawthorne studies,” which took place at the Hawthorne works of the Western Electric Com­pany. Beginning in 1924, multiple experiments w ­ ere conducted over the course of eight years to analyze dif­fer­ent aspects of employee be­ hav­ior, leading to a mass of data that personnel management strug­gled to interpret. One social scientist who was brought in to make sense of the findings was Harvard University professor Elton Mayo, who would l­ ater be known as the “­father” of ­human relations. With interests in psychoanalysis and industrial psy­chol­ogy, Mayo emphasized the importance of workers’ ­mental health and emotional states, and demonstrated that “once the 14 

Introduction

irrationalities of workers are removed, or ameliorated, they w ­ ill respond positively to non-­economic incentives and be motivated to increase their productivity” (Trahair and Bruce 2012, 58). Proponents of ­human relations have helped to draw attention to the social and nonmonetary determinants of motivation, the importance of informal work groups and effective supervision on employee satisfaction and per­for­mance.25 They can also be credited for developing conceptual frameworks—­for example, the idea that organ­izations are social systems, which has influenced con­temporary fields of orga­nizational be­hav­ior and h ­ uman resource management (see chapter 1). And their “softer” approach to management arguably paved the way for concepts of orga­nizational culture that came to the fore much l­ ater on, in the 1980s (see chapter 7). The rise of ­human relations could be discerned in the shifting composition of the management consultancy industry. From the 1950s, the efficiency experts w ­ ere no longer dominant. They had been overtaken by a second wave of consulting firms that specialized in corporate organ­ization and strategy (for example, McKinsey and Co.), selling expertise in “orga­ nizational development, work redesign and personnel management” (Barley and Kunda 1992, 375). As well as drawing on many of their ideas, ­these consultancies also deployed methods devised by the ­human relations school such as employee interviewing and counseling techniques (John Smith cited in Trahair and Bruce 2012). The 1960s signaled the beginning of the modern era of management, in which we see a diversification of approaches. Although humanistic management was still practiced, man­ag­ers had begun to question the efficacy of costly ­human relations practices, and thus looked again at more scientific, technical mea­sures. Operations research (or) and management science became increasingly impor­tant, and t­ here was a return in management theory to quantitative techniques, rational calculation, and Tayloresque “princi­ples.” In par­tic­u­lar, ­there was an emphasis on pro­cess, revealing a new incarnation of managerial discourse: “Pro­cess theorists equated management with setting objectives and designing systems for meeting t­hose objectives. Planning, forecasting and controlling w ­ ere meant to be the man­ag­er’s watchwords. Pro­cess theories thereby provided management with a definition of itself consistent with the tools of or and management science” (Barley and Kunda 1992, 377).26 Especially influential has been the thesis of “management by objectives,” pop­u­lar­ized by management Introduction  

15

guru Peter Drucker, who argued that the “man­ag­er should be directed and controlled by the objectives of per­for­mance rather than by his boss” (Drucker 1954, 137). This thesis has come to inform con­temporary per­ for­mance management, whereby employees are encouraged, via objective setting, to exert self-­control rather than being subject to constant external supervision.27 The current wave of management consultancies, including Systeo, have found success in promoting process-­based management. As we ­will see, they not only advocate management by objectives; they also install computer systems that can operationalize pro­cesses. Further, many of the largest consultancies have diversified, profitably, into outsourcing ser­vices such as “business pro­cess outsourcing,” which reflects an under­lying assumption that an organ­ization consists of a set of pro­cesses, some of which can be shifted elsewhere. It is by reworking pro­cesses that consultancies make claims to produce “high-­performance” organ­izations. In d ­ oing so they have also helped to instill a new regime of value, one that privileges global finance. Financialization and the Rise of Management Consultancy

Since the 1980s, the management consulting industry has grown rapidly—­ faster than Western national economies—­although its overall revenues remain small in comparison to other industries. In 1992 the global market for management consulting had an estimated value of $28.3 billion. By 2010 it had grown by more than tenfold, and was estimated to be worth $350 billion (Kipping and Clark 2012, 4). In part this staggering expansion is a reflection of the increasing dominance of the ser­vice sector and knowledge-­based industries (Kipping 2002). Another explanation lies in the structural changes to the global economy that have taken place over the last few de­cades. The explosion of management consulting has coincided with the rise of financialization, that is, the shift from industrial to financial capitalism. In recent years, authors from a range of academic disciplines have become interested in “how an increasingly autonomous realm of global finance has altered the under­lying logics of the industrial economy and the inner workings of demo­cratic society” (Van der Zwan 2014, 99–100). They have used the term financialization to describe a variety of phenomena. 16 

Introduction

For some, financialization denotes a new regime of accumulation characterized by “the increasing role of financial motives, financial markets, financial actors, and financial institutions in the operation of the domestic and international economies” (Epstein 2005, 3), such that we are now observing “globalized production for the flow of funds” (Milberg 2008, 421). In this new regime we find that “non-­financial firms have increasingly used finance rather than production as both a source and use of their funds” (Milberg 2008, 422). For o ­ thers financialization refers to the ascendancy of shareholder value ideology as the cornerstone of corporate governance.28 While the corporation was previously considered to be a social institution with obligations to a range of stakeholders, including workers and local communities, ­today the primary objective is to create value for shareholders in the form of rising share prices. Other stakeholders and their demands are subordinated to this goal. The pursuit of shareholder value has led to the adoption of new business models. While in the past companies looked to “retain [staff] and reinvest,” ­today they look for ways to “downsize and distribute.”29 They focus on their “core competences,” outsourcing other parts of their business in pursuit of short-­term gains in financial value rather than long-­term growth.30 Mass layoffs and increased job insecurity have ensued. However, the elimination of productive capacity and the reduction in jobs has not, in the main, increased profits from production. Instead, profitability increasingly derives from financial rents, with the corporation becoming reconfigured to accommodate new strategies of capitalization.31 Man­ag­ers have come to view the firm as a financial asset, something from which value can be extracted rather than created,32 reducible to its balance sheet, which is engineered to please securities analysts and institutional investors. As agents of orga­nizational change, management con­sul­tants have successfully mined this new orthodoxy of corporate governance for their own interests. Since the 1990s they have actively promoted “value-­based management”—­management with the express objective of increasing returns for shareholders. Scholars of social accounting have analyzed the steps taken to transform shareholder value ideology into a consulting product. First, a metric of shareholder value—­such as “tsr” (total shareholder return), “eva” (economic value added), and “roi” (return on investment)—is selected or devised to mea­sure per­for­mance. Second, a package of imple­ mentation mea­sures is developed—­the managerial practices and t­ echnologies Introduction  

17

designed to remodel the organ­ization to incentivize the creation of shareholder value (for example, putting employees, especially se­nior management, on a shareholder value creation bonus plan). This second aspect is critical, for “if the product ­were a metric it would be cheap; as long as the product is implementation it must be expensive ­because implementation requires continuous assistance over a period of time” (Froud et al. 2000, 84). Third, management con­sul­tants develop the “guides to action and the promises that purposive management action ­will be rewarded” (Froud et al. 2000, 81)—­that is, they develop narratives and other devices that explic­itly link the creation of shareholder value to success in capital markets. Through t­ hese three ele­ments, shareholder value is transformed from a fragmented rhe­toric into an ontological entity and a moral justification for intervention. The importance of developing a “package of implementation” becomes evident when we look at the shifting makeup of the management consulting industry. Since financial capitalism began to take hold, strategy firms that had hitherto dominated the industry found their market position being challenged by it-­related consultancies and the consulting arms of large accountancy firms. Including the likes of Pricewater­houseCoopers and the other “Big Four” firms, as well as ibm and Hewlett-­Packard, ­these challengers have experienced tremendous growth since the early 1990s, and now make up the largest consultancies worldwide in head count and profits. Their ascent can be traced to the promotion and implementation of computer software known as enterprise systems, especially “enterprise resource planning” (erp) systems, which assume the organ­ization is a conglomeration of pro­cesses, so reflecting the turn to process-­based management.33 Moreover, through their capacity to mea­sure and monitor pro­ cesses in accordance with overarching objectives, erp systems are able to “operationalize value-­based management.” ­These technologies, which have their roots in military decision-­making systems, have served to elevate managerial control on a huge scale.34 erp systems are a type of automated accounting system (Chapman 2005), which replicates “the central ner­vous system” of an organ­ization (Yen, Chou, and Chang 2001). More specifically, they have been described as “computer-­based technologies that integrate data across an organ­ization and impose standardized procedures on the data’s input, use and dissemination” (Grant et  al. 2006, 2) with the stated goal of reducing costs and 18 

Introduction

thus improving profits. Consulting ser­vices typically focus on the orga­ nizational changes required to accommodate erp systems—­which are designed by software companies (erp vendors), not consultancies—­and on training their users. In comparison to the proj­ects carried out by strategy con­sul­tants, an erp implementation is extremely labor-­intensive—­which goes some way to explain why it-­related consultancies hire much larger numbers of con­sul­tants.35 erp implementation is also very lucrative, often taking years to complete and costing on average $15 million.36 Despite their hefty price tag, t­ hese systems have become ubiquitous, a requisite managerial device of the modern corporation. ­Today almost ­every large organ­ ization in the United States and Eu­rope operates an erp system (Pollock and Williams 2008); emerging economies are the next big targets. Indeed, implementing erp is the bread and butter of Systeo’s work in China. A recent study notes that “erp systems are designed around ‘information blueprints’ that supposedly represent the end-­user organ­ization(s). ­These templates can, in princi­ple, be designed specifically for that organ­ization and then mapped onto the pro­cesses and terminology used by the vendor. However, this is difficult, risky and expensive, so in practice most such ‘blueprints’ are based on business models claimed to represent ‘industry best practice’ for each par­tic­u­lar pro­cess designed into the system” (Knox et al. 2007, 26). That is to say, erp systems tend to impose a one-­size-­fits-­ all model of restructuring. Best practice does not, however, only refer to standardization. In their lit­er­a­ture erp vendors and management consultancies typically define “best practice” as the practice that confers maximal profit, and that often comes at the expense of ­labor.37 In his book The New Ruthless Economy Simon Head documents the critical role that erp systems have played in the rise of “reengineering,” a managerial technique that first became popu­lar in the 1970s (Hammer and Champy 1993) and that harnesses the computer to replicate and enact forms of surveillance and control in the domain of office work in a manner that bears striking resemblance to Taylorist forms of management that originated with industrial manufacturing. erp systems enable workers to be monitored in minute detail—­where, when, and how long you spend on any one task can now be documented in real time. Head argues that “the word ‘reengineering’ ” has “become synonymous for the practice of scientific management in the con­temporary ser­vice economy” (Head 2003, 68), and that erp systems, far from signaling a reinvention of management, extend Introduction  

19

the dehumanizing practices commonly associated with Fordist accumulation (see also Braverman 1974) to the “new economy,” by making them amenable for deployment in the increasingly dominant ser­vice sector. By connecting erp systems with scientific management, Head highlights the importance of technical devices for efficiency, a management practice that dates back to the days of Frederick Winslow Taylor and his stopwatch, and Henry Gantt and his “man rec­ord chart.”38 What distinguishes erp systems, though, is the semiotic framework in which this technology is installed and implicated in producing. erp systems are a means of enacting efficiency. Hence, w ­ hether or not organ­izations actually become more efficient as a result of erp implementation may not be critical. Appearing more efficient may be justification enough for an erp implementation. The task of molding Chinese soes into global corporations reveals the inscription of erp systems as a repre­sen­ta­tion of modernity and vector of value. The mass of ipos that ­were initiated by the turn to corporatization in the 1990s also led to a modernization drive in the organ­izations that would be floated, often prior to flotation (Reimers 2003). To obtain the highest pos­si­ble valuation, Chinese soes undertook the considerable investment of installing erp systems to signal to investors that they had the managerial equipment identified with a modern corporation (Reimers 2003).39 This was particularly impor­tant for organ­izations that ­were stalwarts of the former planned economy, and thus considered the antithesis of modern cap­i­tal­ist practice. The narrative that is frequently mobilized within Systeo suggests that China’s comparatively recent opening and switch to a market-­ oriented economy leaves it lacking in the professional conduct and business acumen required to compete in the global knowledge economy, hence the need for consulting ser­vices and erp systems. Although the content of this narrative features the specificities of the China context, the structure of the narrative—­the appeal to a constructed deficiency in market-­ oriented prowess—is not exclusive to China. That is to say, the practice of installing erp systems to create the “right” repre­sen­ta­tion of capitalism is not unique to marketizing China; the proliferation of erp systems around the world is inextricably linked to a more general shift ­toward, and the standardization of techniques used to produce, the vital “input” of shareholder value—­financial accountability.

20 

Introduction

Reflexive Management, Collaboration, and Access

One of the first questions p ­ eople ask when I tell them I carried out fieldwork inside a global management consultancy is: “How did you get access?” Many assume that con­sul­tants would be paranoid about having an anthropologist embedded among their ranks, not least b ­ ecause what I am interested in—­the forms of knowledge and practices of valuation that underpin con­temporary managerial techniques—is also what con­sul­tants sell. Certainly, I did encounter difficulties in gaining entry to Systeo and then within the organ­ization, difficulties that proved insightful for my research. Re­sis­tance was typically justified by recourse to an implication that Systeo’s business was based upon unique and proprietary knowledge. In short, ­there was a perception that Systeo’s knowledge-­based business would be threatened by permitting the entry of a party who is not an employee, and therefore not contractually obliged to maintain nondisclosure. However, once inside I found that man­ag­ers never went as far as claiming that Systeo owned proprietary technologies or knowledge. Instead, they talked about the “extremely power­ful tools” with which they claimed to be able to gain control over the inherent uncertainty of con­temporary capitalism. Con­sul­tants ­were insecure about having an outsider observe their inner workings not ­because they produce proprietary knowledge, but ­because they are knowledge experts who do not produce proprietary knowledge. Management consultancies are the central institution in what geographer Nigel Thrift terms the “cultural cir­cuit of capital . . . ​[which is] responsible for the production and distribution of managerial knowledge” (Thrift 2005, 61).40 Con­sul­tants trade in reflexive business management—­they sell knowledge of the “practicalities of business,” which is, in turn, fed back into business practices. In other words, con­sul­tants are engaged in the commodification and circulation of everyday business practices. However, the fact that con­sul­tants give the impression that outsider access might prompt security concerns over intellectual property suggests that ­these actors may feel insecure about their expertise. In such a context, one might expect that I would need to downplay my interest in con­sul­tants’ production of managerial knowledge. When pitching, I often suggested that my research was preoccupied with cross-­cultural interactions in a knowledge-­ based organ­ization. But once inside the consultancy, I realized that a focus on the object of consultancy—­reflexive managerial knowledge—­could be a Introduction  

21

selling point in access negotiations. Business anthropologists have become the exemplary reflexive managerial subject (Downey and Fisher 2006), a depiction that lends itself to corporate collaboration, especially in industries built on a foundation of reflexive knowledge. For example, anthropologists have been able to carry out fieldwork in the industries of advertising and information and technology.41 An anthropologist “for ­free” could be an attractive proposition if articulated in the right context. My access was brokered with se­nior executives convinced of the efficacy of Systeo’s corporate culture in producing exemplary corporate subjects. “Systeo culture” was frequently invoked as a social totality that would swallow anything in its path. Even the in situ anthropologist would not be able to escape its effects, a view espoused by one expatriate man­ag­er who told me, “By the time you leave ­here you ­will be Systeofied!” Perplexed by Chinese employees who did not display the desired subjectivity, expatriate management was open to the potential of anthropology to shed light on the situation. Many assumed that the prob­lem lay with “Chinese culture”—­the intractability of Chinese employees, b ­ ecause of “their culture,” in yielding to Systeo acculturation. But ­others feared that the in­effec­tive operation of corporate culture, a concept that was originally devised by management con­sul­tants, would threaten their status as knowledge experts and thus had potentially negative implications for the proj­ect of selling management knowledge externally. While acting as an En­glish trainer to Systeo’s back-­office employees, who carry out the routinized work of pro­cessing time sheets, expense claims, and arranging business travel for con­sul­tants, I was invited to participate in an internal management proj­ect concerning Systeo’s corporate culture—­the “­Human Capital Strategy Program.” The ostensibly overlapping content of anthropological and consulting expertise—­that of culture—­surely facilitated, if not informed, the invitation. And with this position came an alternative means of producing anthropological knowledge—­collaboration. Traditionally, anthropologists have sought to adopt the role of a “detached observer.” Such an approach can be traced to the pioneering fieldwork of Bronislaw Malinowski, the founding f­ather of British social anthropology, who suggested that anthropologists should become immersed in everyday life, but never so much that they truly become native. Without maintaining some analytical distance, it would become impossible to objectify and thus analyze the “native point of view.” However, in recent years, anthropologists 22 

Introduction

carry­ing out fieldwork in “nontraditional” field sites, such as technology companies, trading rooms, and nongovernmental organ­ izations, have sought alternative approaches. In such settings, detached observation is all but impossible—­walking around an office with clipboard in hand, scribbling down notes, and then retreating to your “tent” would likely alienate you from your in­for­mants. Nor would detached observation be desirable when studying experts who produce reflexive knowledge, for the ethnographic object in ­these contexts is not a domain of knowledge that could become potentially “contaminated” by the anthropologist’s involvement. Rather, the aim is to unpack the ethnographic sensibilities foundational to the expertise of in­for­mants, an aim that can only be carried out through the premise of collaboration or partnership.42 Once firmly ensconced in Systeo’s ­Human Capital Strategy Program, I offered to design a piece of research for Systeo that addressed a moment of unsettlement, the “crisis” of per­for­mance management that had apparently besieged Systeo’s China practice. As I describe in greater detail in chapter  2, per­for­mance management—­which is not just something that Systeo implements in its clientele, but also a system of evaluation it operates in-­house—­was deemed to be “not working” in its China arm. I realized that this rupture in normal operation was a rare opportunity to push for greater access. ­Until then I was largely confined to Systeo’s Beijing consulting office, which meant I could not observe how consultancy “travels” to their clients. By proposing to merge my research agenda with a few internal management priorities, I gained more support from se­nior executives—­key gatekeepers—­and thus was able to obtain the kind of access that facilitated an examination into what consultancies do. Effectively I was treated as an unpaid external con­sul­tant to Systeo—­a position that conferred access to the hr department, internal corporate training, and entry to a number of “client sites” as well as the vari­ous consulting offices in its China practice.43 However, ­after a year of access, my motivations for carry­ing out work without remuneration started to be questioned. Thus, for the last few months of fieldwork I took on a contractor role in the Corporate Social Responsibility (csr) division, paid at the rate of a local intern, 100 yuan ($14) a day, in which I helped to coordinate local csr initiatives in the China practice.44 It is instructive ­here to emphasize that my primary objective was not to research the interior lives of Systeo employees, but rather the modes Introduction  

23

of analy­sis that characterize their expertise, an approach that reflects the para-­ethnographic character of expertise in this context. A term devised by Douglas Holmes and George Marcus, para-­ethnography encapsulates the par­tic­u­lar relationship that experts have to the knowledge of which they are inscribed as experts. To understand their expertise—­what con­sul­tants do—is to focus on the analytical frame of management consulting. Therefore, I did not conduct extensive life histories with my in­for­mants, or research collaborators as I call them, which is not to say I did not spend a considerable amount of time and effort getting to know them. The ambiguity of my own status in Systeo meant that, if anything, I needed to pay extra attention to the issues of trust and confidentiality, and it was impor­tant for me to form robust relationships with employees of all levels of se­niority. In part this was achieved by carry­ing out fifty-­nine interviews with Systeo employees of all ranks, t­hose working in the outsourcing and consulting divisions. The material gathered from t­ hese interviews does not form the main bulk of the data drawn upon in this book, but rather fulfilled my research collaborators’ notions of what “research” consisted of, and helped to solidify my status as an in­de­pen­dent researcher. Also, I periodically sent reports to the hr director, updating her of my activities and preliminary findings during fieldwork. Although the official language of Systeo is En­glish, fieldwork was carried out in a number of languages: Mandarin, En­glish, and Cantonese. Communication between Chinese workers was often carried out in Mandarin, the national language of China, but the presence of just one non-­Mandarin speaker (usually an expatriate) would cause the conversation to switch to En­glish. And among expatriate man­ag­ers who came from the former colonies of Hong Kong, Malaysia, and Singapore, Cantonese was the language of preference. Indeed, my own Malaysian Chinese parents are Cantonese speakers, although once they moved to Britain in the 1970s they chose, like many immigrants with aspirations for socioeconomic mobility, to speak En­glish at home. Thus, I am unable to speak Cantonese but can understand it fairly well. My proficiency in Mandarin is certainly far superior, having lived and studied in China for almost one and a half years prior to fieldwork. That said, I entered Systeo unconfident of my abilities to communicate in Mandarin in a business setting, and although my linguistic ability improved rapidly once I moved to the Beijing office and started working, I was always anxious that my errors in grammar and intonation 24 

Introduction

would undermine my credibility in a setting paranoid about professionalism. Language demands ­were exceedingly high, not least b ­ ecause many meetings ­were conducted through the medium of conference calls. Without face-­to-­face contact, the pressure to communicate clearly increased considerably, and my listening abilities ­were also tested to their maximum. Furthermore, passing as Chinese undoubtedly increased the expectations of Chinese employees, who often spoke to me as if I w ­ ere a native speaker. In addition to participant observation and interviews, I also collected a host of written materials during fieldwork, which I draw upon considerably in my analy­sis. ­These mainly consist of Systeo lit­er­a­ture, including training materials, internally produced white papers, and information drawn from their intranet system (an internal website used to disseminate news and which gives a sense of how Systeo, the corporation, narrates itself) and their external website. All of ­these ­were obtained with the permission of my research collaborators, who gave me copies of materials or, in the case of the intranet system, or­ga­nized my online access. It should be noted that this willingness to share materials emerged only once my position as a con­sul­tant of culture was established and I had begun to collaborate with the com­pany. In agreement with the terms of access I negotiated with Systeo se­nior management, I have referred to the organ­ization, its clients, and its employees by pseudonyms, trying my best to obfuscate their identities by changing identifying features, ­unless a feature is critical to the argumentation. In the case of employees, this may include their hometown, gender, or exact position in the com­pany hierarchy. Aiding my attempts to maintain anonymity is the high turnover of Systeo’s China practice. Since I left, a large number of employees have also left the com­pany, including many key gatekeepers. And perhaps this is what lies at the heart of fieldwork anx­i­eties in such a setting—­the sense that you only ever have one shot at capturing “fast capitalism” (Holmes and Marcus 2006). Fast, in this context, does not mean short fieldwork, but rather depicts the fleetingness of the relations that govern this kind of fieldwork. ­Every offer of access, of an employee offering to be interviewed, or taking time out to explain an it system, or allowing me to partake in corporate training, had to be capitalized on as quickly as pos­si­ble, for one never knew when, or if, that opportunity would come around again. It is also this very fleetingness that limits the possibility of ­future contact between the anthropologist and the field. Introduction  

25

Cultures of Commensuration

This book follows a nascent yet vibrant field of anthropology that explores the cultural and social constitution of con­temporary financial capitalism. Reversing the discipline’s traditional preoccupation with the marginalized and dispossessed, the anthropology of finance focuses predominantly on elites operating at the center of the global economy. Experts and expert practices have come ­under scrutiny, as well as the knowledges they draw upon, create, and manipulate.45 In addition to investigating how financial value is produced,46 such scholarship has shown that discourses of financialization cannot, in and of themselves, explain the sweeping changes that are happening in the global economy. In her portrait of Wall Street, Karen Ho demonstrates that investment bankers, despite upholding and propagating shareholder value as their key mission statement, actually create waves of stock market volatility, which see share prices crash as much as they rise. To resolve this tension, Ho looks at the institutional culture of Wall Street, examining how it connects to the financialization of public corporations on Main Street. Vividly describing the “culture of smartness” and “hard work” to which bankers are subjected, Ho shows how t­here is “no pure, unmediated shareholder value”; rather, “its meaning and constitution change over time, are dependent on power relations, and are enacted through par­tic­u­lar cultural and institutional contexts” (Ho 2009, 168). Bankers’ actions are ­shaped by their own localized experiences of instability and job insecurity—it is t­ hese experiences, rather than an abstract discourse of shareholder value, that they draw on to legitimize the destructive short-­term orientation to which they subject their clients. Similarly, we should not assume that shareholder value ideology necessarily informs management con­sul­tants’ understandings of their work, or that con­sul­tants justify their interventions by recourse to the creation of shareholder value. In the coming chapters it ­will become apparent that the ways in which management con­sul­tants establish meaning and achieve legitimacy for their actions depend greatly on techniques of commensuration. Rather than stressing one par­tic­u­lar order of worth, the analy­sis reveals the variegated registers of value—­which can pertain to local cultural tropes, orga­nizational values, as well as financial value—­that inform con­sul­tants’ interventions. In par­tic­u­lar, I focus on how ­orders of worth come to be legitimized by 26 

Introduction

attending to pro­cesses of valorization, that is, the attempts to elicit equivalences between dif­fer­ent value scales. The impor­tant role that management con­sul­tants play in the organ­ization of work, and the financialization of economic activity and ­labor, can be traced to the production of what I call “cultures of commensuration.” Cultures of commensuration are integral to the creation of value “beyond the point of production” (Willmott 2010), which has become characteristic of the financialized economy. Brands have become “ ‘objects’ that can be monetized and leveraged” (Willmott 2010, 525), and branding is now considered an integral aspect of business that involves the management of “intangible assets” that feed into market capitalization.47 We find that companies, usually technology firms, can have disputable potential income streams and still have staggering market valuations. Indeed, the specter that surrounds many a start-­up’s initial public offering, even ­after the dotcom crash, highlights anthropologist Anna Tsing’s point that spectacle can, in and of itself, be a means of conjuring value.48 In short, we find the creation of financial assets from what was hitherto impossible depends on the production of the “right” repre­sen­ta­tions through which equivalences are drawn between the intangible and the tangible, between the invisible and the vis­i­ble. In the financialized economy, mechanisms of exploitation and expropriation, and thus the production of in­equality, can also be traced to the production of certain representations—­representations of ­labor productivity that suggest that some constituents are more deserving of value than ­others. Such repre­sen­ta­tions make ethical claims and produce ethical dilemmas. Are shareholders the rightful ­owners of public companies? Is the value of the American ceo’s contribution greater than that of the back-­ office worker in China? On what basis can we decide whose contribution is more valuable? ­These questions can be answered by examining the knowledge practices that visualize productivity and, more generally, make immaterial value tangible. Increasingly, we find that what counts as value is that which can be counted.49 This is especially the case when it comes to evaluations of “performance”—of individual workers, departments, and companies. It has been much remarked that the regimes of per­for­mance mea­sure­ment and objective setting that management con­sul­tants sell have the pernicious effects of eroding trust, professionalism, and autonomy.50 The analy­sis I pres­ent extends ­these observations, demonstrating that Introduction  

27

per­for­mance measurement—­and other techniques of commensuration promulgated by consultants—­also produces new ethics and ontological effects. Consultancies are engaged in producing “values” in the so­cio­log­i­cal sense—­notions of what is desirable or good—­and “value” in the economic sense, the degree to which objects are desired. H ­ ere I draw on anthropologist David Graeber’s theory of value, which takes as its starting point the evaluation of actions (rather than t­ hings) and is concerned with what p ­ eople see as a good and proper life, deploying a mode of analy­sis that trammels t­ hese multiple conceptions of value.51 Graeber argues that values and value “­really are refractions of the same t­hing” (2001, 78)—­what is critical is the media in which value can be realized, which can range from money to symbolic per­for­mances. Con­sul­tants are well aware of the importance of media and mediation to the realization of value. Their obsessive use of Power­Point is a case in point. A piece of software designed to automate the production of visual repre­sen­ta­tions, Power­Point has also led to radical changes to the epistemologies of workplaces, through its use as a technology of persuasion.52 Moreover, Power­Point acts as a crucial prop in the production of a professionalized ethic and the substantiation of expertise. One of the “deliverables” (outputs of consultancy) that Systeo supplies to their clients is a Power­Point that both describes the act(s) of consulting—­typically, the it installation that they carry out—­and also inscribes t­ hese acts with an ethos of professionalism.53 It is as a device of ethics, rather than “pure” repre­sen­ ta­tion, that con­sul­tants plow extensive effort into the production of ­these documents, leading them to acquire a dazzling proficiency with Power­Point over the course of their ­careers. Through repre­sen­ta­tions, typically metrological representations (charts, ­tables, graphs, maps), c­ onsultants are able to link together—­commensurate—­ dif­f er­ent value registers, value, and values. Anthropologist Jane Guyer has pointed out that a priori connections between dif­fer­ent scales of value do not exist; rather, they are pegged together through the per­for­mance or enactment of propositions. For example, t­here is no reason why one’s work per­ for­mance should be defined by one’s contribution to profitability. Rather, it is through techniques of mea­sur­ing ­labor productivity that a par­tic­u­lar ethical proposition about per­for­mance is created, and thus tie per­for­mance to profitability rather than, say, acts of collegiality. Sociologist David Stark has argued that value is created through pro­cesses of evaluation—­the drawing 28 

Introduction

of equivalences between dif­fer­ent logics of worth.54 His suggestion is to develop a concept of accounts—­a term that encompasses both narration and evaluative princi­ples: “[I]t is always within accounts that we ‘size up the situation,’ for not ­every form of worth can be made to apply and not e­ very asset is in a form mobilizable for a given situation” (Stark 2000, 17). Methods of per­for­mance evaluation create a story of l­ abor productivity whereby certain logics of worth are made to apply, and through which individual workers are made to account for their everyday work. ­These techniques of valuation, however, are not necessarily designed to give stable constructions of value. In fact, one could say that the edifice of management consulting is built on the tensions between dif­fer­ent—­often oppositional—­registers of value. From my position inside the management consultancy, I found that the everyday practices of financialization could not be explained as reflecting a singular driver of change such as “the rise of shareholder value.” Improving orga­nizational per­for­mance does not simply refer only to increasing share prices, and financialization cannot be defined as merely the ascendancy of financial worth. Rather, con­sul­tants’ expertise acquires meaning through unresolved tensions between shifting, relationally constructed oppositions that are formed in the par­tic­u­lar historical moment. In this book I show how consulting work draws on an opposition between “Chinese” and “Western” modernities, that map onto a binary of desirable and undesirable subjectivities. I also demonstrate that inherent in the objective of producing profitability and other financial repre­sen­ta­tions connected to share valuation is an opposition between revenue generation and cost generation, which, in turn, dissimulates as a binary of front-­and back-­office workers. In par­tic­u­lar, I draw attention to the fragility of such oppositions by examining the boundary practices through which their meaning is produced. In d ­ oing so, I seek to question basic economic categories and pro­cesses, and reveal the instability and polysemic nature of key consulting terms. Anthropologists of expertise have long demonstrated that the substantiation of expertise comes not from what experts have but rather what they do. For management con­sul­tants, who possess neither proprietary knowledge nor specialist accreditation, this is especially apparent. Management consultancy exemplifies the claim that expertise is “semiotically accomplished” (Carr 2010, 27) with the naturalization of their actions as an enactment of specialist, already acquired knowledge being especially Introduction  

29

impor­tant. I suggest that the power of management con­sul­tants, who continue to be hired in spite of their failure to deliver on their promises, derives from their capacity to naturalize the moral actions of restructuring and other forms of intervention as purely economic or technocratic. Forms of consulting speak are integral to this endeavor, as exemplified by the trope of “best practice.” It is a term that derives rhetorical force from the implication that ­there is one universal scale of evaluation for management or orga­nizational practices. ­Those deemed the best can, indeed should, be implemented across comparable entities. But how do we decide what is best? How can ­people be convinced that such practices are best? In other words, how can one scale of value be foregrounded over ­others? How are other scales of value rendered invisible in the legitimizing of consulting interventions? Management consultancy, I argue, is not simply the implementation of orga­nizational practices, but rather is concerned with the fashioning of ethical proj­ects by which t­hese practices become thinkable and accepted.55 It is the making of “the best”—­the ethical nexus in which practices are judged and valued, but then naturalized as value-­free. Structure of the Book

Each chapter in this book focuses on a dif­fer­ent instantiation of commensuration that con­sul­tants practice and help to propagate, to build a rich portrait of the cultures of commensuration that inform the financialization of work and ­labor in the con­temporary global economy. Chapter 1 looks at the discourse and practices of making “high per­for­ mance,” a term that is invoked to describe the impact of consulting and is associated with ­human resource management (hrm). Described as the reinvention of personnel management as an object of strategy, hrm stresses the importance of “­people” for corporate financial per­for­mance. This chapter is based on material gathered during my time with Systeo’s ­Human Capital Strategy Program, an initiative depicted as a testing ground for high-­performance work practices, a place where they can be practiced and refined before being sold to clients. Providing a rare insight into how hrm operates in practice, the analy­sis unpacks the epistemological logics that underpin the rhetorical claims of hrm. Narrated as an organ­ization’s greatest “asset,” employees are encouraged through regimes of “culture” to stay, engage with, and commit to the firm. However, by looking at how high 30 

Introduction

per­for­mance is mea­sured and made material through repre­sen­ta­tional devices, we find an alternative configuration of ­labor, one which is compatible with the practices of downsizing and outsourcing that have also proliferated in recent years. Practices of high per­for­mance commensurate ­labor with financial return to produce financialized subjects. In chapters 2 and 3 I explore in greater detail how the financialization of ­labor is enacted and operationalized, again drawing on the internal practice and refinement of management forms that Systeo goes on to implement in their clients. Chapter 2 looks at per­for­mance management, a form of ­labor assessment that is closely associated with the rise of audit culture. Drawing on the dozens of interviews I conducted with con­sul­tants and hr staff, and observations of per­for­mance rating meetings, this chapter examines the politics of evaluation—­the discourse and practices by which per­for­mance management can be performed as a meritocratic system of assessment. The intricacies of rating and ranking employees, who are subject to both absolute and relative judgments of worth, reveal the centrality of commensuration for per­for­mance evaluation. I focus especially on the pro­cesses by which an equivalence between l­abor productivity and financial value is produced, and how this is then translated into a notion of “per­for­mance.” Through mea­sures that equate time with the creation of revenue, con­sul­tants are incentivized to perform their designation as “revenue generators”—­employees who contribute to the creation of shareholder value. Revenue ­generators form one part of a dyad of financialized subjectivities. They are defined in opposition to “cost generators,” who are usually found in supporting, back-­office roles. Based on fieldwork inside Systeo’s shared ser­vice center (ssc) in Dalian, chapter 3 elucidates how cost generators are constructed by examining “shared services”—­a form of orga­ nizational restructuring that sees white-­collar work sent to offshore platforms in the global South. Focusing on the organ­ization of work ­under financialization, this chapter analyzes how outsourcing of this kind can be justified as a means of “reducing costs.” I demonstrate that the shape that outsourcing takes, and the practices of work standardization and routinization, devalues the activity of ssc workers. The productivity of t­ hese workers is denied, a finding all the more remarkable given the potency of shared services—­the pro­cess of aggregation which this kind of outsourcing is based upon—to generate income. Techniques of commensuration create Introduction  

31

value hierarchies between dif­fer­ent employees, some of whom are deemed to create revenue, ­others only cost. Although ­these repre­sen­ta­tions do not give accurate depictions of employees’ contributions and productivity, they nevertheless circumscribe their existence within organ­izations, leading to heightened experiences of instability and precarity for all but the most elite groups of employees. Chapter  4 identifies the importance of commensuration for selling consultancy and establishing the legitimacy of their expertise. Drawing primarily on participant observation of training for mid-­level con­sul­tants (ranked as man­ag­ers and se­nior man­ag­ers), this chapter analyzes the logics of worth that con­sul­tants are exposed to when being trained to “create value.” Rather than postulating a specific body of knowledge or skills as the basis of their expertise, the analy­sis reveals how con­sul­tants are taught to moralize and politicize their interventions and the productivity of dissonance for this endeavor. Specifically, we see how consulting expertise is stabilized through the use of analogy—­equivalences are drawn between leadership values and Chinese moral philosophy, between the subjectivity of clients and the values of financialization, their techniques of resolving uncertainty and the derivation of “truth” and “the facts.” I draw attention to the dif­fer­ent scales of economy that con­sul­tants must learn to switch between, and how commensuration is used to emphasize the impact of their interventions and create an ethical remit for consulting. In chapter 5 we see how consultancy travels, as the analy­sis moves from Systeo’s offices to its client sites. As part of the aforementioned research into per­for­mance management, I visited the Beijing offices of a multinational com­pany and a Chinese state-­owned enterprise (soe). Both had hired Systeo to implement an enterprise system, yet consulting practice and con­ sul­tants’ be­hav­ior differed greatly between t­hese two clients. Spending months if not years with their clients, con­sul­tants learn that their work is characterized by a pervasive experience of liminality. Problematizing the notion that management consulting can be reduced to the per­for­mance of an abstract professionalism, I argue that con­sul­tants actively adopt forms of embodied be­hav­ior that respond to clients’ expectations, norms, and values; they establish moral proj­ects of consultancy specific to each client. Demonstrating that financialization need not engender the expulsion of nonfinancial logics, Systeo’s work to prepare a Chinese soe for stock market flotation acquires legitimacy by incorporating local models of modernization 32 

Introduction

and subject formation that elevate the state. Although discourses of “best practice” suggest that consulting is the pro­cess of making emerging economies commensurate with the West, ­here we find that management consulting is made commensurate with existing logics of Chinese development and post-­Mao modernity. Chapter 6 delves more deeply into how local tropes and models of transformation are incorporated into management consulting by focusing on the vernacular ethics of expertise. Despite choosing to work for a foreign consultancy and embracing a distinctly global identity, Chinese con­sul­ tants are motivated by sentiments of patriotism, and see their interventions as acts of loyalty to the Chinese nation as much as a triumph of technological expertise. This seeming contradiction is reconciled through an ethics of patriotic professionalism that links together “individual professional development with national proj­ects of state-­strengthening” (Hoffman 2010, 6). Chinese con­sul­tants draw equivalences between their individual proj­ ects of cultivating a cosmopolitan identity and their consulting proj­ects of transforming Chinese soes into global, financialized companies—­they are both actions that seek to create a more modern and more power­ful China. The final substantive chapter looks at official regimes of corporate ethicizing, that of “corporate social responsibility” (csr). Based on my final months of fieldwork when I was a contractor in the csr division, chapter 7 demonstrates how initiatives designed to improve “corporate citizenship”—­ which include a charity bike r­ide across the mountains of Sichuan—­ incommensurate and commensurate scales of financial and nonfinancial value. On the one hand, internal csr initiatives are narrated as examples of corporate praxis that are not informed by the pursuit of profit—in this way a moral consciousness is produced. On the other hand, csr is practiced with the view to improving employee engagement, that is, increasing employees’ capacity to create shareholder return. In short, a central contradiction of csr is that moral legitimacy is drawn through the per­for­mance of extra-­financial concerns, yet moral authority is generated for the purposes of finance. Across the chapters a common theme emerges—­the centrality of ethics for management consulting. In answer to the question posed at the beginning of this book—­What do con­sul­tants do?—­I suggest that management consulting is concerned with the creation of a legitimate ethical proj­ ect, through which the financialization of economic activity and l­abor is Introduction  

33

achieved. This ethical proj­ect consists of practices of commensuration that bring together an array of value scales—­financial value, social values, and state-­promoted values of “­human quality,” high socialist values of the Chinese collective. Through management consultancy we see how financialization is enacted and altered through the interface with Chinese state capitalism. Far from posing a threat to the per­for­mance of financialization, local discourses and practices that emphasize the ongoing importance of state power help management con­sul­tants to enact forms of best practice.

34 

Introduction

1

High Performers The Making of Financialized Subjects

before i interviewed con­sul­tants, observed them at work, or participated in their training, I read Systeo’s “thought leadership.” It was my first day in the Beijing office, and I was sitting on a cream leather chair in reception. Brightly colored reports adorn the shelves, their glossy covers inviting you to leaf through their pages while you wait. ­Eager to find out what management con­sul­tants do, I picked up a copy of each one. Five hours ­later I had more questions than answers, for t­hese documents do not tell you what management consulting is, nor do they provide details of what Systeo sells. They tell you what Systeo knows. The “flagship” titles focus on their expertise around Chinese businesses, that Systeo understands what characterizes a successful business in China, what distinguishes “the best from the rest,” what makes a “high performer.” Over the last thirty years the number of publications dedicated to the topic of high per­for­mance has exploded, with titles such as High Commitment, High Per­for­mance: How to Build a Resilient Organ­ization for Sustained Advantage1 and Managing the Mist: How to Develop Winning Mind-­Sets and Create High Performing Teams.2 Creating a high-­performing organ­ ization is not just desirable; it has become the raison d’être of business strategy. But what is a high performer? How is such a performer defined? Since the shareholder revolution of the 1980s, the financial per­for­mance of companies has become paramount. The use of financial metrics has proliferated, being used to evaluate not only the value of companies, but also the worthiness of l­abor. Systeo’s thought leadership publications make repeated references to the importance of creating shareholder value, even for Chinese state-­owned enterprises that are half owned by the Chinese state. It would seem that per­for­mance is couched in terms of financial value.

However, this definition is destabilized by the making of high per­for­mance, which draws on the ambiguity surrounding what per­for­mance is. Per­for­mance is rarely defined in absolute terms. Instead, con­sul­tants emphasize what distinguishes a high performer from low or average performers. Apparently, it is their “per­for­mance anatomy.” The use of a biological meta­phor is striking. The term anatomy suggests that per­for­mance is akin to an organism with predetermined characteristics. Like world-­ class sprinters, high performers are blessed with an anatomy that ordinary folk do not possess. However, consulting is predicated on the opposing claim that a com­pany’s per­for­mance anatomy is not fixed. Value can be engineered. It can be optimized through “hard” and “soft” means. A high-­ performing com­pany needs it systems to mea­sure and manage employee per­for­mance according to financial metrics, a topic I discuss in the next chapter. A high-­performing com­pany is also one where employees are “developed” to have “the right mind-­sets.” The idea that ­there is an under­lying anatomical basis to high performers suggests that making per­for­mance is a science, one that con­sul­tants understand. But Systeo’s Chinese employees ­were not yet fully schooled in this science. In my first few weeks in Beijing I met a number of Western expatriates. They had been transferred from Eu­rope, North Amer­i­ca, and Australia—­offices where consulting to deliver high per­for­mance was well established—­hence they ­were well equipped to teach their Chinese colleagues how to cook up this “secret sauce” of orga­nizational excellence which had now thoroughly permeated “their dna.” One such expatriate was Melissa Johnson, an American con­sul­tant with over eight years’ experience of helping clients “to promote and incentivize employee per­for­ mance,” and who describes her job as being concerned with “developing and implementing per­for­mance management” for large organ­izations, typically public companies. Our paths crossed ­because she had taken up a new role. Melissa had been asked to lead Systeo’s Greater China H ­ uman Capital Strategy (hcs) Program. She was no longer tasked with improving the per­for­mance anatomy of clients. Instead, she was responsible for making Systeo’s China practice a high-­performance unit. The widespread adoption of high-­performance work practices, which can be found in the public sector as well as for-­profit companies, reflects the rise of h ­ uman resource management (hrm), a field of management that emerged in the 1980s. Continuing from the humanistic approaches 36 

CHAPTER one

that displaced scientific management, hrm stresses the importance of employees’ well-­being and motivations. It bears close affinity with personnel management in its substance and content; however, the objectives of hrm go beyond improving employees’ welfare and working conditions. Starting from the central belief that p ­ eople are an organ­ization’s greatest asset, hrm positions h ­ uman resources as the key to obtaining a competitive advantage. The optimization of employees’ per­for­mance becomes an objective of corporate strategy, rather than being merely a personnel ­matter. Perhaps unsurprisingly then, hrm—­which has been described as a rhe­toric of management practice rather than a coherent management theory—­has been heavi­ly championed by management con­sul­tants. Through their thought leadership—­one early and now famous example is the McKinsey paper, “The War for Talent”—­management con­sul­tants have highlighted the importance of employees for competitiveness, in par­tic­u­lar for knowledge-­ intensive organ­izations. Management con­sul­tants have also actively promoted and implemented universal templates of hrm known as “best practice” hrm,3 also referred to as “high-­performance work systems”4 or “high-­commitment practices.”5 The hcs Program is one such example. Melissa stressed that the hcs Program was not just an internal initiative, but also an example of how Systeo recycled best practices—an idea gleaned from its clients that would be tried out and refined inside Systeo before being repackaged as a ­standardized knowledge product. The hcs Program is run with the aim of ­making the China practice a high performer; it is also a testing ground for high-­performance management practices that can be sold to clients. This chapter explores the operation of the hcs Program, providing a rare insight into how hrm actually works in practice. As a management theory, hrm has been criticized for its internal contradictions, lack of reflexivity, and for assuming a narrow conceptualization of per­for­mance; it has been claimed that high-­performance work practices can improve financial per­for­mance (Huselid 1995, emphasis added). By analyzing the practices through which high per­for­mance is performed and how claims about per­ for­mance are staked, this chapter seeks to reconcile the rhe­toric around employee well-­being and investment with the predominant concern with financial value. In ­doing so, I shed light on the relations between orga­ nizational forms, l­ abor, and new forms of valuation ­under financialization. Specifically, I look at how the social real­ity of high performers is created High Performers  

37

through forms of valuation that mea­sure ­labor in terms of financial value and how this produces a par­tic­u­lar ontology of ­labor.6 I analyze how, and with what graphical artifacts, l­abor can be reconceptualized as a form of financial capital.7 Management techniques concerning “­human capital” aim to produce what I term financialized subjects. Financialization, Shareholder Value, and ­Labor ­ ere is nothing automatic or predetermined about [the] pro­cess of converting Th the potential of ­labor, including the contribution of man­ag­ers, into value for shareholders. —­Ezzamel, Willmott, and Worthington, “Manufacturing Shareholder Value”

Described variously as a theory of corporate per­for­mance (Van der Zwan 2014) and an ideology of financialization (Froud et al. 2000; Lazonick and O’­Sullivan 2000), shareholder value “generates much of its authenticity and persuasive force by claiming itself as the original state of economic life, and by extension, entrepreneurial, free-­market capitalism as the true nature of ­human society” (Ho 2009, 169). Justified as a means of reconciling the principal–­agent prob­lem presented by the separation of owner­ship and control in modern corporations (Berle and Means 1932), shareholder value suggests that shareholders should be prioritized over other constituents, including workers. Corporate efficiency has become redefined as “the ability to maximize dividends and keep stock prices high” (Van der Zwan 2014, 107), realized through the cooperation of man­ag­ers whose interests are aligned with shareholders through stock options. As a consequence, we have seen changes to business strategies and orga­nizational forms, with significant implications for ­labor. In addition to mergers and hostile takeovers, the increased rationalization and standardization of work pro­cesses, as evidenced through downsizing, offshoring, and layoffs, has been attributed to the drive for shareholder value. Salary differentials between the highest and lowest strata of companies have increased dramatically, with t­hose at the bottom experiencing rising intensification of work and precarity of employment. In short, the mission to create value for shareholders has led to fundamental changes in the ways in which ­labor is managed, or­ga­nized, and rewarded. But while the link between corporate restructuring and shareholder value is well established, the mechanisms by which the pursuit of higher 38 

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share prices is articulated through orga­nizational changes remain largely neglected in accounts of corporate financialization. An exception, though, is an in-­depth study that examines the accounting mea­sures that translate shareholder value creation into internal changes (such as cost cutting) by Mahmoud Ezzamel and his coauthors. In their case study of Conglom, a high-­ tech multinational, they describe not only the intense pressures placed on workers and man­ag­ers alike through financial per­for­mance mea­sures, but also how accounting metrics such as eva (economic value added) and tsr (total shareholder return) act as a means of visualizing operational activities to financial markets and thus impel certain kinds of corporate strategy. Specifically, they argue that “accounting metrics can offer a persuasive reassurance to investors that a com­pany is committed to the incorporation of value-­adding, cost-­squeezing disciplines into its everyday operations” (Ezzamel, Willmott, and Worthington 2008, 109). Their analy­sis of how operational decisions are couched in terms of their impact on investor approval or investor expectations highlights the temporal politics of share valuation. Man­ag­ers in financialized companies are pressured into finding ways of demonstrating—­representing—­­future profitability to investors. ­Whether or not the actions they implement actually deliver profitability, and evidence suggests they often fail in this regard (Fligstein and Shin 2007), does not necessarily ­matter.8 To understand the relationship between the internal management and organ­ization of public companies and their share price, it is useful to discuss briefly how investors carry out share valuation. Although so­cio­log­ i­cal and anthropological accounts have tended to focus on speculative approaches, in fact most fund man­ag­ers and financial analysts practice what is termed fundamental valuation—­that is, they attempt to decipher the intrinsic or “fundamental” value of a com­pany. In this approach, the value of a com­pany is seen as the actualized sum of its f­ uture return. As anthropologist Horacio Ortiz explains, “fundamental valuation is considered to be an act of ‘authenticity’ and ‘conviction’ about the ‘fundamentals,’ based on informed wagers about the ­future” (Ortiz 2013, 66). But the prob­lem is t­here are no known fundamentals. That is to say, investors cannot say with certainty, ex ante, what ­factors ­will determine the per­for­mance of a com­pany’s shares. Rather, investors are engaged in a constant pro­cess of interpreting information about companies and the broader economic conditions, ­under conditions of radical uncertainty. In order to impel themselves High Performers  

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to commit to action—to choose to buy or hold a stock at any given point in time—­“financial agents therefore must be convinced about the profitability of the uncertain opportunities for f­uture gain they hypothesize to exist” (Chong and Tuckett 2015, 310). To do so, they develop what can be termed “conviction narratives”—­stories about an investment target through which they can resolve the psychological and emotional conflicts engendered in committing to an object that could lead to significant loss as well as gain. This is an argument I have made, together with psychoanalyst David Tuckett, in a research proj­ect on fund man­ag­ers and their investment decision making. To develop conviction narratives, fund man­ag­ers look for par­tic­u­lar themes, or heuristics of ­future profitability. For example, many man­ag­ ers described their investment pro­cess as including the search for “good” or “strong” companies. Although vari­ous accounting models can be used to calculate mea­sures of com­pany strength, fund man­ag­ers are well aware that ­these models engender specific assumptions about the ­future that may not hold over time. Hence, many look for proxies of com­pany strength—­“a ‘strong balance sheet,’ ­those which ­were ‘cash rich’ or with a ‘good cash flow’ ” (Chong and Tuckett 2015, 321), for example. However, investors did not always agree upon their interpretations. Further, their interpretations could change over time, as new information about the com­pany came to light or if the political-­economic context altered. Conviction narratives are inherently fragile and unstable. Hence, it is not pos­si­ble for the management of publicly listed companies to say with certainty what w ­ ill please investors. This is a point emphasized in one of Systeo’s white papers, entitled “Do Investors Have an Accurate Picture of Your Com­pany’s Value?” which states: “­There are no standard metrics to track investors’ f­uture expectations for a com­pany, which reflect what they believe about the com­pany’s strategies.” The role of management consultancies lies in bridging the gap between investors’ wagers and man­ag­ers’ wagers. Consultancies claim they have knowledge of, and can control, the uncertain pro­cess of share valuation. This is a claim made in this white paper where the following question is directed to prospective clients: “Is your com­pany’s strategy appropriately valued by the market?” The rest of the paper is a short-­sell in Systeo’s expertise of managing this pro­cess of share valuation, that Systeo can control the subjective act of interpretation undertaken by fund man­ ag­ers, pension funds, and other institutional investors. Put differently, the 40 

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craft of consulting is the trafficking of signals between investors and (the management of) companies. This is achieved through the production of repre­sen­ta­tions that reference the financial health of the com­pany. In par­tic­ u­lar, we see the emphasis on two heuristics of potential profitability—­the generation of revenue, or the reduction of costs—as ­will become apparent over the next two chapters. Further, I show how the production of ­these financial repre­sen­ta­tions in the name of creating shareholder value leads to the promotion of certain actions among employees and also legitimizes certain forms of organ­ization and reor­ga­ni­za­tion. Practices of visualization aim to create a favorable indication of the com­pany’s “fundamentals” and feed into investors’ conviction narratives. The ­Human ­Factor

I first heard about the hcs Program a­ fter two months of fieldwork inside Systeo’s back office, its shared ser­vice center in Dalian. The center’s director, Christina Teoh, asked me if I was interested in carry­ing out research in Beijing or Shanghai, where the consulting practice is based. It was approaching the end of Systeo’s fiscal year, and the hcs Program committee was making preparations to carry out the final review of the program’s initiatives that had been ­running that year. They would welcome an extra pair of hands to help out with the analy­sis. I moved to Beijing in May 2008. Together with Melissa, the hcs Program lead, and her two Chinese subordinates, Natalie and Amber, I spent over a month analyzing data sets that ­were used to evaluate the success of the 2008 hcs Program. The design of the 2009 hcs Program would reflect our findings, with new subprograms introduced to target the areas of improvement that we had identified. As I scanned one Power­Point pre­sen­ta­tion ­after another, I realized the hcs Program was not one initiative, but a set of initiatives. The names of ­these subprograms—­“Valuing Our ­People,” “Talent Powered Organ­ization,” “New Generation Talent Acquisition,” “Flexibility and Diversity”—­make explicit the focus on ­labor. One might think, then, that the hcs Program would fall u ­ nder hr’s responsibility. However, Christina stated unequivocally that “­human capital [strategy] is not ­human resources.” The fact that each subprogram had a “task force” consisting of con­sul­tants as well as hr staff seemed to corroborate her assertion. A number of se­nior executives ­were also involved. Typically, they ­were the “leads” of the subprograms. High Performers  

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Moreover, the most se­nior member of the hcs committee was not the hr director, but Liu Xing, the chairman of the China practice, who reported directly to the chief executive, John Scott. The inclusion of such se­nior employees communicated the prestige and importance of this initiative. In hrm the management of employees is deemed to be a core strategic activity, that is, one that contributes to the achievement of orga­nizational goals, and hence it should be presided over by the highest levels of management and not left to personnel specialists.9 Given that management consulting is a knowledge-­intensive business, it is perhaps unsurprising to find out that Systeo was so committed to having the right ­people. As Liu Xing put it in an address to the entire hcs committee, “­Human Capital Strategy is a very impor­tant program about ‘what kind of geographic investment do we want to make?’ ” suggesting that employees are critical to ­future as well as pres­ent productivity. It is also a statement that reveals a key characteristic of hrm—­the instrumentalization of ­people as “assets” (Alvesson and Willmott 2012). Such a view borrows from the economic lit­er­a­ture, the theory of the resource-­based firm,10 and also the work of Chicago school economist Gary Becker, who defines ­human capital as “the knowledge, information, ideas, skills and health of individuals” (Becker 2002, 1). Like financial capital, ­human capital can yield an income over time; however, “you cannot separate a person from his or her knowledge, skills, health or values the way it is pos­si­ble to move financial and physical assets while the owner stays put” (Becker 1994, 16). If an employee leaves, their knowledge—­and their income stream—­leaves with them. This can have devastating effects, as Olivier Godechot has shown with re­spect to another archetypal knowledge worker—­traders. “When they resign, they take their body with them, a repository of assets that give t­ hose operators ­great value on the job market. They leave with information, know­ ledge, know-­how. They leave with clients. They leave with teams. This job market is therefore fundamentally dual: a market of persons and a market for what ­those persons carry away,” argues Godechot (2008, 47). In other words, banks find the value of their com­pany assets inextricably tied to the par­tic­u­lar employees who have control over them; thus, t­ hose employees can plausibly threaten to take away ­these assets, and thus their value, if their salary demands are not met. Hence, “the financial industry job market should be seen less as a market for individual skills than a ­market for 42 

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interfirm asset transfer” (Godechot 2008, 4). Although an extreme example, the traders of Godechot’s study exemplify the con­temporary inscription of employees in knowledge-­intensive industries as a form of capital that organ­ izations must manage, monitor, and hopefully retain if they are to thrive. As Systeo’s hr director, David Winter, put it, “­Human Capital Strategy is about how p ­ eople engage with the com­pany, it’s [about] attracting them, engaging them, and keeping them.” However, the hcs Program had not succeeded in stemming the flow of outbound employees. During my fieldwork I became accustomed to seeing research subjects come and go, and learned quickly that ­every offer of access had to be capitalized on immediately. As one Chinese con­sul­tant put it, “two years [of employment] is a long time in Systeo China.”11 This was not a secret, but it was a ­matter of secrecy. I found hr staff reluctant to disclose the exact percentages of l­abor turnover,12 other­wise known as “attrition.” ­These figures ­were “sensitive,” they explained. Even in the final review meetings of the hcs Program the figures w ­ ere not discussed. For an initiative that posits l­abor retention as a key objective, the absence of statistical data that would give an indication of l­abor retention was certainly con­spic­u­ous. Furthermore, I found that Systeo did not always attempt to keep long-­serving employees who expressed a desire to leave. Catherine Wu, who had been employed in the shared ser­vice center for five years, had been approached by one of Systeo’s competitors offering to double her current salary. When I asked her if she had used this offer to negotiate a counteroffer from Systeo, she said bluntly, “Kimberly, I work in hr. I know that Systeo ­won’t negotiate. They ­will just let you go.” Surely such action, or rather inaction, undermined the hrm discourse in which ­people ­were described as “assets”—­living repositories of com­pany investment? I would soon find out that such contradictions w ­ ere not limited to Systeo, but rather ­were characteristic of high-­performance work practices. Spotting such contradictions required me to become familiar with a new and very intriguing conceptual landscape. I remember in the early weeks being especially fascinated by the fact that the hcs Program—­this supposedly potent weapon of strategy—­was frequently narrated as an initiative of culture. When Christina suggested that I “tap into the H ­ uman Capital Strategy Program,” she described it as a device designed to “incorporate the China geography into the global Systeo culture.”13 In this par­tic­u­lar context, “the local”—­Chinese norms, logics, and be­hav­iors—is depicted High Performers  

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as an impediment to the “correct” functioning of global Systeo culture, and hence it must be “incorporated” in some way. The very existence of a program with the express aim of instrumental acculturation suggests that culture in this setting is a far cry from the conceptions of culture familiar to anthropologists. ­Here it is something that can be managed and controlled. Furthermore, it can be used as a tool of management, operating through the mechanism of acculturation, guiding the be­hav­iors of Chinese employees to follow standardized protocols. However, once I started working with the hcs Program committee, I found that this pro­cess of “incorporation” is enacted not by augmenting Systeo culture to become commensurable with local values, but rather by paying increased attention to the deployment of what is designed to be a universal model of management—­one that is designed to produce high per­for­mance. The emphasis on culture is one of the key features of hrm, reflecting a belief that strategic goals should be achieved without requiring compliance with rules and procedures (Storey 1995, 7). Instead, organ­izations should focus on eliciting “employee commitment.” As a consequence, employees are subject to intense socialization in the values that are deemed to drive business strategy (Legge 1995a, 44). Against the backdrop of neoliberal restructuring, in which hrm emerged and developed in the United Kingdom and the United States, ­these values typically exalted “the preeminence of the market-­place” (Legge 1995a, 44). In the context of China’s economic modernization and integration into the global financialized economy, what values would be emphasized and inculcated through the hcs Program? Translating Strategy

At first it seemed that the hcs Program, with its focus on recruitment, training, per­for­mance appraisals, target setting, and managing performance-­ related pay, was targeted at the com­pany’s employees. ­Were they not the ­human capital of the “­human capital strategy”? But as the weeks went by it became apparent that the hcs Program was, in fact, geared to optimize the be­hav­iors of a subsection of Systeo employees—­the man­ag­ers. Man­ ag­ers are seen as critical in the hrm paradigm. As one author puts it, “A disproportionate amount of training and development activity and resources is consumed by management development. . . . ​Activity in the

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realms of target-­setting per­for­mance management and ­career planning is again typically geared mainly ­towards man­ag­ers. In other words, the panoply of hrm technology is seen in its fullest form in the management of man­ag­ers” (Storey 1995, 7). As we ­will see, the hcs Program was a means of teaching man­ag­ers in Systeo’s China practice about the logics that related ­labor to corporate financial per­for­mance, and that enabled strategy to filter through to the furthest reaches of the organ­ization. As part of the analy­sis team, I was well positioned to observe how the success of the hcs Program was couched. It became apparent, as we reviewed consecutive sets of metrics, that the hcs Program, like employees, was subject to per­for­mance management. At the beginning of the fiscal year the members of each subprogram had to agree upon the standards by which the success of the subprogram would be measured—­their per­for­ mance mea­sures. ­These ­were almost exclusively quantitative in character. Then they had to set the numerical target. For example, part of the Unlocking Workforce Capability subprogram is concerned with the improvement of employees’ soft skills, which is addressed through the provision of in-­ house training. One of the per­for­mance mea­sures for this subprogram was the number of pre­sen­ta­tion skills training sessions conducted, with the target set at fourteen sessions for the consulting practice. Since fourteen s­ essions ­were held during the year, the subprogram was judged a success. Numerical targets represent the dividing line between “success” and “failure.” This system of evaluation was not devised by Systeo but is borrowed from “The Balanced Scorecard,” a management tool pop­u­lar­ized by management theorist Robert Kaplan and management con­sul­tant David Norton. Designed “to link a com­pany’s long-­term strategy with its short-­term actions” (Kaplan and Norton 1996, 75), the balanced scorecard is articulated by Kaplan and Norton as a “strategic management system” (Kaplan and Norton 1996, 75). Multiple scorecards are required to operationalize a strategic management system (see figure 1.1). ­These correspond to dif­ fer­ent but intersecting areas of the business: financial per­for­mance, customer ser­vice, internal business pro­cesses, and learning and growth. The format of the scorecard is the same in each case. It clearly defines the goals (objectives), mea­sures, and targets of per­for­mance. Systeo’s ­human capital version almost exactly replicates the original scorecard in its constitution, the notable difference being the use of the “traffic light system,” as Melissa

High Performers  

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figure 1.1: ​The balanced scorecard. (Kaplan and Norton 1996, 77)

calls it. If the target is met, it is categorized as “on track” and highlighted in green; if it is closely missed, it is “somewhat on track” and yellow; and if it misses significantly, it is deemed “off track” and red. The scorecard is designed to visually summarize the per­for­mance of the entity ­under evaluation. At a glance, man­ag­ers can make a per­for­mance assessment. During the analy­sis period, when the scorecard was being continuously updated with results, Melissa would look periodically at the scorecard to evaluate the program’s efficacy. She would base her assessment on the ratio of colors. A positive assessment would elicit a comment such as “I’m seeing mostly green ­here, that’s good.” The few red sections on the 2008 h ­ uman capital scorecard prompted further inquiry such as, “What’s happening ­here, guys?” Both colors and numbers serve to reduce the range of pos­si­ble interpretations, simplifying the complexity of “per­ for­mance” and tying success to predefined mea­sures. Only if a subprogram produces outcomes that fulfill the targets chosen at the start of the fiscal year can it be judged efficacious. Outcomes that cannot be mea­sured by 46 

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t­ hese pre-­chosen targets are rendered irrelevant ­under the balanced scorecard system of evaluation. The scorecard is an objectification of a tautology of evaluation—it incentivizes users to choose what is being evaluated on the basis of their suitability for scorecard evaluation. So only what can be evaluated in the scorecard is evaluated in the scorecard. In preparation for the final review meetings with the hcs Program committee, the analy­sis team held phone meetings with Chairman Liu Xing to have a preliminary discussion of the findings. Liu Xing proved himself to be an insightful and critical thinker, refusing to concede to Melissa’s ­human capital expertise, and peppering the discussion with probing questions, which included the topic of per­for­mance management. In the next chapter I give an in-­depth analy­sis of how per­for­mance management works in practice. H ­ ere the focus is on the discourse surrounding per­for­ mance management, and how it fits into a broader objective of making certain kinds of ­human subjects. Melissa highlighted two findings that had led her to believe that per­for­mance management was “not working.” First, employees displayed low accountability, as determined by the Employee Engagement Survey. Second, only 77.6 ­percent of con­sul­tants had written their per­for­mance objectives. To which Liu Xing’s response was:

Liu Xing: Accountability has two dimensions. One, need to have objectives, two, need to have ­these clearly defined. [For] con­sul­tants the nature of the job means it is hard to quantify [per­for­mance]. Is per­for­mance being mea­sured against their objectives? Or just looking at per­for­mance in relation to peer group? If so [that’s] not accountable . . . ​as long as ­you’re better than your peers it’s still OK. Is per­for­mance management . . . Melissa: Rewarding on the basis of objectives? Liu Xing: If not the objectives are meaningless. . . . ​[pause] Getting objectives set is a very basic requirement . . . ​but it ­doesn’t ­really do all the tricks. In the end, do they ­matter? Liu Xing and Melissa agreed that per­for­mance management was “not working,” but they differed in their approach to the prob­lem and in their conclusions. Liu Xing explic­itly questions the utility of per­for­mance objectives—­“do they ­matter?”—­that are critical to the operation of the balanced scorecard system of evaluation. He suggests that setting objectives cannot be the only mechanism of operation—­“it ­doesn’t ­really do all High Performers  

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the tricks”—­implying that any action that improves objective setting may not necessarily correct the functioning of the system. That is, he questions the system of evaluation, while for Melissa the fault lies with the individuals being evaluated, ­those who fail to write their per­for­mance objectives. For her the operation of the system can be improved by ensuring that its users—­namely consultants—­engage with it in the right away; that is, subjects must become disciplined into using the system “correctly.” ­These differing explanations indicated a rupture in epistemic coherency across the organ­ization. But this did not lead to a change in the status quo for the ­human capital agenda, as became apparent in the discussion among the Effective Per­for­mance Management (epm) task force about what actions could be taken to improve per­for­mance management. In addition to joining the hcs analy­sis team, I became a member of the epm subprogram, which was introduced in light of the finding that per­for­ mance management was “not working.” With task force members drawn from the Shanghai and Dalian offices as well as Beijing, our meetings took the format of conference calls. In the first meeting we each introduced ourselves before launching into a group discussion about the se­lection of objectives for the subprogram. I explained my unusual position as the in-­ house anthropologist, and gave a brief description of what I had learned from my participation in the analy­sis of the hcs Program’s 2008 session. In par­tic­u­lar, I talked about the findings that w ­ ere the impetus for setting up the epm subprogram in the first place. I stressed that an explanation as to why con­sul­tants did not set per­for­mance targets had not been found, and proposed that we choose initiatives that would address this issue. My suggestions ­were of the qualitative type and included interviewing and holding focus groups among con­sul­tants. The other members of the team rejected my suggestions b ­ ecause of their lack of “measurability.” Instead, they settled on initiatives that could be mea­sured by the “inputs” into the official review of the hcs Program. Data sets from the Leadership Survey, Internal Communications Survey, Employee Engagement Survey, and ­Human Capital Assessment Survey, as well as other numerical data such as “hr ­actuals,” which included attrition and recruitment figures, ­were used by Melissa and the rest of the analy­sis team to evaluate the efficacy of the hcs Program. In what they saw as a concession to my suggestion, the other task force members asked me to review the existing communication channels available to con­sul­tants, 48 

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having already deci­ded that the prob­lem I had raised—­the “why” of per­ for­mance management malfunction—­was the result of in­effec­tive communication. This led to the decision to produce a document that could be disseminated to new employees in their orientation, detailing per­for­mance management, a task which I was enlisted to carry out. This was just one of four initiatives chosen. With duties spread across the members, the task force carried out a survey eliciting the opinions of ­career counselors (who are the primary disseminators of knowledge surrounding per­for­mance management), wrote a guidance template to aid the writing of objectives, and created a graphical repre­sen­ta­tion of the per­for­mance management calendar. The disagreement over the kind of initiatives that the task force should pursue was one of content: What should be the content of the subprogram? And according to what criteria should this content be chosen? While I had chosen the content on the basis of knowledge production (i.e., it should aim to answer the question of why and how per­for­mance management is malfunctioning), the other members of the task force had chosen the content of the subprogram on the amenability of that content to describe the subprogram as a “success.” What mattered was not the generation of insights about the object in question (per­for­mance management) but the per­for­ mance of the actors involved—­the final evaluation of their actions. Given that the subprogram was about improving the operation of per­for­mance management in Systeo, it seemed to me somewhat ironic that the content of the subprogram—­the initiatives deemed to confer improvement—­would be chosen on the basis of its amenability to per­for­mance evaluation. Seemingly, the corrective for malfunctioning per­for­mance management was yet more per­for­mance management. What I had missed in my initial puzzlement was the functionality of per­for­mance management and its associated devices, namely the balanced scorecard, for the overall strategy of managing h ­ uman capital. Per­for­mance management was not, primarily, a device of evaluation but rather a device of translation. Kaplan and Norton’s terming of the balanced scorecard as a “strategic management system” derives from the role that this device has in translating high-­level managerial strategy into concrete actions at the lower levels (Kaplan and Norton 1996).14 It is through incentivization, that is, per­for­mance evaluation, that strategy can be enacted. What Kaplan and Norton do not make explicit is the effects engendered in this semiotic High Performers  

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transformation from per­for­mance management as a tool of appraisal to per­for­mance management as a tool of managerial control. The pursuit of strategy is achieved through the narrowing of per­for­mance, specifically what counts as good per­for­mance, to incentivize activities that fulfill the mea­sures chosen by management, and at the same time discouraging any activity that does not fall u ­ nder ­these mea­sures. Systeo’s management is able to “translate the vision” (Kaplan and Norton 1996) of the com­pany by using per­for­mance management to constrain the be­hav­iors of workers to fall in line with management objectives. As the above example shows, workers choose the content of their work based on the measurability of their per­for­mance. In short, per­for­mance management is the mechanism by which strategy is transmitted to all reaches of the organ­ization. By saying that per­for­ mance management is a mechanism, I am in effect asserting that it is a means to something e­ lse, an end that is not per­for­mance management. That end I ­will come to shortly. The means can be located in the construction of the balanced scorecard. This is a device that expressly seeks to create the alignment of goals throughout dif­fer­ent levels of the orga­nizational structure, through the mechanism of feedback. Narrated as “strategic learning” (Kaplan and N ­ orton 1996, 77), the production of feedback effects is explic­itly and positively acknowledged by Kaplan and Norton. In an article published in the Harvard Business Review, they state: “With the balanced scorecard at the center of its management systems, a com­pany can monitor short-­term results from the three additional perspectives—­customers, internal business pro­cesses, and learning and growth—­and evaluate strategy in the light of recent per­for­ mance. The scorecard thus enables companies to modify strategies to reflect real-­time learning” (Kaplan and Norton 1996, 77, emphasis added). For Kaplan and Norton, the balanced scorecard is a means of adjusting output (“results”) through input (“per­for­mance”). In other words, the balanced scorecard engenders a feedback effect, and this is a way of homing in on the most value-­productive activities. In this setting, feedback, which I identified as a tautology of evaluation, is not the unintended consequence of construction, but rather is seen as the valorized mode of operation. It is a way of emphasizing and enacting the chosen ends. As I described above, the efficacy of the subprograms was determined by recourse to feedback loops of “objectives”; that is, success was defined by the fulfillment of predetermined criteria. 50 

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Engaged Employees and the Tracking of High Per­for­mance

In notable alignment with David Winter’s description of the h ­ uman capital strategy as being about “how p ­ eople engage with the com­pany,” the hcs Program is evaluated on the “engagement” of its employees, as determined by the “employee engagement score”—­another feedback loop. The score serves as a mea­sure of both the overall efficacy, and thus the “success,” of the hcs Program, and the efficacy of its individual components, the subprograms. Despite its rather amorphous-­sounding name, employee engagement is construed as a concept of vital importance in the ­running of Systeo’s internal management. Its cultivation is most formally addressed through the hcs Program and through other initiatives such as Systeo-­ sponsored activity clubs (which include sports and singles clubs), local community partnerships, and com­pany parties. Indeed, it is considered so impor­tant that two members of staff are employed for the exclusive purpose of promoting employee engagement—­the two other members of the analy­ sis team, Natalie and Amber, titled the employee engagement man­ag­er and employee engagement ju­nior, respectively. It is in ­these capacities that they, rather than hr staff, are responsible for the r­ unning of the hcs Program. Although Natalie and Amber sit adjacent to the hr division, their official separation from hr makes apparent the divisions between ­human capital and ­human resources, which can be tracked to their dif­fer­ent agendas. In line with the definition as p ­ eople as assets—­that organ­izations, therefore, want to keep—­and the accent on culture as a way of implementing managerial control, we find that ­human capital strategy is tied to an objective of engaging employees. The hcs Program uses per­for­mance management as a technique of constraining the be­hav­iors of employees to promote the engagement of employees. To put it succinctly, engaged employees are the desired “ends” of the “means” of per­for­mance management. What exactly this entailed became evident during the analy­sis of the 2009 hcs Program results. ­These ­were presented to the entire hcs Program committee through the medium of Power­Point, a “deck” of forty-­three slides, run over the course of two three-­hour meetings. As is commonplace in Systeo, the meetings ­were carried out as conference calls. A large number of participants dialed in from meeting rooms in Beijing, Shanghai, Dalian, and Hong Kong with the aid of speakerphones and overhead projectors enabling them to follow High Performers  

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the verbal pre­sen­ta­tion.15 The committee was subjected to an onslaught of graphs, charts, and ­tables, a veritable extravaganza of formatting. I would soon find out that t­ hese repre­sen­ta­tions ­were more than visual aids to help participants follow the analy­sis; they ­were also devices for creating expertise and producing certain kinds of desired subjects. In the first meeting, Melissa talked about the “overall pro­gress of the China geography,” and referred explic­itly to the “change-­tracking map” to make her case (see figure 1.2). Depicting the rocky terrain of orga­nizational change, the map showed the journey an organ­ization could make to reach the summit of high per­for­mance. Just like a person traversing the highest peaks of the Alps, Rockies, or Himalayas, an organ­ization’s pro­gress to the top could be described as “struggling ­under pressure,” “building momentum,” “achieved with loss of heart,” or “flatlining.” ­These descriptions of pro­gress marked specific milestones of orga­nizational change. Some ­were bizarre and difficult to comprehend: What did it mean if an organ­ ization was at the point of “Just get on with it”? I was even more puzzled by descriptive inconsistences: the lower strata of the pro­gress mountain, as I termed it, ­were categorized by degrees of change (“off track,” “unsustainable,” and “on track”), while the peak, the ultimate point of orga­ nizational operation, referred to a fixed point on a scalar mea­sure (“high per­for­mance”). It seemed I was not the only person who was confused. In a preliminary run-­through with Liu Xing, the chairman of Systeo China, a number of objections ­were raised. Xing asked the analy­sis team, “Okay, help me ­here, what does ‘Yes, but’ [pro­gress] mean?” Melissa, who was clearly the most clued-in on change tracking, having used this analytical tool when consulting to clients on orga­nizational change, responded: “[It means] t­ here is engagement, passion, and drive but something is missing . . . ​ the vision. [Our employees] are not getting what they need: skills, accountability, [they] ­don’t understand the objectives in the business group. ­We’re excited, engaged, but . . . ​resources are missing to implement change successfully, therefore ­there is disturbance, fear, distress.” A long pause followed before Xing retorted, “It’s very abstract. I have an understanding [of it] but cannot internalize what y­ ou’re saying.” Melissa continued to explain but without gaining clarity. Xing eventually lost his patience: I ­don’t ­really see what [the change-­tracking] slide is telling me. Maybe I’m slow h ­ ere . . . ​but it takes about half an hour [of explanation] and I 52 

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figure 1.2: ​Change tracking map. (Adapted from fieldwork drawing)

still ­don’t get it. On Friday [the hcs committee meeting] you need to educate every­one, you need every­one on the same page. The theory and the map are not intuitive. The En­glish wording is highly intellectual. It’s ­going to be a very challenging task to have every­one on the same page, to see exactly the same conclusions. I think it’s g­ oing to be impossible and ­will only lead to frustration. What Liu Xing had missed in his other­wise astute observations was that the change-­tracking map was not designed to represent some kind of High Performers  

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­ reexisting external real­ity—­changes in ­actual orga­nizational performance—­ p but rather to act as an epistemological intervention. How do you know if you are becoming a high-­performance organ­ization? Certainly an impor­tant question for Systeo’s clients. How do they know the management con­sul­tants they have hired have accomplished what they promised they would? Repre­ sen­ta­tions such as the change-­tracking map, by visualizing the intangible, are one way of substantiating a claim of improved per­for­mance. Maps achieve par­tic­u­lar, depoliticizing effects, as historian Timothy Mitchell has pointed out: “The map pres­ents itself as a mere repre­sen­ta­tion, an idea or abstraction, set apart from the real, fixed, physical real­ity it depicts. It erases and hides the contested, po­liti­cal, repre­sen­ta­tional nature of the world it portrays, in the same action with which it denies its own (shrinking) physicality” (Mitchell 2002, 117). Moreover, such expert ways of seeing and knowing create the very ­thing they purport to mea­sure.16 With devices like the change-­tracking map, the object that is being acted upon—­performance—is enacted, it becomes a ­thing that can be improved, developed, and sold for profit. The change-­tracking map helps bring into being the social real­ity of high per­for­mance. It was telling that the mechanisms by which this map was produced w ­ ere extremely difficult to pin down. ­There was never a definitive statement of what analytics went into its construction; Melissa only made a few vague comments about regressing variables within the employment engagement survey. If you read the small print on change tracking, which notably is not Systeo’s own invention but a tool licensed from Change Tracking Research Ltd., you find out only that its inputs mainly consist of questionnaires sent out to employees and com­pany leadership, and that they have a proprietary analytical tool that can track patterns in employee responses. In other words, the analytical and po­liti­cal work that goes into making the map is hidden, rendered unimportant in comparison to the epistemological effects that it is hoped the map ­will enact. Liu Xing was right, the map was not intuitive. Clarity was not the aim. It was meant, instead, to substantiate the expertise of the hcs Program, an initiative that would hopefully make Systeo China into a high performer. Having the right tools to ensure this claim could be substantiated was an integral part of the program. The change-­tracking map was not the only repre­sen­ta­tional tool used to create knowledge claims about the efficacy of the hcs Program. Melissa

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also turned to the repre­sen­ta­tions of employee engagement to make her case. She flicked to a slide entitled “China also continues to make very good pro­gress in Employee Engagement,” with the chart shown in figure 1.3 under­neath. Among the mélange of colors, arrows, acronyms, and symbols is the depiction of employee engagement—­represented by a crescent that looks strikingly similar to a speed dial on a car’s dashboard. It is ­here I found out that the employee engagement score—­which had been hitherto referred to, directly and obliquely, as a mea­sure of employees’ sentiments—­ actually refers to total shareholder return annualized over a five-­year period, or tsr. The “good pro­gress in Employee Engagement” declared in the title of the slide refers to the 6 ­percent increase in tsr, from 60 ­percent in fiscal year 2007 to 66 ­percent in fiscal year 2008. We can see that with this improvement Systeo Greater China is now firmly in the High Per­for­mance Range. By contrast, the triangle in the m ­ iddle of the dial shows that the average Chinese com­pany—­the typical client—­operates at 50 ­percent. This is the “benchmark” from which the per­for­mance of Systeo Greater China is judged; given that management con­sul­tants are selling expertise in orga­ nizational excellence, it is perhaps unsurprising that they need to reassure themselves that they are indeed superior, in this re­spect, to their clients. When Melissa goes through this slide she makes no mention of shareholder return, referring to the percentage increase in tsr as an improvement in the engagement score. Notably, this translation also engenders a change in the units of measurement—­Melissa does not refer to a percentage change but instead to an increase in “points.” Points also feature in Systeo’s official communications about the hcs Program. On the Systeo intranet, an employee announcement publicizes the Greater China ­Human Capital Strategy: “We are glad to have seen our employee engagement score jump 6 points from fy07 to fy08, attesting that our ­Human Capital and Employee Engagement strategy is on the right track” (emphasis added). It is only when I closely examined the forty-­three slides ­after the meeting that I became aware that employee engagement is not, as the term itself suggests, and as David Winter implied, an abstract mea­sure of employees’ commitment to the com­pany. His statement that the hcs Program is about “attracting them, engaging them, keeping them” suggests that engagement is somehow related to the retention of employees, a point that is emphasized by the secrecy surrounding l­abor turnover—­“attrition figures”—­information

High Performers  

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High Performer Range Avg. TSR=12.1 Overall Avg. TSR=6.5

40%

44%

59%

60%

66%

Foundation Range 25%

$

Transition Range

Critical Range

High Performance Range 100%

0%

Benchmark Average Engagement FY08 Systeo Greater China (66%)

FY07 Global Systeo (60%)

FY06 Systeo Greater China (59%)

FY05 Global Systeo (44%)

China Market Benchmark (50%)

$

High Performing Companies (68%)

TSR = Total Shareholder Return Annualized over a Five-year Period

figure 1.3: ​Employee engagement dial. (Adapted from fieldwork drawing)

that was frequently referred to by hr staff and consulting partners as “sensitive.” In fact, “engaged” employees refers to a workforce that confers a healthy return to the com­pany’s shareholders. That is to say, the hcs Program was about improving Systeo employees’ capabilities to produce financial value. Exactly how employees could be said to be engaged was not explained by Melissa, David, or anyone ­else connected to the hcs Program; that is, the mechanism of effect between ­labor and shareholder return was never made explicit. Indeed, total shareholder return was never verbally referred to in any of the meetings I attended; its presence was limited to this par­tic­u­lar Power­Point slide (figure 1.3), where it is replaced with the acronym tsr. The only instance when it is written in full is in a sliver of a box where the acronym is decoded, disclosing the referent. Relegated to the corners of the slide, tsr appears as a minor adornment to the star of the show—­the multitonal engagement “dial”—­which is placed at center stage. Acronyms render their referents undecipherable. They can become signifiers for alternative referents, which opens up the possibility for tsr to become unmoored from shareholder return and instead associated 56 

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with something ­else. The positioning of tsr around the circumference of the central feature—­the dial of employee engagement—­suggests that tsr is a unit of employee engagement rather than a signifier of shareholder return. By looking at what is omitted and what is emphasized, we can interpret what is the object and focus of analy­sis for the hcs Program. While total shareholder return is all but expunged, employee engagement is repeatedly positioned as the focal point of analy­sis. In both its verbal narration and visual pre­sen­ta­tion, the hcs Program constructs employee engagement as its main aim and object of cultivation. The “absence” of total shareholder return was part of a general erasure of financial connotations from the inscription of employees’ per­for­mance. This is evident from the transformations that the term undergoes: it is doubly obfuscated, replaced first by the acronym of tsr in the slide, and then marginalized as a mea­sure of employee engagement. The substitution of “tsr” and “employee engagement” is a means of avoiding the inevitable associations with finance that would ensue using the original term. The verbal construction of employee engagement continues this work of disassociation. Mea­sured in points rather than percentage points, it is implied that employee engagement is a proxy, which it is, for a quality that cannot be calculated from numerical data, like “commitment,” which it is not. In short, the message being conveyed is one that elides association with financial value, that the pursuit of greater employee engagement is not a financially oriented goal. Instead, the terms of narration, “engagement” and “commitment,” suggest that the objective of corporate culture is to create mechanism(s) of affect. What is less clear, and I have argued is obfuscated, is the object of t­ hese affective ties. While the descriptions of hcs members like David Winter imply that they are trying to improve employees’ commitment to Systeo, I would argue that its ultimate objective is to maximize the value-­creating capabilities of con­sul­tants. Contrary to the narration of se­nior management, the hcs Program was not concerned with the extension of Systeo cultural norms to China; that is, it was not about plugging a cultural “deficit” of business practice, but about ensuring Systeo’s China offices ­were operating on, and w ­ ere being managed by, the princi­ples of per­for­mance management. The hcs Program was designed to train key Chinese employees—­se­nior figures in the consulting workforce and hr staff—in how to use techniques of per­for­mance management to maximize the financial ­per­for­mance of High Performers  

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employees. However, the narratives from the se­nior echelons of management suggest an alternative, dissonant, inscription of l­abor—­that employees are a productive asset rather than a financial asset, and thus should be nourished and invested in.17 Contradictions of High Per­for­mance

In a speech made in the midst of the global financial crisis, John Scott describes the treatment of Systeo’s Chinese workforce as evidence of its corporate ethics, a claim he ties to the core value of stewardship, which he describes as fulfilling their obligation to create a strong f­uture for Systeo.18 “­People are the biggest asset of the firm . . . ​attitude is every­thing. We continuously look ahead to new ventures and businesses that ­will help diversify our portfolio, but nonetheless the common currency at Systeo is the quality, energy, and belief of our ­people as the ­future of this com­pany. Systeo spends 1 billion [U.S. dollars] on training and research a year, and even with t­ oday’s economic challenges, we do not curtail on this spending as we continue to invest for tomorrow in our ­people” (emphasis added). He talks not of layoffs but of the continued direction of funds into training—an “investment in ­people,” he says—­a commitment on the part of Systeo to its employees that is ostensibly unrelated to its immediate financial situation. In other words, ongoing investment in l­abor in times of economic uncertainty is portrayed as an ethical act b ­ ecause it goes beyond Systeo’s short-­term financial self-­interest. This point was underscored by Liu Xing’s comments to wrap up two days of training for newly promoted se­nior man­ag­ers: “John [Scott] says he’s not gonna cut training. I’ve been talking to ­people who work at other companies; you know, they ­were surprised that Systeo was still having training, and training in a five-­star ­hotel . . . ​given the financial crisis. [Training] just shows the emphasis that Systeo places on its ­people, developing our ­people.” Liu Xing seems to suggest that what Systeo is d ­ oing is in some way exceptional, implying the par­tic­u­lar ethical supremacy of the corporation, which he locates in its relationship with its employees. Specifically, what is emphasized is the long-­term orientation of financial management, which suggests a regime of “retain and reinvest” more than “downsize and distribute,” the latter being associated with the turn to shareholder value as the primary mission of the corporation and which has led to a reduction in 58 

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long-­term employment (Lazonick 2010). John Scott and Liu Xing make the implicit claim that employees are not primarily defined (or managed) as subjects who create financial value. B ­ ecause even when revenues decline—­ which would negatively impact Systeo’s share price—­the com­pany continues to invest in its employees, suggesting that the retention of employees is paramount. However, investment was not evenly disseminated among employees. Although con­sul­tants, who are designated as front-­office staff, continued to receive training as John Scott and Liu Xing stated, employees in the sscs, Systeo’s back office, ­were subject to a “training freeze”—­the suspension of corporate training. Some of them w ­ ere also laid off in the early stages of the financial crisis. Contract workers are not eligible for training at all.19 The differential treatment of front-­and back-­office employees, which w ­ ill be elaborated on in chapter 3, is inconsistent with the inscription of Systeo employees, that is, ­labor, as productive assets. Scholars from critical management studies and orga­nizational sociology have drawn attention to the gap between the practice and rhe­toric of hrm, noting that the language of hrm gives an overly positive depiction of how organ­izations actually treat their employees.20 While recruitment and training are emphasized, downsizing, outsourcing, and redundancies are downplayed. As Mats Alvesson and Hugh Willmott have observed, “[I]n most organ­izations ­there is at best a complicated and unstable mix of highly selective, longer-­term investment in ­people and their ­careers together with much expedient treatment of employees as expendable assets who are expected to focus upon their short-­term employability, not their employment security” (Alvesson and Willmott 2012, 123). In other words, the talk of “investing in ­people” and promoting “employee engagement” only actually applies to a select, elite group employees, who are generally buffered from cost-­cutting mea­sures. Alvesson and Willmott go on to argue that “[I]n an economic climate that demands flexibility, and where pressures to deliver shareholder value make executives e­ ager to save costs through rationalizations, the promise of high-­commitment hrm has greater resonance as an alluring discourse of legitimation than as a blueprint for foreseeable practice” (Alvesson and Willmott 2012, 123). In short, the discourse of employee retention—­that the hcs Program aims to promote retention—is undermined by orga­nizational imperatives of financialization.

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Financialized Subjects

­ ere it is instructive to return to the con­spic­u­ous gap in narration—­the H connection between ­labor and total shareholder return. Although David Winter described the hcs Program as being about “how ­people engage with the com­pany,” during my time as a member of the hcs Program committee I never heard anyone explain how the committee improves employees’ ability to confer shareholder return. Instead, the initiatives devised to improve engagement suggested that we, the committee, w ­ ere working to improve the commitment of employees to Systeo. One of t­hese consisted of a pi­lot study of “flexible” working in the Dalian ser­vice center, which involved giving a group of offshore knowledge workers laptops with which they could work at home should they choose, coupled with a monthly bud­get of one hundred yuan to cover “telecommuting”—­phone and Internet costs.21 In her analy­sis of the flexibility initiative, Melissa noted that employees who had participated in the initiative had higher employee engagement scores than ­those who had not, which led her to conclude that “­People who ­participated in the Flexible Work Arrangement in fy08 are 14% more engaged than ­those who ­didn’t.” She pasted this sentence into one of the Power­Point slides presented in the final review meetings of the hcs Program. She erroneously assumes correlation indicates causation, attributing the increased engagement to the flexibility initiative. Moreover, she implicitly states that engagement is directly linked to employee retention, giving the slide the title of “Further leverage the positive impact of flexibility to attract and retain the right p ­ eople.” Through the coupling of two hazy associations—­flexibility with engagement and engagement with employee retention—­Melissa extrapolates a causal relationship between the flexibility initiative and employee retention. The association of engagement with employee retention was also made explicit in two questions on the employee engagement survey that w ­ ere highlighted in the Power­Point pre­sen­ta­tion. ­These expressly concerned employee retention. In the survey, all China-­based employees ­were asked to respond to the following statements: “It would take a lot to get me to leave my com­pany” and “I rarely think about leaving my com­pany.” They could choose from the set responses of “favorable,” “neutral,” and “unfavorable.” The results ­were included in the pre­sen­ta­tion, which provoked lively discussion among the con­sul­tants who sat on the hcs Program committee. 60 

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A three-­way discussion arose between consulting man­ag­ers Tim Deng and Benjamin Ma and hcs leader Melissa about the increasing inclination among se­nior man­ag­ers to leave the com­pany, squarely targeting the issue of employee retention.

Tim: In greater China the key point is compensation [remuneration] structure. . . . ​not much done to improve it. A lot of ­people lost to Tech Consulting and Manage Co.22 Melissa: But according to the employee engagement survey, pay has dropped in importance. Benjamin: The survey asks the same questions ­every year on pay, and ­there are no changes. So ­people think “give up—it makes no use!” [sic]. For Tim, the sentiments of se­nior man­ag­ers are related to remuneration—­ that Systeo does not pay as well as its competitors and that this has affected se­nior man­ag­ers’ feelings ­toward the com­pany. Melissa responds with evidence drawn from the survey indicating that employees place decreasing emphasis on remuneration to suggest, in contrast to Tim, that retention is not related to remuneration. Her response can be read as an attempt to bat away the association with finance—­Tim’s relating of employee retention to financial incentives. However, she is trumped by Benjamin, who undermines her claim by dislodging the relationship that is central to Melissa’s point—­that of engagement and employee retention. His point is that we cannot infer ­whether pay is or is not impor­tant to employees, since employees have already worked out that the employee engagement survey is not concerned with incentivization to stay, b ­ ecause if it ­were, then pay structures would change. In short, he is arguing that employees are aware that employee engagement is not related to employee retention. Despite Benjamin’s assertion, the hcs Program for the following year is planned in exactly the same vein. In other words, employee engagement continues to be narrated as being related to the sentiments of subjects around staying at the com­pany, as opposed to their capacity to produce total shareholder return. A closer look at the concept of total shareholder return is required to illuminate the transformation that is under­gone in the movement from total shareholder return to employees’ commitment to Systeo. Total shareholder return is traditionally used to mea­sure the per­for­mance of securities, not High Performers  

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the per­for­mance of ­labor. tsr captures the total value of capital that is returned to investors ­after a specified period. But the application of tsr in the hcs Program points to a completely dif­fer­ent object of analy­sis—­the per­for­mance of the hcs Program as a tool of “culture.” So a concept that has traditionally been used to mea­sure the per­for­mance of financial assets is apprehended to mea­sure the efficacy of Systeo culture to acculturate ­labor. But this conceptual application is more than a substitution of scales. It also sets the terms of acculturation. That is to say, it alters the ontological basis on which ­labor is configured. It is by using total shareholder return to mea­sure the efficacy of corporate culture to “engineer” the desired subjects that financialization is enacted—­the desired subject is constructed as a financial asset. The equivalence drawn between l­abor and capital in the act of financialization engenders what I term an “ontological takeover”—­the importing of the ontology of financial capital to redefine the ontological foundations of ­labor.23 ­Labor is not simply mea­sured by recourse to mea­ sures of financial capital; it is redefined as financial capital. The “balanced scorecard” and the “engagement dial” are devices networked into the knowledge practices of the hcs Program, along with committee members, the employee engagement team, and the in-­house anthropologist, to constitute the socio-­technical foundation of financialization that informs the conditions in which employees are “engineered.” Crucially, ­these devices intervene in the operations of management, as much as providing a vehicle of narration for management, to permit the simultaneous per­for­mance of one definition of culture and the narration of another. That is to say, by constructing subjects as financial objects, which engenders an ontological transformation through socio-­technical means, “culture” is deployed as a tool for producing financial value. But this ontological transformation is obfuscated by an explicit and contemporaneous narrative that suggests an opposing ontology of culture, which suggests that culture is a means of promoting employee loyalty. To state explic­itly to employees that they have an overriding duty ­toward the com­pany’s shareholders is also to state that their interests are subordinated to ­those of shareholders. In short, making the link with financial value calls into question the commitment of Systeo to its employees. And to reveal the shaky commitment that Systeo has ­toward its workforce would, in turn, threaten to (further) dampen employees’ commitment to Systeo. Perhaps the surprise is not that Chinese employees fail 62 

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to exhibit loyalty to Systeo (hence the high turnover), but rather that Systeo’s expatriate management are surprised that ­there is a high turnover. ­After all, Chinese employees are only returning in kind the com­pany’s lack of commitment ­toward them, which, as we ­will see in the chapters that follow, is realized through suppressed wage demands, threats of outsourcing, and layoffs. Thus, I would argue that narratives that stress benevolence, that Systeo cares about its employees, can be read as an attempt to fill the social void that the pursuit of shareholder value engenders. When the chairman of Systeo China, Liu Xing, emphasized that Systeo was not cutting training even in a financial crisis, he was suggesting that Systeo had the long-­term interests of its employees at heart. When its business is built on ­people—­consultancy is the selling and per­for­mance of subjectivities, in par­tic­u­lar, high-­performance ones—it is particularly impor­tant to create a stable institution buttressed with a sense of integrity.

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2

Evaluating ­Humans Financial Rationality and Practices of Performance-­Related Pay

to mark their newly acquired status, recently promoted con­sul­tants are sent for two days of training. End of day one: a question and answer session. Initially reticent, the con­sul­tants are goaded by the se­nior executives. “Come on! Anything. You can ask us anything,” says one. “­Those ­things ­you’ve always wanted to know but ­were afraid to ask!” says another. One con­sul­tant, Jenny Zhai, stands up. “On average, how much do se­nior executives make?” she asks. The se­nior executives shuffle ner­vously in their seats, each one in turn suggesting another is “best placed” to answer the question. Eventually one of them speaks up. “We start at around one million renminbi a year including stock options.”1 Jenny had broken the unspoken rule in the corporate world that you should never ask a colleague about their salary. She was not alone. “Once pay rises and bonuses are official, news travels round the office like wild fire! Every­one knows who got what. Some of them then go to hr and try to push for a raise if ­they’re not happy,” said one expatriate executive who lamented what he saw as Chinese employees’ lack of professionalism. Another expatriate con­sul­tant told me about a website where Chinese professionals employed by foreign companies share their salary details.2 Jenny’s transgression seemed to be emblematic of all that was wrong about per­ for­mance management not just in Systeo’s China practice, but in China in general. Not only did Chinese employees fail to know, let alone adhere to, the formal princi­ples of per­for­mance management, they also did not maintain the system’s tacit assumptions. In that she had asked about salaries publicly, Jenny seemed to be a particularly audacious example. But her American accent indicated a long

sojourn abroad. Perhaps, like many Chinese employees in Systeo, she had even worked in the West. Had Jenny seized a rare opportunity, when the normal rules did not apply, to find out how lucrative her chosen ­career path could be? But perhaps this was not a liminal moment. Although they ­were invited to ask anything, did this, in fact, mean anything except the unspeakable? A few months ­later I met Jenny’s “­career counselor,” an expatriate se­nior executive called Catherine. She confirmed that Jenny had spent many years in the States, although she was born in China. Catherine was aghast at Jenny’s “insensitivity,” and said that next time she saw her she would have a word. Given that con­sul­ tants are paid on the basis of per­for­mance, and that per­for­mance, as we ­will see, is mea­sured via managerial practices designed to produce transparency and accountability, why is it problematic for con­sul­tants to talk about how much they are paid? Are se­nior executives paid the most ­because they generate the highest per­for­mance? How can such a claim be substantiated? ­These questions point to the vari­ous assumptions and truth claims that have become naturalized in con­temporary managerial systems for evaluating h ­ uman performance—­“performance management.” The fact that we all submit to t­hese procedures, even if we openly dissent and mock their obvious contradictions, suggests that per­for­mance management has become not only acceptable but also unchallengeable. We are witnessing the creation of a new cultural form, according to anthropologist Marilyn Strathern, who uses the term audit culture to describe this new “culture on the make” (2000, 1). She refers specifically to the audit practices that are used to mea­sure, rank, and coerce ­human per­for­mance, and which are constitutive of modern per­for­mance management systems. The reach of this new culture is impressive. “Rituals of verification,” as accounting scholar ­Michael Power (1997) describes them, have become ubiquitous in public-­and private-­sector organ­izations across the globe. This chapter explores in greater detail how the financialization of l­abor is enacted and operationalized through an examination of per­for­mance management, which has become the desired means of evaluation in most organ­izations, in part ­because of con­sul­tants’ interventions. I examine the pro­cesses of commensuration by which equivalence between l­abor productivity and financial value is produced, and how this is then translated into a notion of “per­for­mance.” The social effects of commensuration w ­ ill Evaluating ­H umans  

65

be emphasized—in par­tic­u­lar, that per­for­mance management is a tool for making certain kinds of corporate subjectivities that are modeled as embodiments of accounting repre­sen­ta­tions. ­Human Accounting

In the 1760s and 1770s, universities across Eu­rope started to introduce written examinations to assess students, who had u ­ ntil then been judged on their capacity for oral debate. Accounting scholar Keith Hoskin describes the seismic pedagogic shift that ensued: “the deciding moment is when students become subject to numerical grading, and so part of a regime of quantifiable ­human accounting, where the numbers both describe your ­actual per­for­mance and imply a truth about your under­lying ‘ability’ ” (Hoskin 1996, 273). Not long ­after, ­these practices of ­human evaluation ­were imported into business, which, ­until around 1800, had only applied techniques of accounting to objects—­goods and monies. Hoskin distinguishes ­human accounting from more general practices of exercising control or surveillance over workers, which have a longer history. For him, what makes this regime novel is that workers are mea­sured in relation to financial per­for­mance. We see in the nineteenth c­ entury the emergence of an “approach which si­mul­ta­neously analyzed both financial and ­human performativity, rendering the interrelated but separable values of products and persons jointly calculable” (Hoskin 1996, 276). When you reappropriate a system, however, it is not only the function that changes; the ­thing that is being worked on changes too. That is to say, not only is accounting a dif­fer­ent beast from it was before the nineteenth ­century; how we see ­human subjects has also changed. Hoskin argues that the inscription of ­humans into accounting systems engendered a new form of disciplinary power: calculation is not only applied to ­human subjects, it is made known to them—­they become subjects who ­ought to be self-­scrutinizing.3 Moreover, this disciplinary gaze does not distinguish between man­ag­ers and workers, governors and governed; all are expected to account for their per­ for­mance with a view to improving ­future productivity. In the previous chapter, we saw how the insertion of h ­ umans into systems of financial reporting can also lead to a fundamental reconceptualization of ­labor. We saw how metrics used to mea­sure capital are also used to assess the “engagement” of l­abor—­financial mea­sures are deployed to 66 

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evaluate the “success” of a proj­ect of acculturation. Consequently, ­labor becomes conceptualized as capital—­human capital. This chapter further interrogates the relationship between l­abor and capital, asking the question: In con­temporary systems of per­for­mance management, how is the productivity of h ­ umans conceptualized and claimed? This question cuts to the heart of what con­sul­tants do. The dizzying array of dif­fer­ent divisions, titles, and proj­ects hides the overarching unity of Systeo’s expertise—to create high per­for­mance through managerial practices that mea­sure the productivity of individual employees. Melissa Thompson, who led the ­Human Capital Strategy Program discussed in chapter 1, once described a proj­ect where she designed a per­for­mance dashboard for a client. Installed on employees’ computers, the dashboard referred to a screen that pops up on login, displaying individual per­for­mance metrics to date and reminding you what training you have taken or need to take soon. Providing a visual snapshot of per­for­mance, and how you can improve it, was supposed to act as a spur to productivity; the dashboard was a means of “empowering” employees to monitor themselves. But how do con­sul­tants know ­whether their practices work? To put it bluntly, they d ­ on’t. They train their clients to adopt new managerial practices and accompanying technologies. They “benchmark” per­for­mance prior to adoption, and then mea­sure the “improvement” post-­adoption. But knowing ­whether employees actually become more productive in the long term, and w ­ hether any improvement is due to the dashboard or to any other system they implement, is hard to substantiate. One might expect that the ambiguous efficacy of t­hese per­for­mance “solutions” would inhibit their take-up. The vast lit­er­a­ture concerning the discourses and practices of h ­ uman per­for­mance that have colonized orga­ nizational life would suggest other­wise. For example, the aforementioned work on audit culture, and associated research on “new managerialism,” has shown how per­for­mance indicators, target setting, and policies of “best practice” have proliferated in the public sector, leading to a fundamental transformation of the workplace.4 Professional skill and knowledge have been superseded by an emphasis on external accountability, economic efficiency, and standardization. Employees who w ­ ere once remunerated on the basis of se­niority or tenure find themselves now being “paid for per­ for­mance.” ­These changes are a direct result of imposing market-­oriented practices that ­were borrowed from the private sector on the erroneous Evaluating ­H umans  

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assumption that they “worked” (cf. Shore and Wright 2000). Scholars have noted the prominent role that management con­sul­tants have in this “knowledge transfer.” Governments, universities, and third-­sector organ­ izations have become a lucrative new source of profit for con­sul­tants in the last few de­cades.5 ­These institutions differ considerably from the large corporations that make up management con­sul­tants’ usual clientele, not least in the fact that they are not defined by a profit motive. However, the advice served up to them is remarkably similar. Techniques of per­for­mance management that ­were originally designed for profit-­seeking companies, typically ­those floated on the stock exchange, have been repackaged as practices of efficiency writ large. While productivity once denoted the relationship between input and output, now it refers to economic activity that can be mea­sured, made vis­i­ ble, and thus is amenable to panoptical control. Indeed, the fact that productivity is often replaced by the term per­for­mance is a reminder that what ­matters ­today is not what you do, but what gets seen. Making productivity observable and knowable has gone hand-­in-­hand with an increased emphasis on accountability (Power 1997). Per­for­mance management is often implemented on the basis that it ­will allow an external entity—­shareholders, man­ag­ers, students, customers, patients—to judge w ­ hether a ser­vice provides value for money. However, erp systems, the technologies that facilitate per­for­mance mea­sure­ment, are extremely expensive. Moreover, once in place any potential gain in productivity that might result from the implementation of ­these systems is offset by the substantial administrative costs of ­running them. We find that while the rhe­toric of monitoring is one of saving costs, the implementation of monitoring is costly. So what, then, are employees being made accountable for? According to anthropologists Cris Shore and Susan Wright, in discourses of “new managerialism” in the United Kingdom (and similarly “new public management” in the United States), accountability is presented as a virtue in and of itself. Along with “transparency,” “standards,” and “responsibility,” accountability is part of a set of values that have gained currency in recent years, are difficult to oppose, and have had profound material impact. When they speak about “audit culture,” scholars are referring to an ethos of governance that has served to entrench per­for­mance management as the hallmark of a professionalized, modernized organ­ization across all sectors.

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The central contradictions of this movement have been well docu­ mented—­not least in that per­for­mance management creates a veritable straitjacket of h ­ uman action that is completely at odds with the responsible, autonomous, entrepreneurial subject the system purports to create. Critics have also noted the deleterious effects that the pervasive orientation ­toward monitoring and evaluating individual per­for­mance has on preexisting social relations.6 The contribution I seek to make h ­ ere, on the other hand, does not focus on the institutional and social changes brought on by practices and values of audit. To some extent, this reflects the vantage point of my observations; my access was to per­for­mance management experts and management con­sul­tants, not the organ­izations that receive the expertise. But more importantly, I consider that it is not enough to look at the destructive effects of ­these managerial practices. We also need to look at what they produce. We cannot take the language of per­for­mance, and the claims embedded in that language, for granted. Some of the most “self-­ evident” parts of per­for­mance management are, in fact, highly ambiguous if not misleading. One might assume that practices of efficiency save money; in fact, they do not.7 Similarly, I ­will argue that we cannot assume a priori that we know what is being incentivized by per­for­mance management. Indeed, my approach deconstructs concepts such as incentivization and performance-­related pay, which are taken as read by even the most trenchant critics of per­for­mance management, including anthropologists decrying audit culture. We need to ask: What kind of work does per­for­ mance management do, conceptually? How are claims about productivity produced by the implementation of per­for­mance management? In short, we need to consider the stakes of per­for­mance management. Investigating Per­for­mance Management

In addition to installing the “technical” systems of per­for­mance management, management con­sul­tants have been instrumental in establishing an imperative for t­ hese practices in the first place and legitimizing their ongoing reproduction.8 It is this blend of technocratic practice and the “soft” work of creating managerial knowledge that makes per­for­mance management such an intriguing object of analy­sis. When unsaid expectations surrounding the evaluation of per­for­mance are not fulfilled, the coherency of this

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socio-­technical system is questioned. Recall again the assertion that per­ for­mance management is “not working” in Systeo China, raised in chapter 1. To recapitulate, it was found that man­ag­ers ­were not following the official protocols when evaluating subordinates, and lower-­level employees often failed to write their per­for­mance objectives.9 One potential line of inquiry, one that expatriate management assumed to be the basis of my research, would be to examine what is culturally specific about how Chinese employees understand per­for­mance management. That was not my approach.10 In this chapter I take the “Chinese” failure to practice per­for­ mance management “correctly” as an opportunity to make audible the unsaid princi­ples of per­for­mance management and analyze how this system of ­human evaluation works in practice. Given their claim to be experts who turn their clients into “high-­ performance businesses,” the inefficacy of per­for­mance management in-­ house was not taken lightly. One could go so far as to say that the prob­lems with per­for­mance management inside Systeo produced a kind of existential crisis. If they did not know how to implement per­for­mance management, what did they know? The ­Human Capital Strategy Program, the initiative of high per­for­mance I examined in the previous chapter, recognized the need to act. In the official report that reviewed the 2008 program, it was recommended that “the clarity of [per­for­mance] objectives and vis­i­ble links to corresponding reward must be further established to improve Per­ for­mance Management.” A new subprogram, the Effective Per­for­mance Management subprogram of which I was a member, was created the following year to carry out the recommendations. Sensing an appetite among se­nior leadership to try something dif­fer­ent, I proposed a supplementary plan of action—­ethnographic research, in collaboration with the com­pany. How I presented the research proj­ect would be critical, especially since the subjects of hiring, firing, and pay w ­ ere all considered highly sensitive. The stakes ­were high, for this proj­ect not only constituted an inquiry into how productivity is evaluated, but was a main strategy for obtaining greater access—­I had planned to use this research proj­ect as a springboard for negotiations to interview, and therefore visit, con­sul­tants at client sites. As I discovered not long ­after my arrival, con­sul­tants are not usually found in Systeo offices, but rather are based at the workplaces of their clients. Per­ for­mance management would be the key to extending my study from the internal workings of Systeo to the consultancy work it practices. 70 

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In our discussions I described the research as finding out “why and how per­for­mance management is not operating effectively in Systeo China.” I was advised early on that the format I chose would be crucial. So I presented my research proj­ect as a business proposal—­akin to ­those submitted to their clients. This entailed adhering to consulting conventions. A Word document would not do. Instead, my proposal took the form of a Power­Point slideshow, complete with lse logo, bullet points, and charts. I sent it to the hr director, David Winters.11 He would then broker my introduction to the highest level of management and my ultimate gatekeepers—­ the top se­nior executives of the consulting practice.With the proposal out of my hands, t­ here was nothing to do but wait. Months passed and I grew increasingly anxious. Fi­nally, in November 2008, I had responses from all the se­nior executives and had gained access to the client sites of two of Systeo’s major clients. The se­nior executives agreed to a research agenda that consisted of one-­on-­one interviews with con­sul­tants, work shadowing and observation, and access to the final per­for­mance evaluation meetings at the end of the fiscal year. Having maneuvered my way up the Systeo hierarchy, I then learned to move back down again, via the proj­ect man­ag­ers who run the day-­to-­day operations of consulting proj­ects, and fi­nally to the lower-­level con­sul­tants who formed the bulk of my “research collaborators.”12 In total I interviewed forty-­two con­sul­tants, who ranged from the most ju­nior level to se­nior executives, fourteen back-­office workers in Systeo’s shared ser­vice center in Dalian, and three employees in its it outsourcing and business pro­cess outsourcing divisions. In addition, I carried out formal and informal interviews with several members of the hr department, who or­ga­nize and chair the final per­for­mance evaluation meetings, where pay, bonuses, and layoffs are deci­ded.13 Altogether I spent six weeks at the client sites, where I carried out semistructured interviews that had a general focus on per­for­mance management but invariably would stray onto the subject of consulting work at t­hese client sites. As such, the connections between the internal practice of per­for­mance management and the external practice of making high per­for­mance became apparent.

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The Art of Setting Objectives

“You need to write smart objectives.” So claimed Jessica Hu, a ju­nior con­ sul­tant in the Orga­nizational Per­for­mance division. Vivacious and sharp-­ witted, Jessica had joined Systeo in 2006, having graduated from the prestigious Qinghua University in Beijing with ba and ma degrees. She was explaining the pro­cess of writing per­for­mance goals, “objectives,” which is required of all employees. When she said “smart,” I thought she meant intelligent, prescient, relevant. In fact, she was referring to an acronym: “They should be Specific, so you c­ an’t just say ‘I want to improve my level [biaoxian],’ and they should be Mea­sur­able, which means ‘Can it be counted [liang hua]?’ . . .” A “good objective” also needs to be “Achievable,” “Realistic,” and “Time-­constrained.” It was hard to argue against this prescription, which, by its formulation, invites binary thinking. Who thinks it is a good idea to write vague, imprecise, unachievable, unrealistic, and untimed objectives? That w ­ ouldn’t be smart. She thought the easiest way to explain how per­for­mance management works would be to show me “the system” (xitong)—­the specialist it system for per­for­mance management. She clicked on a button labeled “smart.” Up popped a box explaining what the acronym stood for. That employees needed reminding suggested that writing smart objectives was not, in fact, intuitive. Winnie Wang, one of the hr staff, explained that ­there ­were two types of objectives—­annual objectives (overarching ­career goals) and proj­ect objectives. For con­sul­tants, working life consists of a succession of clients, and thus one proj­ect ­after another—­hence con­sul­tants report to a proj­ect man­ag­er rather than a line man­ag­er. For each proj­ect, con­sul­tants write a new set of objectives, which must be approved by the proj­ect man­ag­er to ensure that they are commensurate with the objectives of the proj­ect. In addition, employees need to ensure their objectives relate to key areas of “leadership.” The idea is to demonstrate how your per­for­mance contributes to, and reflects, the firm’s strategic direction. This might sound like highfalutin stuff; in practice it engendered the mundane and guided pro­cess of selecting from drop-­down boxes. Jessica is presented with a list of ten options that delineate how an objective relates to the key area of leadership she has selected, from which she chooses three or four. In other words, how your objective can be said to, say, create value for the firm is already circumscribed by the system. Her “­career counselor,” a mentor in other 72 

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terms, told her it was impor­tant not to choose too many options. If you do, then it is likely, come review time, that you ­will not “meet expectations.” Jessica’s ­career counselor had reminded her that, apropos smart, objectives must be achievable. Meeting expectations, rather than targets, was the official terminology for achieving goals that cannot be measured—­so-­called “soft kpis” (key per­for­mance indicators). The language of per­for­mance management, which stresses that employees “own” their per­for­mance and that they are the ones who “set objectives,” suggests that employees are judged by standards of conduct they choose themselves. This point is frequently used to illustrate the “self-­ empowerment” of the system (Shore and Wright 2000). However, the practice of writing objectives shows that what is considered “per­for­mance” is actually predetermined. “Self-­chosen” objectives in fact require approval from higher up the hierarchy, ­whether officially from your proj­ect man­ ag­er, or informally from your ­career counselor.14 ­There are other, “technical” constraints. An objective that does not relate to the firm’s strategy in a preset manner is not counted. It cannot be input into the system. Far from choosing how you are judged, we find the imposition of the same external criteria on all employees. This not only assuages fears of subjectivity, made evident by the many interviewees who felt the need to explain the “objectivity” of the system, it also ensures the possibility of comparison. Even if a con­sul­tant meets all her targets or “expectations,” that does not mean she ­will necessarily get a top evaluation. What m ­ atters is how she performs in relation to ­others. In May of each year, the firm holds its annual per­for­mance review of the entire workforce. Employees are categorized by level and division. For each category, a “rank and rate” meeting is held involving hr staff and the ­career counselors of ­every single employee being reviewed. In addition to providing advice and support, ­career counselors must act as counsel, advocating on the behalf of their counselee. ­These meetings could last as long as three hours. One se­nior executive, Bob Wu, joined one meeting remotely. Bob was representing Helen, a se­nior man­ag­er in one of the systems implementation divisions. He had put his phone on speaker. Sitting in his cubicle, he listened to the counselors of other “candidates” before putting forward his “testimony” on Helen’s per­for­mance. Once all the counselors had given their defense, the merits of each candidate ­were discussed. When asked for his opinion on Jeremy, another candidate, Bob stuttered, “Well, I d ­ on’t Evaluating ­H umans  

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know him, uh . . . ​I’ve never met him.” Another counselor—­American expatriate Brian Kelly—­jumped in. “Bob, Bob, Bob, let me stop you ­there. The [rank and rate] pro­cess is . . .” Clearly flustered, Bob replied, “Well, ­don’t ask me what I think then. My ranking is Karen number one, Helen number two, Jeremy number three, Paul number four . . . ​based on what I heard.” Bob’s frustration seemed perfectly understandable: How can you be asked to give an opinion about the per­for­mance of a person you have never even met before? Bob was also Helen’s proj­ect man­ag­er, and thus he had firsthand experience of working with her. By contrast, he knew very few of the other candidates, unsurprising given that t­here ­were hundreds of con­sul­tants in this division. However, what Bob did not realize was the rarity of his situation; only a handful of con­sul­tants I interviewed had counselors who w ­ ere also their proj­ect man­ag­ers. Se­nior and experienced, ­career counselors w ­ ere supposed to be impartial experts on the princi­ples of per­for­mance management, akin to ­lawyers who represent their clients on the basis of their knowledge of l­egal princi­ples. Knowing the person you represent is incidental, not required, and ideally avoided. Brian had interrupted Bob to remind him that counselors are being asked to compare employees strictly on w ­ hether they had met their objectives; that is, he stressed how per­for­mance is qualified. By carefully circumscribing what counts as per­for­mance and ensuring ­these limits are applied across the board, the subjectivity of the counselor’s judgments can be removed. At least that is the rationale. Invariably, though, the persuasive powers of your counselor can come into play. What if your counselor can talk you up? The relationship between counselor and counselee can also have an influence. What if your counselor dislikes you? It is apparent that expunging the subjective dimensions is not so easy. Yet this is not necessarily perceived as problematic, for it is the act of ranking that ­matters. By placing employees on a numerical ordinal scale, the entirely subjective pro­cess of evaluating ­human per­for­mance can be performed as if it ­were an objective pro­cess. As if per­for­mance could be objectively mea­sured. Anthropologist Jane Guyer has made a number of fascinating and impor­tant observations about numerical ordinal rankings, which have proliferated in recent years. First, although ranking is based on the assessment of several criteria (through which equivalence between entities is established), it produces a singular scale of value—­numerical order—in 74 

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which the values of t­hese criteria converge and dis­appear.15 Per­for­mance management invokes multiple princi­ples of evaluation, of which meeting objectives is—as we ­will see—­just one; however, from the numerical order, all we know is that Karen is better than Helen, who is better than Jeremy, and so on. Moreover, we find that more than the values of the assessed criteria dis­appear from view; the values of criteria excluded from the assessment are also invisible. For example, that Karen might be an amenable person to work with is not, ­under the princi­ples of per­for­mance management, reflected in the ranking. In short, ranking—­a par­tic­u­lar pro­cess of commensuration—is the subsumption of other scales of value by numerical ordinal value.16 Furthermore, Guyer reminds us that ranking also produces new hierarchies of value, noting the obvious example of universities that claim social prestige ­because they are top-­ranking institutions. A similar pro­cess is at work in Systeo. Once ranked, the candidates ­were rated. The employees ranked in the top 10 ­percent are rated as outstanding, and as a result receive the highest bonus and “per­for­mance equity” (Systeo shares).17 At the opposite end of the scale, t­ hose in the bottom 10 ­percent are rated as “below peers” and are laid off, although this term is consciously avoided. Instead, hr staff and consulting se­nior executives frequently referred to the lowest performers as “managed attrition” who ­were “managed out.” ­These terms are in conformity with the terminology of this system of evaluation—­performance management. Between ­these two extremes, employees may be rated as “significantly above peers,” “above peers,” or “consistent with peers.” Your rating is not an absolute judgment of your per­for­mance. That is to say, employees find their individual per­for­mance evaluation depends on the per­for­mance of ­others. ­There are two t­hings worth noting. First, per­for­ mance is never absolutely defined in this set of evaluation procedures. Like the business of making high-­performance organ­izations (see chapter  1), evaluating the per­for­mance of employees is characterized by the practice of making classifications from which other knowledge claims can be made or implied. By virtue of being ranked in the top 10 ­percent, you are seen as “outstanding,” as opposed to outstanding per­for­mance being the reason you are ranked in the top 10 ­percent. Second, the imperative of per­for­ mance management—­which I have demonstrated does not produce absolute claims about performance—is to create competition, not generate fair repre­sen­ta­tions of productivity. The threat of being laid off as a result Evaluating ­H umans  

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of your relative performance—­often termed the pro­cess of “[­going] up or out”—­means that con­sul­tants find themselves in a highly pressurized work environment in which their colleagues are also their competitors. Billability: The King of Mea­sures

So far my analy­sis in this chapter has covered the official procedures of per­for­mance management, based mainly on interview data. Participant-­ observation of the “rank and rate” meetings provided other crucial insights. Through ­these meetings I found out that the meeting of objectives was not the only criterion of assessment. For some employees, “billability” was also paramount. Billability was the mea­sure that could override all other per­ for­mance mea­sures. Numerically quantifiable, billability was considered a “hard kpi.” Speaking about the ranking procedure, an employee from hr, Winnie Wang, told me, “If we have two con­sul­tants, and every­thing ­else is the same but one has higher billability than the other, the one with the higher billability ­will go up.” She raised her hand to underscore the point. Like the advertising agency workers who form the subject of Sam Ladner’s discussion on the postindustrial timescape, con­sul­tants at Systeo “­labor ­under a unique time regime: their employers bill clients for each hour of work” (Ladner 2009, 286). The number of hours an individual con­sul­tant spends “on proj­ect,” that is, assigned to a consulting proj­ect, is termed his/ her “billable hours.” This number is then fed into the following equation, which is used to calculate billability. Billable hours × 100

Total hours worked

To rec­ord each con­sul­tant’s billable hours and to calculate the total number of man-hours (of a proj­ect team) to be billed to each client, all con­sul­tants must submit a time report by the nineteenth of e­ very month, in time for the end-­of-­month accounting reconciliations. In their induction training, con­sul­tants are told of the consequences should they fail to meet the deadline: “All employees are responsible for submitting timely, accurate, and complete time reports. Individuals who fail to submit on time three times in one year w ­ ill not be eligible for the outstanding rating.” The exclusion of employees who fail to submit their time reports from the outstanding rating 76 

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­Table 2.1:  Con­sul­tants’ billability targets by level

Level of Con­sul­tant

Billability Target

Ju­nior con­sul­tant

86%

Mid-­level con­sul­tant

90%

Man­ag­er

75%

Se­nior man­ag­er

70%

supports the assertion that meeting objectives is not, in fact, the only basis upon which the evaluation of per­for­mance is carried out. Although constructed as a metric relating to time (the proportion of time a con­sul­tant is deployed on proj­ect), billability was interpreted as con­sul­tants’ capacity to generate revenue—it is transformed into a quality of persons. Moreover, the com­pany sought to regulate this capacity by establishing a norm, a numerical target, which was enforced through sanctions imposed via per­for­mance management. Winnie told me that con­sul­tants are set a billability target that corresponds to their level, revealing the exact numbers in the form of a t­ able that she wrote on a nearby whiteboard (see ­table 2.1).18 So for ju­nior con­sul­tants at least 86  ­percent of their working time should be revenue producing. Winnie confirmed that for ju­nior con­sul­ tants and mid-­level con­sul­tants: “If they miss their target it ­will certainly affect their rating,” while for man­ag­ers and se­nior man­ag­ers billability was less significant, as shown by comparatively lower targets, although this was not b ­ ecause ­there was less emphasis on revenue production in their roles. Man­ag­ers and se­nior man­ag­ers ­were expected to support se­nior executives in the task of selling Systeo’s ser­vices to prospective clients—­time that was defined as nonbillable since it could not be billed to an external party. Se­nior executives are not set a billability target, since they are judged solely on their ability to generate new business. This underscores the point that all con­sul­tants are evaluated on their ability to generate revenue for Systeo, some more explic­itly (se­nior executives) and some less explic­itly (ju­nior con­sul­tants). For se­nior executives, the failure to meet sales targets is taken particularly seriously—­they are laid off. I first heard of this when I revealed to Catherine Xi, a se­nior executive based in Shanghai, my assumption that Evaluating ­H umans  

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se­nior executives could not be fired. She quickly put me in my place, telling me, “In the financial crisis many se­nior executives have been cut!” Se­nior executives are not only evaluated on their ability to generate revenue; their employment depends on generating revenue. She also told me that the flip side is ostensibly unqualified freedom if you meet this stringent requirement. When I asked her why she chooses to work for Systeo, she said, “it’s not for the money,” explaining she could earn more working “in industry” (meaning a blue-­chip com­pany). Rather, she chooses to work at Systeo for the flexibility that comes with being a con­sul­tant. “If you bring in the revenue, then you d ­ on’t have to come in to work at all, no one w ­ ill care that you are not in the office,” said Catherine. Perhaps ­because they ­were so explic­itly judged on their capacity to create revenue, se­nior executives understood why billability was so impor­tant for Systeo. In a speech given by Liu Xing, the director of Systeo China, he said, “A common question I get from con­sul­tants is, ‘why you [sic] press me so hard on billability?’ In order to answer this question you need to ­understand Systeo’s financial results.” Or more precisely, con­sul­tants needed to know how Systeo’s financial results contributed to evaluations of Systeo’s per­for­mance. Melissa Johnson, the ­Human Capital Strategy Program leader I introduced in chapter  1, had claimed that Systeo had a billability culture. When I put this to a se­nior executive, Gary Deng, he stated baldly, “We promote billability so [that] Systeo’s share price goes up.” And in internal training sessions (see chapter 4), con­sul­tants ­were told of the importance of having a “shareholder mind-­set,” which translated into a preoccupation with “generating cashflow.” In their analy­sis of how accounting metrics are used to translate orga­ nizational changes into shareholder value, Mahmoud Ezzamel and his coauthors describe how management at the high-­tech multinational Conglom pursued a range of initiatives to elevate share valuation, which circled around three themes, the first being “pursuing consistent growth in revenues and earnings in the face of global economic fluctuations” (Ezzamel, Willmott, and Worthington 2008, 119). They go on to say that “clear linkages ­were forged between the per­for­mance of Conglom’s share price and expectations of ­future growth in earnings” (121), and describe the vari­ous ways in which metrics of accountability are used to help the com­pany “leverage its assets to raise the share price” (122). Similarly at Systeo, con­sul­tants, who are construed as “­human capital” or “assets” (chapter 1), find their 78 

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capabilities being leveraged through a per­for­mance mea­sure, billability, deemed to demonstrate their capacity to generate revenue, which is, in turn, connected to the imperative to keep Systeo’s share price high. That is to say, they are incentivized through their individual per­for­mance appraisal to contribute to positive repre­sen­ta­tions of profitability that investors look for when carry­ing out share valuation. Grace Wu, who worked in hr, constantly monitored con­sul­tants’ billability rates, producing monthly billability reports that she submitted to the se­nior executives. For con­sul­tants whose billability rate was significantly off target, it was her job to “track the individual nature of each case, [find out] what is the root cause.” She told me of one con­sul­tant whose billability of zero ­percent had to be signed off by the se­nior executive of his division so that his billability would not be considered during his appraisal. She stressed that this was an exceptional case but declined to provide any further details. Although hr staff who facilitate the rank and rate meetings acknowledge the relationship between billability and per­for­mance evaluations, this metric was conspicuously missing from the hr lit­er­a­ture handed out at induction, or published on the com­pany intranet, which explained to employees how per­for­mance management works. Winnie confirmed that the m ­ atter was not addressed in any official communication. Rather, it was common knowledge that a con­sul­tant’s billability would impact their evaluation. Billability was certainly mentioned frequently by con­sul­tants, but not always implying a direct relationship to per­for­mance evaluation. One proj­ect man­ag­er, Terence Wang, stated unequivocally that “billability cannot affect [your] rating,” while analyst Anna Li admitted she was somewhat unclear about the relationship between billability and her per­for­mance evaluation, and claimed that “It’s not a prob­lem if [your] billability is low.” Even the employees who knew that billability was significant for their appraisal could not always explain the exact mechanism of how it affected appraisal. But t­hose who did proffer more specific definitions often emphasized the financial aspect of billability rather than the temporal dimension. While at one of Systeo’s client sites I met a con­sul­tant who defined billability as “your ability to bring cash back or return a profit to the com­ pany,” echoing the se­nior executive’s comment about the link between billability and Systeo’s share price. He told me he did not worry about billability b ­ ecause he was “on proj­ect,” and therefore his billability was consistently Evaluating ­H umans  

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calculated at 100 ­percent. By contrast, the con­sul­tants I met in the Beijing office ­were conscious that they ­were not on proj­ect, and so ­were not clocking any billable hours. To use com­pany terminology, they ­were “idle.” Eric Chen summarized the difference between the two statuses in the following manner: “If you spend a few years on proj­ect your salary ­will double compared to if you spend that time in the office; you see being idle is both hard to endure and also hard to get out of, you can get stuck t­ here.” He spoke of the ­mental suffering (tongku) of being idle. He had heard that an employee at a competitor had committed suicide a­ fter being idle for a year. Through such narratives, con­sul­tants revealed the pressure they ­were subjected to in order to create shareholder value. Market Devices and the Per­for­mance of Shareholder Value

Idle con­sul­tants ­were reminded of their declining billability by a software program—­Scheduler—­a kind of work calendar in which their past, pres­ ent, and ­future client proj­ects are displayed. When they open up the program, the first page that pops up is a list of their metrics, with the two most critical metrics given prime position in the center of the page: my current billability my year to date billability For a system described as a scheduling aid for employees, it is noticeable that the first t­ hing that is presented is a numerical mea­sure of productivity to date. “My current billability” is not a real-­time mea­sure but rather refers to billability calculated on the basis of billable hours totaled in the last two months. In other words, a system that purportedly disseminates information about their f­ uture actually emphasizes the productive capacities of employees evidenced in the past. ­Whether they are on proj­ect or idle, all con­sul­tants are required to submit time sheets, as enforced by the aforementioned penalty. Idle con­ sul­tants bill their time to self-­study or proposal work—­both considered nonbillable activities. Of the two, the idle con­sul­tants ­were encouraged to occupy themselves with proposal work, which involved writing sales proposals tailored to potential clients, rather than spending their days taking computer-­based training courses that made up self-­study. This was for two reasons: if the proposal was successful, then ­these con­sul­tants would be 80 

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chosen to staff the new proj­ect and so would transition to on-­project status, and also b ­ ecause writing proposals allowed them to meet other employees, which would expand their social networks within the com­pany. But the allocation of proposal work was not a demo­cratic pro­cess, nor was ­there always enough proposal work to go around, so invariably some idle con­sul­tants would bill their time to self-­study. This was made apparent not by observing con­sul­tants taking training in the office, but rather by their absence. When asked to talk about their time off proj­ect, two con­sul­tants disclosed that their hr rep had discouraged them from billing their time to self-­study, and instead advised them to take sick leave or vacation. This was with the explicit intention of increasing their billability. Billing their time to self-­study would increase the number of standard working hours in the billability equation, thus decreasing their billability, while sick leave or vacation would reduce the number of standard working hours, thus having the opposite effect. More probing revealed that the manipulation of billability, by coercing employees into ­either falsely declaring illness or taking vacation, was an open secret within the com­pany. It reveals the effort and collaboration that are required to construct “on proj­ect” and “idle” as diametrically opposed statuses in Systeo—­the effort required to make a model of efficiency perform. Within this model, efficiency is narrowly defined as the production of value, and in diametric opposition, inefficiency or “idleness,” as it is called in Systeo, is defined as the failure to produce value. Con­sul­tants are incentivized to perform ­these definitions, an example of what Michel Callon terms the performativity of economics. In his book The Laws of the Markets, Callon argues that economics “performs, shapes and formats the economy, rather than observing how it functions” (Callon 1998b, 2). That is to say, economic models invite or create specifications of be­hav­ior as opposed to acting as accurate descriptions of be­hav­ior; that is, they intervene in the world they claim to depict. “On proj­ect” and “idle” do not depict the ­actual productive capacities of workers, but rather are constructed as contrasting images of worker be­hav­ior, the former aligned with work, the latter with leisure, through knowledge practices that incorporate market devices, namely the Scheduler program.19 As an intern in the strategy division observed, if you have low billability, then “it looks like y­ ou’re not working.” This depends on what counts as work. Far from fulfilling the image of the shirking worker, “idle” con­sul­tants Evaluating ­H umans  

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often put in long hours to formulate sales proposals, a pro­cess that involves tight deadlines and a poor “work–­life balance.” To create a sales proposal, a team of idle con­sul­tants would first sit in a meeting room to brainstorm ideas, which they scribble onto whiteboards and flip charts. Then they return to the open area to document their scribblings using Power­Point, a painstaking and time-­consuming pro­cess involving multiple rounds of formatting, often involving overtime at home, before being approved by the se­nior executive in command. It is apparent that proposal work is not necessarily less pressurized, detailed, or demanding than proj­ect work, and that the labeling of workers who ­were not posted to a proj­ect as “idle” is a misrepresentative characterization. It is only by instructing con­sul­tants to take sick leave or vacation that an appearance of innate laziness and indolence can be constructed—­a post hoc rationalization of the designation “idle.” Indeed, the term idle does much to obfuscate the definition of efficiency that con­sul­tants propagate. It has ­little to do with con­sul­tants’ embodied be­hav­ior. Rather, they are idle in the sense that their revenue-­ generating capacities are not activated. In contrast to a host of anthropological and so­cio­log­i­cal accounts that posit time as a means of producing social discipline (most famously Thompson 1967), I am not asserting an argument of time discipline. In this regard I am proposing an alternative argument to existing analyses of the role of billability in managing knowledge workers that also emphasizes the disciplining effects of time.20 My contention is that the accounting technologies that are designed to track and produce billability (­erp systems) ­are not hyper-­Taylorist, for efficiency, in the sense that Frederick Winslow Taylor meant—­the maximizing of ­labor productivity—is not the objective of ­these devices. Deemed to confer the most added value to the com­pany, ­these con­sul­ tants are rewarded with bonuses that constitute the trickle-­down of their added value. By contrast, low billability is taken to signify a poor per­for­mance of revenue generation. Th ­ ese con­sul­tants who have been idle for extended periods are punished—­they receive a poor per­for­mance rating, which in turn confers a low bonus or no bonus, and the possibility of being laid off. In effect, workers are rewarded in line with their ability to perform revenue generation, which is not defined in relation to real time—it is not referenced to a moving pres­ent—­but rather to reified time. Within the concept of billability, time is posited as an object that can be broken down, 82 

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analyzed, compared, and used as a proxy for worker’s value-­adding per­for­ mance. Time is transformed into a mea­sure of market-­oriented be­hav­ior through the market device of the Scheduler program. The Politics of Evaluation

Initially I presumed that the emphasis on billability was justified by the fact that the client was billed by the hour. In other words, I thought that the abstract entity of the bill code, to which time is billed, was simply a substitute for the physical entity of the client. But attending training for newly promoted man­ag­ers and se­nior man­ag­ers, which is discussed in detail in the chapter 3, I was made aware that this is not the case. Rather, contracts are negotiated on a fixed-price basis, so you give the client a quote for a proj­ect, agreeing on how many staff at what experience/skill levels ­will be required. Of course, an estimate of hours required to complete this job is carried out when producing the final quotation, but the bargaining that ensues a­ fter the initial quotation is released to the client is such that the original bud­ geted hours can become untenable u ­ nder the final agreed price. Furthermore, staff in China are not paid overtime,21 and they have to work all the hours required to get the job done. Thus we find that while con­sul­tants are selling their time internally, externally they are selling a knowledge-­based product. In other words, billability is not necessarily symptomatic of the way in which contracts are constructed; rather, billability is inextricably linked to the imperative to manage employees according to per­for­mance. As mentioned before, billability is conspicuously absent from Systeo’s official lit­er­a­ture, which gives descriptions and explanations of per­for­ mance management. Why is that the case? One possibility is that such a declaration would mitigate competing claims that per­for­mance management is a meritocratic system of evaluation and a means of realizing “self-­ empowerment”; it would tear away the illusion that employees are in full control of their per­for­mance evaluation, and thus should accept full responsibility for a poor evaluation, which in the worst instance entails being laid off. What I have exposed in this chapter is that while revenue generation is narrated as a quality that con­sul­tants can harness control of, it is, in fact, dependent on f­ actors that are beyond a con­sul­tant’s control—­namely the availability of client proj­ects. One se­nior executive told me that the most common reason a con­sul­tant would have low billability is that they Evaluating ­H umans  

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had been recently hired by Systeo for a position on a specific upcoming proj­ect that never came through, that is, a proj­ect that Systeo eventually did not win the contract for. Their skills may not be a g­ reat match for alternative positions, and consequently they spend much of their time “on the bench”—as idle l­abor. But even though p ­ eople may know that billability does not necessarily reflect per­for­mance, it continues to be used as a key indicator of per­for­mance. I knew of a se­nior man­ag­er who, at the time of my fieldwork, was contemplating being “re-­leveled” (demoted, in layman’s terms) to man­ag­er level ­because her billability is too low. Given the fact that interns in the consulting division understand only billable work to count as work proper, it would appear that employees are quickly to exposed to, and learn, the importance of maintaining high billability. However, the aforementioned comment of Liu Xing, that man­ ag­ers frequently ask him why they are pressured to maintain high billability, suggests that the connection to Systeo’s financial statements (as revealed by him in that comment) is not clearly or sufficiently established, for the reasons I have stated above. While per­for­mance management is narrated to employees as an objective system of procedures and devices to evaluate ­whether they achieve self-­imposed goals, closer examination shows that con­sul­tants are evaluated on the degree to which they perform their designation as revenue generators for the com­pany—­the ­people who produce positive repre­sen­ta­tions of ­future profitability, and thus are deemed to be improving the com­pany’s share valuation. Billability is the distinguishing characteristic of a revenue generator, and the “best” revenue generators are ­those with the highest billability. In chapter 3 we ­will hear more from ­those employees who are defined in diametric opposition to revenue generators, the cost generators of the back office. The emphasis on billability can, however, work against the com­pany’s best interests. For one ­thing, it discourages collaboration between billable and nonbillable employees. For example, within consulting ­there is a team that is dedicated to producing “thought leadership”—­so-­called ­because it apparently produces cutting-­edge research that can be sold to clients or underpins the work Systeo currently provides. This cutting-­edge research involves a lot of googling and rehashing of essays written by other researchers, academic or nonacademic. Th ­ ere is a line of thought leadership they call “Perspectives,” which, as the name suggests, are articles meant to represent Systeo’s take on the issues of the day, for example, risk management, sustainability, 84 

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cost management, and so on. The thought leadership team members do realize that rehashing other ­people’s work is rather pointless and often verges on plagiarism, so they would like to base Perspectives on the experience and knowledge that Systeo con­sul­tants have gleaned from working on the application of, say, risk management in an ­actual situation. This would mean that the thought leadership con­sul­tants and the con­sul­tants who actually carry out work on client sites would have to collaborate. But ­here’s the prob­lem: the former are nonbillable and the latter are billable employees. Thus, billability affects the per­for­mance evaluation of the latter but not the former. Moreover, the former have no bill code to give to the latter. Also, as con­sul­tants, the thought leadership team are a special case in not having their billability assessed. This contributes to the disdain of other con­sul­tants who think that ­these ­people get special treatment but ­don’t make the com­pany any money. This special treatment is conferred by the specific categorizations of t­ hese employees. The thought leadership con­sul­tants are not only categorized as part of the consulting workforce; they are in the strategy ser­vice line. As strategy con­sul­tants they get the highest pay and com­pany perks that are not extended to other employees. For example, they are the only ones who get to go abroad for training e­ very year. Meta­phor­ically, strategy con­sul­tants are the “tip of the spear”22—­not only do they decide on the best strategy for their clients, but seemingly they embody the decision-­making function at Systeo. This meta­phor is used by Systeo employees when describing their own orga­nizational structure. If you imagine the com­pany to be represented by a spear or an arrow, then strategy is represented by the triangular tip of the arrow, while the long, straight, rectangular body represents an accumulation of departments (e.g., it consulting, outsourced workers, back-­office functions) that provide “thrust” to the spear. The split between strategy con­ sul­tants and all other employees can also be likened to the mind/body duality. Strategy con­sul­tants are seen as having intellect and agency, in contrast to it con­sul­tants, the outsourcing workforce, and back-­office functions. In theory, the thought leadership con­sul­tants provide the substantive basis, the knowledge foundation on which Systeo justifies its management consultancy ser­vices to its clients. As the tip of the spear, as the mind that rules the body, they assume primacy over other employees in the com­pany. But in recent years their ability to directly bring in profit has been called into question. Thought leadership con­sul­tants based in London have been recategorized as “enterprise workforce”—­traditionally the domain of Evaluating ­H umans  

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back-­office functions—­and thus moved out of the consulting category. From what I can tell, this is a direct result of their inability to fulfill the primary characteristic and meet the primary objective of consulting work—​to complete work that can be charged to an external entity, a client. Members of this team tell me that e­ very year they have to be given special exemption from billability assessment so that their zero ­percent billability is not counted against them. But, as stated previously, this ­causes consternation among other con­sul­tants, who perceive this as some kind of favoritism. Nevertheless, despite being nonbillable employees, they must still subscribe to the rules that govern the modus operandi—­they must find a bill code to bill their time. Enterprise functions are usually given a fixed code that does not correspond to an external entity (i.e., a client), but rather represents a bud­get or cost code. And con­sul­tants bill their work to a code that is an abstract entity meant to represent the client. Th ­ ese con­sul­tants occupy a gray area between enterprise and consulting: on the one hand they have zero billability (“very enterprise”), while on the other hand their work is all about formulating knowledge to sell to clients (“very consulting”). They are not given fixed codes like enterprise but rather are forced to hunt around, looking for partners who ­will sponsor their work. In other words, they have to win over partners who agree to fund the cost of their cutting-­edge research. So what m ­ atters most in the categorization of employees? What defines a con­sul­tant? Apparently not so much what you do, but the manner in which you affect the books. Unable to directly bring “cash back,” the thought leadership team in Beijing failed to fulfill the most fundamental defining requirement of consulting. As a consequence, this team, like their London counter­parts, is also being “persuaded”23 to become recategorized as enterprise employees. One notable outcome of this transformation w ­ ill be lower long-­term compensation. The case I have outlined above is one example of how difference is created via a par­tic­u­lar ideology, which often goes against intuitive understanding. Within Systeo, a con­sul­tant is defined not by what she or he actually does—­that is, a notion of the substantive content of consulting—­but by how she can recoup the cost of her own existence and produce profit for the com­pany. Almost every­one in the organ­ization is in some way defined or affected by billability: they are billable (e.g., con­sul­tants), they are not billable (e.g., back-­office staff), they monitor billability (se­nior executives), 86 

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or they report billability (hr). The omnipresent aspect of billability reflects the importance it has in the com­pany and the g­ reat emphasis on financial rationality, and shows how this ideology is woven into the fabric of the com­ pany and dictates decision making over practically all other considerations. The Performativity of Per­for­mance Management

You ­will recall one of the findings that led Melissa, the hcs Program lead, to conclude that t­here was a prob­lem with per­for­mance management, namely the “low accountability” of con­sul­tants. This assertion was based on a survey of con­sul­tant attitudes, rather than an examination of their actions. More telling was the fact that 78 ­percent of con­sul­tants had failed to set their per­for­mance objectives. The implication was that the con­sul­tants who had not set objectives ­were not showing responsibility for their own per­for­mance. In this setting we find practicing, evidencing, performing accountability is just as impor­tant as being a high performer. In the previous chapter we saw that the question, posed by me to the Effective Per­for­ mance Management subprogram, of why con­sul­tants did not set objectives was not entertained. It was already assumed that poor communication of per­for­mance evaluation procedures was to blame. One explanation for this fait accompli is that many employees held the view that per­for­mance management, while not a perfect a system, is the best of all pos­si­ble worlds. As one se­nior executive put it, “I d ­ on’t know any alternative, other­wise we would have found it.” Having unshakable conviction in how they practiced per­for­mance management internally helped con­sul­tants to sell Systeo’s expertise to clients. It also created a blind spot in their observations. The procedures and technologies of per­for­mance evaluation ­were immune from critique, not b ­ ecause they w ­ ere flawless but b ­ ecause they reflected the fragile expertise around making high performers. For expatriates, especially t­ hose from North Amer­i­ca and Eu­rope, their conviction about per­for­mance management also reflected a set of cultural assumptions that ­were not shared by their Chinese colleagues. “Pay for per­for­mance” practices as described ­here play on the particularly American phenomenon of linking personal worth to financial worth. Asking someone what they earn is considered taboo b ­ ecause you are indirectly questioning their personal worth. At the same time, t­hose with high salaries are shielded from criticism by the notion that they deserve their riches. In the Evaluating ­H umans  

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United States, and indeed much of the Western world, capitalism is ideologically supported by a master narrative that combines the twin logics of meritocracy and individual empowerment. That the rich are where they are through “hard work” and the poor through “laziness” is a widely held view. As a consequence, wealth is something to be admired, not scorned. By contrast, in China personal worth is not primarily indexed to financial worth, but rather one’s “quality” (suzhi), the moral and ethical values that cannot be reduced to economic value (Hsu 2007; Kipnis 2007). Hence, one can have a very high income, as China’s new rich do, and yet be denigrated as having low suzhi, that is, low personal worth. In chapter  6 I discuss Chinese cultural logics of value and the pro­cesses of status making in the post-­Mao context; ­here I consider what we can learn about per­for­mance management when the cultural assumptions upon which its operation is predicated are not maintained. Although China has a large number of university gradu­ates, many of whom have studied abroad, skilled l­abor with the right “exposure” to global workplaces is still in short supply (Ong 2006a, 2006b).24 ­Those with even a small amount of experience of working for a global com­pany are sought ­after—­they already have substantial bargaining power. Knowing how much their peers are paid only increases their leverage. With no taboo on discussing salaries, Chinese employees can easily obtain this information. Salary information travels quickly between organ­izations as well as within them, since employees are typically well connected to rival companies through their personal and familial networks. Wage differentials between similar employees are harder to sustain as a consequence, which may explain why China has lower gender income in­equality than many countries in Western Eu­rope and the United States. Put differently, wage gaps that are justified as deriving from differences in per­for­mance are “threatened” by employees who do not see salary as a reflection of individual merit. Having information about the ­going “price” in the ­labor market empowers employees. Per­for­mance management is revealed to be an anticompetitive practice that serves to cement employers’ power over their employees. The notion that per­for­mance management is a fair system of economic distribution based on meritocratic values, not just a means of improving efficiency, has been used to ideologically advance its implementation across a range of orga­nizational contexts. “Per­for­mance” explains and justifies why ­people can be paid wildly dif­fer­ent salaries for ­doing the same job. Yet 88 

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this claim is difficult to substantiate. In this chapter and the previous one, I have referred to the fact that per­for­mance, although ubiquitous, is rarely defined. Narratives of per­for­mance suggest that we are dealing with a scale of quality. Closer scrutiny suggests, in fact, that per­for­mance does not refer to a singular value register. You can say that Karen has higher billability than Helen; you can say that Karen has met more expectations than Helen; but ­these two statements are not the same as saying Karen has higher per­ for­mance than Helen. A further pro­cess has to happen—­Karen’s worth must be valued in relation to Helen. Like evaluating restaurants on the basis of their value for money, evaluating ­humans on the basis of per­for­ mance refers to the act of placing them on a scale of worth. Some customers may find The Fat Duck (a restaurant in the United Kingdom with three Michelin stars) gives value for money; ­others may not. Value for money is not an objective quality of restaurants—it is a relationship between dif­fer­ent value scales, a relationship that is calibrated differently by dif­fer­ent ­people. Similarly, per­for­mance is not an objective quality of employees; it is a relative concept. Se­nior executives are paid a starting salary one million renminbi per year ­because they are deemed to have higher per­for­mance than any other group of employees. How then can you have an objective system of mea­sur­ing a relative concept? It is not only impossible, but also irrelevant, since the potency of per­for­ mance management lies not in ­whether it is an objective or subjective system of evaluation. Instead, we should be concerned with how claims about value and worth are produced by techniques of per­for­mance management. In the ethnography presented, we find that per­for­mance is created through the act of ranking and rating, rather than being the basis upon which ranking and rating occur. That is to say, evaluation procedures create the very object they claim to measure—­performance. Per­for­mance management, its episteme, and the accompanying set of socio-­technical practices through which it is enacted, are performative in character. Per­for­mance does not exist outside of per­for­mance management; it is a social real­ity that ensues from its implementation. Consequently, the stakes are high if per­for­mance management is not implemented “correctly.” In addition to failing to keep salary information confidential, I found con­sul­tants showed ­little concern for setting per­for­ mance objectives or for the exact order of procedures, some admitting that they wrote their objectives ­after a proj­ect to ensure they had met all of their Evaluating ­H umans  

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targets. As stated above, the hcs committee judged that, by failing to adhere to evaluation procedures, they ­were not demonstrating accountability. In other words, they felt the values of per­for­mance creation ­were not being performed. I argue, on the other hand, that Chinese employees, by disrupting the operation of per­for­mance management, stymie the very making of per­for­mance. We see, thus, that the performativity of per­for­mance is not a given. Cultural norms and be­hav­iors cement conceptual work that audit practices produce, as well as normalizing their use and replication. At stake is not just Systeo’s value creation, but also its expertise. Chinese con­sul­tants who fail to adhere to the tenets of per­for­mance management might not be able to inculcate the required “mind-­set” among their Chinese clientele who procure ser­vices of “high per­for­mance.”

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3

Reducing Costs Shared Ser­vice Centers, ­Labor, and the Outsourcing Rationale Shared ser­vices and outsourced centers are no longer a radical new idea or simply about cost-­cutting. They have become mainstream business strategies that repeatedly create value for organ­izations beyond cost reduction. —­Deloitte Consulting

facilitated by developments in information and communication technologies (icts), the outsourcing of ser­vice work has expanded rapidly over the last thirty years. It would seem that anything that can go down a line is vulnerable. Not just back-­office administrative work, but also the work of copy editing, day trading, and animation is being shifted to offshore locations, typically in the global South. Consequently, some fear that service-­ based industries in the West ­will suffer the same fate as manufacturing, and that a substantial number of jobs w ­ ill be “lost” to countries with significantly cheaper l­ abor (Ross 2006). The specter of structural unemployment and falling investment translates into rising tensions and insecurities over globalized production, in both “winning” and “losing” countries. Yet technological determinism cannot explain the prolific growth of the global sourcing of back-­office ser­vice work, which has to be understood in the broader context of financialized capitalism; so argue Debra Howcroft and Helen Richardson. Citing recent research that has connected shareholder value ideology, and thus the pursuit of profit maximization above all other concerns (including training and investment in staff), with dramatic shifts in orga­nizational forms, they observe that financialization has led to “large organ­izations becom[ing] fragmented as resources previously seen as central to their operation—­such as the back office—­are reconfigured in order to extract increased surplus” (Howcroft and Richardson 2012, 112). They

examine the increasing popularity of organ­izations to adopt shared ser­vice centers (sscs) to which back-­office work is outsourced, a form of orga­ nizational restructuring facilitated by the standardization of work pro­ cesses. This, in turn, leads to the devaluation of work that had hitherto been seen as skilled and thus high value. Management con­sul­tants are one of the main champions of sscs. Systeo not only advises its clients to take up shared ser­vices structures; it can also set up and run sscs on their behalf. In 2008, 43 ­percent of Systeo’s revenues came from outsourcing ser­vices, a figure that compares well with the 57 ­percent that came from consultancy. Much of the l­abor employed in outsourcing is from so-­called emerging economies; hence 60  ­percent of Systeo’s workforce in China is employed in the outsourcing division, with just 40 ­percent in consultancy. That revenues and workforce for each division are accounted separately reflects the view that consultancy and outsourcing ser­vices are seen as two separate parts of the business. However, ­there are strong reasons why they should be seen in relational terms. For one, consulting consists of a range of ser­vices with the common goal of improving orga­nizational per­for­mance. Outsourcing is one way of achieving this. Second, many of the technologies such as enterprise systems that are required to operationalize an outsourcing arrangement are installed as a consulting ser­vice. Third, ­these technologies, insofar as they produce facts about l­abor productivity or “per­for­mance,” can be used to justify an outsourcing arrangement. That is to say, outsourcing can be a solution to consulting, and consulting can be an enabler to outsourcing. Indeed, organ­izations that hire con­sul­tants to install enterprise systems often subsequently hire them to provide outsourcing ser­vices. Given the breadth of con­sul­tants’ client base, it is perhaps unsurprising to find that over 60 ­percent of Fortune 500 companies have an orga­ nizational structure incorporating sscs (Cacciaguidi-­Fahy et  al. 2002, cited in Howcroft and Richardson 2012). An increasingly marketized public sector has also started to adopt shared ser­vices.1 It is impor­tant to stress that shared ser­vices, like all forms of outsourcing, requires not only the replacement of ­labor but a complete overhaul of work pro­cesses and the orga­nizational structure. “In sscs, business functions that w ­ ere previously dispersed across departments are brought together within one location and are often decentered from the hub. The central premise is that ser­ vices provided by one department can just as easily be supplied to ­others, 92 

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thereby reaping substantial economies of scale and eliminating duplication. sscs exemplify a re­orientation within companies from departments to functions and from jobs to roles whereby similar tasks are identified, standardized and brought together in centers dedicated to back office activities” (Howcroft and Richardson 2012, 113). Such orga­nizational transformation would not be pos­si­ble without developments in icts, specifically “computer software that allows a single operating system to be constructed” (Leyshon and Thrift 2007, 103). To run an ssc an organ­ization must install enterprise systems, which can bundle together work pro­cesses, standardize them, and monitor their execution. By producing and centralizing information on work activities, enterprise systems enable large organ­ izations to control and coordinate pro­cesses from afar, thus facilitating the decentralization of production. In short, they are the technical infrastructure that allows the center to know, and thus control, the periphery (Howcroft and Richardson 2012). Deskilled, and increasingly replaceable, ­labor can be squeezed or sourced from elsewhere.2 However, such it-­enabled restructuring is only partly related to the desire to reduce l­abor costs.3 Outsourcing work can also create new income flows from which capital can be raised, in other words, from which speculation can arise. This is the observation of geographers Andrew Leyshon and Nigel Thrift, who argue that a neglected aspect of financial capitalism is the “income flows from real assets” (2007, 98), which are “to the con­temporary financial system what gold was to its precursors, a source of value from which financial innovation can proceed” (2007, 98). They assert that sscs exemplify a recent trend in financialized capitalism—­the derivation of income from a system of aggregation. By standardizing and then bundling together work pro­cesses, a shared ser­vices structure creates a new income stream from which financial value can be referenced (Leyshon and Thrift 2007). The data for this chapter consists of observations of Systeo’s orga­ nizational structure, focusing especially on its own use of sscs (also known as captive sscs).4 In the last ten years Systeo has systematically moved the support functions of most of its First World offices to sscs. Located in low-­ wage locations, including Bangalore and Manila as well as Dalian, ­these are the so-­called back offices staffed by Systeo employees that I w ­ ill refer to as knowledge workers or ssc workers. If a Systeo con­sul­tant in Australia contacts hr to sign up for a session of corporate training to improve her pre­ sen­ta­tion skills, she ­will find her calls and emails directed to a knowledge Reducing Costs  

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worker in Dalian. Similarly, when a con­sul­tant in Japan decides to submit his expenses for his latest consulting proj­ect, his receipts w ­ ill be couriered to the Dalian ssc, to be pro­cessed with the expense claims of Systeo colleagues located in Frankfurt, Melbourne, and Singapore, to name just a few front offices. In the Dalian ssc we can observe the system of aggregation that Leyshon and Thrift claim differentiate “shared ser­vices” from other forms of outsourcing, and which, when applied commercially, produce a regular flow of income for Systeo that attracts potential investors in its stock. H ­ ere we find knowledge workers engaged in process-­orientated, subdivided, and repetitive work, which stands in stark contrast to the more autonomous and project-­orientated work of con­sul­tants employed by Systeo’s Beijing office. Furthermore, while Beijing con­sul­tants spend most of their time working at client sites (see chapter 5), Dalian knowledge workers find their ­mental ­labor transported to their destination via virtual means. It could be said that the fruits of their ­labor are liquefied, a term devised by sociologist Aneesh Aneesh in his study of outsourced it work in Bangalore, which describes a new l­ abor regime where “­labor migrates without the body” (Aneesh 2006, 68). For Aneesh, l­ abor is enacted within the territory of the offshore country, while the effects of l­ abor “migrate” to another locality. In one of the few full-­scale ethnographies of what he terms “virtual migration,” Aneesh reveals the concentration of outsourced software programming work in the “low-­end” market and documents the high l­abor intensity of the work, showing the paucity of creativity or engagement for the engineers. He places his analytical focus on the modes of governance within the technocratic offshore center. He finds the increasing tendency to embed authority in technology itself, specifically the under­lying code, which he argues renders hierarchy less useful, what he terms “algocracy” (110). Aneesh’s algocratic explanation of the flatter orga­nizational structures as emblematic of post-­Fordism and the knowledge economy is contrasted and complexified by Carol Upadhya’s analy­sis of orga­nizational control in the same ethnographic setting, which she describes as a form of “neo-­ Taylorism in the offshore software factory” of Bangalore. Like Aneesh, she finds that Indian software ser­vices organ­izations employ a range of computer-­enabled techniques of direct management, time management, and quality management, but argues that through excessive quantification and mea­sure­ment of the work pro­cess, ­these techniques act as a system of panoptical control through electronic surveillance, which in many ways 94 

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mirrors classical Taylorism (Upadhya 2009, 10). The objectives of t­ hese computer-­enabled techniques of management are “to reduce scope for individual initiative on the part of the workers, and to allow management to tighten control over the ­labor pro­cess as well as over the implicit knowledge of workers” (10). In contrast to Aneesh, Upadhya argues that hierarchy is not rendered less useful, but rather is strengthened and expanded in its remit via electronic surveillance. It is impor­tant to stress the context in which Aneesh and Upadhya are writing. Their arguments are set against a backdrop of claims that define the new economy in contradistinction to the “old economy” (cf. Thrift 2001). The high-­tech corporation has been described as “a style of organ­ization and employment which is radically dif­fer­ent in terms of management structure, ­labor pro­cesses, and social relations more widely, from that in ‘conventional’ firms” (Massey, Quintas, and Wield 1992, 82), a shift that can be broadly characterized as the shift from Fordism to post-­Fordism: the replacement of vertical hierarchies by horizontal networks, and Taylorist management by corporate culture (Marcus 1998). But, as Aneesh and Upadhya show, the man­ag­er–­worker relations of the modern high-­tech corporation replicate many of the inequalities that plagued Fordist organ­izations (see also Freeman 1993, 2000; Massey, Quintas, and Wield 1992), and import the deskilling effects associated with mass production to the realm of ser­vices (see also Head 2003). Although I certainly acknowledge that Systeo employees are subject to the pro­cesses of deskilling and surveillance that they describe, my focus, is not on man­ag­er–­worker relations or employment structures. In a departure from the analyses of Aneesh and Upadhya, I attempt to show how outsourcing itself is part of a larger managerial system of creating value, a system that creates divisions between workers that do not fall on the established hierarchical lines of man­ag­ers and workers but between revenue-­generating and cost-­generating employees.5 In her study of Wall Street investment banks, Karen Ho describes the superior treatment given to front-­office workers, not least in terms of remuneration, on the basis that ­these employees “are understood to generate revenue for the com­pany” (Ho 2009, 79), while the back office is “treated as a cost center, which is understood as a division that depletes money ­because of the refusal of investment banks to recognize or compute their contributions as part of revenue generation” (79). A similar dichotomy is at play in Systeo. In the last chapter we saw how con­sul­tants’ per­for­mance Reducing Costs  

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is evaluated primarily on their “billability”—­the proportion of their time that can be billed to clients, which is taken as a proxy for their revenue-­ generating capacities. By contrast, ssc workers are deemed to be nonbillable employees, although they do in fact have clients, as the following sections ­will show. Hence, they are not evaluated by billability. Instead, their per­for­mance is judged on “customer satisfaction ratings” and their “average ­handling times” of each ser­vice request. Furthermore, con­sul­tants can be promoted in any given year as long as their per­for­mance falls in the top 10 ­percent of their cohort, while ssc workers are told that for them promotion is “position-­based”—no ­matter how well they perform they must wait for a position to become available. ­These dif­fer­ent modes of evaluation not only reflect dif­fer­ent kinds of employees, they create dif­fer­ent kinds of employees. Employees who are billable—­who can make their revenue-­ generating capacities legible—­are categorized as ­those in the front office, while the back office consists of employees who are nonbillable—­those whose revenue-­making capacities are not legible.6 Instead, ­these employees find that their cost-­generating capacities are foregrounded, informing their designation as “cost generators,” ­people with the capacity to destroy value. The assimilation of shareholder value ideology not only engenders greater attention to bud­gets and cost controls, it also involves the construction of value hierarchies of ­labor through practices of mea­sure­ment and organ­izing. By focusing on how t­hese value hierarchies are constructed, I seek to provide an alternative perspective on the connections between financialization and orga­nizational restructuring. Vari­ous scholars have drawn attention to the imperative for financialized corporations to focus on their “core competences” as part of an attempt to create the depictions of corporate efficiency—of lean, rationalized production—­that ­will elevate share valuation (Lazonick, cited in Milberg 2011; Milberg 2008).7 Few, though, have questioned what counts as a core competence. An exception is the work of Ezzamel and his coauthors, who in their case study of a financialized multinational found that “what was ‘core’ depended upon its assessed contribution to the growth target, share price and shareholder value creation” (Ezzamel, Willmott, and Worthington 2008, 126). Following their lead, I draw attention to the fragile and tenuous construction of the boundary between core and non-­core competences, and the importance of accounting for drawing the dividing line.8 I show how the logic of e­ levating

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share prices by means of financial repre­sen­ta­tions leads to the ongoing construction of revenue- and cost-­generating ­labor, a split that is reflected in the unstable distinction between front-­and back-­office work. The Shape of Outsourcing

One of the first t­ hings you notice when you walk into the ssc is how quiet it is. Only the rhythmic tapping of keyboards and the odd ­gaggle of laughter punctuate the silence. Workers do eight-­hour shifts corresponding to the time zone of their front-­office colleagues, which for some of them means starting at six in the morning, when Australia gets g­ oing. ­Every day, at eleven ­o’clock precisely, a group of workers get up from their desks to do stretching exercises, led by their team man­ag­er. During the lunch hour some play badminton in the courtyard outside. Almost 95 ­percent of the four hundred workers employed ­here are ­women. Puffs of steam fill the air. Many have brought in a humidifier to combat the deleterious effects of Dalian’s notoriously dry climate. Many more of them have a goldfish bowl on their desk, for Chinese consider goldfish to be auspicious creatures that attract prosperity and success. In China, ­these workers are already considered to be wealthy and successful.9 Usually the only child of a middle-­class ­family, ­these workers have at least an undergraduate degree, and some have a master’s degree; I even met a few who had an mba. Many have graduated from a university in Eu­rope or North Amer­i­ca. In Systeo, Western degrees are desirable, not for the level of technical skill or knowledge they might denote, but rather for the cultural and linguistic exposure they indicate. ­These workers ­were expected to use En­glish, the com­pany’s lingua franca. Moreover, they ­were expected to be familiar with, and if pos­si­ble embody, the global knowledge worker who is defined by their extra-­local professionalism. Most of them had ­adopted a Western name that did more than smoothen communication with Western colleagues. Used outside as well as inside the office, a Western name also referenced and performed the cosmopolitan subjectivity ­these workers yearned for.10 Con­sul­tants from Eu­rope, Amer­i­ca, Japan, and Australia rely on the work carried out in this, and other, captive sscs. Dalian being a former Japa­nese colony, ­there are a large number of Japa­nese speakers ­here, which makes this par­tic­u­lar ssc well suited to outsourcing from northern Asia.

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However, in recent years, as the En­glish competency of workers has improved, more and more work from Western countries has been outsourced to the center. At the time of my fieldwork, the Dalian ssc pro­cessed the work of over thirty functions, which related to areas traditionally thought of as hr, finance, sales, and marketing. When work is outsourced to the ssc it does not retain its original form. Work is subdivided into routines that form the basis of individual functions or teams, whose per­for­mance is coordinated by a number of enterprise systems. Most pro­cesses are coordinated by sap (a leading brand of enterprise system). A high degree of work specialization is evident. The Time and Expense team only ­handles the pro­cessing of con­sul­tants’ time sheets and expense claims, while the Cross-­Border Finance team calculates the income tax payments for employees, usually con­sul­tants, who get seconded abroad, ensuring that the entries are logged onto sap. Within some teams, a further degree of subdivision occurs based on the region from which the work is outsourced. For example, English-­speaking workers staff the Australia Personnel Administration and Training team and spend their days checking eligibility and pro­cessing in the administration of Australian employees’ training sessions. Japa­nese speakers do exactly the same but for Japa­nese employees. Although ­these roles w ­ ere described as requiring creativity and intelligence, thus justifying the need for highly educated l­abor, workers often complained about the routinized and process-­oriented nature of their jobs. One described the work in the ssc as laodong miji xing, extremely labor-­intensive, a term usually reserved for factory work or physical l­abor. Some even wear polyethylene sleeve protectors typically worn by Chinese factory workers, such is the volume of sorting work—of receipts, forms, letters—­that they undertake. In my first weeks at the ser­vice center I met Tilly Zhao, who explained the pro­cess of “transitioning”—­the transferring of production to the ser­ vice center. She explained how Malaysian recruitment was transferred to her team, which now pro­cesses all job applications to Systeo’s Kuala Lumpur office. Tilly explained that the work pro­cess of recruiting Malaysian staff is first broken down into individual tasks. They calculate the number of man-hours that each task would require by combining the volume of cases (for example, the number of cvs to be uploaded), frequency, and time required per case. This number is then compared with the standard number of hours that a person works per year. I was told this was 1,504 hours, although Tilly was unable to tell me where this number came from, 98 

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aside from speculating it came “from Global,” referring to Systeo’s American headquarters. By comparing the two in the form of a ratio, the number of staff required to carry out each task, the “head count,” is calculated. However, this often results in a number less than one, in which case several tasks are combined to form a ­whole number and thus create the business case for deploying another back-­office worker. Working u ­ nder Tilly in the same team, Mary Gao spent her days uploading cvs onto Seibel, another enterprise system. Some w ­ ere soft copies—­cvs attached to online applications. ­Others ­were hard copies that had been faxed over from external recruitment agencies, or collected in Malaysia and then couriered to the ser­vice center. Once they get to Dalian, the hard copies have to be manually scanned into the system. When the recruitment work pro­cess was transferred from Malaysia to the ser­vice center, they hired ten interns for the sole purpose of scanning cvs from Malaysia. During my time in Dalian, this number had been reduced to two interns and Mary, who also input data surrounding the vacant positions and the corresponding candidates’ cvs. Mary stressed that they never contacted candidates directly, since only the local (i.e., Malaysian) recruiter was permitted to do this. Rather, they ­were concerned with the “backstage” aspects of the recruitment pro­cess. Mary was not, therefore, enlisted to replace the Malaysian recruiter per se. Rather, the Malaysian recruiter’s position was reduced to only direct liaison with prospective candidates applying to Systeo’s Kuala Lumpur office; all other aspects ­were outsourced to Mary. In contrast to the rhe­toric of “jobs lost to outsourcing,” which is often voiced in the United States, the transfer of production to the ssc demonstrates that t­ here is not a direct relationship between jobs lost in ­those countries and the offshore platforms, numerically or substantively, for it is not jobs that are outsourced but work pro­cesses.11 Therefore, one job “lost” in, say, the United States does not automatically equal one job “gained” in China. Rather, the shape that outsourcing takes is best characterized as the hollowing-­out of work, leaving only the thinnest veneer “onshore,” with the remaining content outsourced. In addition to enterprise systems, other icts make such a work arrangement feasible. For example, Mary communicates with the Malaysian recruiter using the f­ree online messaging ser­ vice, msn Messenger. With workers prohibited by internal cost controls from telephoning colleagues based abroad, msn Messenger enables real-­ time connection with front-­office colleagues. Reducing Costs  

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On my last trip to Dalian, I interviewed the team man­ag­er of Business Operations, Susan Han. She described the function as having a wide-­ranging scope which allows her to neng shang, neng xia (literally, go up and down) the orga­nizational hierarchy. Her daily work consisted of facilitating new business meetings, or nbms, virtual affairs where a sales team of se­nior executives and man­ag­ers of the consulting practice gather via the medium of a conference call to discuss potential and current sales opportunities—­the selling of Systeo’s consulting ser­vices. Her role as the facilitator means she is responsible for organ­izing the call: liaising between all participants via email to find a suitable time for the meeting and then emailing them the access code, which must be dialed in order to enter the meeting. The virtual timespace that enables this meeting of territorially separated colleagues comes at a cost, which is recorded by the specific access code assigned to the meeting. Once the call has commenced, Susan takes meeting minutes, which must be sent out to all participants on the same day. From information gathered from t­hese meetings, Susan logs the pro­gress of sales opportunities, from first contact with the client to the winning or losing of the contract, onto sap. Susan told me that “in truth it should be the se­nior executives that do [the job].” She admitted that sap is very easy to operate, but that se­nior executives in certain countries, including China, seem to think it is too difficult for them. In the United States, United Kingdom, and Germany, the se­nior executives input the data themselves, thus obviating the need for her team’s ser­vices. In some other Eu­ro­pean countries and in Singapore, the se­nior executives “take well” to the system and often do their own data entry. But in greater China and Japan, se­nior executives almost always rely on offshore help. Or, in the case of greater China se­nior executives, it is more accurate to say onshore but offsite help.12 Susan considered language to be an additional hindrance for the se­nior executives in ­these latter two countries, since the sap system used En­glish as its default. But in my extended fieldwork at the Beijing office, I found that most se­nior executives, in fact, spoke En­glish well, with ­careers punctuated by stints in the United States or another English-­speaking country. Their linguistic skills ­were often displayed in region-­wide trainings and other corporate events where they also showed off their American business acumen. Such findings would appear to invalidate Susan’s assertion that a se­nior executive’s inclination to carry out the administration surrounding his or her own sales opportunities is influenced by En­glish proficiency.

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Another explanation is that this work arrangement enables cost reduction. Chinese se­nior executives in the consulting practice receive far higher salaries than workers in the ser­vice center. Utilizing the latter to complete tasks for the former represents a clear cost-­saving benefit to the com­pany. Indeed, junior-­level con­sul­tants in the Beijing consulting practice are better remunerated than workers in Dalian. Their time sheets, hr files, and training opportunities are all pro­cessed in the ser­vice center. It would appear that the outsourcing of work from Chinese con­sul­tants to Chinese ssc workers replicates the cost-­saving rationale that is invoked in the offshoring of hr and finance functions from Systeo offices in First World countries to the ssc in Dalian. However, the salaries of UK and U.S. se­nior executives represent an even greater cost to the overall accounts of the Systeo Corporation, but their backstage work is not outsourced. That is to say, lowering costs is not always, or not the only, determining ­factor under­lying the outsourcing of production. Like all the workers in the center, Susan uses the term client to refer to the con­sul­tants she speaks to in virtual timespace. In d ­ oing so she conveys not only the idiom of customer ser­vice repeatedly emphasized in the center, but also her subordinate position vis-­à-­vis the Systeo employees she “serves” as a “ser­vice provider.” The superiority of clients is enshrined through confidentiality agreements that workers sign to protect the information of their clients, even though the latter are also employees of Systeo. This is a practice borrowed from Systeo’s commercial outsourcing business. In the case of commercial outsourcing, ­these agreements are justified by recourse to the intellectual property embedded within the software code, which is handled by a separate financial entity, the outsourcing ser­vice provider. But in the case of an internal outsourcing arrangement, the ser­vice provider and clients both belong to the same com­pany, and the “intellectual property” often consists of lines of time sheets, rec­ords of claimable expenses, and so on. We thus find that the ser­vice provider/client relationship does not accurately describe the nature of the relationship between offshore knowledge workers and con­sul­tants, which is not defined by the transfer of intellectual property. Instead the ser­vice provider/client relationship cements the hierarchical split between ­these two groups of workers. This hierarchical split is also played out in the material culture and working practices of the workplace. Employees are made acutely aware of

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their inferior status by the restrictions placed on their consumption of Systeo assets within this sphere of production. The use of the photocopier, for example, was policed by one of the office caretakers. It was not placed in the open area but rather was ­housed in a separate room where the caretaker sat and logged all photocopying activity. Workers ­were unable to photocopy ­unless they had a bud­get code to which their photocopying would be charged. Similarly, the caretaker controlled all access to the stationery cupboard. Over lunch two workers, Gina Choi and Zhang Lai, with whom I was well acquainted, joked about how difficult it was to get stationery. “You have to ask the caretaker, who then makes you sign for each piece. You feel so guilty when you look at the book [the stationery log] and see your name many times,” said Zhang Lai. The fact that Zhang Lai felt guilty ­because she had made multiple requests for stationery was indicative of how workers internalized the responsibility of minimizing costs. ­These controls remind workers of the costs that they impose and that reflect their status as cost generators—­workers who do not generate revenue but rather must seek to minimize costs or risk losing their jobs to global competition. Workers feared being replaced by colleagues in Systeo’s other internal sscs, in Manila and Bangalore—it was rumored that office rent and ­labor costs ­were much lower in ­these cities compared to Dalian. Although the historical particularities of Dalian are such that its mono­poly on offshored work from Japan is secure, an increasing proportion of the work in the center is outsourced to them from English-­speaking regions. Workers feel insecure about their En­glish proficiency compared to Bangalore and Manila. Furthermore, Dalian’s “seat charge” is comparatively high, and threatens to reduce the center’s competitiveness vis-­à-­vis Systeo’s other offshore platforms. The seat charge mea­sures the cost of having a worker based in the center and is based on the office rent and r­ unning and maintenance costs. The high seat charge was, of course, a f­ actor over which workers had no control. What workers could control, however, was their consumption of Systeo assets. Reminding workers of Dalian’s high overhead (seat charge) could be implicitly read as an instruction to workers to restrict the costs that they could control: stationery, photocopying, and more importantly their wage demands. Circumscribing workers as solely productive of costs acted to suppress wage demands. Put differently, it is by denying their productivity that the low wages of workers in the ssc is legitimized.

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On a short follow-up trip to the ssc in 2009, I experienced the effects of the seat charge firsthand. I saw a vacant desk and asked if I could set up my laptop. Two discussions and one phone call ­later, the worker sitting at the adjacent desk told me, “­Because [it] incurs no cost, yes, you can use the desk.” Then I asked if I could make a phone call to the Shanghai office. Her response was, “Of course . . . ​if you have a passcode.” In Beijing I never needed a passcode to make calls to another Systeo office, and I found con­ sul­tants ­were ­free to photocopy and ask for stationery without a bud­get code. Also, my desk was equipped with a phone and the it department set up a Systeo email account for me, both of which ­were unavailable to me during my fieldwork in Dalian. The rationale for this differential treatment is that the Beijing office, as an entity, generates revenue, and hence is designated a profit center; consequently, the employees in that office are exempt from such cost controls. In chapter 2 we saw that con­sul­tants are incentivized to generate revenue through the com­pany’s per­for­mance management system. By not fulfilling their designation as revenue generators for the com­pany, con­sul­tants who are idle for extended periods of time incur punishments in the form of poor per­for­mance ratings, diminished remuneration, and for ­those ranked in the bottom 10 ­percent of their cohort, being laid off. Similarly, when cost generators do not “fulfill” their designation, they risk losing their jobs to workers who are “better” cost generators—­workers who are cheaper l­abor. Revenue generators and cost generators find their existence—­their job security—­precariously balanced on their ability to perform the categories to which they have been designated in this mode of production. Dynamic Oppositions

Although they w ­ ere excessively qualified for the mundane, process-­ orientated work they carried-­out, ssc workers would often emphasize the positive aspects of their jobs. Susan proudly stated that her job required “communication skills, time management skills, and soft skills.” Another worker, Joan Lau, told me that she had started out on another team but asked specifically to be transferred into Business Operations b ­ ecause she got to see and be involved in what Systeo “­really does”—­consulting proj­ects—­ and that her work was not just pro­cess work like the rest of the ser­vice

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center. Not all workers, however, ­were enthusiastic. Carol Tang told me of the disappointment she felt when she first joined the team, realizing the work was “feichang [extremely] administration.” She said that when she applied for the position it sounded in­ter­est­ing, but she soon asked to be moved to another position that did not require documentation work and where she could see her own value very clearly. In the end she moved to a team involved in more direct aspects of sales, where she felt she could infer her value from the revenues generated. Although Carol differed from other workers in her negative evaluation of Business Operations, she similarly drew lines between revenue generation and job appraisal. She enjoyed her new position, where she felt more intimately tied to revenue generation, while Susan and Joan drew positive evaluation from their daily communication with ­people categorized as revenue generators in the organ­ization. By contrast, I never heard a con­sul­tant express a desire to get closer to cost generation. Rather, they tried to clearly distinguish their work from the back office. It would seem that both groups of Systeo employees internalize the revenue/cost distinction as indexical of their worth. However, the line between con­sul­tants and their back-­office support was extremely ambiguous. At the time of my departure, t­ here ­were tentative plans to set up a specialist ser­vice center to which a core component of consulting, the writing of sales proposals, could be outsourced. According to Christina Teoh, the director of Systeo’s East Asian outsourcing operations, the bulk of proposal construction—­the main structure of the Power­Point slides that are submitted to clients—­could be done by workers off-­site, leaving only “the final touches” to con­sul­tants. From my own participation I knew that her proposition was not as s­ imple as her description suggested. Earlier in the year I participated in the business development—­the Systeo term for proposal writing—of one par­tic­u­lar sales proposal. Systeo was pitching its change management services—­management expertise it claims w ­ ill smooth the transition from one management team to another—to a Eu­ro­pean com­pany that had recently taken over a small Chinese player in its industry. The team consisted of a se­nior executive from Hong Kong, a se­nior man­ag­er from the United States, and a ju­nior con­sul­tant from China. Together, they embodied the cross-­cultural expertise they ­were selling. As a British-­Chinese anthropologist, the se­nior man­ag­er thought I was the ideal complement to the existing multicultural team and brought me in to work on what he called a “cross-­cultural merger.” Most of the research work was done by the 104 

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ju­nior con­sul­tant, Valerie Fu, who trawled through Systeo’s intranet looking for content that she could leverage. Her resources included a manual called “The Playbook,” which contains all of Systeo’s “tried and tested” management techniques and jargon assembled into formalized business models, including a model of corporate culture that she puzzled over for two days.13 Also available to Valerie was an exhaustive database of old sales proposals—­existing material from which she could borrow or customize to fit. It would appear that t­hese online resources lend this pro­cess to outsourcing. Accessed remotely, the painstaking work of online research could be done in the back office by cost generators. But when Valerie presented a rough draft of the proposal to her superiors, it became apparent that the rhetorical work of consulting—­the final touches—­could not be so easily separated from the labor-­intensive work of knowledge recycling, as Christina’s proposition would suggest. Valerie was admonished for wasting time on what the se­nior executive saw as an unnecessary preoccupation with accuracy. Instead, the se­nior executive told her repeatedly to “just make it up.” Rather than researching culture in Systeo’s intranet, Valerie was instructed to create the narrative of the proposal and then cherry-­pick material that supported it. What was impor­tant was not the integrity of a proposal’s content but the rhetorical effects that could be generated from the content. This was pointed out to me when I failed, like Valerie, to grasp the princi­ples of proposal construction. Offering basic insights from the anthropology of China to buttress Systeo’s cross-­cultural credentials, I mentioned to Valerie the ongoing importance of guanxi (social connections) in Chinese business affairs, which she reformatted into an “observation of cultural difference” between Chinese and ­Eu­ro­­pean business practices. The se­nior executive burst into laughter when he saw what I had contributed. “I ­will be the laughingstock if we have guanxi in t­ here—­it’s not the 1990s!” he retorted. My input was rebuffed not for being incorrect, but for lacking the requisite rhetorical buzz of the “cutting-­edge” recent innovation needed to win pitches. I had failed to realize that the creation of a spectacle is not just part of the pitch—it forms the vital content of what con­sul­tants sell. Proposal writing is an instantiation of what Anna Tsing calls “the economy of appearances,” where “the self-­conscious making of a spectacle is a necessary aid to gathering investment funds” (Tsing 2000, 118). In other words, the production of spectacle is, in and of itself, an act of generating value (Tsing 2000, 118). Therefore, attempts to dismember this Reducing Costs  

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creative act through, say, outsourcing would come at a price—­reducing the rhetorical impact and therefore the potential value of the pitch. ­There was also another, simpler reason against outsourcing the writing of proposals: in the ambiguous definitions of what constitutes front-­office work and what constitutes back-­office work, proposal writing falls into the former. Although it cannot be billed to clients directly, proposal writing does contribute to revenue generation—it wins contracts. Moreover, it is a key ele­ment of con­sul­tants’ training. It is by writing proposals that newly hired con­sul­tants learn the fundamentals of Systeo-­speak and the conventions of consulting pre­sen­ta­tion that are so critical to the cultivation of the expertise with which con­sul­tants claim their ontological primacy.14 In short, it is a key step in the making of con­sul­tants. For this reason alone, I was surprised to hear that proposal writing could be a thinkable target for outsourcing. But perhaps I should not have been surprised. An imperative of this par­tic­u­lar mode of production is that outsourcing eats into consulting, and does so continually. As the scope of con­sul­tants’ work decreases, the dividing line between what counts as revenue and what counts as cost has to remade and re-­specified. The daily work of ssc workers consists of the parts of consulting that are not vis­i­ble to clients but nevertheless are critical to the production of consulting. For example, the pro­cess of pitching and submitting a proposal to prospective clients requires the l­abor of both con­sul­tants and offshore workers. As we saw earlier, the latter facilitates virtual sales meetings and completes documentation to track and guide the sales pro­cess. Also, ssc workers play a significant role in the financial management of consulting proj­ects—­processing time sheets, expense claims, and organ­izing accommodations and flights for con­sul­tants. Almost anything that can be done remotely, that is, anything that does not require direct contact with the client, is outsourced to Dalian. In effect, the costs of consulting are hollowed out from con­sul­tants and reconstituted in the form of ser­vice center jobs—­this is the shape that outsourcing takes. Con­sul­tants are left with only a thin shell of their original jobs, made up of the vis­i­ble or client-­facing aspects of consulting. It is only by hollowing out that con­sul­tants can assume the appearance of revenue generators—­defined by their lack of vis­i­ble cost more than their revenue-­generating potency. In contrast, ssc workers are saddled with an abundance of cost, obfuscating any claims they have to generate revenue. 106 

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In the ssc, employees are forced to sign a training bond of nine thousand yuan ($1,300), not for training, as the term suggests, but if they are sent abroad for work. The value of the bond is, for some employees, equivalent to four months’ pay. Unlike bonded ­labor, ­these employees do not pay interest. Rather, the bond acts to tie employees to Systeo for six months ­after they receive the training in question; if they leave before six months they must pay the full amount of the bond. Employees may be sent abroad to facilitate the transfer of production to the center. Two man­ag­ers ­were sent to Ireland to learn the work routines and pro­cesses that would soon be outsourced to their teams of back-­office workers. Alternatively, employees are sent to bring back outsourcing expertise. One employee was sent to Bangalore, the global capital of outsourcing, to learn innovations in Systeo’s outsourcing practice, while a group of employees who serve Japa­nese clients spent time in Systeo’s Japan office in an attempt to improve the quality of their customer ser­vice. In all ­these cases we find that employees are engaged in the act of tooling up production. Through the training bond, back-­office employees are forced to bear part of the risk of capital investment. By making them sign a bond, the implication is that tooling up engenders the acquisition of “transferable skills” for the employee; that is to say, the employee acquires value that is not tied to the specific context (i.e., Systeo) but can be touted to Systeo’s competitors. This is also the case for con­sul­tants. A few years at Systeo and con­sul­tants are well positioned to negotiate large salary bumps elsewhere. Indeed, this is exactly what happens, which is why I was frequently told “two years is a long time in Systeo,” referring to the high turnover (of con­sul­tants, specifically). However, con­sul­tants are not made to sign a training bond when they are sent abroad. This does not mean they are more valuable than ssc workers. In one sense it suggests the opposite. The knowledge workers of the ssc are made to sign a training bond b ­ ecause the “training” they receive is integral to the business. The ways in which productivity is made to count or not count has power­ful implications for the production of socioeconomic in­equality. The salary gap between the top and bottom of Systeo’s ­labor pyramid—­a term con­sul­tants use to describe the workforce—is considerable: U.S. se­nior executives in Systeo’s consulting division take home over $200,000, while entry-­level workers in the Dalian ssc earn approximately $4,300 (30,000 yuan) per annum. Systeo’s ceo was paid over $15 million in 2014. The Reducing Costs  

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revenue/cost opposition underpins a radical split in l­abor evaluation between front-­office jobs and back-­office jobs. Moreover, this split creates a rationale for orga­nizational restructuring. The so-­called race to the bottom, which is often invoked in descriptions of outsourcing and which contends that the rationale for outsourcing is the lowering of costs by employing low-­wage ­labor (e.g., Friedman 2005), fails to observe the ex ante requirement of separating cost from revenue. Although workers in the Dalian ssc are indeed paid less than con­sul­tants based in Beijing, this is related to the ontologically opposed subjectivities of cost and revenue that have to be made, and which then legitimize the suppression of wage demands for the back office, and high salaries and bonuses for the front office. Cutting costs also requires the making of costs—­what is and what is not a cost. Enacting Restructuring

In this chapter we have seen how a par­tic­u­lar ­labor pro­cess is enabled by technology, the enterprise system, which is both the object of consulting and the tool with which consulting reproduces itself. Con­sul­tants sell management expertise in the form of computer systems that make vis­i­ble workers’ contributions to shareholder value (the com­pany’s share price) only to use the same computer systems as the means of justifying their ongoing presence within their clients’ premises—to maximize share prices clients should offload their “costs” to Systeo via an outsourcing arrangement. By reading the managerial techniques used to render corporate subjects within Systeo, I have sought to demonstrate the practices by which employees are crafted and incentivized to perform their designations as revenue generators and cost generators. In science and technology studies, t­here has been much work exposing not just the socially constructed nature of real­ity, but also showing how “real­ity does not precede the mundane practices in which we interact with it, but is rather ­shaped within ­these practices” (Mol 1999, 75). It has been suggested that ­there is not a single real­ity that can be observed from multiple perspectives (i.e., perspectivalism), but rather multiple pos­si­ble realities that can be “done and enacted rather than observed” (77, emphasis in original).15 Throughout this chapter I have been inspired by this observation, and have taken seriously the prospect that outsourcing may be a real­ity that is enacted, and that ­there is a politics of its enactment that I have sought to unravel. 108 

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In par­tic­u­lar, I have found useful John Law’s concept of heterogeneous engineering, “the idea that when technical systems are constructed they involve the ‘engineering’ of p ­ eople” (Law 2003, 3). In his analy­sis of a management accounting system that was introduced in the 1990s, and that shows similarities to and differences from enterprise systems, Law argues that accounting systems engender not only epistemological effects—­new forms of knowledge—­but also ontological ones—­the creation of “a new orga­nizational world or object and a new kind of knowing subject or man­ ag­er” (1996, 281). In short, the distinctive aspect of ­these systems is the ontological character of the repre­sen­ta­tions they pres­ent. For him, the organ­ization is not a single real­ity; rather, it slips between what he calls dif­ fer­ent “ontological regimes” (1996, 282). The installation of an accounting system makes one par­tic­u­lar regime dominant, in the sense that this tool is able to influence what is counted—as a subject, as desirable, as warranted. His approach is very much to call into question the idea that technology has a given purpose and fixed effects, what he terms decentering. So the qualities that are associated with t­hese new accounting systems, and that are brought to bear as the knowing subject, are not m ­ atters of technological determinism, but rather are “produced artifact(s)” (Law 1996). The concept of heterogeneous engineering conceives of managerial devices as assemblages of both the social and the technical, which produce certain kinds of ­people, “suitable” for global markets. In this chapter and the one that precedes it, I have sought to demonstrate that the ideal corporate subject is one that generates revenue and so creates value, but this is a sub­ject engineered in relation to its other—­the subject that generates cost and thus destroys value. And as such one cannot be engineered without the other. ­These relational subjectivities are not isomorphic with the vital components of the shareholder value model—­cost and revenue; rather, the construction of cost generators and revenue generators alters the economic categories upon which they are constructed. By reconfiguring work pro­cesses and ­labor, management con­sul­tants institute a system of subcontracting that leads to the appearance of lower costs. Th ­ ese actions in themselves redefine cost, and concomitantly value and revenue. The system of outsourcing work to sscs purifies the production of value from the production of cost—­that is to say, value is produced through the separation of cost from the act of creating revenue. In this way, cost can be removed, or rather outsourced, to a less vis­i­ble terrain, leaving value “clean” and solely consisting of revenue. Reducing Costs  

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4

Training Value The Moral and Po­liti­cal Proj­ect of Selling Consultancy

i first met Sun Lan at a workshop on pre­sen­ta­tion skills—­one of the many mandatory training events for new employees. She agreed to be interviewed, but in En­glish, not Mandarin as most Chinese employees preferred. So it came as a surprise when, two weeks ­later, she greeted me in Mandarin. We had planned to go on a bus tour of Beijing’s Olympic Park and then hang out in Houhai, an area in downtown Beijing with lots of bars and cafés. She explained that it d ­ idn’t feel right to speak En­glish outside the office ­because I w ­ asn’t a “proper foreigner.” Although she was fluent, having spent a few years in the United States, she was clearly much more relaxed speaking her m ­ other tongue. Lan had joined as an “experienced hire,” not a fresh gradu­ate, and had been at Systeo for just a few months. It seemed the honeymoon period was over, however. I could sense that Lan was anxious about her decision to leave the energy industry, where she had worked for almost ten years, to join Systeo’s strategy consulting division. As we took in the sights, the famous “Bird’s Nest” stadium and the “Watercube” aquatics center, she started to talk about her early onset disillusionment. “Management consultancy is a scam [pianqian],” she said. “It’s a philosophy, not something tangible [bu shi shizhi xing de]. When someone asks you what you do you ­can’t tell them anything concrete. Instead you come out with phrases like ‘collaborative planning,’ but what exactly does that mean? We produce slide shows and pre­sen­ta­tions but it’s all very abstract, very xu,” she complained. The word xu can be translated as the absence of semantic content. For Sun Lan, this paucity of meaning was one of the reasons she doubted she would have a long tenure at Systeo. “Perhaps new hires would be better suited to this job? Once ­you’ve worked in industry

y­ ou’ve already formed ideas about business.” She might have been onto something. In the U.S. and UK offices the vast majority of con­sul­tants are recruited straight out of university. But in China a large percentage of con­ sul­tants have worked prior to joining Systeo, in other consultancies or in industry. Th ­ ese employees, especially, need to be taught how to conceptualize their expertise. ­Every quarter the com­pany holds a “community event” that does not involve local stakeholders, as one might suppose, but a series of pre­sen­ta­ tions in a large conference room. Although con­sul­tants are told to mingle and have fun, their attendance is mandatory. Any absentees are noted by hr. Con­sul­tants told me that their attendance at ­these events contributed to their annual per­for­mance evaluation; hr staff explained that attendance demonstrates “employee engagement.” Employees get the latest news on Systeo’s operating model, quarterly projections, and thought leadership. In addition to narrating the state of the business, ­these events are an opportunity for se­nior executives to pres­ent a definition of management consultancy. “What do you tell your parents you do?” asks one se­nior executive. “A doctor, we are like a doctor. If a client has a prob­lem we go in and help them,” volunteers a ju­nior con­sul­tant. The se­nior executive wrinkles his face. “­Wouldn’t it be better to tell ­people ‘I reduce 10 million in inventory’? Or ‘I raise revenue by 25 ­percent’? ­Doesn’t that sound much better than saying ‘well . . . ​I make clients ­these, er, deliverables, ­these Power­Points’?” Just two months earlier I had participated in a training workshop. A short film was played to round off the final session. Entitled Historia de un letrero (The Story of a Sign), it is set in a bustling city plaza, prob­ably in Mexico, where the film was produced, but it could be London, Paris, Beijing even. Scenes of an urban idyll are spliced together: ­children playing in the sun, pigeons cooing by ­water fountains, workers eating lunch al fresco. Then the camera cuts to a beggar slumped against a wall with just a few coins in his rusty tin.1 Passersby are apparently unmoved by a cardboard sign which says, “Have compassion, I am blind.” But one man does stop. Smartly dressed in a crisp gray suit, his eyes shaded by sunglasses, he puts down his briefcase and picks up the sign. We see him writing on it with an expensive-­looking pen. He puts the sign back, looks at his watch, and then walks away. The beggar is flooded with donations. His hands scramble Training Value  

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to pick up the bouncing coins; his face is bursting with delight. ­Later the stranger returns. “What did you do to my sign?” asks the beggar. “I wrote the same but in dif­fer­ent words,” he replies. The camera zooms in. The sign reads, “­Today is a beautiful day and I cannot see it.” Although the film was presented to help con­sul­tants understand “effective leadership,” it can also be read as a power­ful allegory of consulting. The stranger has all the qualities of a consultant—­assertiveness, a penchant for timekeeping, and a strong professional image. Most importantly, he understands the importance of words. Con­sul­tants must find the right discourse to explain what it is they are d ­ oing and why. The right narrative can reconceptualize a situation. The beggar is still a beggar—­his status has not been changed by this encounter with an enigmatic, potent, shaman-­like stranger. But by switching the focus from his disability to the consequence of his disability—he cannot appreciate the innocent beauty of a sunny day—­the beggar’s plight has been substantially reframed. Passersby are no longer asked to have compassion. Rather, the aim is to produce an organic ethical impulse, to provoke guilt for what they take for granted. Though romanticized and crass, the film clearly demonstrates how words can shape the po­liti­cal and moral dynamic of a situation. In this chapter I look at how con­sul­tants are trained to sell consultancy. One of the first rules of sales is that you must know your product. This is true of ser­vices as well as goods. A ­lawyer knows how to draw up a contract, a hairdresser knows how to cut hair, and a mechanic knows how to fix cars. But for con­sul­tants, selling does not start from a stable proposition about their expertise. Instead it comes from the deliberate attempt to politicize and moralize their interventions. For some commentators this amounts to ­little more than deception—­recall the joke (or satirical observation) that con­sul­tants are ­people who borrow your watch to tell you the time. Yet an intervention may not necessarily engender deception—­the blind beggar could not, of course, see the beautiful weather. This is not to say that all interventions are equally desirable. Note that the beggar was not taken to a shelter. Con­sul­tants are taught that their work is not primarily about delivering help and hence are dissuaded from conceptualizing consultancy as the curing of sick clients. Rather, their job is to create an ethical rupture that provides a remit for change. In the above vignette the se­nior executive suggests one method of achieving this—­through allusions to their ability to improve profits. But this is by no means the only way of 112 

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creating an imperative for consulting. In the coming pages we ­will see how gift giving at Chinese New Year and the moral philosophy of Confucius are alluded to in the pursuit of generating a higher aim.2 In addition to learning to incorporate local tropes of ethical be­hav­ior, con­sul­tants are trained in the language of value. The ubiquity of value in discourses of consultancy—­“shareholder value,” “value creation,” “added value,” to name but a few examples—­underlines the importance of interrogating a term that seems to obfuscate as much as it explains. In a discussion piece on how value is used and invoked in con­temporary capitalism, anthropologist Daniel Miller argues that classical theories of value, ­whether of Ricardo or Marx, are inadequate for understanding how value as a term actually operates. His examination, which includes management consultancy and its role in promulgating shareholder value, culminates in a call for a mode of analy­sis that unpacks the “everyday cosmologies by which ­people, and indeed companies and governments live” (Miller 2008, 1122). In a similar vein, Horacio Ortiz has argued that financial analysts, whose job it is to make monetary valuations, do so not by evaluating securities in the economic sphere alone, but rather by inscribing price into specific moral and po­liti­cal relations. As new scales of mea­sur­ing social activities arise, or the relationship between dif­fer­ent scales of value changes, so do their monetary valuations. “Value” refers neither to established understandings of economic value nor moral and po­liti­cal values; rather, in the financial industry it is a concept by which p ­ eople create meaning and make sense of their own working practices (Ortiz 2013, 76). Hence, Ortiz warns against assuming that value, as talked about by our in­for­mants, maps onto our own analytical tools. Inspired by t­hese perspectives, I ­will argue that training value is not about imbuing con­sul­tants with the capacities to create economic value or social values. Rather, I take value to be an emic term, a concept that is fundamental to the creation of legitimacy and control that underpins con­ sul­tants’ own sense of expertise. The analy­sis presented ­will focus on how value is made into a material t­ hing (an objective, a remit, a quality), and the devices, concepts, and conceptual transformations that can “operationalize” value.3 Although con­sul­tants often talk about value, an analy­sis of their discourses and practices reveals an under­lying preoccupation not with creating value per se, but with creating logics of worth. ­These logics feed into the ethical rupture described above, thus helping to legitimize consultancy, Training Value  

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their interventions, their implementations, and their fees. Moreover, we find that logics of worth can be dissonant with each other. Yet this dissonance need not destabilize the making of expertise, but instead can broaden the moral and po­liti­cal traction of expert claims.4 By revealing the efforts undertaken by management consultancies to produce legitimacy internally, that is, among their employees, this chapter marks a departure from the critical studies of management consulting, which have tended to focus on how con­sul­tants achieve legitimacy externally, that is, with their clients.5 Further, by shedding light on the cultural repertoires of valuation and commensuration that con­sul­tants are exposed to, the analy­sis contributes to the growing body of work concerned with how economic regimes become normalized and naturalized through epistemological interventions.6 The rise of financialization has seen the import of financial logics and imperatives into the industrial economy. Although the structural ­factors ­behind this transition have been examined at length, the question of how structural changes translate into new economic realities on the ground still seeks answers (Van der Zwan 2014). As we ­will see, techniques of “sales” teach con­sul­tants how to traverse, link together, and switch between dif­fer­ent scales of economy. China is made commensurate with the West, management consultancy is made commensurate with space rocket engineering, and clients’ needs are made commensurate with the values of financialization. Through commensuration, con­sul­tants learn to draw proportions, that is, create a structural relation between two dif­fer­ent entities (Hankins and Yeh 2016). The creation of ­these relations constitutes the preparatory work for the dissemination of economic logics and ideologies, including ­those identified with financialization. Crafting Value Propositions

In the sixteen months I spent inside Systeo, two events stood out in par­ tic­u­lar: the training sessions for newly promoted man­ag­ers and the training sessions for newly promoted se­nior man­ag­ers. It was in one of t­ hese sessions that I watched Historia de un letrero. Stately opulence best describes the five-­star ­hotels in which ­these events are held, and where employees live it up for two days. They get to feast on Eu­ro­pean and Asian delicacies, truffles and sea cucumber, macarons and mochi, Angus steak and Beijing roast duck. They watch pre­sen­ta­tions orchestrated with the 114 

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precision and finesse of a Broadway production. Stage mics, sound engineers, rolls of duct tape fill the backstage area, with Cammie Pan from hr calling the shots as stage man­ag­er. The se­nior executives are the stars, the participants the audience, who treat the training as a weekend away as well as an opportunity for learning. One participant from Dalian even brought along her ­mother to enjoy the largesse. The occasion is topped off with a professionally taken “graduation” photo, which is pro­cessed in lightning speed, with framed copies handed to participants as they leave the ­hotel on the final day. Participation in such corporate extravaganza is not just a reward for reaching the se­nior echelons of the organ­ization. The dazzle and excess also mark a symbolic transformation of employees from “foot soldiers” to “frontline infantry,” which engenders the nourishing of expertise but not, perhaps, in the ways one might expect. The long titles of the events—­“Man­ ag­ers’ Milestone Training” and “Se­nior Man­ag­ers’ Milestone Training”—­ are both indicative and misleading. In making it this far, con­sul­tants have reached a turning point in their c­ areers, but not b ­ ecause they are now expected to manage. When I went to client sites I found that, even on large proj­ects, ­there ­were only a few proj­ect man­ag­ers but many employees who hold the title of man­ag­er. Indeed, t­hese training sessions had l­ittle to say about fostering managerial skills. Instead, employees are taught how they can, as “­career counselors,” improve Systeo’s own per­for­mance management. Moreover, they learn to “grow as a leader” and become “value creators.” hr man­ag­ers and se­nior executives often emphasized the importance of training. Theirs is a mantra that is explic­itly connected to the motives of ­human capital strategy and that is trickled down to the lowest tributaries of the workforce. Time and again employees would tell me that Systeo is “famous for [its] training.” Some of them even specified training as one of the main reasons they applied to the com­pany in the first place. For ­those who ­were still bothered by Systeo’s low salaries (in comparison to their competitors), hr man­ag­er Jack Yang would remind them “that compensation is not just salary but also training.” In other words, training d ­ oesn’t make up for low salaries. Training is akin to salary. Furthermore, remuneration is always referred to as compensation, a term that allows the bracketing together of both financial and nonfinancial forms of reward. We could say that the way in which training is sold to employees constitutes a kind of “value proposition.” Training Value  

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As con­sul­tants move up the orga­nizational hierarchy, they become more and more involved in sales. They not only learn to pitch; they also take a leading role in the writing of sales proposals, so-­called business development. Of fundamental importance is that con­sul­tants learn how to construct a “value proposition”—­the desired response to “How can you add value?” At first glance, a value proposition would appear to be a set of actions that are justified by recourse to the production of value. But ­whether con­sul­tants actually produce value is less impor­tant than generating a convincing projection of successful ­future outcome. Let us take the example of shareholder value, a trope characterized by conceptual lability and that “can be variably invoked as cause, consequence or justification” (Froud et  al. 2000, 81) of consulting.7 Shareholder value can be seen as a kind of business ethics, the idea that creating value for the com­pany’s shareholders is the right ­thing to do.8 But in the analy­sis that follows we ­will see that shareholder value can also be construed as a product of science, acquiring an objectivity that lends ideological force to the term. We also observe the explicit ethicizing of shareholder value, which implies that shareholder value itself is not an ethic. ­These multiple iterations demonstrate that the concepts with which con­sul­tants justify their interventions are not stable. They have shifting, situated meanings, through which the case for intervention—­for restructuring, for implementing it systems, for outsourcing—­can be legitimated, as ­will be explored in greater detail in chapter 5. ­Here the focus is on the temporary stabilization of meaning, so as to create a sense of control in the minds of con­sul­tants. Technologies of visualization, like the change-­tracking map analyzed in chapter 1, once again come to the fore. Se­nior executive Edward Zhang lectures the 160 newly promoted man­ ag­ers on how to sell Systeo’s value proposition. “Too often in China we approach the client with completely new material, [but] making a totally new Power­Point drives up sales cost and increases delivery risk,” he intones. “Please, please, refer to the sales playbook rather than coming up with something weak,” he says. “The playbook has tried and trusted material that ­will help you sell.” Although ­there are invariably tweaks to content, depending on the client and their par­tic­u­lar demands, con­sul­tants are encouraged to use standardized sales material for a number of reasons: the belief that what has worked in the past ­will work in the ­future; that what

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has worked elsewhere w ­ ill work in China. Fi­nally, successful material can make for confident sales; the emphasis on trust suggests that having faith in selling techniques is also paramount, a point that w ­ ill be revisited l­ater in this chapter. In addition to highlighting the utility of decontextualized forms of knowledge, Edward lectures the man­ag­ers on the importance of relationships: “Relationships win deals. We carried out a study in fy08 q1 [the first quarter of the 2008 fiscal year]. We found out that 65 ­percent of the time ‘relationship’ was the key f­ actor contributing to the win for Systeo or our competitor.” This is not news to anyone familiar with sales—­after knowing your product comes knowing your customer. What was surprising was how con­sul­tants ­were expected to improve their understanding of client relations. “One of the common ­mistakes [in selling],” said Edward, “is assuming that we offer solutions based on the values and relationships which ­don’t correspond to how the buy decision is actually made.” To overcome this inconsistency, con­sul­tants need to “work the Deal Power Map.”9 “Under­standing the organ­ization of the client is crucial to securing a deal,” said Edward. However, a power map is not an orga­nizational chart (see figure 4.1); it is described as a tool through which con­sul­tants can map out the coordinates of a client’s decision-­making pro­cess. In order to construct the map, you need to find out “who are the key players and what are their roles? Are they evaluators, influencers, recommenders, or approvers?” to use Edward’s words. This translates into: Who are the ­people involved in the decision to buy Systeo’s ser­vices, and how is their relationship to the final outcome structured? For example, do they evaluate the sales proposal, make recommendations, or give the final approval? Once their roles are determined, “you gotta find out w ­ hether they are analyticals, amiables, ­drivers, or expressives,” he continues. This is the terminology of the social styles™ model, which Systeo licenses from the training com­pany Tracom Group (see figure 4.2). According to this model of ­human be­hav­ior, every­one falls into one of ­these four categories on the basis of two characteristics—­their assertiveness and their responsiveness.10 Edward ­doesn’t bother to describe all four styles, concentrating his efforts on “­drivers,” which, according to the model, are defined by their high assertiveness and high responsiveness, which translates into a desire to control (situations), tell (­people their

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ConsultCo

+3

Wendy Flynn VP Procurement Evaluation +1

-2

Daniel Sinclair CFO Influencer

Kate Grayson COO Approver +3

+2

Paul Sanchez VP & Project Leader Eval/Rec

Driving

Analytic

+1

John Whitehouse SE Systeo

+3

Caroline Lee Director Business Services Eval/Rec

0

0

+2

George Johnson Sr. Mgr Systeo

-1

Fred Berwick CIO Eval/Rec

Manage Soft

Expressive

Amiable

Tech Consulting

+1

Eval - Evaluator Rec - Recommender Eval/Rec - Evaluator/Recommender Influencer

- Competitor - Coach - Systeo - Neutral

-3 Strongly Negative/-2 Non Supportive/-1 Mildly Negative +3 Strong Personal and Business relationship/+2 Good business relationship/+1 Mildly Positive

- Thickness of line indicates strength of relationship

figure 4.1: ​Deal power map overlaid with social styles™ model. (Adapted from fieldwork drawing)

opinion), and win (conflict). He describes this disposition as “I want this tomorrow!” and, like many se­nior executives I met, he says that most con­ sul­tants are ­drivers; “they produce actions and deliver results.” Employees would almost always say that I, on the other hand, was not a driver. “­You’re an amiable—­you know every­body,” said one ju­nior con­sul­tant, which suggests I’m rather assertive but not very responsive. “­You’re an analytic—­ that’s why ­you’re d ­ oing a PhD,” explained another, which would make me not very assertive or responsive—­a person who asks and emotes. Yet it is not improbable to suppose I could be characterized by all or none of ­these social styles in any given situation. I did, ­after all, finish my PhD, a task that requires in­de­pen­dence, practical thinking, and self-­motivation—­all qualities of a driver. It is apparent that the static, one-­dimensional model of personhood does not reflect the diversity of subjectivity. So why then do con­sul­ tants wish to emphasize they are all ­drivers? And why do they suggest that social styles are mutually exclusive and an immutable property of the self? Enlightenment could be found in a training handout. Knowing the social styles of the p ­ eople who make decisions on the client side is critical 118 

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Analytical Want to be right Serious Exacting Indecisive Logical

Driving Want to win Independent Formal Practical Dominating

Amiable Want to be liked Dependable Supportive Pliable Open

Expressive Want to be admired Animated Forceful Opinionated Impulsive

Tells

Assertiveness

Asks

Controls

Emotes Responsiveness figure 4.2: ​ social styles™ model. (Adapted from fieldwork drawing)

­ ecause, according to the social styles™ model, each style trusts differb ently. How they derive trust is modeled by the trust equation. Credibility + Reliability + Intimacy Trust =  Self-Orientation Con­sul­tants are told that ­drivers emphasize credibility to produce trust, amiables reliability, expressives intimacy, and analytics self-­orientation. If con­sul­tants can decipher the social style of their client, then they can work out how to get their client to trust them using the pseudoscientific means of the trust equation. The creation of management con­sul­tants and theorists David Maister, Charles Green, and Robert Galford, the trust equation appears in their book The Trusted Advisor, a manual specifically designed for the consulting and advisory industry on how to make the transition “from outside technician to habitué of the inner sanctum.”11 The work of Systeo is to synthesize ­these two models, social styles™ and the trust equation, which are not their intellectual property, to produce a template Training Value  

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for social relationships that w ­ ill guide their con­sul­tants in the sales pro­ cess. Given the costly restructurings they prescribe, con­sul­tants certainly do need to have their clients’ trust. If we look at the power map example that is presented to con­sul­tants in their training handout (see figure 4.1), we can see that the approver, Kate Grayson—­the person on the client side who makes the final decision as to ­whether they procure Systeo’s services—is a driver. In training, this is presented as the typical scenario. Systeo employees are repeatedly told that the decision makers on both sides of the deal are predominantly ­drivers—­that is, both the con­sul­tants and the key client personnel. In fact, the models of social styles™ and the trust equation are utilized not to emphasize the diversity of subjectivity, but rather to emphasize that ­there is a singular subjectivity associated with consulting. On a slide that’s rather tellingly entitled “How you want your client to feel,” we find out that consulting, if directed to d ­ rivers, is about delivering, about having “the A team,” about saving the client time and money and giving them predictability. In the last slide of Edward’s pre­sen­ta­tion, a chart delineates the buzzwords that resonate most strongly with each style, and con­sul­tants are told to use the chart as guidance for tailoring official business communications with their client. The handout that accompanies the training states explic­itly that ­these buzzwords summarize and highlight the values that each “style” prefers. ­Drivers value and are most responsive to: “(the) bottom line,” “action plan,” “assets,” “experience,” and “credibility” (see t­ able 4.1). Notably, t­ hese values reference a model of financial valuation in which profitability, return on assets, and credibility of information are the focus of investor scrutiny. That ­ rivers, then they coalesce is to say, if both con­sul­tants and their clients are d around a set of values that are associated with a shareholder value logic of worth. Far from depicting the range of ­actual be­hav­iors and characteristics of their clients, ­these tools are designed to teach con­sul­tants how clients should behave—­they should be ­drivers. And thus they should be driven by an overarching aim to maximize shareholder value. The idea that relationships lie at the heart of business is nothing new in China. A w ­ hole body of lit­er­a­ture talks about the importance of guanxi (social connections) in cultivating economic ties.12 Trust is built through a system of reciprocal gift-­giving that emphasizes instrumentality and affect (Kipnis 1996), and that binds together Chinese on the mainland and in the diaspora (Yang 1994). However, it is apparent that a very dif­fer­ent model of 120 

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­Table 4.1:  social styles™ and buyer values

Analytical

Amiable

Driver

Expressive

Data and detail

Teamwork

Bottom line

Innovation

Transparency

Consensus

Action plan

Vision

Accuracy

Proven

Assets

Pro­cess/methods

Experience Credibility

social relations is being presented ­here. ­These tools emphasize the plurality of value registers and contend that, through the calculation of affect, resonance between the con­sul­tant and the client can be created. This promotion of wide-­ranging social proficiency is, however, dissonant, with the implicit suggestion that shareholder value is the only point where clients’ needs are commensurate with what con­sul­tants can offer. It is obvious that sales also depend on t­ hings like intimacy and reliability, which are emphasized in the other social styles. But this dissonance need not threaten the legitimacy of ­these tools nor their capacity to improve sales. Dissonance “allows” ­these tools to confer a sense of power and expertise, by claiming to cover all manner of subjectivities and communicate a mode of valorization. Con­sul­tants need both in order to construct a convincing value proposition. Language, Science, and Truth

The very names of t­hese tools—­Deal Power Maps, social styles™, and the trust equation—­make the management of social relations sound like a scientific endeavor. They suggest that relationships can be solved, or at least optimized. And like a mathematical prob­lem this task can be facilitated by devices of calculation that assem­ble ­these tools into one unified architecture—­the qsa tool, ­where qsa stands for “quality,” “strategy,” and “assurance,” and serves to make this quasi-­scientific material. Explicating how to use the qsa tool and why con­sul­tants should use it was the main objective of the Sales Effectiveness Workshop, which was only open to se­nior man­ag­ers and se­nior executives—­those who have the greatest responsibility when it comes to sales. The workshop was the brainchild of the ­Human Capital Strategy Program, which was discussed in chapter  1. Recall that Training Value  

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this program was designed to ensure the effective replication of Systeo’s global corporate culture. In practice, this meant the export of standardized management models, together with the tools that support them. Like the erp systems that Systeo implement in their clients, the qsa tool is designed to standardize working practices and act as a system of surveillance. Nick Carson, an American se­nior executive based in the Shanghai office, acts as the “teaching faculty” for the workshop. He tells the participants that using the qsa tool can be the difference between winning and losing a deal. It does this by “structuring thinking through a common, single set of critical success f­ actors, csfs; it tells you the likelihood of closing and winning a deal as you go through the sales cycle; it has a reporting engine that generates consistent output reports for review meetings. It’s basically a ‘one-­stop shop’ for all the best practice sales tools.” Standardization is, once again, foregrounded, this time with a healthy dose of prediction and a sprinkling of transparency and accountability. W ­ hether you win a deal depends on three ­things: the “winnability” of your value proposition, its “desirability,” and its “deliverability.” ­These terms are comparable to the concept of value propositions in that they are also presented as answers to hy­po­thet­i­cal questions: “Can we win?” “Do we want to win?” and “Can we deliver on our promises if we win?” Circular thinking creates a seamless per­for­mance of expertise, and also fends off the possibility of critique. What do you need to win? Winnability! Yet ­these terms are also more than tautology and rhe­toric. Like the concept of “relationships,” winnability, desirability, and deliverability bespeak an under­lying notion of cause and effect, and thus a scientific model of social real­ity in which winning or selling is construed as a being informed by a series of “­factors” or determinants. As one handout stated unequivocally, the qsa tool “is not a crystal ball”—it does not make baseless predictions. Participants are being socialized into understanding selling as something they can actively control. Nick runs through the operation of the tool with the comportment of an American game-­show host. He darts around the training room rallying the participants to draw on the flip charts, “be active,” and generally “have fun.” They strug­gle to match his meteoric levels of energy and hesitantly respond to his onslaught of questions. “So how many winnability csfs are ­there to complete?” Silence descends on the room; the participants studiously avoid his gaze. “ding—­out of time! The right answer is t­here are twelve csfs to complete.” This stilted dance of exuberance and passivity 122 

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continued: “So who do you need for a new business meeting? You got the ser­vice center guys in Dalian, and who ­else? come on guys! ­Legal, hr—­ you need to involve them other­wise ­they’re gonna kill yer.” Nick’s pre­sen­ ta­tion style could be explained as the charismatic, confident personality necessary to liven up an other­wise dull topic. But one could also interpret his game-­show host persona as an attempt to suggest t­ here are indeed “correct answers” when it comes to selling consultancy. But how can this suggestion be made plausible if their expertise is truly so hard to define? As Nick started to run through the operation of the qsa tool it became apparent that ­there was a certain “flavor” to the qsa terminology. “You gotta get the iwiks, you need the iwiks, ­you’re not gonna get to the next level u ­ ntil you find out the iwiks,” he implored. As I sat observing Nick in the corner of the room, as “co-­faculty,” I wondered ­whether the participants ­were as puzzled as I was. ­There ­were tabs and buttons in the qsa software labeled with the letters i.w.i.k. ­There was a w ­ hole pro­cess of structured thinking dedicated to finding out the iwiks. Only at the end, Nick flicks the slide and all is revealed—­“I. Wish. I. Knew.” This was one of the more unusual examples to come up in fieldwork, which was, on the ­whole, heavi­ly punctuated by the use of acronyms. Some con­sul­tants referred to the dizzying list of acronyms (suoxie) they used in their everyday work as another language (lingwai yige yuyan) or “Systeo speak” (Systeo hua). Th ­ ere ­were occasions when it seemed reasonable to find a shortened expression; certainly erp is a lot easier and quicker to say than enterprise resource planning. iwik, though, was not one of t­hese. Rather, ­here we find that acronyms do the work of performing and concealing expertise. Expertise is enacted as something that only certain p ­ eople possess. In this way an insider/outsider distinction is formed—­those who can decode the acronym are insiders, ­those who cannot are outsiders. Ju­nior con­sul­tants would confide that they often had no idea what the acronyms stood for, especially in their first year ­after joining, but ­were reluctant to ask their superiors what an acronym meant. It was a painful admission that they ­weren’t yet in the know, that they ­were incomplete experts. Acronyms also work to convey a sense of scientism. Like dna code, iwiks can be isolated and analyzed. What you wished you knew about the sales opportunity—­who is the ultimate decision maker on the client side, what is the most they are willing to pay, who ­else is bidding for the work—­ gets transformed into an artifact of scientific knowledge. This transformation Training Value  

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gives iwiks a certain facticity. In the book A History of the Modern Fact, Mary Poovey describes the epistemological transformation engendered with the generation of the modern fact, which is “assumed to reflect t­ hings that actually exist, and they are recorded in a language that seems transparent,” in contrast with “ancient facts, which referred to metaphysical essences” (1998, 29). In short, the modern fact becomes inextricably linked to scientific knowledge, which is, among other ­things, characterized by the dominance of numbers—­a par­tic­u­lar example of a repre­sen­ta­tion that commands its own authority, and that inscribes expertise. Rather than seeing numbers as an artifact of abstraction, devoid of ethical imperative,13 Poovey shows, through a historical account of double-­entry bookkeeping (which dates back to the fifteenth ­century), how the incorporation of numbers into a system of writing has specific social effects—­imposing certain beliefs and ethical inscriptions such as “honesty” on its users (1998, 30). Numbers also have epistemological effects—­for example, generating the modern fact. It could be argued that acronyms share in this epistemological effect. A sense of scientism is also produced by standardizing and dictating practices—­the aim of the qsa tool—­and then by connecting this set of “correct answers” with the depiction of truth and real­ity. ­These two words are used interchangeably by Nick, who tells participants to “review the qsa tool and find the truth.” Groups of participants are given case studies of sales pitches and are asked what they would do in the situation. First they must decipher “the facts” of the case using the qsa tool, and then make decisions such as ­whether to pursue a par­tic­u­lar client, or what coaching they need to give to their team, based on “the truth.” In associating truth with the knowledge generated from their sales tools, con­sul­tants are encouraged not only to see sales as a technical praxis, but also to understand their expertise as creating unambiguous—­objective—­benefits for their clients. But in drawing on social relationships as a functional tool of knowledge, ­these techniques attempt to empty sociality between con­sul­tants and clients of its content: the reciprocal obligations and trust that are so constitutive of Chinese economic life. This point was highlighted in Nick’s own advice for the se­nior man­ag­ers and se­nior executives. He makes explicit that ­these con­sul­tants are not being trained in the art of relationships: “The key secret in China or Asia I’ve learned [is] if it’s gonna be a painful negotiation I ­don’t want Anna [pointing to se­nior executive Anna Wang] to 124 

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be involved in negotiation if she’s involved in delivery. I want to separate negotiation from the person who is responsible for delivery. You may have dif­fer­ent experiences from me, but I have so many experiences in China. Fly someone in from the U.S., get the Global Negotiating Team for ten thousand or twenty thousand U.S. dollars.” Separating the con­sul­tants who actually do the consulting from ­those who sell the value proposition to clients is an attempt to expunge social relations from deal making. This construal of value creation, as something that can be aided by the removal of sociality, is at odds with—is dissonant with—­the earlier emphasis on “relationships” as the key to winning deals. Far from helping them work on improving their client relationships, ­these tools of selling are designed to dig beneath the surface of social relations to help con­sul­tants uncover “the facts.” In other words, it is only by getting past the hazy fuzz of sociality that con­sul­tants can find out that what their client r­ eally wants is shareholder value, and that this demand is what drives and defines consulting. They are engaged in the tautological pro­cess of uncovering shareholder value as the real need of clients, and si­mul­ta­neously constructing their sales pitches to convince clients of the primacy of shareholder value as the cornerstone of corporate governance. Se­nior executives often confessed that they had difficulty achieving this goal. One American se­nior executive I interviewed told me that “Chinese clients are often principle-­based rather than objective-­based. So rather than aiming to reduce costs, improve capital charge, they have princi­ples like become an innovator or maintain social harmony.” To use the language of social styles™, Chinese clients are not easily constructed as ­drivers, and as such “are not on the same page” as con­sul­tants, to use consultancy-­speak. It is only through the alignment of values and value, where shareholder value is ingrained as the hegemonic ethic, that consulting can be seen to “add value.” If Chinese clients do not hold shareholder value as the ultimate objective of restructuring, one might suppose that the value of con­sul­tants’ claim to “add value” is somewhat diminished. Yet this se­nior executive did not share this view. Rather, it is by problematizing the dissonance between Chinese “princi­ples” and the “objective” of maximizing shareholder value that this se­nior executive goes on to formulate an imperative to modernize Chinese soes; that is, the fact that they are not oriented to shareholder value is all the more reason to chase their business. In other words, dissonance in this instance legitimizes Systeo’s proj­ect of ethicizing Chinese Training Value  

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companies through a large dose of consultancy. Far from posing a threat to performed discourses, dissonance can be productive for a profession that is concerned with selling logics of worth. Ethicizing Corporate Praxis

The failure of shareholder value creation to become hegemonic in China is portrayed by expatriate se­nior executives as a critical shortcoming of post-­ Mao Chinese culture, which is seen as still bearing the hallmarks of the old socialist command economy. They see their role as ensuring the effective transportation and replication of Systeo’s business practices in China. In an interview, one American se­nior executive told me: China is missing the leaders. If analysts and con­sul­tants are the foot soldiers, the man­ag­ers and se­nior man­ag­ers are frontline infantry, then se­nior executives are air cover—­ready to shoot down any prob­lems if not covered by the p ­ eople on the ground. Currently China needs more air cover, it needs more local leaders with skills. I spend a lot of time coaching, explaining t­ hings that I w ­ ouldn’t have to do elsewhere. I enjoy helping local talent, which is good b ­ ecause ­there’s a lot of ­people ­here who ­don’t “get” business operations. Or at least it feels like ­there’s more of a lack ­here. Like many of the expatriates, this se­nior executive saw Systeo’s methods of business as “best practice,” and in this way normalized the value-­based management they propagate. He justifies the need for foreign expertise, in the way of expatriate se­nior executives, in terms of their “Systeoness.” He was not, however, referring to the embodiment of the com­pany’s culture, but rather the delicate balancing of profit making and corporate ethicizing that, I would learn, defines Systeo’s leaders. In the milestone trainings for man­ag­ers and se­nior man­ag­ers, con­sul­tants receive extensive training on how they “impact the bottom line” through their sales deals. ­There are two princi­pal mechanisms: through price and through cost. Se­nior man­ag­ers must attend a session where they learn “pricing excellence,” narrated as a lesson in “basic contract financials” by the three Chinese se­nior executives who conduct the training. Their speeches are peppered with acronyms such as ode, hsp, and cci, which stand for original deal economics, hot skill premium, and contract controllable income, 126 

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respectively. ­These are used in their careful explication of the economics of consulting. First of all, they tackle price. A slide appears on the projector screen. It has two columns: how pricing our work impacts Systeo’s business and how it impacts your rewards. U ­ nder the first column is shareholder value, investor perception, and client perception; ­under the second is annual pay increase and bonus program. Con­sul­tants are told that the ability to price well ­will positively affect Systeo’s share price, which ­will trickle down to individual remuneration. The se­nior executives stress that the se­nior man­ag­ers must learn to price Systeo’s work correctly and learn the time to close, meaning the time to submit the price to the client. Before they explain how to do this, they address the second mechanism—­costs. Con­sul­tants are advised to reduce the costs required to deliver on their promises—­the client contract—by lowering the cost of ­labor. This is achieved using offshore ­labor found in Systeo’s outsourcing division, and by conducting a “pyramid refresh”—­technical jargon for changing the structure of their consulting teams to incorporate more lower-­level staff such as ju­nior con­sul­tants in order to reduce costs. This act of costing has to be balanced with the act of pricing to ensure that the profit margin of each contract, technically termed the contract controllable income or cci, is a minimum of 40 ­percent. Se­nior man­ag­ers must learn to carefully calibrate the levers of price and cost in order to maintain this golden figure of 40 ­percent without compromising Systeo’s reputation. Terence Huang, one of the Chinese se­nior executives, tells them that “rule number one is that pricing is not cost-­plus, instead it is what you are willing to pay. So I suggest moving off price and talking about value” (emphasis added). He says that most of the time Systeo’s price is higher than that of their competitors, which he attributes indirectly to the fact that “Systeo does very honest work for clients, our competitors maybe not.” What he stresses is that con­sul­tants should avoid only moving on price since this affects the cci. But he also incorporates an ethical justification—­that it ­will appear that they are con­sul­tants without integrity. Se­nior man­ag­ers are told to avoid simply lowering prices on demand; instead, any change in price must be accompanied by a corresponding reduction in scope. In other words, they must reduce what they are willing to provide in the way of consulting ser­vices in order to meet the demands of their client. If they lower their price without changing the scope, they may become embroiled in a price war with their competitors, and it w ­ ill Training Value  

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also appear that the initial price was artificially high. In short, con­sul­tants are tasked with continually reinforcing the message that they are giving a fair price. In the sales workshop, which took place in the depths of the 2008–9 financial crisis, Nick Carson reiterates this point: “You cannot use the economic situation to lower prices; if you do, shame on you, it affects our brand. The second you do, you undervalue our firm,” he says. His comment draws attention to two ways in which ethics are critical to market valuation. One, he highlights the importance of fostering the right affective ties—­the creation of a “brand”—­underpinned by a strong ethics. Two, he articulates implicitly who con­sul­tants should be creating value for and thus displaying loyalty to. His claim that the lowering of prices, ­because it culminates in the undervaluing of Systeo, is shameful be­hav­ior, even in a financial crisis, rests on the assertion that con­sul­tants are in the ser­vice of Systeo’s shareholders and not other constituents such as their clients. “Pricing is an art, not a science, just ­don’t get the math wrong! It is the art of knowing your client—­don’t sell them a bicycle if they want a car,” are some of Terence’s parting words of advice. By learning how to price, and learning how to cost, t­ hese con­sul­tants are invested with the productive power to create value. But the narration of this pro­cess suggests that this is not a purely technical enterprise—­creating value is also an affective and ethical act. Sometimes this ethics is enfolded into acts of economizing; at other times an extraneous ethical responsibility is articulated. One example is the discourse of value-­based leadership, which, as the similarity in terminology suggests, goes hand-­in-­hand with the value-­based management that con­sul­tants preach. If value-­based management is management oriented by the objective of creating shareholder value, then value-­based leadership is the explicit ethicizing of that very pro­cess. One could imagine that the task of selling value would include attempts to make Chinese businesses commensurable with shareholder value by, for example, expressly teaching con­sul­tants how to frame cost-­stripping exercises and the implementation of accounting technologies in terms of “Chinese” business ethics. However, ­there are few attempts to localize consultancy in this way. Instead, the aim is to create an explicit ethical consciousness. In the Se­nior Man­ag­ers’ Milestone, the chairman of Systeo China, Liu Xing, draws on China’s extensive tradition of moral philosophy to explain the concept of value-­based leadership. Quoting Confucius and Mencius, he describes his own leadership as being guided by the princi­ples of: 128 

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Hefa, heli, heqing [be lawful, reasonable, and fair] buxiao wu liangjiang [to be unfilial is to be unscrupulous] He then recounts a conversation he once had with a professor at Beijing University, who conducts research on the “best practices” of Chinese employees. The professor told him of an entrepreneur who had a particularly in­ter­est­ing way of judging his employees: he would match the remittances that his employees would send back to their ­family at Chinese New Year. The entrepreneur justified his actions, saying that if he ­doesn’t see his employees taking care of their parents, he ­won’t re­spect them. “That’s his princi­ple,” says Liu Xing. “I’m not saying you have to have the same princi­ ple, but you have to have a princi­ple to guide your decisions.” The recourse to local ethics continued with the next speaker, Liang Xiao Hong, party secretary of the Chinese Acad­emy of Launch Vehicle Technology (calvt), the state-­owned manufacturer of space rockets. Introduced by Liu Xing as a very local speaker, Xiao Hong spoke in perfect standard putonghua (Mandarin), his diction crisp and his projection impressive. This was the only session to not be presented in English—­most of the expatriates left the room to check their BlackBerrys. They missed an engaging speaker who had not come to give away the secrets of Chinese space exploration, but rather to draw parallels between Systeo and space shut­tle manufacturing—­“dif­fer­ent kinds of organ­ization can have lots of ­things in common [butong de leixing de qiye you hen duo dongxi yiyangde]—­ both have their own distinctive culture, both are striving for excellence.” The analogies, though, did not stop ­there. calvt recruits some of China’s brightest gradu­ates, and so does Systeo. Making space rockets requires a ­great deal of expertise; the suggestion is that consulting does too. Rocket engineers might be motivated by ideals of Chinese techno-­nationalism; their work in the most high-­tech of industries serves to elevate China’s development and global standing. Perhaps con­sul­tants, in making Chinese state-­owned companies efficient, companies which could include the likes of calvt, would also serve this greater good (see chapter 5). The ethicization of corporate praxis does not, however, only refer to some kind of awkward bolt-on conscience. Ethicizing action also creates a belief in skill that is necessary to carry out their jobs on a day-­to-­day basis. In one session, “Creating a Winning Value Proposition,” con­sul­tants ­were told, “You have to convince yourself first, you have to believe [the value Training Value  

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proposition].” Faith is found, in the first instance, by “knowing yourself.” More than just woolly prescription, this could be achieved through practical means. Liu Xing, Systeo’s China chairman, gives the example of the funeral exercise described in the book Seven Habits of Highly Effective ­People. The participants must ask themselves: What would the mourners at your funeral say in the eulogy? According to Xing, this is a pro­cess that allows you to find out “who you are and who you want to be.” In another very similar example, he talks about his ­daughter tagging him in a Facebook post, which asks you to list twenty-­five ­things about yourself that most ­people ­don’t know. He said when he tried to complete this exercise he found it very hard to do. ­These exercises aim to unveil a hidden, “true” self where one’s essential, unadulterated core supposedly lies. The content of this self is not impor­tant—­just knowing that you have an inner ethics can provide the stable reference point from which more complex claims to knowing can be spun. Even if they could not prove the efficacy of their interventions, having a sense that they ­were acting correctly was critical. In another research proj­ect, I found analogous examples of fund man­ag­ers articulating a self-­conscious ethics as a way of creating conviction in their expertise. Although their expertise would be depicted as deriving from their individual, unique investment pro­cess, ­these pro­cesses ­were, however, liable to change according to their successes and failures. When they did, fund man­ag­ers would nevertheless “emphasize that their ethics, on the other hand, have stayed the same” (Chong and Tuckett 2015). In addition, they ­were compelled to act on their individual ethics—­“eat their own cooking”—­meaning that a proportion of their salary would be invested in the very funds they managed. Both management con­sul­tants and fund man­ag­ers find it difficult to evidence the efficacy of their actions—it is difficult to evidence skill. Instead, expertise, at least in part, relies on creating alternative bases of stability. Having faith in the morality of their actions is one way of achieving this.

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CHAPTER Four

5

Client Sites Liminality, Modernity, and Per­for­mances of Expertise

although my fieldwork was plagued by prob­lems of “studying-up” and access, I found that some employees, se­nior executives and support staff, ­were easy to meet. They spent most of their time in the office, as reflected by their highly personalized workspaces. Particularly memorable was a se­nior executive who had hung a poster inside his glass-­walled cubicle detailing the orga­nizational structure of the Chinese Communist Party (ccp). At the top was a headshot of Hu Jintao, then leader of the ccp, under­neath the stern ­faces of the Politburo. On the desks of support staff I would find ­family photos, plants—­cacti ­were particularly popu­lar—­and magazine cuttings of dream travel destinations. However, not all of the workspaces ­were so vibrantly adorned. The desks for con­sul­tants ­were barren and monotone, not so much as one pen pot or rogue sticky note could be found; ­these ­were not permanently allocated to any individual employee, but rather had to be booked in advance using the com­pany’s intranet. Furthermore, ­there ­were fewer than twenty spaces in this “hot-­desking” area, even though over three hundred con­sul­tants ­were employed in Beijing. Con­sul­tants’ lives are defined by a lack of permanence. They move from client to client, in between encountering airports, taxis, h ­ otels, their laptop “freeing” them from the constraints of time and space. This mobility was portrayed in a glamorous light in the induction training and Systeo’s recruitment lit­er­a­ture. Photos of young, well-­groomed professionals dressed in muted tones, pulling along carry-on luggage, illustrated the com­pany dress code. Pre­sen­ta­tions explaining the procedures to book plane tickets and ­hotels described the “opportunities for travel” that came with the

job. Employees ­were told in dizzying detail about the array of com­pany expenses and benefits they would enjoy, which included regular return flights to Beijing and a daily travel allowance, or per diem, they could claim whenever they ­were based at a client site outside of Beijing. This provoked a flurry of questions from the new employees, who w ­ ere excited to know more about air miles and membership lounges. This enthusiasm is typically short-­lived. When I interviewed one con­ sul­tant, who had been with the com­pany for over three years, he told me he wished for “more proj­ects in Beijing so I ­don’t have to spend my life living out of a suitcase, and a locker, so on the few days I am in the office I can actually have space—­just a small space—­I can call mine.” Con­sul­tants with c­ hildren, especially ­women, found the travel and extended periods of time away from home a strain. Grace Zhu, who had an eight-­year-­old son, told me that in 2008 she spent three months in Henan, a province in central China. She flew back to Beijing, seven hundred kilo­meters, ­every two weeks. During this period she “went crazy!” Luckily her ­mother lives with her and could help with childcare. Another female con­sul­tant, Joanna Han described herself as pao jia qizi (a runaway wife). She had left her thirteen-­year-­old son in Xi’an, 1,100 kilo­meters away, to be based in Beijing. Given that the job entailed so much travel to and from clients who may be located anywhere in China or the world even, it made l­ittle difference where you actually lived, she reasoned. Wherever you called home, you would still find yourself on the road, separated from your ­children. Con­sul­tants spend most of their working lives inside their clients’ offices, which are termed “client sites.” To understand the nature of consulting, it is necessary to observe how it is practiced in t­ hese contexts. In this chapter I examine consultancy at two very dif­fer­ent client sites. I follow con­sul­tants posted to GlobalCo, an established transnational corporation that had in recent years relocated most of its supply chain to China, and had contracted Systeo to design and install an it system to help them manage their “sales pipeline” and provide technical support for the system post-­ installation. I also observed and interviewed con­sul­tants at China Corp, a Chinese state-­owned enterprise that had hired Systeo to implement an enterprise resource planning system to improve its financial accountability and transparency, in preparation for its imminent stock market flotation. When requesting access, I specifically asked for t­ hese two clients.1 To date management consulting has been studied almost solely with reference to 132 

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Eu­ro­pean or American clients; how consulting is practiced with Chinese clients—­soes or private companies—­has received almost no attention.2 ­There ­were significant differences between consulting work at t­ hese two sites, as we ­will soon find out. However, ­there ­were also commonalities. At all client sites, con­sul­tants must work in compliance with their client’s practices, hierarchies, and dynamics. They almost assume their client’s identity without actually belonging to the client’s organ­ization. Organ­ ization theorists Barbara Czarniawska and Carmello Mazza conceptualize the client site as a “liminal space,” one that “shares its ­legal bound­aries and physical environment with a proper work organ­ization, but [it] forms a virtual space, experienced differently by con­sul­tants than by the regular employees” (Czarniawska and Mazza 2003, 273).3 They describe the ways in which con­sul­tants are subordinated to their clients’ whims, the need for constant flexibility, and their strug­gle to separate their roles—­and expertise—­from ­those of their clients. Without their clients ­there would be no “billable hours”—­the “hard” mea­sure of their individual per­for­mance.4 The sense that their clients “own them”—­their time, their identities, their performance—­poses significant social and psychological challenges for con­sul­tants, challenges that ­were all too familiar to me. A feeling that grew, as I became more and more embedded, was that I was being swallowed by Systeo. I went into the office e­ very day, wearing a bland outfit of “business casual.” I became proficient in their jargon of acronyms and buzzwords, and could quickly put together a Power­Point pre­sen­ ta­tion, complete with animation. If you searched for me in the employee directory, you would find my name, email address, and extension number. Although being an unpaid observer meant I was not explic­itly bound by their regulations, to be taken seriously—­necessary to gain access—­I needed to look like them, speak their language, use their technologies, be “on their wavelength.” Hence, I had insight into con­sul­tants’ everyday experience of working inside organ­izations they did not have full membership in; I understood the pressure to abide by practices and norms other than t­ hose of your own profession and the challenges posed by having an ambiguous position. I found myself in what could be described as a metaliminal experience: I was stranded between the university and the consultancy, passing for subjects who w ­ ere themselves marooned between two institutional contexts, the consultancy and their client. None of us felt we belonged. All of us needed to justify our presence. Client Sites  

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Dominant approaches to management consulting can be divided into two main camps: the functionalist approach, which analyzes the ways in which consultants—­through the dissemination of expertise (e.g., Aharoni 1997; Gallessich 1982) or the promotion of learning (McGivern 1983; Schein 1999)—­can be said to help their clients, and the critical approach, which highlights the symbolic nature of consulting and contends that con­sul­tants are mostly concerned with demonstrating their value to clients (e.g., Alvesson 1993; Clark 1995; Clark and Salaman 1996).5 Despite their clear differences, both have tended to focus on communication and the flow of knowledge between con­sul­tants and clients. By contrast, constructivist perspectives focus on the orga­nizational realities in which knowledge is produced and exchanged. Con­sul­tants can be thought of as “merchants of sense-­making tools” (Czarniawska and Mazza 2012) who “ ‘help’ clients by providing linguistic and material artefacts, shaping the perception of the real­ity that clients assume to be the object of their actions and decisions” (Czarniawska and Mazza 2012, 436). The coproduction of orga­nizational real­ity takes place u ­ nder specific conditions, what has been termed the state of liminality, a term that denotes the suspension of usual codes of practice, and the feelings of “in-­betweenness” and ambiguity that arise as a consequence. A somewhat marginal subfield in the research on management consulting, the scholarship on liminality has tended to center on rites and rituals of consultancy such as start-up meetings and business dinners,6 perhaps ­because ­these are the most obvious occasions when con­sul­tants and clients meet. Absent from t­ hese analyses is the larger po­liti­cal and social context in which consulting proj­ects are situated and how it may impact the state of liminality, and consequently the shaping of orga­nizational realities. In a global management consultancy that not only employs dif­fer­ ent groups of employees, some from the United States and Eu­rope, as well as Chinese nationals, but also has a broad range of clients, some Western multinationals, some Chinese soes, the state of liminality refers to more than the awkward rituals or moments when con­sul­tants interface with clients. The state of liminality is also informed by the dif­fer­ent value tropes and teleologies of production that can be found in a par­tic­u­lar client site, which con­sul­tants must manage and commensurate in their quotidian practices. Con­sul­tants’ liminal existence is the focus of the first part of this chapter, in which I provide an account of the everyday realities of consultancy 134 

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at a client site, drawing on fieldwork at GlobalCo. In contrast to some se­nior executives who suggested that con­sul­tants’ legitimacy came, in part, through the per­for­mance of an abstract professionalism,7 a fixed exemplary corporate subjectivity, I ­will demonstrate that con­sul­tants adopt certain habits and ways of speaking—­forms of embodied be­hav­ior—­that respond to clients’ expectations. In the second part of the chapter I delve further into how ­these expectations are incorporated, showing how consultancy itself—­the transformations that con­sul­tants claim to enact—is framed in terms of clients’ moral concerns. In the last chapter we saw how con­sul­tants, keenly aware of the difficulties they face in justifying their ser­ vices, are trained explic­itly in the art—­and science—of creating an ethical remit for their expertise. We could term ­these “moral proj­ects of consultancy,” which, as this chapter ­will demonstrate, are created specifically for each client. Con­sul­tants’ experience of liminality reflects the pro­cess of discovering the moral under­pinnings of clients’ needs and then tailoring their per­for­mances of expertise to resonate with t­ hese values. In the coming pages we ­will see how con­sul­tants at China Corp, who are tasked with making one of China’s most impor­tant companies into a global player, actually draw on local models of modernization and self-­cultivation—­salient tropes of social and cultural change in the post-­Mao period—to explicate and give meaning to their interventions. Liminality at GlobalCo

Located outside Beijing’s third ring road, far away from any metro station, GlobalCo was exceedingly difficult to get to. Accordingly, the com­pany provided a network of twenty-­eight shut­tle buses to ferry in its employees. The number nine bus stopped just five minutes from my apartment in Chaoyang district. At 8:30 in the morning I hopped on. In front of me was a blond ­woman who spent most of the ­ride reading a Chinese-­for-­beginners textbook. Foreign employees—­though not common—­were hardly a rare sight at this client site. However, con­sul­tants emphasized that the client ­here was neither foreign nor Chinese, they w ­ ere “global.” It was paramount that con­sul­tants similarly projected a global outlook and w ­ ere seen to offer global expertise. As we ­will see, language was a key means of achieving this; the composition of the consulting team was another. Headed by an Australian se­nior executive, with everyday work overseen by a Taiwanese Client Sites  

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proj­ect man­ag­er and a Japa­nese proj­ect man­ag­er, the team, which also included a ju­nior American con­sul­tant in the ranks, was positively cosmopolitan. With my British accent and British style (ying shi), I was not out of place; it was conceivable that I would be mistaken for one of the small but significant number of Western-­educated Asian expatriates who typically filled mid-­level managerial roles.8 GlobalCo was a particularly impressive client site: a towering edifice of glass and steel built using “green” technologies; inside, leather couches, plant-­lined corridors, and sparkling marble rest rooms. Con­sul­tants, like GlobalCo employees, worked in open-­plan workspaces designed to maximize productivity. Desks ­were height-­adjustable—­you could go from sitting to standing at the touch of a button; movable fabric screens, again electronically operated, segmented the open area, providing shelter from distractions when workers needed to concentrate. Such experiences of luxury and modernity reminded con­sul­tants that their interventions w ­ ere being enacted at the very height of global capitalism. GlobalCo was a highly successful, transnational corporation, a leader in the field of electronic consumer goods, and was listed on the New York Stock Exchange. The decision to build this office, which was completed just a year before my visit, was informed by the centrality of China to its global operations. Although its customer base covered all regions of the world, it manufactured the bulk of its products through an intricate system of subcontracting that was concentrated in China’s southeastern provinces of Guangdong and Fujian. Business operations, though, would be coordinated from this site, where the high-­value activities of research and development and design also took place. Prototypes and design tweaks could be realized almost instantly in this specialized setup; ­there was a factory connected to the office building, a virtue in a global economy defined by ever-­decreasing lead times between design and final distribution. Although they ate at the same onsite canteens, factory workers w ­ ere easily distinguished from white-­collar employees, not least by their light-­ blue uniforms and the plastic bags they wore over their shoes to reduce electrostatic charge. Systeo con­sul­tants also ate at ­these canteens. As I sat with them, tucking into a hearty lunch of braised beef and noodles, I asked them what exactly they ­were trying to do at this microcosm of global production. Raymond Wang, the proj­ect man­ag­er, explained they ­were helping GlobalCo to streamline their sales pro­cess, “get rid of sales and 136 

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distribution inefficiencies,” in part by “provid[ing] real-­time visibility to sales operations.” This required the installation of an enterprise system—­ not an erp system, but one targeted to facilitate “customer relationship management” (crm). More specifically, GlobalCo had instructed Systeo to install a Siebel crm system, which would monitor, analyze, and forecast the sales of the fifty thousand retail outlets that sold GlobalCo’s products in China. crm can be understood as a more recent iteration of enterprise systems. An established transnational corporation like GlobalCo ­will almost certainly already run an erp system; digitizing their sales—­their revenue numbers—­would be the next step in terms of computerizing their operations. The term con­sul­tants use to describe what the system enacts (tracking) suggests that they are helping their client to mea­sure a preexisting external real­ity—­“sales.” The idea underpinning such a claim is that by making vis­i­ble what already exists but was hitherto invisible improves managerial control of complex business operations. In fact, such devices are not engaged in representing real­ity. Through the production of data, they create a real­ity; they create a sales real­ity that can be worked on, altered, improved.9 I was able to access just one phase of this iterative pro­cess of creating and then altering real­ity, through my observations of con­sul­ tants engaged in “designing and implementing the Siebel system.” Simon Lin is a “solutions architect,” a title that told me every­thing and nothing about what he actually does. A congenial man with a penchant for loud shirts, Simon explained that his job entails “providing solutions and controlling outcomes.” Such woolly statements belied the everyday real­ity of teasing out requirements from the clients and constructing solutions to ensure success. Though the system was designed, like the tentacles of an octopus, to spread out to the fifty thousand retail outlets in China that sold GlobalCo’s products, con­sul­tants never actually visited a single one of ­these retailers. Nor did they talk to any sales representatives. Instead, the “end user” of the crm system they w ­ ere preoccupied with ­were ­middle and se­nior management in GlobalCo’s business operations division. “For example, I might find out from them that we need to increase the response speed,” Simon told me. He was referring to the time between entering data into the system and the system updating. Having fast business software was seen as a requisite in a global economy defined by “time-­space compression” (Harvey 1989). Time savings at all stages of operation—­not just factory lead times—­are postulated as critical for profit maximization. Consequently, Client Sites  

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the response time is a key metric of the system’s per­for­mance, and thus con­sul­tants’ per­for­mance, in the eyes of the client. Although con­sul­tants ­were engaged in testing the system, they ­were not primarily responsible for executing changes. The grunt work of system building was carried out by software engineers located offsite, in a Dalian ser­vice center. Considerably cheaper to employ than con­sul­tants, ­these Systeo employees ­were often more technically qualified as well. The outsourcing of technical capability underscores the point that con­sul­tants’ jobs are not predicated on having technical knowledge. This was exemplified by the fact that many of the “systems implementation” con­sul­tants did not have computing degrees; I met one who had a degree in operations management; other majors included mathe­matics, chemistry, finance, business, and communications. Consultants—or “pro­cess designers”—­although responsible for implementing software, ­were primarily engaged with the work of client relations. ­Every day I would see con­sul­tants and client personnel strike up conversations about system design, I also sat in on a daylong meeting where con­sul­tants and the client (some of whom attended via speakerphone) discussed how implementation was progressing. Although the proj­ect was “on track,” t­ here ­were a few obstacles to completing according to schedule. During this meeting one of the client personnel got increasingly combative; one moment she would be shouting at the con­sul­tants, the next she would be sobbing, her face red and flustered. The con­sul­tants continued working, nonplussed at her outbursts, saying the odd word h ­ ere and t­ here to placate her. The atmosphere was tense yet intimate; con­sul­tants discreetly passed pocket tissues to the client, their eyes still focused on their laptop screens. Without prior knowledge it was hard to tell the client from the con­sul­tants. It was like watching a f­ amily at work; together they w ­ ere dysfunctional yet committed to the proj­ect at hand. I was impressed by the con­sul­tants’ ability to manage such a potentially explosive situation, which, judging by their calm reaction, had prob­ably happened before. It was apparent that the con­sul­tants ­were highly attuned to their clients’ needs. Sometimes they would eat lunch with them, or grab a coffee; such occasions afforded opportunities to develop the close ties necessary for a successful proj­ect. Even before they get to the client site, con­sul­tants are socialized to under­ stand the importance of client relations. In the last chapter we saw how 138 

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con­sul­tants, taught that client relations are central to winning deals, are exposed to techniques of mapping and graphing relationships—of making relationships legible. H ­ ere I suggest that developing close relationships with clients to find out what was most impor­tant to them, and then deciding how they could calibrate their actions to fulfill ­these requirements, was not just a large part of consultancy. Arguably, it was the mainstay of con­ sul­tants’ expertise. Although client–­consultant interactions w ­ ere often vis­i­ble at GlobalCo, the short duration of my stay precluded an in-­depth analy­sis of their nature. What I was able to observe in greater detail was how con­sul­tants ­were sensitized to fulfilling generalized expectations held by the client of what consulting entailed, which did not necessarily refer to the technical details of system implementation. For most of the days the con­sul­tants ­were scattered across the open area, blending in chameleon-­like with the client employees who surrounded them. Only when Raymond, the proj­ect man­ ag­er, would summon them to a proj­ect meeting, and all the con­sul­tants would get up from their seats, could you distinguish them from GlobalCo employees. Indeed, it was partly b ­ ecause they w ­ ere always working in full view of the client that Raymond felt the need to call a meeting in the first week of my visit. The team went to “Milan” (all the meeting rooms w ­ ere named ­after global metropolises), Raymond paced up and down, the rest of the team sat around an oval conference ­table. The main agenda item was the importance of looking busy. “You need to flap around from desk to desk, pao lai pao qu [run to and fro],” he intoned, waving his arms from side to side in case anyone was unclear. This was perhaps an unsurprising request, given that management consultancies bill their clients by the hour. Although this applied to all of the team, con­sul­tants who provided system support ­were singled out for more specific instruction. They needed to be available from nine in the morning ­until five-­thirty in the eve­ning to comply with the terms of the “ser­vice level agreement.” During ­these hours, the con­sul­tants would answer emails and phone calls from GlobalCo employees who had technical difficulties or any other queries about the sales-­tracking system. Carson, an expatriate employee at GlobalCo and key client contact, had flagged the issue. Raymond told the con­sul­tants, “If your shut­tle bus arrives ­after nine then ­there’s not much you can do, but if you want to get breakfast from the canteen then ­you’ve got to have it ‘to go,’ okay?” He spoke of how embarrassing it was when, walking with Client Sites  

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Carson, he bumped into Jason, the American con­sul­tant, at the canteen eating steamed buns when he was being “paid to staff the call center.” Jason smiled sheepishly and promised it ­wouldn’t happen again. GlobalCo employees ­were also encouraged to keep up the appearance of productivity. I observed them regularly getting coffee—­proper coffee, not just the instant variety—­from machines located at refreshment s­ tations on ­every floor, a novelty in China, where tea is still the preferred hot beverage. This was one method of staying alert. ­After lunch I would often hear the whirring sound of the height-­adjustable desks being elevated, as employees tried to stave off their drowsiness by standing rather than sitting. Yet, as the next section ­will show, the fact that con­sul­tants are paid by the hour does not, in itself, mean they must always appear productive. Rather, I would suggest that con­sul­tants posted to GlobalCo needed to embody the efficient worker, ­because looking busy was valued by this par­tic­u­lar client. For con­sul­tants like Jason, who w ­ ere in effect employed to replace GlobalCo staff, this was particularly impor­tant. On my first day at Global­ ­Co, I noticed that Jason and the two other con­sul­tants in the technical support subteam (other­wise known as the on-­site call center) had dif­fer­ent laptops from the o ­ thers—­theirs ­were provided by GlobalCo. Moreover, they had GlobalCo email addresses, through which GlobalCo employees would contact them. They seemed more GlobalCo than Systeo in this context. Unsurprisingly, they ­were harshly judged if they ­were seen to deviate from GlobalCo’s values and expectations. Another way in which consultants—­all of them at this client site—­ demonstrated an understanding of the client was through the way they spoke. Nominally, they spoke Mandarin Chinese, but it certainly w ­ asn’t of the form that most Beijingers would understand. They would speak in a Chinese-­English mix, which entailed inserting En­glish words into sentences constructed using Chinese syntactical structures. For example, when Raymond described Carson, the client contact who complained of con­sul­tants’ paucity of availability, he told con­sul­tants that “ta ye shi reasonable de ren” (he is also a reasonable person). At first I thought that con­sul­tants would only insert En­glish words that could not be easily translated into Chinese; this would explain the popularity of phrases like “zheige bu make sense” (that ­doesn’t make sense). In Chinese you can talk about something having logic (you luoji) or being principled (you daoli), but making sense—­having meaning, though not necessarily logic or princi­ple, 140 

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that validates action—is not easily translated. Yet I also found that con­ sul­tants would insert En­glish words that did have a suitable Chinese analog.10 This could lead to awkward phrasing, as when one con­sul­tant told another that when he “zuo de pre­sen­ta­tion feichang de boring” (did the pre­sen­ta­tion, it was very boring). It was apparent that the switching in of En­glish terms was not only for purposes of semantics, but also to convey a global disposition to the client. Chinese employees of GlobalCo also spoke in this manner, which could be characterized as typical of a white-­collar, cosmopolitan class in China who work in private, usually foreign-­owned companies. Raising Quality at China Corp

It was not yet eight ­o’clock when the phone rang. Ju­nior con­sul­tant Ding Fei was calling to ask if I had “fixed” my pass. Although I had authorization from se­nior executives to join the consulting teams at China Corp, I still needed to get permission from the client—­the only way to get a long-­ term entry pass that all con­sul­tants ­were issued with, and that would be personalized with my photo. However, Fei had forgotten to get my paperwork signed off, which meant she could only get me a temporary pass—­a blank card, no photo—­that would be valid for just a few days. Fearing I would lose access to this most intriguing of field sites, I deci­ded to take an old passport photo and paste it onto my temporary pass. “Can you make it look real? ­Will you do it? Do you dare?” she asked. Guards stood at ­every entrance, each holding a ­rifle. The high security reflected China Corp’s elevated position. One of China’s “National Champions,” China Corp is part of the elite group of soes deemed central to nation’s strength and ambitions on the global stage, and that occupy the critical industries of banking, resources, utilities, and defense.11 I took several deep breaths, hoping to steady my nerves before entering the lobby. Making eye contact, I presented my makeshift pass to the guard. He barely glanced at it before waving me through. I ­wouldn’t always be so lucky. The following week the guard asked to inspect my pass. Maybe he could not tell it was a forgery. Maybe he was impressed that I went to that much effort. ­Either way, he let me in. In fact, Fei had not forgotten to pro­cess the paperwork. She knew that the client was highly unlikely to agree to my access—­her “forgetfulness” belied an acknowl­edgment that having someone other than a con­sul­ tant inside the proj­ect rooms could be seen as an infringement of client Client Sites  

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confidentiality.12 Though it was never discussed openly, the fact I could pass for my in­for­mants was critical for my access to ­these soes. Unlike at GlobalCo, the consulting team at China Corp consisted only of mainland Chinese consultants—no expatriates—at all levels of se­niority. Looking Chinese was an imperative if I was to carry out observation unnoticed at ­these most mysterious of cap­i­tal­ist enterprises. One of the reasons expatriate con­sul­tants ­were not posted to China Corp was that all client communication was conducted in Mandarin Chinese; even En­glish buzzwords and business terminology would be translated. Only once did I hear a con­sul­tant at China Corp use an En­glish term—­se­nior con­sul­tant Tracey Yao talked about “[management] capability” rather than using the Chinese term neng gou. Deliverables to the client, including the training material for end users, and emails to clients and among the team, ­were all rendered in Mandarin. Furthermore, fluency in Chinese concepts as well as Chinese language was a prerequisite for consulting at this client site, as my descriptions of one Power­Point pre­sen­ta­tion ­will soon reveal. China Corp is just one of the many Chinese soes that have solicited the ser­vices of foreign management con­sul­tants.13 Although they w ­ ere known for driving a hard bargain in contract negotiations, soes constituted a lucrative source of business. According to one con­sul­tant, it was “no secret that many Chinese soes throw money at [Systeo],” a benefit that trickles down to individual employees in the form of generous expenses.14 Once stalwarts of the socialist command economy, Chinese soes are now some of the largest profit-­making companies in the world. Their transformation began in earnest in the 1990s with the second phase of Deng Xiao Ping’s program of market reforms, which brought an acceleration of economic restructuring. ­Under the policy of zhua da fang xiao (grasping the large and releasing the small), the Chinese state reor­ga­nized large state-­owned enterprises into corporations, the largest of which ­were listed on overseas stock exchanges. However, t­ hese companies are still mainly owned by the state, the majority shareholder. So what, then, has changed with corporatization? According to Philip Huang, “the key issue in the soes’ corporatization pro­cess involved not simply or even mainly a change in property rights, but rather above all a change of the value system and outlook of the entity’s personnel” (Huang 2012, 607). Becoming a listed com­pany required not only a focus on profits and the share price, but also greater transparency, accountability, and efficiency. Huang cites a recently published 142 

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book about the corporatization of the Bank of China written by the chairman of its board, Xiao Gang. Xiao describes how the culture of the bank was transformed prior to its initial public offering, a pro­cess achieved through the hiring of foreign experts. Management con­sul­tants ­were hired to create an efficient organ­ization based on professional expertise rather than hierarchy. In my negotiations for client site access, I found more than one expatriate man­ag­er express their keenness for me to visit China Corp. They had begun to fear that Chinese con­sul­tants working with soes ­were becoming more “soe-­like.” This was especially a concern at long-­running proj­ects of two or three years—­the typical duration of erp implementation—in which con­sul­tants may never be rotated to another client nor set foot in a Systeo office. The constant engagement with client personnel is part and parcel of consulting, which is the business of producing “high performers” (chapter 1). But when the transformed subjects are con­sul­tants rather than clientele, this raises questions about the efficacy of Systeo’s management practices. For one American man­ag­er, the issue was the “susceptibility” of Chinese employees to return to the “old ways” of the socialist economy and renounce the Western management practices they had been privy to through Systeo. He recounted stories of con­sul­tants posted to China Corp taking extended naps in the after­noon—­be­hav­ior that he considered to be in conflict with their role as professionals who are paid to improve efficiency. Having never worked on a China Corp consulting proj­ect, he was unable to corroborate the rumors personally. Instead, he pointed out examples of such be­hav­ior in Systeo’s Beijing office, which suggested that ­there was substance to the hearsay. Notably, the perpetrators had worked in state-­owned enterprises prior to joining Systeo. In my second week at China Corp I had lunch with con­sul­tant Eric Chen, who expressed his frustration at having to work with China Corp employees. “soe efficiency is, indeed, very low,” he told me, letting out an audible sigh. In agreement with expatriate man­ag­ers, he thought that when Systeo con­sul­tants spend a long time on an soe proj­ect, they start to acquire the working practices of the client. He gave an example: “When you communicate with the client they w ­ ill say this is not my responsibility, I’m responsible for this and that, which ­doesn’t include what­ever ­you’ve asked them about, as a way of getting out of work. Similarly, I find my colleagues ­will start to say the same ­thing and become picky about the scope Client Sites  

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of their work.” He shook his head in disapproval. For Eric, the adoption of soe working practices goes against the main reason why he, and accord­ ing to him most Chinese workers, choose to work for a foreign-­owned com­pany—in order to tigao xiaolv, to improve their efficiency. ­After lunch Eric and I returned to the hall. He closed his laptop before laying his head down for a twenty-­minute nap. Soon I found that ­every con­sul­tant, proj­ect man­ag­ers included, and ­every China Corp employee was asleep, and I became painfully aware of the sound of my own typing. Like Eric, many of the con­sul­tants slept on pillows they had brought to work, indicating that this was sanctioned be­hav­ior. By contrast, none of the Chinese con­sul­tants at GlobalCo took naps—­such be­hav­ior could not be generalized as a quality of Chinese professionals. How can con­sul­tants criticize their clients as inefficient but also take naps on-­site? Why do Chinese con­sul­tants at China Corp take naps, while ­those posted to GlobalCo do not? What does it mean to make Chinese soes efficient in preparation for stock market flotation? In both academic and popu­lar accounts, efficiency is often portrayed as an economist’s abstraction that lands in dif­fer­ent localities. By contrast, I would argue that efficiency is not, in practice, a predefined concept that con­sul­tants are tasked to embed, but is made in the relationship between con­sul­tants and their clients, which is, moreover, informed by the par­tic­u­lar context and historical moment. In this regard I follow anthropologist Karen Ho’s call to rethink efficiency away from conventional notions of market efficiency by looking at what efficiency actually means to the actors who propagate this rhe­toric. In her ethnography of Wall Street, Ho argues that efficiency is a marketing strategy of financial intermediaries that legitimizes their interventions (2009), while in the context of state cap­i­tal­ist China, I demonstrate that efficiency acquires meaning by connecting technologies of financial accountability with narratives of development—­national development and self-­development. It was winter when I first visited the China Corp client site—­a large unheated hall that was previously the t­ able tennis gymnasium of a former socialist work unit. The temperature hovered around minus ten degrees Celsius. Con­sul­tants ­were wearing down jackets inside and had sealed the win­dows with duct tape in a vain attempt to keep out the cold. Food wrappers ­were strewn across ­tables that had not been wiped down for months, it seemed. In the corner, a wastepaper bin swilled with lukewarm, unwanted tea. Brown stains on the carpet, accompanied by a sprinkling of moldy tea 144 

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leaves, indicated where con­sul­tants and client employees had missed the bin. Con­sul­tants kept rolls of toilet tissue in the drawers of their desks; ­there was rarely any to be found in the rest­rooms. The basic and uncomfortable surroundings did not speak of China Corp’s finances (which w ­ ere very healthy indeed), but rather indexed a lingering socialist asceticism.15 The hall was filled with an eclectic collection of computers, some desktops, some laptops, Dells, Compaqs, Lenovos, and hps, all thrown together on rows of gray desks. On one wall hung a poster of party leaders, past and pres­ent; blown-up photos of Chinese ­table tennis stars w ­ ere affixed to another. Just below the ceiling hung massive red banners, each over twenty feet wide, with the slogans: Every­thing is in the interest of China Corp; Be determined to go to any length, we must win; Both timeliness and quality of work must be up to scratch. Conscientious engineering The working environment at China Corp was a far cry from the luxurious surroundings of GlobalCo and the uniform modernist aesthetic of the Systeo offices; it was a place where state patriotism (Harrison 2001) could be readily observed. It was in this context that con­sul­tants ­were implementing an erp system that, by giving man­ag­ers real-­time visibility into the financial productivity of their workers, would illuminate where cost savings could be made. When I asked con­sul­tants what China Corp had used before their intervention, one joked, “Excel spreadsheets?” Con­sul­ tants emphasize that the soe’s legacy systems, which may or may not have been based on Excel, are outdated and inefficient in comparison to the erp system they are installing. Through such depictions they allude to the transformative potential of their interventions. My visits to the China Corp client site had coincided with “end-­user training”—­the training of the China Corp employees who would use the erp system. Con­sul­tants would spend much of their time watching t­ hese employees try out the software, correcting them when they went wrong and answering their questions. Some of the end users diligently followed instructions, while ­others appeared to ignore their requests, preferring instead to play computer games. This was done openly, with con­sul­tants seemingly indifferent to the cluster of end users who would leave their seats to watch the antics of another employee immersed in a game of Formula Client Sites  

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One racing. Although training was in part about creating compliance among the p ­ eople who would ultimately use and be controlled by the erp system, con­sul­tants ­were more preoccupied with testing ­whether the system was operating as intended. Any glitches would be reported back to the proj­ect man­ag­ers, who would assign the work of fixing the system back to individual con­sul­tants of all levels of se­niority. The laxity with which con­sul­tants carried out end-­user training would suggest that con­sul­tants buy into the promise of erp systems—­that ­these are machines that operate through technological determinism. Given that its business is based on the installation of ­these systems, it is unsurprising that Systeo makes the claim that through the use of technical devices corporate subjects can be cultivated ­under a means–­ends rationality. What kind of corporate subjects are judged desirable is made explicit in the material given to the client. When I work-­shadowed proj­ect man­ag­er Steven Wang, he gave me a Power­Point pre­sen­ta­tion that detailed the proj­ ect taking place around me and that would be submitted to the management of China Corp. One slide in par­tic­u­lar caught my eye. Entitled “­After erp implementation you’ll find the capabilities and suzhi of your workers transformed,” it gave a pictographic repre­sen­ta­tion of how erp transforms workers in two ways—­they become of higher suzhi and more financially productive (see figure 5.1). Starting “helpless” and out of his depth, the worker, represented by a stick man, is shown swimming in shark-­infested ­waters in stormy conditions. Then the worker undergoes a radical transformation to eventually become a high-­suzhi, revenue-­producing success, depicted by the stick man bathing under­neath a “dollarized” sun. The inclusion of the Chinese concept of suzhi is con­spic­u­ous in a pre­ sen­ta­tion that was largely about how Systeo could make this state-­owned enterprise conform to “global” financial management practices established in the Anglo-­American world.16 Often translated as “­human quality,” suzhi is a flexible, slippery term that is almost impossible to define. It used to refer to a person’s innate characteristics; however, in the con­temporary era it is understood as a property of the self that can be worked on—­improved—­ through purposive action.17 This is a discourse that ­rose to prominence in the post-­Mao era as the ccp sought to promote stringent birth planning policies without resorting to Malthusian thinking (Fong 2004). Population control, including the infamous one-­child policy, was sold as a means of increasing the quality of the population rather than reducing the quantity 146 

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figure 5.1: ​erp implementation. (Adapted from fieldwork drawing)

(Fong 2004).18 At its core, suzhi discourse emphasizes the power of institutions to create subjects who are more educated, more civilized, more modern—­subjects who are more able to contribute to the nation and thus propel economic growth (Hsu 2007, 139). Hence, universities and schools are the prototypical sites of analy­sis (see Kipnis 2011; Woronov 2008). Con­ sul­tants emphasize another institutional setting in which quality can be cultivated or affected—­the workplace. Before joining Systeo, Steven had worked at one of its rivals, Tech Consulting. When I asked how the two consultancies compared, he replied, “Systeo is not as good as Tech—­Tech employees have better suzhi.” And in an interview with first-­year con­sul­tant Meng Chun, I was told that a good c­areer was one “where you are surrounded by ­people with good suzhi.” Con­sul­tants’ preference for working with p ­ eople of “high quality” is coupled with an avoidance of ­people deemed to have low suzhi. Walking back to the hall a­ fter a team lunch in a nearby restaurant, se­nior con­sul­tant Anna Li asked me about my ­family, and overseas Chinese families more generally. In our discussion she told me that, in China, parents prefer to have their c­ hildren looked a­ fter by grandparents b ­ ecause “maids are not high-­quality ­people” (baomu suzhi bu hao). Implicit in ­these comments is the importance of exposure—­exposure to ­people of high suzhi ­will positively affect one’s own accumulation of quality, and vice versa. That con­ sul­tants draw on suzhi to explain their own life choices suggests that the discourse is not being strategically or cynically used in client communications. Rather, the insertion of suzhi reflects their own understandings of Client Sites  

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how changes to one’s environment—­albeit through technologies of financial management—­can lead to new forms of subjectivity. In d ­ oing so, con­sul­tants reframe ostensibly standardized, “technical” forms of rationalization in local terms. Sinologists have been divided over ­whether suzhi discourse is part of an emerging neoliberal governmentality in China or w ­ hether it is a continuation of authoritarianism. For Yan Hairong (2003) and Ann Anagnost (2004), suzhi is a discursive formulation that flattens cultural and social values to market value, while for Andrew Kipnis (2007), suzhi is defined mainly in relation to a person’s educational attainment and correlates not with one’s economic value but rather one’s moral stature. Rather than the market, it is the state, Kipnis points out, that decides who is of high quality and who is of low quality; this hierarchy reflects the par­tic­u­lar politics of modernization, in which modernity is conflated with the possession of formal education, urban residency, and cosmopolitan sensibilities (Kipnis 2006). Consequently, entrepreneurs with ­little or no education, and who come from undesirable social backgrounds, are typically denigrated as having low quality, no m ­ atter how rich they become. By contrast, t­ hose with college degrees tend to be described as ­people of high quality, even if their companies do not turn a profit (Hsu 2007, chapter 5). By separating monetary remuneration from the benefits of improved suzhi, con­sul­tants similarly suggest the irreducibility of suzhi to economic value. Many con­ sul­tants told me they had chosen to work at Systeo b ­ ecause it was a waiqi, a foreign-­owned com­pany, and that this decision conferred benefits that ­were not of a monetary kind.19 As ju­nior con­sul­tant Wayne Zhou put it, “It’s not about salary [bing bu shi qian]—­foreign companies cultivate the person, discipline the person, [your] suzhi w ­ ill improve, your life ­will be happier and enriched.” For con­sul­tants, suzhi is not conceived as “a sense and sensibility of the self ’s value in a market economy”;20 instead, it refers to the very values of the self that cannot be marketized. By claiming that erp systems improve suzhi as well as profitability, con­ sul­tants invoke moral registers of modernity as well as material ones. It is impor­tant to note that ­these registers do not map onto an ethics of professionalism in which rationalization or abstraction are emphasized. In addition to taking naps, I observed con­sul­tants giving each other neck and shoulder massages in full view of the client. I witnessed other open displays of intimacy—­back-­slapping, stroking each other’s hair—­among con­sul­ 148 

CHAPTER Five

tants. It was apparent that con­sul­tants at China Corp, unlike con­sul­tants at ­GlobalCo, did not feel pressured to look busy, nor was looking busy considered to be desirable be­hav­ior by this client. In short, this proj­ect did not require con­sul­tants to embody an ethic of exemplary productivity. Although erp systems are installed with the view to making Chinese soes into ­viable cap­i­tal­ist entities that practice sound financial management and seek to maximize productivity, they are sold to the soe client ­under a dif­ fer­ent rationale. High-­suzhi ­people are ­those who are seen to contribute to China’s strength (Hsu 2007, chapter 6). In suggesting that an erp system can help create a workforce of high-­suzhi ­people, con­sul­tants imply that modernization is not equated with the production of transparency, accountability, or time discipline. Instead modernization for Chinese soes was primarily about showing how t­hese institutions could make even greater contributions to national well-­being. In short, Chinese con­sul­tants at China Corp, far from being lazy, demonstrate a strong understanding of the models of transformation that are valued by China’s National Champions. If we w ­ ere to be cynical, we could say that another reason why suzhi was incorporated was that con­sul­tants find it hard to substantiate w ­ hether their interventions actually work. They avoid suggesting that their interventions can only be understood in financial terms—­numbers are too immovable—­ and instead proffer an equally slippery term to qualify their expertise. Teleologies of Production

From consumption to production, education to kinship, the extensive influence of the West since market reforms w ­ ere introduced has been widely documented, suggesting that China’s social and economic development could be characterized as a pro­cess of convergence. Anthropologists have been keen to understand this relationship between China and the West through the lens of modernity. For some, comparisons with the developed First World nations, primarily the United States and Eu­rope, characterizes reform era, Dengist modernity, in contrast to the era ­under Mao, when modernity was defined in opposition to “old China” and its feudal traditions (Greenhalgh 2008; Zhang 2010). On the other hand, the idea that China is drawing on Western knowledge, models, and technological systems in its pursuit of modernity is countered by accounts that suggest that China is creating a distinctly Chinese modernity based on Confucianism and other “native” Client Sites  

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cultural resources (Ong 1997). The question of ­whether China is pursuing Western or Chinese modernity, however, breaks down on the ground where we find it difficult to distinguish between “Chinese” and “non-­Chinese” forms of practice and knowledge. The fact that Western consultancies are being parachuted into Chinese soes to “prepare” them for their ipo does not necessarily entail a straightforward pro­cess of imposing Western conventions, norms, and practices. Systeo’s Chinese con­sul­tants derive pride and superiority from working for a Western consultancy and having expertise of Western management systems. Yet they also deploy Chinese concepts and models of social formation and valuation to explain and make sense of their work, b ­ ecause this conceptual framework is intelligible to the client.21 Although discourses of “best practice” suggest that consulting is the pro­cess of making China commensurate with the West, for Chinese con­ sul­tants posted to China Corp, consulting was about making consulting commensurate with existing logics of Chinese development and modernity. ­These logics, and how they relate to con­sul­tants’ own individual proj­ects of self-­cultivation, are discussed in the next chapter. Con­sul­tants posted to GlobalCo, both Chinese and expatriate, similarly make efforts to perform their clients’ values—we saw how they are instructed to look productive, an imperative that con­sul­tants at China Corp are exempt from. In disagreement with the expatriate man­ag­er who implied that con­sul­tants’ expertise engenders be­hav­iors of professionalism that do not depend on context, I argue that con­sul­tants must demonstrate a flexible expert subject position that is responsive to clients’ own teleologies of production. At one client site they may be required to embody rationalization and efficiency, while at another it may be acceptable, even expected, for them to take regular post-­lunch naps. Locally salient tropes must be drawn upon, not only to demonstrate an understanding of the client, but also ­because the articulation of consulting expertise depends on the par­tic­u­lar moral concerns that pervade each proj­ect. So while con­sul­tants at China Corp were keen to phrase their interventions in the language of post-­Mao modernity making, con­sul­tants at GlobalCo sought to emphasize a hegemonic model of efficiency, one that connects time discipline to profitability, which has come to define late capitalism.22 Con­sul­tants are professionals whose expertise does not rest on a decontextualized form of knowledge, but rather the highly contextualized and performative knowledge that is substantiated through embodied experience. 150 

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6

Building a Paradise Post-­Mao Visions of Transformation

i met du weifan, a ju­nior con­sul­tant in the technology division, in December 2008. I was visiting China Corp—­a large Chinese state-­owned enterprise (soe)—­where many con­sul­tants had been posted to modernize its it systems and financial management. My aims ­were twofold: to interview con­sul­tants about the com­pany’s per­for­mance management and to observe them working at client sites. From the start, Weifan was friendly but suspicious. This was perhaps understandable—my research would be shared with the com­pany’s ­Human Capital Strategy team (chapter 1), and hence could be seen as a directive from above. As part of my research, I spent some time shadowing Weifan, sitting next to him so I could observe his everyday work and ask questions about the software he was using and installing. I noticed that he had a dif­fer­ent laptop from all the other con­ sul­tants. Rather than using Systeo’s standard issue, which “sits at home in a drawer,” he was using his own Lenovo device. I was surprised since having a com­pany laptop could be construed as a perk, one that most con­sul­tants choose to take up. Moreover, working on one’s personal computer could compromise the confidentiality of Systeo and its clients. In the com­pany’s offshore it centers, computers had been stripped of their usb ports for fear that employees might copy confidential information and pass it on to competitors.1 It was simply a ­matter of personal preference, explained Weifan. ­There was nothing untoward in his actions: “I’m still loyal to my com­pany [danshi wo ai wo de gongsi]!” he said, roaring with laughter. I did not believe that Weifan harbored any ulterior motives; a­fter all, who would be so audacious as to use their personal computer to steal proprietary information? Rather, I read his actions as an expression of individuality.2 Consultancy is a profession characterized by a high degree of

conformity: con­sul­tants are recruited from similar universities, have similar socioeconomic backgrounds, follow strict dress codes, and have everyday routines characterized by repetition. What I found more in­ter­est­ing was how he responded to my observation—­implying that a lack of conformity somehow placed his loyalty to Systeo in question. Weifan might have been making a jocular reference to the common perception among expatriates that high turnover was related to a “Chinese” propensity for opportunistic be­hav­ior. However, as I spent more and more time with Weifan and his colleagues, I found that few of them had ever spoken to an expatriate employee—­ consulting proj­ects at soes ­were staffed almost entirely by mainland Chinese ­because of the requirement to speak Mandarin with the client. An alternative explanation is that his comment constituted a form of meta-­narrative; that loyalty—an ethics of ser­vice and duty to an entity other than themselves—is a prism through which con­sul­tants understand their work. In this chapter I focus on the vernacular ethics of expertise, foregrounding the historical moment and context in which con­sul­tants locate and perform their expertise. It ­will be suggested that this ethics does not necessarily, or primarily, relate to their employer. Among Weifan’s pens, note­pads, and mobile phone stood China’s national flag; on each con­sul­ tant’s desk, almost without exception, you could find t­ hese flags, standing about a foot high, the unmistakable crescent of gold stars on a bright red background, visibly con­spic­u­ous in a sea of black laptops. As the following pages ­will demonstrate, Chinese con­sul­tants are often motivated by strong sentiments of love and fidelity ­toward the Chinese nation. This is despite choosing to work for a foreign consultancy that derives profits from Chinese soes and actively promotes a global identity. Anthropologist Lisa Hoffman has argued that in the post-­Mao era a new ethics of subjectivity has emerged—­“patriotic professionalism”—­that combines “individual professional development with national proj­ects of state-­strengthening” (Hoffman 2010, 6). Her study, based on fieldwork in the coastal city of Dalian, where incidentally many of Systeo’s offshore centers are located, traces how rationalities of governance have shifted from the high socialist period ­under Mao, when jobs ­were assigned and confined to rural collectives or state-­owned work units, to the post-­Mao era of marketization and state capitalism, where the majority of citizens are employed in the private sector, including foreign-­invested companies. The recent emphasis on letting students have greater autonomy over their employment, far 152 

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from signaling a decline in state intervention and governance, signals an alternative form of governance, one that regulates through an emphasis on self-­responsibility and personal fulfillment (Hoffman 2010, 89). Yet this foregrounding of individual choices does not necessarily eliminate collective concerns. As Hoffman puts it, “ordinary citizens embrace an ethic of self-­care that foregrounds individualized ­career development and social mobility enacted through the marketplace with politics reminiscent of socialist modernization that link work and patriots and that emphasize the good of the nation as a ­whole” (Hoffman 2010, 17). That said, many of the professionals in her study did not work for the government or state-­owned enterprises; nor did their patriotic beliefs necessarily translate into support for the Communist Party. Rather, for highly educated Chinese urbanites who have come of age in the 1990s and 2000s, “patriotism was about fulfilling one’s potential as ­human capital, engaging the global world, and thus fostering national development” (Hoffman 2010, 99). I found that Chinese con­sul­tants would often frame their interventions not as a per­for­mance of superior know-­how, but rather as a nationalistic endeavor of improving Chinese soes, and by extension China. In their narratives, expertise could not be abstracted from the broader context; expertise only became meaningful in the context of China’s modernization. In the last chapter we saw how the implementation of erp—­computer-­based management systems designed to monitor real-­time productivity—is sold to Chinese state-­owned enterprises (soes) as devices to improve workers’ suzhi. The inclusion of suzhi—­a discourse on “­human quality” that has become entrenched in the post-­Mao era—­was not just a cynical attempt to localize consultancy, but rather intrinsic to the explication and per­for­mance of expertise. In this chapter I explore further the grounding of consultancy in con­temporary Chinese moralities and notions of modernity, focusing especially on how Chinese con­sul­tants conceptualize the genesis of their expertise, and by extension the meaning they attach to their work of transforming Chinese soes. Although expatriates often narrated consultancy as the work of transmitting Western managerial expertise and saw their roles as preachers of financial capitalism, Chinese con­sul­tants understood consultancy as a means of enriching themselves and saw themselves as stewards tasked with making China into a “paradise” (tiantang). Anthropologist Li Zhang has pointed out that the Chinese word tiantang can also be translated as “heaven.” That said, it “does not necessarily Building a Paradise  

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carry a religious connotation [but] can refer to a perfect place of ultimate comfort and satisfaction” (Zhang 2010, 3). In her study of Chinese students, anthropologist Vanessa Fong found that they would use the term paradise to describe foreign, usually Western, advanced countries that they wished to visit, study in, or even migrate to. Yet paradise could also describe homes, restaurants, or luxury ­hotels in China that ­were deemed to have met advanced world standards (Zhang 2010). Paradise refers not to a specific locality, but rather depicts a vision of, and desire for, transformation. In this vision students see themselves as the motor of China’s modernization—by seeking out opportunities to study abroad they hoped to bring back social, cultural, and economic capital that would not only fortify themselves and recast them as cosmopolitan citizens (Fong 2011, 52–53); they also believed that by improving their own capabilities they would be helping to develop China. Hence, ­after their sojourns abroad they would redefine paradise—it referred no longer to distant places but to China, the motherland. Many con­sul­tants had, like Fong’s in­for­mants, studied in the United Kingdom, United States, Canada, or Australia. And they too would draw connections between their individual development and China’s modernization. By applying to Chinese entities the knowledge they acquired while studying abroad and working at global companies, con­sul­ tants saw themselves as helping to integrate China into the global economy. For con­sul­tants, the term paradise evokes not only the specter of economic development, but also past indictments to contribute to the collective and the nation. Con­sul­tants draw on socialist notions of modernization that highlight the importance of making China strong, but which, it ­will be argued, do not necessarily conflict with post-­Mao rationalities of self-­ development and individual choice that are also emphasized. Rather, by reformulating high socialist narratives of modernity, con­sul­tants understand their interventions to be acts of patriotism as well as a triumph of technological expertise. The kinds of identities that Chinese con­sul­tants desire and perform do not, though, immediately suggest national pride, but rather the opposite: they are at pains to emphasize and elevate their global identities. It w ­ ill be suggested that, insofar as the global has become code for the highest standards of cultural and economic capital in con­ temporary China, this strategy fits with an overarching ethics of patriotic professionalism.

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CHAPTER Six

The Return to ­Human Capital

All con­sul­tants, indeed all employees, I met ­were urbanites with a strong educational background. Without exception, they had been to university and held at minimum an undergraduate degree; many had a master’s degree. By contrast, in 1949 when the Communists came to power, “eighty ­percent of the Party membership was of peasant origin and the ­great majority ­were illiterate or had only a grade-­school education” (Andreas 2009, 18). ­Under Mao, po­liti­cal loyalty took pre­ce­dence. Party members w ­ ere recruited on the basis of their commitment to Marxism-­Leninism, the po­liti­ cal ideology that informed Maoist thought, and their f­amily background (    jiating beijing), with lowly peasants being the most favored class and cap­i­ tal­ists being treated with the greatest revulsion. Displays of loyalty formed the foundation of the prevailing socioeconomic system, a “virtuocracy” in which po­liti­cal “virtue” was more valuable than skill and knowledge (Shirk 1984). Although at the highest level ­there was a mild endorsement, or at least acknowl­edgment, that the country needed education and expertise, in practice po­liti­cal virtue was often prioritized. The party took control of urban enterprises, completely transforming their orga­nizational structures. ­Those in charge, educated man­ag­ers and supervisors, found themselves being supervised by cadres without specialist training, which was other­wise described as “reds leading experts.” In addition to suffering demotion, experts, who tended to be aligned with the defeated Nationalists, ­were also expected to show allegiance to the party and follow Maoist thought. Indeed, to be an expert without espousing socialist values, that is, without being red, could lead to the charge of being a dangerous reactionary (Lynteris 2013, 63). According to sociologist Carolyn Hsu, “the Maoist state vacillated between meritocracy and virtuocracy, between empowering the educated for the sake of economic pro­gress, and attacking intellectuals in po­liti­cal campaigns for tainting communist truth with their bourgeois falsehoods” (Hsu 2007, 159).3 In her argument about the shifting forms of credentialization, Hsu also invokes the term ­human capital, utilizing an economic definition of ­human capital as an agglomeration of education, knowledge, and skill that bears close resemblance to how the term is used in official narratives of Systeo’s H ­ uman Capital Strategy.4 Hsu makes the point that although the assault on meritocracy and h ­ uman capital was justified in official narratives Building a Paradise  

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as a means of promoting equality—­lowly peasants could rise to the highest echelons of society—it in fact produced an alternative model of stratification, whereby po­liti­cal credentials became the means of obtaining social and economic privileges. Po­liti­cal credentials had replaced education in the pursuit of status and wealth. Vari­ous po­liti­cal campaigns ensued that saw the two groups—­the old elite of technocrats and experts and the new elite of cadres and party officials—­tussle for power.5 The tension between being “red” and being “expert” reached its peak during the Cultural Revolution (1966–76), which ended Mao’s rule. Intellectual learning was seen as bourgeois and elitist, students criticized their teachers, entrance examinations to universities ­were abolished, and many institutions closed down or had their funding frozen. The Cultural Revolution constituted a tremendous attack on ­human capital and its institutions of cultivation and reproduction. Born in the 1970s and 1980s, in the immediate aftermath of the Cultural Revolution, con­sul­tants had come of age ­under Deng Xiao Ping, who purged the country of antagonisms t­ oward education. His goal was to transform the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) “once a party of peasant revolutionaries, into a party of experts” (Andreas 2009, 233). His po­liti­cal philosophy, encapsulated by the concept of the “Four Modernizations”—­ the need to modernize agriculture, industry, defense, and science and technology—­stressed the importance of expertise, of technological breakthroughs, for generating economic growth. This resuscitation of expertise, moreover, would engender the embrace of once forbidden interlocutors. For Deng, China’s isolation u ­ nder Mao, particularly during the Cultural Revolution, meant the country had missed out on impor­tant advances in science and technology that had occurred elsewhere in the world—­a narrative that justified “opening China not only to foreign science and technology but also to foreign direct investment and foreign companies—in order to learn foreign management techniques, of course” (Hsu 2007, 127). The con­sul­tants in my study not only worked for a foreign com­pany that “imports” foreign management techniques into China; they act as the vital transmitters of this knowledge. With their degrees in computer science, finance, economics, and management, ­these Chinese professionals undoubtedly had the credentials befitting managerial experts. Although few professed connections to the ccp, many suggested that their work as management con­sul­tants contributed to the national proj­ect of modernization. Con­sul­tants did not necessarily perceive a tension between being 156 

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“red” and being “expert,” unlike their parents who labored in previous de­cades. Con­sul­tants also did not see a tension between their individual desires and the collective needs of the nation as a ­whole. ­Under Mao, Chinese ­people ­were expected to sacrifice personal desires and choices to strengthen the nation. What job you had, where you lived, how much you earned, and how much you consumed ­were all determined by the needs of the country rather than by individual preferences. Jobs ­were assigned rather than chosen; ­careers ­were largely determined by forces outside an individual’s control. By contrast, in the post-­Mao era, one’s employment—­ though still guided by universities—is the product of individual choice (see Hoffman 2010, chapter  3). Con­temporary Chinese professionals see the fulfillment of individual potential, through the accumulation of degrees and by broadening their horizons through company-­provided training, as a ser­vice to the collective. In this sense, their actions—­which, as we ­will see, can include outright denouncement of state-­run institutions and even the Chinese state—­could be seen as a continuation of socialist practices of laboring for the nation. Waiqi ­People

Heidi Cheng, a technology con­sul­tant, has a master’s degree from the University of Warwick, an elite Russell Group university in the United Kingdom.6 When I asked her why she deci­ded to work for Systeo, she replied: “Salary ­isn’t the most impor­tant ­thing. Foreign companies are more open—­you can say what you r­ eally think” without worrying about the consequences. “They are more fair,” she concluded. It was notable that she had brought up, implicitly, a comparison with Chinese companies. The frame of reference in which con­sul­tants articulated their preference for Systeo was rarely one of competing consulting firms—­they did not say why they chose Systeo over one of its competitors. Rather, they articulated their decision as one of choosing waiqi (foreign companies) over guoqi (Chinese state-­owned enterprises). Their preferences, though enacted individually, spoke volumes about changing societal attitudes among Chinese urbanites.7 As we ­will see, con­sul­tants, in their justifications of their employment decisions, reproduce national discourses on ­human capital and expertness. In his study of occupational prestige, anthropologist William Jankowiak finds a considerable shift in which jobs are considered desirable in the Building a Paradise  

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2000s compared to the early 1980s. This shift, he argues, corresponds to the changing “cultural princi­ples” that inform ­people’s moral horizon. He finds that China’s transition to state capitalism engendered not only a revaluation of economic capital, which has become increasingly desirable, but also a renewed appreciation of intellectual knowledge and technical expertise in comparison to po­liti­cal virtue.8 Hitherto prohibited or unheard-of occupations such as being an entrepreneur have gained popularity,9 as has working for foreign or “global companies” (Duthie 2005). In fact, most con­sul­tants had only ever worked for foreign companies. Sun Lan is a typical example. Before being hired by Systeo, she worked for EnergyGlobe, a multinational com­pany in the energy sector, and before that she worked for one of the “big four” global accounting firms. Her parents w ­ ere satisfied with her choice of employers: “in their opinion waiqi [foreign companies] have less office politics, and therefore ­there ­will be more opportunities.” During the five years she worked at EnergyGlobe, she spent two years in the United States. “I liked [the United States] a lot, ­because it’s ­free, ­there are less p ­ eople and it’s cheaper than Beijing,” she said. An only child, her parents missed her a lot and visited Houston, where she was based, twice, staying for ten months in total. ­After expressing surprise that they ­were able to obtain such long visas, Sun Lan explained that they had multiple entry visas that allowed them to stay up to six months on each occasion. Th ­ ese visas ­were not available to ordinary Chinese during the early 2000s. At the time Sun Lan’s f­ather was a se­nior diplomat who had been posted to a country in the Eu­ro­pean Union. Many con­sul­tants told me they would never consider working for a Chinese soe—­the companies that formed the bulk of their clientele. This was striking for a number of reasons. First, it is not unusual for con­sul­ tants to be hired by their clients, at least outside of China.10 Second, their parents who had invested so deeply in their education and ­careers, had worked, and even continue to work, for ­either the government or soes. And yet con­sul­tants, often influenced by their parents, expressed a strong preference for working for foreign-­invested companies.11 “Guoqi and waiqi have dif­fer­ent styles,” explained one con­sul­tant. This opposition reflected under­lying beliefs about how dif­fer­ent kinds of persons suited, and could be promoted through, dif­fer­ent kinds of organ­izations. In foreign companies, not just Systeo, per­for­mance was deemed to be the primary determinant of promotion, while in a guoqi, “relationships jiu geng zhongyao [are 158 

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more impor­tant].” This was according to Jessica Hu, a ju­nior con­sul­tant in orga­nizational per­for­mance, who, although broadly supportive of per­for­ mance management, also thought it could stand in the way of promotion: “Your ­career path is longer, you ­can’t climb the ladder quickly.” Sometimes she wished the promotion mechanisms could be a bit more flexible (linghuo yidian). In an soe ­there may be more “po­liti­cal obstacles,” but if you have the right connections you can pro­gress quickly, she told me. Although she liked the idea of promotion being expedited, she feared she would not have the necessary skills to survive in that kind of setting. In other words, the attraction of foreign companies was the lack of importance placed on managing relationships and acquiring social capital. In my interviews, con­sul­tants would often cite per­for­mance management as evidence that Systeo was an organ­ization of “fair practice,” even though they could find fault with the evaluation system. For them what mattered was not ­whether per­for­mance management worked, but what it stood for. soes ­were seen as overly hierarchical and riven with orga­nizational politics, while foreign—­especially Western—­companies ­were seen as flatter, more meritocratic organ­izations, where the individual had greater importance. However, in my own experience and observation of Systeo’s orga­ nizational hierarchies and networks, I found that relationships ­were in fact very impor­tant. If con­sul­tants wanted to be posted to the most desirable proj­ects—­those that w ­ ere in the big cities, with well-­known clients, with large bud­gets that provided generous expenses—­they needed to build a strong network in the com­pany, especially among the highest echelons, namely the Chinese se­nior executives. That said, relationships in a large, global organ­ization are of a quite dif­fer­ent kind from ­those found in traditional Chinese society, which are instrumental to the operation of soes and other state institutions. Numerous China scholars have written about the importance of cultivating social connections or guanxi through reciprocal gift giving and banqueting.12 The exchange of f­avors, nurture, and care has in some accounts been depicted as a particularly Chinese form of interaction and morality.13 Fei Xiao Tong, possibly China’s most famous anthropologist, argued that guanxi implicated a specific kind of personhood. He argued that in China one could not talk of a bounded individual who existed prior to or outside of specific relationships; instead, one finds a “relational person.” How one ­ought to behave is calibrated not in terms of universalisms, Building a Paradise  

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but in particularistic relationships in which t­ here are certain moral obligations. ­These obligations can be fulfilled through guanxi, forms of reciprocal exchange. Although ­there ­were attempts to stamp out guanxi during the Maoist era, when it was denounced as feudal and even corrupt, t­ here is evidence to suggest that the practice actually flourished during this period. Anthropologist Mayfair Yang points out that state socialism led to conditions that promoted the formation of guanxi networks. A redistributive economy and a pervasive, autocratic party led to conditions of ongoing scarcity, sometimes to the point of catastrophe. The ­Great Famine that followed Mao’s disastrous attempt to increase iron production at all costs, the ­Great Leap Forward, is one notable example. ­People had ­little choice but to turn to their personal networks and cultivate social connections in order to survive.14 According to con­sul­tants, particularistic ties w ­ ere still impor­tant thirty years ­after the demise of socialism, especially if you sought work inside guoqi.15 When I asked Heidi Cheng w ­ hether she would consider working in a state-­owned enterprise, she replied, “That’s impossible, you need to have connections to get into one of ­those.” Although con­sul­tants drew an opposition between waiqi and guoqi on the basis of guanxi, that is not to say they did not try to “la guanxi”—­make social connections through practices of reciprocal exchange—­within the organ­ization. Con­sul­tants ­were careful to keep ­favor with hr staff in an ac­ knowledgment of their influence. This was a legacy from when work was allocated, the days of the socialist work unit, claimed ju­nior con­sul­tant Fan Yining, who spoke with a soft Mancunian accent thanks to having spent two years at the University of Salford. “My parents told me that hr ­don’t have a good reputation in China and it’s rooted in the factory days when they had a lot of power. They ­were the ones who would have final say. And you would have to ‘kiss a lot of ass’ to get anywhere. So even now . . . ​now that hr is dif­fer­ent and I work in an American consultancy, I keep [hr] happy.” Yining made sure to buy the hr staff gifts on her birthday or whenever she went on holiday, usually sweets or local specialties from wherever she had traveled to. She was not alone. I saw con­sul­tants at all levels, from ju­nior con­sul­tant to se­nior executive, bring in edible treats on returning to the office from annual leave, and they would always make a point to include hr.16 Even expatriates joined in, recognizing how such exchanges might make their working life easier.

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Guanxi was certainly practiced by employees. But despite using guanxi to smoothen their everyday working lives, they did not see their jobs as primarily influenced by guanxi relations, nor did they see the aim of guanxi as being to cultivate po­liti­cal ­favor. Furthermore, having guanxi is not a prerequisite to gaining employment inside Systeo; it was more impor­tant to have the right “skill set,” as indicated by past work experience, past employment, and technical qualifications, or the right elite identity, as indicated by a degree from a prestigious university in China or the Western world. That is to say, ­human capital was decisive. When combined with an emphasis on meritocracy, the a­ ctual practice of fostering guanxi networks did not threaten the notion that waiqi ­were intrinsically dif­fer­ent institutions from guoqi. Insofar as con­sul­tants shunned virtuocratic employers, they could be said to be responding to their parents’ negative experiences ­under socialism. On some occasions they would explic­itly refer to their parents, particularly when explaining how they came to make ­career decisions. When Wayne Zhou, a ju­nior technology con­sul­tant, told his parents he was ­going to work for Systeo, they asked if it was a legitimate (hefa) com­pany—­they had never heard of it, or any management consultancy for that m ­ atter. His ­father works in a government bureau, while his ­mother works for a private domestic com­pany. He has difficulty explaining to them what Systeo’s business concerns, but he says that as long as he d ­ oesn’t blindly choose a com­pany they ­will be happy. The most impor­tant ­thing to his parents is job stability: “the more stable the better [yue wending yue hao].” According to Heidi Cheng, parental preference can be traced to their experience of working and coming of age ­under Mao. “They worked in a turbulent time [dongdang de shihou] when their work was allocated [fenpei de] and out of their control, social security was pretty poor—it was difficult to support your ­family back then [hen nan weichi yige jiating].17 They just hope your work is stable,” said Ting. However, con­sul­tants also conceded that guoqi work was generally considered more stable than “jumping into the sea” (xia hai) of private and foreign-­invested companies. A number of scholars have written about urban ­couples in con­temporary China deploying a strategy of having one spouse (usually the wife) employed in a state unit, while the other (usually the husband) tries their luck in private, entrepreneurial adventures.18 In addition to offering better job security, soes and positions in

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government ­were valued for the non-­income benefits, such as housing and pensions. Although they respected their parents’ views, con­sul­tants chose to work in foreign companies ­because they ­were not stable. David Huang, a mid-­level strategy con­sul­tant, has a degree in management from Beijing University (“Bei Da”), one of China’s most prestigious universities. He had also carried out fieldwork in an orga­nizational setting, in ­Korea, for his undergraduate dissertation. Hence, he was particularly keen to share his opinions on the per­for­mance management system. He stressed how per­for­mance management could only work with a certain kind of disposition or attitude: “You have to have responsibility for yourself, you have to manage yourself so you can be active [suoyi ziji zhudong de].” By contrast, soes ­were seen as more relaxed (fangsong), which is not necessarily what you want in your twenties and thirties, claimed se­nior executive Natalie Zhang. Recall also the words of Eric Chen, who said that most con­sul­tants worked for Systeo to “discipline themselves” (chapter 4). The idea that working in a foreign com­pany could, by challenging the self, make a stronger, more capable subject was deeply ingrained among the Chinese workforce. According to them, disciplining oneself was a vital means of nourishing one’s suzhi (quality). In addition to improving their clients’ suzhi through the implementation of erp systems (chapter 4), con­sul­tants sought to improve their own. Indeed, suzhi narratives neatly captured the kind of transformation that con­sul­tants hoped they could enact writ large. A key means of improving their suzhi was through education, particularly the kind that fostered creativity and a moral consciousness (Woronov 2008). China’s education system—­despite the purported emphasis on engineering quality citizens—­ was deemed by con­sul­tants to be less than ideal. Degrees from Western universities, insofar as they promoted more in­de­pen­dent and critical thinking, ­were seen as better suited for fostering high-­quality citizens. By elevating their own educational trajectories—­foreign degrees and global corporate training—­they suggested that they had better suzhi than their clients. What defines suzhi, though, is incredibly hard to pin down (see also Hsu 2007; Kipnis 2006; Yan 2003); I would suggest that, more than being a fixed end to which con­sul­tants aspired, suzhi was a concept with which they could refract their aspirations for refashioning the self, in line with multiple logics of development. In her analy­sis of how collective narratives 162 

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are formed and help to propel institutional change in Harbin, northeast China, sociologist Carolyn Hsu argues that “[s]uzhi discourse allowed Harbiners to combine high culture and morality, socialist contribution, science and technology, and the nationalist proj­ect of cap­i­tal­ist economic development into one package, associated with h ­ uman capital” (Hsu 2007, 176). Con­sul­tants, when they invoked the concept of suzhi, drew on a multiplicity of referents to suggest that, by nourishing themselves they ­were also contributing to China’s economic development and helping to civilize China. “I was months away from getting my green card,” said Joanna Yuan, who had not only studied in the United States but also worked in Chicago for a few years. “But I feel I owe it to my country to come back. I’ve learned so much—­the teaching is much better in the United States than in China; I want to contribute to China’s development [gongxian yu zhongguo de fazhan]. What I realized living in the West is how far b ­ ehind [China] is, in so many ways.” Joanna’s narrative typified the sentiments of many con­sul­tants with whom I worked; they would often tell me, in ambivalent tones, how they felt compelled to return to the motherland (zuguo) to make China strong or to make China competitive. Far from being an act of self-­centeredness, their quest to challenge and fortify their individual capacities was intimately connected with the greater mission of serving the nationalist proj­ect of modernization. In this sense, their thinking combined post-­Mao rationalities of individual choice and self-­development with socialist rationalities of nation-­building.19 Situating the Global

I first met Karen, a ju­nior technology con­sul­tant in her late twenties, at an internal training session on pre­sen­ta­tion skills. Unlike most con­sul­tants, she found it easy to find time to be interviewed. She had been “idle” for a month already but seemed untroubled by this. “hr offered me a China Corp proj­ect but I refused. If I take it god knows when I’ll get off it—­ people are posted ­there for years!” she told me. You ­will recall that China Corp, a large soe and one of Systeo’s most impor­tant clients, had hired Systeo to completely overhaul its operations, modernize its it systems, and “improve efficiency,” in preparation for its imminent initial public offering (chapter 5). Despite her reluctance, Karen would not be able to avoid China Corp for long. Six months ­later she took me out for dinner and told Building a Paradise  

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me her worst fears had been realized—­she had been posted to China Corp against her ­will. She complained about how uncivilized the client was and the uncomfortable working conditions. “We have to eat at the canteen three times a day. I’m sick of it. The other day my coworker asked if I wanted to order pizza! We manage to find some time to escape, though. ­Every day we go to Starbucks. It’s the only ­thing I look forward to!” Earlier Karen had asked me if I could take her to a Western restaurant in Beijing; she missed eating salads, steaks, and pasta and d ­ idn’t know where to go. I was surprised since ­there was no shortage of magazines and websites that offered listings of American and Eu­ro­pean restaurants in the city, some of which ­were very good indeed. Only when we actually went out for dinner did I realize that Karen, more than missing Western food, missed sharing it with someone who appreciated it too. Eating with her Chinese boyfriend, who had never lived abroad, just ­wasn’t the same. Pizza and coffee w ­ ere not cheap options in China. At thirty yuan ($4) a cup, a coffee from Starbucks cost more than eating dinner at a neighborhood restaurant, and could be almost five times the price of a canteen lunch inside China Corp. What Karen consumed on a regular basis ­were in fact luxury goods, even for middle-­class Chinese in the late 2000s. Karen had spent her formative years at an international school in Germany, then went to university in the United States before returning to her native Beijing in early 2005. She was one of many con­sul­tants who had studied abroad, at significant cost to their parents, who typically footed the bill. Like most of her Chinese coworkers, Karen was an only child. Since the early 1980s, China has promulgated strict ­family planning rules that have restricted most urbanites to having just one child. From the start, the “one-­child policy” was narrated explic­itly, through propaganda and other means, as being concerned with raising the quality of the p ­ eople rather than restrict20 ing their quantity. This was played out through the aforementioned emphasis on h ­ uman capital and suzhi discourse. In short, population control was sold as a means of expediting China’s development; this took place at the scales of the individual, the ­family, and the nation. Rather than spreading their resources across a large sibling set (which was characteristic of traditional Chinese families), Chinese parents in the post-­Mao era channel their energies and finances into an only child, who w ­ ill be expected to bear the sole responsibility for their old age in return. Karen’s biography testified to the high investment her parents had made to give her “the same 164 

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consumption patterns, and educational attainment as their counter­parts in wealthier socie­ties” (Fong 2004, 635). The consumption of Western, particularly American goods with global reach, such as Starbucks coffee, was part of an overarching proj­ect to perform “developed world citizenship” within China. For ­these con­sul­tants, demonstrating a modernized and modern self did not require them to actually live in or have citizenship in a wealthier, developed country; rather, it was achieved by curating a specific identity through their consumption practices. More than once I was invited to go to a designer clothes sale in a high-­ end shopping mall in Beijing’s central business district. Consultants—­all female—­would trawl rails of usually Eu­ro­pean designer clothes. At the time, Prada and Christian Dior labels w ­ ere particularly coveted. One con­sul­tant even asked if I she could give me money to buy her a Longines watch on my yearly visit to my London-­based ­family—­she wanted to take advantage of the weak sterling, and thus favorable exchange rate. From supporting Arsenal football club to sending their c­ hildren to expensive international schools, con­sul­tants’ preferences seemed to reflect an overarching preoccupation with the West.21 It would appear that con­sul­tants in my study wanted to become “Westernized.” However, I would argue, the content of t­hese practices—­which clearly placed a high value on Western habits, brands, and norms—­should not be mistaken for their objective. Consuming “Western” ­things was not a means to becoming Western; rather, con­sul­tants sought to position themselves in a constructed hierarchy of modernization that placed each country somewhere along a linear scale of development (see also Fong 2004, 2011). They ­were trying to show a relative shift—­a transformation—­that ­under the terms of reference meant copying Western cultural forms. Con­sul­tants ­were, like the transnational students of Vanessa Fong’s study, “both consumers and promoters of discourses that portrayed developed world citizenship as the paradise ­toward which every­one should be striving” (Fong 2011, 219). That con­sul­tants ­were trying to demonstrate modernization relative to other groups of ­people in China was deeply apparent when I observed con­sul­tants in situ at China Corp. Th ­ ere I found that Karen was not the only con­sul­tant to find respite in the form of coffee. At a dif­fer­ent site, con­ sul­tants ­were unable to reach a local Starbucks. Instead, they would carry out a daily ritual of making their own coffee. The long consulting t­ able, Building a Paradise  

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where most of the con­sul­tants worked, at times resembled a makeshift kitchen: a carton of long-­life milk, paper cups, a box of sugar cubes, Godiva choco­lates, Juicy Fruit gum, vitamins, an apple, a bag of Starbucks ground coffee—­which cost one hundred yuan, apparently—­Starbucks coffee filters, and fi­nally, the pièce de résistance, the Starbucks-­branded coffee machine. Each con­sul­tant had a specific role in the “production pro­cess,” which reflected their own position in the team hierarchy. As the newest and most ju­nior con­sul­tant, Fei Yang had to clean the coffee machine. Li Chunming and Qi Rui, se­nior con­sul­tants, took responsibility for the milk and sugar, respectively, and Guo Fan, the proj­ect man­ag­er, had the coveted task of pouring the coffee. Coffee is a new commodity in China, a country famous for its consumption of tea. The widespread napping I described in the previous chapter suggested that they do not feel any moral or professional impediment to repressing their post-­lunch drowsiness. In other words, con­sul­tants do not drink coffee for a caffeine hit. Rather, I suggest that con­sul­tants see coffee drinking as a way of performing a global identity that differentiates them from their soe clients, who ­were essentialized as having a more traditional and provincial outlook. Drinking together—­ just like eating Western food together—­promoted a sense of solidarity; con­sul­tants ­were a group united in certain re­spects. Sammi Fu, who has a master’s in psy­chol­ogy from Rice University in the United States, told me that one of the ­things she liked about Systeo was that her mentors w ­ ere almost always Chinese who had lived abroad in the past. “­We’re all haigui [sea turtles],” she said, referencing the local slang for Chinese p ­ eople who go overseas but then l­ater return to China. “A lot of us have that background [of being haigui], it’s part of the global com­ pany culture [waiqi de wenhua],” she explained. As we w ­ ill see in the next chapter, Systeo promulgated a rather dif­fer­ent notion of corporate culture. That said, Sammi’s comments are in­ter­est­ing ­because they emphasize how con­sul­tants develop a sense of being part of an elite, insider group, which is defined by experiences of living in paradise—­Western developed countries—­and the experience of making China into a paradise—­applying the skills, education, and insights they obtained overseas into helping China “catch up with the West.” They w ­ ere more than just cosmopolitans; they ­were paradise makers.

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Patriotic Interventions

A five-­star ­hotel in downtown Beijing was the venue for the 2009 New Year’s party. As they entered a ballroom adorned with oversized chandeliers, employees ­were each handed a cordless ­kettle and tea warmer set. This act of giving was saturated with symbolism; in the absence of markets, workers during the Maoist era ­were reliant on their danwei (socialist work units) to provide them with domestic goods. Although Systeo employees could freely buy such appliances themselves, receiving such gifts from their employer recalled notions of state welfare and paternalism that ­were associated with the urban work units of the Maoist past. Some employees would leave with another “gift”—­all employees w ­ ere entered into a drawing for a brand new mountain bike. Along with a watch and a sewing machine, a bicycle was one of the “three desirables” during the 1950s when China was in the first years of communist rule. ­These objects proved awkward party accessories, as scenes of con­sul­tants stuffing ­kettles ­under dining t­ ables covered in crisp white table­cloths testified. But they ­were ideal for demonstrating the com­pany’s awareness of local Chinese customs and the popularity and importance of tea, as well as allowing the com­pany to benefit from selective associations with the socialist period. Furthermore, ­these goods, having been embossed with Systeo’s logo, ensured that employees would regularly be reminded of their employer and the Systeo brand. The interweaving of global Systeoness and “the local” was a recurrent theme. The invitation stated that the official dress code was “Red.” In China red has traditionally been seen as an auspicious color, associated with prosperity and good fortune. For that reason, it is traditionally worn at Chinese New Year. Red is also, notably, the color of socialism. Mark McDougall, a British se­nior executive dressed in a black dinner suit, was reprimanded by a ju­nior con­sul­tant for failing to stick to the theme. “That’s where ­you’re wrong, though,” he replied. He unbuttoned his jacket to reveal a bright red, silk waistcoat, adding unnecessary verbal impact with a loud “ta dah!” L ­ ater on, along with other se­nior executives, he would perform a dragon dance, which is traditionally performed at Chinese New Year. The sight of four se­nior executives jumping up and down in a dragon costume, out of time, to crashing cymbals would be hard to forget. Another expatriate, American David Barnet, would then give a Building a Paradise  

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speech hailing Systeo China’s successes of the past year: major contracts won, overall business growth, and their increasing head count in the region. Like other expatriates, he would start his speech in Mandarin—­“Da jia hao [hello every­one]!”—­prompting gasps of shock and awe, not unlike the reaction Facebook ceo Mark Zuckerberg received when he uttered the same words at Tsing­hua University in 2014. But unlike Zuckerberg, David delivered the rest of his speech En­glish.22 Expatriates’ reluctance to truly “go native” was informed by their own notions of cultural superiority. They saw themselves as embodying the “global” subjectivity that defined Systeo professionalism, and they hoped if they led by example, Chinese employees would come to resemble them. Their per­for­mances of professionalism, which they claimed ­were informed by the com­pany’s “core values,” w ­ ere seen as critical to their enactment of expertise. Such “image professionalism” (Kipping 2011) has informed the staggering growth of this industry in the United States and Eu­rope. Yet, image professionalism did not seem to inform Chinese employees’ idea of consultancy or their conception of a good workplace. A stage, almost ten meters across, had been erected at the front, flanked by large flat-­screen monitors. A ­ fter dinner a video was played. Screeching audio feedback pierced the convivial atmosphere, then the first few bars of ­music started to fill the room. Employees took to their seats, their attention unwavering as the screens came to life. For birds it is to fly with abandon in the sky For fish it is to swim freely in the sea If ­there’s a paradise for you Can you tell me what it looks like? In this world ­there are so many challenges Where is my safe haven? ­ ese are the lyr­ics of “Building a Paradise,” a Mandarin pop song that Th was released in the 1990s. It was recorded by a group of “Mandopop” and “Cantopop” artists including Taiwanese starlet Julia Peng and Hong Kong pop prince and actor Andy Lau. They each sing just a ­couple of lines, in a style reminiscent of charity singles such as Band Aid’s infamous “Do They Know It’s Christmas?” However, ­there are no famous ­faces in this video, only white-­collar workers dressed in suits. Con­sul­tants have hijacked the sentimental ballad to create a new anthem for the com­pany. The chorus is 168 

CHAPTER Six

sung by the consulting teams of Systeo’s major Chinese clients. They stare directly into the camera, displaying broad smiles, swaying with their arms interlinked. [Chorus:] I build a paradise with love With virtues from my heart With your dreams and all of my hopes That is my paradise, that is my home As the video played I scanned the room for reactions. While Chinese employees wore broad smiles and clapped their hands, the ­faces of expatriate staff showed amazement and bewilderment. It was hoped that employees would go home with more than just a Systeo ­kettle; according to expatriates, this was an event designed to foster Systeo spirit—to create the social solidarity that would feed into com­pany loyalty and com­pany morale. By contrast, this video suggested that Chinese con­sul­tants ­were united in their quest to modernize China. Filmed inside the offices of their clients—­Chinese soes—­the video depicts consulting teams as tight-­knit families bound by ties of sentiment and ethics. Vari­ous messages are communicated: that consulting is the work of transforming Chinese soes into a “paradise,” and that paradise is made through moral and emotional l­abor. The last line of the chorus is particularly telling: “That is my paradise, that is my home [na jiu shi wo de tiantang, wo de jia].” The Chinese word jia can be translated as both “home” and “­family.” Con­sul­tants draw on this double meaning to suggest that China is their home, despite their having pursued studies and sometimes employment abroad, and that China is like a ­family for which you have enduring love and devotion. The master frame of the motherland has often been emphasized in analyses of Chinese nationalism; however, some recent accounts suggest that in the post-­Mao era love for the motherland can also be combined with negative feelings and even disassociation. For example, Vanessa Fong has argued that Chinese teen­agers in Dalian ­were steadfastly devoted to improving the nation’s development despite being critical and even ashamed of China’s “backwardness” (Fong 2004, 644). She explains that they conceive of their commitment to the nation as a filial duty, akin to the loyalty they give to their parents—­they express sentiments of “filial nationalism.” Fong draws on Michael Herzfeld’s concept of cultural intimacy to suggest that shared shame and embarrassment, so often Building a Paradise  

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experienced within families, far from harming social unity can provide its vital resource (see Herzfeld 1997): “when they expressed devotion to their nation, they recalled their parents, with the uneasy combination of love, ambivalence, frustration, and duty that such filial devotion entailed” (Fong 2004, 645). For con­sul­tants, their engagement with soes provoked similar comparisons and structures of loyalty. soes not only reminded them of their parents who had spent their working lives in such institutions; soes ­were akin to their parents and hence w ­ ere on the receiving of end of both criticism and devotion. As we saw in chapter  5, they looked down on soes; they even felt ashamed of their “inefficient” working practices and their “unproductive” employees who failed to take responsibility for their own actions. But this was a shame that they shared among themselves, and that bound them even more tightly to the plight of soes, and by extension to the modernization of the country. From the time I spent interviewing and shadowing con­sul­tants at China Corp, I knew that many con­sul­tants ­were unenthusiastic about attending the party. For them “Systeo” was not where they derived or located their corporate identity. Instead, they saw themselves as belonging to the proj­ect team. On large proj­ects such as erp implementation, each site might have between twenty and forty con­sul­tants; the ­whole proj­ect might have more than a hundred con­sul­tants. During my time at China Corp I saw con­sul­ tants handing out invitations for their own China Corp Proj­ect New Year’s party. Unlike the invitation to the Systeo party, which was sent via email, this invitation was printed in color on Kodak paper and was designed to look like an airmail envelope. Each invitation was personalized with the con­sul­tant’s name, photo, and proj­ect team, as well as the event details. It was apparent that a ­great deal of effort had gone into their production. By contrast, when t­hese same con­sul­tants attended the official Systeo party, they could not be bothered to adhere to the red dress code. But this should not lead us to think that Chinese con­sul­tants wanted to be an soe employee or that they saw soes as their home or “true” workplace. Although hired to make soes competitive on the global stage, a job that many claimed to be proudly carry­ing out, con­sul­tants did not see themselves as being representative of ­these entities; they ­were waiqi ­people. Fong points out that Chinese youth, b ­ ecause they “did not define themselves as China writ large” (Fong 2004, 644), are able to reconcile filial nationalism 170 

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with feelings of dissatisfaction and embarrassment ­toward China.23 I would suggest that con­sul­tants, similarly, did not see themselves as extensions of soes, but rather as the over­burdened ­children who have the education and expertise—­people with suzhi—to strengthen t­hese National Champions, the largest soes, which are considered crucial to national strength. They might have disliked soes, but by disassociating themselves from soes and all they symbolized—­bureaucratic inefficiency, virtuocracy, hierarchy—­ they could find ethical fulfillment in being part of their orga­nizational transformation. It should be noted that not all con­sul­tants interpreted their work at soe-­related proj­ects in terms of their contribution to state strengthening. Eric Chen was based in the Shanghai office, but was then posted to the China Corp proj­ect in Beijing. When I asked him w ­ hether he preferred Beijing or Shanghai, an act of small talk, he said: “all ­things considered, Shanghai—­there are less soes.” He says that Shanghai is not comparable to any other place in China. “In Beijing ­people think that working for an soe is a comfortable life and your work is helping the country, while Shanghai has historically had a lot of foreign influence,” he said. Eric believed that the attraction of Systeo for most Chinese employees is that it is a foreign com­pany with a good reputation; where they deployed their expertise, he implied, had no bearing on how he conceived of his work. And yet Eric was one of the most prominent f­ aces in the “Building a Paradise” m ­ usic video. In a foreign com­pany, Eric could nurture his own modernization, which is experienced through active engagement with and creation of “the global”; such individual transformation was also part of a g­ rand vision of “building a paradise.” Although the top-­level narration depicts consultancy as an expertise of standardization and convergence, on the ground we find that per­for­ mances of consultancy can be driven by multiplicity and divergence. The ways in which the individual, national, and global are si­mul­ta­neously invoked through the notion of paradise draws our attention to how expertise is actually enacted. Specifically, in this chapter I have highlighted how the per­for­mance of expertise is grafted onto locally salient concepts and inserted into the historical context. In the next chapter I continue this exploration of how purportedly universal, “global,” managerial concepts are negotiated by Chinese employees, turning my attention to regimes of corporate ethicizing. Building a Paradise  

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7

Con­spic­u­ous Ethicizing Corporate Culture, CSR, and Corporate Subjectivity

on my first day of fieldwork I met Christina Teoh. I was fortunate to catch her since she is not based in China. A con­sul­tant turned in-­house outsourcing specialist, Christina is a Malaysian Chinese employee who is normally based in Kuala Lumpur. She was spending just two days in ­Dalian for “back-­to-­back meetings” before jetting off again, but she found a few minutes in her busy schedule to meet with me. As I walked into her office, she gave me a puzzled look that suggested I had made a m ­ istake. As I started to introduce myself, she interrupted me. “­You’re not local!” she exclaimed. I nodded my head and went on to explain that I was the doctoral student she had authorized to carry out research in the com­pany. She immediately recalled our previous email communication and then explained her reaction, saying she could tell I was foreign from my accent and appearance. We talked about my background, and she was delighted to find out that we shared a Malaysian connection.1 For Christina this commonality served to differentiate us from the workers. Rather than seeing us as part of a pan-­Chinese collective, that is, in unity with the mainland Chinese workers who made up most of Systeo China’s workforce, she distinguished us in opposition to them—we ­were not local. This was a point she emphasized in our next meeting, when I asked her about c­ areer development, a concept around which I sensed a slippage between the definition espoused within Systeo’s corporate culture, which I had gleaned from participant observation of soft-­skill training and in my capacity as an ad hoc editor of hr documents, and the conceptualization held by Systeo’s back-­office employees. Specifically, I found that workers did not feel empowered to take charge of their own ­career development—­a term frequently mentioned by hr staff—­since they felt this was a m ­ atter

that was largely out of their hands. In response she told me that for Chinese workers, “­career development is that you join as an assistant, then you become an analyst, then a specialist, then a man­ag­er, and so on u ­ ntil you reach ceo!” In other words, Chinese workers see ­career development as successive promotions, a hierarchical progression up the com­pany ladder. She contrasted this understanding of ­career development with “our” understanding, grouping me together with herself, though she never made explicit what “our” definition would be, aside from saying that mine was “being an anthropologist and so on.” For Christina, Chinese employees’ inability to understand Systeo’s definition of ­career development could be attributed to their failure to imbibe and fully comprehend the com­pany’s “core values,” which are taken to form the main content of the com­pany’s culture. She told me about the challenges she encountered when she first arrived in Dalian to set up the ssc. “They just ­didn’t get it,” she said. Many of the core values corresponded with the classic values of Protestant individualism, emphasizing stewardship, individual empowerment, and moral integrity, and seemed to delineate a par­ tic­u­lar quasi-­Weberian ethic of capitalism. Indeed, workers told Christina that the core values w ­ ere not a part of Chinese culture, they w ­ ere Western values. She disagreed and told them that they w ­ ere values that could be understood in all cultures, a point repeated by vari­ous se­nior executives during the course of fieldwork. At the time Christina was taking intensive Mandarin lessons from a private tutor, paid for by the com­pany.2 Convinced of their universal relevance, she asked her tutor to translate the core values into Chinese and pull out historical examples that illustrated their applicability to Chinese culture. She said that at first he thought this would be an easy task. But in the end it took him three days of continuous searching to find the examples, she told me with a chuckle. When she showed ­these to her subordinates, they said that they could find better ones, so she deci­ded to hold a competition among Systeo’s Chinese employees “to find the best example of the core values in Chinese culture.” The winner had their essay published in the com­pany magazine. Christina’s actions reflect a widespread perception among expatriate man­ag­ers that Chinese workers, while well educated for their jobs, do not display the requisite social knowledge and dispositions befitting employees of global entities.3 In this chapter I follow anthropologist Aihwa Ong’s injunction to pay attention to the managerial technologies that define Con­s pic­u­o us Ethicizing  

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corporate subjectivities (Ong 2006a, 2006b), and I consider the new forms of sociality that are accompanying China’s economic modernization. In the few ethnographic studies of China’s nascent technology industry, we find that Western man­ag­ers tend to attribute the “deficiencies” of Chinese workers to their socialization in a context that is portrayed as the antithesis of global capitalism. ­Under Mao Zedong, China ran an autarkic regime ­under which workers enjoyed lifelong employment in state-­run “work units” (danwei), shielded from the pressures of market competition in a socialist command economy. During this time almost all aspects of public and private life ­were subject to state control. The Chinese Communist Party even sought to influence ­people’s thoughts (Lynch 1999).4 Ridding Chinese workers of their “socialist” ways or “irrational” Chinese culture is posed as a managerial conundrum (Kessler 2006; Ross 2006), a hurdle to economic development that must be overcome if China is to move higher up “the value chain.”5 While Ong’s research focuses on how the conduct of Chinese employees is problematized by Western man­ag­ers and discourses in mainstream business lit­er­a­ture, I am interested in the ­actual practices that are deployed to transform the problematized Chinese worker into an idealized corporate subject “who ­will think and behave in accordance with global business norms” (Ong 2006a, 171). For a global management consultancy, it is vital to have core values with cross-­cultural relevance. Clients, no ­matter where they are in the world, should receive the same service—­the strength of Systeo’s brand and orga­nizational identity relied on maintaining consistency across borders. It was also impor­tant ­because the embodiment of the com­pany’s core values was a key mechanism by which workers ­were managed and disciplined.6 My analy­sis focuses on corporate social responsibility, or csr, as a managerial tool of acculturation; specifically, I examine the ways in which the internal practice of csr is used to “civilize” Chinese employees in the ways of global capitalism. Notions such as “the ­triple bottom line” (­people, planet, and profit) and “fair competitiveness” suggest that csr operates by expanding economic value to subsume social and ethical values (see Rajak 2011, 10; Rajak 2008). As Geert de Neve and his coauthors put it, csr can be read “as an attempt by corporations to underscore [the claim] that a ‘humane capitalism’ is pos­si­ble” (de Neve, Luetchford, and Pratt 2008, 17). Elsewhere, anthropologists such as Elana Shever, Marina Welker, and Peter 174 

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Benson have focused on how csr is deployed as a means of manipulating the external perceptions of corporate practice, that is, how it feeds into corporate reputation, particularly in contexts like the extractive industries, where the destructive aspects of capitalism are especially vis­i­ble.7 By contrast, the argument I pres­ent ­here concerns how csr is deployed internally to create social meaning for employees. Although I am looking at the implementation of csr in China, it is impor­tant to stress that the story I pres­ent ­here is not one of overcoming “cultural difference.” Rather, I suggest that the molding of corporate subjectivity provides a useful forum to examine the connections between ostensibly depoliticized forms of morality and the economic interests of global business. I am interested in how morality is woven into the production of new forms of corporate personhood (Kirsch 2014), taking my lead from anthropologist Dinah Rajak’s insights about how corporations, through forms of storytelling, create an “imaginary of a moral self ” that intensifies rather than ameliorates the most destructive ele­ments of global capitalism. Writing about the mining com­pany Anglo-­American, Rajak argues that “narratives of philanthropy play a key role neither as the antithesis to the logic of capitalism, nor as the com­pany’s conscience, but as the warm-­blooded twin to the vio­lence of corporate imperialism” (Rajak 2014, 266). However, I extend Rajak’s argument by showing that embodied per­for­mances of morality also feed into an imaginary of the good corporate citizen. For management con­sul­tants, the making of moral legitimacy is particularly impor­tant—­they rely on pro­cesses of con­spic­u­ous ethicizing to underwrite their other­wise hollow professional standing (Kipping 2011). Invested with extraordinary power to restructure organ­izations—­almost all large public-­and private-­sector organ­izations ­will hire a management consultancy at some point—­management con­sul­tants are known for failing to deliver. Indeed, it is in the event of failure that performing morality—­ being a good corporate citizen—­becomes paramount. In this chapter I explore the proj­ects of corporate citizenship through which employees are encouraged to embody a moral ethos, in par­tic­u­lar the annual charity bike ride—­the most vis­i­ble of Systeo China’s corporate citizenship initiatives. Experiences of suffering, hardship, and dislocation are part of an enactment of morality in which employees are asked to relate to a “safe” other to which they can direct their goodwill. In this way the Con­s pic­u­o us Ethicizing  

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production of meaning and affect is carefully managed. However, as we ­will see, Chinese employees interrogate the morality they are being invited to perform, suggesting that ­there are limits to how far csr can be depoliticized as a device of “shared global values” (Rajak 2011). I argue that csr, which Rajak has criticized as a modern reincarnation of Western paternalism and corporate imperialism (Rajak 2011), is a discursive formation that is incompatible with the post-­Mao context, where economic development and morality are mainly controlled by the state (Kipnis 2007). Second, I demonstrate that corporate ethicizing, although often characterized as an extra-­financial disposition,8 is subsumed into the work of making “engaged employees,” which you ­will recall is defined as ­those who are productive of shareholder return (chapter 1). Hence, my analy­sis substantiates Rajak’s observation that csr is not conceived as a “moral bolt-on” to capitalism as usual, but rather the integration of ethical princi­ples and praxis into corporations’ core business (Rajak 2008). Management Con­sul­tants and Corporate Culture

By participating in initiatives of “corporate citizenship”—­ the vehicle through which csr is implemented—it was hoped that employees would learn to perform the core values that formed the foundation of the firm’s corporate culture. It was hoped that they would become “Systeofied.” Due to my commitment to anonymize Systeo to the best of my abilities, I am unable to disclose the com­pany’s core values. However, it should be noted that companies in the professional ser­vices industry have strikingly similar core values. This is despite claiming explic­itly, or at least implying on their websites, that their core values form the basis of a distinct culture or “way of ­doing business.” For example, Boston Consulting Group, Pricewater­ houseCoopers, and kkr—­a consultancy, an accounting firm and consultancy, and a private equity firm, respectively—­all espouse core values of “integrity,” “diversity/respect for the individual,” and “innovation.” Notably, Boston Consulting Group does not use the term innovation, preferring instead “Expanding the Art of the Pos­si­ble.” Historian Christopher McKenna observes that the two books that are widely cited as initiating the corporate culture movement in the 1980s, Corporate Culture: Rites and Rituals and In Search of Excellence, have strong links to McKinsey management consultancy’s “brand” of professionalism 176 

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(McKenna 2006). The former was based on McKinsey’s definition of corporate culture, while the latter was written by two McKinsey partners, Tom Peters and Robert Waterman, as part of a strategic decision to commodify the firm’s professional practice (McKenna 2006).9 The now ubiquitous idea that a com­pany’s culture is defined by a set of core values derives from the codification of McKinsey’s internal notion of what constitutes professionalism.10 Rather than expertise being a source of professional status, for con­ sul­tants, per­for­mances of professionalism provide a resource for claiming expertise (Kipping 2011; McKenna 2006). Moreover, professionalism can be standardized and developed into a full-­scale model of organ­ization, as exemplified by McKinsey’s famous “7s” model, which places “shared values” at the center of orga­nizational coordination. In short, corporate culture hijacked cultural analy­sis for a management product.11 It is of relevance to ask, Why do con­sul­tants espouse this notion of culture? The idea that orga­nizational culture is a totalizing force that can be engineered at ­will, while clearly rejected by anthropologists (Marcus 1998; Wright 1994), is also a very par­tic­u­lar view in organ­ization studies and the field of management.12 In a paper on risk culture in the finance industry since the 2007–8 financial crisis, Mike Power, Tommaso Palermo, and Simon Ashby make the observation that regulators, risk committees, and con­sul­ tants have a tendency to selectively appropriate from the orga­nizational culture lit­er­a­ture in their problematization of risk culture (2014). In par­tic­ u­lar, lit­er­a­ture from the 1980s such as the work of orga­nizational theorist Edward Schein is favored. Schein, who espouses a deterministic notion of culture that can, vitally, be controlled, appeals to experts whose legitimacy rests on assertions of being able to change or at least strongly influence social real­ity. By contrast, more recent lit­er­a­ture, which emphasizes a more open, less deterministic conceptualization of culture (e.g., Alvesson 2013), is sidelined. Schein’s formulation of orga­nizational culture closely resembles McKinsey’s formulation of corporate culture; indeed, Schein was a favorite intellectual source for Systeo con­sul­tants in their Power­Point “deliverables.” Typically portrayed as a “soft” form of management, corporate culture aims to discipline by creating self-­regulating subjects. However, the regulation desired is not the same as the “­silent” orientation to checking that is the goal of per­for­mance management (chapter  2). Instead, employees are encouraged to filter their be­hav­ior by “loudly” channeling all activities Con­s pic­u­o us Ethicizing  

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through a con­spic­u­ous, and officially prescribed, corporate ethics. Similar to how Systeo’s leadership often invoked the benevolence of the com­pany (chapter 1), workers are expected to display if not embody an ethics of work. But it was always the specter of failure, that despite all the exhortations of management con­sul­tants such a notion of culture could not produce the desired subjectivities, that animated my investigation. Hence, the aim of this chapter is to draw attention to the vari­ous subjectivities inside the consultancy, rather than an analytical focus on subjectivation in the Foucauldian sense, which assumes the smooth production of subjectivities.13 Furthermore, I suggest that it is by comparing desired subjectivities, as delineated by management practices and discourses, with ­those that employees actually evidence that we can shed light on the character of the knowledge that con­sul­tants sell. Corporate Citizenship and the Per­for­mance of Morality

One way of performing “good corporate citizenship” is to practice consultancy in a not-­for-­profit context. Con­sul­tants based in Eu­rope and North Amer­i­ca can take a sabbatical of six months or a year to lend their consulting skills—­it implementation, per­for­mance management, some aspects of microfinance—to one of Systeo’s development partners, typically ngos in the developing world. At the time of my fieldwork, this option was not yet available in Systeo China, though se­nior executives I talked to anticipated it would be rolled out in a year or two. Instead, Chinese employees could participate in community engagement proj­ects—­a form of “social investment” designed to “empower” local communities. The message conveyed through ­these initiatives is that ­because of Systeo, ngos become high-­ performance organ­izations, and local communities become (potential) high performers. It is apparent that ­these initiatives are designed to highlight Systeo’s expertise and foreshadow the potential expansion of high-­performance practices to organ­izations outside the corporate domain, which has already begun in many regions, but not yet in China. That is to say, csr can be read as a means of legitimizing and promulgating the knowledge base of consultancy. Furthermore, csr can bolster the com­pany’s reputation, a point that se­nior executives ­were not shy to admit. In a sales training workshop, con­sul­tants ­were told that csr credentials can be the difference between winning and losing a contract: “in 2006 25 ­percent of rfps [requests for 178 

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proposal] asked about csr; in 2008 that figure was up to 75 ­percent,” remarked Tom Flanagan, head of strategy consulting. “Clients want to know what kind of ethics we practice,” remarked se­nior executive Nick Miller. Yet it would be too cynical to say that Systeo practiced csr only to improve their chances of winning business. csr was also a form of internal “social investment.” Writing about the “de-­radicalization of csr,” sociologist Ronen Shamir observes that “the community” of csr discourse can often refer not to local stakeholders but the employees of large corporations. He argues that, “[B]y focusing on employee participation in csr proj­ects, by enlisting them to contribute time, money and knowledge, and by sharing with them the com­pany’s reputation as socially responsible, the normative control is deployed by transforming employees into a ‘community’ and by turning ­labor relations into a question of employees’ satisfaction and loyalty” (Shamir 2004, 683). csr initiatives provide myriad possibilities for employees to perform the com­pany’s core values. Inducting employees into being good “corporate citizens” constituted a pathway for them to become “Systeofied.” As Peter Grantham, a con­sul­tant from the London office, put it: “csr seeks to inspire our employees and reinforce cultural values about ‘who we are’ and ‘how we operate.’ ” In China, this injunction takes on a rather literal meaning. According to Stephanie Smith, head of Global Giving, Systeo was only allowed to open offices in China on the condition they provided educational and community investment. In autumn 2008, I participated in Systeo China’s “flagship” corporate citizenship event—­a charity bike ­ride across Sichuan province to raise money for victims of the devastating earthquake that had hit the region on May 12 of that year. To be considered for participation, I had to donate at least one item to an online auction. Other employees would then bid for ­these gifts, the money ­going to the Sichuan relief effort. The fifteen employees with the highest bids, and thus who had raised the most money, would be selected automatically. The remaining twenty slots would be deci­ded by drawing names (of the remaining “sellers”) out of a hat. Just a ­couple of months a­ fter the auction, I boarded a flight to Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan province, with all the other Beijing-­based employees. Once ­there we boarded a coach, which took us on a tour of the city before arriving at the h ­ otel. Along with our flights and meals, Systeo had paid for us to stay in a four-­star ­hotel in the downtown area. A ­ fter thirty Con­s pic­u­o us Ethicizing  

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minutes to check in and freshen up, we met outside the h ­ otel for the bike fitting. Gleaming new mountain bikes ­were unloaded into the car park. British se­nior executive Mark McDougall had brought his own, well-­used racing bike. The bike mechanics enjoyed teasing him in broken En­glish, saying that it was a ­great bike “maybe ten years ago.” Conversations ­were stilted but jovial, as the participants—­consultants drawn from the dif­fer­ ent China offices—­started to get to know each other. We continued chatting over dinner. One con­sul­tant, Xing Feng, a native of Chengdu, was in hospital when the earthquake began. “I was lying in the hospital bed when the walls started to move. I had no idea what was happening,” he recalled. The other participants listened with unwavering attention, some of them visibly moved. “This is my home and I know p ­ eople who have lost their homes, friends, or ­family members,” he went on to say. His personal narrative contrasted with that of James Tsang, from Hong Kong but brought up in the United States, who spoke in abstract terms, saying “in ­these times, what with the financial crisis, it’s good to give something back to society.” We cycled between fifty and seventy kilo­meters each day, covering 150 kilo­meters altogether. Mark, the British se­nior executive, was my “chaperone.” One of the best riders, he was usually at the front of the pack, but periodically he would hang back to check on t­ hose ­behind him. He would often cycle next to me, giving me advice on how to make better use of my gears and encouraging me with comments such as, “just imagine how amazing ­you’re ­going to feel when you cross the finishing line—­it’s gonna be worth all the pain!” ­Saddle sores ­were the least of my worries. With a route that included motorways and dirt tracks through industrial pro­cessing zones, as well as the expected climbs up Emei Shan and Le Shan, the famous mountains of Sichuan, we found ourselves cycling in harsh conditions. Our clothes w ­ ere splattered with mud, and a thick layer of dirt covered our ­faces. The participants—­middle-­class, white-­collar workers—­could be forgiven for thinking they had signed up for a survival course, not a bike ­ride. The message that we needed to suffer to do good, that this was an exercise in being “outside your comfort zone,” was deeply apparent. Blocked roads, collapsed buildings, and piles of rubble became familiar sights on our journey. The “finishing line” was a construction site. A primary school that had been destroyed in the earthquake would be rebuilt, funded by Systeo. Led by the se­nior executives, we formed a pro­cession of cyclists, greeted by cheers from local government officials, pupils, and 180 

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their parents. The students performed a song-­and-­dance routine. The con­ sul­tants presented them with rucksacks stuffed with treats. Then the day’s climax—­a groundbreaking ceremony in which se­nior executives ­were photo­graphed posing with shovels alongside government officials. The next day we visited two more schools. Con­sul­tants dished out blankets and laptops. They asked the ­children if they had heard of Systeo and if they wanted to be management con­sul­tants when they grew up. L ­ ater we filed into the makeshift canteen and had lunch with the students, some of whom ­were dressed in the traditional costumes of the Yi minority. One ­little girl notable for her green eyes, so uncommon among Han Chinese, drew the most attention. Out came the digital cameras. Groups of con­sul­tants and ­children held their hands up, fin­gers displaying the “V” for victory symbol, and smiled to the beat of the flash. Fetishizing the ­people they helped made it appear that Systeo employees considered them to be wholly dif­fer­ent. The c­ hildren ­were rural citizens, less sophisticated, and unmodern in comparison. Deciding who deserves help requires a pro­cess of differentiation. Workers considered the ­children to be of lower suzhi (quality)—­a concept that has become central to pro­cesses of governance in post-­Mao China, and that is typically invoked as form of social classification that justifies inequalities of power, status, and wealth between ­those with high suzhi and ­those “lacking quality” (Kipnis 2007). Yet, in some ways, the ­children ­were not so dif­fer­ent. Only the top fifty students (by test scores) ­were allowed to attend. Like the con­sul­tants, who w ­ ere typically recruited from elite universities, they ­were high academic achievers—­perhaps one day they would become con­sul­tants. The con­sul­ tants w ­ ere helping ­people they could both distance themselves from and identify with. Depicted as less fortunate versions of themselves, the precocious pupils of the destroyed Sichuan schools w ­ ere the “safe” other to which they could direct their good intentions. Employees sign up for a strange mix of endurance, self-­deprivation, and indulgence. Given that they spend at least five days a week inside an office, cycling 150 kilo­meters across Sichuan was physically as well as mentally challenging. But ­these ­were isolated, contained challenges. Unlike the ­children they visited, the recipients did not stay in makeshift housing, but rather at a four-­star ­hotel. Similarly eating ­simple dishes of plain vegetables and rice was a one-­off experience of “the local,” not a mundane aspect of everyday existence. ­These ­were also meticulously planned challenges; by Con­s pic­u­o us Ethicizing  

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contrast, the c­ hildren ­were faced with the ongoing instability, uncertainty, and precarity of living in the aftermath of the earthquake. I point out ­these differences ­because it is precisely by drawing parallels with recipients—­the creation of an “empathic zone”—­that employees can be said to be experiencing the other and thus testing themselves. It is this carefully calibrated testing of the self that is so covetable and definitive of the internal practice of csr. The bike r­ ide is designed to be experienced as a series of revelatory moments—­about their own capabilities, their responses to adversity, their position in social hierarchies, and even the utility of their expertise. ­These revelatory moments are crucial to transforming the self, that is, to promoting the creation of new subjectivities. One might expect that employees would return to work with an improved ethic of their craft. Perhaps also they become more content in their everyday work, which might translate into a state of heightened passivity, thus making them easier to manage. Or, most obvious, one might expect that they would find meaning, a sense of purpose, in their jobs, which are defined by their inscrutability. Performing a Global Morality in Post-­Mao China

Although long established in Systeo’s older geographies (in North Amer­ i­ca and Western Eu­rope), corporate citizenship was still in its infancy in China. “It’s been hard to get traction—­it’s been difficult to build corporate citizenship in China,” remarked Stephanie Smith, head of Global Giving. Tentatively she suggested that that ­there was “not a strong heritage of charitable giving due to cultural norms.” Stephanie implied that Chinese employees constrained by “their culture” did not grasp the idea of charity—­ giving without the expectation of return—­a prob­lem that suggested, in her words, “a need to increase employee awareness.” This was especially impor­tant ­because “corporate citizenship is something that develops organically in each region,” since it is made up of “employee-­driven initiatives [and hence] often takes on a ‘local flavor.’ ” As sociologist Carolyn Hsu has pointed out, voluntary giving is not a foreign concept to Chinese, who have long seen it a moral obligation to provide for kin in need (2008, 84). However, giving to strangers—­a central princi­ple in Western charitable giving—is not valorized and has only recently been introduced (Hsu 2008, 84; see also Rolandsen 2008). Hsu examines the historical development of Proj­ect Hope, one of the first and 182 

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most successful charities in the post-­Mao era, which was set up to raise funds for rural schools. It solicits donations from individual and corporate donors, the latter including, notably, Systeo. According to Hsu, the main prob­lem facing charitable organ­izations in China is that Chinese ­people find it difficult to trust strangers ­unless they are engaged in reciprocal relations built up through gift exchanges. In addition to noting that charity is a culturally conditioned perception based on a Western conception of universal love that can thus be applied to ­those near to and distant from us, Hsu observes that such cultural hurdles can be overcome by drawing on existing schemas of moral legitimacy. For example, by recasting hitherto anonymous donations as personalized, and hence trust generative, relations between donor and recipient. Stephanie’s assertion, shared by many expatriates, that Chinese employees are held back by a set of norms or cultural values fails to grasp how notions of charity are predicated on configurations of social relations that are not necessarily shared across contexts. As we ­will see, this failure to consider social relations would not be the only threat to the realization of the desired corporate subjectivity. During the bike r­ ide, ­there ­were nightly team briefings, in which con­ sul­tants ­were invited to share their thoughts on the day. One con­sul­tant commented that one of the ­children in the schools we had visited had the same mobile phone as he did. “Do they r­ eally need our help?” he intoned. A few of us went to a bar afterward, where the discussion continued. “It’s dif­fer­ent for us,” said Chen Jin, a con­sul­tant from Beijing, referring to mainland Chinese employees as opposed to expatriates. “Obviously, we have very dif­fer­ent lives from ­these ­children, but you know thirty, forty years ago . . . ​we ­weren’t so dif­fer­ent.” Since market reforms ­were introduced, income in­equality has skyrocketed and Chinese society has become increasingly stratified. That being said, the suggestion that urbanites and rural citizens w ­ ere equal u ­ nder Mao is at best nostalgic. Vari­ous scholars have pointed out that rural China, although privileged in communist party discourse (Bach 2010), was continuously decimated and devalued for the sake of creating urban China as the vision of socialist modernity (Siu 2007). Nevertheless, Chen Jin’s comments do show how memories of China’s socialist past continue to inform how p ­ eople experience and make sense of present-­day social differentiation. Chen Jin had questioned ­whether ­these communities ­were truly deserving of corporate aid on the basis that the recipients appeared to be too Con­s pic­u­o us Ethicizing  

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similar to the con­sul­tants. I should stress that Chen Jin and other Chinese employees ­were not disengaged from the plight of China’s rural poor. They would often forward emails to each other asking for donations to charities dedicated to improving the living standards for rural ­children. Containing harrowing images of teary-­eyed ­children eating scraps of food, carry­ing sacks of sticks on their back, hands and ­faces raw from the cold, ­these emails stated emphatically who was the deserving subject of charity. Systeo’s csr initiatives had disrupted the overdrawn, if not patronizing, image of the rural child as the uncivilized, inferior other to the modern, middle-­ class urbanite that employees propagated. Yet this was precisely the opposite of what was intended. csr initiatives are predicated on, and serve to magnify, the in­equality between recipients and donors. ­Whether represented as integral to their business model, or simply old-­fashioned corporate giving, csr has innovated l­ittle on the imperialistic trope of Western folk helping to civilize the developing world. It is by highlighting inequalities that csr initiatives gain their moral legitimacy—­who can quarrel with mea­sures to help ­those who are worse off? It is apparent that certain repre­sen­ta­tions of communities are necessary to legitimize csr as a way of “giving back” to society. If Chinese employees do not see themselves as superior to the recipients of their goodwill, then the moral imperative that drives the initiative is lost. They might begin to won­der why they have made personal sacrifices—­not just the objects they put up for bid, but also four days of annual leave, four days that could have been spent with their f­amily—to cycle across Western China. They have suffered, but for what and for whom? At the end of the event we ­were divided into groups of three and asked to write an article together based on our experience. The best articles would be published in the com­pany csr magazine. I was put with Chen Jin and Yu Na, two con­sul­tants from Beijing. We sat together on the bus back to Chengdu to discuss what we might write. Yu Na asked a rhetorical question: “The government would provide help if Systeo ­didn’t, right?” to which Chen Jin agreed. From conversations on the road, I sensed that many employees had chosen to participate in the bike r­ ide in order to see with their own eyes the destruction wrought by the earthquake. A distrust of Chinese media repre­sen­ta­tions that had saturated prime-­time tv night ­after night served as one motivation. Buying into the wave of Chinese nationalism that was fueled by this media explosion was another. As 184 

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we passed a refuge of temporary shelters, metal cabins with uniform blue roofs, Lisa Teng, a con­sul­tant based in Shanghai, pointed out the ­grand, gray brick government offices in close proximity. “Buildings for officials get rebuilt before homes for ordinary p ­ eople—­that’s China for you,” she lamented. Even though employees thought that the relief effort would be marred by corruption, they took it for granted that the state would be leading the operations. As Catherine Dolan has argued, the practice of csr typically claims its legitimacy, or at least rhetorical traction, by claiming to plug gaps in development produced by the absence of the state (Dolan 2010). The lack of formal standards or regulation concerning l­ abor practices or factory emissions, for example, is used to justify the growth of csr practice in ­these areas. In the United States, where state intervention is often treated with suspicion, the idea that corporations w ­ ill intervene in everyday life, indeed that they should ­because they provide better, more efficient solutions, is widely accepted. In China, however, the state is seemingly omnipresent. Basic choices concerning h ­ uman reproduction, media consumption, one’s place of residency, are all subject to state intervention. This control is enacted through paternalistic ties, not unlike the kind invoked by the practice of csr. This point is exemplified by the media construction of “Grandpa Wen,” Wen Jia Bao, then premier of the ­People’s Republic of China, the sixty-­six-­year-­old poster “boy” of the relief effort. tv crews and journalists document him in the trenches, consoling homeless, maybe even orphaned, c­ hildren—­the victims of the earthquake. Such media narratives drive home the message that the patron of the relief effort was the Chinese Communist Party, not Systeo or any other Western donor. Stephanie Smith and other employees, expatriate and Chinese, involved in building Systeo China’s csr program had not thought through how a strong, paternalistic state would impact the effectiveness of csr in engaging employees. I argue that, in this context, the value that Systeo brought to the relief effort was not apparent. And thus the key csr message, to both external stakeholders and Systeo employees, that Systeo is ­there to “make a difference,” failed to materialize. Months ­after the bike ­ride I had lunch with a few con­sul­tants. The conversation turned to the topic of corporate citizenship. One con­sul­tant, Joanna Li, told me that they do not yet have the culture (wenhua) for such initiatives. She said that “not long ago the government took care of every­thing—­your Con­s pic­u­o us Ethicizing  

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work, where you lived, p ­ eople in need.” She was referring to Mao’s “iron bowl”—­the set of cradle-­to-­grave benefits, including lifelong employment, that prevailed u ­ nder socialism. “­People ­don’t ­really consider giving to ­others, it’s just not in the culture right now,” she explained. Joanna’s comments seemed to imply that culture, a bit like older ideas of development, was based on a linear teleology.14 One day, Chinese culture would “catch up” with the West, and then giving to charity would be normalized, expected even. ­Until then Chinese “culture” would hold back the implementation of csr. Joanna’s thinking seems remarkably close to that of Stephanie Smith, the head of Global Giving—­recall her remark that “the norms” of giving ­were not yet established in China. The idea that t­here exists a teleology of development that is matched, or evidenced, by a teleology of mentalities may not be anything new. What is in­ter­est­ing is how, in this context, culture is seen as the driver of ­these teleologies, in contrast to standard modernist notions of development, in which culture is posed as a hindrance to producing rational, liberal citizens. It may be the case that this reversal simply reflects the fact that culture is a dominant discourse of management consultancy and is seen as a model for controlling social real­ity. As I have already pointed out, con­ sul­tants, despite being hired to create efficiency through the implementation of standardized, rational, and technocratic forms of management, in fact base much of their expertise on culture. But the recourse to culture, and in par­tic­u­lar the invocation of cultural difference to explain the failure to conform, could also be read as an unprovocative way of side-­stepping managerial control. That is to say, Chinese employees are also a­ dept at apprehending culture for their own self-­interest. Providing a “High-­Level Experience”

The money raised from the bike ­ride bolstered the already considerable amount that was raised through a donation drive launched in the immediate aftermath of the earthquake, in which the com­pany matched ­every yuan donated by an employee. In just one week, Systeo China and its employees had donated over two million yuan ($285,000) to the relief effort. Employees’ generosity called into question Stephanie’s assertion that “the norms” of giving ­were not yet established in China. Given that a sizable donation had been made, and with ease, why was it necessary to or­ga­nize a 186 

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fund-­raising bike ­ride? Some insight can be found by looking at who was eligible to participate. Any employee could donate money, but only per­ manent employees received the email explaining how they could join in.15 As we ­will see, corporate citizenship is seen as a form of ­human investment, which is reserved only for ­those the com­pany seek to retain. Just six months a­ fter the bike ­ride I was hired as Systeo China’s very first “corporate citizenship coordinator.” In fact, the job was created with me in mind. The experience I had gained working in the H ­ uman Capital Strategy Program was seen as especially relevant, a point I w ­ ill return to ­later. Also, having participated in the bike ­ride, I was well informed to help or­ga­nize the following year’s bike r­ ide, the main task of this position. So I joined a bike ­ride committee consisting of con­sul­tants who had volunteered their proj­ect management and logistics skills, as well as their time, to the csr program. Over a series of conference calls, we hammered out a rough sketch of the event; it was my job to translate ­these ideas into fluent, exciting communications that would be sent directly to employees and uploaded onto the com­pany intranet. Very quickly I realized that we ­were planning a much more ambitious event than in previous years. ­There would be more participants—up to sixty employees—­and for the first time the bike ­ride would be open to employees from outside of China as well as t­ hose based in the China offices. This was the idea of Emma Jiang, se­nior executive and bike ­ride lead. The participation of employees from North Amer­i­ca and Eu­rope would, according to her, show that Systeo China was a truly global entity. Another reason for pursuing this arrangement was that it might encourage Chinese employees to take part. As I described in the last chapter, most ­were aged between the mid-­twenties and mid-­thirties, and, unlike their parents, had only ever been employed by foreign companies. They saw themselves as part of a generation of Asian cosmopolitans who wanted to work in “global” environments. csr initiatives such as the bike r­ ide ­were almost unheard-of in Chinese enterprises. Their existence signaled immediately that t­ hese ­were not “local” entities. Moreover, such events allowed employees to actually meet and interact with Eu­ro­pe­ans, Americans, and Australians. Emma also expected that “foreign” employees would jump at the chance of cycling in China. But getting access to them would not be a straightforward ­matter. We needed to reach out to the csr leads of the dif­fer­ent Systeo offices. Their Western names indicated what the employee directory Con­s pic­u­o us Ethicizing  

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confirmed—­only Systeo offices in the global North employed specialist csr professionals. China did not have a csr lead. A contracted csr coordinator, I was the next best alternative. Hence, I was asked to pres­ent a Power­Point detailing our plans for the coming bike ­ride and background information on the previous year’s event. David Kraus, the German lead, was the first to comment: “I know what the [German] se­nior executives ­will say: ‘that’s nice but what does a bike ­ride have to do with Systeo?’ ” The connection between corporate citizenship activities and Systeo’s core business was not apparent. Amelia, the U.S. lead, had dif­fer­ent objections. She said she would only want the U.S. offices to be involved if we could “deliver a high-­level experience that rivals the Everest event.” The year before, employees, notably only t­hose from the global North, w ­ ere invited to “challenge themselves” by trekking to the Mount Everest base camp, an event of g­ reat complexity to or­ga­nize, and which was collectively judged a “resounding success.” I was struck immediately by Amelia’s emphasis on the individual employee’s experience rather than the charities for which the employees would be raising money. Cathleen Doyle, the Ireland csr lead, seemed to share her concern, interjecting with “does anyone on the global corporate citizenship team know y­ ou’re organ­izing this?” The tone in which Cathleen asked her question seemed to suggest that we, the Chinese corporate citizenship team, ­were errant ­children ­going ­behind the backs of our “Global” parents. The implication was that if Global was not involved, then they—­the Western csr leads—­could not ascertain the quality of the event or the experience we would deliver, which made them wary of letting “their” employees participate. In fact, Global w ­ ere the ones who suggested we contact the csr leads. Sitting at my desk, staring at my phone as if it could talk back to me, I felt extremely uneasy. ­There was something untoward in their questioning, something that suggested we ­were not just talking about logistics or csr. Our competency, our skill at performing corporate ethics, was ­under attack. Amelia stated in no uncertain terms that she would not be sending out our communications to all U.S. employees. In effect she was refusing access. Only ­those who had signed up to corporate citizenship interest lists and Asian American employees would be made available to us. I was floored. ­There was a mailing list consisting of only Asian American employees? In a “global” com­pany? And why would only Americans of Asian ethnicity be interested in participating? Amelia’s comments seemed to 188 

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rehearse my own observation that csr “works” when employees can identify with the recipients of their goodwill, except that she seemed to suggest that a common ground could only be found on the basis of ethnicity. ­There ­were also controversies over who would be a deserving recipient: “Where do you draw the line? Th ­ ere are lots of charities which need our support in Ireland so why should we help raise funds in China?” remarked Cathleen. Emma trotted out the global narrative, that as a global com­pany Systeo should encourage its employees to participate in charity events in dif­fer­ent regions. Met with awkward silence, Emma added: “the foreigners, I mean the expatriates who participate in the bike rides . . . ​you should see the ­children’s ­faces—­they have never seen a foreigner before.” I got her point that having expatriates involved gives Chinese recipients a much greater sense of Systeo, that it is a global entity with employees drawn from around the world. At the same time, I could not shake the feeling that we—­the China corporate citizenship team—­were selling ethnic voyeurism to white employees. The gap between recipient and donor had suddenly been amplified. Such comments did not necessarily suggest a paucity of professionalism or inaccuracy of observation—­I had seen for myself the enchanted f­ aces that she spoke of. Rather, it appeared that Emma was unprepared for the csr leads’ spiky questions and negative feedback. We had not anticipated the csr leads would act as gatekeepers to employees. If d ­ oing good was integral to corporate citizenship activities in all regions, as suggested by Stephanie Smith, the head of Global Giving, Systeo’s leadership videos, and the com­pany magazine, then why is employee participation so tightly policed? The finances of corporate citizenship are instructive h ­ ere. Overall, the bike r­ ide committee hoped to raise at least 250,000 yuan ($35,700) through the event. However, when g­ oing through the proj­ect bud­get I found that less than 10 ­percent of this money would go to charity. Most of it would go into covering the event’s costs: the h ­ otels, the flights, the meals, the bike rental, bike mechanics, and third parties (e.g., agencies specializing in local logistics). The injunction from Amelia, the U.S. lead, to “deliver a high-­level experience” belies an overarching objective, not to raise money for charity, but to create what are termed engaged employees. As I would l­ater find out by reading the business case for my role as China corporate citizenship coordinator, corporate citizenship activities are seen as an input to ­human capital. Systeo sells and practices internally the Con­s pic­u­o us Ethicizing  

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idea that csr is a way of making “engaged employees,” ­those who actively contribute to the creation of shareholder value. Each csr lead is u ­ nder pressure to demonstrate how they have improved employee engagement—­ this is how their per­for­mance is evaluated—­which explains why they are wary of letting “their” employees participate in initiatives or­ga­nized by other regions. As an internal con­sul­tant to the H ­ uman Capital Strategy Program (described in chapter 1), I was privy to the range of activities—­intraorganization dating events, sports clubs, flexible work arrangements—­which ­were considered deserving of com­pany investment. csr was yet another example. The naïve theory is that by participating in such activities employees develop a more positive relationship with the com­pany, thus enhancing productivity, and, in turn, shareholder value. Although I found that the connection with shareholder value was rarely mentioned, on occasion it was explic­itly referred to.16 For example, in an interview with Systeo’s head of Global Giving, Stephanie Smith, she stated baldly that corporate citizenship initiatives “need to prove return of investment w ­ ill come” in order to be implemented. Writing about the partnerships between big business and ngos, Robert Foster argues that con­temporary global capitalism uses consensus as a way of defusing potentially conflictual relationships and agendas, and in ­doing so weds ethical praxis with the creation of shareholder value (2014). This kind of bridging between ethics and profit through strategic collaborations is termed connected capitalism. The use of csr as a tool of acculturation is but another example of how external associations or partnerships, such as investing in local schools destroyed by natu­ral disasters, can be apprehended for the moral aestheticizing of business as usual. Reflections on CSR

In this chapter I have examined the work of “reengineering” Chinese employees in a global ethics through the internal practice of csr. I have shown how activities of “­doing good,” by inducing employees to perform a decontextualized form of morality, aim to create a discursive moral self. The content of this morality, however, lacks a subterranean ethics. Instead, employees are invited to perform the com­pany’s core values, which are more codifications and commodifications of professionalism (McKenna 190 

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2006, 193) than ethical coordinates for social action. Hence, morality is defined in negative terms—as what it is not. Through revelation, corporate citizenship activities are designed to create affective ties that would appear to be defined by the absence of financial concerns. The a­ ctual amount raised by the bike r­ ide for the charity is never disclosed, somewhat strange given that this is the explic­itly narrated objective of the event. Hence, employees, apart from the bike ­ride committee, are not aware of the slim margins of charitable giving. At the same time, employees do not question the comparative luxury in which they are “challenged.” It would seem that employees are encouraged to see such changes to the self as not driven by profit. In this way they can be said to have been “engaged.” Yet sentiments that derive their meaning from the elision of finance are generated with the view to making subjects who maximize the creation of financial value. One of the central contradictions of csr is that moral legitimacy is drawn through the per­for­mance of extra-­financial concerns, yet moral authority is generated for the purposes of finance. How this contradiction is effaced is of par­tic­u­lar interest. We find that the failure to display the correct ethical dispositions is, in the first place, denigrated as a prob­lem of culture. Chinese employees are seen as somehow less developed, culturally speaking, than their Western colleagues. Their “failure” is that they do not display the right norms of giving and benevolence befitting global professionals—­they are exoticized to explain their supposed lack of professionalism. We find that, to be deemed worthy, recipients of corporate aid are also exoticized. Th ­ ere is a common theme of ethical action being legitimated through pro­cesses of making strange what might other­wise be familiar. However, in the analy­sis presented above we see that such attempts at othering are not always successful in the post-­Mao context. The prob­lem is not only that Chinese employees see the targets of their goodwill as too similar to themselves. They also question the legitimacy of corporate intervention. In post-­Mao China, where state power is still hegemonic, the rhetorical traction of csr is somewhat decimated. This would suggest that the efficacy of csr to produce the “right” per­for­mances of morality is not, as the discourse suggests, universal. Rather, the desired moral self is ­imagined in continuation with older structures of paternalism and corporate philanthropy. Although ­there is nothing intrinsically “Western” about the marriage of ethics to capitalism, the discursive effects of csr rest upon Con­s pic­u­o us Ethicizing  

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certain assumptions of how cap­i­tal­ist practices relate to local development, assumptions that derive from a long history of Western capitalism. Far from producing “global” subjects, practices of corporate responsibility aim to bolster and reassert corporate power in the minds of employees as well as in public perception.

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Conclusion Our team lives with numbers but numbers are tools and have no souls. —­William Li, Systeo con­sul­tant

September 2008, I had just moved into temporary accommodation meters away from Systeo’s Beijing office, when the full horror of the financial crisis started to unfold. My eyes popped with disbelief as I watched news bulletins reporting the collapse of Lehman B ­ rothers, Wall Street’s fourth-­largest investment bank, the takeover of Merrill Lynch by Bank of Amer­i­ca, and the bailing out of Amer­i­ca’s largest insurer, aig, by the federal government to the tune of $85 billion. I flicked between Chinese-­and English-­language news channels. They played the same footage of gray-­ faced men and ­women, suited and booted, walking out of their Wall Street and Canary Wharf offices, carry­ing boxes of their personal belongings—­ their jobs just some of the casualties of the 2007–8 credit crunch. One cnn broadcaster asked the question on every­one’s lips: “How could the financial crisis happen?” Panels of experts proffered their opinions. Viewers at home could email in their take. One comment caught my attention: “Enron, ici, McKinsey . . . ​[we] have to question the cultural ethos of mea­sur­ing success. . . .” This was the first time I had heard the crisis being linked with management consultancy; notably, this viewer had brought up Enron, whose demise had unveiled some of the most questionable practices of consulting. Although many in the aftermath of the financial crisis have questioned the culture of finance, few have linked the global economic meltdown to the practices and norms of valuation that can be traced to management con­sul­tants, which they actively promote and naturalize. Con­sul­tants themselves fail to see the connection. Just two months a­ fter the global economic meltdown began, a lunchtime seminar was held in Systeo’s Beijing office entitled “Financial Crisis

and Its Impact on China.” ­There was standing room only, the conference room packed out with con­sul­tants, hr staff, and interns. It seemed as if every­one wanted to know how their lives would be affected by the economic apocalypse. They sat with laptops and notebooks at the ready, their eyes glued to the projector screen. An equation appeared: Risk = f (Debt, Greed, Speed) “I wrote it, it’s a William patent!” exclaims William Li, a leading light in Systeo strategy consulting practice. The room roars with laughter. According to him, the crisis is inextricably linked to ethics, but the prob­lem is that “the risk deriving from ethics is not something that can be modeled.” On the next slide he shifts the emphasis to the tricky issue of accountability—­ who can be held responsible. “Americans have learned that the experts who advise them what to do with their savings are at best fools. The lesson is . . .” “­Don’t blindly believe the experts,” he says to the audience, in a masterstroke of irony. While not immediately implicated in the financial crisis, con­sul­tants play a critical role in producing the conceptual and material apparatus of financial value that has come u ­ nder fire in the aftermath. They are a subset of the market experts that William refers to, who produce the very ethical dilemmas that he problematizes in his pre­sen­ta­tion. Ethics is at the root of consulting, not in the sense of a codified com­pany ethos, but in the sense that consultancy is concerned with the creation of a legitimate ethical proj­ect. Put more concretely, it is the production of an ethical object—­high performance—­that legitimates the fees that Systeo charges its clients and that cements the position of the consulting industry as an integral cog in the machinery of financial value. Investment banks restructure by redirecting capital flows, while con­sul­tants restructure by reconstituting (the ontological premises of) l­ abor; they are both implicated in a financial system brought to the brink of collapse in 2008. Systeo employees are not trained in proprietary technologies, or exposed to knowledge that is the exclusive intellectual property of Systeo. erp systems, as well as the models of value creation such as social styles™ and the trust equation, are all licensed from third parties. William Lazonick has pointed out that ­under the regime of “retain and reinvest” in the old economy, firms wanted to retain their workforce b ­ ecause they had made considerable investments in their productive capacity, which was 194 

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linked to this proprietary information (2010). The move to open-source technologies has led to a shift such that traditional old economy firms (for example, Hewlett-­Packard) have now ­adopted the new economy model of financialization, “downsize and distribute.” The fact that Systeo licenses its knowledge tools from third parties is almost never mentioned to employees. One has to look at the small print located at the back of training handouts to find this out. Indeed, the recurrent inscriptions of t­ hese techniques as “power­ful tools” that are par­tic­u­lar to Systeo often give the misleading impression that they are devised by Systeo. The question is, why are employees sold the message that Systeo has proprietary technologies, when this in fact is not the case? The reasons prob­ably have much to do with the need to legitimize consultancy—­the position of con­sul­tants, what they do, and the exorbitant fees they charge. The sales training that consulting partners and se­nior man­ag­ers receive is aimed not, primarily, at cultivating unique skills, but rather at giving employees the sense that, contrary to the model of market efficiency, they have the tools and skills to apprehend and control activity in financial markets that are characterized by uncertainty and volatility. Share valuation is based on expectations and imaginaries of the f­ uture, which investors try to decipher by interpreting the information available to them regarding the com­pany in question. Con­sul­tants help to establish purportedly fail-­safe templates of interpretation. Management consultancy is built upon a claim of creating high-­performance companies that can thrive in the stormy conditions of global stock markets, which, in turn, rests on making the related claim that financial markets can be made predictable. We have seen how many of the subjective ele­ments that underpin financial markets—­such as trust, social relations, and needs—­are remade inside the consultancy into objects of science and calculation through techniques of mea­sure­ment and graphical repre­sen­ta­tion. We have seen how an illusion of control is produced. For Systeo’s clients, the creation of value must come at the right moment. It must peak when the com­pany is floated on the stock market, that is, in the initial public offering (ipo). To obtain the highest pos­si­ble valuation at flotation, Chinese state-­owned enterprises enlist the expertise of Systeo, which claims to be able to transform t­ hese stalwarts of the command economy into highly efficient, market-­oriented machines by way of erp implementation. But w ­ hether this claim is authenticated is almost irrelevant. Just by installing Conclusion  

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erp systems, the potential valuation of the entity in question can be elevated. For the efficacy of erp systems as a tool of value relies not solely on their operation but also on the repre­sen­ta­tions of  value that Systeo can generate surrounding the installation of erp systems. In short, Systeo is able to create value through a claim—­a claim of efficiency in a long f­uture—­rather than evidence of efficiency in the past or pres­ent. Of course, the articulation of this claim is not so straightforward. It is built on a repertoire of socio-­ technical practices that have been the focus of this book. Management con­ sul­tants, in their capacity as market experts, work to re-­present their clients as v­ iable investment options; this requires changing the foundations upon which value is produced and legitimized. Through socio-­technical means, Systeo “engineers” subjects as financial objects, thereby setting up the claim that value can be elicited from ­labor in the same manner as financial capital—it can be “extracted” in the form of shareholder returns. Fueled by repre­sen­ta­tions of efficiency, “good management,” and “best practice,” shareholder value is produced by sculpting employees into depictions of financial objects, h ­ uman embodiments of a “healthy” balance sheet. Employees are treated like entries to accounts, some constructed as “cost” and ­others constructed as “revenue.”1 ­These subjectivities restrict the production of cost and revenue to dif­fer­ ent factions within the workforce, which, as I have demonstrated, serve to minimize the generation of cost and incentivize the generation of revenue. ­These are actions that benefit the shareholder and not (in the main) Systeo’s employees. Cost generators, the back-­office workers in Dalian, must limit their own wage demands for fear that their work ­will be transferred to cheaper outsourcing location(s), which are surmised to be Systeo’s shared ser­vice centers in Bangalore and Manila. And con­sul­tants risk being laid off ­unless they can sufficiently perform their designation as the com­pany’s revenue generators, a per­for­mance that is not entirely within their control. The ethical reformatting that financialization engenders is realized through the production of subjectivities that circumscribe the existence of employees—­whether they ­will continue to be employed or are laid off. By examining the inner workings of Systeo, I have tried to delineate the complex ways in which management con­sul­tants enact such ethical reformatting. Consultancy can be described as the business of creating representations—­for example, the “healthy” balance sheet—­that have agency. If t­ hese repre­sen­ta­tions can be crafted, value w ­ ill ensue. Shareholder 196 

Conclusion

value could be described as a self-­actualizing fiction, a term used by lit­er­ a­ture scholar Mary Poovey in her book A History of the Modern Fact to describe the seeming paradox that conventions of financial repre­sen­ta­tion are also ethical structures that impel action. She argues that “ ‘the personal-­ moral meta­phors’ of accounting tended to realize what they purported to describe—by encouraging the com­pany’s agents to act as responsibly as the books represented them as being” (Poovey 1998, 58).2 She goes on to say that “the fictions essential to the double-­entry [bookkeeping] system also tended to discipline any agent who wrote in the books, enhancing the merchant’s credibility and the reliability of his books” (Poovey 1998, 59, emphasis added). The same maneuvers of ethics are applicable in the case of shareholder value—­here the balance sheet is used as disciplinary tool, which, in turn, buttresses the reputation of con­sul­tants. What Poovey shows is that techniques of repre­sen­ta­tion are not used to reflect an external real­ity, but rather to actively produce a structure of ethics that makes up the “content” of t­ hese techniques. “Reducing costs” and “raising revenue” are not just neutral descriptions of what con­sul­tants do; ­these actions are narrated as the right ­thing to do—­they are invested with a moral imperative. Described as the work of “creating high per­for­mance,” the work of consulting can be seen as the production of ethical frameworks that have ontological effects—­they create new t­hings, new subjects, new concepts, which have to be worked up, improved, and monitored. At the same time, the work of consulting is the making of a stable socio-­technical apparatus that enables the replication and proliferation of ­these ethics, which legitimize and thus encourage certain forms of value production. In his article “Making Finance Productive” (2011), Brett Christophers shows that finance, ­until very recently, was not productive. It is by moving the boundary of productivity—­what counts as output in the national accounts—­that finance is made productive, thereby safeguarding the existence of the financial ser­vices sector and the rhe­toric that “its under­lying economic contribution—­notwithstanding periodic crises—is beyond dispute” (Christophers 2011, 113). In a fascinating account of how the finance sector, in par­tic­u­lar in the United Kingdom, was able to reclassify its main activities as productive (of output), Christophers defines value solely as industrial output, as it was ­under Fordism. The definition of value mobilized by the finance sector itself—­share prices—is absent.3 This “gap” in value can be seen as lying between what the finance sector claims as value Conclusion  

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to their clients, and thus the wider economy, and what the finance sector articulates as value in their po­liti­cal claim for immunity. This gap has even been noted by one of the most se­nior figures in finance, Paul Volcker, a former chair of the Federal Reserve. At a Wall Street Journal conference in 2009, he said, “I wish someone would give me one shred of neutral evidence that financial innovation has led to economic growth.”4 In short, finance claims to produce value in the form of rising share prices (Ho 2009), but this value is transformed into output, that is, gdp, in its claims of economic vitality (which underwrite state interventions, e.g., bailouts and the guaranteeing of deposits), which makes the finance sector “po­liti­ cally untouchable” (Christophers 2011, 113). Christophers writes mostly about the United Kingdom, but in connection to broader changes in accounting practices that extend across the globe. Of relevance to the context I write about are his references to the work of Anwar Shaikh and E. Ahmet Tonak (1994), who show that “excluding finance [from calculations of output] was precisely the approach of the material product national accounting system used in the Eastern Bloc, the former Soviet Union and, ­until 1993, China” (cited in Christophers 2011, 121, emphasis added). Strikingly, 1993 also marks the start of China’s second phase of market reforms, which proceeded ­after Deng Xiao Ping’s tour of the special economic zones in the southern provinces in 1992. This phase instituted much more aggressive and radical economic restructuring, including the privatization and corporatization of state-­owned enterprises. With the adoption of the Com­pany Law in 1994, the largest Chinese state-­owned enterprises became corporations, their stock traded on international stock exchanges, with the Chinese state as the majority shareholder. In short, the shift away from excluding finance coincided with the shift ­toward corporatization. Put another way, we find that finance becomes productive at the very moment that the corporate form becomes dominant. To add to the intrigue, we find that it is also at this time that Systeo sets up shop in China—it opened its first office in Shanghai in 1993, closely followed by its Beijing office in 1994. That is to say, we find that transformations in economic value and corporate governance coincide with Systeo’s entry into the Chinese market. Of course, Systeo was not alone in the field of professional ser­vices in advising (and arming with tools of value) newly privatizing and corporatizing China, but this historical conjuncture does highlight the connection between the forms of management practiced and 198 

Conclusion

disseminated by Systeo and changes in the definition of productivity in China. In this book I have drawn par­tic­u­lar attention to boundary practices. Just as the “productivity boundary” demarcates the sanctity of the finance sector, it demarcates the valorization of revenue generators and the subordination of cost generators. What counts as value, and by extension who counts as a creator of value, is dependent on how the boundary of productivity is conceptualized, and where the boundary of productivity is placed. China’s transformation into a global cap­i­tal­ist superpower has engendered a multiplicity of changes in how economic activity, goods, and ­labor are valued and treated. ­Under socialism, urban workers employed at state-­owned enterprises enjoyed cradle-­to-­grave security. ­Today, Chinese employees, ­whether employed in state-­owned enterprises or private companies, face ever-­increasing precarity and instability. Socioeconomic in­ equality in China has skyrocketed, making China—­one of the most equal countries in the world u ­ nder Mao Zedong—­one of the most unequal countries in the world ­today. China’s integration into the global economy, aided by Western intermediaries including management consultancies, has led to the adoption of value practices that borrow from already an established repertoire of repre­sen­ta­tional techniques characteristic of financialized economies in North Amer­i­ca and Eu­rope. By instantiating ­these techniques, one could say that management consultancies are in the business of performing financial capitalism in China. Certainly, they are implicated in the restructuring of China’s economy to ser­vice the needs of capital. However, the state remains a dominant market actor and guiding force for capitalism in China. Though floated on international stock exchanges, Chinese soes—­which have played a major role in China’s economic growth—­are still mainly owned by the state. Profits from state firms are not seen as an end in themselves, but rather a means of advancing the public good—­they can be plowed into proj­ects of urban development and infrastructure construction, for example (Huang 2012). Indeed, the legitimacy of state intervention derives from the responsibility bestowed on the state to maintain economic development and stability. This was evident when China’s stock markets crashed in the summer of 2015. The majority of Chinese investors are not large institutions, but “retail investors”—­individuals, typically middle-­class urbanites, many of whom had bought shares with borrowed money. Seemingly untroubled by theories of market efficiency, t­hese investors called for the state to intervene and help Conclusion  

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prevent further losses. Despite earlier statements that they would “let the market play the decisive role in allocating resources,” the state took decisive action to “rescue” the markets, which included suspending initial public offerings and allowing over a thousand firms to halt the trading of their shares.5 Such action underlines the pervasive influence and force of state power, a characteristic that has led vari­ous scholars to describe China’s economic system as one of “state capitalism.” Instantiated through cultures of commensuration, the pursuit of financial value is not necessarily incompatible with the advancement of state power and objectives of Chinese nationalism. In this book we have seen how management con­sul­tants draw on state-­imposed discourses and models of transformation—to not only translate their ideas, but also to help them perform their expertise. Far from being a threat to the financialization of work and l­ abor, tropes of state capitalism help to bring financialized realities into being. They provide the structure of ethics through which practices of economic restructuring can become established as best practice. In contrast to dominant approaches to the study of capitalism that emphasize the ever-­increasing economization and marketization of society, this portrait of management consulting shows how actors who are supposedly tasked with spreading the gospel of economic logics display a flexibility of expertise, which can include, foreground even, noneconomic values and logics. Generating capitalism need not engender the expulsion of ethics. As Laura Bear has put it, “capitalism generates, and consists of, a diversity of ethical forms and social relations” (2015, 179). The shape and content of ­these ethical forms can differ from one locality to another, but nevertheless the commensuration of dif­fer­ent ethical proj­ects is a general characteristic of con­temporary financial capitalism. In a classic anthropological move, this account invites us to consider the ethical proj­ects that “make” financial capitalism outside of China. Rather than seeing Chinese state capitalism as dif­fer­ent or deviant from capitalisms in the West, we must look at the mechanisms—­the cultures of commensuration—by which the production of financial value has been naturalized across contexts. The organ­ization of work and the formatting of economic subjects has been radically transformed in recent de­cades; this has been achieved not only by drawing equivalencies between economic and noneconomic values, but also by drawing equivalencies between profit-­making and other ethical proj­ects of productivity—­which can relate to dif­fer­ent scales of economy. 200 

Conclusion

Through tropes that moralize the production of capitalism, the individual, the collective, the nation, and the global are brought together. Rather than referring to the standardization of cap­i­tal­ist forms, best practice indexes the expertise of connecting t­ hese dif­fer­ent scales, the inherently po­liti­cal work of eliding and foregrounding ethical frictions.

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Notes

Introduction

1 http://­w ww​.­g uardian​ .­c o​ .­u k​ /­s ociety​ /­2 009​ /­jun​ /­04​ /­n hs​ -­m anagement​ -­c on­​ ­sultancy​-­costs, last accessed December 30, 2015. See also “MoD [Ministry of Defence] pays cost-­cutters £3,950 a day” (The In­de­pen­dent, October 27, 2011), http://­www​.­independent​.­co​.­uk​/­news​/­uk​/­politics​/­mod​-­costcutters​-­paid​-­3950​-­a​ -­day​-­2376580​.­html (accessed December 30, 2015). 2 Con Tricks: The Shadowy World of Management Consultancy and How to Make It Work for You is a highly critical account of the consulting industry written by a former management con­sul­tant (Ashford 1998). 3 Georgina Born’s ethnography, Uncertain Vision: Birt, Dyke and the Reinvention of the bbc (2004), gives an insight into the role of management con­sul­tants in the restructuring of the bbc. According to Born, the bbc spent approximately £22 million a year on con­sul­tants in the 1990s (2004, 218). 4 See McKenna 2006, chapter 2. 5 I had wanted to compare the practices of reason that inhere in a Eu­ro­pean or American com­pany, with t­ hose in an Asian one. Dalian is the world leader in North Asian outsourcing, in part due to structural advantages conferred by its proximity to Japan and South ­Korea. However, I soon learned that this would be impossible. In the formal and informal pitches, I realized that one of the primary concerns was confidentiality—­these high-­tech companies appeared to be paranoid about what they saw as their intellectual property (for a detailed discussion, see Kessler 2006) and would almost certainly refuse access to an outsider who was also associated with a competing firm. Given that I ­don’t speak Japa­nese or Korean, it was obvious that I would narrow the scope of my study to Eu­ro­pean or American firms only. 6 See Ong (2006a, 2006b). 7 Systeo is a pseudonym. As part of my terms of access, I agreed to anonymize the management consultancy and all of its employees. 8 This definition of consultancy as parasitic action can also be found in academic scholarship (see Clegg, Kornberger, and Rhodes 2004). 9 See Tsing (2005), Ong and Collier (2005). 10 For example, see MacKenzie (2006), MacKenzie, Muniesa, and Siu (2007). 11 See Thrift (2005).

12 Lisa Hoffman (2006) points out that this assertion is based on an erroneous equation of neoliberalism with unfettered markets, created through the absence of state intervention. She reminds us of the considerable state intervention required to create so-­called ­free markets. 13 Anthropologist Ellen Oxfeld (1993) is one of many authors who have questioned the existence of a specifically Chinese capitalism, alternatively known as “Confucian capitalism.” On the ­whole, such tropes of fetishized capitalism contend that t­ here is something distinctly “Chinese” about the economic pro­ cesses currently occurring within China and across its borders, and propound notions such as the idea of a uniquely Chinese business culture, or of cultural/ ethnic affinity between diasporic and mainland Chinese p ­ eople, which facilitates economic interaction (Hofheinz and Calder 1982; Redding 1993). 14 Explicit disclosure can be found in the form of white papers published by consultancies, including Systeo, and also the websites of soes, which often name their corporate advisors. 15 This can be partly attributed to the bias ­toward macro-­level analyses of enterprise reform (qiye gaige), which do not capture the subtle pro­cesses of enactment that defines the ground-­level transformations that consultancies carry out. Broadly speaking, this bias reflects the division of l­ abor between academic disciplines. Economists and po­liti­cal scientists have examined China’s institutional changes at the macro level. And anthropologists and sociologists of China who are well placed to carry out a ground-­level study have rarely looked at the agents of change—­the mediating institutions of capitalism. Instead, their focus has been on changes to local communities, l­ abor, kinship structures, and migration that can be connected to the reform of state-­owned enterprises and the diversification of owner­ship structure in China to permit the entry and proliferation of foreign-­invested firms (see Chan 2001; Lee 1998; Pun 2005; Rofel 1999; Solinger 1999). 16 Many of China’s National Champions feature in the top ranks of the Financial Times list of the world’s largest companies by market capitalization, which is published annually. 17 In this proj­ect I analyzed over forty interviews that investigated how professional fund man­ag­ers, from the United States and the United Kingdom, made investment decisions. This proj­ect, which concerns more broadly the role of narratives and emotions in decision making, uncovered how culturalist concerns about Chinese state-­owned enterprises frequently appeared in what we have termed “conviction narratives”—­narratives that fund man­ag­ers draw on to generate conviction in their decisions u ­ nder conditions of radical uncertainty (discussed further in chapter 1). 18 See Fishman (2005). 19 See Michael Faust cited in Kipping and Engwall (2002, 39). 20 In recent times, extreme versions of the culturalist account have gained in popularity, especially in the United States. They commonly contend that a questionable 204 

NOTES TO Introduction

Chinese morality, without a liberal democracy to keep its motivations in check, is liable to harness markets for the purpose of national empowerment—­the so-­ called China threat—an assertion that Steinfeld’s book Playing Our Game (2010) addresses squarely in its refutation. For another denunciation of the “China threat” assertion, see http://­www​.­newyorker​.­com​/­online​/­blogs​/­johncassidy​/­2010​ /­12​/­the​-­china​-­threat​.­html (accessed December 30, 2015). 21 For an explanation of the relationship between the stock market and mass layoffs in the United States, see Ho (2009). 22 ­There is a considerable body of lit­er­a­ture that documents the mass layoffs at state-­owned enterprises since the second phase of market reforms, for example, Chan (2001) and Steinfeld (1998). However, official discussion was prevented by classifying any information regarding the layoffs as a state secret, according to McGregor. In his book The Party, he describes his initial surprise at the refusal of Chinese state bank executives, who presided over national banks soon to be listed, to discuss the topic, given that job cuts would be seen favorably by foreign investors (McGregor 2010, 50). It would seem that although Chinese soes adopt practices similar to Western companies, the explicit disclosure of ­these practices, prob­ably ­because they threaten the party’s po­liti­cal legitimacy, is being hushed up. 23 See Wright and Kipping (2012). 24 For a discussion on the periodization of modern management, see Keulen and Kroeze (2014). 25 See Wren and Bedeian (2009). 26 Writing about the rise of (business pro­cess) reengineering, Fincham examines “the pro­cess concept,” noting how it was spawned through “a collaboration between academic, consultancy and corporate interests—­Ivy League universities, major consultancies and large corporations—­which fed into orga­nizational change paradigms particularly around the mid-1980s” (Fincham and Evans 1999, 35). 27 Management con­sul­tants have also been responsible for importing per­for­ mance management—­management by per­for­mance objectives, per­for­mance targets, and per­for­mance standards—­into the public sector. This has been termed new managerialism or new public management. 28 See Lazonick and O’­Sullivan (2000), Williams (2000), Boyer (2000). 29 Lazonick (2010) describes this as the shift to the “New Economy Business Model,” which could be traced to the success of open standards technology, beginning with the ibm pc and its “Wintel” architecture. Without proprietary technology to invest in, companies w ­ ere less inclined to invest in and retain their employees (who had acquired the skills and know-­how to use and develop t­ hese technologies), and saw instead the cost benefits of maintaining a lean workforce supplemented by contractors. 30 See Lazonick cited in Milberg (2011), Milberg (2008), Ezzamel, Willmott, and Worthington (2008). 31 See Krippner (2005, 2011), Lapavitsas (2014). NOTES TO Introduction  

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3 2 See Lazonick (2010). 33 Other kinds of enterprise systems include ­those of customer relationship man­ agement (crm) and supply-­chain management (scm), which Systeo also installs. 34 See Head (2014), chapter 7. 35 The kind of ­labor is also dif­fer­ent; while strategy-­oriented consultancies tend to almost exclusively hire mba gradu­ates, it-­related consultancies prefer it and engineering experts, often hired straight out of university. 36 Based on a survey of sixty-­three small and medium-­sized enterprises and large firms (Xu and Quaddus 2013, 113). Total owner­ship of an erp system ranges from $400,000 to $30 million (Xu and Quaddus 2013). 37 See sap (1999a, 1999b, 2004). 38 For more detail on Gantt’s man rec­ord chart, and how it preempted the use of per­for­mance incentives in the Netherlands, see Dix (2014). 39 See Tuckett (2011) for the importance of management, specifically the perception and detailing of “good management,” and including managerial infrastructure, in influencing the context in which investors make decisions about which stocks to buy and hold. 40 The cultural cir­cuit of capital also includes business schools and management gurus (Thrift 2005). 41 For ethnographic research on and within the advertising industry, see Moeran (2006), Mazzarella (2003). For the information technology sector, see Cefkin (2009), Nafus and Anderson (2006). 42 As a consequence, in­for­mants are also reframed, as Douglas Holmes and George Marcus put it, as “collaborators or partners in research, a fiction to be sustained more or less strongly around the key issue of the postulation of para-­ ethnography as the object of research” (Holmes and Marcus 2005, 248). 43 Systeo’s Greater China practice has offices in Beijing, Shanghai, Dalian, Hong Kong, Guangzhou, and Taiwan. I ­either worked in or visited all the offices, with the exceptions of Guangzhou and Taiwan. 44 Throughout the book, Chinese yuan is translated into U.S. dollars at an exchange rate of 1 yuan to $7, the average exchange rate during fieldwork (2007 to 2009). 45 See Zaloom (2006), Riles (2011), Miyazaki (2013), Maurer (2005). 46 See Lee and LiPuma (2004), Ortiz (2014), Lepinay (2011), Poon and Wosnitzer (2012). 47 See Arvidsson (2005, 2011), Moor (2007), Foster (2007). 48 See Tsing (2000). 49 Accounting scholars have long pointed out that accounting metrics are critical to the structuring of valuation decisions, making vis­i­ble, and so foregrounding, certain priorities and thus providing an epistemological basis upon which restructuring is carried out (see also chapters 2 and 3). The social effects of audit amount not to the par­tic­u­lar cultural values it purportedly mobilizes (­whether of neoliberalism or socialism), but rather pertain to how audit is, in itself, a means of creating value through mea­sure­ment. 206 

NOTES TO Introduction

5 0 See Strathern (2000). 51 In Graeber’s review of existing anthropological approaches to value, he mentions a third concept, value in the linguistic sense (which stems from the structural linguistics of Ferdinand de Saussure)—­glossed as “meaningful difference” (Graeber 2001). 52 See Stark and Paraval (2008). 53 See Yates and Orlikowski (2007). 54 In recent years ­there has been a renewed interest in the concept of worth, particularly among economic sociologists. See Boltanski and Thévenot (2006), Stark (2000), Beckert and Aspers (2011), Berthoin Antal, Hutter, and Stark (2015). 55 Thus exemplifying Carr’s point that “successful enactments of expertise hinge on the would-be expert’s ability to establish an interpretive frame through which to view that object” (Carr 2010, 23). Chapter 1. High Performers

1 See Beer (2009). Michael Beer is professor emeritus at Harvard Business School. He is also a cofounder of Truepoint management consultancy. 2 See Sillitoe (2013). Andrew Sillitoe is a con­sul­tant at Winning Mindsets Consultancy, based in the United Kingdom. 3 See Pfeffer (1994, 1998). 4 See Berg (1999), Appelbaum et al. (2000). 5 See Guest (2001). 6 My approach is broadly inspired by the performative turn in the social sciences (cf. Licoppe 2010), in par­tic­u­lar the growing lit­er­a­ture on the performativity of economics, which has explored how economic realities are “provoked” through repre­sen­ta­tional practices that bring the very objects they describe into being (Muniesa 2014). This chapter shares many common threads with recent work on the performativity of valuation devices (e.g., Doganova and Muniesa 2015; Helgesson and Kjellberg 2013; MacKenzie 2011) and extends existing work that examines the performativity of strategy (e.g., Cabantous and Gond 2011; Car­ter, Clegg, and Kornberger 2010; Kornberger and Clegg 2011). 7 In this vein, I continue from the valuable work of anthropologists who consider documents (Riles 2006) and graphical artifacts (M. Hull 2003, 2008, 2012a, 2012b) to be more than repre­sen­ta­tional devices. Instead, they explore their productive effects: the epistemological registers they intervene upon and the epistemological effects they can enact. 8 As Van der Zwan has put it, “shareholder value has been conceptualized as a discursive construct, a language of financial market expectations that operates in­de­pen­dently of a firm’s per­for­mance” (Van der Zwan 2014, 108). Of relevance to the context of this study, in which Chinese soes seek modernization for flotation on international stock exchanges but still retain aspects of state control and influence, Van der Zwan cites the study of Fiss and Zajac (2004), which NOTES TO Chapter one  

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found that “German man­ag­ers used the language of shareholder value to placate foreign investors, but avoided full-­scale implementation of its associated policies” (Van der Zwan 2014, 108). 9 As one scholar has put it, hrm represents “the discovery of personnel management by chief executives” (Fowler 1987). 10 See Barney (1991), Mahoney and Pandian (1992). 11 Indeed, my own term of “employment” in Systeo, sixteen months of fieldwork, compared well with my research subjects. 12 I refer to percentages and not the percentage of ­labor turnover b ­ ecause Systeo keeps a breakdown of attrition rates based on the division and rank of employees. 13 Since 2007 most regions in Systeo’s global network of offices have seen the inauguration of locally run and tailored hcs programs. 14 In their follow-up article to their first article in Harvard Business Review (Kaplan and Norton 1992), in which they introduced the balanced scorecard concept, Kaplan and Norton explic­itly state that “the scorecard addresses a serious deficiency in traditional management systems: their inability to link a com­pany’s long-­term strategy with its short-term actions” (Kaplan and Norton 1996, 75). 15 The Taipei office (Taiwan) was con­spic­u­ous by its absence. Second to Hong Kong, Taiwan had the worst results of all the offices in Systeo China, which caused Melissa and Natalie to exclude Hong Kong and Taiwan from the analy­ sis, since ­these outliers would need dif­fer­ent “actions” for improvement. However, the chairman of Systeo China disagreed, arguing to include Hong Kong and Taiwan “so that mainland staff understand,” which came across as more a shaming of ­these offices and underscoring the mainland’s superiority. 16 Writing about how the object of “the economy” came into being, Mitchell argues that “the making of the economy [it follows] does not lie outside the forms of knowledge that enable statistics and economics to know it” (2002, 117). 17 I borrow William Lazonick’s distinction between ­labor conceptualized as financial assets and ­labor conceptualized as productive assets (Lazonick 2010). 18 See chapter 7 for more discussion of Systeo’s core values and how they are seen as an alternate, yet complementary, conceptualization of corporate culture that Chinese employees must learn to embody. 19 As a contractor, Amber, one of two ­people hired to work on employee engagement, was actually exempt from the very practices of high per­for­mance and ­human capital development that she was responsible for implementing. She would not be allowed to participate in any initiatives designed to improve commitment or engagement, including the charity bike ­ride designed to promote “corporate citizenship” that I discuss in chapter 7. 20 See Legge (1995b), Delbridge and Keenoy (2010), Mabey, Skinner, and Clark (1998). 21 This certainly did not cover the costs of telecommuting for Dalian-­based workers, who spent the majority of their time speaking to clients in foreign countries, which meant they needed to make overseas calls. 208 

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2 2 ­These are pseudonyms for two of Systeo’s main competitors. 23 Mats Alvesson and Hugh Willmott have similarly argued that “the explicit identification of p ­ eople as ‘resources’ is suggestive of their equivalence to other ­factors of production—­a status that exemplifies the application of a ‘systems’ logic to ­human beings” (Alvesson and Willmott 2012, 120). Chapter 2. Evaluating ­Humans

1 Renminbi is the official currency of the ­People’s Republic of China. Although the term yuan is often used interchangeably with renminbi, it is more accurate to describe yuan as the primary unit of the Chinese currency, just as the pound is the primary unit of sterling, the British currency. 2 www​.­waiqi8​.­com (last accessed June 12, 2011). 3 Hoskin makes clear the epistemological contribution of written examinations: “­Here was an apparatus that embodied the means for mea­sur­ing ­human profit and loss, producing mea­sures that si­mul­ta­neously defined your ­actual ‘worth’ and provided a valuation of the truly virtuous, successful or passing per­for­mance (while equally defining the crime of failure): an apparatus therefore fit, as Foucault once put it, to judge individuals ‘in their truth’ ” (Hoskin 1996, 273). 4 See Shore and Wright (2000), Strathern (1996), Power (1994, 1997). 5 At the same time, we have seen a retrenchment of state functions, increasing privatization, and deregulation of financial markets—­what is typically referred to as neoliberal reform—­across the globe. Some parts of the state have been outsourced to con­sul­tants and other external providers. 6 See Strathern (2000), Hull (2012). 7 See chapter 3. 8 In consulting speak, this is termed creating a “burning platform.” 9 According to the hcs official report, “accountability” was poorly ranked in the company-­wide employee survey, and only 78  ­percent of all con­sul­tants had completed their per­for­mance objectives. 10 Although in chapter 5 t­ here is a discussion on how per­for­mance management was understood by Chinese employees in the post-­Mao context, who display a growing preference for workplaces deemed “meritocratic.” 11 The lse logo refers to that of the London School of Economics and Po­liti­cal Science. 12 I borrow this term from Douglas Holmes and George Marcus (2006). 13 Although I was initially granted access to t­hese meetings, nearer to the time it was deemed that discussions ­were too “sensitive” for my physical presence. Thus, I was not allowed to attend them in person, but was instead allowed to dial in remotely, which meant I could hear the discussions but would have no vis­i­ble presence. 14 Citing Lambek, Guyer reminds us of the distinction between choice and judgment: “Choice calls for mea­sure­ment and application of standard algorithms, NOTES TO Chapter two  

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whereas judgment demands consideration of incommensurables” (Guyer 2011, s19). 15 Writing about the ranking of medical specialty centers in the United States, she claims that “they are ranked by several criteria whose values—­once compounded with each other—­relegate the distinctions amongst them to near-­irrelevance” (Guyer 2010, 4). 16 See Espeland and Stevens (1998, 2008). 17 Only se­nior man­ag­ers and se­nior executives ­were entitled to per­for­mance equity. However, all employees w ­ ere also incentivized through a scheme that gave employees points that could be exchanged for consumer goods such as electric toothbrushes, cellular phones, digital cameras, even washing machines. 18 Whiteboards ­were fitted inside all meeting rooms and the cubicles of se­nior executives. 19 In the edited volume Market Devices, the term market device is defined as “the material and discursive assemblages that intervene in the construction of markets” (Callon, Millo, and Muniesa 2007, 2). 20 For Sam Ladner, billability is a component of what she calls “agency time.” She contends that the reification of time that billability confers signals a return to Taylorist forms of management, asserting that software programs that track billability “are designed to treat time as it would any entry in an accounting ledger; time can be calculated, reconciled and fundamentally controlled in ways that ­were previously pos­si­ble but too consuming . . . ​­these programs are ‘hyper-­Taylorist’ in that they eliminate much of the tedious time calculations that Taylor would complete when mea­sur­ing efficiency” (Ladner 2009, 288, emphasis in original). 21 Overtime was a m ­ atter of ­great contention among employees. At one dinner I watched a mid-­level con­sul­tant grill a se­nior executive about why employees outside China got overtime. This con­sul­tant had been posted to Australia for a few months and found his Systeo colleagues ­there ­were paid outside of normal working hours. 22 I first heard this analogy in an interview with a ju­nior strategy con­sul­tant, an American employee based in the Beijing office. ­Later I heard it in a pre­sen­ta­tion made by a partner at a “community event” when describing the new “operating model” that the com­pany had ­adopted. 23 The 2007–8 financial crisis made “persuasion” all the easier from t­ hose with the power to make hire-­and-­fire decisions. 24 Writing about it professionals in Chennai, India, anthropologists Chris Fuller and Haripriya Narasimhan (2006) discuss how their c­areer trajectories are ­shaped by the concept of “exposure”—­exposure to certain institutional environments in order to acquire the skills and dispositions deemed requisite for employment in global workplaces. ­These skills map closely onto the social and cultural capital of the urban ­middle classes in Chennai.

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Chapter 3. Reducing Costs

Epigraph: www​.­deloitte​.­com​/­view​/­en​_­GB​/­uk​/­services​/­consulting​/­finance​/­shared​ -­services​-a­ nd​-­bpo​-­advisory​/­(accessed July 20, 2014). 1 For example, the National Health Ser­vice in the United Kingdom. 2 In his book ­Labor Capital and Mono­poly Capital: The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth ­Century (1974), po­liti­cal economist Harry Braverman argued that an increasing proportion of jobs, including ­those in the ser­vice sector, are becoming “deskilled,” that is, subdivided, routinized, and alienating. Braverman goes on to say that deskilled l­abor is cheap and easy to control due to workers’ lack of engagement in production as a ­whole pro­cess, rendering them easily replaceable, reducing their bargaining power vis-­à-­vis employers, and minimizing employers’ commitment to employees. The fact that outsourcing is almost always accompanied by deskilling informs the often-­postulated argument that the outsourcing of ser­vices is predicated on the drive for reduced costs (for example, Friedman 2005; Ross 2006), that is, that service-­based industries are also plagued by a “race to the bottom.” 3 In the context of financialization, it is apparent that reducing costs can “improve the return on capital which in turn improves shareholder value” (Milberg 2008, 439). 4 For more on captive shared ser­vices and the definitions of dif­fer­ent types of outsourcing, see Jahns, Hartmann, and Bals (2006). 5 For more ethnographic accounts of it-­enabled outsourcing, see Amrute (2010), Aneesh (2012, 2015), Upadhya and Vasavi (2012). 6 An mba student and in­for­mant of anthropologist John Orta, despite earning a six-­figure salary, described his situation as precarious ­because he was “non-­ billable.” The quotes that Orta gives make explicit how man­ag­ers in industry, not just management con­sul­tants, are taught to understand billability as indexical of revenue generation and thus ­labor worth: “ ‘Not being billable is a second-­ class citizen. They are the first to get cut.’ Business-­school training was a way ‘to attach myself back to revenue’ ” (Orta 2013, 697). 7 This is particularly evident in the flourishing lit­er­a­ture on global value chains, which draws on the connection between core competence and competitive advantage first discussed by Prahalad and Hamel (1990). For example, Milberg and Winkler write, “[F]or the strategic firm, offshoring is a means to cost reduction, flexibility enhancement, entry deterrence, and at the same time serves the broader strategy of focusing on core competence and shareholder value” (2013, 143). 8 In this endeavor I am inspired by the work of Thomas Gieryn, whose seminal paper on the demarcation of science from nonscience exposes the boundary work that is engendered in separating ­these two ostensibly opposing domains (1983). Like Gieryn, I am interested in the ideological operations that construct the exclusivity of domains for the benefit of certain actors. He demonstrates NOTES TO Chapter three  

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9 10 11

12

13 1 4 15

the shifting repre­sen­ta­tions and rhe­toric over time through which a boundary is produced that separates science from nonscience, thus showing how seemingly fixed attributes of science as “objective or rational may best be analyzed as ideologies: incomplete and ambiguous images of science nevertheless useful for scientists’ pursuit of authority and material resources” (Gieryn 1983, 793). Apart from four exceptions, all the workers ­were mainland Chinese. For an examination into why Chinese white-­collar workers take on Western names, see Duthie (2007). For example, “Feds Dole Out $450 Million for U.S. Jobs Lost to Outsourcing,” http://­www​.­infoworld​.­com​/­t​/­job​-­search​/­feds​-­dole​-­out​-­450​-­million​-­us​-­jobs​ -­lost​-­outsourcing​-­293 (accessed July 20, 2014). I use the term onshore to describe outsourcing that is carried out within the same country. However, it should be noted that the standard industry terminology for this kind of outsourcing is nearshore. For more discussion on corporate culture and how this term is connected to management con­sul­tants’ expertise, see chapter 7. See also chapter 4. This is an approach that shares intellectual kinship with the work of Marilyn Strathern, who goes about rethinking the anthropological assumption of ethnographic ­wholes constituted from a number of “parts” that reflect a general taxonomy or structure (1991, xx, 109). Instead, she argues that the ethnographic object can be multiply enacted and that we can, at best, grasp “partial connections,” “the enactment or realisation of a relationship is an elaboration on its existence. In making connections vis­i­ble, ­people assert their ever-­present capacity to act upon them” (Strathern 1991, 102). The focus is placed on how a par­tic­u­lar ethnographic real­ity comes into view, an approach that clearly encompasses the reflexive turn in anthropology and, more specifically, how an ethnographic real­ity is sustained (Strathern 1996, 53). Chapter 4. Training Value

1 This film was produced in Mexico and the United States, and won the nfb Short Film online competition in 2008. 2 Many anthropologists have pointed out that forms of “global” expertise are, in fact, produced through the apprehension of local tropes—­those that are locally derived or have local resonance on a moral, historical, or po­liti­cal level (see Bear 2015; Mains 2012; Rudnyckyj 2009, 2010). Even in Western contexts, where expertise tends to take on a more dehistoricized, delocalized, or abstract appearance, anthropologists have demonstrated ­there is always a historically rooted, locally specific derivation of knowledge (e.g., Maurer 2002b). 3 One could argue that I am, strictly speaking, more interested in valuation than value, following pragmatist approaches to the study of value (Muniesa 2011).

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4 I borrow ­here from so­cio­log­i­cal and anthropological approaches that highlight how dissonance or friction can be a productive force (see Bear 2013; Stark 2009; Tsing 2005). 5 See also Clark and Salaman (1998), Fincham and Evans (1999), Berglund and Werr (2000), Alvesson (1993), Legge (2002). 6 For management consulting specifically, Thrift’s seminal book Knowing Capitalism (2005) is of ­great relevance. More generally, this has been a topic of growing research interest in anthropology, as demonstrated by the work of Maurer (2002a, 2005), Ho (2009), Roitman (2013), Weston (2013), Bear (2015), Guyer (2016). 7 See Guyer (2012) for more on the connection between conceptual lability and expertise in the global economy. 8 This is also a key objective for investment bankers, as Karen Ho’s ethnography of Wall Street demonstrates so clearly (Ho 2009). 9 For more research on the salience of demonstrations for the substantiation of expertise, see Vargha (2011). 10 For more description of this model, see the website of Tracom Group: http://­ www​.­t racomcorp​.­c om​/­t raining​-­products​/­model​/­s ocial​-­style​-­model​.­html (acces­­sed January 6, 2012). 11 See Maister, Green, and Galford (2000). 12 See Gold, Guthrie, and Wank (2002), Kipnis (1997), Yan (1996), Yang (1989, 1994). 13 As is often assumed in descriptions of economic “disembedding” (for example, Carrier 1998; Granovetter 1985; Miller 1998). Chapter 5. Client Sites

1 Access to client sites was negotiated as part of the collaborative per­for­mance management research that is described in chapter 2. ­Because con­sul­tants spend the majority of their time at client sites, it was agreed that I would have access to consulting teams at t­hese two clients, for purposes of work shadowing and interviewing. 2 Although t­here have been references to the hiring of foreign management experts during the period of corporatization and privatization (for example, Huang 2012), ­there have not, to the best of my knowledge, been any scholarly accounts of consulting to Chinese companies during the post-­Mao era. 3 Czarniawska and Mazza borrow liminality from anthropologist Arthur Van Gennep, who first referred to a “liminal period” in his book The Rites of Passage. The concept of liminality was further developed and pop­u­lar­ized by anthropologist Victor Turner, who describes it as the condition of being “neither ­here nor ­there; they are betwixt and between the positions assigned and arrayed by law, custom, convention, and ceremony” (1969, 95). Czarniawska and Mazza use the term to denote the suspension of usual codes of practice, and the feelings of in-­betweenness and ambiguity that arise as a consequence.

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4 Using the term chargeability, which is used interchangeably with billability in management consulting, an interviewee of Czarniawska and Mazza reports that “to a certain extent, we consults are what we charge our clients. Our chargeability is a mea­sure of our per­for­mance” (2003, 274). 5 For a comprehensive review and analy­sis of the dif­fer­ent approaches to the study of the client–­consultant relationship in the existing management consulting lit­er­a­ture, see Nikolova and Devinney (2012). 6 See Czarniawska and Mazza (2003) and Sturdy, Schwarz, and Spicer (2006). 7 See chapter 7. 8 This was not how I would describe my own mannerisms and style of dressing, but rather a term used by Chinese female con­sul­tants and support staff I befriended. 9 That digital technologies produce rather than represent social realities has received increasing attention in recent years, especially in the nascent fields of digital anthropology and digital sociology (see Horst and Miller 2012; Ruppert, Law, and Savage 2013; Walford 2012). A number of scholars have written specifically about large information systems, such as enterprise systems, and how repre­sen­ta­tional practices create new ontologies (see Bloomfield and Vurdubakis, 1997; Knox et al., 2007; Law 1996). 10 For example, when giving out critical feedback, con­sul­tants would ask each other “ni accept ma” (do you accept [the comments])? The Chinese verb shou can be directly translated as “to accept,” and would be a more than adequate alternative. 11 See Steinfeld (2010, chapter 6). 12 The only Systeo employees other than con­sul­tants to be allowed onto client sites ­were members of hr. Hoping to gauge “employee engagement” (see chapter 1), once a year they would visit a handful of client sites to carry out focus groups among con­sul­tants. 13 In his discussion of Chinese state capitalism, Huang (2012) describes how foreign con­sul­tants and management specialists, Hewitt Associates, w ­ ere hired by the Bank of China to aid in its pro­cess of internal reform and transformation in preparation for becoming a profit-­making, publicly listed com­pany. 14 ­Those con­sul­tants posted to especially wealthy Chinese soes would report getting a “weekly flyback”—­they could claim return flights to Beijing e­ very week, not ­every two weeks as most con­sul­tants could. 15 State socialism ­under Mao, when China’s economy was closed to foreign trade and was centrally planned, was characterized by ongoing scarcity. Only the most basic needs w ­ ere taken care of in a period during which greed and self-­ concern ­were openly criticized (Hsu 2007; Walder 1988). 16 Yingyao Wang (2015) argues that not only have financial management techniques been extended to China during the post-­Mao period, but that the Chinese state itself has become financialized. The state is now the major shareholder and institutional investor in the Chinese economy. 214 

NOTES TO Chapter five

17 With memories of Mao’s G ­ reat Famine still lingering, the Chinese government was keen to avoid references to poverty and starvation, and instead justified draconian interventions into ­human reproduction by recourse to development and cultural citizenship. 18 The lit­er­a­ture on suzhi is extensive, and examines how it is invoked in policy and propaganda moves, how it is defined and conceptualized ethnographically, and how it is used to justify social and economic hierarchies, typically between rural and urban citizens (for example, Jacka 2009; Kipnis 2001, 2011; Murphy 2004; Sigley 2009). 19 See chapter 5. 20 See Yan Hairong (2003, 495). 21 In the very dif­f er­ent context of post-­Suharto Indonesia, Daromir Rudnyckyj (2009) shows a similar pro­cess at play. He describes how factory workers are subjected to “spiritual training” sessions that combine Muslim religious practice with business management. The aim of such training is not simply to localize managerial techniques, but rather to reframe the norms and ethics of neoliberal capitalism—­the emphasis on individual accountability, responsibility, and efficiency—as being commensurate with Islam, what Rudnyckyj terms “market Islam.” 22 Often inspired by the seminal article “Time, Work Discipline and Industrial Capitalism,” written by E.  P. Thompson (1967), many scholars have written about the speeding up of work pro­cesses, and how this is internalized by workers who are feared to have a propensity to shirk. Chapter 6. Building a Paradise

1 This is common practice in China’s it-­enabled outsourcing industry (see Kess­ ler 2006). 2 This is in the context of growing individualization in Chinese society (Yan 2010). 3 Under­lying the distinction between “red” and “expert” was opposing conceptualizations of knowledge: the “core knowledge” of politics and morality that made up po­liti­cal capital, and merely technical knowledge that made up h ­ uman capital (Hsu 2007, 46). 4 However, her use of the term ­human capital does not, unlike its invocation in Systeo, refer to the instrumentalization of ­people for the sake of producing shareholder return. 5 During the 1956 Hundred Flowers Campaign, in which ordinary citizens w ­ ere encouraged to criticize the regime, the old educated elite protested about experts being supervised by reds and sought to challenge the new po­liti­cal elite that held the reins of power. However, this campaign, far from being a means of allowing dissent to be aired, was a means of detecting dissidents, “rightists,” who ­were flushed out in the subsequent Anti-­Rightist Movement (see Andreas 2009; Spence 1990). NOTES TO Chapter six  

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6 Including the University of Cambridge and the University of Oxford, the Russell Group is a group of twenty-­four universities in the United Kingdom considered to be the most research-­intensive, prestigious, and world-­renowned of all British universities. 7 Chinese urbanites see the workplace not only as a place to earn a wage, but as a place in which, ideally, they can develop an idealized subjectivity capable of competing in the con­temporary global economy. They particularly desire to work in environments associated with modernity, science (Hsu 2005), and cosmopolitanness (Rofel 2007). 8 See also Hsu 2007, chapter 6. 9 See also Hsu 2007, chapter 5. 10 In his insider’s account of the global management consultancy McKinsey, Duff McDonald states: “A job at McKinsey, regardless of duration, can serve as an enviable listening post for plum corporate roles, particularly at McKinsey’s own clients” (McDonald 2014, 7). See also http://­observer​.­com​/­2013​/­09​/­the​-­ceo​ -­factory​-­ex​-­mckinsey​-­consultants​-­get​-­hired​-­to​-­run​-­the​-­biggest​-­companies​ /­(accessed September 3, 2015). 11 Based inside the consultancy, my fieldwork did not extend to interviewing their parents. Instead, my arguments are based on what con­sul­tants told me about their parents’ opinions. 12 See Fei ([1947] 1992), Gold (1985), Gold, Guthrie, and Wank (2002), Kipnis (1996, 1997), Yan (1996), Yang (1994, 2000). 13 For example, the work of Confucian sociologist Liang Shu-­Ming. 14 Taking a po­liti­cal economy perspective, Yang could be said to overstress the instrumentality of guanxi cultivation. ­There exist also numerous accounts that emphasize the under­lying ethics of reciprocal exchange, which stress the per­ for­mance of emotion, which acts to balance the instrumental aspects of fostering relationships for only personal gain (e.g., Kipnis 1997; Stafford 2000; Yan 1996). 15 An irony of the high socialist period is that although at the discursive level the ccp sought to create a universalistic ethic based on the shared commitment to revolution and the nation-­state, in practice socialism relied upon the cultivation of particularistic ties (guanxi) rather than universalistic ties. 16 In a similar context, that of postsocialist Poland, Elizabeth Dunn also notes the continuation of socialist practices of gift exchange in the transition to market-­ oriented practices of the market economy (Dunn 2004). 17 Although in many re­spects social security for at least Chinese urbanites was better during the Maoist period than in the con­temporary post-­Mao era. Socialist work units, danwei, where their parents worked, provided a raft of cradle-­to-­grave benefits including housing and medical care, as well as providing for old age (see Lu and Perry 1997). 18 For example, see Hoffman (2010, chapter 6).

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NOTES TO Chapter six

19 See also Lisa Rofel (1999), who contrasts the “Cultural Revolution cohort” who exalt Maoist radical politics with the “post-­Mao cohort” who ­favor economic liberalization and the engagement with foreign entities. 20 See Fong (2004), Greenhalgh and Winckler (2005). 21 I also noticed that female con­sul­tants often only dated Western men, although this could also be explained as relating to gender in­equality and resurgent conservatism, which saw unmarried Chinese ­women past their mid-­twenties branded as “leftover ­women” (Hong Fincher 2014). 22 See https://­www​.­youtube​.­com​/­watch​?­v​=­irdckcxfTUc (accessed August 17, 2015). 23 Fong argues that con­temporary Chinese youth, “well educated and raised on wealthier socie­ties’ images and brand names, . . .  felt that they did not resemble the ‘backwardness’ they associated with their motherland any more than they resembled their own long-­suffering, poorly educated parents” (Fong 2004, 644). Chapter 7. Con­spic­u­ous Ethicizing

1 My parents are also Malaysian Chinese, and although brought up in the United Kingdom, I spent many a summer holiday in Malaysia visiting relatives. 2 Like many Malaysian Chinese, Christina grew up speaking Cantonese and not Mandarin. Many workers told me that when she first arrived to Dalian in 2002, “[ta]yi ju hua, ye bu hui [she ­couldn’t speak one sentence of Mandarin],” underscoring the impressiveness of her swift linguistic improvement to near native fluency by the time of my fieldwork in 2007. She is even able to give public speeches in Mandarin, as in Systeo corporate events, incorporating poetry and Chinese proverbs to showcase her proficiency. 3 According to Ong, Western man­ag­ers in Shanghai consider “the reengineering of Chinese knowledge workers and the production of new business ethics the most challenging part of their work” (Ong 2006a, 167). 4 State intervention in private and public life endures in the post-­Mao period of market socialism. In some senses, though, it has diminished. For example, ­people now have far greater choice and control in decisions regarding work and where they live. But in other ways intervention has become more invasive. One obvious example is the imposition of the draconian f­ amily planning rules, other­wise known as the “one-­child policy.” 5 Of course, we should be wary of taking references to Chinese culture, and by implication Western culture, at face value. As Carol Upadhya (2006) has pointed out in her study of international it workplaces, when employees speak of “cultural differences” they are, in fact, highlighting the structural differences—­the power inequalities—­between Western and non-­Western employees. 6 See also Upadhya (2006). 7 See Shever (2010), Welker (2009), Benson (2014).

NOTES TO Chapter seven  

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8 In ­simple terms, csr consists of practices and discourses in which business is portrayed as being concerned with more than just profit. They are good “corporate citizens” who stress the “­triple bottom line” (accounting for “­people” and “planet,” as well as profit). 9 McKenna states that “the managing partners at McKinsey & Com­pany created ‘corporate culture’ as a strategic response to the declining demand for the firm’s central ‘product’—­the orga­nizational study” (McKenna 2006, 193). 10 In their book Corporate Culture: Rites and Rituals, Deal and Kennedy define “values as the bedrock of any corporate culture . . . ​[they] provide a sense of common direction for all employees and guidelines for their day-­to-­day behaviour” (1982, 21). 11 See http://­www​.­mckinsey​.­com​/­insights​/­strategy​/­enduring​_­ideas​_­the​_­7​-­s​_­frame​ work (last accessed April 16, 2015). 12 Somewhat surprisingly, given the overlap in nomenclature, anthropologists have given corporate culture rather short shrift. George Marcus (1998) and Susan Wright (1994) observe that within organ­izations corporate culture is an ideology, making the point that it is not correlative of the orga­nizational culture per se; rather, it is just one of the many strands of cultural discourse found within the locale of the firm. When corporate culture does enter anthropologists’ accounts, it is mentioned as a means of fashioning the knowledge worker (Upadhya 2006, 2009), or it is used interchangeably with institutional or orga­ nizational culture (Garsten 1994; Ho 2009; Wright 1994), or examined as a new culturally informed and inflected corporate form (see the collection of essays in Marcus 1998). 13 Foucault’s thesis of subjectification has informed many analyses of subject making in the workplace (see Dunn 2004; Hoffman 2006; Rofel 1999; Shore and Wright 2000). Of par­tic­u­lar relevance are the writings of neo-­Foucauldians Peter Miller and Nikolas Rose on “governmentality” (Miller and Rose 1990; Rose 1999), where it is claimed that the inculcating of values (of the f­ ree market) through external regulatory mechanisms can transform individuals into self-­regulating subjects, allowing po­liti­cal objectives to be fulfilled via “action at a distance” (Miller and Rose 1990, 1). What is assumed is the stability and determination of ­these governing systems—­these external regulatory mechanisms—­which ostensibly produce t­ hese desired self-­regulating subjects in a smooth, unproblematic fashion. But as my examination of Systeo culture ­will demonstrate, systems of governing, such as management systems, are unable to “colonize” places of governing with the subjectivities that are inscribed and objectified within ­these systems. Furthermore, they produce unintended effects, including the failure to produce the desired subjectivities. 14 This is well described by Emma Crewe and Richard Axelby: “Proponents of modernization theory saw all socie­ties arrayed at vari­ous points along a linear progression. Viewing the developed world’s past as the undeveloped world’s pres­ent, it follows that the developed world’s pres­ent is the undeveloped world’s 218 

NOTES TO Chapter seven

f­ uture. To modernization theorists and proponents, development can be achieved by mimicking the historical experience of the industrial states of Eu­rope and North Amer­i­ca” (2013). This development discourse has been promulgated by the likes of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, and has consequently been roundly criticized by anthropologists who have deconstructed this rhe­toric, exposed its ethnocentric biases, and drawn attention to the power relations that underpin its promotion (for example, Escobar 1991, 1997; Ferguson 1990; Gardner and Lewis 1996; Moore and Schmitz 1995). 15 ­Because I was not a permanent employee, I should have been disqualified. However, other colleagues lobbied the se­nior executive who was overseeing the event, telling her about the unpaid work I had done for Systeo’s corporate citizenship initiatives. Thus, she deci­ded to make an exception. 16 As we saw in chapter 1, it was only made apparent in diagrams that mea­sured the improvement in “employee engagement” in terms of total shareholder return. Conclusion

1 Mary Poovey puts forward an argument that can be seen as the complement to my argument that employees are constructed as entries to accounts. In a fascinating historical account of double-­entry bookkeeping, she shows how the writing of a transaction first as a credit and then as a debit led to the personification of aspects of the business devoid of h ­ uman agency, for example, “Stock,” “Money,” “Profit and Loss” (Poovey 1998, 57). 2 Of interest to the ethnographic context I examine is Poovey’s discovery that double-­entry bookkeeping was an accounting system used to demonstrate honesty (as opposed to rhe­toric)—­the numbers in the books revealed “the facts.” The central role of the balance sheet, which is constructed through techniques of double-­entry bookkeeping, in “producing” value should be seen in connection with Poovey’s point. 3 Also, in the financial media, “value” is commonly invoked as isomorphic to share prices. 4 Quoted in a recent article by financial journalist Chrystia Freeman (an editor for ­Reuters) in The Atlantic magazine, see http://­www​.­theatlantic​.­com​/­maga­­zine​ /­archive​/­2011​/­01​/­the​-­rise​-­of​-t­ he​-n ­ ew​-g­ lobal​-e­ lite​/­8343​/­(accessed January  26, 2016). 5 See http://­foreignpolicy​.­com​/­2015​/­07​/­20​/­setting​-­the​-­record​-­straight​-­on​-­chinas​ -­stock​-­market​-­bubble​-­intervention​/­(accessed April 4, 2017).

NOTES TO Conclusion  

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240 

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Index

Page numbers followed by f indicate illustrations. accountability, 20, 47, 68, 87, 90, 132, 144, 194 accounting systems, 109, 124, 197, 198, 219nn1–2 acronyms, use of, 123–24, 126–27 algocracy, use of term, 94 Alvesson, Mats, 59 Anagnost, Ann, 148 Aneesh, Aneesh, 94 Ashby, Simon, 177 audit culture, use of term, 31, 65, 68

139–40; defined, 79; exemptions from, 86; idle ­labor and, 80–82, 84, 103, 163; importance of, 86–87; manipulation of, 81; as per­for­mance mea­sure­ment, 76–80, 95–96; revenue generation and, 82–84, 211n6; tracking devices for, 80–83 Boston Consulting Group, 176 Bowker, James, 13 Braverman, Harry, 211n2 “Building a Paradise” (pop song), 168–69

back-­office ser­vice work: devaluation of, 91–92; distinction from front-­office work, 96–97, 104, 106, 107–8; interview-­based data on, 6; outsourcing of, 91–92, 107, 196; training bonds of, 107; treatment of employees in, 59 backwardness, 169, 217n23 balanced scorecard tool, 45–47, 46f, 49, 50, 62, 208n14 Bear, Laura, 200 Benson, Peter, 174–75 best practice(s): discourses, 33; ethics in, 201; in hrm, 37; as maximal profit earning, 19; selling to clients, 6–7; trope of, 30; of Western/ Chinese development, 150 billability: of agency time, 210n20; appearance of productivity and,

Callon, Michel, 7, 81 calvt. See Chinese Acad­emy of Launch Vehicle Technology Cantonese language, 24, 217n2 cap­i­tal­ist economy: consensus in, 190; core values in, 173, 174; destructive ele­ments of, 174–75; efficiency model in, 144, 150; erp systems and, 20; local development and, 7, 34, 190–91; suzhi discourse and, 162–63; transition to, 8, 10–12, 16, 20, 153, 158, 174, 199; value in, 113 ­career development, 172–73 ccp. See Chinese Communist Party change-­tracking map and, 52–55, 53f, 116 chargeability, use of term, 214n4. See also billability charity, 33, 175, 179–91

China: modernization and management consultancy in, 1, 9–12; social/ economic transformation in, 8, 10, 173–74 Chinese Acad­emy of Launch Vehicle Technology (calvt), 129 Chinese Communist Party (ccp), 12, 131, 146, 153, 156, 174, 183, 185, 216n15 Chinese-­English language mix, 140–41 Chinese stock market crash (2015), 199–200 Christophers, Brett, 197–98 client confidentiality, 4 client relations, 117, 125, 138–39, 144 commensuration: centrality of, 31, 32; cultures of, 8, 26–30, 114, 200; social effects of, 65–66; techniques of, 26, 27–28, 31–32; values in, 34. See also financialization; high per­for­mance; per­for­mance management Com­pany Law (1994), 10, 198 compensation, use of term, 61, 115. See also financialization; salaries Confucianism, 149–50 connected capitalism, use of term, 190 conviction narratives, 40–41, 204n17 core values, 173, 174, 176 corporate citizenship, 33, 175, 176, 178–91 corporate culture, 30, 43–44, 62, 157–63, 176–78 corporate ethicization, 33, 116, 125–30, 171, 175–76. See also corporate social responsibility corporate restructuring: accounting metrics in, 206n49; core competences in, 96; enacting, 108–9; erp systems on, 19; management con­sul­ tants, failure of, 30, 175; neoliberal, 12, 44; outsourcing and, 9, 92–93; rationale for, 108, 116; shareholder value in, 38–39, 125 242 

Index

corporate social responsibility (csr), 33, 174–76, 178–86, 190–92, 218n8 corporatization in China, 12, 20, 142–43, 198 cost generation: as destroying value, 96; incentivization and, 108; job security and, 102, 103, 196; proposal writing and, 106; vs. revenue generation, 29, 31, 84, 95, 104, 109, 199 crm system. See customer relationship management (crm) system csr. See corporate social responsibility cultural cir­cuit of capital, use of term, 21 Cultural Revolution (1966–76), 156 customer relationship management (crm) system, 137–38 Czarniawska, Barbara, 133 Deal Power Map, 117, 118 Deloitte Consulting, 91 Deng Xiao Ping, 9, 142, 149, 156, 198 deskilled ­labor, 95, 211n2 developed world citizenship, 165 Dolan, Catherine, 185 downsizing, 17, 30–31, 38, 58–59, 195 Drucker, Peter, 15–16 economics: of consulting, 126–28; performativity of, 81 economic value added (eva), 17, 39 Effective Per­for­mance Management (epm) task force, 48–49 efficiency: core competences in, 96; corporatization and, 142–43; culture and, 196; defined, 38, 81, 144; failure of improving, 12; in ­future, 196; hegemonic model of, 150; napping and, 143–44; per­for­ mance management and, 67–69, 81, 88–89; Taylorism on, 13–14, 82, 210n20; technology in, 20, 82. See also idleness

employee engagement: attendance at events as, 111; dial of, 55–57, 56f, 62; hcs Program on, 43, 51, 55–57, 60–61; high per­for­mance and, 36–37, 43, 51, 55–57, 60–62; retention and, 55–56, 60–63; score, 51, 55, 60; through csr, 189–90 employee retention: data on, 43; engagement and, 55–56, 60–63; flexibility and, 60; importance of, 59 En­glish language, 24–25, 97, 100, 102, 110 Enron, collapse of, 2 enterprise resource planning (erp) systems, 18–20, 68, 82, 93, 98, 100, 108, 140–41, 146–49, 147f, 195–96 epm task force. See Effective Per­for­ mance Management (epm) task force erp systems. See enterprise resource planning (erp) systems ethics: in best practice, 201; importance of management consultancy, 33, 194; of patriotic professionalism, 33, 152–53, 154 eva. See economic value added Ezzamel, Mahmoud, 38, 39, 78, 96 feedback, 50, 51 Fei Xiao Tong, 159 fieldwork, embedded, 3–6, 21; access for, 4–5, 21–22, 25, 43, 131; alter­ native approaches to, 22–23; in client organ­izations, 6; languages of, 24–25; in profit centers, 103; purpose of, 23–24; reports on, 24 financial crisis of 2007–8, 193–94 financialization, 16–20; fragmentation in, 91; of ­labor, 31, 60–63; new models of, 195; shareholder value in, 17–18, 38–41; use of culture in, 62 Fong, Vanessa, 154, 165, 169–71, 217n23 Fordism, 19–20, 95

Foster, Robert, 190 Foucault, Michel, 218n13 Four Modernizations, concept of, 156 Galford, Robert, 119 Gantt, Henry, 20 Gieryn, Thomas, 211–12n8 Godechot, Olivier, 42 governmentality, 148, 218n13 Graeber, David, 28 ­Great Chinese Famine (1958–61), 160 ­Great Leap Forward, 160 Green, Charles, 119 guanxi (social connections), 105, 120, 159–61, 216n14 guoqi (Chinese soes), 157–62. See also state-­owned enterprises (soes) Guyer, Jane, 28, 74–75 Hairong, Yan, 148 Hawthorne studies, 14 hcs Program. See ­Human Capital Strategy (hcs) Program Head, Simon, 19 Herzfeld, Michael, 169–70 heterogeneous engineering, concept of, 109 Hewlett-­Packard, 18 high per­for­mance: anatomy of, 36; change-­tracking map and, 52–55, 53f; contradictions of, 58–59; engagement and, 36–37, 43, 51, 55–57, 60–62; financial value and, 35–38; mea­sure­ment of, 30–31 History of the Modern Fact, A (Poovey), 123, 196–97 Ho, Karen, 26, 95, 144 Hoffman, Lisa, 152–53, 204n12 Holmes, Douglas, 24, 206n42 Hoskin, Keith, 66 Howcroft, Debra, 91 hrm. See ­human resource management Index  

243

Hsu, Carolyn, 155–56, 162–63, 182–83 Huang, Philip, 142–43 ­human accounting, 66–69 ­human capital, defined, 155–56 ­Human Capital Strategy (hcs) Program, 22, 30, 36, 41–44, 151; on corporate culture, 43–44, 62; on employee retention, 43, 59, 61; on engagement, 43, 51, 55–57, 60–61; evaluation of, 48–49, 51; importance of, 42; management focus of, 44–45, 57–58; on per­for­mance management, 37, 70, 87–90; on qsa tool, 121–22; sales effectiveness workshop of, 121–22; subprograms of, 41; tools for, 54–55; on training, 57–58, 115 ­human relations (hr) school, 14–15 ­human resource management (hrm), 30; best practice template of, 37; on employee management, 42; on man­ ag­ers, 44–45; practice vs. rhe­toric of, 59; rise of, 36–37; social systems in, 15, 44; technology of, 45 Hundred Flowers Campaign (1956), 215n5

ibm, 18 icts. See information and communi­ cations technologies idleness, 80–82, 84, 103, 163 incentivization, 14–15; balanced scorecard and, 47; employee retention and, 61; in per­for­mance management, 36, 49–50, 69, 79, 103; revenue generation and, 81, 108, 196; shareholder value and, 17–18, 31 information and communications technologies (icts), 91 investment banking: restructuring of, 194; revenue-­generating employees in, 95; volatility in, 26 iron rice bowl (welfare system), 12, 185–86 244 

Index

Jankowiak, William, 157–58 Kaplan, Robert, 45, 49–50 key per­for­mance indicators (kpis): hard, 76; soft, 73 Kipnis, Andrew, 148 kkr, 176 knowledge workers, 8, 60, 82, 93–94, 97, 101, 107 kpis. See key per­for­mance indicators ­labor: attrition in, 43; deskilled, 211n2; financialization of, 31, 60–63; as ­human capital, 67, 115, 164; idle, 80–82, 84, 103, 163; in outsourcing/offshoring, 30–31, 127, 211n7; shareholder value and, 38–41, 58–59, 63, 96, 108–9, 196. See also employee retention ­Labor Law (1994), 12 Ladner, Sam, 76, 210n20 language switching, 140–41. See also specific languages Lau, Andy, 168 Law, John, 109 Laws of the Markets, The (Callon), 81 layoffs, 17, 38, 63, 205n22 Lazonick, William, 194–95 Leyshon, Andrew, 93 Li, William, 193 liminality, 134–41 loyalty, 33, 62–63, 128, 152, 155, 169–70, 179 Maister, David, 119 Malinowski, Bronislaw, 22 management by objectives, 15–16 management consultancy: American/ Chinese, 11, 29; belonging in, 133; client relations in, 132–33; conformity in, 151–52; connection to outsourcing, 92; corporate culture and, 157–63, 176–78; cultures of commensura-

tion in, 26–28; disillusionment with, 110–11; dissonance in, 32, 114, 121, 125–26; enacted real­ity in, 108; enactment of morality in, 175–76; ethics, importance of, 33, 194; failure to deliver, 30, 175; financialization and, 16–20; functionalist/critical approaches to, 134; in global culture, 163–66; global expertise in, 135–36; idleness in, 80–82, 84, 103, 163; information technology and, 4, 10; liminal existence of con­sul­tants, 134–35; modernization in China and, 9–12; package of implementation in, 18; as performative, 7–8; in post-­Mao Chinese culture, 126–30; process-­ based management by, 16; on public companies in China, 11; purpose of, 6; rise of, 16; role of, 2, 40–41; roots of, 13–14; social commentators on, 1–2; working lives in, 131–33. See also specific topics, e.g., shareholder value managerial practices, mediating, 13–16 Mandarin language, 24, 110, 129, 140, 142, 152, 168, 173, 217n2 Mao Zedong, 155–56, 157, 160, 174, 186, 199, 214n15 Marcus, George, 24, 206n42, 218n12 Mayo, Elton, 14–15 Mazza, Carmello, 133 McGregor, Richard, 12 McKenna, Christopher, 176–77 McKinsey, James O., 13 McKinsey and Co., 13, 37, 176–77 meritocracy, 155–56, 181 military decision-­making systems, 18 Miller, Daniel, 113 Miller, Peter, 218n13 Mitchell, Timothy, 54 modernity, 7, 20, 32–33, 148, 149–50, 153, 154, 183 morality, per­for­mance of, 175–76, 178–79, 182–86

nationalism, 152, 163, 167–71 nearshore. See onshore outsourcing neoliberalism, 12, 44, 148, 204n12, 209n5, 215n21 Neve, Geert de, 174 new managerialism, 68–69, 205n27 New Ruthless Economy, The (Head), 19 Norton, David, 45, 49–50 numerical ordinal rankings, 74–75 objective-­setting, 72–76 offshoring, 5, 31; confidentiality in, 151; cost of ­labor in, 127, 211n7; En­glish proficiency in, 102; expansion of, 91; of hr and finance functions, 101; migration and, 94; reliance on, 100; shareholder value and, 38; of work pro­cesses, 99. See also onshore outsourcing; outsourcing; shared ser­vice centers (sscs) Ong, Aihwa, 173–74 onshore outsourcing, 99, 100, 212n12. See also offshoring; outsourcing open-­source technologies, 195 operations research (or), 15 orga­nizational culture, concept of, 15. See also corporate culture orga­nizational restructuring. See corporate restructuring Ortiz, Horacio, 39, 113 outsourcing: of business pro­cesses, 16, 17; confidentiality in, 151, 203n5; connection to consultancy, 92; cost of ­labor in, 30–31, 127, 211n2; deskilled ­labor in, 95, 211n2; devaluation of work and, 92; expansion of, 91; of industrial restructuring, 9; institutional, 9, 10; of it ser­vices, 4, 5–6, 71, 94, 138; new income flows from, 93; onshore, 99, 100, 212n12; pyramid refresh in, 127; rationale for, 91–97, 108, 109, 116; of sales proposal writing, 104–6; of ser­vice Index  

245

outsourcing (continued) work, 91–92, 107, 196; shape of, 97–103, 106; threat of, 63; training bonds in, 107; of work pro­cesses, 99; work specialization in, 98. See also offshoring; shared ser­vice centers (sscs) Palermo, Tommasi, 177 paradise (tiantang), use of term, 153–54 para-­ethnography, use of term, 24 patriotic professionalism, ethics of, 33, 152–53, 154 Peng, Julia, 168 per­for­mance management: accountability in, 47, 65, 67–68, 87, 90; billability in, 76–83, 95–96; crisis in, 23, 47–48; hcm on, 70; incentivization in, 36, 49–50, 69, 79, 103; investigating the practice of, 69–71; mea­sure­ ment in, 27–29, 31, 48–50, 76, 88–89; new managerialism movement, 68–69, 205n27; performativity of, 87–90; setting objectives in, 72–76, 89–90; tools for, 67–68; as translation device, 49–50. See also high per­for­mance performativity, 7–8, 66, 81, 87–90, 178–79, 182–86, 207n6 PetroChina, 12 Politburo of the Chinese Communist Party, 12 Poovey, Mary, 123, 196–97, 219nn1–2 post-­Fordism, 95 Power, Michael, 65, 177 Power­Point, use of, 4, 5, 28, 51–52, 60, 71, 82, 104, 133, 146, 177 Pricewater­houseCoopers, 18, 176 Princi­ples of Scientific Management, The (Taylor), 14 privatization, shift to, 12 professionalism: brand of, 176–77; ethics of, 148; image, 168; lack of, 3, 246 

Index

4, 64, 143–44, 148–49, 191; language usage and, 24–25; local context for, 97, 150; of outsourced workers, 97; patriotic ethics of, 33, 152–53, 154; per­for­mance of, 27–28, 32, 135, 168, 177, 190–91 Proj­ect Hope, 182–83 proposal writing. See sales proposals public trading in China, 11–12 pyramid refresh, use of term, 127

qsa (quality, strategy, assurance) tool, 121–24 Rajak, Dinah, 175, 176 ranking, 31, 74–75, 89, 210n15 reengineering managerial technique, 19 reflexive business management, 21–22 reform and opening, program of, 9 remuneration. See compensation retention. See employee retention return on investment (roi), 17 revenue generation: billability and, 82–84, 211n6; vs. cost generation, 29, 31, 84, 95, 104, 109, 199; incentivization and, 81, 108, 196; per­for­mance evaluation based on, 84, 103–4, 196; proposal writing and, 105, 106 Richardson, Helen, 91 Rose, Nikolas, 218n13 Rudnyckyj, Daromir, 215n21 salaries, 64–65, 87–89, 101, 108, 115. See also financialization sales proposals: con­sul­tant involvement in, 116; outsourcing of, 104–6; playbook for, 116–17 sap enterprise resource planning software, 98, 100 science vs. nonscience, 211–12n8 scientific management, 13–14

Seven Habits of Highly Effective ­People, 130 Shaikh, Anwar, 198 Shamir, Ronen, 179 shared ser­vice centers (sscs): back-­ office work in, 91–93, 107–8; captive, 93, 97; in corporate restructuring, 31; cost vs. revenue in, 104–10; fieldwork in, 31–32, 97–103; hierarchy in, 101–2; knowledge workers in, 93–94, 107; as mainstream business activity, 91; management con­sul­ tants on, 92–93; as nonbillable, 96; productivity in, 102; seat charge in, 102–3; standardization in, 93; training bonds in, 107; training freezes in, 59; workers’ view of, 103–4; work pro­cesses outsourced to, 99; work specialization in, 98. See also outsourcing shareholder value: accounting metrics, use of, 78–79; csr and, 189–90; defined, 26, 38, 116; ­drivers for, 120, 125; financialization and, 17–18, 29, 38–41, 91; ­labor and, 38–41, 58–59, 63, 96, 108–9, 196; management consultancy for, 11, 32, 113, 120–21, 125, 197; management standardization of, 20; market devices and, 80–83; metrics of, 17; per­for­mance and, 35, 80–83, 207n8; in post-­Mao Chinese culture, 126–30 share valuation, 29, 39, 40, 78–79, 84, 96, 195 Shever, Elana, 174–75 Shore, Cris, 68 social styles model, 117–20, 118f, 119f, 121f, 194 soes. See state-­owned enterprises special economic zones, 9, 198 spectacle, 27, 105 sscs. See shared ser­vice centers (sscs) Stark, David, 28

state-­owned enterprises (soes), 7, 10, 199; ccp and, 12; culture of, 157–62; erp systems, use of, 20; global stage, involvement in, 141; layoffs from, 205n22; loyalty to, 169–70; as management consultancy client, 11, 142–43; modernity and, 153; nationalism and, 167–71, 200; suzhi and, 146–48, 171; working environment/ practices in, 143–46 Steinfeld, Edward, 9–10 stewardship, 58, 173 Strathern, Marilyn, 65, 212n15 subjectification, thesis of, 218n13 surveillance, 19, 66, 94–95, 122 suzhi (quality): definitions, 146–48, 162–63; discourse, 147–48, 153, 164; erp systems and, 146, 148–49; personal worth and, 88; self-­discipline and, 162; social classification and, 181; soes and, 171; values of self and, 148 Taylor, Frederick Winslow, 13–14, 20, 82, 94–95, 210n20 thought leadership, 84–86 Thrift, Nigel, 7–8, 21, 93 Tonak, E. Ahmet, 198 total shareholder return (tsr), 17, 39, 55, 61–62, 63 Tracom Group, 117 training, 57–58, 111, 115; as corporate extravaganza, 114–15; in ethical rupture, 112–14; in value, 113–14 training bonds, 107 Trusted Advisor, The (Maister/Green/ Galford), 119 trust equation, 119–21 Tsing, Anna, 27 tsr. See total shareholder return Tuckett, David, 40 Upadhya, Carol, 94–95 Index  

247

value: cost/revenue and, 109; defined, 197–98; language of, 113; propositions, 115–21; theory of, 28–29. See also shareholder value; share valuation virtuocracy, 155–56 Volcker, Paul, 198

Welker, Marina, 174–75 Willmott, Hugh, 38, 59 World Trade Organ­ization, 10 Worthington, Frank, 38 Wright, Susan, 68, 218n12

waiqi (foreign companies), 148, 157–62, 170 Wang, Yingyao, 214n16 “War for Talent, The” (McKinsey report), 37

Yang, Mayfair, 160

248 

Index

Zhang, Le-­Yin, 12 Zhang, Li, 153–54 Zuckerberg, Mark, 168

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