A generation of aspiring business managers has been taught to see a world of difference as a world of opportunity. In Making Global MBAs, Andrew Orta examines the culture of contemporary business education, and the ways MBA programs participate in the production of global capitalism through the education of the business subjects who will be managing it.

Based on extensive field research in several leading US business schools, this groundbreaking ethnography exposes what the culture of MBA training says about contemporary understandings of capitalism in the context of globalization. Orta details the rituals of MBA life and the ways MBA curricula cultivate both habits of fast-paced technical competence and “softer” qualities and talents thought to be essential to unlocking the value of international cultural difference while managing its risks. Making Global MBAs provides an essential critique of neoliberal thinking for students and professionals in a wide variety of fields.

About the Author

Andrew Orta is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He is the author of Catechizing Culture: Missionaries, Aymara, and the “New Evangelization.”

List of Figures
Acknowledgments

1 • Wall Street Goes to the Ends of the Earth
Masters of the Universe
The MBA Boom and the Refiguring of Global Capitalism
Anthropology and Capitalism
Capitalism, Difference, and the Excess of Culture
An Anthropologist among the MBAs
Organization of the Book

2 • Fast Subjects: The Rituals of MBA Training
Compression and the Paracurriculum
Axioms of Capitalism
Science and Art: Talent and the Management of Excess

3 • Accounting for Business
From Clerks to Managers
Managing the Modern
Managing the Postwar World
Managers Abroad

4 • The Currency of Culture
Discovering Culture with First-Year MBAs
Culture in Context
Culturing the Ugly American
Building a Better International Manager

5 • Managing the Margins
Staging the Global Incompletely
Short-Term Study Abroad

6 • Partial Answers: The Uses of Ethnographic
Capitalist Realism
The (Panic-Inducing) Hold Real Life Has
Inventing the Case Method
Working the Cases

7 • Frontiers of Capitalism
Scaling Difference
Two Parables of Social Entrepreneurship
New Economies Arising
Scaling the MBA

Notes
References
Index

Reviews

"Orta brings a particular expertise to the analysis of cultures, honed in earlier ethnographic studies of relations between Catholic missionaries and the indigenous Aymara communities of the Bolivian highlands. He notably delves into the growth in “international business” teaching on MBA courses, transmitted through case studies and short-term study assignments abroad."
— Financial Times

"A thick and vibrant description of the MBA experience that makes a contribution to an understanding of the MBA milieu and influence and to the anthropology of business."
— American Anthropologist

"A sweeping vision that sees the MBA as underpinning the current era of globalization and business development. . . . Recommended."
— CHOICE

"A fascinating cultural portrait of future middle and senior managers as key players in global business. . . . The book will be a valuable reference to anthropologists interested in education and business culture."
— Anthropology Book Forum

"Andrew Orta offers an important addition to the anthropological study of neoliberalism by doing an ethnography of one of the bellies of the beast, MBA programs. He persuasively shows how business schools teach their students to deal with culture in ways that are both patterned and reductive. Finally anthropologists have a thoughtful and enormously productive lens on how neoliberalism reproduces its logics by distorting a classic anthropological concept—culture." —Ilana Gershon, author of Down and Out in the New Economy: How People Find (or Don't Find) Work Today

"Andrew Orta has found in the globalization of US MBA programs an extraordinary method for analyzing contemporary capitalism. The cultivation of risk, “good enough” cultural knowledge, horizons of difference, and the production of global managers emerge not only as features of the global economy. They are also the touchstones of the MBA’s personal identities. Orta offers a brilliant retelling of classic anthropological concerns in his transit of some of the freshest international venues for engaging the problem of culture, economy, and capital."—Rudi Colloredo-Mansfeld, coauthor of Fast, Easy, and in Cash: Artisan Hardship and Hope in the Global Economy

"In this book, which is at once an ethnography of MBA programs and an analysis of the culture of neoliberal capitalism, Andrew Orta brilliantly shows how professional education, which is explicitly imagined as ‘practical’ instead of ‘theoretical,’ is in fact deeply theoretical. The MBA curriculum, inculcating the ‘soft skills’ of contemporary business, produces students proficient in routines and rituals that both presuppose and bring to life the world of global business as a total social fact, including the cultural premises upon which it relies. In carefully managed study-abroad trips, MBA students sally forth to explore a global world of difference, but their interest is trained on differences that can be easily marketed—even as they are welcomed home, and onto the corporate job market, as intrepid global explorers." —Richard Handler, author of Critics against Culture: Anthropological Observers of Mass Societies

About the Book

About the Author

Table of Contents

Reviews