Creating and dissolving social groups from New Guinea to New York: on the overheating of bounded corporate entities in contemporary global capitalism.
Adam Leaver Manchester Business School
Keir Martin University of Oslo
Introduction.
The emergence and global spread of the corporation as a social entity has been one of the major motors for social changes in the past 150 years of world history.
Micklethwait and Wooldridge, for example, in their 2003 book, The Company, argue that the establishment of the corporate form in the latter half of the nineteenth century was the basis for the explosion of economic productivity and the spread of global capitalism that has characterized the period since. The evidence from PNG and similar examples from other parts of the postcolonial world in recent decades might lead us to believe that the intensification of commodity exchange and capital accumulation leads inherently to the global replication of this trend for the creation of ever bigger and more fixed and stable group-entities, as the corporate form distributes itself across the world, alongside other products originating in industrial capitalism’s original Western heartlands, such as coke bottles and David Beckham T-shirts. But this would only be half the story. Simultaneous with these trends, the overheating of contemporary globalized capitalism has also led to a situation in which the corporate form established as, ‘the basic unit of modern society’ (Mickelthwait and Wooldridge), is often no longer able to hold the flows of debt and exchange obligation in a relatively fixed and stable form as was its original intended justification. In this paper, we explore what anthropological perspectives on the nature of social groups might tell us about the emergence and dissolution of corporations as particular kinds of social entities. We take this as the basis for an exploration of three case-studies that illustrate the ways in which changes in the nature of debt have led to an overheating of a tension between fixity and fluidity in the corporate form, a consequent greater inability of the corporate form to hold shifting obligations in a relatively fixed state for the purposes of investment and accumulation, and an intensification of contests over the performative power of naming practices to fix the limits of obligation and the consequent boundaries of the social group-entity. In particular, we argue that in contrast to an expectation that capitalist modernity involves a relentless speeding up of time, that the corporation, as the major social entity associated with its spread, can be seen as a mechanism whose (not always successful) aim is to freeze or slow down the pace at which social entities can be brought in and out of being.
What is a social group?
Understanding the origins and effects of different kinds of social groups has been central to the anthropological project from its inception. Throughout much of the twentieth century groups such as kinship lineages were seen as the basis of non-Western life and posited as the alternative to such institutions as the state, courts or corporations as the basis for the organisation of society by writers across the theoretical range from functionalists to Marxists. In the final quarter of the century the functions, origins and even the existence of such groups were increasingly thrown into question however. In Melanesia in particular, the importation of social group models based upon African lineage groupings was subjected to a critique that led to a general questioning of the epistemological status of ‘social groups’ in anthropological theory. In particular Wagner’s (1974) paper, Are there Social Groups in the New Guinea Highlands?, opened up a tradition that tended to argue that the assumption of entities called ‘social groups’ as the basis for organising social life was a particularly Western way of viewing and organising social relations that, Westerners, such as colonial patrol officers and anthropologists, ‘felt a strong obligation to discover’ (Wagner 1974:112), and hence tended to impose upon non-Western people who did not necessarily share that starting point[1]. Wagner’s insight has been built upon by other anthropologists in the region, many of whom have tended to nuance Wagner’s stark contrast between a Western belief in fixed social groups that precede naming and Melanesian naming practices that elicit temporary collections of persons that tend to be misapprehended by Westerners as fixed social groups[2]. The shift from an assumption of entities called social groups as the foundation of social life to an assumption that the main work of ethnographic analysis in Melanesia is the study of their elicitation or constitution is well summarised by Merlan and Rumsey’s (1991:40-1) claim that,
“Groups” in general, and “corporate” ones in particular, should not be
taken as preconstituted entities, but as contested ones, which are more or less problematically instantiated or reproduced in social action . . .
Under Western Eyes? Nation states and corporations as perspectives for the freezing of time.
For all its undoubted influence, Wagner’s depiction of Melanesia as a place where social groups did not exist as entities pre-existing the naming relations that elicited them seemed potentially to implicitly assume that such groups or group-entities might really exist in such a manner in the ‘West’. Yet as scholarship in the years since Wagner’s (1974:103) paper has emphasised, ‘[n]ations, societies and groups’ as, ‘the social form or manifestation of the reliance on order, organization and consistency that pervades our whole approach to collective doing and understanding…’ are just as much,
hard won social constructions, which, if they are to exist at all, must exist at least in part as more or less contested “representations” ’ (Merlan and Rumsey 1991:56),
in the ‘Western’ world as they might be in New Guinea or anywhere else. Anderson (1983) detailed the way in which nations had to be carefully constructed as and indeed elicited as ‘imagined communities’ by the careful construction of perspectives from which such collectivities came to appear as natural. Likewise the sovereign power often vested in nation-states that was frequently a major foundation for the construction of such imagined community has also come under similar critical scrutiny, with scholars exploring how this group-entity has to be carefully and painstakingly constructed globally (e.g. Benton 2010, Lombard 2012, Hansen and Stepputat 2005, Martin 2014a) and in Melanesia in particular (e.g. Rutherford 2012).
Likewise, the most powerful economic group-entities in the (Western) world, namely corporations, are also elicited from a mass of potential relations by creating a legal perspective from which certain potential relations are recognized and others are discounted, most crucially relations of potential debt obligation whose limitations are at the heart of the construction of the corporation as a collective person in US and UK law, both globally (e.g. Martin 2012, 2014b), and in Melanesia in particular (e.g. Golub 2014). Wagner explains how the use of the word ‘Para’ draws particular distinctions and thus evokes or even calls into being a particular set of collectivity at a particular moment rather than describing a pre-existing social entity,. Similarly, we might argue, particular linguistic performances (whether spoken in court or written in legal documents) draw particular distinctions and evoke a collective entity called ‘Rio Tinto Zinc’ (or whatever) at a particular moment. Western social groups and group-entities are just as much performatively constituted effects of particular social perspectives as their Melanesian counterparts.
If there is a difference between the elicitation of a ‘Para’ and a ‘Rio Tinto’ it lies in the degree of permanence that the elicitation is designed to create. The legal elicitation of corporations and nation states is intended to create a group with a degree of longevity that will the basis upon which future relations and transactions can be organized and conducted, whereas ‘Para’, in Wagner’s description is momentary. The main difference then is the amount of time that the naming is intended to fix the boundaries of the group for. We are familiar with the idea that capitalist modernity involves a dizzying speeding up of temporal rhythms. Indeed time is one of the things that we might consider to have become increasingly heated up in global capitalism and increasingly ‘overheated’ by the global intensification of capitalist commodity circulation over the past quarter of a century. But this overheated speeded up time when viewed from one perspective can be viewed as a freezing or slowing down of time when viewed from others. When it comes to the ways in which names call collectivities into being, Daribi time operates at a dizzying pace, with the same name constantly calling ever changing shifting collectivities in and out of being, whereas the time rhythm of capitalist modernity is deliberately slowed and frozen with legal mechanisms being manipulated in order to freeze a particular moment of elicitation into a perspective that allows the social form thus created to act as the basis for particular kinds of social action. Indeed the slowing of time when viewed from this perspective is one of the bases upon which the speeding up of time is conducted, as the nation states and corporations whose longevity is enabled by this freezing of elicitation act as the basis for the commonly noted experience of the ever intensifying speeding up of capitalist modernity. The speeding up of time is not therefore a one way process but relies precisely upon the slowing down of time in other contexts or when viewed from other perspectives and capitalist modernity therefore slows down time as much as it speeds it up although this aspect is less widely noticed or commented upon. Hence a temporally rapid coming in and out of being of collectivities in the moment is the flipside of what might appear to be the slow, relaxed and repetitive way of life of the Daribi, as described by Wagner, whilst the temporally slow freezing of the elicitation of particular social or corporate entities is the flipside of the bewilderingly rapid way of life that is often said to characterize capitalist modernity.
Here time rhythms are revealed to be at the heart of capitalist modernity much as Thompson (1967) observes to be the case in a different context. The difference is that the time-discipline described by Thompson is something imposed by the capitalist class upon the working class as a central part of the process by which the latter are forged out of pre-capitalist artisan labour into a working class capable of meeting the needs of capital accumulation in a system of industrial production. The time-regularization described here is one in that is organized by entrepreneurs and lawyers in order to construct the entities that conduct capitalist enterprises and transactions (including the imposition of Thompson’s version of time-discipline upon those whose labour they purchase).
Even this distinction between elicitations that are allowed to come and go and those that are deliberately frozen is not best described as a Western/Melanesian contrast however. Temporary elicitations of the kind described by Wagner happen all the time in Western Europe, as anyone who has observed the processes of in and out groups being formed amongst high school students for example could testify to. More to the point, despite their degree of fixity relative to more momentary elicitations such as ‘Para’, corporations go out of being or change their boundaries subject to new legal-linguistic performances subsequent to their initial incorporation, such as mergers, divestments or winding up proceedings. Social life inherently entails moves in both directions- towards greater fixity and greater fluidity of social forms, whether in New Guinea or in New York. The condition of overheated 21st century global capitalism can be read at least in part as one in which these necessarily complimentary double movements, in which the creation of fixity at one point presupposes and encourages fluidity at others and vice versa, now oscillate at such a speed that they increasingly remove solid ground from which people can thrive and act in the world.
There are social groups in the New Guinea Highlands.
Ever since Wagner, Papua New Guinea has provided the basis for a body of anthropological work that has stressed the relative fluidity of social forms as an ideal type basis for Melanesian sociality in opposition to an ideal type fixity of forms that are described as forming the basis for Western ‘society’. Yet simultaneously with this narrative that could be characterized as attempting to itself freeze time in order to keep ideal type Melanesia intact as the basis for a particular type of Western anthropological thought experiment (cf. Fabian 1983), another narrative emerged that stressed the ways in which this different kinds of actors attempted to introduce greater social fixity in a variety of different contexts. Filer (2007:139) for example, describes what he refers to as, ‘Melanesian heavy industry’ as being a, ‘creature with four legs’; oil/gas, mining, logging and oil palm. Although the dynamics differ in all four industries, they tend to involve a move towards the creation of more stable fixed groups that are able to negotiate the relationship between locals who become reconfigured as members of groups and outside interests who are interested in extracting or developing resources from or on their land (e.g. Filer 2014:77). Much of the impetus for this comes from relatively powerful actors who are perceived as being external in origin, such as the state that encourages the creation of such groups through legislation such as the 1996 Land Act (ibid) or multinational corporations who want to have clearly defined groups of people to negotiate and deal with. However, as Filer (2007:142) observes, although the process of group ‘incorporation’ is pushed heavily by the nation-state of Papua New Guinea and by industries, it is also a process in which local people themselves take a leading role in order to secure particular positions within global flows of wealth. Hence,
[i]f nowadays we find a cult of incorporation amongst the Landowners
themselves, this suggests that the ideology of landownership is not the property of any one party to the social relations of resource compensation, but is a form of the relationship itself. (Filer 2007:165).
This process can be clearly seen in legal moves to create incorporated land groups (ILGs) under the provisions of various land and forestry acts since the 1970s in response to the threats and opportunities presented by large scale resource extraction. The moments at which groups are brought into being through legal ritual sometimes attract great attention. One report mentions 25 000 people attending the official unveiling of a certificate of group incorporation in an area of the Eastern Highlands where it was thought that oil had been discovered (Post Courier 27.01.2005). But the process of introducing increasing fixity to social relations so that entities that look more and more like groups emerge in response to perceived economic opportunities goes beyond official land group incorporation and has been observed now for several decades. In the 1990s, observers such as Jorgenson (1997) detail a process described by Ernst (1999) as ‘entification’; namely how shifting social collectivities rapidly became re-described as fixed social units in response to the hope of royalty payments from predicted resource extraction projects as potential beneficiaries attempted to limit potential overlapping claims. The process was one in which people,
who were familiar with government notions of landholding, began talking of traditional cognatic descent categories (tenum miit) as “clans”, complete with patrilineal descent’ (Jorgenson1997:611).
Likewise Filer (2007:160-166) describes how rapidly the idea of a clan as a fixed social group has been adopted by many Papua New Guineans in the past two decades, as part of a process in which entities such as ILGs are created out of flexible contextually elicited social groups which are then retrospectively re-envisioned as fixed social groups that become seen as the basis for the incorporated groups that they themselves are in fact modeled upon. Less dramatically but equally significantly, the few areas of PNG where local people have a long history of making significant money from cash cropping on their own customary land have seen moves towards a greater fixity in the boundaries of clans that begin to look a little bit more like the social groups that Wagner warned us against taking for granted. The Gazelle Peninsula of East New Britain Province for example has one of the lowest number of legally registered ILGs in the country, but nonetheless has a long history of a process of gradually increasing fixity in social relations that make those relations look more ‘groupy’, as Wagner (1974:101) might have it (see Martin 2013:30-99).
What is clear is that recent years have seen a rapid acceleration and overheating of this previously gradual tendency. For example Filer (2014:77) claims that between 2003 and 2011, when the PNG government called a temporary halt to the process, fully 11% of PNG’s customary land was subject to de facto alienation through the issuance of ‘Special Agricultural and Business Leases’ (SABLs) in the forestry sector alone. Given that 97% of PNGs land surface is commonly (if perhaps inaccurately) reckoned to be customary this amounts to at least 10% of the land surface of PNG and this does not take into account land also subject to de facto alienation by virtue of other legal mechanisms in oil, gas and mineral mining, this is a significant trend, with 80% of this alienation occurring in the two years before the government called a halt to proceedings. These processes and others like them rely upon the legal incorporation of groups and it is no accident that this process has been subjected to an almost unimaginable overheating in the recent years. Between the passage of the Land Groups Incorporation Act in 1974 and 1992 only eight groups had been established in the entire country. By 1995 this had risen to 700, and by 2014, Filer (2014:84) estimates somewhere in the region of 18 000.