Duke University Press Best Practice: Management Consulting and the Ethics of Financialization in China

In Best Practice Kimberly Chong provides an ethnography of a global management consultancy that has been hired by Chinese companies, including Chinese state-owned enterprises. She shows how consulting emerges as a crucial site for considering how corporate organization, employee performance, business ethics, and labor have been transformed under financialization. To date financialization has been examined using top-down approaches that portray the rise of finance as a new logic of economic accumulation. Best Practice, by contrast, focuses on the everyday practices and narratives through which companies become financialized. Effective management consultants, Chong finds, incorporate local workplace norms and assert their expertise in the particular terms of China's national project of modernization, while at the same time framing their work in terms of global “best practices.” Providing insight into how global management consultancies refashion Chinese state-owned enterprises in preparation for stock market flotation, Chong demonstrates both the dynamic, fragmented character of financialization and the ways in which Chinese state capitalism enables this process. Review "As anthropology looks more deeply into contemporary institutions, including businesses, NGOs, and public entities, contributions such as Chong's Best Practice are going to become increasingly important to the discipline.... Best Practice illuminates new issues and possibilities in the increasingly global regime."--Allen W. Batteau "American Anthropologist" (6/1/2021 12:00:00 AM) "In short, this ethnography is of groundbreaking value.... Any reader interested in the knowledge economy in contemporary China or anthropology of financialization in 21st century China is strongly encouraged to have a look at this book."--Jiangnan Li "Journal of International & Global Studies" (7/1/2020 12:00:00 AM) "Best Practice speaks to many of the themes that interest scholars of cultural economy.... Chong is an anthropologist skilled in being both close to, and critically distant, from the field. But this should not underestimate the emotional and intellectual effort that has gone into this powerful book, which is a treasure trove of insights for scholars of cultural economy."--Michael Power "Journal of Cultural Economy" (9/27/2020 12:00:00 AM) "The book should make for vital reading in graduate and undergraduate courses focusing on the anthropology of finance, cultural theories of value, ethical subject-making, and labor in post-Mao China." --Michael M. Prentice "PoLAR" (4/1/2020 12:00:00 AM) "Kimberly Chong's Best Practice o?ers a thought-provoking ethnography. . . . This book is an important addition to the rapidly expanding ?eld of business anthropology."--Tomoko Hamada "Anthropological Forum" (4/1/2020 12:00:00 AM) " Best Practice is an engaging ethnography based on immersive, multisited fieldwork, and is worth reading for anthropologists specializing in work, business, and capitalism, both inside and outside of China."--Xinyan Peng "Anthropology of Work Review" (7/1/2019 12:00:00 AM) "Based on rich, immersive fieldwork, this book allows for understanding the complex social processes whereby 'financialization' takes place, as a combination of multiple repertoires such as shareholder value, modernization, nationalism, culturalism, state capitalism and the teleologies of globalization they facilitate."--Horacio Ortiz "Asian Anthropology" (9/1/2019 12:00:00 AM) "In this well-written book, the author underscores for her readers how consultancy unfolds as a very crucial site for the consideration of the transformation, in China, of corporations as well as business ethics, employee performance and labor in general in the context of financialization."--Augustine Adu Frimpong and Noah Kankam Kwarteng "African and Asian Studies" (2/28/2019 12:00:00 AM) Review “Kimberly Chong provides a fascinating ethnography of the critical role that manageme