Making Global MBAs: The Culture of Business and the Business of Culture

Product Description

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.
 

Review

"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."
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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."
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American Anthropologist



"A sweeping vision that sees the MBA as underpinning the current era of globalization and business development. . . . Recommended."
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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."
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Anthropology Book Forum
From the Inside Flap

"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 diffe