Corporate Memory: Historical Revisionism, Legitimation and the Invention of Tradition in a Multinational Mining Company

Political and Legal Anthropology Review

Volumn 37, Issue 2, 2014, Pages 259-280

  Rajak, Dinah ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF SUSSEX   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

Corporate capitalism; History; Memory; Mining; South Africa; Tradition

Indexed keywords

EID: 84910603499     PISSN: 10816976     EISSN: 15552934     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/plar.12074     Document Type: Article

References (68)

1. Anglo American 1997 Submission to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Johannesburg: Anglo American Corporation of South Africa Ltd.
2. Anglo American 2008 Report to Society 2008: Making a Difference. London: Anglo American PLC.
3. Bakan, Joel 2004 The Corporation. The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power. London: Free Press.
4. Benson, Peter 2014 Corporate Paternalism and the Problem of Harmful Products. PoLAR: Political and Legal Anthropology Reviw 37(2):218-230.
5. Benson, Peter, and Stuart Kirsch 2010 Corporate Oxymorons. Dialectical Anthropology 34(1):45-48.
6. Bream, Rebecca, and Alec Russell 2007 Upheaval at Anglo American as Patricians Leave the Stage. Financial Times August 10:9.
7. Cain, Peter, and Tony Hopkins 2001[1993] British Imperialism: 1688-1800. Toronto: Longman.
8. Carmody, Padraig 2002 Between Globalisation and (Post) Apartheid: The Political Economy of Restructuring in South Africa. Journal of Southern African Studies 28(2):255-275.
9. Cronin, Jon 2006 Let Business Lift Africa Out of Poverty. BBC News. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/5099990.stm, accessed July 9, 2014.
10. Dansereau, Suzanne 2005 Win-Win or New Imperialism? Public-Private Partnerships in Africa Mining. Review of African Political Economy 32(103):47-62.
11. Department of Minerals and Energy, South Africa 2004aBroad-based Socio-Economic Empowerment Charter for the South African Mining Industry. http://www.dmr.gov.za/publications/summary/24-mining-charter/571-gg-26661-miningcharter-13-aug-2004.html, accessed July 31, 2014.
12. Department of Minerals and Energy, South Africa 2004b Scorecard for the Broad Based Socio-Economic Empowerment Charter for the South African Mining Industry. http://www.dmr.gov.za/publications/summary/108-mining-charter-downloads/130-scorecard-mining-charter.html, accessed July 31, 2014.
13. Dolan, Catherine, and Rajak, Dinah 2011 Introduction. Theme Issue: Reigning Responsibilities: Ethnographies of Corporate Ethicizing. Focaal-Journal of Global and Historical Anthropology 60:3-8.
14. Epstein, Edward Jay 1982 The Diamond Invention. London: Hutchinson and Co.
15. Fassin, Didier 2007 When Bodies Remember. Experience and Politics of AIDS in South Africa. Berkeley: University of California Press.
16. Ferguson, James 1994 The Ant-Politics Machine: Development, Depoliticization and Bureaucratic Power in Lesotho. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
17. Fig, David 2005 Manufacturing Amnesia: Corporate Social Responsibility in South Africa. International Affairs 81(3):599-617.
18. Foster, Robert 2012 Big Men and Business: Morality, Debt and the Corporation. Social Anthropology 20(4):486-490.
19. Froud, Julie, Sukhdev Johal, Adam Leaver, and Karel Williams 2006 Financialization and Strategy: Narratives and Numbers. London: Routledge.
20. Gabriel, Yiannis 2000 Storytelling in Organizations: Facts, Fictions and Fantasies. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
21. Gardner, Katy 2012 Discordant Development. Global Capitalism and the Struggle for Connection in Bangladesh. London: Pluto Press.
22. Gregory, Theodor Emanuel 1962 Ernest Oppenheimer and the Economic Development of South Africa. Cape Town: Oxford University Press.
23. Herzfeld, Michael 2000 Uncanny Success. Some Closing Remarks. In Elites: Choice, Leadership and Succession. João de Pina-Cabral and Antonia Petrosa de Lima, eds. Pp. 227-237. Oxford: Berg.
24. Ho, Karen 2009 Liquidated. An Ethnography of Wall Street. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
25. Hocking, Anthony 1973 Oppenheimer and Son. Johannesburg: McGraw-Hill.
26. Hordes, Stanley M. 1986 Does He Who Pays the Piper Call the Tune? Historians, Ethics and the Community. Public Historian 8(Winter):53-56.
27. Innes, Duncan 1984 Anglo American and the Rise of Modern South Africa. New York: Monthly Review Press.
28. Jamieson, Bill 1990 Goldstrike! The Oppenheimer Empire in Crisis. London: Hutchinson Business Books.
29. Jessup, Ernest 1979 Ernest Oppenheimer: A Study in Power. London: Rex and Collings.
30. Johnson, R. W. 1998 Colonialism Returns to South Africa. New Statesman: 21.
31. Jones, Jim 2005 Getting More than Giving. Mail and Guardian, March 24: 19.
32. Jones, Geoffrey, and Tarun Khanna 2006 Bringing History (Back) into International Business. Journal of International Business Studies 37(4):453-468.
33. Kroeze, Ronald, and Sjoerd Keulen 2013 Leading a Multinational is History in Practice: The Use of Invented Traditions and Marratives at AkzoNobel, Shell, Philips and ABN AMRO. Business History 55(8):1265-1287.
34. Kuper, Adam 2009 Incest and Influence: The Private Lives of Bourgeois England. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
35. Lanning, Greg, and Marti Mueller 1979 Africa Undermined. Mining Companies and the Underdevelopment of Africa. Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin Books Ltd.
36. Lester, Alan, Etienne Louis Nel, and Tony Binns 2000 South Africa: Past, Present and Future: Gold at the End of the Rainbow? Edinburgh: Pearson Education Ltd.
37. Lipton, Merle 2007 Liberals, Marxists and Nationalists: Competing Interpretations of South African History. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan.
38. Lupton, Tom, and C. Shirley Wilson 1959 The Social Backgrounds and Connections of the Top Decision Makers. Manchester School 2:30-51.
39. Macalister, Terry 2005 I am an African. Interview: Nicky Oppenheimer, Chairman of De Beers. Guardian, July 2: 21.
40. Mamdani, Mahmood 1996 Citizen and Subject. Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of Late Colonialism. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
41. Marks, Shula, and Stanley Trapido 1987 The Politics of Race, Class and Nationalism in Twentieth Centruy South Africa. Harlow, UK: Longman.
42. Muehlebach, Andrea 2012 The Moral Neoliberal. Welfare and Citizenship in Italy. Chicago: Chicago University Press.
43. Nafus, Dawn, and Ken Anderson 2009 Writing on the Walls: The Materiality of Social Memory in Corporate Research. In Ethnography and the Corproate Encounter: Reflections on Research In and On Corporations. Melissa Cefkin, ed. Pp. 137-158. Oxford: Berghahn.
44. Nattrass, Jill 1988 The South African Economy: Its Growth and Change. Cape Town: Oxford University Press.
45. Nattrass, Nicoli 1999 The Truth and Reconciliation Commission on Business and Apartheid: A Critical Evaluation. African Affairs 98(392):373-391.
46. Neuhauser, Peg C. 1993 Corporate Storytelling: The Power of Storytelling as a Management Tool. New York: McGraw-Hill.
47. Oke, S. 1987 The Strike in Retrospect: The Lure of the Low Road. Johannesburg: Mathison and Hollidge.
48. O'Meara, Dan 1983 Volks-Kapitalisme Class, Capital and Ideology of Afrikaner Nationalism 1934-1948. Johannesburg: Ravans Press.
49. Oppenheimer, Nicholas 1979 Investment in South Africa Today and Tomorrow. Speech presented at Investment in 1980, at the Financial Mail Conference, Johannesburg, South Africa, November 9.
50. Packard, Randall. 1989 The "Healthy Reserve" and the "Dressed Native": Discourses on Black Health and the Language of Legitimation in South Africa. American Ethnologist.16(4):686-703.
51. Pallister, David, Sarah Stewart, and Ian Lepper 1987 South Africa Inc: The Oppenheimer Empire. Johannesburg: Media House Publications.
52. Perks, Rob 2010 "Corporations are People Too!" Business and Corporate Oral History. Oral History 38(1):36-54.
53. Rajak, Dinah 2011 In Good Company: An Anatomy of Corporate Social Responsibility. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press.
54. Ranger, Terence 1983 The Invention of Tradition in Colonial Africa. In The Invention of Tradition. Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, eds. Pp. 211-263. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
55. Relly, Gavin 1981 Reform and Reaction in South Africa. Speech presented to the South Africa Club. London, 8 October.
56. Relly, Gavin 1982 Forward. In Social Responsibility in South Africa: The Work of the Anglo American and De Beers Chairman's Fund. Supplement to Optima 31(1):iii-iv.
57. Relly, Gavin 1985 Address on the Occasion of the Graduation Ceremony of the University of Cape Town, June 28.
58. Robbins, David 2001 Anglo American's Corporate Social Investment in South Africa. Johannesburg: Anglo American Corporation of South Africa Ltd.
59. Rosaldo, Renato 1989 Imperialist Nostalgia. Representations 26:107-122.
60. Shever, Elana 2013 "I am a Petroleum Product": Making Kinship Work on the Patgonian Front. In Vital Relations: Modernity and the Persistent Life of Kinship. Susan McKinnon and Fenella Cannell, eds. Pp. 85-109. Santa Fe: School for Advanced Research Press.
61. Sunter, Clem 1987 The World and South Africa in the 1990s. Cape Town: Human and Rousseau Tafelburg.
62. Truth and Reconciliation Commission of South Africa 2003 Final Report. Cape Town: Juta.
63. Van Zanden, Jan L., Joost Jonker, Stephen Howarth, and Keetie Sluyterman 2007 A History of Royal Dutch Shell. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
64. Walkowitz, Daniel J. 1986 Corporate History, or Giving History the Business. In Presenting the Past: Essays on History and the Public. Susan Porter Benson, Stephen Brier, and Roy Rosenzweig, eds. Pp. 225-239. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.
65. Welker, Marina 2014 Enacting the Corporation. An American Mining Firm in Post-Authoritarian Indonesia. Berkeley: University of California Press.
66. Wolpe, Harold 1972 Capitalism and Cheap Labour Power in South Africa. Economy and Society 1(4):425-456.
67. Yanagisako, Sylvia Junko 2002 Producing Culture and Capital: Family Firms in Italy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
68. Yanagisako, Sylvia Junko 2013 Transnational Family Capitalism: Producing "Made in Italy" in China. In Vital Relations: Modernity and the Persistent Life of Kinship. Susan McKinnon and Fenella Cannell, eds. Pp. 85-109. Santa Fe, NM: School for Advanced Research Press.