Expectations of paternalism: welfare, corporate responsibility and HIV at South Africa’s mines

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[Review] Roger Southall and Henning Melber, ed. (2009) A new scramble for Africa? Imperialism, investment and development

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Ethnographies of Extraction: Anthropology, corporate social responsibility and the resource curse

FORUM: ANTHROPOLOGY OF OIL AND THE RESOURCE CURS

Introduction: Labour, insecurity and violence in South Africa

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Hope and betrayal on the platinum belt: responsibility, violence and corporate power in South Africa

This article considers the resurgence in state-backed violence against mineworkers in South Africa, which reached its apogee at the Marikana platinum mines in August 2012, in relation to the rise of corporate social responsibility (CSR) within the post-revolutionary political economy. I explore a paradox of CSR, which has emerged more strongly than ever in the wake of Marikana, whereby mining companies have been able to use CSR to dispense with (rather than fulfil) their social obligations and to externalise (rather than address) their social impact. Operating within an old-school logic of paternalism and benevolence, the practice of CSR is at odds with the discourse of empowerment, upward mobility and worker autonomy that modern mining companies claim to foster. Marikana shows us how CSR paradoxically serves as a resource that empowers companies (in response to their critics and claimants) rather than its intended beneficiaries

Waiting for a deus ex machina: ‘sustainable extractives’ in a 2°C world

In recent years the oil industry has shifted from climate change denialism to advocacy of the Paris Agreement, championing sustainability in an apparent assertion (rather than rejection) of corporate responsibility. Meanwhile growth forecasts continue unabated to finance the industry’s enthusiasm for upstream ventures in uncharted territories. How do extractive companies, and those who work in them, square this contradiction? Fieldwork among oil company executives points to a new wave of techno-optimism: a deus ex machina that will descend from the labs of corporate research and development (R&D) labs to reconcile these irreconcilable imperatives. Rather than denial, the projection of win-win synergies between growth and sustainability involves a suspension of disbelief; an instrumental faith in the miraculous power of technology that tenders salvation without forsaking fossil fuels, or restructuring markets

Readiness, Resilience and the Ripple Effect: Women-owned enterprise in Kenya and the Promise of Global Inclusion

This article interrogates the promise of inclusive markets as the vehicle of gender empowerment empirically through a case study of a small women-owned enterprise in Nairobi on its journey to inclusion in one of the world’s largest corporate supply chains as part of their empowerment through enterprise initiative. Chronicling the efforts of women entrepreneurs to meet the stringent imperatives of a global retailer and be made ‘ready’ for inclusion in the global marketplace, the article reveals how this conversion to global supplier leaves small enterprises in Africa leveraged and dependent rather than secure and autonomous. The inclusive market becomes a vehicle of unfulfilled aspiration and opportunity foreclosed that falls short of its inclusionary ideals

Aspiring minds: "A generation of entrepreneurs in the making"

This article examines how corporate, state and donor interests have converged in attempts to craft South Africa’s youngsters into an army of entrepreneurs as the last frontier for creating growth in a post-job world. We investigate the apparatus designed to engineer this entrepreneurial revolution and the actors hoping to seed enterprising aspirations in school-age kids. Our ethnographic findings show that while the ideology of entrepreneurial education enrols kids in anticipation of an entrepreneurial future, it falls short of both its enticing promise and its transformative intentions. As enterprise education fails to deliver on the New South African Dream, we argue, the aspirations it propagates withers, generating disaffection rather than a generation of entrepreneurial subjects faithful to the neoliberal creed of making it on your own

Platinum City and the New South African Dream

Much has been written about the persistence of economic apartheid inscribed on the geography of South Africa’s cities. This has intensified fragmentation, producing spatial configurations that are at once reminiscent of the old order of segregation, and simultaneously embody the particular inequities and divisions of the new neoliberal order (Turok 2001, Harrison 2006). Through an ethnographic study of Rustenburg, the urban hub of South Africa’s platinum belt, (once labelled the ‘fastest growing city in Africa’ after Cairo) I explore how the failure of urban integration maps onto the failure of the promise of market inclusion. What is particular about mid-range towns such as Rustenburg, is that the opportunities of ‘empowerment through enterprise’ are seen, or believed to be, all the more attainable than in large cities. Here the extended supply chains of the mining industry and the expanding secondary economy appear to offer limitless possibilities to share in the boons of the platinum boom. Yet as the account below shows, the disjuncture (and friction) between corporate authority and local government, has given rise to increasing fragmentation and exclusion, as only a very few are able to grasp the long-anticipated rewards of the new South African dream