Settling the Neoliberal Contradiction through Corporate Volunteering: Governing Employees in the Era of Cognitive Capitalism

《Settling the Neoliberal Contradiction through Corporate Volunteering: Governing Employees in the Era of Cognitive Capitalism》

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关键字: corporate volunteering, volunteering, corporate social responsibility (CSR), cognitive capitalism, multi-sited ethnography

作者单位: 1Department of Anthropology, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands;2Department of Sociology, Ghent University, Belgium

摘要: Corporations are increasingly interested in promoting corporate volunteering, and their efforts are aligned with supportive nonprofits and public policies. The article seeks to understand the reasons for this growing interest. It is based on insights from an ethnographic exploration of corporate volunteering activities in a transnational nonprofit that involves highly skilled corporate volunteers in its programs of entrepreneurship education. A multi-sited fieldwork was conducted in the organization’s program offices and its corporate partners in the United States, Belgium, and Israel. The analysis demonstrates how corporate volunteering conjoins various elements—ideological, interactionist, symbolic, and ethical—to maintain the creative engagement of highly skilled employees in cognitive capitalism. The article thus argues that the increasing interest in corporate volunteering emerges from a classwide rationality that extends beyond instrumental interests of particular corporations, as corporate volunteering constitutes a governmentality technique that molds employees’ subjectivities and maintains their wider commitment to capitalism.