Social Anthropology

Transparency and legibility in international institutions

The UN Global Compact and post‐political global ethics

This article draws on the ethnographic study of a recurring anomaly: the ‘abnormal’ mortality of a highly valued species of mollusc grown in farms in the Natural Park of Ria Formosa, Southern Portugal, which has been variously construed as an environmental, social and economic problem, a technical puzzle, an administrative dilemma, as a persistent and multifarious controversy. It examines counting procedures used in lay inquiries and on the daily work on the farms to establish the nature and dimension of the mortality. The article analyses how the historical persistence of the ‘abnormal’ mortality is told, exhibited and made in and through these practices, and how the various parties to the controversy about its nature are identified and articulated therein. It considers, then, what social orders are implicated, that is, presupposed and constituted, in and by taking these counts into account.

What is an institution? We successively examine definitions provided by Durkheim, Mauss, Parsons, Goffman and Berger, and Luckman. Whilst anthropologists acknowledge that the stuff of human institutions is ‘the combination of modes of action with modes of thinking’, somehow they have seen the epitome of that embodied in the compulsory organisations of modern, state‐run, Western society. The paper argues for the abandonment of representational solutions, which operate with a Cartesian view of mind; sociocentric solutions, which view groupness as unitary and teleological; and individualist solutions that fail to see people as constituted in ontogeny through intersubjective attunement. Human sociality and human understanding must not be separated from the world, but persons do not pre‐exist intersubjective attunement and this operates through a process of triangulation between self, other and world where all elements are intrinsically involved.

Quantitative reporting plays an important role in modern corporate organisations and most particularly in financial institutions, where it has been argued that large‐scale statistical information has thoroughly replaced more local and qualitative forms of knowledge. Based on an ethnographic study of financial accounting procedures, this paper analyses how quantitative information is used by banking risk analysts, demonstrating that there is an inescapable qualitative dimension to every form of quantitative production, deeply related to particular techniques, expectations and interpretations that actors mobilise in order to make themselves at home with the numbers. The article also demonstrates that quantification does not just represent a means of reducing qualitative information to numbers and codes, but rather represents a means of converting information (be it qualitative or quantitative) into ever‐changing standards and conventions in an organisational environment marked by growing concerns over issues of accountability, governance and transparency.

In this article, I argue that in order to maintain some organisational uniformity the Portuguese police institution must ensure a high level of individual mobility – that is, a professional community all over the country. Based on in‐depth fieldwork in Portuguese police stations, I treat police bureaucracy not only as an institution with fixed boundaries but also, and simultaneously, as a unit continuously sustained by broader environments and the officers’ own domestic rationales.

Institutions frame social life, yet the power to institute is unequally distributed among social positions. Based on ethnographic fieldwork on the daily struggles undertaken by workers, engineers and management at a glass containers plant over the (de‐)institution of production complexity, this article provides a discussion of the processes and conditions that co‐shape each agent's ability to fully institute – i.e. to enforce as public and formally recognised – a production‐related idea or rule across the factory's uneven social fabric. It is argued that ambiguous, inequality‐driven under‐instituting processes may occur and perform key roles in complex, hierarchical production organisations.

Over the last three decades, scientists at research universities have responded in a wide variety of ways to the pressures of academic capitalism. Institutional research has under theorised this trend by assuming entrepreneurialism passively follows formal organisational change. In contrast, I treat academic capitalism not as but as a complex field characterised by contested knowledge production. An increased emphasis on knowledge capitalisation does not necessarily displace traditional academic values, although it may, but it has facilitated the diffusion of conceptual vocabularies that are retooling scientific culture and practice at the centre and margins. These vocabularies are (1) market‐oriented entrepreneurialism, (2) external consulting work, (3) consumer‐oriented research, and (4) interdisciplinarity. Their impact is diffuse across units, but involves processes of group and individual adoption, adaptation or resistance, as the case may be. Their local flavour varies by research domain, level and type of university embeddedness, and epistemic identity.

Notes and queries, inspired by a reading of ‘The new tools of the science trade…’