Global health discourse that either underinforms or misinforms its audience is "global health non... more Global health discourse that either underinforms or misinforms its audience is "global health nonsense." Such nonsense is widespread, and jeopardises improvement in global health governance, argue Stein, Storeng, and de Bengy Puyvallée KEY MESSAGES • Spin, hyperbole, meaningless buzzwords, and technocratic jargon have become increasingly common in global health discourse. They are part of a broader phenomenon labelled "global health nonsense" • Three main forms of global health nonsense are obfuscation, misrepresentation, and omission of relevant information • Global health nonsense must be called out, because it stifles collective efforts to understand, critically assess, and improve global health governance
After the 2014 Ebola outbreak, the World Bank committed to providing a financial mechanism to sup... more After the 2014 Ebola outbreak, the World Bank committed to providing a financial mechanism to support global pandemic preparedness. In line with its mandate of creating new markets, the bank is proposing an insurance arrangement that does not simply pool donor money but creates a market for private sector investment. We outline the bank’s efforts to do so through the Pandemic Emergency Financing Facility (PEF). We then analyse some potential benefits and wider concerns about private sector involvement in global health.
Recent studies of capitalist modernity have defined one of its attributes as the acceleration of ... more Recent studies of capitalist modernity have defined one of its attributes as the acceleration of social life. This article provides ethnographic insight into one of the drivers of this acceleration by describing the labor of management consultants as speeding up corporate activity. Since speed is hard to sell directly, management consultants foster an intense temporality in the people they work with, one that highlights the temporal nature of all things and stresses temporal finitude. As part of selling speed, consultants need to develop this temporality themselves. The resulting alienation stems not only from temporal incongruities but also from feelings of being trapped in time, as well as blindness to the long-lasting and the potentially infinite aspects of human existence.
Which research trends promise to make the anthropology of states and markets particularly interes... more Which research trends promise to make the anthropology of states and markets particularly interesting during the years to come? What do these trends tell us about the nature of economic anthropology at a time when more and more of our scholarship is conducted within bureaucracies rather than local communities? In this chapter I attempt to answer both of these questions. I begin with a brief sketch of insights that result from treating states and markets as essentially different, albeit related, entities, drawing especially on recent work on the nature of neoliberal-ism and global inequality. The bulk of this chapter, however, will focus on those aspects of state and market institutions that show them to be largely collaborative, similar social formations. In doing so, I mean to suggest that future anthropologi-cal research should be more explicitly concerned with aspects that cut across the state-market division, including the study of financialisation and ritual. For each of the themes explored here, the methodological message is the same: economic anthropologists should continue their concern for disenfranchised social groups, continue to carry out research marked by long-term physical engagement and continue to develop concepts that can be applied across differences of time and space. This will allow us to provide analyses of states and markets that promise to be both distinctive to our discipline and relevant for society at large. States and markets as different entities For more than a decade, anthropologists approaching states and markets as fundamentally different have tended to describe their relationship with reference to neoliberalism. Drawing on a recent review by Tejaswini Ganti (2014: 91), we can distinguish at least four different meanings of neoliberalism. Firstly, it refers to a model of development with specific roles for labour, capital and the state, and since capital tends to be privileged in this model some have described neoliberalism as a class-based project (Harvey 2005). Secondly, the term denotes historically-situated economic policies including fiscal prudence, the privatisation of state-owned enterprises, trade liberalisation, precarious work regimes and privileging lenders over borrowers in times of debt default. Thirdly, it refers to treating notions linked to market exchange as central to interpreting and evaluating human action. Lastly, it denotes a mode of governance that fosters market-based values such
Background During the first year and a half of the COVID-19 pandemic, COVAX has been the world’s ... more Background During the first year and a half of the COVID-19 pandemic, COVAX has been the world’s most prominent effort to ensure equitable access to SARS-CoV-2 vaccines. Launched as part of the Access to COVID-19 Tools Accelerator (Act-A) in June 2020, COVAX suggested to serve as a vaccine buyers’ and distribution club for countries around the world. It also aimed to support the pharmaceutical industry in speeding up and broadening vaccine development. While COVAX has recently come under critique for failing to bring about global vaccine equity, influential politicians and public health advocates insist that future iterations of it will improve pandemic preparedness. So far COVAX’s role in the ongoing financialization of global health, i.e. in the rise of financial concepts, motives, practices and institutions has not been analyzed. Methods This article describes and critically assesses COVAX’s financial logics, i.e. the concepts, arguments and financing flows on which COVAX relies....
This article investigates how commodification operates with reference to expertise, rather than m... more This article investigates how commodification operates with reference to expertise, rather than material objects. By drawing on the work of German management consultants, it highlights three forms of ignorance that arise as part of commodifying expertise. These are here described as ignorance due to profit, ignorance due to rhetoric and ignorance due to strong assumptions. These forms of ignorance render invisible the wider socio-economic effects of consulting, hide the degree to which corporate representations may not reflect the world they purport to describe, and postulate specific yet highly skewed understandings of freedom regarding human subjects. Taken together, they point out that a distinguishing feature of the commodification of expertise, vis-à-vis that of material objects, is that it provides greater scope for the creation and use of ignorance, as it blurs the boundaries between commodity and context.
In the nearly half century since it began lending for population projects, the World Bank has bec... more In the nearly half century since it began lending for population projects, the World Bank has become one of the largest financiers of global health projects and programs, a powerful voice in shaping health agendas in global governance spaces, and a mass producer of evidentiary knowledge for its preferred global health interventions. How can social scientists interrogate the role of the World Bank in shaping ‘global health’ in the current era?
Global health discourse that either underinforms or misinforms its audience is "global health non... more Global health discourse that either underinforms or misinforms its audience is "global health nonsense." Such nonsense is widespread, and jeopardises improvement in global health governance, argue Stein, Storeng, and de Bengy Puyvallée KEY MESSAGES • Spin, hyperbole, meaningless buzzwords, and technocratic jargon have become increasingly common in global health discourse. They are part of a broader phenomenon labelled "global health nonsense" • Three main forms of global health nonsense are obfuscation, misrepresentation, and omission of relevant information • Global health nonsense must be called out, because it stifles collective efforts to understand, critically assess, and improve global health governance
After the 2014 Ebola outbreak, the World Bank committed to providing a financial mechanism to sup... more After the 2014 Ebola outbreak, the World Bank committed to providing a financial mechanism to support global pandemic preparedness. In line with its mandate of creating new markets, the bank is proposing an insurance arrangement that does not simply pool donor money but creates a market for private sector investment. We outline the bank’s efforts to do so through the Pandemic Emergency Financing Facility (PEF). We then analyse some potential benefits and wider concerns about private sector involvement in global health.
Recent studies of capitalist modernity have defined one of its attributes as the acceleration of ... more Recent studies of capitalist modernity have defined one of its attributes as the acceleration of social life. This article provides ethnographic insight into one of the drivers of this acceleration by describing the labor of management consultants as speeding up corporate activity. Since speed is hard to sell directly, management consultants foster an intense temporality in the people they work with, one that highlights the temporal nature of all things and stresses temporal finitude. As part of selling speed, consultants need to develop this temporality themselves. The resulting alienation stems not only from temporal incongruities but also from feelings of being trapped in time, as well as blindness to the long-lasting and the potentially infinite aspects of human existence.
Which research trends promise to make the anthropology of states and markets particularly interes... more Which research trends promise to make the anthropology of states and markets particularly interesting during the years to come? What do these trends tell us about the nature of economic anthropology at a time when more and more of our scholarship is conducted within bureaucracies rather than local communities? In this chapter I attempt to answer both of these questions. I begin with a brief sketch of insights that result from treating states and markets as essentially different, albeit related, entities, drawing especially on recent work on the nature of neoliberal-ism and global inequality. The bulk of this chapter, however, will focus on those aspects of state and market institutions that show them to be largely collaborative, similar social formations. In doing so, I mean to suggest that future anthropologi-cal research should be more explicitly concerned with aspects that cut across the state-market division, including the study of financialisation and ritual. For each of the themes explored here, the methodological message is the same: economic anthropologists should continue their concern for disenfranchised social groups, continue to carry out research marked by long-term physical engagement and continue to develop concepts that can be applied across differences of time and space. This will allow us to provide analyses of states and markets that promise to be both distinctive to our discipline and relevant for society at large. States and markets as different entities For more than a decade, anthropologists approaching states and markets as fundamentally different have tended to describe their relationship with reference to neoliberalism. Drawing on a recent review by Tejaswini Ganti (2014: 91), we can distinguish at least four different meanings of neoliberalism. Firstly, it refers to a model of development with specific roles for labour, capital and the state, and since capital tends to be privileged in this model some have described neoliberalism as a class-based project (Harvey 2005). Secondly, the term denotes historically-situated economic policies including fiscal prudence, the privatisation of state-owned enterprises, trade liberalisation, precarious work regimes and privileging lenders over borrowers in times of debt default. Thirdly, it refers to treating notions linked to market exchange as central to interpreting and evaluating human action. Lastly, it denotes a mode of governance that fosters market-based values such
Background During the first year and a half of the COVID-19 pandemic, COVAX has been the world’s ... more Background During the first year and a half of the COVID-19 pandemic, COVAX has been the world’s most prominent effort to ensure equitable access to SARS-CoV-2 vaccines. Launched as part of the Access to COVID-19 Tools Accelerator (Act-A) in June 2020, COVAX suggested to serve as a vaccine buyers’ and distribution club for countries around the world. It also aimed to support the pharmaceutical industry in speeding up and broadening vaccine development. While COVAX has recently come under critique for failing to bring about global vaccine equity, influential politicians and public health advocates insist that future iterations of it will improve pandemic preparedness. So far COVAX’s role in the ongoing financialization of global health, i.e. in the rise of financial concepts, motives, practices and institutions has not been analyzed. Methods This article describes and critically assesses COVAX’s financial logics, i.e. the concepts, arguments and financing flows on which COVAX relies....
This article investigates how commodification operates with reference to expertise, rather than m... more This article investigates how commodification operates with reference to expertise, rather than material objects. By drawing on the work of German management consultants, it highlights three forms of ignorance that arise as part of commodifying expertise. These are here described as ignorance due to profit, ignorance due to rhetoric and ignorance due to strong assumptions. These forms of ignorance render invisible the wider socio-economic effects of consulting, hide the degree to which corporate representations may not reflect the world they purport to describe, and postulate specific yet highly skewed understandings of freedom regarding human subjects. Taken together, they point out that a distinguishing feature of the commodification of expertise, vis-à-vis that of material objects, is that it provides greater scope for the creation and use of ignorance, as it blurs the boundaries between commodity and context.
In the nearly half century since it began lending for population projects, the World Bank has bec... more In the nearly half century since it began lending for population projects, the World Bank has become one of the largest financiers of global health projects and programs, a powerful voice in shaping health agendas in global governance spaces, and a mass producer of evidentiary knowledge for its preferred global health interventions. How can social scientists interrogate the role of the World Bank in shaping ‘global health’ in the current era?
The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Anthropology is a free and open access teaching and learning resour... more The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Anthropology is a free and open access teaching and learning resource hosted at the University of Cambridge. Its goal is to facilitate access to anthropological knowledge for experts and non-experts worldwide. You can find it at www.anthroencyclopedia.com
Work, Sleep, Repeat is a fascinating account of the work regime of German management consultants.... more Work, Sleep, Repeat is a fascinating account of the work regime of German management consultants. Examining one of the most sought-after – and secretive – graduate professions, the book provides a first-hand account of the boardroom culture of Europe's strongest economy.
Analyzing how knowledge and power operate in this sector, the book explores a number of paradoxes. For example, while it is the job of management consultants to analyse the activities of other employees, they actually spend most of their time in luxurious seclusion away from them. In addition, despite having a strong sense of the importance of their work, consultants often find it difficult to explain to outsiders what it is they do.
The book addresses these and other paradoxes by arguing that consultants are engaged in abstract labour. Anthropologists have long struggled with the question of how to describe contemporary work regimes which do not produce anything tangible. Stein demonstrates that elite work is predominantly abstract, in the fourfold sense that it is epistemically removed from the object of analysis, emotionally detached from it, several steps away from the assumed sources of economic value creation, and increasingly hard to grasp. In doing so, he offers new ways to think about white collar work and elites in the 21st century and establishes the notion of 'abstract labour' as a key category in social anthropology.
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Papers by Felix Stein
Analyzing how knowledge and power operate in this sector, the book explores a number of paradoxes. For example, while it is the job of management consultants to analyse the activities of other employees, they actually spend most of their time in luxurious seclusion away from them. In addition, despite having a strong sense of the importance of their work, consultants often find it difficult to explain to outsiders what it is they do.
The book addresses these and other paradoxes by arguing that consultants are engaged in abstract labour. Anthropologists have long struggled with the question of how to describe contemporary work regimes which do not produce anything tangible. Stein demonstrates that elite work is predominantly abstract, in the fourfold sense that it is epistemically removed from the object of analysis, emotionally detached from it, several steps away from the assumed sources of economic value creation, and increasingly hard to grasp. In doing so, he offers new ways to think about white collar work and elites in the 21st century and establishes the notion of 'abstract labour' as a key category in social anthropology.