Making the Corporation, and its Critics Mining Capitalism: The Relationships between Corporations and Their Critics

In 1940, Max Gluckman wrote a celebrated account of the ceremonial opening of a bridge in Zululand. In it, Gluckman captures the fissures and convergences between a multiplicity of actors – from policemen and tribal headmen, engineers and mine laborers, to trade unionists and magistrates – brought under a colonial “social situation”. Seventy-five years later, Marina Welker’s Enacting the Corporation and Stuart Kirsch’s Mining Capitalism similarly describe the increasingly salient communities that have sprung up alongside – or in fierce opposition to – mining corporations across the world. Albeit with different results, each book seeks to examine how corporate boundaries and their mechanisms of governance are shored up or undermined, focusing respectively on the Indonesia operation of Newmont Mining Corporation and the fate of BHP’s gold and copper mine of Ok Tedi in Papua New Guinea.