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Selling Speed: Management Consultants, Acceleration, and Temporal Angst
Author(s) -
Stein Felix
Publication year - 2018
Publication title -
polar: political and legal anthropology review
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.529
H-Index - 27
eISSN - 1555-2934
pISSN - 1081-6976
DOI - 10.1111/plar.12256
Subject(s) - temporality , modernity , alienation , acceleration , feeling , sociology , ethnography , aesthetics , blindness , postmodernism , work (physics) , epistemology , psychology , social psychology , political science , engineering , art , philosophy , mechanical engineering , law , anthropology , medicine , physics , classical mechanics , optometry
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.