KAREN HO University of Minnesota Commentary on Andrew Orta’s “Managing the Margins”: The anthropology of transnational capitalism, neoliberalism, and risk ABSTRACT Ethnographic examinations of neoliberalism are increasingly nuanced and varied, intersecting vertical power relations to enter such sites as MBA curricula and the training and cultivation of business executives. Andrew Orta’s “Managing the Margins” exemplifies such research. In it, he investigates how professionalizing business subjects are socialized to approach “the market” and showcase their business expertise through commensurating techniques such as executive summaries and value-chain analyses. At the same time, the distinctiveness of their education is often forged through singular, seemingly incommensurable study-abroad trips to “emerging markets,” where the experiences and adventure of encountering “risky” margins construct the self as daring and enterprising. Incommensurable experiences at the margins are translated and reabsorbed into the normative production of professional selves. Careful attention is required, in ethnographic projects such as these, not to reinscribe dominant assumptions of what constitutes capitalist motivations and approaches to risk, not to mention, the very context of capitalism itself. [capitalism, risk, expertise, margins, neoliberalism] S ocial scientific engagements with neoliberalism have focused largely on marginalized communities’ incorporation into or strug- gles against it, leaving by the wayside a direct examination of the production and the definition of neoliberalism itself (Hoff- man et al. 2006:9). In other words, the effects of neoliberalism, as manifested through resistance and accommodation, often ventriloquize for the planning and the “patterning” of these effects themselves (Chong 2012:202). For some time now, anthropologists have noticed this taken-for- granted, uneven treatment—with its singular focus on “impact studies” or “globalization from below” 1 —and have called for direct ethnographic re- search on the diverse, concrete mechanisms by which powerful neoliberal frameworks and decisions are shaped and enacted. There is perhaps no better way to shine a light on the production of so- called neoliberalism than to study the pedagogical and experiential train- ing of business executives, managers, and experts. At the core of the an- thropological enterprise to study elite business subjects is the recognition that the thought, sensibilities, and influence of these key actors are all ac- tively produced. To become a Wall Street financier or a corporate execu- tive at a Fortune 500 company, one must acquire a prehistory and a certain kind of education, predisposition, and cosmology. How, for example, do particular ideologies and habits—from the obsession with “growth” to the fixation on stability and anti-inflation—get ingrained? Like surgeons who must be inculcated with the knowledge, ability, and wherewithal to cut into the human body, it is only through longue dur´ ee pedagogical immersion or apprenticeships (or both) that management consultants and investment bankers conjure their authority and learn how to project (or bluff ) balance sheet growth and that CEOs acquire their particular way of apprehending and talking about global markets. AMERICAN ETHNOLOGIST, Vol. 41, No. 1, pp. 31–37, ISSN 0094-0496, online ISSN 1548-1425. C  2014 by the American Anthropological Association. All rights reserved. DOI: 10.1111/amet.12057