ANDREW ORTA
University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign
Managing the margins:
MBA training, international business, and “the value chain
of culture”
A B S T R A C T
Global capitalism requires a world of manageable
differences. U.S. business schools train MBA
students in the reckoning of international space as a
field of risk and opportunity. Focusing particularly
on the short-term study-abroad trips that have
become a staple of MBA training in the past decade,
I examine the role of international knowledge and
experience as a constitutive part of the managerial
selves contemporary capitalism is explicitly thought
to require. Through these and other
internationalizing experiences, I argue, MBAs learn
to manage the margins: converting the risks and
uncertainties of social and cultural differences into
value. [capitalism, international business,
globalization, education, area studies, locality,
management, commensuration, business
subjectivities]
AMERICAN ETHNOLOGIST, Vol. 40, No. 4, pp. 689–703, ISSN 0094-0496, online
ISSN 1548-1425. 
DOI: 10.1111/amet.12048
n 2007, I accompanied a group of U.S. MBA students on a study-
I
abroad trip to Mexico. We were hosted by an elite business school in
Mexico City. Our hosts had developed a program around the theme
of “Doing Business in Mexico,” combining a series of lectures pre-
senting a narrative of recent Mexican political and economic history
with more standard MBA curricular fare: case studies focused on Mexican
businesses, corporate visits, and team exercises. For the team exercises,
the U.S. MBAs were intermixed with their Mexican counterparts and as-
signed to undertake business analyses of a set of enterprises in Mexico City.
These assignments all involved restaurants, bars, and nightclubs, so, for
the U.S. participants, the “work” felt a bit like spring-break-party tourism,
with young Mexican elites as guides and pals. The restaurant my team was
assigned marketed itself as specializing in fresh, well-prepared seafood as
well as a genre of bartending known as “free pour”: tableside bartending
with rum or whisky poured until the customer says “when.” I still have the
hat and polo shirt I received after our group’s visit to and tour of the Corona
brewery, where, in addition to sampling the product line, we saw a preview
of an upcoming marketing campaign.
The classroom component of our trip was also memorable. In the course
of an introductory lecture sketching the recent history of the Mexican
economy and economic policy, one of our hosting professors reviewed the
Mexican financial crisis of 1994 and the subsequent liberalization of
the national banking system, one outcome of which was the increasing
participation of European and U.S. banks in the Mexican retail banking
market. Our professor observed that this was especially beneficial for
the development of Mexican banking because banks like Citibank, for
example, brought needed experience and expertise in assessing credit
risks, enabling Mexican banks to expand their loan activities.
The timing of the presentation could hardly have been worse. In 2007,
the global credit bubble was stretching to the breaking point but had not
yet burst. With hindsight, it is clear that U.S. banks may not have been
optimum sources of “best practices” in credit risk assessment. But it is
equally clear that the Mexican business adepts were not really interested
C 2013 by the American Anthropological Association. All rights reserved.
American Ethnologist  Volume 40 Number 4 November 2013
in Citibank’s abilities to detect credit risk. They were inter-
ested, rather, in Citibank’s efficiency in creating manage-
able risk by pushing out credit to as many people as pos-
sible (cf. Williams 2005). One of the case studies featured
for the MBAs involved a small messenger service that had
leveraged the reputation of its intrepid deliverymen—who,
on bicycle, motorcycle, and horse, negotiated an illegible
warren of back roads to make deliveries where no one else
could—into a multimillion-dollar enterprise. A key part of
the company’s spectacular growth was that it had secured
contracts with new retail banks to hand deliver shiny credit
cards to legions of new users of consumer credit across the
country.
In this article, I examine the story being told here about
“doing business in Mexico” as part of a broader accounting
of the internationalization of MBA training in the United
States. Short-term study-abroad (STSA) trips like the one I
joined have become an integral part of that training over
the past decade. Business study-abroad experiences are es-
pecially potent because they provide an experiential “ex-
ecutive summary” of frontier spaces of capitalist poten-
tial while also shaping and ritualizing the alignment of the
emergent selves of U.S. business professionals within a ge-
ography of business practices now seen inevitably to re-
quire such spaces. I am interested, then, in the ways U.S.
MBAs learn to manage the margins: how they develop a
transnational habitus of engaging with foreign profession-
als and negotiating foreign places and how they cultivate
capacities of self that enhance the transiting of risk-bearing
difference in ways that realize or create value. This align-
ment of mobile expert subjects within a landscape of value-
adding places is at the core of contemporary global capi-
talism, the production of which is the business of business
schools.
Fast subjects in need of difference
From the earliest articulations of the ethos of capitalism,
space has appeared laden with the interlaced potentials of
risk and opportunity: from the comparative advantages and
salubrious effects of regional or national competitive dif-
ferences to the promises of materials and markets in more
distant colonies (e.g., Ricardo 1821; Smith 1994). The foun-
dational texts also make clear that engagement with fron-
tiers is an inexorable condition of capitalism’s existence:
“The need of a constantly expanding market for its products
chases the bourgeoisie over the whole surface of the globe.
It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish con-
nections everywhere” (Marx and Engels 1977:224).
Such expansion is an iterative process; as a cultural sys-
tem, capitalism is ceaselessly productive of the very differ-
ences it struggles to transcend and realize as value. In Karl
Marx’s just-so story of homo faber, the first historical act is
the production of new needs (Marx and Engels 1986:49). A
corollary to that, crucial to the expansive ambitions of cap-
690
ital, concerns the production of new spaces: a development
that has intensified under the localizing, niche-generating
ethos of neoliberalism (e.g., Peck and Tickell 2002; Thrift
2006). As Nigel Thrift points out, “capitalism is not a
fixed and unforgiving force. Rather, it is a heterogeneous
and continually dynamic process of increasingly global
connection—often made through awkward and makeshift
links—and those links can be surprising, not least because
they often produce unexpected spatial formations which
can themselves have force” (2006:280).1 Quite distinct from
the flattening of global space posited by some discussions
of globalized capitalism, what is at stake here is a limitless
need for difference, “mystery,” and “risk” as part of a scalar
chain binding the global to the local (e.g., Tsing 2000).
The past two decades have been a boom time for the
production of spatialized difference in the training of U.S.
business adepts in MBA programs. These years mark a repo-
sitioning of international business (IB) studies in MBA cur-
ricula: from a distinct subfield of business studies to an ori-
entation “infused” across all functional areas of business
training (e.g., Buckley 2005; Daniels 2003; Robock 2003).2
This has been a moment, then, of profound routinization
of a particular construction of global space as shaped by
differences that are relatively enduring, potentially gener-
ative of (or threatening to) value, and unavoidable. And this
process has gone hand in hand with the emergence of new
business subjectivities required of managers by the “new
economy” (Downey and Fisher 2006). Cast as a state of per-
manent emergency, the new economy requires the produc-
tion of “fast” managerial subjects and spaces of particular
intensity that serve in their production (Thrift 2000:675).
Business schools are sites par excellence of the produc-
tion of business subjects. As culturally embedded institu-
tions, part of the “cultural circuit of capital,” they partic-
ipate in a dialectic of reflecting and remaking the world
of business in every sense (Olds and Thrift 2008:270ff.;
cf. Callon 2007; MacKenzie 2006). Focusing here on study-
abroad experiences as a now ubiquitous component of
MBA curricula, I argue that the MBA construction of global
difference as an unavoidable challenge to business practice
is constitutive of the state of emergency compelling new
managerial subjects. The study-abroad experience crystal-
lizes the coimplicated processes of producing difference
and constructing managerial subjects. STSAs at once pack-
age places and constitute entrepreneurial selves as em-
bodiments of claims about the state of global capital-
ism and the utility and necessity of managerial qualities
that identify and extract value from a variegated global
landscape.
Valuing the incommensurable
“Value” implies a meaningful cultural order. Expres-
sions and experiences of value are inseparable from so-
cially shared schemas that effect the commensuration of

different features of the world. Commensuration is a ubiq-
uitous and indispensable feature of human cognition. It
is also an essentially social process (Espeland and Stevens
1998). With its reliance on a universal medium of exchange
and the accountability of returns and results across time,
and as a function of its expansive assimilation of new peo-
ples and products, capitalism has been an engine of com-
mensuration par excellence.
Yet habits of commensuration require the incommen-
surable, and it bears noting that incommensurability is no
less socially produced. Things that escape or elude settled
systems or habits of commensuration create new oppor-
tunities. I am interested here in the ways the current mo-
ment in the production of capitalism requires an evanes-
cent incommensurablity—ceaselessly sited (and sighted)
and overcome in the context of business practice. Business
as usual is energized by the unusual. The internationaliza-
tion of MBA curricula routinizes specific claims about a
world of difference and about the qualities and habits nec-
essary to its management. It routinizes a view of the world
as what one study-abroad returnee described to me as “a
value chain of culture.” Internationalizing MBA programs
are in the business of producing business subjects with ca-
pacities to unlock the value chain and so manage the mar-
gins of commensurability.
***
In pursuing this project, I have managed a related margin
of commensurability. I approached my time as an MBA stu-
dent as an immersion in a different culture,3 requiring flu-
ency in a new vocabulary and new conceptual categories.
The simulated corporate energy and self-aware profession-
alism that suffuses the corridors and classrooms of the well-
appointed business schools I studied contributed to an aura
of difference that was palpable to me. In other ways, how-
ever, my MBA consultants and I were already familiar to one
another: They conformed to a type of student I had encoun-
tered before; I was a shaggier version of the faculty they saw
at the front of their classes, and, to MBA faculty, a colleague
from another discipline engaged in research of interest to
them.
Although some program administrators sought to limit
my access to students and faculty—they were far “too busy”
to talk with me, one dean told me, and I was not assigned
to MBA project teams in the cohort I shadowed because
I was not “competing” for a grade—this project has felt in
many ways like a collaborative effort shaped by converging
research interests (cf. Cefkin 2010). My curiosity about in-
ternational content was legible to students and faculty, as,
for all of them, this content was a salient facet of their pro-
gram experience. As an anthropologist and Latin American-
ist, I was an authorized interlocutor on these themes.
Managing the margins  American Ethnologist
Yet, in other respects, as a participant-observer of MBA
programs as sites of cultural production, I was not fully
on their radar. The concern about my not competing for
a grade was data. My participation in orientation activi-
ties for new MBAs, immersion in daily MBA life through
class observations, time in business-school cafeterias and
lounges, participation in extracurricular events, and time
spent with project teams (the students let me tag along) all
inform an ethnographic analysis of MBA education. In clas-
sic fieldwork style, these activities helped me build rapport
and access that have enriched my study. I have also relied
on another page from the methods of anthropological anal-
ysis by historicizing my object of study. Historicizing the
MBA project, an endeavor presenting itself as the essence
of instrumentality, distilling state-of-the-art techniques for
managing the world of capitalism, helps illuminate the en-
tanglement of MBA programs in the production of the world
they mean to manage.
In the following sections, I examine the history of the
internationalization of MBA curricula and detail the tech-
niques of commensuration as taught in core MBA courses.
I then turn more fully to the organization of STSA programs
and the experiences and “take-aways” of MBA travelers to
the margins. In conclusion, I reflect on the impact of the
most recent financial crisis on MBA education in the United
States and the role of MBA curricula in the production of the
subjects of global capitalism.
New economies and old area studies
For some time now, the concepts of “culture” and “re-
gional difference” have been ascendant in the field of busi-
ness. Business schools are increasingly interested in provid-
ing their students with “international” content to prepare
them for a business climate that requires knowledge of and
engagement with consumers, governments, investors, and
business counterparts in other areas of the world. This con-
ceptualization of international space is a cultural process,
implicated with shifting regimes of transnational capitalism
and entangled with an implicit vantage on the world of in-
ternational business.
The early decades of the 20th century saw the system-
atic employment of regional specialists in the U.S. Depart-
ments of State and Commerce, as in the Commerce Depart-
ment’s “Special Agents Series,” which provided country-
and region-level information about trade and investment
opportunities and strategic advice about getting things
done on the ground in specific countries (e.g., Halsey 1918;
Shurz 1921). The department’s special agents crossed be-
tween government and academic work; some, like William
Lytle Shurz, wrote textbooks on their regions of expertise
(e.g., Shurz 1941). Shurz, who went on to serve on the
faculty of the Thunderbird School of Global Management
soon after its founding in the wake of the Second World
691
American Ethnologist  Volume 40 Number 4 November 2013
War, embodies the dovetailing of scholarly specialist area
knowledge with the institutionalization of business training
in the academy (e.g., Whitaker 1942).4
The transformation of the field of business training in-
tensified in the decades after the war: from the rather voca-
tional and déclassé sense of the enterprise in the early 20th
century—focused on producing employees with functional
competence in, say, accounting—to an increasing empha-
sis on the production of professional managerial leaders.5
The earliest IB concentrations in U.S. business schools
date to the post–WWII years, with programs established at
Columbia (1956), Indiana (1959), Harvard (1961), and NYU
(1963; Robock 2003). As a component of the professional-
ization of U.S. business training, these programmatic de-
velopments reflect the geopolitics and political economy of
the postwar period and the strategic interest of the United
States in shaping the economic recovery of regions affected
by the war. Initiatives such as the Economic Cooperation
Authority, established under the Marshall Plan, facilitated
interactions between European economists and U.S. busi-
ness faculty and helped routinize and broaden interna-
tional perspectives and expertise in U.S. business programs
(Fayerweather 1994).
Another crucial initiative was the American Univer-
sities Field Service (AUFS) program. Established in 1951
as an extension of the work of the Institute of Current
World Affairs, the AUFS was intended “to give young men
of promise an opportunity to study, firsthand, foreign ar-
eas about which there is a general lack of knowledge in this
country” (California Institute of Technology n.d.). With the
participation of institutions such as Brown University, the
California Institute of Technology, Carleton College, Har-
vard Business School, the University of Kansas, Stanford
University, Tulane University, and the University of Wash-
ington, an early report announced,
The field staff is expected to be built up to a strength
of some 20 men. These men will prepare regular re-
ports for the staffs of cooperating institutions, and will
be available for consultation by visiting professors and
graduate students. Each man will return home every
2 years, and will visit the campus of each participat-
ing institution to take part in seminars, faculty discus-
sions and conferences, give lectures and meet with lo-
cal bankers, businessmen, and journalists. As the plan
expands this will mean that four or five field men will
be visiting each university each year, to expand and en-
rich the university’s existing courses of instruction with
their direct reports on conditions in various sections of
the world. [California Institute of Technology n.d.]
AUFS reports were taken up in business-school class-
rooms, where they served as the basis for case studies
(Fayerweather 1994:3).
692
The founding in 1958 of the Academy of International
Business and the debut of the Journal of International Busi-
ness Studies (1969) gave further scholarly coherence to the
field, indexing an increasingly felt need for professional-
ized experts with international knowledge. As embodied
by “special agents” like Schurz or the intrepid “field men”
of the AUFS, this expertise stemmed from classical area-
studies scholarship: that of “country hands” leveraging a
detailed knowledge of place (including linguistic compe-
tence) to produce reports of strategic relevance for busi-
ness practices. This was echoed in corporate organiza-
tional structures, in which international posts were typically
staffed by managers with long-term connections to specific
foreign countries. Although these posts are remembered to-
day as dead-end middle-management positions, there was
a sense that “our man in Buenos Aires” was an adept of the
place, with deep knowledge deriving from long-term per-
sonal immersion.
CIBER-business and the global order
The push toward IB gained additional momentum in the
1980s, spurred—goes the story—by the challenges to U.S.
international competitiveness posed by the rise of Japanese
manufacturing. James P. Womack et al. (1990) report on a
study, begun in 1984, of Japanese “lean production” tech-
niques that cast them as revolutionizing global industry
and concluded that the United States needed to learn the
Japanese (or, at least, the Toyota) way if it wanted to avoid
being left behind as a global competitor. IB textbooks simi-
larly cast the period as one of an epochal shift in which the
intensifying global economy exhausted settled patterns of
international business behavior (Bartlett et al. 2004). The
rise and consolidation during the 1980s of global “free mar-
ket fundamentalism,” spurred by shifting policy priorities at
the IMF and World Bank as well as by a series of “structural
adjustment policies” implemented in developing nations,
facilitated and in many ways compelled the increasingly
routinized engagement of U.S. capital across the world (e.g.,
Harvey 2005; Stiglitz 2003). This emergent reframing of the
international space of capitalism had the effect of establish-
ing international engagement as an inevitable component
of business practice and thereby created a new conceptual-
ization of risk and a requirement for its management across
physical and cultural space.
One index of the perceived critical need for the re-
tooling of U.S. business training in view of a new land-
scape of global capitalism was the addition of U.S. federal
funding in support of IB education. By the late 1980s, U.S.
business schools were competing for federal support to es-
tablish CIBERs: Centers for International Business Educa-
tion and Research dedicated to fostering international busi-
ness competitiveness. The CIBER program was constituted
in 1988 through an amendment to Title VI, Part B of the

Higher Education Act of 1965: that is, as a component of
the congressional act that also provides National Resource
Center and Foreign Language and Area Studies (FLAS) fund-
ing. With average annual awards of $386,000 supporting
faculty and curriculum development, international busi-
ness research, and outreach to U.S. businesses at more than
30 centers around the country, the CIBER program consti-
tutes a significant effort to routinize the production and ap-
plication of international knowledge in business training
and practice.
That the institutional “slot” for this initiative is the
administrative home for the federal area-studies project—
itself an effort to harness the production and circula-
tion of knowledge about international spaces to the per-
ceived national interests of the United States—is telling.
The alignment of IB training with area studies certainly
reflects the earlier characteristics of international busi-
ness knowledge concentrated in country hands. How-
ever, over the course of the 1980s, the texture of in-
ternational expertise was changing under the ascendant
frame of “globalization.” Here the development of interna-
tional business knowledge mirrors the vicissitudes of area
studies within a self-consciously global order (cf. Dirlik
1999; Escobar 1995; Guyer 2004; Pletsch 1981; Rafael 1994;
Szanton 2004).
An influential 1983 Harvard Business Review article by
Theodore Levitt, called “The Globalization of Markets,” is
representative of the discussion at the time. Levitt saw the
rapid juxtaposition and transformation of cultures and, in
language that echoes research in the social sciences, iden-
tified a dawning ecumenical modernity in which success-
ful firms would develop and market products standardized
to emerging global norms. The challenge to business was to
think beyond national frameworks and innovate for a global
market.
Two decades later, this vision of global standardization
(like the envisioned ecumene of some of the social science
literature of globalization) is widely considered to be in-
adequate (e.g., Bartlett et al. 2004). Spurred, I suspect, by
a combination of three factors (the standardized vision of
the world was empirically limited to start with; the busi-
ness opportunities for the standardized model predicted by
Levitt were quickly limited by expanding competition and
narrowing margins; and the shape of neoliberal capitalism
emergent in the 1980s and 1990s created new kinds of flex-
ibility facilitating localization), focus is intensifying on re-
gional and cultural differences and on the need to balance
standardization with localization in international business
endeavors.
The details of the shift are cast with different nuances
by different scholars. Pankaj Ghemawat (2007) writes of
semiglobalization; Alan M. Rugman and Alain Verbeke
(2004) argue that regional units of analysis (defined by
geographical and cultural proximity), rather than “global-
ization,” better fit the actual business activities of multi-
Managing the margins  American Ethnologist
national enterprises. Christopher A. Bartlett et al. (2004)
suggest four “evolving” stages of internationalization: “in-
ternational mentality,” “multinational mentality,” “global
mentality” (here they reference Levitt), and “transnational
mentality.” This current business mentality is a strategic
response to “countervailing forces of localization” and
reassertions of “national preferences” that emerged in
response to the powerful threat of global homogenization
made patent over the 1980s (Bartlett et al. 2004:10ff.). But
all of these discussions in IB reflect a growing preoccupa-
tion with international difference of a finer grain than the
imagined ecumene of the late 20th-century globalization
literature. The theme of the 2007 Annual Meetings of the
Academy of International Business reflected this: “Bringing
the Country Back In.”
Of course, in the context of MBA education, especially,
this is not a return to the in-depth local knowledge of the
classic area hands. The Shurz of the 21st century is meeting
a different need than his or her predecessor. The challenge,
as Bartlett et al. frame it, is “for companies to become more
responsive to local needs while retaining their global effi-
ciency . . . In such companies, key activities and resources
are neither centralized in the parent company, nor decen-
tralized so that each subsidiary can carry out its own tasks
on a local-for-local basis” (2004:12).
This magical middle ground, balancing standardiza-
tion with the nuances and niches of localization, is familiar
from other discussions of the neoliberal moment. And this
literature has shown that the world of such a “transnational
mentality” is made rather than found (e.g., Ho 2005; Lee
and LiPuma 2002; Tsing 2004, 2000; Wilk 1995). Indeed,
much as the very idea of “the global” requires the cultural
constitution of specific places and their scalar connections
to national, regional, and global circuits of capital (Ho
2005; Tsing 2000), the renaissance of place and region in
global business thinking is a blueprint as much as a map.
The study-abroad experiences of the MBA curriculum are
at once productive of this world and of the “mentality”
required to manage it.
Coordinated with this development, then, is a change
in the sort of business subject required to work in this newly
apprehended global environment. Of particular note is a
change in the status of the expatriate manager. The position
is still crucial, but it is no longer considered a dead-end ca-
reer move, nor is it considered the exclusive organizational
locus of international knowledge. The trend, instead, is for
a saturation of international competencies across the man-
agement hierarchy. Alongside CEOs, “parachuting in” to
close deals and evaluate performance, and in place of highly
specialized expatriate managers, a wide range of mid- and
lower-level managers are increasingly expected to be in-
volved in international activities in a range of places. In this
view, all business is international, and the core competen-
cies of any MBA ought to include the ability to work as part
of business teams that span borders and cultures.
693
American Ethnologist  Volume 40 Number 4 November 2013
This view is matched by changes in MBA curricula:
away from a pedagogy in which business fundamentals are
presented in a set of core classes to which international
business issues are appended as an elective or as additional
themes for the final week of the course and toward a cur-
riculum in which international themes are taught as the ba-
sic, unmarked condition of business practice. IB specialists,
of course, frame this shift differently: as a tension between
teaching IB as a specialized field and a dilution of special-
ized knowledge and intellectual integrity.6 This tension is
played out within the shifting historical field I have just out-
lined. MBA curricula, at any given point in time, crystallize
a particular reading of the exigencies of contemporary cap-
italism: the managerial subjects required and the curricu-
lar subjects and methods adequate to produce them. In the
current moment, they are calibrated to the production of
standardized international competencies adaptable to mul-
tiple local contexts. I turn here to these fundamental com-
petencies as perceived through my participant-observation
in MBA classrooms.
The art and science of management: Techniques
of commensuration
A common refrain among former MBA students and many
of the executives that hire them holds that students attend
MBA programs merely to build a network and be creden-
tialed for lucrative employment and that they really learn
their profession on the job. These sorts of claims often
come wrapped with disdain for the classroom and the insu-
lated eggheads who teach there, who burden budding en-
trepreneurs with their abstracted theoretical views of the
world. There is some truth to this (cf. Ho 2009). But MBA
students get much more than they bargained for during
their two years of training.
It is productive to look at this disdain for the academic
aspects of MBA education as part of a ritual of emerging
MBA subjectivity. MBAs are trained to be impatient with
theory, rarely interested in contextual details of a case, and
eager to pounce on the key facts, the nub of a problem that
will inform and enable a business decision. The patience
of scholarship, the exhaustive search for missing informa-
tion, is the inverse of real-time business practice, which,
MBAs are frequently reminded, requires decisions that risk
resources on the basis of always partial and imperfect in-
formation. Thrift (1999) has written perceptively about this
bent toward “practical theory” and the conceptualization
of “problem spaces” requiring prompt action. MBA curric-
ula, through case-method teaching and other techniques,
require and encourage students to develop precisely these
skills.
MBA programs, then, do more than provide technical
information (or entrée to elite networks). They instill habits
that shape the ways future managers assimilate and act on
694
that information. Indeed, they constitute the very idea of
a manager as the embodiment of a particular orientation
enabling a practical engagement with fast-paced complex-
ity. This idea is a claim about the world and how best to
manage it; the fluent embodiment of this worldview is a key
emic marker of the MBA “culture of expertise” (Holmes and
Marcus 2008).7 In orientation sessions celebrating the boot
camp–like intensity of the curriculum, new MBA students
are challenged to prepare themselves to “drink from a fire
hose”: to assimilate an overwhelming flow of information.
The real challenge, they learn later, is avoiding the “paraly-
sis of analysis” (business schools have a fondness for pithy
turns of phrase)—to be able to select only the details rel-
evant to decision and action. This has particular implica-
tions for the engagement with international difference and
the routinized discernment of which differences make a
difference.
This hazing of excessive curricular content, 100-hour
workweeks, and hyperscheduled days of classes, team
projects, meetings with recruiters, and obligatory extracur-
ricular activities aptly marks this liminal moment in bud-
ding managerial lives. MBA programs promise to simulate
in crystalline form the truths of business practices. They are
the molds for MBA subjects, who emerge as the authorized
agents of the production of the world the programs aim to
approximate.
MBAs are told repeatedly that they are preparing
themselves for a profession in which they will be called on
to make recommendations for future action on the basis of
imperfect information. The models they work with are inad-
equate to the messy complexities of the real world, but they
are good models insofar as following them yields positive
results more often than not. “It’s like high school Newto-
nian physics,” suggested one professor. “That’s not how the
world really works, but the issue is not whether it is real or
not, it is whether it is useful or not. Don’t prejudge based
upon whether it seems realistic to you.” The development
of such fictive but efficacious models, he added, is “part
science and part art.”
This combination of science and art and of technique
and talent is constituted as essential to managerial com-
petence. MBAs are taught that international business com-
pels a specific blending of these qualities. As I elaborate be-
low, the rhetorical space between “science” and “art” marks
the margins of commensurability of international experi-
ences. Insofar as they must embody the blending of the
habits of effective commensuration with the artful assimila-
tion of the incommensurable, contemporary managers re-
alize these margins as a space of potential value.
One habit of commensuration that saturates the busi-
ness school experience is the scaling down of complex-
ity, linked to an MBA communicative habitus emphasiz-
ing brevity and the controlled distillation of key points to
motivate sufficiently informed action. Through one-page

“executive summaries” or 30-second “elevator pitches,” as-
piring capitalists are encouraged to create an optic of cut-
and-dried essentiality. These exercises in brevity conjure a
professional setting: You have been asked by your boss for
your opinion and you have the duration of the elevator ride
to present your case; you have prepared a detailed report
and now must convey your findings in the one page that a
busy CEO will have time and patience to read.
MBA programs are thus rituals of simulation: Class pre-
sentations are staged as presentations to a board of direc-
tors or stockholders; team assignments claim to replicate
the fast pace and high pressure of a business environment.
These are the training grounds for the managerial distilla-
tion of complexity. Some programs make use of a capstone
exercise in which MBA teams manage computer-simulated
firms, taking them through a set of decisions linked to quar-
terly reports that convey the results of previous decisions.
Over the week of the simulation, the intensity of the quar-
terly decision cycle is stepped up: the three-hour window
for the earliest team decision is gradually reduced until the
teams have only an hour and 30 minutes.
Alongside these more practical features of MBA train-
ing, the conceptual tool kit of contemporary business the-
ory is generative of other techniques of commensuration.
The ‘ur concept of “market,” of course, is premised on (and
makes conceivable) the potential exchangeability of all hu-
man activities and relationships. Two other conceptual en-
gines of commensuration that figure in MBA training and
in the MBA experience of study-abroad are “marginal anal-
ysis” and “value-chain analysis.”
Margin is a multiply resonant term in “business
speak.”8 For traders, margin can refer to borrowed capi-
tal used in an investment or an account of personal funds
deposited as a guarantee of a percentage of the value be-
ing traded through securities. Margin is also a synonym
for profit—the space between a selling price and the cost
of production. In all of these cases, the margin is a space
of pure risk and potential—it is a measure of “skin in the
game” while it also points to the anticipated, but unknow-
able, future state of a market transaction.
In this regard, consider “marginal analysis.” A funda-
mental calculus of capitalist thought, marginal analysis pre-
sumes to calculate the cost and profit potential of the n + 1
item in a series of actions currently containing n moves. It
is a way of reckoning incremental change. What is the cost
or the benefit of producing one more pair of shoes or one
more circuit board? As a maximizing decision-making strat-
egy, marginal analysis is a tool for managing the spaces be-
tween the singularity of a given moment of production or
decision point and the seriality produced by previous mo-
ments and decisions.
Perhaps the most familiar sense of “margin” has to do
with the edges of legibility and convention: the unknow-
able, the unusual, the foreign. Think of marginalia, the
Managing the margins  American Ethnologist
emendations at the edges of a text or a ledger book that
point to meanings that escape the systematicity or com-
mensurability of the main body of writing, or of an area
that reflects the notes and calculations that transform the
raw data into entries in the ledger. In all of these senses,
margins mark and manage the space between incom-
mensurable singularity and the serial commensurations of
capitalism.
“Value-chain analysis” is a comparable process of de-
composition, creating and revaluing singularities in the
construction of commensurability and incommensurabil-
ity. A value chain is a rendering of a productive activity as
a set of potentially discrete processes: from research and
development, through product design and manufacturing,
to marketing, distribution, retailing, and after-sales service.
The rationale for value-chain analysis is that firms should
examine which of these activities are points of strength or
competitive advantage and also assess the marginal bene-
fits of activities at each link of the chain. Few firms do every-
thing well, and value-chain analysis is a technique enabling
firms to determine where their competencies fall and where
maximizing opportunities lie.
I am interested in the concept of a value chain as it an-
alytically decomposes what may be a more integrated pro-
ductive process. Realignments of business activities may
include selling or acquiring part of a business, redirecting
efforts away from low-margin areas of the chain (like as-
sembly plants) toward activities that “create more value”—
research and development, patenting new technology, and
so on—with consequences that may include closing fac-
tories or outsourcing activities. The trope of a value chain
opens up spaces for disintegration, facilitating the concep-
tualization of articulated, but potentially discrete, activities
often mapped on the transnational space of international
business practices (Bartlett and Ghoshal 2000).
Alongside this emphasis on commensurative practices
in MBA training runs the contrapuntal theme of the “art” of
management. For many MBA students, who typically think
at the margin, calculating the opportunity costs of two ad-
ditional years of high-priced schooling, this art is the added
value they seek. MBA programs market this value quite
clearly, offering training in the ineffable: the management
habitus that routinizes the seizing of singularity at the mar-
gins. In this, they enact the cutting edge of management
literature stressing the need to cultivate talent and cre-
ativity and capitalize on the intuitive insights of managers
(Kahneman and Klein 2010).
The art of management is the marginal quality of
leadership that separates midlevel managers from their
superiors: Senior managers require an intuitive grasp of
problems and solutions that is not reducible to the quan-
titative “plugging and chugging” of middle-management
decision making (Hayashi 2001). In one management
course I attended, the professor referenced the sports
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experience of “being in the zone” to illustrate a sense of un-
conscious competency: a heightened functional state that
transcends rational or reflective knowledge. Some manage-
ment texts present this state as an alternative to a dominant
rational mode of thought and action in Western cultures.
Embracing your full management potential may prepare
you to manage in an international business environment.
Conversely, getting in touch with business in other cultural
contexts may awaken a broader range of management
talents than are typically cultivated in Western settings
(cf. Dane and Pratt 2007). I take this explicit emphasis
on personal qualities and the need to complement the
inevitably inadequate models asserting straightforward
commensurability as an index of the particular, flexible
nature of capitalism today. MBA programs strive to locate in
the managerial subject a competent nimbleness enabling
capitalist action across variegated global space.
Short-term study abroad
The internationalization of business curricula takes a
number of forms, from courses devoted specifically to IB
themes to the inclusion of international cases in standard
functional courses. Most programs also leverage the fact
that international students compose a high percentage of
MBA cohorts to claim that they offer a virtual international
experience for U.S.-born MBAs—something of a Noah’s
ark of international capitalism.9 International students
are urged to be ambassadors of their cultures and to help
contextualize IB discussions by sharing their experiences
in their home countries.
The STSA format has also become a core component of
MBA curricula. STSA experiences take two forms. The first
is a trip of a week or two, sometimes hosted by a foreign
business school. These trips combine classroom activities
abroad with visits to local corporations and “cultural” ex-
periences of a more touristy variety. The second model ties
a trip of similar duration (usually taken during an interses-
sion) to a regular course that meets during the preceding
term and is devoted to the study of the country or region to
be visited. The topics of study range from broad contextual
regional knowledge (history, religion, “culture” [in the sense
of local arts: say, tango in Argentina]) to more detailed infor-
mation about specific industries or companies in the coun-
try, characteristics of the banking system, and so forth.
Faculty for these courses often work alongside a team
of two student leaders, who have a hand in shaping the
study-abroad experience. In one program I examined, stu-
dents compete for the position of team leader by submit-
ting proposals containing ideas and itineraries for sched-
uled study-abroad courses to be offered in the coming term.
In another program, the student role is even more en-
trepreneurial: a team of two students develops a proposal
for a study tour and recruits a faculty member to lead the
696
class. Team leaders recruit other students to the class, they
work to set up many of the corporate visits and other activi-
ties to be undertaken in-country, and they coordinate com-
munications with the travel agent.
The planning of the course is itself a performance
of business subjectivity. Student leaders I spoke with
seemed to take some pleasure from the competitive, en-
trepreneurial experience of forming a successful partner-
ship and winning the leadership positions. One man, who
had been part of a successful team organizing a trip to
South Africa, noted that he and his partner had been se-
lected over another team that included a woman with an
area-studies background focused on the region as well as
knowledge of a local language. Although many details of
the course are standardized from year to year—particularly
when the same faculty member is involved—many students
experience the course as an emergent team project reflect-
ing their interests and expertise. Most of the STSA teaching
faculty I interviewed told me they have a few set presenta-
tions of their own and a list of invited speakers they draw
on.10 However, the bulk of the preparatory meetings are de-
voted to student presentations on specific themes, ranging
from contextual information to reports on specific indus-
try sectors or on particular corporations. Like so many other
MBA presentations, they are extremely condensed commu-
nications, supplemented with PowerPoint slides. Students
reported that they conducted most of their research on-
line, and the presentations I observed were, typically, com-
pilations of data already reduced to tabular form. In some
cases, the presentations are further compiled into a “brief-
ing binder” for the aspiring executives to take on their trip.
Study-abroad students also have a chance to flex their net-
working prowess. Corporate visits often involve mobilizing
networks of MBA alumni as well as family and professional
connections of current MBA students.
For program administrators, the array of courses of-
fered in any term is a function of the perceived relevance
of the country or region to IB education, the program’s rel-
ative success in terms of enrollment in previous trip of-
ferings, and concerns about providing a range of options
for students. Questions of market segmentation often arise:
Should Argentina and Brazil be two separate trips or one?
What about Japan and China? Students also participate in
this double life of the study-abroad course as educational
experience and marketed product. Some programs hold
study-abroad fairs at which student leaders from compet-
ing trips staff booths marketing their courses. Information
about potential itineraries and business opportunities in,
say, India are accompanied by music, food, posters, and
slickly produced videos showing experiences from previ-
ous years. Students similarly cast their decisions regarding
a course and their participation in it in terms of market
metaphors. Often surprised by how “academic” the course-
work is, most make sense of this hard work less in terms

of assimilating information about another place than as an
index of their personal investment in the experience—they
speak of “buying in” and gaining a sense of “ownership” in
the trip.
More than a few students set their experience against
other study-abroad courses (often courses in which friends
in other MBA programs participate), seen as “vacations for
credit.” Their skepticism of trips to Anglophone countries
or of trips that include tropical beach locales sets in relief
the sober professional value of their own experience. The
calculus that many MBAs reported involved assessing a des-
tination as both a plausible IB location and one that was re-
mote or otherwise challenging enough that they could not
imagine going there outside of the structured STSA context.
Indeed, the value added of the study-abroad experience, in
the accounts I have collected, was a shift in the boundary of
competence.
One student, who traveled to India, told me, “I might
go to Brazil for a vacation but not to India.” She had gone
to business school after working for a large consulting firm,
where she saw an increasing number of professional activi-
ties moved to offices in India. “You expect to see this in the
service sector or manufacturing,” she told me, “but these
were accountants and actuaries.” She mentioned repeat-
edly that this offshoring had created bad feelings among
professionals in her U.S. office and that part of her moti-
vation to go to India was to “see the other side of it. I was
getting a very American picture and didn’t have the oppor-
tunity to talk to my Indian counterparts about it.”
Another student (who went to Brazil) told me of his ex-
periences at the STSA fair.
My initial take: this is a glorified field trip. You see the
Cuba booth and you think, I’m going to be smoking
cigars and drinking mojitos on the beach. It was excit-
ing, but I felt I really want to do something. I’m making
a huge upfront cost to go back to school. I want to have
something that I can at least use in a story. I thought
South America was a fairly strong story because I be-
lieve that’s where tech is going.
This student had worked in the computer industry be-
fore going to business school. He had been through some
turbulent ups and downs at the end of the dot-com bubble.
Although his situation prior to entering the MBA program
sounded good to me (“I had achieved my goal of hitting six
figures by the time I was 30”), he experienced his position as
precarious. “I was nonbillable,” he told me. “Not being bil-
lable is a second-class citizen. They are the first to get cut.”
Business-school training was a way “to attach myself back
to revenue.”
In these comments, we find a reckoning of a distinc-
tive sort, rooted in the relentless unease of managerial sub-
jects in the new economy (Thrift 2000). The first student,
Managing the margins  American Ethnologist
threatened by outsourcing and troubled by the anger she
experienced in her office, feels compelled to expand her
“American” view of the economy. The second student, hav-
ing experienced “cratered” dot-coms, seeks the credentials
that will give him a structurally more secure position as
well as an informed sense of the future of the tech mar-
ketplace, which, he has come to believe, lies to the south.
With the market here “tapped out,” he told me, the BRICS
economies (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa)
offer the most potential for growth in the technology indus-
try. His trip to South America, he felt, was “an opportunity
to jump in and see where the market was going to be . . .
maybe not in five years, but ten years down the line.” In
this regard, the study-abroad experience serves to mitigate
risk, affording students a glimpse of the business future and
supplying them with “outside,” rather than “inside,” infor-
mation. Presupposed in all of this is the expansive nature
of capital, converting unaccounted risky singularity at the
margins into manageable future value.
The international milieu of MBA student life is another
factor shaping MBAs’ motivations to study abroad. Some
students spoke positively about the presence of interna-
tional students on campus as an inspiration to undertake
a study-abroad class. Others, however, read the large num-
bers of MBA students from India, China, or Korea as effec-
tively closing off those areas of the world as regions where
a U.S. student might gain a competitive advantage. As one
MBA student put it, “There are so many people here already
who are Chinese or Indian. They are fluent in English and
have work experience. They bring more value to the table.”
Because there were fewer Latin American students at his
program, he concluded there would be “more opportunity
for me” to pursue a study-abroad trip to Argentina.
Even as he recognized international students as adepts
of international business, whose competence he could only
hope to approximate in a different regional niche, this same
student raised reservations about the ability of those stu-
dents to convey to U.S. students the local cultural flavor of
business in their home countries.
I don’t think you get as good a feel unless you’re im-
mersed in it. Walking down the street, seeing how peo-
ple talk and interact, going to restaurants. So much of
it is—I don’t want to say soft skill—it is something you
just have to experience. In terms of students who come
here, day-to-day interactions at school don’t give you
that great of a feel for how things work in a country. And
what you hear [is] very stereotypical.
Perhaps as an index of “being there,” many of the STSA
experiences I learned about were cloaked in an aura of dan-
ger. An information session for a trip to Mexico focused
almost exclusively on the grave dangers students would
face from the moment they exited customs until they were
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ensconced in their swank hotel. Fears of crime and of in-
testinal instability loomed large for students preparing for
other trips as well. Warnings about avoiding unofficial taxis,
not traveling at night, or not wearing jewelry on the street
are good advice, and certainly necessary for many U.S.
MBAs, who have little international travel experience, ac-
cording to my sample. Still, I was struck by the ways dan-
ger seemed to be the defining frame of the trip. This is poor
marketing, I thought. Or maybe not. While most of these
trips offer comfortable and privileged glimpses of other
countries—excellent hotels, corporate visits, private buses,
and hired taxis—the discourse of fear and risk burnishes
the authenticity of the experience. It also mutes any dis-
comfiting sense of privilege that might taint the experience.
And the haze of danger and fear that envelops this interna-
tional activity intensifies a sense of triumphant capability
and productive risk taking recounted at the other end of the
experience. As one student put it, speaking to a hypotheti-
cal employer, “You can throw me on an airplane and I’m not
going to die if I get off the airplane at Buenos Aires!”
Such survival is not an individual accomplishment.
To return to the Mexican trip introduced at the start of
this article, our more intimate immersions in the place oc-
curred within the collegial cocoon of transnational case-
study teams. The Mexican MBAs, more thoroughly interna-
tionalized and dealing with their own elite anxieties about
safety, confirmed our concerns while also heroically shep-
herding us around town in convoys of their own cars, on
hypervigilant subway rides, and for the most adventurous
of the group, on a memorable trip to a lucha libre (pro-
fessional wrestling) event. The buffer of our Mexican MBA
guides constituted and brokered the margins of commen-
surable and incommensurable experiences of Mexico. The
totality of the experience was assimilable to U.S. students’
professional selves through the staged collegiality of the
team projects: the frame or excuse for many of the adven-
tures, sealed with an all-nighter before our team presenta-
tion was due; an earnest exchange of business cards and
cell numbers and heartfelt embraces at the end of the trip
with pledges of open-ended hospitality (“If you’re ever in
Chicago . . . ”).
The Mexico trip began in a familiar environment: a
well-appointed classroom with a series of lectures by host
faculty summarizing the development of the Mexican busi-
ness climate. A succession of Mexican political administra-
tions was rendered as a narrative of progress in the consol-
idation of free-market capitalism in Mexico. This was done
graphically on a chart with two axes: “democratization” and
“economic liberalization.” Taking the balance of the two as
the best possible condition, the lecturer presented the po-
litical and economic history of Mexico as a series of lurch-
ing steps, not always in a straight line but tending toward
a neoliberal sweet spot on the graph.11 This was, of course,
a strategic rendering of the singularity of Mexican history,
698
intended for consumption by U.S. MBAs there to assess the
prospects of doing business in Mexico.
What interests me here is the response of the U.S. stu-
dents to this presentation. Initially, this historical narrative
seemed to greatly clarify the current situation in Mexico,
and more than a few students remarked that they wished
their home MBA program included a similar discussion of
U.S. political history and economy.12 By the end of the pro-
gram, however, this reflexive insight was lost. In follow-up
interviews, students I spoke with were left with the take-
away lesson that a distinctive feature of countries “like Mex-
ico” was the tight link between politics–government and the
business climate. In an inversion of the Lévi-Straussian cat-
egorization of hot and cold societies, countries like Mexico
were hot societies, where dynamic historical events were
part of the lived fabric of contemporary lives. The United
States, by contrast, was a cold society lacking dynamic his-
tory or politics.
One student suggested (in 2007) that it would be neces-
sary to go back to an event like the Great Depression to have
a comparable view in the United States of the link between
government and business climate. She stressed the vast dis-
tance between this historical moment and her own lived ex-
periences. Her analogy is thus particularly resonant for my
purposes because it simultaneously creates commensura-
bility and incommensurability. One can relate to Mexico as
having gone through its own version of a process that the
United States went through previously. However, for con-
temporary U.S. citizens, that lived experience is radically
other. For their part, the Mexican business faculty members
had a different genealogy in mind: Using Mexico’s record
of sustained economic growth over the 1950s and 1960s
(the “Mexican Miracle”), they explicitly positioned Mexico
as the “China” of that time—an odd enfolding of time and
space to endow contemporary Mexico with the fully de-
veloped potential expected for the future of contemporary
China.
An important anchor of transnational commensura-
tion on many STSA trips is a visit to the local stock exchange.
Reflecting on his trip to South Africa, a student described a
tour of the Johannesburg Stock Exchange, where his group
met the founder of a South African entrepreneurial suc-
cess story: a company producing backfill bags used to help
prevent mine cave-ins. Especially noteworthy, the company
employed disabled miners to produce the bags. The stu-
dent summed up the experience as providing a glimpse of
a “value chain of the culture.”
We saw how the stock exchange was slightly differ-
ent and what they were doing to bring in these en-
trepreneurs, we saw a consulting organization that was
working with this lady at [the company] and how she
was developing her concept and how she was employ-
ing people from difficult situations in Africa. . . . It’s on

its own local time line, it has its own local characteris-
tics, and so that was really important for us [to see].
Here the distinctive attributes of the South African
business climate concatenate into a “value chain”—
distinctly South African but structurally commensurable
with any other business practice. By “culture,” the student
was gesturing to “the distinct characteristics of the people
and maybe how they’re different than some of our habits,
concepts, ideals that exist in the States . . . . I guess when
I say ‘cultural’ it is what makes their people and their her-
itage unique.” Viewed as a resource in a value chain, this ir-
reducibly singular quality is aligned and rendered commen-
surable with activities anywhere.
Something comparable was at stake in the packaging
of Mexican cultural distinction in the 2007 trip. The for-
mal case studies we discussed were selected to showcase
specific “Mexican” entrepreneurial qualities along with the
business potential charted in the thumbnail economic his-
tory of the country. Recall the success story of the mes-
senger service that renders the illegible warren of Mexi-
can neighborhoods (places our MBAs hosts would not take
us to) receptive to consumer credit and other commer-
cial communications. The company’s success rested on the
can-do ingenuity of its intrepid messengers. A second case
involved a company that produces rail frames for trucks,
buses, and recreational vehicles. Founded in the 1970s by a
man who had worked for a U.S.-owned steel mill in Mexico,
the company has become one of the three largest produc-
ers of rail frames in North America. With the now-elderly
owner present for our discussion, faculty extolled the com-
pany as anchored in family values and for its loyalty to cus-
tomers and concern for workers. They celebrated a spirit
of artisanal ingenuity, developing innovative production
processes to meet customers’ needs, implying that such
problem-solving ingenuity and creativity was not possible
in the U.S. firm that originally employed the company’s
founder. These are the qualities you get, was the message,
when you access Mexican (or global) markets with Mexi-
can partners; this is the marginal value of doing business
in Mexico.
For traveling MBAs, familiar institutions like stock ex-
changes or romantic frames like the family-owned business
help manage differences at the margins, some of which they
find quite troubling. A student on a trip to Brazil remarked
on the stark differences he experienced between the pace of
business life in Brazil and in the United States. With some
disapproval, he described the “lax,” disorganized, “thrown
together” quality of the corporate visits. This was unset-
tling for the student, and it was the primary example he
offered when I asked him to expand on his comment that
the trip had given him a sense of cultural differences and
the different ways society works “down there.” The laid-
back approach in Brazil was different from the approach in
Managing the margins  American Ethnologist
the United States, where “we’re very driven here to work a
lot and produce a lot.” The only exception to this impres-
sion came during a visit to BOVESPA, the Brazilian stock ex-
change, which the student described as “really driven.”
For this student, as for others, the otherness of Brazil
was condensed most powerfully by the stark poverty he
observed.
I found Brazil incredibly depressing. Such a black and
white division—a horrible pun!—of economic division.
Areas of beautiful houses next to favelas. . . . It was just
crappy. You see that kind of thing and it does makes
you appreciate where you live because there is no gen-
eral poverty here. I mean you see Appalachia and you
see homeless people in metro areas. We saw families of
eight—not one crazy homeless person—living in stick
huts. . . . You see someone here and you can say that
guy did something to screw up his life, he’s clearly a
crack addict or an alcoholic, and then you’re in a posi-
tion where you’re seeing—we went on a jungle tour do-
ing canopy rides, and the farther we went out of town
the more things went downhill. And you get to a point
where you say I just don’t want to go any farther be-
cause I don’t want to see this out here.
“It sounds elitist,” he went on, “but I guess to some point
you can hope to insulate yourself from that. In certain areas
you don’t even see it. If I were [posted there] I wouldn’t take
my family to see that. Or if I did it would be just before we
hopped on the plane to leave.” It may be important to see
such things (his analogy was a troubling trip he took to the
Holocaust Museum in Washington, DC), but “you only need
to do [it] once.”
This desired onceness is instructive. The trip to the
margins confronted this MBA student with a set of more
and less manageable experiences. Alongside the serial fa-
miliarity of BOVESPA and the more rehearsed accommo-
dation of stereotypically late and disorganized Latin Ameri-
cans, he struggles to make sense of the scenes of poverty he
glimpsed. Analogies from home—“Appalachia,” the home-
less “crack addict”—are inadequate, and all he can say is,
“I just don’t want to go any farther because I don’t want to
see this.” As the saying goes, you cannot “unsee” something.
The task, rather, is to manage the singularity of what you
see: maintaining its marginality as a potential terminal link
in a “value chain of culture” or as an experiential emblem of
global managerial competency.
Conclusion: Ours margins, our selves
The study-abroad experience as an emblem of global man-
agerial competency is a theme that has surfaced in virtu-
ally every interview I have conducted with MBA students
with study-abroad experience. In almost every case, stu-
dents have told me that the greatest value of their experi-
ence (the marginal value?) has little to do with acquiring
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direct knowledge of a particular place. For most students,
the greatest value stems from what the experience reveals
and cultivates about attributes of their selves. This is con-
sistent with the liminal condition of MBAs: undergoing a
transformative rite of passage designed to remake them into
suitable subjects of contemporary capitalism. A number of
students told me that their study-abroad experience was a
great “ice breaker” in recruitment interviews: that anecdo-
tal information about a city or the linguistic sophistication
casually displayed by correctly pronouncing a recruiter’s
“foreign” name, served to establish rapport in these inter-
actions. And, as a marginal addition to the standard busi-
ness school resume, these study-abroad experiences were
understood to signal their adventurousness, their inquisi-
tive spirit, their flexibility and willingness to take risks, their
capacities to work in cross-cultural environments.
Recall the student who was interested in going to South
America because he could “use it in a story.” “What do you
mean, ‘use in a story’?” I asked him.
When you interview with people. Things like that.
There’s got to be some kind of a reason you do things.
. . . I think the international aspect is very valuable and
I think bringing South America to the table for me is
much more compelling if you know I have some kind of
an international exposure, some kind of a vision, [that]
I get how things are going to a small degree down there,
you know, culturally.
The nimble and artful subjects of international business,
managing the margins of contemporary global capitalism,
ultimately commensurate the singularity of international
experiences through the marketing and the circulation of
their professional selves.
Intrinsic to this circulation as constructed by the study-
abroad process is the cultivation of risk. The double sense
of cultivation—the nurturing of growth and the harness-
ing of growth to managed ends—evokes precisely the ways
STSA trips to the margins are charged with a risk that must
never fully recede. The high-value trips are the ones that
take MBAs to places they would not risk going on their
own. The relative secure bubble of privilege in which most
STSA groups travel while in-country, the network of pro-
fessional counterparts in Mexico or South Africa or Brazil
that they develop in the course of their trips, and the con-
fidence that inheres in the partial expertise they develop
from firsthand experience of local places, currencies, foods,
or other tokens of the exotic create a space of plausible leg-
ibility for both foreign sites and the MBA students as adepts
of international management. Students returning from the
2007 Mexico trip told me that they came away with a bet-
ter understanding of the lives of their professional counter-
parts in Mexico and a better appreciation of the challenges
of business management in the face of what they saw as
700
the socioeconomic obstacles presented by Mexican society.
One student told me that the experience “got rid of some
stereotypes,” adding that the friendly, family-oriented style
of business she now associated with Mexico not only would
shape how she would do business there but also would
serve as a model of work–life balance she would strive for
in her own career. Yet, even as they harness these place ex-
periences to their own “stories,” taking the experiences with
them as part of their professional selves, they leave aside, in
the margins, the singularities they do not yet know how to
manage—the things they hope to see “only once.” Although
largely screened from the MBAs on the study-abroad trip
to Mexico, this too was a vital part of the story told about
“doing business in Mexico”—evident in the heroic delivery
of consumer credit to the places the MBAs only glimpsed.
Thus placed on the margins of the ledger, on the verge of
legibility, these singularities stand for the promise of risk
and the potential for its management.
Coda
The economic crisis of 2008 has provoked a torrent of crit-
ical assessments of MBA training and the adequacy of the
curriculum and the managers it produces for the realities
of contemporary capitalist practice.13 These assessments
have set the internationalization of MBA curricula in
instructive relief. MBA curricula have always been part
of a highly reflexive process, linking a paraethnographic,
anxious self-awareness suffusing capitalist practices
(cf. Holmes and Marcus 2008) with the standardized
production of the agents of capitalism’s future. The devel-
opment of the international business curricula detailed
here reflects one strand of an iterative process of self-
examination and reinvention in the face of the perceived
new realities of capitalism.
While the resulting changes have been far from fun-
damental, a couple of trends appear to be emerging. One
involves “if only they had listened to us” reforms: redou-
bling initiatives already under way in the wake of the Enron
and WorldCom scandals to increase ethics education and
infuse ethics training across all functional areas of the cur-
riculum. A similar effort applies to the MBA message that
management is part science and part art, with its increasing
emphasis on cultivating the “soft skills” and awareness of
social and historical contexts necessary for responsible
management decisions. The value of international ex-
perience is highlighted here as one opportunity in the
business curriculum for students to link classroom expe-
riences with the real world (Riaz 2009). The focus on case
studies is flagged as another best practice in this regard.
Alongside these efforts are trends in some MBA programs
toward awarding degrees focused on “green” or sustainable
business or that blend business with other professional
training, such as engineering, as well as a growing emphasis

on one-year MBA programs and efforts to recruit applicants
who do not fit the traditional business-school mold. While
these developments are no doubt responses to a variety of
substantive challenges to the MBA curriculum, they should
also be seen as a savvy repositioning of the brand at a time
when business school applications from U.S. students are
down and increasing numbers of MBA students indicate ca-
reer goals outside the structured corporate paths of finance
and banking, for instance, starting their own businesses.
In this environment, some of the discussion of the post-
2008 MBA suggests a shift away from technical compe-
tencies and a doubling down on the cultivation of leader-
ship talents. In the findings of one study, in a world where
“nomadic” managers may never be tightly linked to a sin-
gle corporate community, MBA programs must embrace
their role in providing “rites of passage—shaping the val-
ues, commitments, habits and mores of aspiring leaders”
(Petriglieri 2012).
I have been interested in this article in the role of short-
term study-abroad courses as they cultivate these sorts of
capacities as required attributes for the future managers of
global capitalism. The production of these managerial sub-
jects, I have argued, is coterminous with the production of
“the global” as the grounds of contemporary business. The
global is always a heuristic for what is a mobile engagement
with a shifting set of specific places. Capitalism has long
required the constant location of such spaces at the horizon
of business as usual. The ascendant frames of “semiglob-
alization” and the renaissance of regionalism in business
thinking are more than just recognitions of the empirical
limitations of simplistic metaphors of a flat world; they are
themselves generative cultural projects. MBA programs are
institutional sites for the production of adepts of mobile
specificity (fast subjects), even as they are also productive
of the scalar engagement of places of putative singular-
ity and risk whose ceaseless assimilation is a core value
proposition of capitalism.
Notes
Acknowledgments. The research reported here was supported
by research grants from the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthro-
pological Research and from the Research Board and the Center
for International Business Education and Research of the Univer-
sity of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign. Jennifer Hardin and Eliza-
beth Youngling have been outstanding research assistants for dif-
ferent phases of this work. This article has also been improved by
the generous comments of Angelique Haugerud and anonymous
reviewers for American Ethnologist.
1. This expresses, in a different register, a point made in other re-
cent commentaries on globalization, stressing countervailing pro-
cesses of localization or “friction” (e.g., Appadurai 1996; Dirlik 1999;
Miller 1995; Tsing 2004).
2. This is noted with alarm by some IB scholars, such as Peter J.
Buckley (2005:6), who see the field “under threat,” particularly in
the United States, where the trend toward infusion has dulled the
edge of any disciplinary mission.
Managing the margins  American Ethnologist
3. Research for this project has included an academic year spent
shadowing an MBA cohort through courses and extracurricular
activities; observation of courses and other activities at six ad-
ditional MBA programs; interviews with faculty, administrators,
and students from a total of 12 MBA programs; and participant-
observation in conferences and workshops related to international
business research and curriculum development.
4. For more on Shurz at Thunderbird, see Arizona Memory
Project n.d.
5. The more coordinated efforts to reimagine a professional
business curriculum in the United States, signaled in a pair of re-
ports commissioned by the Carnegie and Ford Foundations (Gor-
don and Howell 1959; Pierson 1959; cf. Clark and Opulante 1964),
build on a confluence of cultural developments crystallizing since
the 1930s. These range from the ascendance of the idea of “the
American dream” of upward mobility to the emerging figure of the
business “manager” as a cultural type and the consolidation of cog-
nate academic disciplines such as human relations and industrial
psychology (Berle and Means 1991; Frederick 1964; O’Connor 1999;
Susman 1984).
6. See N. 2.
7. See also Preda 2002, Riles 2010, Santiso 2003 (esp. ch.
5), and Clark and Thrift 2005 for discussions of the construc-
tion and mobilization of authoritative expertise in business
practices.
8. My comments here on marginal analysis, and below on value-
chain analysis, are informed by the courses I observed in MBA pro-
grams as well as by Albaum et al. 2005, Bartlet et al. 2004, Landsburg
2005, and Wild et al. 2006.
9. In one orientation session for new MBA students, the dean
made a point of introducing select international students to un-
derscore the range of countries represented, even asking an Indian
student to demonstrate the “Indian head shake” as a source of con-
fusion in intercultural communication.
10. These lists rarely include area specialists from elsewhere on
their campus.
11. For discussions of neoliberalization in Mexico, see Babb
2004, Cahn 2008, Lugo 2008, and Weaver et al. 2012.
12. One of the recommendations of a post–Great Recession re-
view of MBA curricula is that programs do precisely this (Datar
et al. 2010).
13. In addition to Datar et al. 2010, see, for instance, Mintzberg
and Danos 2011, Aspen Institute 2008, Damast 2008, and Petriglieri
2012.
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Andrew Orta
Department of Anthropology
University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign
607 South Mathews Avenue, 109 Davenport Hall
Urbana, IL 61801
aorta@illinois.edu
703