Corporate Anthropology

Biblical scholars have long debated the identity of the suffering servant of Isaiah 53. Most Christians identify the servant as Jesus and interpret Isaiah 53 as a description of Jesus’ unique, substitutionary death. However, Isaiah 40–55 repeatedly identifies God's servant as Israel. Was Isaiah 53 about the unique experience of a future individual, or was the passage about what all of God’s people would experience? The aim of this paper is to determine how best to understand the suffering servant of Isaiah 53 from an exegetical (rather than a modern theological) standpoint. The thesis is that the suffering servant was to be both the forerunner to and the paradigmatic exemplar of the ideal people of God—a paradigm the people of God were called to conform to. Thus, in light of the ancient conception of corporate solidarity, the answer to the question of whether the servant was to be an individual or a group is: “both.”

Этот доклад – попытка найти простые универсальные слова, которые будят в человеке «ген гостеприимства». Именно так называет врожденную способность к обслуживанию мой первый шеф-ресторатор. Меня зовут Жанна Прашкевич, я начала карьеру в сфере гостеприимства в 2008 году как маркетолог и за несколько лет разработала множество инструкций, чек-листов и интеллектуальных карт по продвижению систем гостеприимства. Сначала для себя, потом для своих сотрудников, затем – для клиентов в консалтинге.

This paper draws from an incident on a construction site when Xhosa workers organised a rite of passage for a fallen colleague. Probing into the history of the industrial, corporate workplace, an anthropological study of the 'Rites of Passage' shows how these ancient, culturally universal rites could work in the corporate workplace to provide employees with the symbolic tools needed to traverse the inevitable passages of human life: events of birth, marriage, death, accident, disease and death. Western corporate practices regarding life event management are held up to scrutiny and comparison with traditional indigenous methods of people management. Challenging Psychology's pre-eminence in making recommendations to companies as regarding employee management, anthropology here does the same with an hypothetical modification of the rites for the 21st century workplace.

The relationship between Achan and Israel in Josh 7 has puzzled commentators for thousands of years. Achan sinned, yet the anger, judgment, and punishment of the Lord came upon the Israelites at large, and the result was the death of dozens of Israelite soldiers. Why would God’s judgment come upon the whole nation in response to the sin of one individual? Various explanations of the Achan-Israel relationship have been proposed over the past century, including “corporate personality,” the concept of “taboo,” and “corporate solidarity.” The question is: which, if any, of these proposals are correct? The goal of this paper is to determine the actual relationship between Achan and Israel in Josh 7.
          After an introduction to the problem, the paper proceeds in three sections. In the first section, four current proposals are examined. All four are found to be inadequate, establishing the need for a new proposal—one which better matches the actual text of Josh 7. As a first step toward this new proposal, the second section provides an exegetical examination of the relevant passages (Josh 7:1–5, 10–15). In the third section, a new explanation is proposed which better accounts for the exegetical data. The new proposal is that the Achan-Israel relationship in Josh 7 is best explained in terms of Israel’s covenantal commitment to be a properly functioning community before God—a commitment Israel was failing to uphold at the time of the divine punishment. Thus, Israel was not punished for Achan’s sin but for their failure to uphold their covenantal obligation. The term corporate responsibility is ultimately found to be a fitting description of Israel’s relationship with Achan.

In 1 Timothy 2:15 Paul makes a very perplexing statement to the effect that Eve will be saved through “the childbearing” if they exercise good judgment and remain in the Christian way. This statement has puzzled commentators for two thousand years. The purpose of this Masters thesis is to help clarify Paul's meaning by explaining his reference to “the childbearing.”
Chapter 1 carefully considers the relationship between the term and its immediate literary context. Chapter 2 establishes the conceptual domain of the noun. Chapter 3 discusses the classification of the article. Five prominent interpretations are then assessed in chapter 4 in light of the evidence presented in the first three chapters. Finally, in chapter 5, a new solution is proposed which better accounts for the actual wording of the Greek text.

The purpose of this paper is twofold: to provide a sound exegesis of Psalm 44 and to discuss the implications of this exegesis for both biblical scholarship and for the Church. Of particular interest is the way in which the psalmists intentionally confuse the singular and the plural, suggesting that our modern categorization of the Psalms as either “individual” or “communal” is mistaken. Instead, readers ought to view the “singular” as the community’s expression of its singular, corporate identity, and the “plural” as the community’s expression of corporate solidarity. In other words, both the singular and the plural were corporate expressions. One of the implications of this for the Church is that Christians should view themselves not as individuals, but as a corporate entity with corporate solidarity.

The purpose of this paper is to show that sonship in the NT served as a metaphor for the OT concept of corporate solidarity. Part 1 explains the corporate anthropology of the OT authors and provides a definition of corporate solidarity. (The section also draws a distinction between corporate solidarity and other related concepts, such as corporate personality and corporate responsibility.) Part 2 surveys the relevance of corporate solidarity to NT interpretation generally and to passages about sonship specifically. Part 3 establishes that sonship in the NT served as a metaphor for likeness (or solidarity). Part 4 demonstrates through comparative study that NT sonship was a metaphor for corporate solidarity.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the corporate dimension of the NT presentation of the Spirit as a corrective to individualistic interpretations of the Spirit in the NT. The body of the paper consists of seven sections, covering the reception of the Spirit, being filled with the Spirit, the spiritual gifts, the presence and power of the Spirit, the fruit of the Spirit, the Spirit’s role in bringing Scriptural truth, and the Spirit in Christ and the Church. In each section, the individualistic theology of the Spirit is shown to be inadequate. The paper concludes with a call to modern interpreters to pursue a more corporate theology of the Spirit.

Sustainability paradox has become a debate of our time; adding to this predicament is sometimes the questionable behaviors of the corporations. This detrimental demeanor is counterproductive, as it for the entity so do for our common goods. The issue of sustainability is a dilemma of our which many scholars pondered over last decades, yet despite their efforts, the message is somewhat convoluted through a plethora of conflicting strategies, definitions, mandates and regulatory measures. The obfuscation has created deviation in the discourse of “sustainability” measures without addressing systemic discord with sustainability challenges at organizational and societal level, and societal and ecological level. This survey examines presence and absence of a particular behavioral dimension in global corporations and corollary effect of it. In addition, this global survey unveils previously unknown data depicting correlation between certain behavioral dimension at workplace and other corporate level factors including profitability, innovation and market leadership. This global survey serves as the basis for further research to find a common ground that brings institutional integration to sustainability conjectures.

This dissertation explores types and forms of political influence churches have in Africa. The study supplements the studies on church-state relations in Africa with a closer examination of the political significance of the social learning environment and social capital found within African churches. I argue that most churches can be considered schools of political socialization, but not all of them are necessarily schools of democracy. Regardless of their emphasis on external engagement with the state, churches still practice internal and external religious pedagogies that can either empower the democratic process or retard democratization. This dissertation explores the attributes of these different religious pedagogies and thus contributes an explanatory framework for better analysis and comparison of why and how different churches can help or hinder the development of democratic values and principles. 

Based upon 13 months of field research in Kenya, the study relies on a qualitative- interpretative research methodology that works from the ground up to develop concepts and theories, which when woven together with current scholarship, contributes to an understanding of how churches (one of the largest civil society organization across Africa) represent a social learning environment that shape political belief and behavior. This study examines the following three structural domains to better analyze these internal church dynamics: Pulpit to Pew (Sunday sermons and activities); Pew to Pew (religious life outside Sunday services); and Pastor to Pulpit (theological education of pastors). Important cultural and historical analysis undergirds the development of these religious pedagogies of democratic empowerment and disempowerment.

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