Copenhagen Business School: CBS Open Journals
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Anthropology: An Entrepreneurial Discipline
No full textIn this essay, I take stock of the existing entanglements and possible future symbiosis between anthropology and entrepreneurship, both as a field of research and as a practice of venture creation. While anthropologists have studied entrepreneurship as an economic phenomenon (anthropology of entrepreneurship) and have more modestly entered into direct conversation with this field (anthropology in entrepreneurship), I propose that there is an alternative way in which the discipline can make an impact and assert its value in the realm of new venture creation. To substantiate this proposition, I showcase how anthropologists and founders share affinities of practice. Specifically examining uncertainty, failure, and pivoting as fundamental to both how anthropological knowledge is generated and how venture creation unfolds, I argue that, seen in this way, anthropological practice and thinking can be understood as fundamental to business creation.
Escaping the Climate Crisis: Speculative Wealth and the Selling of a Smart City
No full textAs climate change threatens cities worldwide, how does the act of escaping environmental disaster become entangled with opportunities to generate wealth? Recent projections indicate that Manila, the capital of the Philippines, will become uninhabitable due to rising sea levels. In response, the government has begun constructing New Clark City, a smart city promoted as a backup capital where government functions can escape to if climate disasters render Manila inoperable. However, New Clark City has sparked intense speculation and is marketed not only as a safe haven, but also as a lucrative investment. This article introduces the concept of speculative escape to explore the complex fusion of fleeing climate catastrophe and capitalizing on climate infrastructure. It argues that speculative escape depends on deliberate spatial and social isolation, shielding privileged groups from ecological and infrastructural breakdown. Corporate actors reinforce this narrative by promoting New Clark City as both a secure financial asset and a space of sustainability, linking survival to capital accumulation in a climate-threatened future. Through this case, the article shows how climate change is transformed into a managed and marketable vision of elite survival, revealing how climate escape is shaped by exclusionary practices and uneven politics of adaptation.
On a Perpetual State of Becoming: Transnationality and Precarity against the American Dream in Dinaw Mengestu's The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears
No full textThis paper reads Ethiopian-American writer Dinaw Mengestu’s The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears (2007) to consider how the liminal experience of national identity that is often thematized in transnational literature pertains not only to the intersections of race and gender, but also to class conditions. The novel’s protagonist, Sepha, struggles to reconcile idealistic notions of America with the harsh realities of working-class life in a low-income DC neighborhood. To Sepha, citizenship figures not as the stable destination the American dream professes to offer, but rather as a marginal state of isolation and uncertainty. For decades, linear notions of immigration as assimilation have been subject to critique and re-framing. In addition, recent developments in the labor market under late-stage capitalism have generated working-class narratives that are fragmented by the forces of precarity. Mengestu’s novel addresses, through Sepha, an intersection between an ephemeral transnational identity and a precarious working-class position, subverting the narrative chronology of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century migrant novels. By contrast with these, transnational and precarious narratives defer such stable endpoints to remain in transition. The result, this paper argues, is the aesthetic expression of a perpetual state of becoming, the prevalence of which ought to be further considered within the field of American studies
