Creating and dissolving social groups from New Guinea to New York : on the overheating of bounded corporate entities in contemporary global capitalism

Attempts to create and fix the boundaries of various social entities have always been central features of modern capitalism. Such entities have always had the potential for either instability, on the one hand, or a lack of flexibility that is experienced by many as threatening, on the other. Such tensions have reached a point of intensification with the overheating of contemporary global capitalism. In this paper, we compare two examples of the changing and problematic nature of attempts to redraw the boundaries of such entities in an attempt to shape changing economic circumstances. The first is based upon research in Papua New Guinea, where attempts to create ever more bounded land holding groups with increasingly exclusive rights to parcels of land have exploded since the 1990s. The second is the changing nature of the corporation, perhaps the most significant entity in the history of global capitalism, whose boundaries have become increasingly unclear and permeable with the rise of finance capital. Whilst the move towards bounded landholder groups might seem to fit a narrative that would predict that a move towards capitalist modernity would entail the creation of ever more fixed and bounded social groups, the latter trend suggests that contemporary capitalist accumulation tends to simultaneously both fix and deconstruct the boundaries of such entities in different contexts. Contemporary overheated capitalism brings both tendencies to a head in a manner that makes the ever-present tension between them increasingly difficult to successfully manage or control.