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.