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Business Culture and Rediscovery of Difference  

Review by Anastasia Krutikova 

 

Andrew Orta. 2019. Making Global MBAs. The Culture of Business and the Business of Culture. 

Oakland: University of California Press, pp. 256 ISBN: 9780520325401 

 

Key words: business culture, capitalism, MBA, globalization, difference 

 

It seemed a generation ago that, with the triumph of capitalism, the world had come to the "end of 

history,"i marked by standardization of global markets and the imminent end of local specificity. 

Today, however, the trend seems to be reversed - not only have local differences not disappeared 

from the global space of capitalism, but they have been getting more attention from international 

business scholars and managers. Andrew Orta aptly calls this trend the "re-enchantment of the 

local" (7). His book Making Global MBAs tells the story of this "reimagining of global space as a 

space of difference" (2) and paints a convincing portrait of the managerial subject who is best 

prepared to manage risks and opportunities in this new space. To this end, the author explores 

MBA programs as one of the key places that both produce and reflect the business culture in the 

United States. Each of the seven chapters of the book focuses on a specific aspect of MBA 

education, ranging from its history and ethnographic accounts of students' daily experiences to 

detailed descriptions of the curriculum designed to prepare students to do business abroad. 

Together they provide a comprehensive overview of the business culture in the United States and 

its basic assumptions about the world.  

The first introductory chapter includes important background information about the shift 

in perception of foreign space and culture that has taken place in U.S. business circles and the 

social sciences over the past few decades. The chapter elaborates on how the idea that "managers 

of the 21st-century capitalism will necessarily engage a world at once rife and rich with 



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difference" (6) has become conventional wisdom and an expected outcome of the MBA training 

path. The second part of the chapter introduces the author's ten years of fieldwork in a dozen 

distinguished MBA programs.   

Chapter 2 describes the main features of MBA programs and their meaning for students' 

professional future. The author highlights the challenges associated with the huge flow of 

information and the fast pace of educational and extracurricular activities that saturate the MBA 

training. He carefully examines its most salient features, including fundamental concepts of 

capitalism such as market, risk or value, language patterns and common ways of presenting data 

in MBA classes that reveal basic assumptions about business practice. The main argument of this 

chapter is that MBA training, designed as a ritual of professional socialization, offers students 

much more than technical knowledge in several core disciplines, but also a set of experiences and 

claims about the world through which students come to embody "a theoretical representation of 

contemporary capitalism" (29).   

The historical overview in Chapter 3 reviews origins of business education and its 

struggle for legitimacy in academic circles in the first half of the twentieth century, followed by 

its exponential growth after World War II and the redefinition of the manager as an "engineer of 

social relations" and a "new American cultural type" (76). The chapter concludes with a section 

on the evolution of the international component of MBA programs, which recalls the process of 

rediscovery of global space among business scholars throughout the twentieth century. 

Introducing the milestones and key personalities that have shaped this field, the author 

demystifies business education. The chapter could, however, benefit from a more elaborate 

description of the links between the evolution of MBA programs and the broader historical 

context.   

Chapter 4 looks into the MBA conception of culture. It provides a subtle comparison 

between anthropological and business framings of cultural difference, highlighting the 

similarities and connections between them. This chapter brilliantly illustrates how 

anthropological concepts can be borrowed and creatively accommodated by other disciplines. 

Examining the ideas of major business theorists on cultural differences, Geert Hofstede and 

Pankaj Ghemawat - both mandatory references in the MBA international business classes - the 

author underscores the specificity and implications of a business understanding of culture in 

terms of distance and resources, risk and opportunity.  



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The following chapters contain ethnographic descriptions of two signature components of 

MBA international business curriculum. The author first examines short-term study abroad trips, 

which take the form of "carefully staged international experiences" (129). He turns next to the 

case study teaching method, describing it as a "quasi-ethnographic simulation of the world and 

[…] manager’s engagement with its uncertainties" (24). These examples immerse the reader 

further into the MBA education routine. Along with this, by giving voice to teachers and 

students, the author demonstrates how business assumptions about culture and global space shape 

their learning experiences and professional future.     

The closing chapter offers author’s reflections on MBA training in light of two trends that 

have recently marked global capitalism and that coincided with his fieldwork: the effects of the 

global financial crisis of 2008-9 on MBA curriculum and the resurgence of populist governments 

and antiglobalist movements around the world. The concluding remark describes these trends as 

consistent with the general trend of the rescaling of global space and rediscovery of difference, 

emphasized throughout the book.   

In the subtitle of his book, Andrew Orta promises to introduce the reader to "the culture of 

business and the business of culture," and he indeed keeps this promise. Through generous 

descriptions of the environment, rituals and experiences that MBA students encounter during 

their training, the author paints a fascinating cultural portrait of future middle and senior 

managers as key players in global business. Furthermore, the reader finds an insightful analysis 

of how these managers learn to conceptualize and cope with cultural differences in the 21st 

century. This is one of the few studies that explore both content and production of knowledge 

about culture and demystify managers whose practices and understanding of culture, difference, 

risk and opportunity shape the lives of many people around the world. The book will be a 

valuable reference to anthropologists interested in education and business culture. 

 

Anastasia Krutikova is a PhD candidate in the Laboratoire d'anthropologie sociale at the School 

for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences. Her dissertation research focuses on secondary 

school conceptions of human diversity in France and in Russia. Her research interests include 

secondary education, theory and history of anthropology.  

 

 



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© 2020 Anastasia Krutikova 

 

 

 
i The expression refers to Fukuyama, Francis. 1992. The End of History and the Last Man. New York: Free Press.  


