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Ethnography
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Unlocking the geographies of the Mind Gym

Adrian Smith

University of Wales, Aberystwyth, UK, cllrsmith{at}gmail.com

This article engages with a number of literatures regarding ethnography as a tool for researching management training, considered as a key component of `new capitalism'. Put briefly, new capitalism as an object of academic inquiry, as well as an emergent epistemology within management training literature, seeks to embed the economic within a series of discursive and embodied practices, such that money systems, labour regulations and so on are exposed as fully relational, and hence contingent and changeable phenomena. Thus far, however, micro-scale academic analyses of the economic have lagged behind studies of broader scale relations and practices that seek to outline an emerging, self-reflexive epoch within capitalism. This article attempts to use ethnography to attune this literature to the micro-spatialities of new capitalism, illuminated by fieldwork with the Mind Gym.

Key Words: reflexivity • capitalism • ethnography • geography • agora

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Ethnography, Vol. 8, No. 4, 425-444 (2007)
DOI: 10.1177/1466138107083560


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This Article
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What's this?