Enacting the global in the age of enterprise resource planning

Abstract

In this article we seek to address 'the experience of work in a global context' by revisiting the relationship between globalisation and information technologies and att ributions of local and global eff ects. We do this through an empirical investigation of enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems, information systems which are purported to enable the institution and the enactment of global business practices. Rather than looking for the metrics that might best demonstrate the shaping infl uence of global processes upon local work sett ings - and which would in turn allow talk of such sett ings becoming more or less globalized - we draw on debates in science and technology studies and in particular the work of Latour in order to re-approach 'the global' as the outcome of a specifi c set of socio-material knowledge practices. Such an approach allows us to re-situate the analysis of globalization as an emergent, cultural and political phenomenon involving, for example, contestations over the potential and the nature of knowledge, the evaluation of diff erent ways of knowing and the ongoing importance of the embodiment of ideas about the human subject, which we fi nd are being worked out in processes of global (re)organisation. © Berghahn Books and the Association for Anthropology in Action.