Exploring compliance from an anthropological perspective, this book offers a varied and international selection of chapters covering taxation, corporate governance, medicine, development, carbon offsetting, irregular migration and the building trade. Compliance emerges as more than the opposite of resistance: instead, it appears as a valuable heuristic approach for understanding collective life, as a means by which actors strive to accommodate themselves to others. This perspective transcends conventional distinctions between power and resistance, and offers to open up new avenues of anthropological enquiry.
Table of Contents:
Introduction: Compliance: Politics, Sociability and the Constitution of Collective Life
Will Rollason & Eric Hirsch
Chapter 1. ‘We Are Poor, So We Keep Quiet’
Anna Berglund
Chapter 2. Good People Doing Bad Things: Compliance Regimes in Organisations
Steven Sampson
Chapter 3. Tax Compliance Dancing: The Importance of Time and Space in Taxing Multinational Corporations
Lotta Björklund Larsen and Benedicte Brøgger
Chapter 4. Surveillance, Discipline and Care: Technologies of Compliance in a South African Tuberculosis Clinic
Jonathan Stadler
Chapter 5. The Controversy of Voluntary Carbon Offsetting: Compliance by Proxy
Steffen Dalsgaard
Chapter 6. Complying in the ‘Right’ Way: Competing Fiscal Rationales in Highland Bolivia and Problem of ‘Compliance’ in Tax Studies
Miranda Sheild Johansson
Chapter 7. ‘Making Safety Personal’: Safety Compliance, Labour and Ethics in Construction
Sarah Winkler-Reid
Chapter 8. Compliant Rule-Bending: Migrants’ Encounters with Italian Immigration Bureaucracy
Anna Tuckett
References
Index
About the Author :
Will Rollason is a Senior Lecturer in Anthropology at Brunel University London. His research to date has focussed on Papua New Guinea and Rwanda.
Review :
“There are few books in the field of Anthropology that tackle the issue of compliance as directly as this volume does … The editors have elicited a set of contributions that make significant and varied ethnographic contributions to fields, some of which have hitherto passed under the radar. The contributions are illuminating, topical and interesting.” • Allen Abramson, University College London
