UC Irvine

This ethnography centers around findings from my two year fieldwork in China, when I enrolled as a business student at Tsinghua University, to address the question how might cultures of business be related to cultures of business. Examining my interlocuters’ view of school as a “place of purity” vis-à-vis their view of business as a “dangerous Jianghu,” I discuss how for students, business school represent a break from, rather than a continuation of, the production and reproduction of capitalism. This imagining of school as “suspension” allows for a creative reweaving of relations, dispositions, and temporalities by students, which continues to shape business cultures long after graduation.