Globalization as it happens: on globalizing assemblages in tax planning

Abstract

Globalization is usually understood as a structural, epochal condition altering the environment in which people, organizations, and societies operate. But such accounts offer little insight into the infrastructures, practices, and connections that facilitate the production of the global. This article uses findings from an ethnographic study of tax planning to show how mundane practices and connectivities forge and organize global operations, and to argue for the value of analyzing processes of globalization in terms of assemblages and infrastructures. Empirically, the article captures how the making of ‘tax structures’ involves connecting, for instance, buildings in France, a human in Switzerland, a company in Denmark, various tax laws, a trust fund in New Zealand, and large amounts of money on the move. If studied along the lines of an analytics of ‘globalizing assemblages’, such financial objects can help us capture how the global is produced and navigated in finance and beyond. By engaging with these questions, the article contributes conceptually, methodologically, and empirically to current attempts at rethinking globalization, and provides novel insights into the practices and entanglements involved in globalized and globalizing financial activities.

Keywords:

• assemblages
• ethnography
• financial objects
• globalization
• infrastructures
• practices
• tax

Notes

This article draws on two sources of empirical material. The first is a brief (five weeks) ethnographic study involving observations at the main office, repeated participation in meetings, internal workshops, and discussions, visits to employees’ offices, and ten lengthy (one to three hours), qualitative interviews with account managers, directors, and other employees. On top of these situated observations, interviews, and conversations, the empirical material consists of a range of documents, such as internal memos, training materials, and various forms used in the daily work of the company. Interviews and parts of meetings and office visits have been recorded and transcribed. This empirical material has been coded along the lines of ‘situational analysis’ (Charmaz 2005; Clarke 2005; Clarke and Friese 2007). Starting from the conception of globalization as assemblages of material, ideational, and human elements, the coding of the material focused on a careful unpacking of tax structures and practical manifestations of globalizing and globalized elements. What came out of these analyses was a number of insights about how tax structuring involves the assembly and stacking of financial, material, and organizational components.