Socio-Legal Discussion Group: A farm, and a firm: Ethnography of a Chinese Agricultural Corporation

This is an ethnography of the daily life in a Chinese corporation, H & Co. (pseudonym), drawing on empirical material to explore the socio-legal meanings of corporate personality. Based on empirical material, my main argument is that corporate personality is not just the corporate legal form provided by national laws and administrative recognition, or the corporate social assemblages that characterise its organisation, practices, and assets, but the interrelated co-existence of both. Weaving together insights on H & Co’s formalist engagement with legal regulations, organisational heterogeneity in daily work, embedded localities of corporate branches, and dynamics among actors of all kinds, this ethnography makes sense of how the legal form of corporate personality, a foreign import to China, matters in the corporation's daily life.

• The CSLS Socio-Legal Discussion Group is student-led, with each session exploring a different research topic. See the Trinity SLDG Term Card for the full schedule.
• Light lunch will be provided for those attending in person.
• If you cannot attend in person, please join online via Zoom.