ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that the work regime of management consultants is best described as ‘abstract labour’. It draws attention to the similarities and differences between German business consultants and British social anthropologists. In many ways, anthropologists also engage in abstract labour. They tend to describe entities that lie beyond their concrete environment, and they frequently do this from the comfortable physical seclusion of the university campus. Two trends blur the currently existing lines between anthropology and consulting. First, consulting is becoming an increasingly interesting job prospect for anthropology graduates. Secondly, the British government is aggressively increasing its demands on social anthropologists to make their work ‘policy relevant’. An immediately politically inflected understanding of critique may often be a driving force for anthropological work as well, even if it is mostly geared at social justice rather than business imperatives.
