What I’m Reading: Damon Salesa
I’m currently reading Ryan Bodman’s new Rugby League in New Zealand: A People’s History. I skimmed it quickly as soon as my copy arrived, and now am working my way through it from front to back: I’m loving it, and it combines two things I care about – sport and social change.
Rugby league has a particularly compelling history in New Zealand, with its growth in and across the deepest of fault lines in New Zealand’s culture – race, social class, region, urban/rural/suburban, labour/ capital, gangs, new forms of corporatisation and media – and Ryan’s book does a great job at tackling (forgive me) these.
I’m now back to the last couple of chapters of a book about management, accounting, and finance, but which takes it up in a way that is utterly compelling and has occasioned some sombre reflection on my part.
It’s a book by Caitlin Rosenthal called Accounting for Slavery: Masters and Management and is a confronting book, in compelling detail, about the reprehensible but profitable nature of slavery. It draws out the way that many familiar management techniques were embedded—by the late 1700s—in the systems of slavery in the US.
Amidst their horrific and dehumanising activity, slave owners also did productivity analysis, compiled balance sheets denominating units of human life and assigned value to those lives from birth to death and contributed to the rise of “scientific management”. It isn’t just neoliberalism that is the source of the managerial excess and bureaucracy.
Its sobering, which is why I keep a piece of popular crime or action fiction nearby as well.