Neoliberal associations: Property, company, and family in the Argentine oil fields

ABSTRACT

The transformation of Argentina's state-owned oil company into a transnational joint-stock corporation and a series of worker-owned subcontracting microenterprises in northwestern Patagonia provides an example of an actually existing neoliberal project. In this article, I illustrate how this project was as much a process of sustaining affective relationality as it was a process of fostering calculative rationality. The privatization process generated corporate subjects attached through familial associations of property, company, and family. Kinship sentiment was also the crucial force that incorporated former state oil workers into the inequitable circuits of the global petroleum industry. I argue that this neoliberal process was effective inasmuch as it worked affectively. [neoliberal, kinship, property, affect, corporations, structural adjustment, petroleum, Argentina]