During the late twentieth century, US multinationals performed a magic trick: they made workers disappear. People still went to work, but they became contractors, or they worked for contractors, or they worked for firms that had been acquired by financial corporations on which they had no claim. The Disappearing Worker travels across the globe from 1945 to 2000 to understand the studied production of corporate practices that made workers disappear—not physically or economically, but legally and symbolically, with profound consequences for class relations.

Practice is often thought of as the province of religion, music, and other domains of culture that are easily recognizable as such. Yet the modern corporation has itself been important site of practice in several senses—a locus of learning through repeated application and of cultural norm making on issues of great human significance. The corporation is a place where, through daily experience and experimentation, people produce new common sense about proper relations of social power and obligation. This project approaches corporate practices in that spirit. The unraveling of the employment relationship grew from iterative experiments within multinational corporations—processes of learning (practice of one sort) whose product was a set of “best practices” or normative standards for corporate conduct that we live and struggle with today.