In 1979, John D. Mucros and his wife, Ginny, were living in Dublin, CA. Thirteen years, eight assignments and five relocations after starting with International Harvester straight out of college, K’s Uncle John was a “truck sales manager” making $41,000 a year plus benefits. In that same year, his employer made $370 million on sales of $8.4 billion with nearly a hundred thousand people on its payroll: “132 years after its incorporation by Cyrus McCormick,” the company was “an industry leader in the manufacture of agricultural and construction products, engines, and medium and heavy-duty trucks.”¹ And then “the roof fell…

The song goes, “Here’s a truck stop instead of Saint Peter’s…yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah,” and K sings along.¹⁸⁷ Is it really so surprising that “the soul of business” should find such a clear and distinct expression in the ordinary workings and the succession plan of a family-owned commercial transportation dealership in the middle of the Arizona desert? The source of our amazement now appears to be four-fold: first, “that capitalism is industrial in its essence or mode of production,”¹⁸⁸ we treat sales and service activities as marked and downstream from the firm’s primary operations understood as the assembly line; second…

The anthropology of apprenticeship recommends that a theory of learning account for three fundamental elements or components: “Telos: that is, a direction of movement or change of learning (not the same as goal directed activity); Learning mechanisms: ways by which learning comes about; Subject-world relation: a general specification of relations between subjects and the social world (not necessarily to be construed as learners and things to be learned).” It has shown how this scheme can be profitably deployed to account for “salespeople’s learning at work.”¹⁷⁵ For our purposes, this same scheme does not represent the theoretical aim or objective, but…

“How is a person made?”¹⁶¹ Specifically, how is a person made as a function of “the biggest machine in the world,” the diachronic capitalist machine or what we have been calling the extended commercial enterprise?¹⁶² We take it for granted that such a machine is capable of making people rich or poor, happy or sad, well-adjusted or mad, powerful or mutilated; more importantly and urgently, it must be shown how the workings of its parts and gears actually make a people: “Our society produces schizos the same way it produces Prell shampoo or Ford cars, the only difference being that…

By carefully mapping the field of commercial practice, we are not only able to affirm the legitimacy of K’s apprenticeship, but more importantly we put ourselves in a position to ascertain the “functions of the soul, and its status in the world of flux.” More specifically, by tracing and aligning the two movements that define the field, we put ourselves in a position to follow the soul of business “in its journey toward the source of all harmony,” a journey that amounts to a “program for discontent” centuries in the making, a “noble discontent” and “critical discount” the ultimate value…

Uncle John set forth a number of “action steps” in his first letter to K, one of which was to “specifically identify the learning process and what it entails, plus the time space necessary.” He did this in a second letter after he and his wife, Ginny, had made a trip to Berkeley to meet with K and Ally to further explore the possibility of K leaving school to join the dealership.

April 10, 1997

Dear K,

We have had two weeks to review our situation and what direction we need to take for you and Ally and I-10 International…

Our construction of the notion of whole person attempts to do justice to the multiple relations through which persons define themselves in commercial practice by effectively combining society’s working relations with the learning curriculum that is demonstrably present in those very relations. The K-function is precisely the combination of the two, laying out a plane in which economic organization is inseparable from a profound form of human development (or arrested development) that is operative and consequent, yet until now has managed to evade detection and therefore remains largely taken for granted (see Figure 1.28).

As the ethnographer of copresence and…

What sort of evidence can we bring to bear on such a problem? It is precisely at this point that the study of learning asserts not only its theoretical importance, but even its necessity as it may be impossible to recognize the co-variation and symmetry that define the logic of commercial practice without assuming the perspective of a partial participant whose vector or trajectory of participation effectively leads from one limit of the field to the other. Indeed, it is essential that we “bring ‘degrees of development or perfection’ into the picture.”¹¹⁶ By following and recording the essential moments of…