No corporate gift is ever free. Behind the bottle handed to a client, the hamper slipped to a partner, lies the oldest mechanism of human relations: to give is to bind, to receive is to owe, and every debt, sooner or later, comes due. A century after Marcel Mauss's The Gift, this issue asks what our professional presents really say about us, and why compliance, far from killing the business gift, has only made it rarer, more deliberate, almost aristocratic. Five voices — an anthropologist, two sociologists, a historian, and a legal counsel — decipher the silent language the powerful have never stopped speaking.
81 pages • Digital edition with clickable links & Instant downloadPierre Dehillotte-Dejean, International Legal Counsel, specialising in contract and compliance, and PhD Candidate at the Institute for Research in Business and Property Law (IRDAP), University of Bordeaux • Jean-Édouard Grésy, Anthropologist of Law, Mediator and Founding Partner of AlterNego, Paris • Marie-Karine Schaub, Historian and Senior Lecturer (HDR) at Paris-Est Créteil University, and Member of the Centre for Research in Comparative European History (CRHEC) • Philippe Steiner, Sociologist and Emeritus Professor at Sorbonne University • Florence Weber, Sociologist, Anthropologist and Emeritus Professor at the École Normale Supérieure.
The Art Institute of Chicago, USA • Château de Poncié, France • INAO Press Office, France • Institut et Fondation Félix Vallotton, Switzerland.
No corporate gift is ever free. Behind the bottle handed to a client, the hamper slipped to a partner, lies the oldest mechanism of human relations: to give is to bind, to receive is to owe, and every debt, sooner or later, comes due. A century after Marcel Mauss's The Gift, this issue asks what our professional presents really say about us, and why compliance, far from killing the business gift, has only made it rarer, more deliberate, almost aristocratic. Five voices — an anthropologist, two sociologists, a historian, and a legal counsel — decipher the silent language the powerful have never stopped speaking.
81 pages • Digital edition with clickable links & Instant downloadPierre Dehillotte-Dejean, International Legal Counsel, specialising in contract and compliance, and PhD Candidate at the Institute for Research in Business and Property Law (IRDAP), University of Bordeaux • Jean-Édouard Grésy, Anthropologist of Law, Mediator and Founding Partner of AlterNego, Paris • Marie-Karine Schaub, Historian and Senior Lecturer (HDR) at Paris-Est Créteil University, and Member of the Centre for Research in Comparative European History (CRHEC) • Philippe Steiner, Sociologist and Emeritus Professor at Sorbonne University • Florence Weber, Sociologist, Anthropologist and Emeritus Professor at the École Normale Supérieure.
The Art Institute of Chicago, USA • Château de Poncié, France • INAO Press Office, France • Institut et Fondation Félix Vallotton, Switzerland.
