For the modern social anthropologist, there's no better place for fieldwork than the business convention. A researcher entering the George R. Brown Convention Center in Houston to investigate the natural gas industry finds rooms full of stout and comfortable men who spend workdays flogging fuel. Most played football at Texas universities, and now wear golf shirts with an enviable, gregarious ease. Junketing Latin American bankers, meanwhile, sport expensive clothes and bodyguards. During bull markets they bring mistresses; in down years, wives. At tech industry conventions, researchers find hordes of shy obsessives. These subjects are patient, though, and have a... More >>>