The growth of agents who joined Amway, a network marketing company, presents a paradox: at the same time Amway recruits those agents - as employees -, it don't provide them with legal rights prescribed in formal contracts and, most of the cases, the Company doesn't offer even a monetary return. This research aims to demonstrate how Amway is structured by a continuous process which institutes a new cognitive order. The analytical model considers that the collectivity's elementary social bond is possible only when individuals share in their minds a minimal set of parameters about the social order: instituted social conventions. Inside Amway these instituted social conventions are constantly mobilized through practical and ritual activities which intend to increase and give dynamism to the networks, and thus tend to conduct the collective memory and maintain these social conventions.
Amway; economic anthropology; life's style; network marketing
