New books

Ethnography and the Corporate Encounter: Reflections on Research in and of Corporations, with chapters by a number of the Anthrodesign crowd, is due out in July from Berghahn Books. Here are the contents:

1) Melissa Cefkin: Introduction: Business, Anthropology, and the Growth of Corporate Ethnography       

2) Donna K. Flynn: “My Customers are Different!” Identity, Difference, and the Political Economy of Design

3) Chris Darrouzet, Helga Wild, and Susann Wilkinson: Participatory Ethnography at Work: Practicing in the Puzzle Palaces of a Large, Complex Healthcare Organization

4) Brigitte Jordan with Monique Lambert: Working in Corporate Jungles: Reflections on Ethnographic Praxis in Industry

5) Dawn Nafus and ken  anderson : Writing on Walls: The Materiality of Social Memory in Corporate Research    

6) Françoise Brun-Cottan: The Anthropologist as Ontological Choreographer

7) Martin Ortlieb: Emergent Culture, Slippery Culture: Conflicting Conceptualizations of Culture in Commercial Ethnography

Jeanette Blomberg: Insider Trading: Engaging and Valuing Corporate Ethnography

9) Michael M. J. Fischer: Emergent Forms of Life in Corporate Arenas

According to the blurb,

The volume bridges across varying forms of applied ethnographic work in and for organizations, from product design to organizational consulting. The settings the authors address include product design teams, ethnographic research teams, organizational learning groups, schools, manufacturing and more.  Microsoft, Intel, Yahoo! and the Veterans Administration are among the organizations highlighted in the explorations.

The book explores, on the one hand, the social, cultural and organizational worlds we intersect with as ethnographic practitioners operating in organizational worlds while at the same time reflecting on the affect [I think this is meant to be effect] of ethnography in these organizations, on the nature of anthropological relations in ethnographic work, and on the value, practices, impact, and quandaries of this work. The volume aims to identify and sharpen the questions raised by this realm of work and to advance an understanding of the role of ethnographic work in industry and its effect on both organizations and in intellectual traditions of cultural analysis.

Meanwhile, Duke University Press has announced that it will publish the dissertation of S. Ann Dunham, Barack Obama’s mother, revised by her PhD advisor and a fellow graduate student in anthropology at the University of Hawaii. The book, Surviving Against the Odds: Village Industry in Indonesia, is “based on Dunham’s research, over a period of 14 years, among the rural craftsmen of Java,” and has an afterword by Robert Hefner.

New Centre for Study of Muslim Societies

Next month the University of Western Sydney will be launching a new Centre for the Study of Contemporary Muslim Societies.  Here are the details of the Centre and the launch:

Launch of the new Centre for the Study of Contemporary Muslim Societies

The University of Western Sydney is its new Centre for the Study of Contemporary Muslim Societies on the 16th of July, 2009 (Sydney, Bankstown Campus, Lecture Theatre 4, Building 23)

Prof. Jim Beckford (Warwick University, UK), Prof. Riaz Hassan (Flinders University), Prof. Fethi Mansouri (Deakin University), A/Prof. Gabriele Marranci (UWS), and Prof. Bryan Turner (UWS) will be
speaking on the day.

A copy of the program for the launch can be downloaded at

http://tinyurl.com/mqkwrj and the invitation can be found at the following URL http://tinyurl.com/nceisinvite

For more information or to RSVP, please contact Judy Crabb, Executive Officer, College of Arts: j.crabb@uws.edu.au, or (02) 9772 6765.

Attendees are welcome to attend the dinner but bookings for this are essential.

The development of this Centre has been assisted by a Federal Government grant of $8m which established the National Centre of Excellence for Islamic Studies and brings together the University of
Melbourne, Griffith University, and the University of Western Sydney. Collaboration between these institutions has already established a new undergraduate program in Islamic studies.

The Director of the Research Centre is Professor Bryan Turner,Professor of Social and Political Thought in the School of Humanities and Languages in the College of Arts.

The Research Centre is essentially concerned with the contemporary world and will seek to foster comparative studies of Muslim communities both within and outside Australia.

Upcoming symposium on Islamophobia

While I am in announcement mode, here are the details of an upcoming symposium that may be of interest to some CM readers.

SYMPOSIUM:    Sunday 19th of July

CONFERENCE:   Mon-Tue 20-21 July

Under the broad theme of ?Challenging Islamophobia: towards social
justice & inclusion?, National Social Cohesion Conference will explore
the following themes in six plenary sessions.

Muslim experiences, settling in Australia

Media and its Role in Public Hysteria

On the Borderline of Vilification and Freedom of Speech

Politics of Diversity and the Politics of Marginalisation

Muslim Women: Narrated experiences from the margins

Anti-racism: Learning from the past, new strategies

Attached are full conference details and registration form. Please
email filled registration form to info@affinity.org.au, alternatively
you can register online at www.affinity.org.au.

For any other enquiries please email info@affinity.org.au.

We look forward to your attendance and participation in discussions.

Upcoming NT Intervention Protests

We haven’t posted anything on the NT Intervention for some time but the issue is still very much alive.  A report on SBS news last night included some interviews with Aboriginal women from Bagot,  an urban community in Darwin, on their views of the intervention.  Two key points stuck out for me based on those interviews:

1. The prohibitions of alcohol use appear to be leading to new population movements as people attempt to escape regulatory mechanisms.  This means that the effects of the Intervention are uneven, with problems being exacerbated rather than reduced in some areas.
2. The paternalistic nature of the Intervention, with its enforced quarantining and management of all welfare income, means that “model” members of communities — those who are best able to manage their funds independently — are resentful about being treated as though they were not capable of looking after themselves.   If the Government’s goals are pedagogical, i.e. aimed at producing new kinds of subjects closer to the bourgeois ideal of the self-managing individual, it’s problematic that those people most closely resembling that kind of subject are punished and feel disempowered.  The predictable result of such a policy would be the increasing institutionalisation of welfare dependence.

Meanwhile, anti-Intervention protests have been organised for this weekend.  Here are the details:

On June 20, marking two years of the Northern Territory Intervention, demonstrations will be held across the country in defense of Aboriginal Rights .

See the Youtube promo at

http://www.youtube.com/user/solidtv7#uploads/7/9rHbpKEZVco

Darwin: 11am Raintree Park contact Dave 0407209520

Sydney: 10:30 Belmore Park contact Monique on 0415410558

Brisbane: 11.00am Queen’s park contact Rob 0424265730 or Sam 0401227443

Melbourne: 12pm outside the State Library Cnr Swanston/La Trobe sts.

Perth: 12 noon Wesley Church.

This rally will have a focus on Aboriginal death’s in custody, demanding justice for Mr Ward.

www.rollbacktheintervention.wordpress.com

www.stoptheintervention.org

Allen & Unwin non-fiction award for writing on Australia

Marlene Lage, one of our former Masters of Applied Anthropology students, just alerted me to a non-fiction writing award from Allen & Unwin. Called The Iremonger, the award offers $10,000 and guaranteed publication (and royalties too) for an idea on a contemporary Australian political, social or cultural issue.  Marlene thought that it would be “a great opportunity for ethnographic writing to expand its audience. They do say it can’t be a thesis itself, but it can be a modified version of one.”

It’s a great incentive for anthropologists (and other academics) who work on Australia to think about crafting their writing to reach a more general audience.  Does anyone know of any similar awards for writing on other parts of the world, besides the University of California Public Anthropology book competition?

–L.L. Wynn

PhD dissertation in comic format

My colleague Juliette Koning alerted me to a PhD dissertation in cultural geography, on Korean missionaries, which its author, Judy Han, has converted into a comic strip. See here.

Sounds like a practice that should be encouraged in every household!

Culture matters for health

Let me break my long silence with a quick announcement for a conference.  The ANU is hosting a symposium and short course on the subject of cultural epidemiology.  Seems like and event that would be of interest to readers of this blog.  Here are the details:

*Culture Matters for Health: Exploring cultural epidemiology & related
approaches in a symposium and short course.*

26-29 October, University House The Australian National University,
Canberra.

According to the 19th centure anthropologist and doctor, Rudolph
Virchow, ‘disease is a disturbance of culture’. Over the past 150 years,
cultural epidemiology has evolved as a hybrid or sub-discipline with a
body of work and research approaches that resonate with Virchow’s
proposition.

*Scoping cultural epidemiology in the Antipodes – a symposium.*
Through the presentation of brief papers and posters over one and a half
days, the symposium will explore the inter-relationships between
culture, health and illness.

*Cultural Epidemiology short course*
This two day course introduces students to the emerging discipline of
cultural epidemiology, defining what it is and how it might be
undertaken. It focuses on employing cultural theories, concepts and
related methods to the health of populations and sub-populations.

Speakers include:
Professor Sandy Gifford, Director, Refugee Health research Centre,
School of Social Sciences, LaTrobe University
Professor Claude Fischler, Director, Centre National de la Recherche
Scientific, Paris
Associate Professor Julir Park, Associate Professor of Anthropology,
University of Auckland
Professor Tony Blakely, Director of the Health Inequalities Research
programme, University of Otago,
Dr Maggie Walter, School of Sociology, University of Tasmania
Jill Guthrie, Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait
Islander Studies.

For more information and to register go to:
<http://nceph.anu.edu.au/Short_Courses/CulturalEpi/index.php>

*Register early to be guaranteed a place – strictly a limited number
available!*

Alfons van Marrewijk’s inaugural lecture on business anthropology

On 14 May, Alfons van Marrewijk, who has been guest blogger on CM during his recent stay in Sydney, gave his inaugural lecture at the Vrije Universiteit as the newly appointed Professor of Business Anthropology, Especially the Anthropology opf Cultural Interventions in Complex and Public/Private Networks. Such lectures are major public events with considerable pomp (I am already planning my own in November!), and the topic signifies a further step in the academic mainstreaming of business anthropology (although the VU has already been in a special situation, having both a social and cultural anthropology department and one that deals largely with organisational anthropology). The lecture broadly outlined the scope of business anthropology in Alfons’ own practice, in which I found particularly interesting the focus on material culture and spatial settings — from office spaces to project locations — which is close to the interests of one of our PhD students at Macquarie, Melanie Uy, who is doing her research in a small Chinese company.

Corporate anthropology as well as the anthropology of business is increasingly in the news in Europe as well, and the collapse of financial institutions may have given it a boost. The simple idea that managers do not always behave rationally suddenly does not need “selling.” Alfons mentioned that British anthropologist Gillian Tett’s book Fool’s Gold: How Unrestrained Greed Corrupted a Dream, Shattered Global Markets and Unleashed a Catastrophy (a rather un-anthropological title, I must say) received the British Press Award. The book Gezocht: Antropoloog m/v (Required: Anthropologist [m/f]) and the organisation NAGA (Niet Academisch Gebonden Antropologen, Anthropologists Without Academic Affiliation) are testimony to the emergence of the trend in the Netherlands. Unlike in many other academic settings, at the VU, there is no animosity between academic and applied anthropologists, and the institutional conditions for a close interaction between them are at hand. Yet even here, the training of anthropology students (in either department) has not quite kept step with or been able to drive home the fact that anthropologists are in demand in the workplace — despite the fact that Alfons himself, together with another colleague in his department, runs an anthropology consultancy.

Macquarie is hiring an anthropologist of Aboriginal Australia

Macquarie is hiring again! Please spread the word to anyone who works on the anthropology of Aboriginal Australia. Below is the official job ad, and here’s a link to where you can submit an online application.
________________________________

The Department is seeking to appoint an anthropologist to a teaching and research position in our department where exciting new synergies are developing after a series of fresh appointments. The appointee will teach at both undergraduate and graduate levels, including PhD theses and our Masters degrees in Applied Anthropology, and in Development Studies and Cultural Change.

Essential Selection Criteria: Experience and commitment to fieldwork in Australian Indigenous communities & demonstrated capacity to contribute to the teaching, research and supervision of Anthropology of Aboriginal Australia; PhD in Anthropology or related discipline; Demonstrated research record relative to opportunity as evidenced by peer reviewed publications.

Desirable Selection Criteria: The area of academic specialization is open but could include any of the following fields: Visual Anthropology, Anthropology of Performance, Anthropology of Environment, Health, Art or Law.

The position is available on a full-time (continuing) basis and may be subject to probationary conditions. Selection criteria must be addressed in the application.

Enquiries: Dr Christopher Houston on +61-2-9850-8471 or email chris.houston@scmp.mq.edu.au

Package: From $84,949 pa, including Level B (Lecturer) base salary $71,783 to $85,121 pa annual leave loading and up to 17% employer’s superannuation.

Information on the Department of Anthropology is available from www.anth.mq.edu.au

This appointment is currently governed by the terms of the Macquarie University Enterprise Agreement 2006-2009.

Closing date: 7 June 2009

Accountability in the aid industy

Earlier this week I attended an inspiring 2 day workshop at the Berlin Civil Society Center.

I wrote an overview about the workshop on my betterplace.org blog, but would like to share it also with Culture Matters readers, as it concerns the development industry about which anthropologists have quite a bit to say.

The topic was “Exploring Mutual Accountability“ and some of the top CEOs and program directors of the large development INGOs (Oxfam, Terre des Hommes, Care, World Vision, Welthungerhilfe etc.) were present, as well as leading civil society think tanks from AccountAbility and Active Philanthropy to Humanitarian Accountability Partnership and Keystone.

Accountability to whom?
For Civil Society Organisations „accountability“ usually means the accountability of organisations receiving funds to those who provide the financial inputs: their donors (governments, corporations, foundations or private individuals).

One of the discussion strands at the workshop concerned how the many different, often conflicting, accountability regimes which different donors demand from organisations and whose fullfillment costs them millions of Euros, can be simplyfied and made more effective. There was a consensus, that there exists a lot of „toxic accountability“ (as Simon Zadek from AccountAbility called it), doing more harm than good.

One prominent ongoing attempt to standardise this kind of accountability is the INGO Accountability Charter, which was presented at the workshop by Jeremy Hobbes, Executive Director of Oxfam International.

 Yet from my perspective, the really important discussions concerned a different accountability: the accountability of development organisations not to their financiers (which consists predominantly of rather technical and financial stuff, such as management procedures), but to the people they are supposed to serve: their clients, i.e. the poor and/or disadvantaged. 

The reason why aid has failed
I have argued again and again (or rather, repeated the wisdom of others…) that the main reason six decades of development aid have failed has to do with the fact, that aid organisations are NOT sufficiently held accountable for their performance. And all too often programs are badly designed and/or executed.

What do donors know about the quality of the charities they support? Some, of course, know a lot, as they are involved in volunteering for a specific organisation. But the majority, don’t know much about how effective a development program has been.

This is a result of the huge power imbalance between NGOs – mostly Western organisations with millions to spend and their clients – often poor, illiterate and badly organized. The latter simply lack a voice. They can’t say what they need, nor complain if the services they recieved were inadequate or even harmful.

In order to empower the poor they need voice, yet this would automaticall take power away from the organisations.

As Burkhard Gnärig, former CEO of Save the Children and Director of the Berlin Civil Socitey Center writes: 

Many civil society organisations talk about partnership, many talk about human rights, children’s rights and self determination but very few grant their local partners and beneficiaries tangible rights comparable to the rights they have to grant their own donors.

One of the results is, that in many non-Western countries, development organisations are considered less trustworthy than corporations: 

1. This is especially significant as CSOs spend hundreds of millions of Euros/Dollars in Asia and Latin America for the supposed benefit of the local population. The discrepancy between resources allocated and trust obtained indicates a strong lack of accountability, with a resulting lack of appropriateness of the projects CSOs run.

Give your clients a voice
Only beneficiary feedback can redress this situation. And some of the participants were very frank about badly run projects of their own organisations or that of others. Nevertheless there seemed to be a real gulf between the large INGOs and the participants representing leading think tanks and expert organisations.

Whereas the former acknowledged: yes, the situation is bad and we definitely need to incorporate more feedback from our „primary constituents“, the latter tend to look for more radical solutions.

The key questions revolved around: How much power are you willing to yield to others? How much voice are you willing to give to others, which – very probably – will challenge your work?

Thinking about it, it seems unlikely that INGOs will change fundamentaly. It seems very difficult to truthfully incorporate negative feedback, without completely undermining an organisation. „What do you do“, asked one participant, „if in a beneficiary evaluation, you find out that 85% or more of the recipients state that your organisations work has been useless or even harmful to them?“ Giving truthfull feedback might hugely undermine an NGO brand.

Yet, as the concept paper of the workshop rightly pointed out:

Empowering beneficiaries to seriously hold their donors accountable will do more for raising the average quality of projects than any other single step.

Here I obviously get very, very excited about the potential of betterplace.org and our web of trust. Because already now recipients can give feedback on services recieved. If the intervention they receive is on betterplace.org, they can post a statement as a visitor or advocate (well, the terminology for these roles will have to be rethought, as a refugee in a camp is hardly a „visitor“) on the project page.

So far only a few do so, such as the Namibian Benson Muramba, who wrote a visitors statement about what the funds received meant to him. Or the palestinian project Cinema Jenin, were (so far) 15 advocates, among them a number of local inhabitants, and 3 visitors voice their interest in the project and follow its realization. 

But it is not hard to imagine, how this feature can be used for massive real-time reporting.

Better capital allocation
Thus it is with great excitement, that we are planning a cooperation between Good Root and Keystone International, with the aim of bridging the power gap by giving more people a voice and thus making it possible for donors to get a much more reliable impression of project quality. The result would be that more money is spend on those projects which deliver effective social change and that ineffective projects would feel the need to change their approaches. This is hardly as easy as it sounds, as social change is often difficult to measure. Still this is no excuse not to use those state of the art impact tools which sit around, waiting to be implemented.