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.

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.

Making ethics training ethnography-friendly

I’ve been meaning to write about an ethics project I’ve been working on, and now someone else has beaten me to it! Serves me right for neglecting poor Culture Matters for three weeks. I’ll tell you about the project and then I’ll tell you who has scooped me with a critique of my own website.

It all started out because I teach a couple of methods classes and I ask my students to do their own independent research projects. This requires a bit of careful work to secure ethics clearance with our Human Research Ethics Committee. Another time I’ll write about that what that entails. Here I want to describe my solution for giving the students training in research ethics. It became apparent to me that our ethics committee would be more comfortable about the idea of undergraduate students launching into their own fieldwork if they were sure that they’d been trained in research ethics, so I had the idea that I could develop a set curricula to use with every class that I want to send “into the field.”

My inspiration, and nemesis, was the U.S. NIH ethics training module. I had to take it when I was a graduate student, and so I had only dim recollections of what it covered. My first thought was that I could use it as a starting point for my students, but when I went back to look at it, I was shocked at how inappropriate it was for training anthropologists in the ethical dilemmas of ethnographic fieldwork. Like most international ethics codes, its basic assumptions about research are grounded in a model of a clinical (mostly biomedical) encounter. Plus it was full of U.S. regulatory code. Ad nauseum.

A screen capture from the NIH training module covering the concept of “equipoise.” I gotta say, I never heard of this word before.

So at first I thought, OK, it’s a government document so they would probably give me permission to adapt it for my own non-profit, educational use. I’ll just change a few things around, drop every mention of U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and replace it with a reference to the Australian National Statement on Ethical Conduct in Human Research, mention “ethnography” a few times, and add some stuff about Australian research.

But the more I played around with the idea, the more I thought it needed something completely new.

Anthropologists in cross-cultural management

Observing people in Sydney made me quite clear that the dominant focus of cross-cultural academics and practitioners on national cultures is problematic. People from so-many cultural background study and work in closely cooperation at universities and public and private organisations. Looking at your Indian, English, Dutch, Japanese or German colleague as representatives of fixed national cultures will not help you very much in your collaboration. The so-called essentialistic perspective has become very popular in contemporary management literature and consultancy and is highlighted by European authors, such as Hofstede (1990) and Trompenaars (1993). The work of Hofstede and Trompenaars, who have developed ‘cultural maps of the world’ in which each country can be situated based on their score on different indexes, fitted perfectly in the assumption that culture is a (more or less) stable entity that can be ‘engineered’, and managed. However, recent evaluations of these essentialistic cultural programs are not positive in regard to organizational costs and sustainability. The programs use a dramatic oversimplification of the culture concept and make no difference between espoused values and actual behaviour. Consultants of large cross-cultural consultancy firms themselves don’t believe in the value of multi value models. Instead they do use their international sensitiveness and experience to train managers and employees. In our research on the number one consultancy on cross cultural business in the Netherlands showed that a larger part of the consultants were using anthropological tools and methods rather than the corporate developed multi value models. None of them however, were anthropologists.

And this is surprising as international management and the training of managers in cross-cultural affairs should be of the core competences of anthropologists. However, anthropologists are not very good at selling their knowledge and skills to corporations. They are outnumbered by all other kind of professions that have taken up cross cultural consultancy. Only recently I have seen a growth of (small) anthropological consultancy firms, but there could be many more of them. The message that everything is more complex than what our cultural “competitors” bring is of course not a very good argument for selling your services. That could be done better by, for example, showing in a business case the costs of failures and awkward collaboration.

To support managers and organisations operating in a international context, we have explored new directions in cross-cultural management by making managers aware of practices of (cross-cultural) collaboration. The interest is not so much in gaining knowledge of other (national) cultures but rather on spaces and boundary objects in which cross cultural collaboration in daily organizational life takes place. Two weeks ago I was working with a large project management firm that had asked help to manage their large diversity of workforce. The company had employees of more than 35 different national cultures working in complex projects. Instead of training the management on all these cultures we studied collaboration practices at the workfloor from a socio-material perspective which includes spatial settings, materiality and social behaviour. The French anthropologist Latour called this symmetric anthropology. We found that engineers and project employees of both the company and the client gathered around so-called “rollerboards”. These are tables that can roll and have large paper drawings of installations on them. Around the rollerboard 6 different professionals stand, hang and are bending over the drawings. In debating which objects had to be left out, changed or added, each of the 6 professionals got time to explain their view, experience, perspective. If agreed upon, different colours were used to materialize the debate and colour the drawings on spots were the debate was on. The manager was surprised as he wanted to replace the rollerboard by a computer system, which would have ruined this efficient cross-cultural collaborative practice. In this way anthropologists can deliver knowledge and advice that are not given by traditional cross-cultural consultancy firms.

Some HTS updates

A couple of news items about the Human Terrain System have crossed my desk in the past week and I’m finally getting around to writing about them.  First, there’s an extended article in the Boston Globe about Paula Loyd, the HTS anthropologist who was killed in Afghanistan by a man who set her on fire (she died after 2 months in the hospital).  It gives more details than had previously been available about the man who killed her, suggesting that it wasn’t a spontaneous act of rage but something a bit more premeditated:

As part of a new military program that uses social scientists to improve the troops’ understanding of the local population, Loyd began interviewing a gregarious stranger who approached her with a jug of cooking fuel in his hands. He talked for 15 minutes, thanking her profusely in English. But just as her guards motioned it was time to leave, he lit his jug on fire and engulfed the 36-year-old Loyd in flames.

The other news item from this week’s Wired.com and Pravda is that HTS employees are about to become government employees instead of private contractors, with a substantial decrease in pay. From Wired.com’s Danger Room:

Imagine you’re on a mission for the military in Iraq and Afghanistan. The job is dangerous. The hours are long. And suddenly, you find out that your pay is about to be cut by sixty percent or more.

That’s the situation facing interpreters, researchers and  managers, deployed overseas as part of the Army’s social science program, the Human Terrain System. Since the inception of the project in 2006, these specialists have been generously-paid contractors, serving as cultural counselors to combat units. Earlier this week, however, program manager Steve Fondacaro told workers that they’re all becoming government employees — effective almost immediately. Which means that Human Terrain pay is suddenly not all that generous. One linguist, previously pulling in an annual salary $270,000, will now make about $91,000 — if that person continues his warzone work for the Human Terrain project, that is.

It abruptly changes the incentives calculus for anthropologists working for the military, which is something that has been widely reported on and critiqued — though even a ‘measly’ $91,000 a year is still about double the average starting salary of most anthropologists who teach at U.S. universities.

–L.L. Wynn

A new anthropology ethics scandal (?)

The Union of Organizations of the Sierra Juárez of Oaxaca (UNOSJO), an Indigenous umbrella group, has issued a press release condemning the American Geographical Society’s Bowman Expedition, “México Indígena.”  (Below I’ve pasted this press release, and following that, the text of the AGS description of the Bowman Expedition’s “México Indígena” project, which refutes many of the UNOSJO charges.)

The first charge is that one of the AGS researchers, University of Kansas’s  Peter Herlihy,  failed to disclose the fact that his research was partially funded by the U.S. military, specifically the Foreign Military Studies Office (FMSO) of the United States Army. It also claims that Herlihy failed to disclose the participation of Radiance Technologies, “a company that specializes in arms development and military intelligence.”

Another ethics charge is a novel variation on accusations that international researchers exploit Indigenous cultural and intellectual property: they accuse the project of “geopiracy.”

They also claim that the mapping data collected by the project is fed into “a global database that forms an integral part of the Human Terrain System (HTS), a United States Army counterinsurgency strategy designed by FMSO and applied within indigenous communities, among others.”

AGS refutes  the association with HTS, but one thing that seems clear from this project is that one of the 5 main concerns expressed by the American Anthropological Association about the HTS, namely its prediction that HTS would taint anthropologists and their informants worldwide, seems to be coming true.

–L.L. Wynn (pasted press releases below)

Guest blogger: Alfons van Marrewijk

After Pal mentioning the prominence of anthropologists in the Dutch public sphere in a recent post, we’re very happy to have Dutch business anthropologist Prof. Alfons van Marrewijk join us as a guest blogger.  Prof. van Marrewijk is Professor of Business Anthropology, Culture, Organisation and Management at the Free University in Amsterdam. He is currently spending a month at the Centre of Management and Organisation Studies at the University of Technology, Sydney (UTS)  and has kindly agreed to post to CM while he is out here.  The theme he will be addressing is cross cultural cooperation in organisations, which is one of his specialisations.

I would like to welcome Prof. van Marrewijk to Culture Matters and certainly look forward to his posts over the next month or so.

Blog: Islam, Muslims, and an Anthropologist

It’s always great to see anthropologists engaging in contemporary debates and attempting to give their perspectives some sort of public dimension.  Although, as Pal mentioned in a recent post, this is not all that easy in Australia, there are some out there trying.  One example I came across recently is a blog written by Italian-born anthropologist Gabriele Marranci, who is currently Associate Professor in the Anthropology of Islam at the University of Western Sydney National University of Singapore.  Called “Islam, Muslims, and an Anthropologist”, the blog takes a broad focus on Islamic issues, from writing about recent fatwas in Malaysia trying to ban Muslims from practising yoga,  to recent posts on the Israeli bombing and invasion of Gaza (here and here — warning, the posts contains some graphic images).

The blog is a good example of engaged anthropology.  More than just being another social commentary, Marranci tries to define what’s anthropological about his approach.  For one thing, he cites Franz Boas and Margaret Mead as examples of anthropologists who social engagement as one of their key roles and duties.  Secondly, he links the concept of the blog to anthropological methodology, stating:

Being an anthropologist, my methodology is to conduct fieldwork through participant observation. For this reason, the title of this Blog is Islam, Muslims and an Anthropologist. As an anthropologist, I become part of the community I am studying, and am offered the opportunity to observe and understand things from everyday life and as an ‘insider’, instead of from the mass media or libraries.

USA Today covers anthropology and the military

A couple of people (thanks Greg and Laleh) sent me this link: USA Today has an article on anthropology and the military that covers debate over the Human Terrain System (HTS) at the last AAA meeting.  The article situates the anthropology-military relationship within the history of colonialism, reports that two HTS social scientists were killed in the last year (but doesn’t clarify that they weren’t actually anthropologists), and covers perspectives advanced at the AAA by anthropologists Roberto Gonzales (whose book on HTS will soon be published by University of Chicago Press), Kerry Fosher, Brian Selmeski, and Phillip Stevens.

There is also a sidebar where Montgomery McFate answers questions about the program, and another sidebar that notes that three other academic/professional associations (the American Psychiatric Association, the American Medical Association, and the American Psychological Association) have policies barring various forms of professional participation with the US military.

The article contains several typos, I’m afraid, which doesn’t speak all that highly of USA Today, but it’s still interesting to see anthropology being covered in such a mainstream news outlet with national coverage.  There are 93 comments on the article — most of them inane.

New blog: MqVU

A group of us — anthropology PhD students and faculty — working on China’s development projects, investment, related migration flows and their implications around the globe — have started a new blog, MqVU (the name reflects that it will very soon be a joint venture between people based at Macquarie University in Sydney and the Free University, or VU, in Amsterdam). Give us a few days and then visit us!