corporate anthropology = anthropologists working for the military?

Over at Savage Minds there is a small but fierce exchange of comments about the merits of corporate anthropology (two commentators divide over whether the appropriate analogy is corporate=military or corporate=academia).  Since we here at Macquarie like to think about applied anthropology, maybe some of our students and readers of Culture Matters would like to go over there and weigh in.  Preferably with something a little more thoughtful than name-calling (e.g. “reductive dumbass”).

What is a “practicing” anthropologist?

I just got an e-mail from COSWA, the Committee on the Status of Women in Anthropology, which is part of the American Anthropology Association. The e-mail invites “practicing anthropologists” to take a work climate survey. I didn’t read very carefully beyond that but went straight to click on the survey link, wanting to do my part. When I got there, I read this:

If you are a practicing anthropologist, we would greatly appreciate your completing this survey!

Hmm, I thought, that’s me. I teach anthropology, I do research (when I can), yep, I’m a practicing anthropologist. But then I read on:

If your main occupation is a full-time faculty member at an academic institution, please exit now.

Whoops. *That’s* me.

This often nags at me: between “applied” and “practicing” and “academic” and whatever other modifier for anthropologist you can think of, we don’t really have a suitable lexicon for distinguishing between anthropologists who teach at “an academic institution” and those who work for other institutions. I apply anthropology to most everything I do, and I expect that anthropologists who don’t teach at academic institutions but have PhDs from them are about as academic as I am.

Can anybody out there suggest literature that troubles the difference between “academic” and “applied” or “practicing” anthropologists?

Harvard Business on Corporate Anthropology

Tom Davenport has written an article on “The Rise of Corporate Anthropology”. He seems particularly supportive of anthropology as a corporate research technique because of its emphasis on “systematic observation”. I can’t say my own fieldwork experience felt all that systematic, but maybe that was because I wasn’t in a corporate environment. Davenport writes:

What’s so good about systematic observation? It’s the key to knowing what’s working and what isn’t, how people are using technology and other tools in the course of the workday, how workers extract meaning (or don’t) from their work, and so forth. We all make sweeping generalizations about these and many other topics, but we don’t really know. Corporate anthropology provides the possibility of actually knowing what’s happening and why in organizations.

Of course, it’s not easy. Anthropologists can be a pain in the butt. They will want to watch for a long time before coming to a conclusion — longer than you will deem reasonable. They will question your fundamental assumptions. They will insist on interpreting every little thing. They may even resist your desire to intervene in the work process they’ve studied, particularly if it means worse working conditions for the workers involved.

Yes, not sure that “systematic” is quite the right word for the sort of observation that anthropologists do — social life is a little too chaotic to be too systematic and still do justice to it — but I do agree we tend to be very keen to debunk neat theories and generalisations by “talking back” from the specific and particular.

The Rise of Corporate Anthropology - Harvard Business Online’s Tom Davenport

Jovan Maud

New book on anthropology in consumer research

Left Coast Press has just published Doing Anthropology in Consumer Research by Patricia L. Sunderland and Rita M. Denny. For more information:
http://www.lcoastpr ess.com/book. php?id=116

A blurb by George Marcus reads:

“This work succeeds brilliantly in blurring the increasingly unhelpful perception of a divide between ‘applied’ and ‘academic’ anthropology. Along several dimensions, it demonstrates how ‘cutting edge’ and indeed ‘theoretical’ post-1980s ethnographic research on consumers and marketing has been. Among the current literature in this field, this book has the comprehensiveness to serve as an ideal teaching tool.”

Virtual anthropology article

Just came across this article on so-called “virtual anthropology”. It provides, I think, a good overview of the impetus pushing market researchers and others towards anthropological methods, which they self-consciously label as “anthropology lite”.

What I found interesting about the article was the connection it made between the emergence of “ethnography” as a corporate technique and the “long tail” phenomenon — the transformation from mass markets to much more actively consumer defined niche marklets. In this sort of world, closely connected to the Web 2.0 phenomenon, is the idea of user-produced content. A more nuanced way of understanding the market, or rather the multiplicity of micro-markets, is needed. So along comes anthropology, which specialises in working with small scale communities and finding out how people make meaning of the world from living and working with them.

I think I have some problems with this but I’ll have to save further discussion for another day.

VIRTUAL ANTHROPOLOGY | An emerging consumer trend and related new business ideas

Jovan Maud

Ethnographic Praxis in Industry Conference

The American Anthropology Association and the National Association for the Practice of Anthropology are sponsoring the third annual “Ethnographic Praxis in Industry Conference” in Colorado, U.S. The press release promises, amongst other things, a special panel discussion about ethnography in industry that “will bring ethnographic practitioners side-by-side with clients with whom they’ve worked to discuss the good, the bad and the ugly of the ethnographer-client partnerships.” Really? Even the ugly? With corporate clients as part of the panel? I won’t be attending but would love to hear more…

L.L. Wynn

Article: Anthropologists go native in the corporate village

Online magazine Fastcompany posted an article a little while ago on the growing trend of anthropologists working in corporate environments, which, they claim, has become an “explosion” in recent years.

Anthropologist Elizabeth Briody earned her PhD studying communities of Mexican-American farm workers and Catholic nuns. For the past 11 years, though, she’s been studying a different community — the men and women of General Motors. As GM’s “industrial anthropologist,” Briody explores the intricacies of life at the company. It’s not all that different from her previous work. “Anthropologists help elicit the cultural patterns of an organization,” she says. “What rules do people have about appropriate and inappropriate behavior? How do they learn those rules and pass them on to others?”

Cited amongst the attractions is anthropology’s “holistic” approach, which, interestingly, is said to mirror the changes and complexity in today’s workplace. An anthropologist who has become a Vice President of a Texas bank, Anita Ward, is quoted as arguing that anthropology brings the following insights:

The first was a respect for cultural differences within and between organizations. “Every culture is different,” she explains. “What works in Papua New Guinea is not likely to work in Thailand.” The second involved the “ability to quickly identify the core culture of the organization.” In the case of TCB, that meant recognizing that teams — not individuals — were the basic cultural building block, and that any change effort would have to revolve around teams. The third was an ability to recognize natural leaders. “The anthropologist can identify the true social leaders within an organization,” Ward says, and enlist them as the most effective champions of change.

Interestingly, it is one of the features of anthropology which has been most critiques over the last couple of decades — the privileging of the notion that “cultures” are bounded entities — which the corporate types are finding the most attractive. Consider the way “corporate cultures” are treated as bounded entities for the purposes of work design, just as “national cultures” are also treated as the basic units for culturally sensitive product design and marketing.

Original article

Rite Marketing Strategies

Advertising Age has reported on a large report done by the BBDO agency which studied daily rituals in a number of national populations in order to detect regularities that might be of use to marketers.  Entitled “The Ritual Masters”, this study was conducted with 5,000 people over nine months and suggests that daily rituals can be broken into five stages.  The reasoning behind the study is explained thus:

By identifying the rituals we perform as we move through the day, the idea is to work out how to fit brands into those rituals and create products, packaging and communication to make it happen.For example, women in Colombia, Brazil and Japan are most likely to apply makeup in the car, and 49% of Chinese eat on the way to work (against a global average of 17%). Such statistics suggest product innovations and marketing strategies that could prove useful.

“The idea here is to look at rituals as an important behavior in consumers’ lives, to understand what they are, how they work and how to work our clients’ brands into them,” said Andrew Robertson, BBDO Worldwide president-CEO. “We usually look at behavior through the lens of a brand or a category. This is an extra lens to look through.”

However set in stone our routines may be, there are always opportunities for clever marketers to infiltrate rituals and seek out moments when they may be disrupted. One Dutch interviewee had used Gillette razors all his life. On holiday at a Club Med, he was given free Wilkinson razors for a fortnight.

Advertising Age - Do You Know Your Rites? BBDO Does

Also commented on here, with the headline that “anthropology is the new selling science”.

Some of the findings are interesting.  For example:

Americans are most likely to meet in a restaurant (27%), while the Spanish and French eat the highest percentage of meals at home (42%). Italians, French and Spanish do not eat at work or in the car, but the car has become a dining venue for Saudis (12%), Chinese (10%) and Americans (10%).

Judging from the article, though, I’m not sure to what extent this kind of study can be considered anthropology.  Perhaps it’s just the recognition that different national groups have statistically significant differences in habits and can therefore serve as predictors for marketing purposes. Is it simply the cross-cultural focus that makes it “anthropology”?  I’m not sure what kind of methodology was employed but it looks like it was mainly survey-style interviews and focus groups judging by the sort of data they’ve collated.  Again, this doesn’t seem to be overly anthropological as it doesn’t seem to provide the sort of qualitative understandings you might expect from an ethnographic study.

Another thing that immediately strikes me is what appears to be the underlying assumption that national groups correspond to cultural groups.  This is hardly an ethnographic move.  For me at least, ethnographic interventions tend to go the other way, by problematising assumptions of these kinds.  Maybe that’s just me, and as Nursel’s recent post suggests, attempts to define “anthropology” are always going to be problematic.

An article about Nokia’s cellphone ethnography in Business Week

http://www.businessweek.com/innovate/content/mar2007/id20070314_689707.htm?link_position=link7

Anthropologist at Swisscom

This article is a few months old, still I think it is useful to remind oursleves that the use of anthropologists and ethnography in corporations is not exclusivly a trend in the anglo-saxon world. Here it is the largest Swiss telecommunications company who employs an anthropologist in order to understand how people are using the new variety of communication devices, such as mobile phones, fixed-line phones, e-mails and chats. What the anthropologist finds is that “each new channel or media that appears slowly redefines the uses of the older existing media.” At the same time people seem not to be overwhelmed by their increasing communication devices, but they do seem to differentiate more what they do with each one of them.