Weaponized irony

There’s a fabulous little piece in the July issue of Harper’s from Graham Burnett and Jeff Dolven, a couple of professors at Princeton who put together a $650K, 3-year grant proposal for Lockheed Martin to identify irony and weaponize it.  An excerpt:

“Ideally suited to mobilization on the shifting terrain of asymmetrical conflict, inherently covert, insidiously plastic, politically potent, irony offers rogue elements a volatile if often overlooked means by which to demoralize opponents and destabilize regimes…

“If we don’t know how irony works and we don’t know how it is used by the enemy, we cannot identify it…. Without the ability to detect and localize irony consistently, intelligence agents and agencies are likely to lose valuable time and resources pursuing chimerical leads and to overlook actionable instances of insolence.  The first step towards addressing this situation is a multilingual, collaborative, and collative initiative that will generate an encyclopedic global inventory of ironic modalities and strategies.  More than a handbook or field guide, the work product of this effort will take the shape of a vast, searchable, networked database of all known ironies.”

Human Terrain indeed.

Harper’s notes that “Princeton declined to forward [the proposal] to Lockheed.”  It puts me in mind of David Vine’s vow to write a proposal for Minerva funding from the Pentagon to study “how overseas military bases affect relations with other nations, ‘how they’ve damaged our international reputation and how they’ve damaged the lives of people around the world.’”  Anyone know of other examples of this wonderful genre of grant proposal as parodic critique of the funding source?

–L.L. Wynn

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.

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.

Business Anthropologist in Sydney Hospital

Yesterday I had a chance of observing organisational space in a Sydney hospital as I joined a UTS Centre for Health Communication group. Rick Iedema and his staff do wonderful ethnographic research in hospitals filming professional collaboration around patient care. Yesterday’s topic was the designed spatial settings in hospital. In our group was apart from the UTS researchers also hospital staff and the architect of the visited spaces. Completely dressed up as hospital employees we were able to visit the different surgery and recovery rooms. One of the staff members washed her hands when entering a new room. When I asked her about that she told me that all the doctors were obliged to wash their hands when going from one patient to another in order to prevent the spread of diseases. For many years academic articles have been written, she told me, to show the neg correlation between handwashing and disease spreading. However, still only 15% of the male doctors did wash their hands. Therefore, she saw herself as a role model to show others that handwashing should be done every time. Articles, information, stickers, and role model however had not helped to increase the handwashing rituals of male doctors. ‘It is behavioural,’ she said. I told her that ethnographic study would probable show that hand washing was perceived as to be in the female domain by male doctors. That handwashing, in contrast to scrubbing of surgeons, is not in the professional domain of doctors. Interventions to increase the handwashing should therefore be based upon changing the meaning of handwashing in the professional culture. This is where interests of contemporary businesses and organisations such as this Sydney hospital have interests in anthropologists and their methods. The detailed accounts of what really happen at the work floor of a, for example, hospital makes professionals aware of their own action. Helping with their reflection on action in order to increase their reflection in action (Schön).

There are many rituals in hospitals that are questioned by researchers but that are exercised by practitioners. The Amsterdam Academic Centre had a campain last year to recruit nurses who where asked to get rid of unnessasary rituals by showing a picture of a Ladakhi oracle acting a cleaning ritual with a patient. In my anthropological fieldwork in the early 1990s I encountered many rituals among the Ladakhi shamans in the upper Indus valley in Northern India. This Tibetan Buddhist community has male (llhamo’s) and female (llapa’s) village oracles and eight monastery oracles. The oracle is perceived as the possessor of power and the linking between the human and the spiritual world. By virtue of calling and training the oracle is able to restore the disturbed relation between patients and the supernatural forces that have brought disorder (Miller 1997). The power is not exclusively attached to the person of the oracle. It is the relation between the oracle and his patients that generates the power (Taussig 1987). The shaman and his audience construct a joint interrogation of their ideological environment. Shamans employ their power in public rituals for the benefit of the community or individuals. And there is why the rituals in the Sydney hospital are so difficult to get rid of as the are part of a larger construction of healing.

Datamining anthropologists

Hi, my name is Alfons van Marrewijk (1960) and during the coming month I want to share some of my thoughts on business anthropology. Last weekend my wife Kris, our children Veerle (7) and Sido (5) and I travelled from Amsterdam to Sydney. I was a little bit nervous as a uniformed officer in Hong Kong awaited us with a printed ‘Mr. van Marrewijk’ sign when leaving the gate. Last time I was awaited by an officer I was wrongly accused of being a terrorist. Two years ago when I flew back to Amsterdam from Iran, with a friend of mine, airport authorities waited at the aircraft and held a computer printed list with five passport numbers. Our passport numbers were on the list and we were separately taken into an interrogation by the airport authorities. After twenty minutes they had found out that we were humble fathers of families in need of a cultural adventure. I found out that datamining systems had traced us as ‘possible suspected’ as:

· we had not checked in luggage,

· we both had vegetarian food,

· travelled without family,

· tickets were not paid by ourselves but by my company,

· we had not booked through any travel agency,

· no clear destination and stayed only 9 days in Iran.

Datamining systems combines all different data sources to find people of a certain profile. This is done in marketing to target down new customer groups but increasingly datamining is used in security services. After the interview I asked whether the information on my profile as ‘possible suspected’ could be erased. In my work I do travel to ‘suspected’ countries and I didn’t want to be surprised when entering the USA for a conference or so. However, it took me all day telephoning to find out that profiles from datamining software can’t be erased but will be valid for up to forty years! ‘And if you keep on insisting on destroying your information,’ a officer warned, ‘that will be recorded too’. For business anthropologists working in strange countries with strange vegetarian tastes, travelling has become more difficult nowadays.

I was afraid walking towards the officer in Hong Kong holding the ‘Mr. van Marrewijk’ sign. Fortunately, this time it was no possible terrorist profile but an e-visa to Australian that hadn’t work properly. This had to be restored by a strange ritual of an airport employee. The computer was consulted but refused to recognise our passport numbers. After trying this twenty times, the airport employee copied by hand all info of my e-visa computer print-out and took this to his superior. The supervisor, half hidden is an office behind, didn’t show up but send the employee back to try another computer screen. In the meantime our children were playing hide an seek in the growing line of waiting people behind us. It took the airport employee three quarters of an hour to finally confirm the Australian e-visas. But, here we are in Sydney!  

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.

Anthropologists in the Dutch public sphere

There appears to be a lull on the blog, as my colleagues at Macquarie are (I guess) off to do fieldwork. So, as I have been silent here for a while, I’ll take the opportunity to share my first impressions of anthropology in the public in the Netherlands, as I experience it having just arrived at the Free University (VU) in Amsterdam.

While this is not Norway, where anthropologists are constantly in the news (though Thomas Eriksen did have a guest appointment at this department for a while!) it does seem that the media are more interested than, say, in Australia in what anthropologists have to say. In December alone, my departmental colleagues (including PhD students, who are considered staff) have been interviewed in the media on religion, Gaza, environmentalism, and Suriname. There is also a feature article in the popular Volkskrant of the type that we are by now used to, about corporations hiring anthropologists. This is true also for Philips, one of the Netherlands’ best-known multinationals, which has a Futures, People and Trends team. (The article notes, though, that anthropology students are often unaware of how trendy they are, as are their teachers who sometimes advise them to write in their CV that they studied “social sciences.”)

I guess one reason for this higher profile is that the Dutch press simply has more in-depth debates on social issues than the Australian one. Another may be that PhD students are often treated as authorities on their own right. A third, and perhaps more specific to the VU, is that within this department there is a strong research stream to do with religion, which is clearly a hot topic for journos (even though research here is mostly on neoprotestant conversion rather than Islam; but the VU also is a hub for Muslim students. Apparently, the fact that it is a university that has religion in its charter is considered a plus by many Muslim students, even though that religion is Protestant Christianity). And finally, there is a separate department of organisational research within the faculty of social sciences, whose members define themselves largely as organisational anthropologists. This is interesting, as such departments tend to be within business schools and thus fairly isolated from mainstream anthropology.

More on the Military’s ‘Culture Rush’: Brian Selmeski interview

There’s a culture rush going on in the U.S. military. While the Human Terrain System gets most of the media attention for being the face of the military’s sudden interest in culture, there are a whole host of other military efforts revolving around the concept of culture. For example, as we have mentioned on Culture Matters, the Marine Corps has just published a textbook called “Operational Cultures for the Warfighter” with chapters that include sections on topics such as “tribes,” “folklore,” “rituals,” and “religious beliefs.” In 2006 the US Army Training and Doctrine Command (TRADOC) opened the TRADOC Cultural Center which teaches soldiers about foreign cultures and languages, particularly “the cultures of Iraq and Afghanistan.” And the Air Force teaches what it calls “cross-cultural competence,” or the idea that soldiers can be taught to comprehend and act in a culturally complex environment, even without having any past experience in that part of the world.

On 3 September 2008 (actually it was 2 September in the US), I interviewed one of the driving forces behind the Air Force’s Cross Cultural Competence (dubbed “3C”) program, Dr Brian Selmeski.  He’s the Director of Cross Cultural Competence at the Air Force Culture and Language Center of Air University at the Maxwell Air Force Base in Alabama. I thought it might be interesting for Culture Matters readers to hear about how one branch of the military is applying anthropological concepts in practice. He gives us information about the Cross Cultural Competence program and talks about the ethics of anthropologists working with the military.

Lisa L Wynn: Some have said that the past 5 years or so have seen a “culture rush” in the US military. Do you think this is an accurate assessment? Do you think it’s a passing fad or here to stay? And what do you think is driving this recent “culture rush”?

AAA call for ethics case studies

The Commission on the Engagement of Anthropology with the US Security and Intelligence Communities (CEAUSSIC) of the American Anthropological Association has put out a call for ethics cases for a book project.  They seek “illustrative cases that explore intersections among the ethical, methodological, and theoretical aspects of work in, around, and for the national security state, including public and private institutions, in and outside academia.”

See the AAA website for details.

–L.L. Wynn