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.

Anthropologie sans frontières: Interview with Dr Alice Corbet

This post has been removed at the request of the author.

More on HTS

It’s a pity that the month that Culture Matters won the Savage Minds blog award, we’ve been really slow. It’s the end of the semester right before everyone disappears for the summer, and I assume that everyone is either swamped with marking or making exciting travel plans. I have a huge backlog of work and e-mails to answer so I probably shouldn’t be taking the time to post something, but I couldn’t resist because I keep getting distracted from grading by a couple of Wired articles on the Human Terrain System.

We already reported on news coverage of the attack on a Human Terrain Team member, Paula Lloyd, who was set on fire in Afghanistan by a man she was interviewing. Another Human Terrain Team member, Dan Ayala, then reportedly shot her attacker in the head after the attacker was disarmed and fully restrained. Ayala has since been charged with second degree murder and subsequently released on bail and is back in the U.S. (Open Anthropology has a list of links covering the story.)

Of course the attack and the revenge killing raise to a whole new level the debate about the ethics of putting social scientists in the middle of a war, and though I didn’t attend the AAA meetings this year in San Francisco, my sources tell me that this was hotly debated (see Inside Higher Ed for coverage). But all of this has been amply reported on elsewhere, so I didn’t think we needed to write more about it, until a friend and colleague based at SOAS in London sent me to have a look at the comments that have been posted to the Wired articles.

The first is an article by Noah Shachtman reporting on the charges against Ayala. What’s been distracting me from work is the comments that readers posted following the article. If you don’t get sick reading them, it’s actually fascinating to observe how misogyny and homophobia blend seamlessly with the ostensibly “anthropological” statements about local culture.

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”?

Anthropology on stage

I recently learned that a small theatre in Budapest is putting on a play (according to other descriptions, and opera!) based on a short ethnographic piece I published in 2000, in a literary journal. (They seem to have treated it as “open source.”) It’s the monologue of a Chinese migrant woman — sraight from my field notes.

I remember the discussion some months ago about non-academic publications. So I guess it’s worth writing these pieces, if they manage to move people! The producer said what they liked was the way the story was everyday, and yet not. That’s what anthropology is all about, hm?

Iraq, occupation, culture and the military: brief roundup

There has been a fantastic discussion going on here on Culture Matters that I wanted to draw attention to, for those who don’t meticulously follow the stream of comments on older posts.  After I ate humble pie over my simplistic and error-filled rendering of Steve Featherstone’s recent article on the Human Terrain System in Harpers, I have stepped back and enjoyed a really interesting dialogue between Steve and a couple of commentators: Gonzo, who supports collaboration with the U.S. military in Iraq and Afghanistan, and Joneilortiz, who fiercely opposes it.

What I think it particularly interesting in their discussion (which incidentally is remarkable for the way that two anonymous commentators can spar over an issue which they clearly feel passionate about, but at the same time engage respectfully without resorting to name-calling, which so often happens in debates over anthropology and the military) is the way Joneilortiz reorients the framing of the issue, pressing us to think about what occupation means for Iraqis, not Americans, and what the ethical obligations are for anthropologists who oppose the occupation.  Here’s an excerpt:

Hungarian values

These days, states like to define their “values” — either, as in Europe or Australia, to limit immigration, or, as in Asia, to evade criticism of human rights violations. The “values” expressed in European or Australian citizenship tests are largely very similar: freedom of expression, respect for democratic institutions, equality of the sexes and of sexual minorities, non-coercive childrearing, reasoning instead of violence, and so on. Not bad, though who would have thought that the Christian Democratic Party in the conservative German state of Baden-Wuerttemberg would initiate citizenship tests that include questions like “In this country, it is accepted that people who are openly homosexual hold public office. Do you agree with this?”  The correct answer is “yes.” Considering Baden-Wuerttemberg’s sociodemographics, it is likely that a large proportion of current citizens would, however, answer “no,” and the question is simply an imagined way of ferreting out supposedly homophobic Muslims. That is perhaps part of the reason why conservative parties embraced these values, rather than, say, faith in God or the importance of family — an alternative set of “European values” espoused by the Vatican and its Eastern European allies, who are not worried about deeply religious immigrants. (Not just because there are few of those, but also because Eastern European politicians are less concerned about the niceties of keeping them out.)

In our recent book Maxikulti, Joana Breidenbach and talk about two Brussels politicians adamant about defending European values. Guy Verhofstadt, the former Belgian prime minister and author of a number of liberal “citizens’ manifestos” that defend openness, tolerance and individualism in the face of the xenophobic moral panic that has followed the rise of home-grown Islamist terrorism. For Maciej Giertych, a member of the European Parliament representing the League of Polish Families (whose presidential candidate he also was), European values are morality, faith in God and respect for parental authority.

Another Eastern European politician who publicly shares these values is Zoltan Balog, chairman of the Human Rights Committee (!) of the Hungarian Parliament and “spiritual adviser” to the opposition leader, Viktor Orban, who is expected to win the 2010 election. In a recent interview, he explained that “it is not right to accept uncritically everything that people want to sell us under the pretext of human rights.” For example, it is not right that “the mayor of Berlin can only win with a large majority by getting out in front of people and declaring that he is homosexual,” or that soccer players are not allowed to pray on the field because that is an imposition of their religion on others. Balog went on to explain that although the state must be distinguished from religion, it “cannot be separated… from it” because “although they are not the same, they belong together.”

It is obvious that Giertych’s or Balog’s “European values” are close to the “American values” of the U.S. religious right or to the “Asian values” of Mahathir Mohamad, Lee Kuan Yew or the Chinese Communist Party than to the “European values” of the citizenship tests.  I wonder why this does not receive more public scrutiny — especially considering that Balog’s job is supposedly to ensure that those consensual European values of tolerance and respect for individual rights prevail in Hungary. In this capacity, he is presumably in constant touch with his Brussels counterparts. Yet these fundamental disagreements on the nature and limits of rights and tolerance within the EU’s mainstream institutions remain quite hidden.

Child sexual abuse, the law, and ‘culture’

News Limited sources recently ran a story about a new case involving Judge Sarah Bradley, a Queensland judge who became the centre of a furore after not imposing gaol terms on nine indigenous youths who gang raped a 10-year-old girl in their community in Cape York. In this new case, she has allowed a teacher accused of sexually abusing a child time to gather evidence that he was enacting local cultural norms. The story is interesting in a number of ways, not the least in terms of how ‘culture’ can be deployed in legal settings, and where judges may appear to be more ‘culturally sensitive’ and culturally relativist than members of the communities in question.

In this case, an anthropologist from James Cook University has apparently been called in to write a report on the authenticity of the claim about the cultural legitimacy of the act. It would be interesting to know what s/he has to say. I would particularly like to know what the response to the question of whether the practice of oral sex between men and boys is a ‘part of’ the culture in question. From my reading of the article, there are a number of problematic issues arising from the way the issue is being constructed, particularly about the sorts of assumptions being made about the nature of culture.

For example, in a fascinating detail, although the accused was not raised in a ‘traditional’ manner, his lawyer argues that he was ‘imbued’ with the culture, presumably simply by living and working in the area. Culture as contagion, I suppose. It also seems to ignore the holistic premises of an anthropological understanding of culture, which require that we consider an act not in isolation, but within the context of wider institutions, beliefs and practices. To simply ask whether the performance of oral sex between men and boys in a particular community is a ‘part of the culture’ decontextualises the act. It assumes that if an act can be found ‘in a culture’ then the act is therefore ‘cultural’, regardless of the context in which it occurs. This would appear to be a particularly erroneous position to take with regard to ‘mens’ business’ rite of passage type acts. If they are occurring in secret, isolated from the political institution they participate in — the production of initiated men — then it would be very problematic to my mind to ascribe them with cultural authenticity. Making use of the fundamental anthropological notion that culture is both shared and practised, I would also be putting more emphasis on the opinions of members of the community about the legitimacy of the act, than on an anthropologist’s opinion about an abstracted and therefore reified culture. Sorry, anthropologists!

Ironic, really, that an anthropological insight serves to delegitimise anthropological knowledge. However, this legal prediliction to treat anthropologists as experts on a particular ‘culture’, understood to be a sort of archive — a relatively stable, bounded and possessing a traditional and authentic form that can be catalogued — actually puts anthropologists at odds with their own understandings about culture and how it works. If anthropologists are to be experts on cases such as these, I think it should be as much to consider and critique the manner in which culture is being deployed in the courts as to act as curators of a cultural archive.

The full text of the article follows.

Gang-rape judge in child sex furore

By Padraic Murphy, Natasha Robinson and Tony Koch

February 15, 2008

Article from: The Australian

THE north Queensland judge who last year allowed nine child rapists to go free has given a teacher, who has admitted forcing an indigenous 11-year-old boy to perform oral sex on him, time to gather evidence that he was educating his victim in “men’s business”.

James Last, a Sydney-educated teacher who recently worked in Northern Territory communities, last week pleaded guilty in Cairns before District Court judge Sarah Bradley to seven counts of indecently dealing with an 11-year-old boy over a four-month period in 1983.

But Judge Bradley has granted a three-month adjournment to allow Last, who claims he received no sexual gratification from the assaults, to allow his lawyers to find an anthropologist to support his claim that he had been trying to introduce the Torres Strait boy to “traditional” islander sexual practices.

Judge Bradley granted the adjournment despite the prosecution pointing out that it had two witnesses – “respected elders” from the boy’s home island – ready to debunk the claim that such practices were part of “men’s business”.

The adjournment has outraged indigenous leaders, who have already called for Judge Bradley’s sacking after she failed last year to jail nine males for the gang rape of a 10-year-old girl in the Cape York community of Aurukun.

Last, now 61 and living in Darwin, took the 11-year-old boy from his family on Saibai Island in the Torres Strait in 1983, promising to educate him in Cairns.

But Last, who was 37 at the time of the offences, repeatedly sexually abused the boy, at one point saying: “I’ve sucked you, now it’s your turn.”

Last said yesterday he had taken the “self-sacrificial” step of pleading guilty to the charges to spare the boy, who he loved, a trial. He said Aboriginal elders in the Torres Strait had “entrusted” the boy to him, and he was tutored by the elders in “men’s business”.

“I’m saying that certain things are not abuse and they never were in the traditional culture,” he said. “A lot of it is men’s business and that’s why, I think very wisely, Aboriginal islander people have said men’s business is men’s business. They say, ‘You don’t tell the white fella what he can’t understand’.”

Prosecutor Skye Growden told the court Last had told the victim the abuse was a part of traditional culture. “The defendant told the victim that this was traditional and that older men did this to young men when they loved them and he believed him,” she said. “The complainant says in his statement that the arresting officer in this matter was the first person that he told because he was ashamed about the offences and worried what people would say if they found out.”

Ms Growden told the court that although Last had a part-Aboriginal father, he was not raised in a traditional manner and that he should receive a custodial sentence to send a clear message to the community.

“It is stated in the defence material that he was born in Sydney where he was educated to grade 12. He then went on to receive a scholarship and teach in Wollongong and undertake postgraduate studies,” she said.

“He has gone on to have an illustrious and distinguished career. He is an educated man, using what he claims to be part of Papua New Guinea and Torres Strait Islander culture, that is, men’s business, to explain away his offending behaviour. I have been instructed that this is not part of the culture.”

But Judge Bradley rejected calls for an immediate custodial sentence, allowing Last’s lawyers to gather evidence that he had been abusing the boy as some kind of rite of passage.

“What we’ve got here is a plea in mitigation on the basis that the defendant genuinely believed that what he was doing was culturally appropriate and that he had that excuse for it,” Judge Bradley said on February 6. “I appreciate he’s pleaded guilty but the prosecution is not accepting that, so we’ll need some evidence. Clearly, it’s got a significant impact on penalty.”

The following day, Judge Bradley adjourned the case until May 15 to allow lawyers to ask an anthropologist from James Cook University, which is based in Townsville, to write a report on whether child sexual abuse was an accepted part of Saibai islander culture. “It’s clearly a live issue, and it’s clearly an issue that’s relevant to penalty, so I need to give the defence that opportunity,” she said.

Judge Bradley’s decision to consider the anthropology report was made after Ms Growden said it was “the Crown’s submission that an adjournment is not necessary unless you’re rejecting the submissions that I made yesterday, which were based on decisions of the High Court and the Court of Appeal. I do have two people – two elders from Saibai Island – that are on standby this morning, but can give evidence that it’s not part of men’s business at Saibai Island.”

In earlier submissions, Last’s counsel Kevin McCreanor said his client had become “imbued” with indigenous culture.

He said Last told police when interviewed about the allegations that an elder on Saibai Island had told him cultural secrets.

Mr McCreanor said the interviewing police officer told Last that in his investigations in the Torres Strait he, too, had heard that boys’ first sexual experiences were “with an older male of their tribe to teach them about his body and things like that”.

But Ms Growden, a former associate to Judge Bradley, later said that statement was “a tactic” of the interviewing police.

Mr McCreanor said Last told police: “Those things were told to me as well, but I was encouraged because of the incapacity of most people to understand, and the derision that flowed back on to so-called primitive people, not to talk about these things.”

Judge Bradley said it was up to Last to supply evidence to support his contention that his actions were “culturally appropriate”.

Late last year, Judge Bradley had refused to impose jail terms on nine youths and men who gang-raped a 10-year-old intellectually impaired girl on Aurukun community, on western Cape York.

The Court of Appeal in Brisbane on Wednesday ruled that the Crown would be given an extended time to appeal against those sentences.

Many thanks to Kirsten Bell, former lecturer at Macquarie, for alerting me to this article.

http://www.news.com.au/story/0,23599,23215930-2,00.html

The Bischop and the Sharia

Over the last few days, European papers have discussed the controversial comments by Rowan Williams, Archbischop of Canterbury, who stated in a speech, the adoption of certain aspects of Sharia law in the UK “seems unavoidable”. The many outraged commentators, among them Islamophobe Mark Steyn, greatly exxagerated and misinterpreted Williams, who dealt with the topic in a highly differentiated way (here is the text).

I came across one reasonable blogpost by German journalist Heinrich Bergstresser, who pointed out that legal pluralism – far from being a dangerous new trend – is the norm in most countries. “In India, Jordania or Nigeria, to name just a few states, secular state law coexists with islamic law and customary law, without threatening the legal security in any way.” 

It is worth pointing out that in addition to countries with a colonial past, legal pluralism is also already practiced in many European countries, thus in Germany there are special slaughtering laws for Jews and Muslims. In disputes concerning inheritance and divorce among Muslims, German courts often take the legal principals of their country of origin into consideration. In Britain, orthodox Jews can have cases adjudicated in front of their own courts (Beth Din) and there already are sharia councils (yet their judgements are not legally binding and their authority is greatly disputed among different sectors of  British-Muslim society).

Far from being scandelous, the archbishops speech thus seems to me a welcome realization that we have to deal with the (legal) pluralisation of European countries in an open and differentiated way.

UnAustralian Vegetarian?

I have started going to Yoga classes at my local Yoga center. In a recent class I was standing in the tree pose and staring fixedly ahead for balance. It so happened that the object of my gaze was one word on a nutrition chart; “MEAT”. The word stood out because it had been written above (and almost on top) of the word “TOFU” in black permanent marker. The nutrition chart was entirely vegetarian but for the minor addition.

The nutrition chart was not large enough for anybody but the person standing in front of it to see, so people would have to actually walk up and read the chart with some purpose if they did not happen to be standing in front of it during the class due to the room being slightly over crowded.

Somebody clearly felt that this piece of information should be communicated, “MEAT” was needed. Was this person concerned that people attending this yoga center might be confused with a nutrition chart that did not position “MEAT” under the protein section? Or perhaps that the chart was UnAustralian? The Australia day advertisements tell us that if we don’t BBQ lamb chops on Australia day we are UnAustralian… maybe this is something that should be added to the citizenship test? Who was Don Bradman? Which country “discovered” Australia? Do you eat lamb chops on Australia day?