The Routledge Companion to Anthropology and Business

Raza Mir, Anne-Laure Fayard, Raza Mir, Anne-Laure Fayard

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000079210
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Organisational Behaviour
• Index: Business

Interest in anthropology and ethnography has been an ongoing feature of organizational research and pedagogy; this book provides a key reference text that pulls together the different ways in which anthropology infuses the study of organizations, both epistemologically and methodologically.

The volume hosts key scholars and experts within the fields of Organizational Anthropology, Organizational Ethnography, Organizational Studies and Qualitative Research.

The book provides a combination of methodological guidelines, exemplars and epistemological reflection. It includes methodological viewpoints, ethnographic journeys within organizations as well as beyond organizations, and individual reflections on challenges faced by organizational ethnographers.

This book is aimed at PhD, master and advanced undergraduate students and researchers across disciplines, especially those who are engaged with general management, organizational behaviour, strategy and anthropological/ethnographic issues.

1

Anthropology and Organizational Studies

A Symbiotic Connection

Raza Mir and Anne-Laure Fayard

Interest in anthropology has been an on-going feature of organizational research and pedagogy. We felt that the time was ripe to develop a single volume that pulls together the different ways in which anthropology infuses the study of organizations, both epistemologically and methodologically. We believe that the academic community in business schools will welcome a volume that links organizational studies to classical and current contemporary anthropological concerns, and makes explicit how these linkages can inform and enrich organizational research.

Motivations

This volume was motivated by observations of the field as well as personal experience. While it has been argued that qualitative research has produced some of the most interesting research in organizational studies (Bartunek, Rynes & Ireland, 2006; Rynes & Bartunek, 2015), it is still under-represented when it comes to research published in leading academic journals. Moreover, our experience as reviewers and our conversations with students or colleagues made us realize that qualitative research often seems “simple” and merely a matter of good storytelling. We can relate to Diana Forsythe reporting how her colleagues in medical computing asked her for the “just one article” they needed to read to be able to do ethnographic work, all sharing the belief that in the end “anyone can do ethnography – It’s just a matter of common sense!” (Forsythe, 2001, p. 135). Yet, like Forsythe, we believe that ethnography is more than a set of techniques and that “anthropology’s strongest technique is its philosophical stance” (ibid. p. 136). Therefore, we thought it was important to go back to one of the sources of inspiration of qualitative research, anthropology, as well as its methodology of choice, ethnography, and explore how they have influenced and still influence organizational studies in a generative manner.

As organizational researchers with over two decades of experiences in the field, we each have unique, and hopefully complementary approaches to organizational anthropology.

Raza chose ethnography as the methodology of choice in his doctoral dissertation. He experienced loneliness in his initial journey, and had to rely on colleagues in anthropology and other social sciences to discuss his ideas. Much later, he connected with other organizational ethnographers who shared his methodological focus, and mitigated his sense of isolation. His entry point into ethnography was critical, visualizing culture as a tool of ideology, normalization of inequalities, imperial colonialism, and global capitalism. In the field of anthropology, he was influenced by works such as James Clifford’s The Predicament of Culture (Clifford, 1988), George Marcus and Michael Fischer’s Anthropology as Cultural Critique (Marcus & Fischer, 1986) and Arturo Escobar’s Encountering Development: The Making and Unmaking of the Third World (Escobar, 1995), and hoped to translate those ideas into the realm of management scholarship. For him, this book continues that journey.

Anne-Laure came to ethnography via a non-conventional route: she trained in philosophy, did a PhD in Cognitive Science, and discovered ethnography as she was working as a research assistant on a participatory design project; her first four and a half months on the project were spent observing a team of air traffic controllers. She read Hutchins’ Cognition in the Wild (1995), Suchman’s Plans and Situated Actions (1987), Julian Orr’s Talking about Machines (2016) and discovered ethnomethodology, video ethnography, and conversational analysis. As she joined INSEAD Business School as an assistant professor she had the chance to meet John Van Maanen and have John Weeks as a colleague. These encounters opened up new perspectives, the field of organizational studies, many more readings – Goffman, Becker, Geertz, etc. – and lots of productive conversations which had continued over the years with her co-authors. Her own multidisciplinary journey has convinced her of the necessity of fluid boundaries across disciplines and the fecundity of mixing different perspectives. It is in this spirit that she accepted Raza’s invitation to co-edit this volume.

Together, we hope we have been able through this book to collect ideas, theories and methodological discussions that will make the hitherto solitary sojourns of our fellow researchers with an interest in organizational anthropology more of a collective journey, imbued with multiplicities of interests, yet interweaved with a common language to discuss methodologies, epistemologies, and practical concerns.

It might be useful at this juncture to clarify our position on what we mean by organizational anthropology. The field of anthropology is after all a social science in its own right, incorporating a spectrum of sub-fields, from the physiobiological to the linguistic, the cultural to the archeological, and beyond. The purpose of our definition is to provide some loose and porous boundaries around which we have structured the arguments of this book, with an explicit understanding that these boundaries are ripe to be spanned. We define organizational anthropology as the cultural study of human behavior in organizational settings. This is a simple definition, which at the same time offers the possibility of incorporating insights from other social sciences.

Organizational Anthropology: An Incomplete History

Interest in anthropological analysis by organizational researchers has a long and distinguished history. It is not our intention in this chapter to provide a comprehensive history of organizational anthropology. Readers interested in the same can consult other works that have attempted such a history (e.g. Baba, 2012; Bate, 1997; Wright, 1994). But it is worth recalling that the Hawthorne experiments conducted by Elton Mayo and W. Lloyd Warner in the 1930s had a decidedly anthropological orientation (Roethlisberger & Dickson, 1934). Bate (1997) recalls that the first book on organizational behavior was written by a social anthropologist (Whyte, 1969). A book-length treatise written in 1951 by Elliot Jaques titled The Changing Structure of a Factory deployed the language and tools of anthropology to examine and develop the concept of corporate culture (Jaques, 1951). The term “business anthropology” came into the field in the 1950s (Nash, 1959, see Baba, 2012 for a detailed history). Barry Turner’s analysis of cultural patterns in organizations allowed him to formulate patterns of cultural continuity that became enshrined as “organizational subculture” (Turner, 1971). Turner himself was following the traditions of Joan Woodward, whose sociological studies of organizational contingency had a strong anthropological component (Woodward, 1970). For social scientists working in the organizational realm, organizations were studied less as economic entities and more as collectivities where humans engaged in acts of culture making, and eventually developed deeply coded ways of thinking, doing, and being.

Over time, organizational anthropology began to stake its claim as a sub-discipline in the field of management research. John Van Maanen’s book Tales of the Field (Van Maanen, 1987) has become a signpost for all organizational anthropologists and ethnographers. Van Maanen provided ways in which organizational theorists and management researchers could use methodological insights from earlier anthropological works to explore the terrain of work. Many of his students, his students’ students and other researchers who were influenced by his work have shaped the field of organizational anthropology and organizational ethnography.

Subsequently, anthropology-themed books like Joanne Martin’s Organizational Culture: Mapping the Terrain (Martin, 2001) have provided a roadmap for viewing organizations through a cultural lens. Book-length accounts of anthropological journeys such as Gideon Kunda’s Engineering Culture (Kunda, 1986) and John Weeks’ Unpopular Culture (Weeks, 2004) have made an explicit connection between organizational studies and anthropology. Recent ethnographies of organizations such as Catherine Turco’s The Conversational Firm (Turco, 2016) or Michel Anteby’s Manufacturing Morals (Anteby, 2013) show the enduring fertility of anthropological research in 21st-century settings. Some papers using ethnographic methods such as Steve Barley’s Technology as an Occasion for Structuring (Barley, 1986), Wanda Orlikowski’s Knowing in Practice (Orlikowski, 2002) and Beth Bechky’s Sharing Meaning Across Occupational Communities (Bechky, 2003) are heavily cited in organizational studies and management.

Organizational ethnographies also contributed to theoretical development. Interpretive scholars rescued the idea of culture from the iron cage of positivism (Smircich, 1983). Feminist critical analysts had provided newer methodological templates to view power relations, such as Dorothy Smith’s concept of “institutional ethnography” (Smith, 1986). Marxists and critical ethnographers had shown how anthropology and ethnography needed to guard against being the unwitting and occasionally conscious agent of economic exploitation (Clifford, 1988). Postcolonial anthropologists had offered subaltern subjectivities to theorize their own predicaments, rather than become subjects of Western anthropology’s unconscious and conscious practices of cultural imperialism (Escobar, 1995). In such a formulation, the corporation can be visualized and critiqued as nothing more than a colony situated in in the realm of work (Mir & Mir, 2009). Armed with these new tools, a new generation of organizational ethnographers and anthropologists began to discuss research that broke new grounds, both theoretically and empirically, and showed that in the new economic atmosphere, an anthropologist was a neat colleague to have, someone who studied not just the leaves but the roots, and saw rhythms and patterns in organizational life that other perspectives had unwittingly passed by.

In the last two decades, organizational ethnography appears to have become more self-assured, arguing for incorporation into mainstreams of organizational research. When Anne-Laure Fayard and John Weeks analyze informal interactions and space in organizations (Fayard & Weeks, 2007), Karen Ho reports on her ethnography on downsized workers in Wall Street (Ho, 2009), or Alexandra Michel discusses the way overworked bankers in New York treat their bodies as problematic entities in their overworked state (Michel, 2011), they do so without feeling the need to justify their methodological choices to their business school peers. One could argue that organizational anthropology has truly come to a stage of maturity in the 21st century. Be it the world of social media or high finance, artificial intelligence or multi-firm ecosystems, an anthropological focus has the potential to add value to our understanding of organizational theories and processes.

Organizational Ethnography: Today and Tomorrow

Many recent ethnographic studies in organizational studies and management reflect changes in the phenomena that organizational ethnographers study nowadays and the associated methodological concerns. As illustrated by empirical chapters in this volume, organizational ethnographers have to play and experiment with traditional ethnography in order to develop rich understandings of new phenomena they want to study. For instance, while ethnographers would traditionally spend an extended amount of time in one single location (Van Maanen, 2011), “the field” has expanded and multiplied across multiple organizations and/or geographies and culture is not always the main focus. Even within one organization, technology is making a lot of the work invisible (Riopelle, 2013). Recent developments with algorithms and machine learning are making these tensions even more salient while also stressing the need for deep and rich studies of the use and impact of AI on work and occupations. This is evidenced by the multiple ethnographies-in-progress presented at the Academy of Management, as well as a few already published (e.g. Beane, 2019; Beane & Orlikowski, 2015; Shestakofsky, 2017). Grand challenges constitute another important and complex phenomenon that requires the deep and detailed understanding provided by ethnographic approaches (Ferraro, Etzion & Gehman, 2015). While such studies might raise complex ethical issues as noted by de Rond (Chapter 25 in this volume), an ethnographic approach can be generative and provide important contributions for researchers and practitioners (for example, Mair, Wolf & Seelos, 2016; Nanna Mik-Meyer, Chapter 17 in this volume; Goffman, 2014).

To adjust to the changes in the phenomena they study, ethnographers have been experimenting – tweaking traditional methods or creating new ones: doing video ethnography (Heath & Hindmarsh, 2002), engaging in contract ethnography (Fayard, Van Maanen & Weeks, 2016), taking a consultant role (Nahoko Kameo, Chapter 6 in this volume) or performing insider ethnography (Brannen, Mughan, and Moore, Chapter 15 in this volume). One could argue that some of these studies cannot be categorized as ethnographies because they do not solely rely on ethnography’s characteristic fieldwork. However, as argued by Anne-Laure, “ethnography is more than a set of methods; it is an epistemic stance that can be enacted through different practices. What makes a study ethnographic is not so much the methods but the stance that the researcher enacts” (Fayard, 2017, p. 141).

If one embraces a creative approach to methods, with the intent to stay grounded to the phenomena and understand them in context, avoiding dichotomies and willing to do the work (tedious at times, often confusing, exciting in the end) to unpack everyday interactions and practices in their complexity and subtleties, then, we argue, there is a role for an ethnographic approach. In consequence, this volume presents “different strokes” (Van Maanen, 1998) of qualitative research from ethnography to interview-based research, photo-ethnography, and historical analysis; while using different methods for data collection and analysis, all authors favor an inductive, interpretative approach.

The notion of organizational ethnography traverses a broad philosophical and methodological spectrum, and in this volume, we have been inclusive. All chapters have made their own positions clear, and can be read as stand-alone pieces, reflecting the authors’ expertise and perspective. Each chapter in this volume stands alone as exploring some facet of organizational research, but it is our hope that this ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Notes on Contributors
• 1. Anthropology and Organizational Studies: A Symbiotic Connection
• PART I: Methodological Viewpoints
• PART II: Ethnographic Journeys
• PART III: Beyond Organizations
• PART IV: Reflections
• Index