Anthropology and Business

Baba, M. Anthropology and Business. 2006. Encyclopedia of Anthropology. H. James

Birx, Ed. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications. Pages 83-117.
 BUSINESS AND ANTHROPOLOGY

Business and industry are fundamental ways of organizing economic activity to

meet basic human needs in modern market societies. Business means the buying and
selling of goods and services in the marketplace (also known as commerce or trade),
while industry refers to the organized production of goods and services on a large scale.
These terms, when used in the anthropological context (e.g., business or industrial
anthropology 1 ), may be used to refer to one or more of the three major domains of
anthropological research and practice in the private sector 1) anthropology related to the
process of producing goods and services, and the corporate organizations in which
production takes place; 2) ethnographically-informed design of new products, services
and systems for consumers and businesses, and/or 3) anthropology related to the
behavior of consumers and the marketplace. In this article, we explore these domains,
beginning with a discussion of the historical development of the field, and continuing
with an overview of the contemporary landscape.

Part I: Historical Development of the Field

Early Colonial History: Anthropological roots that trace back to European

colonial interests also connect, albeit indirectly, to the international trade of that era and
the commercial activities associated with such trade. Early in the 19th century, for
example, the Court of Directors of The East India Company made a formal decision to
acquire anthropological knowledge of India, as such knowledge was deemed to be of
great value in the administration of the country. Subsequently, Frances Buchanan was
appointed by the Governor-General in Council to undertake an ethnographic survey to
enquire into the conditions of the inhabitants of Bengal and their religion. Likewise, in
Nigeria, where the British government employed a National Anthropologist for research
purposes, the journal Africa was established in 1928 to harmonize research policy and
practice in the colonies “for the solution of pressing questions that are of concern to
(among others)…traders working for the good of Africa”, according to Lord Lugard, the
first Governor General of Nigeria in his article in the first issue of Africa. These traders
included Lever Brothers and John Holts, companies that secured the produce of the
colonies for British factories and in turn shipped the finished products to the colonies
(Azuka Dike. The Global Practice of Anthropology, 1997).

While the actual value of European anthropology to colonial interests has been
called into question, there was, at least, sufficient potential there to justify the funding of
a Colonial Social Science Research Council (CSSRC) in Great Britain from 1944 to
1962, an organization that advocated a practical research agenda for anthropology in the
colonies. It is, perhaps, not a coincidence that during this same period (i.e., the 1950s),

1
The term ‘business anthropology’ come into usage in the 1980s, when anthropologists became full-time,
non-academic practitioners in niches related to consumer behavior and marketing. Prior to that time, the
term ‘industrial anthropology’, ‘anthropology of work’, or ‘applied anthropology in industry’ were used
more frequently to denote areas of research and practice focused on business related phenomenon. More
recently, the term ‘business anthropology’ has begun to be used more generically to mean any application
of anthropology to business-oriented problems.

1
British industrialists, led by Israel Sieff (a co-founder of Marks and Spencer, a
department store chain), requested support from British anthropologists to deal with quite
different issues in England; e.g., staff relationships and productivity in corporations. The
industrialists were rebuffed, however, with the reply that anthropology was an
exploratory discipline, and thus could not be used for anything so concrete as
recommendations to businesses (Sarah Pink, From the Colonies to the Modern
Organization: Public and Private Sector Applications of British Anthropology,
forthcoming).

The relationship between anthropology and colonial interests is part of the world
history of applied anthropology, and is one of the reasons why European anthropologists
were slow to adopt applied anthropology as a formal area of research and graduate
training in the latter half of the 20th century. The kind of work supported by the CSSRC
became tainted with political incorrectness as independence movements grew in force
around the time of World War II, causing embarrassment for some anthropologists who
found themselves linked to colonial purposes. As a result, many European
anthropologists threw the ‘applied baby’ out with the bathwater, and application simply
was off-limits in many places until the last quarter of the 20th century. The mantle of
leadership in application consequently ‘jumped the pond’ to the United States -- the home
of pragmatic philosophy, with important implications for the relationship between
business and American anthropology in the 20th century and beyond.

The American Context. On the other side of the Atlantic, the United States was
experiencing its industrial revolution during the latter part of the 19th century, and with it
the focus of applied anthropology shifted from studies of Native Americans to research
based in industry. The rise of American industry was accompanied by a theory of
organization known as ‘scientific management’, developed by the engineer Frederick W.
Taylor 2 . According to Taylor, the activities of both workers and managers should be
determined by ‘scientific’ methods – thorough investigation of the skills and actions
needed to perform a given role, careful selection of individual workers and managers
based on their ability to perform the role, and detailed instructions that would direct each
employee’s behavior so that maximum output could be achieved with minimum input.
Frederick Taylor believed in the theory of ‘economic man’ – that individual employees
would respond rationally to economic rewards by increasing their productivity to
maximize rewards to themselves. The trick was to find exactly the right kind and amount
of incentive – sufficient to motivate the worker effectively, but not so generous as to
detract from profitability. This approach, he believed, would reduce labor-management
strife, as all actors would be satisfied with their situations.

Taylor didn’t have to worry about unions interfering in his plan to optimize the
productivity of the workforce. Prior to the 1930s, manufacturing companies did not have
industrial unions, as many did later on in the 20th century. Up until the mid 1930s,
American unions were organized along trade lines (e.g., carpenters, glassblowers,
shoemakers), not by industry (e.g., automobiles, steel, textiles). This reflected the craft-

2
Many of the basic tenets of scientific management are implicitly in force in today’s corporations.

2
based organization of production that was common at that time 3 . The less skilled
production workers of the growing manufacturing firms were not permitted to join trade
unions. As manufacturing companies expanded in scope and influence toward the end of
the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries, their managers very much wanted to keep
unions from organizing the less skilled production workers. The 19th century had been a
period of serious labor-management conflict in the United States, with members of trade
unions regularly going on strike against their employers, and violence sometimes
breaking out 4 . As industrial technology began to replace the skills of the craft workers,
managers looked forward to the day when the trade unions would decline in influence
(which they soon did). Managers were still concerned, however, that the less skilled
production workers, who were becoming more numerous as national markets for mass
produced goods expanded, would organize unions of their own, something they wanted to
avoid at all costs.

One effective approach to avoiding unionization was a benign theory of

management known as welfare capitalism, an ideology that became central to the future
relationship of business and anthropology. The hypothesis was that if management
treated the workers well and ensured that they were contented, labor strife would subside
and unions would not grow stronger. This approach was especially prominent during the
economic boom years of the 1920s, when employers spent money improving workers’
quality of life. They built new housing for workers, created flowerbeds, parks and
libraries, and set up elementary schools for the workers’ children. Management also
formed company unions that negotiated ‘sweetheart deals’ (e.g., union leaders were
treated very well, and they agreed to whatever management wanted). As a result of these
efforts by management, the union movement did not advance in the 1920s, and there was
a reign of relative peace in the ranks of less skilled industrial workers up to the time of
the stock market crash in 1929.

The Hawthorne Project. It is against this backdrop that the Western Electric
Company (now part of Lucent Technologies) began in 1924 at its Hawthorne Works near
Chicago a series of experiments aimed at increasing the productivity of the workforce
(see F. J. Roethlisberger and W. J. Dickson, Management and the Worker, 1939). These
experiments reflected both the influence of welfare capitalism and Frederick Taylor’s
scientific management movement. The company wanted to find out how to improve
working conditions so that worker fatigue and dissatisfaction would be reduced (i.e.,
welfare capitalism), and they believed that a single variable (such as factory illumination)
could be manipulated to make this happen (i.e., scientific management). In these

3
In craft production, skilled workers with deep knowledge and experience in all aspects of a particular craft
make products by hand (e.g., shoes). This manual process yields high quality products, but it is very slow
and not suited to mass production for large national markets. Craft workers used trade unions to maintain
some measure of control over the conditions under which they worked (e.g., who could join the trade, how
they would be trained, what they would be paid). Such trade unions were much like medieval guilds.
4
Members of the trade unions would go on strike against their employers if their interests were not
protected, but these strikes were not legal, and violence often broke out as union members clashed with
private security guards, state militia, and even federal troops. Sometimes, people were killed in these
struggles. American workers at this point in time did not have a federal law granting them the right to form
a union, so employers could have workers arrested and charged with crimes such as conspiracy.

3
particular experiments, however, the results did not make sense from the standpoint of
scientific management theory. The experimenters found that worker productivity
increased when the lights were made brighter (as expected), but productivity also
increased or stayed the same when lighting was decreased, even to the dim level of
moonlight. This result definitely was not expected, and could not be explained by the
prevailing theory of the time.

Intrigued, the Hawthorne researchers instigated a further series of tests to explore

the anomaly, one of which was called the Relay Assembly Test Room (RATR)
experiment. In this test, a group of women were isolated in a laboratory where their
conditions of work and output could be measured carefully. The experimenters then
varied the working conditions, giving the women rest breaks, snacks, incentive pay, and
then gradually withdrawing each of these, while they measured the number of relay
assemblies each woman produced. Again, the same mysterious results emerged –
productivity was sustained or increased no matter what the experimenters did to working
conditions. We now know this phenomenon as the ‘Hawthorne Effect’, meaning that
non-experimental variables are affecting the experimental results, but at the time the
outcome was inexplicable.

Hawthorne researchers called upon Harvard psychologist Elton Mayo to help

them interpret the mysterious results of their experiments. With his help, they came to
realize that they had inadvertently altered the working conditions of the women far
beyond those of a normal work environment. For example, the researchers themselves
had become the women’s supervisors, and had developed a congenial relationship with
their research subjects. Two women who were not cooperative in the project had been
replaced with two other women. Neither of these conditions paralleled those that might
be experienced on the shop floor. Further, the women themselves had developed an
‘esprit de corps’ in which they worked together as a team, encouraging and helping one
another if one fell behind 5 . In other words, the women had developed a distinctive social
system, and this system itself had become part of the production process and was no
doubt contributing to the enhanced level of productivity that was being observed in the
experiment. Now, rather than simply being interested in how one variable (illumination)
influenced another (fatigue), the Hawthorne researchers started to became interested in
understanding the relationships among variables in the social system, and what their
effects on production might be.

As discussed by Helen Schwartzman in Ethnography in Organizations (1993),

Hawthorne initiated in 1928 a massive interview project involving 20,000 employees,
aimed at obtaining a better understanding of psychological factors that affected the
workers. It was these interviews that uncovered the tendency of workers to band together
as a means of defense against anything that might be perceived as a threat. This tendency

5
The account provided here is the ‘official’ version that emerged after internal disputes regarding the
appropriate interpretation of the data had been settled within the research team. Richard Gillespie’s
Manufacturing Knowledge: A History of the Hawthorne Experiments (1991) provides an illuminating
exploration of the differing interpretations among Hawthorne researchers regarding the significance of the
experimental results, and explains how Mayo’s views came to dominate social science lore on the subject.

4
produced a uniformity of behavior among individual workers; e.g., reluctance to ask for a
raise, which might create a rift within a work group. This tendency gradually came to be
conceptualized as the worker’s social system or social organization, and it was an interest
in understanding this social system that prompted the next and final phase of the
Hawthorne project.

It was at this point that anthropology entered the Hawthorne Project. Elton
Mayo had established a friendship with two prominent anthropologists, Bronislaw
Malinowski and A. R. Radcliffe-Brown, and he therefore knew that anthropologists study
natural social systems in the field. It was this very approach that Mayo wanted to adopt
for the final phase of the Hawthorne study. Through his professional network, Mayo was
introduced to one of Radcliffe-Brown’s students, W. Lloyd Warner, who had just
returned from fieldwork in Australia, studying the Murngin. Warner consulted with the
Hawthorne researchers in designing and conducting the next phase of their experiment,
and with this act he fathered industrial or organizational anthropology.

With W. Lloyd Warner as design consultant, the Hawthorne researchers

conducted the final phase of the Hawthorne project, known as the Bank Wiring
Observation Room (BWOR) experiment. This portion of the project was aimed at
exploring what workers actually did on the job, in contrast with what they said during the
interviews. For the BWOR, a replica of the shop floor at Western Electric was
constructed, into which a typical work group (14 male bank wirers and their supervisors)
was installed. The workers performed their tasks as usual, while a trained observer
watched them and recorded their interactions over a time period extending for several
months during 1931 and 1932, the depths of the Great Depression. To gain a better
understanding of the worker’s point of view, a second researcher, not present in the
observation room, conducted periodic interviews with the workers. Warner encouraged
the researchers to read anthropological theory, and to analyze their observational data
much as an anthropologist would in studying a small society such as a band or tribe.

The BWOR study was the first to demonstrate empirically the starkly contrasting
points of view separating management and the workers. Hawthorne management had
accepted Frederick Taylor’s concept of ‘economic man’ (i.e., workers are rational actors
who respond to economic incentives), and therefore they had devised a complex piece
rate incentive scheme that guaranteed a minimum hourly wage in exchange for a
minimum daily standard of production (the ‘bogey), plus an additional sum that was
determined by the amount of output produced by the entire group in excess of that which
was guaranteed by the minimum hourly wage. Management believed that this system
would encourage workers to maximize their efforts up to the point at which fatigue and
discomfort inhibited additional production. Part of this incentive scheme was the notion
that slower workers would be spurred on by those in the group who worked faster (much
as they witnessed in the earlier RATR experiment).

In reality, however, the piece rate system had exactly the opposite effect to what
the managers envisioned. Workers had their own notion of a ‘fair day’s work’ which was
considerably below that which management envisioned as desirable under the piece rate

5
incentive system. The workers’ informal standard was translated into a certain number of
units to be produced by each man during the day; this was basically the amount of labor
required to produce the ‘bogey’. Anything produced in excess of this minimum was
frowned upon and negatively sanctioned by the group. If a worker set a fast pace and
produced more than the minimum standard, he was subjected to verbal abuse (e.g., called
a slave), ‘binging’ (using the thumb to snap the third finger against the violator’s arm),
and eventually, the most dreaded punishment – ostracism or virtual banishment. Often,
the workers would produce their quota early in the day, and then subtly scale back effort
in the afternoon, while enjoying one another’s company (all the while keeping an eye out
for management). This work culture arose from the workers’ belief that a higher daily
rate of production would prompt management to raise the ‘bogey’ (i.e., the minimum
daily standard of production), cut the hourly rate, or layoff some of them. The
Hawthorne project was conducted during the depths of the Great Depression, so it is not
surprising that workers feared such actions from management.

The Hawthorne findings were in conflict with the existing management theory of
the day. According to Taylor, the economic man was an individual, and incentive
structures were set to encourage individuals to give their maximum effort, and to push
their peers to do the same. Yet in the BWOR, the workers did not respond as individuals,
but as a group, and they had developed their own informal theory of management that
was based on distrust of managers, not on an interest in economic gain. Here was the
first solid empirical evidence of informal organization (what we might call an
occupational subculture or counter-culture), defined as the actual patterns of social
interaction and relationships among the members of an organization that are not
determined by management. Researchers were able to map this informal organization by
quantifying interactions among workers, and to graphically depict networks of
relationships between different work groups or cliques, much as network analysis today
reveals informal patterns of communication and exchange among individuals. The
informal organization that was depicted very much contrasted with the formal
organization (interactions defined by the rules and policies of the corporation) that
management had put in place to enable pursuit of the company’s goals. The corporation
thus was comprised of two kinds of organization that were not aligned with each other –
one a rational organization designed for instrumental purposes, and the other a
spontaneous, natural form of human social interaction that arose in response to inherent
human interests and needs. These findings made clear that workers were not simply
‘factors’ in production, much like machines, but were sentient beings who assigned their
own meanings to phenomenon, and who protected their interests through mechanisms of
their own design. Although this insight seems obvious to us now, it was a startling
breakthrough in the early 1930s, and it represented a severe critique of Taylor’s scientific
management theory.

One of the most significant findings to emerge from the Hawthorn Project was
that workers exert considerable influence over industrial productivity. As long as
machines did not control the work process, as they did not in those days, workers could
manipulate the pace of production in many subtle ways not easy to detect without an
army of supervisors. Management was no longer fully in control of the corporation, as

6
the theory of the day assumed, but had to deal with a powerful natural force that, from
management’s perspective, did not respond to the logic of economic incentives. From
the worker’s point of view, of course, the men of the BWOR were being quite logical,
since any behavioral pattern other than that which they exhibited could end up costing
them in the long run. Interestingly, this latter anthropological view is not the one adopted
by the Hawthorne researchers, who accepted Mayo’s interpretation of the findings, which
held that the BWOR workers were acting in an irrational manner, based on psychological
“maladjustment”. A different industrial future may have unfolded if the alternative view
had prevailed.

A new school of thought emerged in organizational theory as a result of the

Hawthorne findings, and it held sway for the next two decades -- the Human Relations
School. This school of thought was based on functional equilibrium theory, a theory
widespread in the social sciences at the time, which viewed human organizations as
integrated social systems, with specific structures that interacted to maintain a smoothly
operating whole. Each individual was seen as being tied to the whole, yet still having his
or her proper place and function in the system. Within the context of this theory, conflict
between management and workers was seen as pathological, reflecting the disruption of
an equilibrium state, and was to be ameliorated by making adjustments in the pattern of
interaction among individuals and organizational structures. A disruption of the
equilibrium state would affect worker morale in a negative way, and this in turn would
interfere with efficient production. The Human Relations School aimed at creating
harmonious worker-manager relationships that would ensure optimal productivity in a
company (some later called this ‘cow sociology’ – contented workers give better work).
Mayo argued that a work groups’ informal organization either could support management
goals (as seen in the Relay Assembly Test Room experiment), or work against them (as
in the Bank Wiring Observation Room). Management needed to adjust its relationships
with workers to ensure the former result, not the latter. This school of thought was
prominent in American industry for the next twenty years, and was highly influential in
shaping the practices of the first generation of industrial anthropologists.

Not coincidentally, the Human Relations School often is associated with welfare
capitalism, and with a tendency in managerial thought and action to resist unionization of
the workforce. The anthropologists who were prominent within the Human Relations
movement appear not to have questioned the status quo ante assumptions upon which this
movement was founded, and consequently they and their colleagues often have been
judged as management-centric in their research and practice, a judgment that may not be
completely fair given the anthropologists’ landmark efforts to understand the perspective
of the Hawthorne workers.

The Human Relations Movement. Ironically, Warner and his colleagues did not
have further opportunity to continue their studies at Hawthorne during the 1930s. This
was the result of two developments. First, the Hawthorne researchers followed-up on the
Bank Wiring Observation Room study by initiating a program of psychological
counseling with workers that they believed would contribute to industrial peace. No
further studies of social interaction on the shop floor were conducted (while industrial

7
psychology as a field expanded). Secondly, as the Great Depression unfolded in the
1930s, severe economic deprivation meant that companies did not have the resources
needed to continue to support research of the Hawthorne type. Thus, little industrial
anthropology was conducted in the United States during the remainder of the 1930s.

As the United States recovered from the Great Depression and then entered World
War II, production pressure intensified and internecine ‘feuding’ between workers and
management erupted once again, becaming an increasingly serious threat to the economic
welfare and security of the nation. Any effort to ameliorate this conflict was viewed as
contributing to important national goals. Intellectuals were motivated to become
involved in Mayo’s Human Relations project primarily because of such critical national
interests, and not as a result of concern for the competitiveness or profitability of
individual firms.

The group of anthropologists at Harvard during the time of the Hawthorne project
also was influenced by a general interest in modern institutions, and they found many
opportunities to conduct observational studies in large corporations, and to apply their
insights toward the goal of industrial harmony, from the 1940s through the 1950s. This
generation of industrial anthropologists, including Conrad Arensberg, Elliot Chapple,
Burleigh Gardner, Robert Guest, Solon Kimball, Frederick Richardson, Leonard Sayles,
and William Foote Whyte (who was trained as a qualitative sociologist) undertook a
series of important studies both of workers and managers, with the goal of discovering
factors and forces that could be manipulated to achieve an equilibrium state in the
organizational system (i.e., the elimination of conflict).

Anthropologists who worked in industry during this period continued to be

influenced by Elton Mayo’s conception of social science as therapeutic or clinical
practice. In keeping with functional equilibrium theory, Mayo believed that a key role of
social science, including anthropology, was to gain a better understanding of human
social systems in industry in order to permit the design of effective interventions that
could alleviate pathologies such as labor-management conflict, resulting in more
smoothly functioning organizational systems. If a social system was not in an
equilibrium state, the anthropologists believed that they could contribute to restoring a
healthy equilibrium by identifying sources of friction in the social system, and
recommending ways to transform adversarial or rebellious relations into productive
collaboration. The anthropologists did not question the asymmetrical relations of power
in a company as a key source of conflict; these were taken as given.

During the 1940s and 50s, anthropologists were hired by management to work on
problems in specific plants, such as high turnover, absenteeism, strikes, and poor worker-
management cooperation. They studied various aspects of social structure and relations
within the industrial enterprise, such as informal relationships among workers, actual
work processes, status hierarchies, relations between workers and managers, union-
management interaction, and voluntary associations in the workplace. Many of these
studies identified the small work group as a critical factor within the industrial system,

8
thus opening a new area of study in the social sciences that has been highly productive
from a theoretical standpoint.

Companies that hired anthropologists during this period included Sears, Roebuck
& Company, the Container Corporation of America, International Business Machines
(IBM), Inland Steel Container Company, Libby MacNeil and Libby, Bundy Tubing
Company, and the Eastern Corporation. Some of the anthropological studies of such
firms produced industrial ethnographies (case studies) of the entire company, with a
focus on the factors and forces that influenced human relations within an integrated social
system. For example, Warner and Low (1946) conducted their famous case study of a
major industrial strike in Yankee City (Newbury, Massachusetts), explaining connections
between the social system within the factory and larger economic, technological, and
social forces that contributed to the strike. Yet, the anthropologists saw themselves not as
“hired guns”, but as scientists, working to discover laws of human interaction that could
establish the foundation for a science of human behavior. W. Lloyd Warner, the founder
of industrial anthropology, had a larger theoretical agenda that he hoped to advance
through the study of modern institutions such as industrial organizations (see also E.
Eddy and W. Partridge (Eds.) Applied Anthropology in America, 1978).

Methodologically, Eliot Chapple and other anthropologists aimed to obtain a

detailed, quantitative record of interactions among workers and managers in industrial
settings, much as a naturalist would record the behavior of an animal species in the field.
Detailed measurement of actual behavioral interaction would help to pinpoint the sources
of tension and conflict between different industrial roles. This knowledge could then be
used to make precise adjustments in patterns of interaction that could contribute to a
reduction in conflict. Chapple developed a new technological device, called the
Interaction Chronograph, which helped to record quantitatively the interactions among
individuals as they unfolded in real time (see Eliot Chapple, The Interaction
Chronograph: Its Evolution and Present Application, 1949). This device may be viewed
as the precursor of modern videotape analysis of workplace interaction that was later
pioneered by a second generation of industrial anthropologists.

Frederick Richardson’s work provides an example of a key social variable – the

human contact -- discovered by the anthropologists through observational methods, and
describes how this variable could be used to improve worker-manager relations (The
Elusive Nature of Cooperation and Leadership: Discovering a Primitive Process that
Regulates Human Behavior, 1978. The contact pertains to the behavioral interaction that
takes place between a supervisor and his or her subordinate in face-to-face meetings.
Richardson suggests that it is possible to predict the performance of a work group solely
by recording the supervisor’s contacts that last one minute or more. High performing
units display “contact moderation” about 90% of the time. The anthropologists argued,
based on studies of primates and other animals, that conflict between work groups is
exacerbated by physical separation and a lack of on-going contact. This behavior pattern
is one in which a supervisor spends one-half to three-quarters of his or her time engaged
in contacts with others. The contacts are well distributed across the group, with the
average length being fairly short, but not curt. Typically, there are 15-30 contacts per

9
day, with a good balance between group and pair contacts. Supervisors of high
performing groups also were found to be more talkative, more dominant (cannot be
interrupted easily), more flexible in style, and less flappable. These supervisors over and
under-react less to excessive talking or silence from others, maintaining their own rhythm
of speech. This description was derived from close recording of behavioral interactions,
and it was used to advise managers on ways to improve the productivity of their workers.

It is clear from the discussion above that industrial anthropologists of the time
studied not only workers, but managers as well, something Fredrick Taylor had difficulty
doing, as managers resisted the application of his methods to their ranks. Being able to
study both workers and managers meant that the anthropologists had to gain access to,
and establish trust with, both of these groups, a feat that was quite difficult to do in times
of industrial unrest. Anthropologists were virtually the only group of researchers capable
of performing this feat, although later they were criticized for being too close to
management in their assumptions and point of view.

After the Hawthorne Project, W. Lloyd Warner shifted his focus to the
contemporary community in his Yankee City studies (Newburyport, Massachusetts). The
focus of this project was the social stratification of a community using the
anthropological techniques of direct observation and interviews. It was in this project
that Warner uncovered the importance of both the voluntary association and the
corporation as distinctive modes of social integration in American life. Warner found
that both of these forms of organization bring together and articulate diverse social
elements, including individuals, families, and ethnic groups, in ways that are not typical
in other societies. Anthropologists conducting studies of families, work, and corporations
only now are beginning to follow-up on these insights.

Especially important to our understanding of industrial anthropology in this

period was Warner and Low’s study of a major strike affecting several Yankee City
shoemaking factories. The intensity and duration of the strike, which took place during
the depths of the 1930s’ depression, were a surprise to many observers, since the workers
in the plant had never mounted any job action in the many decades of the factory’s
history. Warner and Low (The Social System of a Modern Factory, 1947) were able to
trace the roots of the strike to changes in the technology, work process, and social
relations within the factory, and they also linked these micro-level changes to larger
technological and economic transformations unfolding at the macro-level of the nation.
Over some decades before the strike, shoemaking production technology had gradually
evolved, reducing once highly skilled craftsmen to less skilled and more interchangeable
workers in a more heavily mechanized production process. The deskilling of the
workforce had destroyed the traditional social system within the factory, which was
based in a hierarchy of increasing levels of skill in the craft of shoemaking. Workers’
identity and self-esteem were tied to their capacity to move up the skill hierarchy as they
gained increasing experience and expertise. But technological changes destroyed the
skill hierarchy, reducing once proud craftsmen to a more or less undifferentiated mass of
deskilled workers. Such changes generated a sense of loss of control and autonomy
among the workers, drawing them into a group with shared interests. At the same time,

10
the ownership of the factories themselves had changed hands, shifting from local
ownership to distant owners in New York City. The absenteeism of the factory owners
removed social constraints against strikes that had been in place when the owners were
integral members of the community. As a result, members of the community supported
the strike in a way that would not have been possible before, and this support made a
lengthy strike possible. As a result of the strike and its community support, the workers
organized an industrial union and were successful in their demands against management,
thereby reflecting similar changes that were taking place across the country. Through
this study, Warner and Low showed that behavior inside a plant cannot be understood
fully without also knowing the connections between the plant and its historical, social,
economic, political, and technological contexts. The discovery of the open-systems
nature of work organizations was an original theoretical contribution that pre-dated
Selznick’s (1949) work on the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) that often is credited
in the management literature as the first research to demonstrate organizational-
environmental interactions.

In 1936, Warner left Harvard and went to the University of Chicago where he
founded the Committee on Human Relations in Industry. This group encouraged and
supported the work of many industrial anthropologists and sociologists, such as William
Foote Whyte, whose qualitative field studies of various industries have became classics
of the organizational theory literature. Another significant event during this period was
the founding of the Society for Applied Anthropology (SfAA) at Harvard in 1941.
Several of the founders were industrial anthropologists who published their industrial
research findings in the SfAA’s journal Applied Anthropology (now Human
Organization).

The Decline of Industrial Practice. Around 1960, a number of significant

changes in the social, political and economic context of the United States influenced the
development of academia, and with it the trajectory of industrial anthropology. Instead
of continuing to establish itself as an important subfield of anthropology, as might have
been projected from its promising start in the previous three decades, the anthropology of
industrial organizations entered a prolonged period of decline from which it has only
recently begun to emerge. This decline is related both to a waning interest in modern
institutions within the mainstream of anthropology, and to a scarcity of practitioners, that
is, individuals who conduct the science and craft of anthropology (whether research or
application) inside industrial and business organizations. Reasons that may be given for
the decline are as follows:

•Change in Academic Environments. With the end of World War II, and the
Soviet Union’s launch of Sputnik in the 1950s, major changes swept over American
higher education. Record numbers of baby boomers entered college, along with returning
GIs, and the ranks of college students exploded in number. Simultaneously, the
American government was eager to continue the technological advances that had helped
the Allies to win the war, and toward that objective the National Science Foundation was
established to fund academic research. These developments meant that academic
anthropology, and federal funds for fieldwork in countries outside the United States, grew

11
both in numbers and stature. American anthropologists now had growing numbers of
academic employment posts, and the means to travel abroad to conduct research. The
academic discipline of anthropology emphasized the significance of fieldwork outside the
US as necessary to the creation of a “real anthropologist”. Those conducting research in
the United States (such as the industrial anthropologists) were relegated to a second class
citizen status, which ultimately pushed many of them out of anthropology and into the
business world. Some became professors in business schools (e.g., Frederick Richardson,
William Foote Whyte, and Leonard Sayles), while others started businesses or became
business consultants (e.g., Burleigh Gardner and Eliot Chapple). This meant that they
were not able to produce a new generation of industrial anthropologists.

•Shift in Social Science Theory. The Human Relations School and functional
equilibrium theory were incompatible with the emerging reality of labor relations in
American industry, which was increasingly characterized by severe labor-management
conflict and strife 6 . As the organized labor movement grew in strength, collective
bargaining and the ‘union contract’ came to be the answer to labor-management relations
on a daily basis, rather than the smooth equilibrium sought by the Human Relations
clinicians. As a result, this movement and its practitioners gradually faded into
obsolescence. The industrial anthropologists themselves appear not to have realized what
was happening until it was too late. Historians of social science have criticized this
generation of industrial anthropologists for being too management-centric, and not
connected sufficiently to the working class to foresee the rising tide of unionization and
its theoretical consequences. In the meantime, other disciplines such as industrial
sociology were developing new theory to explain organizational behavior. The most
prominent of these (and still dominant) is contingency theory, which explains what is
happening in an organization through correlations among formal variables such as
organizational structure, technology, and the environment. Studies conducted under this
theoretical regime rely upon quantitative data drawn from large surveys of scores or
hundreds of organizations, and rigorous statistical modeling of survey results.
Anthropological methods were sidelined as appropriate mainly for “case studies”, which
were suspect as unreliable and non-generalizable to a large population of organizations.

•Political and Ethical Issues. The era of academic expansion in the 1960s and
early 1970s brought with it serious concerns on campuses regarding the ethical propriety
6
During the Great Depression, unionism of all kinds declined as unemployment grew to unprecedented
levels. The moral authority of business (and its capacity to practice welfare capitalism) was severely
damaged, and thus, when a slow recovery began in 1932, the previously harmonious labor relations
disappeared. Labor agitation mounted as workers were called back to their jobs, and President Franklin D.
Roosevelt, concerned that labor unrest could derail the fragile recovery, decided that the federal
government would sponsor collective bargaining as part of a strategy to get the economy moving again.
When this approach was ruled unconstitutional, the US Congress passed the National Labor Relations Act
in 1935, which for the first time gave workers the right to bargain collectively. Shortly afterwards, the
Council of Industrial Organization (CIO) was formed to organize less skilled workers on an industry-wide
basis. Now, when the union called a work stoppage such as that which took place during the Flint sit-down
strikes of 1936-37, the government no longer interfered, and the unions began to make serious headway
toward their goals of improved wages and working conditions for unskilled workers. The modern union
movement was born. Over the course of the next several decades, union bargaining succeeded in
transferring approximately 16% of shareholder wealth into the pockets of working people.

12
of conducting research under the auspices of powerful sponsors such as governments or
corporations. Just as anthropologists in Great Britain reacted negatively when their ties
to colonial administrations became a subject of public criticism, so American
anthropologists reacted with distaste when they found out that certain agencies of the US
government had attempted to engage anthropologists in research that would become part
of counter-insurgency programs in the developing world (e.g., Project Camelot). Such
revelations, together with a growing anti-war movement in the US, turned
anthropologists away from government service, and fostered a suspicion of any powerful
sponsor who could use anthropological research in ways that might injure those studied,
and also injure anthropology in the process. In addition to government, multinational
corporations also were identified as potentially dangerous sponsors. During the 1960s,
American multinational corporations were dominant overseas, making inroads into
foreign markets and setting up factories in developing countries to reduce the cost of
production. Academic anthropologists who were conducting fieldwork in the very places
that American business was investing often saw the negative consequences of
industrialization, including increasing poverty, new disease threats, and the disintegration
of traditional social supports.

One notorious example of such tragedies was the malnutrition and infant death
that followed Nestle’s introduction of infant formula in the developing world. Often,
Third World women could not afford to continue to buy formula in the amounts
recommended, nor could they ensure that bottles were sterile or that water to mix the
formula was pure. Formula often was heavily diluted with contaminated water, leading
to infant diarrhea, malnutrition, and outright starvation. Women who relied on formula
instead of breastfeeding could not switch back to the breast, since their milk supply dried-
up when not used. Nestle was aware of these problems, yet would not withdraw the
formula from countries where these problems were manifest, triggering a massive global
boycott of Nestle products. Such instances of unethical corporate behavior further
alienated anthropologists from industry, and caused some to begin labeling any work for
industry as ‘unethical’. This label stuck as the American Anthropological Association
promulgated principles of professional responsibility in 1971 that prohibited any research
that could not be freely disseminated to the public. Since industrial research sometimes
is proprietary (i.e., owned by the company and not publishable without their permission),
this code of ethics virtually banned industrial anthropology for the next two decades.

The Fragmentation of Industrial Anthropology in Academe: 1960-1980. After

the demise of the Human Relations School, industrial anthropology splintered into
several branches, the principal ones being 1) Marxist and neo-Marxist critiques of
industry at home and abroad, 2) the ethnography of industrial occupations and
professions, and 3) the study of industrialization processes outside the West. Academic
anthropologists who did not practice inside corporations, but studied them the outside, at
a distance, were responsible for much of the research and conceptual development during
this period.

Marxist Critique of Industry. For some anthropologists, a focus on the negative

consequences of industrialization at home and abroad led to a radical critique of the

13
existing industrial order and to a cultural analysis framed in terms of Marxist, neo-
Marxist and post-Marxist theory 7 . The Marxist tradition was well suited to the
conditions of modern industry after World War II. As collective bargaining gained
strength in US industry, workers and management clearly came to see themselves as
separate parties on opposite sides of a struggle for economic gain, much as they were
portrayed in Marxist writings. In this environment, anthropologists focused on the ways
in which management used its power to increase the productivity of the workforce, and
how the workers responded. An especially prominent stream of research in this vein
centered upon managerial strategies to reduce workers’ skills and their jobs (and thus
their wages, numbers, and power) through the process of technological innovations. The
union movement had been successful in its efforts to improve wages and working
conditions, but in the process unions had ceded control of technological change to
management. Before World War II, workers had significant control over the work
process, and in some industries they could virtually speed up or slow down the work
process at will. Intent on gaining something in exchange for higher wages, American
management generally insisted on the use of technology as a ‘managerial prerogative’,
meaning that management had the right to implement new technology whenever and
however they saw fit. Managers used improvements in production technology and
automation to wrest control over the work process away from the workers. Technology
was used both to reduce the number of workers needed for a certain level of production,
and the level of skill workers needed to do their jobs. Machines increasingly did the
work that previously had been the province of skilled craftspeople. The process by which
workers lost skill over time became known as deskilling (as discussed by Harry
Braverman, Labor and Monopoly Capitalism, 1974), and it was associated with the rise
of tedious, repetitive industrial jobs that were demeaning, boring, and alienating. Once
management had control of the work process, they could speed-up the rate of production
in order to increase output without increasing costs, thereby improving profitability.
Workers often had little choice but to go along with this program if they wanted to keep
their jobs. Many workers lost their jobs anyway as technological advance reduced the
need for workers in many industries.

7
Marxist criticism focuses on the mode and relations of production within capitalist economic systems,
meaning the way in which economic value and surplus value are produced, and social relations between
management (as the agents of the capitalist owners of the means of production) and workers (the
proletariat). Marxism holds that capitalist economies are predicated on an immoral and unsustainable
exploitation of working people. The difficulty stems from the notion of profit, which is viewed as surplus
value (i.e., not required to cover costs) produced by workers, but not returned to them through wages. In
other words, the wages that workers are paid do not represent the full value of all that they produce.
Rather, a portion of this value is diverted to profits that management uses to enrich itself and to enhance the
enterprise. Marx believed that capitalism eventually would collapse because workers would not have
sufficient income to absorb all of the goods that they were producing (and that had to be produced to keep
profits growing). Rather than waiting for capitalism to self-destruct, however, Marx advocated that
workers rise up against the owners of private enterprise and create a new social order in which the
proletariat, through a socialist state, would become the owners of the means of production and all of the
economic value produced by it. Neo-Marxism and post-Marxism updates (or revises) classical Marxist
theory by incorporating new ideas and explanations that address criticisms of classical Marxism, and/or
extend Marxian-like arguments into the post-Fordist era. Obviously, capitalism has not yet collapsed, and
neo-Marxism helps to explain why this is so and what it means to those who reject capitalist economics.

14
 Industrial anthropologists in the Marxist and neo-Marxist traditions carefully
documented the strategies workers used to cope with such adverse employment
conditions. Anthropologists and qualitative sociologies were among the first to
empirically demonstrate the informal working knowledge that people use on the job, both
to get the work done, and to protect their jobs, skills, and earnings (e.g., K. C. Kusterer,
Know-How on the Job: The Important Working Knowledge of Unskilled Workers, 1978;
Louise Lamphere, Fighting the Piece Rate System: New Dimensions of an Old Struggle
in the Apparel Industry, 1979). While management often assumed that less skilled
workers did not have much need for intellect on the job in an age of automation,
anthropologists found just the opposite – workers brought their intelligence with them
and used it to solve work-related problems that management could not or would not
address. Anthropologists conducted this research both in the United States and abroad,
delving into numerous industries, including mining, automobile manufacturing, and
garment production.

An example of an ethnographic study of industrial work that is Marxist in

orientation is provided by Louise Lamphere’s (see above) study of a New England
apparel factory. She begins with an historical description of the development of the
apparel industry in the US, explaining why this particular industry has remained labor
intensive, and exploring strategies managers use to maximize profit under conditions of
intensive competition. The key managerial approach to ensuring a reasonable profit is
maintenance of low wages. The hiring of marginalized workers (women and
immigrants), and locating plants in low wage areas are managerial tactics used to ensure
low wages. Lamphere also documents the coping strategies of workers and their union as
they struggle against a relentless drive by management to continuously reduce labor costs
by ‘scientific’ means, a process that also threatens jobs, wages, and skills.

Marxist and Neo-Marxist anthropologists often highlight the special adversity

faced by women workers in industry. Gender-related traits are used as reasons to bar
women from the most lucrative jobs in industry, while restricting them to low status or
dead end jobs that pay poorly. Women also serve as a ‘reserve army’ of the unemployed
(a Marxist concept), ready to go to work when needed (e.g., during World War II), but
then finding themselves removed from their jobs when male workers become available
again. At the same, women workers continue to be responsible for domestic production
(housekeeping and child rearing), leading some writers to suggest they are ‘doubly
exploited’, as discussed by Carol Holzberg and Maureen Giovannini in Anthropology and
Industry: Reappraisal and New Directions, 1981. Union organizations that take
advantage of women’s plight when attempting to organize groups of workers
simultaneously deny women leadership roles within the organized labor movement,
meaning that patriarchal practices are not restricted to the capitalists. Anthropologists
have documented some cases in which women have overcome these barriers to
participate in and even lead union movements.

Generally, anthropologists do not confine their analyses to what is going on at the

shop floor level, but like W. Lloyd Warner, they trace lines of influence from the
corporation to the nation-state and even the global economy. The Marxist anthropologist

15
June Nash, for example, studied a multinational petrochemical company, including in her
investigation the work of global middle managers with whom she conducted interviews
(The Anthropology of the Multinational Corporation, 1979). Nash’ work is unusual in
that most anthropologists working in the Marxist tradition do not study managers, only
workers (a bias which has limited the impact of their analyses). Nash was surprised to
find that the managers were just as alienated from their work as others who had no
managerial authority. Her investigation is classic in showing how this company is
connected to larger economic, political, and social forces. More recently, Nash (From
Tank Town to High Tech: The Clash of Community and Industrial Cycles, 1989) has
examined the transformation of a mass production company into a technology-intensive
defense producer (General Electric), focusing on the effect of these changes on
communities and families in the local area (Pittsfield, MA). This work is important in
showing that workers are not passive observers of such changes, but active participants in
the change process. Helen Schwartzman provides a useful discussion of Nash’s work in
Ethnography in Organizations (1993).

Occupations and Professions. While many Marxist and neo-Marxist

anthropologists followed the activities of industrial workers who were largely deskilled,
other anthropologists in the decades between 1960 and 1980 focused their attention on
members of industrial occupations or professions whose remaining or continuing skills
afforded them a place of status and distinction within the work context. Members of
occupations or professions often have characteristics that parallel those found in small-
scale societies, such as a unique system of meanings, practices, and a language that
distinguishes them from other work groups. It was Durkheim who noted that
‘…occupational activity (is) the richest sort of material for a common life’. Workers who
cooperate together in the same activities and share similar experiences also tend to
associate with one another and to form a collective identity.

The common life of occupational members gives rise to a work culture, which
Herbert Applebaum defined as a system of knowledge, techniques, attitudes, and
behaviors appropriate to the performance of work and social interactions in a particular
work setting (Work in Market and Industrial Societies, 1984). The features of a given
type of work promote certain patterns of behavior while suppressing others; these
patterns are reinforced through selective hiring, formal training, and the informal
enculturation of new recruits. Work cultures are not only influential on the job, but off
the job as well, with traditions, beliefs, and behavioral standards extending themselves
into the worker’s general life and life style. Work cultures may be compared along
several dimensions, including social relations among workers, time-orientation (i.e., the
extent to which time provides discipline in the work process), authority structures,
relations with peers (e.g., friendship), language (i.e., jargon that fosters a sense of
identity), dress and demeanor, gendering (i.e., the sex-typing of occupations), and roles
and statuses.

A work culture lends itself well to application of the classical concept of culture
that was prevalent during this period, and the ethnographic method, and anthropologists
have used ethnography to record the distinctive cultures of many different occupations

16
and professions. For example, Herbert Applebaum studied construction workers,
yielding insights on the relationship between the technological requirements of an
industry and the nature of its work culture (Royal Blue: The Culture of Construction
Workers, 1981). Applebaum was himself a construction worker, and so he had first-hand
knowledge of the craft through many years of participant observation. His ethnographic
account of life as a construction worker depicts a world in which highly skilled
craftspeople (carpenters, masons, electricians, cement finishers, ironworkers, sheet metal
workers, plumbers and others) often own their own tools, accessories, and trucks, and in
many cases have been in business for themselves at one time or another. They know
their business better than anyone else, and they thus control the work process, with an
emphasis on quality. If a general manager places too much emphasis on speed, the
worker is likely to walk off the job. Workers gain the respect of others through the
quality of their finished work, and highly respected journeymen consider themselves to
be the peers of the engineers and other overseers. It is the craftspeople and their
supervisors who make most of the decisions at a work site, and since the latter have come
from the ranks, they are usually on friendly terms with the workers. Hiring and firing
happen on the job site, not in the home office. The personal networks of the supervisors
and foremen are the sources from which workers are selected, based on past experience.
Workers also determine whether or not conditions are safe enough to commence or
continue working. These conditions create a work culture that is highly satisfying to its
members, who take pride in work that they control.

Applebaum observed that the construction industry has not been affected by the
increasing mechanization of work processes and specialization of tasks that has led to
deskilling in many other industries. Rather, construction workers have maintained a high
level of skill in which workers control much of the work process and trade unions have
great strengths. These features, in turn, are related to the technological requirements of
the industry, including the uniqueness of each building and site, the temporary duration
of a given project, the variation in work processes due to changes in weather, and the
inability to stockpile a product. All of these requirements have prevented the advance of
mechanization, and have enabled construction workers to maintain their independence
and autonomy.

Over the years, anthropologists, sociologists, folklorists and others working in the
qualitative research tradition have contributed much to our knowledge of many different
occupational and professional work cultures 8 . Particularly well known is the work of
Frederick Gamst, whose career was devoted to producing a literature on railroading (see
for example The Hoghead: An Industrial Ethnography of the Locomotive Engineer,
1980). Descriptive studies of occupational and professional cultures in many different
industries 9 created a foundation of knowledge that contributed greatly to our

8
Like occupations, members of professions (e.g., attorneys, accountants) also tend to form cultural
patterns, but professions have relatively greater work autonomy and control compared with occupations.
9
This includes studies of accountants, high steel workers, locomotive engineers, longshoremen, medical
school students, nightclub strippers, police, professional dance musicians, rodeo workers, social workers,
timber loggers, underground miners, waiters, and many others to numerous to mention. A thorough
discussion is provided by Harrison Trice, Occupational Subcultures in the Workplace, 1993.

17
understanding of cultural phenomena in organizations more generally, and set the stage
for the emergence of the concept of organizational or corporate culture during the 1980s.

Industrialization Processes Outside the West. During the 1960s and 70s, the rise
of fieldwork outside the United States was supported by federal agencies such as the
National Science Foundation. Such support enabled anthropologists (and members of
other disciplines, such as sociologists) to explore the changes taking place in nations that
were just beginning to develop an industrial infrastructure. A prominent theory in the
social sciences at the time, known as convergence theory, predicted that societies around
the world would become ever more similar to one another in their ways of life, based on
the technological imperative of industrialization (William Form, Comparative Industrial
Sociology and the Convergence Hypothesis, 1979). The convergence hypothesis holds
that as national economies shift from traditional agriculture to modern industry (i.e., large
scale mass production) as the primary mode of production, the technologies of
industrialization would require parallel changes in society and life style across many
different nations, including the break-down of the extended family, migration from rural
to urban areas, the congregation of populations in urban centers, the need for increasing
discipline of the work force, mandated formal education for children, and similar
occupational structures. Many of these societal changes, it was argued, follow from the
fact that industry organizes production on a mass scale at certain concentrated locations
(e.g., factories, mines, mills), and this tends to attract people who seek a livelihood, as
well as smaller supplier firms, that provide products and services both to the primary
industry and its workforce. The industrial requirements for literacy and regimented
individual and group behavior were the reasons why societies increasingly required
formal education for children, with schools also serving as a means to teach discipline to
the future workforce.

Some theorists believed that every industrializing society, regardless of its history
and culture, must follow the same evolutionary pathway as that taken by Western
societies, with respect to the development of its economic and socio-cultural systems 10 .
An ethnocentric implication of this assumption is that non-Western nations will be able to
industrialize only to the extent that they emulate Western societies in their institutional
structures, values, and behavioral patterns. From this point of view, traditional
indigenous customs (e.g., kinship obligations, spiritual orientation) are thought to impede
the transition to industrialization.

Anthropological studies of societies in the midst of industrial transitions provided

a critique of convergence theory, based on historical specificity and cultural relativism.
A thorough discussion of this literature is provided in Carol Holzberg and Maureen
Giovannini’s 1981 review, mentioned earlier. Anthropologists provided a more complex
and nuanced view of preindustrial societies, demonstrating that various aspects of their
traditional social structures and life ways may complement industry. For example,
Clifford Geertz demonstrated that indigenous entrepreneurs can play a crucial role in
economic development (Social Change and Economic Modernization in Two Indonesian

10
The one great exception to this thesis – the Soviet Union – ended up supporting the convergence
hypothesis when socialism collapsed at the end of the 1980s and early 1990s.

18
Towns: A Case in Point, 1962); Max Gluckman showed that dual economies, in which
indigenous people straddle two economic worlds (the village and the urban center) can
co-exist effectively with industry, and are necessary to the fulfillment of human needs
Anthropological Problems Arising from the African Industrial Revolution, 1961); and
June Nash’s work explored the role of traditional cultural forms such as rituals in easing
the transition to industrial life (We Eat the Mines and the Mines Eat Us: Dependency and
Exploitation in Bolivian Tin Mines, 1979). Other contributions of anthropologists
expanded our knowledge of industrialization processes in several related areas, including
qualitative changes that take place in pre-existing institutions, the emergence of new
institutional forms, the role of ethnicity and race as factors in structuring social relations
within and beyond the industrial workplace, the role of women in industrialization
processes, and the relative costs and benefits of the shift to industrial production. The
knowledge base accumulated through anthropological studies in the developing world
also supported radical critiques of mainstream models of economic development models,
including dependency theory which holds that both industrial development (as seen in the
West) and underdevelopment (witnessed in the so called Third World) are interdependent
parts of a single global system of modern capitalist production.

Through fieldwork outside the US, anthropologists made significant contributions

to diffusion theory, a multidisciplinary approach to understanding the adoption of
innovations (i.e., products or technologies new within their context) within populations,
nations, and cultures (Everett Rogers, Diffusion of Innovations, 1962). Anthropologists
contributed to the expansion and increasing sophistication of diffusion theory, which is
one of the principle theoretical frameworks underpinning the modern marketing
discipline. Some of the most significant discoveries made by anthropologists have
focused on the aftermath of new product diffusion into geographic regions where specific
technology-based commodities previously were unknown. Often, unintended (and
negative) consequences have been the result. For example, Pertti Pelto (The Snowmobile
Revolution: Technology and Social Change in the Arctic, 1973) studied the introduction
of snowmobiles to reindeer herders in Lappland. Families of herders that were able to
afford to purchase and maintain a snowmobile also were able to increase their herds of
reindeer as a result, since more reindeer could be herded with a snowmobile versus skis
that had been used traditionally. At the same time, however, the snowmobile itself
frightened the reindeer and this new stressor tended to deplete the herds overall.
Consequently, a de facto class system of haves and have-nots emerged in a society that
traditionally had been more egalitarian. Such studies were the forerunners of the modern
emphasis on consumers and consumption processes.

In addition to the aforementioned literature, there are three other anthropologists

whose work deserves special mention. Each studied business organizations in quite
distinctive ways that do not fit into any of the categories described above, and/or later
applied theoretical constructs to business problems, and each was precocious or prescient
in his vision of future developments in global economic and social systems. The work of
these three scholars is relevant to the relationship of business and anthropology in the
current era.

19
 Thomas Rohlen wrote a classic ethnography focusing on a medium-size Japanese
bank (For Harmony and Strength, 1974), explaining the cultural logic of Japanese
organizational structures and practices just as these were becoming acutely interesting to
business scholars and practitioners in the West. Rohlen’s approach of entering the bank
as a trainee, and participating in the full training program with a cohort of new recruits
provides numerous insights into Japanese management methods that would not be
available otherwise. For example, he describes a training exercise called Roto, in which
recruits are required to leave the training academy and not return until they have
persuaded a stranger to allow them to perform some household chore free of charge, a
very difficult task in a nation where favors from strangers create onerous obligations.
Recruits who finally found someone willing to allow them to discharge this task were so
grateful that they did any job gladly, no matter how dreadful (e.g., cleaning an outhouse).
Managers used this exercise to instill in trainees the notion that the nature of a task should
not determine one’s attitude towards it; rather, one’s attitude should determine how a task
is perceived. Such normative approaches to employee control are becoming more
common in Western firms that have adopted the practice of consciously fashioning
‘corporate culture’ as a means to instill values and norms that generate their own self-
policing discipline.

Edward Hall, who is said to be the most frequently cited anthropologist among
business authors, developed a novel theory of culture as a network of biologically based
‘primary message systems’ that humans extend and enhance through social
communication. Hall’s interests ranged far beyond language and into the nonverbal and
contextual aspects of communication. Much of his work was aimed at explicating the
role of space and time as contextual dimensions of communication; through this work he
invented a number of constructs that have become standards in the world of international
business, including the concepts of monochronic and polychronic time (i.e., time
experienced as linear and segmented versus time experienced as cyclical and non-
segmented), and high-context and low-context cultures (i.e., cultures in which most of the
informational content of a message is embedded in contextual variables versus cultures in
which most of the information is explicit and encoded in language). These constructs
were presented in Beyond Culture and The Dance of Life. Hall and his partner Mildred
Reed Hall wrote a series of books applying Hall’s theoretical work on intercultural
communication to the field of international business, especially directed toward
businesspeople in the United States, France, Germany and Japan. The Halls’ interests are
in helping businesspeople to translate and interpret communication processes and events
across cultural boundaries, and to prevent cross-cultural misunderstandings. Hall’s books
have been translated into sixteen languages, his work often is cited in business textbooks,
and his ideas have been incorporated into the international business lexicon.

In the late 1970s, Alvin Wolfe developed the idea of a new level of socio-cultural
integration above the level of the nation-state (The Supranational Organization of
Production: An Evolutionary Perspective, 1977). In his 1960s study of the African
mineral extraction industry, Wolfe discovered a complex, global-level network of
wealthy individuals, families, corporations, and states operating together to ensure that
raw materials for the world’s industrial plants are indeed produced. Nationality was not

20
an issue; the supranational network operated regardless or in spite of the interests of
individual nation-states or other actors. Indeed, the ‘supranational integration of the
economic sphere’, as Wolfe put it, tended to supersede political, international ties and
cleavages. Wolfe postulated that the nation-state was not the highest or most complex
level of socio-cultural integration, as had been proposed by previous theorists (e.g.,
Marshall Sahlins and Elman Service, Evolution and Culture, 1960). Rather,
supranational networks seemed capable of transcending individual nation-states in
political and economic maneuvering. These observations still appear fresh and relevant
to theorizing on globalization processes.

The themes developed by these anthropologists, particularly ethnographic

exploration of corporate entities outside the US, and communication within cross-cultural
contexts, have continued to resonate in the millennial era that is described next. The next
era is distinguished, however, by the re-emergence of anthropological practice in the
business world, that is, the application of anthropological knowledge to business-related
problems by practitioners, rather than strictly academic interest in industry, which the
case from 1960 to 1980 (with a few exceptions, such as Edward Hall). The reasons for
this important change, and its implications, are examined below.

Part II. The Contemporary Landscape

Globalization: 1980 to Present. The last two decades of the 20th century
witnessed a transformation of capitalist economies, marked by increasing global flows of
goods and services, worldwide deregulation, and the diffusion of converging information
and telecommunications technologies (together, sometimes known as globalization 11 ).
These factors have acted in concert with other important socio-economic trends,
including rising per capita incomes in industrialized and newly industrializing countries
and shifts in the demographic composition of industrialized nations, to alter the
competitive landscape for American corporations. New markets were opening around the
world, and new competitors were rising in nearly every industry. American firms found
that they could not maintain the economic hegemony they had enjoyed during the brief
period following World War II and up to the 1960s and 70s. In what became known as
the ‘post-Fordist’ world of the late 20th century 12 , the (American) producer was no longer
king; indeed, no producer was. Instead, consumers were recognized as the crucial actors
under the rules of the ‘new economy’, in which services often generated more revenue
and employment than goods, and the knowledge content of a corporate asset often was
more valuable than its tangible matter.

11
To observers such as Jonathan Friedman (Globalization, the State, and Violence, 2003), these flows do
not represent a new stage in the evolution of capitalism, but rather reflect the most recent cycle of de-
centering in the point of capital accumulation, this time from West to East, and a resulting loss of Western
hegemony that leads to horizontal and vertical fragmentation, as the loss of hegemony weakens nations as a
source of collective identity, and people seek ‘rootedness’ elsewhere.
12
Fordism pertains to the structures and ideologies generated by mass production as an economic system,
where the producer (a la Henry Ford) determined nearly everything about the products that were made (and
how they were made) and consumers (as well as employees) had no choice but to buy what was put in front
of them (or to do the work that was dictated by the rigid moving assembly line where such products were
made).

21
 New and emerging markets in Asia, Eastern Europe, and certain parts of the
developing world became lucrative targets for corporations, as consumers in these
regions gained sufficient incomes to support purchases of services and goods offered by
multinational and transnational firms. Saturated consumer markets in the West
fragmented into specialized niches, requiring companies to learn much more about the
preferences of demographic groups that they previously had lumped together or simply
taken for granted. Gradually, it dawned on American firms that they no longer
understood (if, indeed, they ever did) their customers, whether these were in their own
country or abroad. To understand and reach these consumers both at home and abroad,
the firms themselves had to change their policies and practices, sometimes in
fundamental ways. Yet, the metamorphosis required to turn Western corporations away
from the 20th century’s producer-domination, with its self-focused and functionalist
perspective, and move them toward a more globally competitive, consumer-centric view
of the world is no small matter. Who better to join this sort of millennial quest for
renewal than an Other-focused discipline such as anthropology?

Economic and technological turbulence in business environments opened new

opportunities for relationships between anthropology and business in the post-Fordist era.
The anthropological incentive to respond has been influenced by three developments.
First, there has been a significant gap between the production of new PhDs in
anthropology and the rate of vacancies in academic employment openings since the late
1970s. In 1984, for the first time since the survey of new PhDs was conducted by the
American Anthropological Association, non-academic employment for new PhDs
exceeded academic employment. At first, only a small trickle of these graduates moved
into the private sector (it is estimated that there were about 100 full-time business
practitioners around 1990), but as word of their achievements grew (described below),
the trickle grew into a steady stream 13 . Second, academic institutions have faced
mounting pressure to seek external funding for research from federal agencies (to offset
both direct and indirect costs), and these agencies (e.g., the National Science Foundation)
have been directing a greater share of grant monies toward strategic, interdisciplinary
issues and problems (i.e., those that are of greatest concern to society, versus individual
disciplines). Such problems may involve private sector actors such as corporations (e.g.,
knowledge and distributed intelligence, micro-markets in developing nations, disaster
prevention and recovery). Working with corporations in such contexts no longer seems
beyond the pale of appropriate anthropological involvement. Third, in response to its
growing practitioner ranks, the American Anthropological Association (AAA) revised its
principles of professional responsibility during this era, removing language that
essentially forbade research that could not be publicly disseminated. The AAA also
founded the National Association for the Practice of Anthropology (NAPA) in 1984, and
several of this organization’s officers have been full-time business practitioners or
academic consultants. NAPA’s first monograph encouraged relationships between
business and anthropology (i.e., Marietta Baba, Business and Industrial Anthropology:

13
Unfortunately, the American Anthropological Association has not conducted its Survey of New PhDs in
over a decade, so the percentage of new PhDs entering business employment at the present timeis not
known.

22
An Overview, 1986) 14 . The stage was set for American anthropology’s second major
foray into the world of business practice.

We will review three interdisciplinary domains in which anthropologists have

explored new opportunities through business-related research and practice, including 1)
organizational behavior and management, 2) ethnographically-informed design of
products, services, and systems, and 3) consumer behavior and marketing 15 . Each of the
three domains is fairly well established, with some representation in academic
departments of various kinds 16 , a tradition in the scholarly literature, and an active
community of practice, including positions in major corporate research laboratories and
institutes (e.g., GM, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, Motorola, Xerox), business functions (e.g.,
marketing) and consulting firms (at one point, Sapient employed more than 20 PhD
anthropologists). Scholar-practitioners are not unusual, since corporations often grant
access to scholars in exchange for some service (i.e., strategic research). Each of the
three domains operates at both national/regional and at international/global levels. Some
scholars and practitioners specialize in the former, some in the latter, while others are
competent at both levels.

An exhaustive review of the literature in these domains is beyond the scope of this
article. Rather, the intention here is a general overview, with the scope of discussion
limited to illustrative empirical research and practice conducted primarily by American
anthropologists, both academic and non-academic. Also, additional factors and issues
related to the historical development of the domains after 1980 is considered.

Organizational Behavior and Management. Continuing the tradition established

by W. Lloyd Warner and his colleagues in the 1930s, this line of inquiry grows directly
out of the producer-orientation with its focus on the interior of the firm – describing and
explaining the behaviors of people and groups inside the corporation, and possibly trying
to effect modifications in these behaviors. Anthropological interest in organizations
continues to be inspired by a conception of formal organization as ‘society writ small’,
thus constituting a site for the production and reproduction of distinctive localized
systems of meaning and practice (i.e., culture). Warner’s encompassing vision of inquiry
at multiple levels of analysis (e.g., industry, enterprise, work group), as well as
interactions among these levels, also is sustained. The substantive focus of the research
has changed considerably, however. While Warner and company were interested in
treating the problem of labor-management strife with functionalist theory, the post-
Fordist anthropologists have other agendas.

Anthropologists studying businesses today are part of a larger universe that

examines organizational phenomenon in general (see for discussion Helen
14
This monograph actually was NAPA’s second publication, but the first was a membership directory.
15
These terms are taken largely from the literatures and traditions in which much of this work is published,
although some is published in/by traditional anthropological journals and presses. Each domain reflects an
interdisciplinary field. Many of the anthropologists are joining established groups of colleagues from other
disciplines, but some authors are ‘hybrids’, remaining both in anthropology and joining other fields as well.
16
Including anthropology departments, business schools, and interdisciplinary research centers and
institutes.

23
Schwartzmann, Ethnography in Organizations, 1994). Yet apart from the master concept
of culture (and that, of course, is in disarray), the private sector literature does not reflect
a coherent theoretical agenda, or even a discourse organized around competing schools of
thought. Rather, the literature may be clustered into three general areas that reflect
enduring anthropological interests, as well as historical developments in the larger frame
of post-Fordist capitalism: organizational cultures in technology-based firms; boundary-
crossing in a global context; and regional perspectives on work and corporations. These
three areas are interrelated, and distinctions between particular works assigned to each
may be somewhat arbitrary.

In the review below, further developments in the anthropology of work and

occupations, neo and post-Marxism, and/or industrialization outside the United States
that do not involve empirical research or practice inside a business organization (i.e., with
access to the business) are not considered (e.g., research on academic-based scientists,
engineers, or physicians; research on unions), unless such work has fairly clear
implications for corporations or industry as a whole.

Organizational Cultures in Technology-Based Firms. In the 1980s, the business

community was introduced to the concept of ‘corporate culture’ via the consulting
industry (e.g., Terrence Deal and Allen Kennedy’s Corporate Cultures: The Rites and
Rituals of Corporate Life, 1982), yet there was considerable oversimplification of the
construct as it diffused via this mechanism. Academic anthropologists were under
pressure to bring more enlightened views to the management literature, but many were
skeptical of the corporate agenda of ‘culture change’ (see special issue of the
Anthropology of Work Review edited by Patricia Sachs, 1989). Within this context, a
small number of anthropologists were able to gain access to corporations for basic
research purposes, via networks based at corporate research laboratories and research
universities. The first wave of anthropologists to examine organizational behavior at this
time were intent on demonstrating the subtlety and complexity of anthropological
conceptions of cultural phenomenon in organizations, and on introducing the ‘native’s
point of view’ as a valid and powerful source of empirical data. This latter goal was
meant to distinguish anthropological work from that of other academic disciplines that
also claimed authority in the area of ‘corporate culture’ (e.g., psychology), yet sometimes
represented culture as a monolithic phenomenon (e.g., see the first edition of Edgar
Schein’s Organizational Culture and Leadership, 1985). The anthropologists also were
influenced by previous literature on occupational and professional cultures. Their earliest
efforts conceptualized corporations as complex configurations of interacting technical
and managerial sub-cultures.

For example, Kathleen Gregory, in an oft-cited paper in the Administrative

Science Quarterly (1983), employed ethnoscience ethnography to uncover ‘native view
paradigms’, or ways that technical professionals inside Silicon Valley computer
technology firms understand their social worlds. Gregory explained the use of
ethnoscience methods to elicit ‘native’ taxonomies or classification schemes which in
turn signaled the existence of occupational boundaries within the firms. These
taxonomies could be used to a gain deeper understanding of occupational identities, and

24
experiences that were most important to individuals affiliated with particular identities.
Gregory was one of the first to identify ‘the project’ as a critical activity for many
computer professionals; this later proved to be a key insight for decoding the cultural
logic and social practices of hackers (see below).

Later in the 1980s, Frank Dubinskas (who at one point in his career wrote cases
for the Harvard Business School), studied a biotechnology start-up firm and
deconstructed the conflict between executives and PhD molecular biologists, showing
how differences in the temporal patterning of their activities created serious conflicts
around the goals of research, how to make choices among projects, whether research
direction should change, and which projects should be dropped. Dubinskas found that
managers and biologists possess fundamentally different images of the self that are
related to their notions of developmental time, giving rise to stereotypical images of the
other (e.g., mature versus immature), and explaining why the two subcultures frequently
conflicted in ways that thwarted the company’s performance.

It was also during the late 1980s that Elizabeth Briody and Marietta Baba
investigated General Motors’ difficulty repatriating managers from overseas duty
(Explaining Variability in Repatriation Experiences: The Discovery of Coupled and De-
coupled Systems, 1991). Drawing on cultural materialism, they described two antithetical
subcultures within the corporation, one pro-international and one anti-international, each
dominating different organizational units within GM, based upon historical and economic
factors. Depending on a repatriating manager’s destination upon return, his (all were
male) knowledge pertaining to overseas environments would be valued more or less
highly by one of these subcultures, respectively, leading to significant differences in post-
repatriation job assignments and job satisfaction. This discovery was enabled by
statistically testing the validity of several different ‘native hypotheses’ against a database
of information about expatriate assignments and repatriation outcomes, and modifying
these hypotheses systematically until one hybrid model was found that explained most of
the variance in the data set.

Around this same time, Julian Orr made significant contributions to our
understanding of culturally constituted meanings and socially organized work practices
among groups of technical workers who are not considered ‘professional’ or
‘managerial’. Orr was based at Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), and while
there he became known for his research on Xerox repair technicians (Julian Orr, Talking
About Machines: An Ethnography of a Modern Job, 1996). Once a service technician
himself, Orr was interested in why service technicians were able to repair technologically
advanced copiers in about 95% of all cases, usually without much or any resort to the
company’s expert help system, even though they had little if any knowledge of the
physics or engineering underlying the machines. After following pairs of technicians for
about three weeks, Orr discovered that they solved difficult machine repair problems by
telling each other stories of past machine failures, and finding in their stories diagnostic
and procedural clues about how to proceed with the present case. Significantly, these
stories were not only ones that the technicians themselves had experienced, but ones they
had learned from their colleagues through war story swap meets that took place whenever

25
technicians gathered informally (e.g., at training sessions). The company had no idea that
this knowledge resource even existed. Xerox modified its practices based on Orr’s
findings, by equipping all technicians with mobile radio phones so that they could
communicate with one other, and with roving ‘tiger teams’, more readily. Orr’s work
also was innovative in conceptualizing the technicians’ work practices as a triangular
relationship among the technician, the customer, and the machine, such that the
customers became a source of knowledge about machine misbehavior, and technicians
became a source of knowledge about customers. Technicians, Orr discovered, often
needed to repair a customer relationship, as well as a machine. This research
demonstrated the economic value of tacit knowledge possessed by employees who
previously had not been considered ‘knowledge workers’.

The entire corpus of research at Xerox PARC (to be discussed in greater depth
later in the article) was highly influential in placing anthropology at the center of a
movement within American corporations known as ‘knowledge management’. As
demonstrated in Orr’s studies, many different types of work groups develop tacit and/or
embodied systems of local knowledge that are embedded within their work practices, and
represent intangible assets that may hold great value for the corporation. Knowledge
management is a set of principles, practices, methods and tools that enable firms to
identify such assets and convert them to more explicit form so that they can be further
developed and leveraged for the firm’s benefit (e.g., the mobile radio phones are an
example of such a tool). At Xerox PARC, and later at a spin-off organization called the
Institute for Research on Learning (IRL), many of the core constructs associated with the
knowledge management movement first were conceptualized. An especially important
contribution emerged from the ethnographic research of anthropologist Jean Lave, who
was involved in the early development of IRL, an institution dedicated to understanding
the social context of learning 17 . Lave’s research on Liberian tailors revealed that learning
is situated in a community of practice -- an occupational network (such as Orr’s repair
technicians) that shares a set of work activities and a common identity. Lave found that
learning takes place within a community of practice through ‘legitimate peripheral
participation’, a process by which apprentices come to master increasingly more difficult
and complex tasks as they gradually adopt the identity of the group. Lave collaborated
with Etienne Wenger to adapt this concept for learning in various corporate work
settings, and to write a popular book on the subject (Situated Learning: Legitimate
Peripheral Participation, 1991). These developments coincided roughly with an
explosion of interest in the emerging ‘knowledge economy’, and (a bit later) with the
Japanese management scholar Ikujiro Nonaka’s research identifying tacit-explicit
knowledge conversion as a new source of innovation for corporations (The Knowledge

17
IRL was founded in the late 1980s with a seed grant from the Xerox Foundation. Its initial impetus was
the report A Nation at Risk, which portrayed the United States as deficient in educational achievement
compared to competitor nations. IRL was charged with the mission of ‘rethinking learning’; that is,
conducting research on learning that went beyond studies of cognition and other psychological factors and
considered the role of social context. IRL focused on two contexts of learning – schools and work places.
While some of the work conducted at IRL squarely addressed the design of learning and training efforts,
from early distance learning programs to the design of expert systems that support call centers, other
research projects examined corporate transformation initiatives using ethnographic methods (e.g., studies of
‘empowerment’; see Melissa Cefkin, Toward a Higher-Order Merger: A Middle manager’s Story, 1998).

26
Creating Company: How Japanese Companies Create the Dynamics of Innovation,
1995). Communities of practice (or ‘CoPs’ as they became known) were highlighted as
one of the key loci that embed tacit knowledge, and this concept entered the business
lexicon as the knowledge management movement diffused around the globe.

While the studies described above maintain continuity with the previous era in
their focus on occupational ‘subcultures’ or communities, the very notion of ‘culture’ and
even ‘subculture’ had become increasingly problematic by the 1990s. Anthropologists
seemed more interested in the blurring and crossing of boundaries than in descriptions of
what they might demarcate. Interestingly, American corporations also were working
hard on the project of taking down functional boundaries that had been built up over a
century of Fordist practice; walls dividing functional ‘silos’ inside corporations were
found to increase product development time (and thus product cost) and also were
responsible for defects in product quality (e.g., engineers didn’t cooperate with
manufacturing). The great transformation from the vertical to the horizontal corporation
was underway, with a huge investment in information technology to force information
and work to flow more efficiently across basic processes (e.g., product development),
instead of inefficiently up and down chains of command, as it had in the Fordist period.

Thus, rather than focusing on occupational subcultures within specific firms per
se, anthropological research inside corporations after the early 1990s tended to reflect
efforts by corporations, communities, or individuals to cross boundaries of various kinds,
whether functional, national, or otherwise (as described here and in the next section). As
it turned out, however, during the 1990s, the Fordist structures proved difficult to
dislodge. For example, in the mid 1990s, Marietta Baba investigated a major
corporation’s effort to streamline its product development process by introducing a single
‘strategic’ technology system that would replace hundreds of different systems then in
operation across dozens of different technical groups (The Cultural Ecology of the
Corporation, 1995). She mapped the cultural ecology of these groups, defining the
ecological niches formed by their location in a two-dimensional product development
environment. Baba was able to explain variance (e.g., resistance, adoption, reinvention)
in these work groups’ responses to the corporation’s strategy as ‘normal’ extensions of
adaptive patterns they had developed within the niches in which they were situated.
Following this work, Baba separately explained why work groups resist electronic
connections (e.g., CAD/CAM, electronic data interchange) with other groups when there
are pre-existing relationships of distrust (Dangerous Liaisons: Trust, Distrust and
Information Technology in American Work Organizations, 1999).

In the meantime, as the initial excitement surrounding the concept of ‘corporate

culture’ abated, American management departments gradually adjusted to its existence,
generally in one of three ways. For some, ‘culture’ became a variable or a set of
variables in contingency models of the corporation, a system of constructs to be defined
operationally and measured in surveys. For others who defined ‘culture’ in ways that
defied such modeling (e.g., the interpretivist school), ‘culture’ became a specialty niche
or boutique practice in a handful of select business schools. Important contributions were
made by management scholars working in both of these traditions; for example, Dan

27
Denison modeled ‘cultural factors’ that correlate with high performance in organizations;
Joanne Martin and colleagues parsed the management literature on corporate culture into
three streams (i.e., integration, differentiation, and fragmentation), corresponding roughly
with developments in organizational theory; Gideon Kunda’s ethnography of a high
technology firm revealed the human cost of normative control in a high commitment
culture (this is only a tiny sampling of many rich offerings, which helped to establish the
legitimacy of ‘corporate or organizational culture’ as a field of study). More likely,
however, corporate culture was simply dispensed with or ignored by faculty in
management departments as too complex or difficult to change. Publishing ‘cultural’
research conducted from a non-modeling perspective in top management journals was
problematic, unless accompanied by significant additional quantitative analysis.

Anthropology departments for the most part were not heavily influenced by the
developments described above, although faculty members in a few departments and some
practitioners expressed interest in organizational research. Such interests were
incorporated only very gradually as ‘normal science’ in anthropology via several
mechanisms: individual faculty interest, course development, and funded research;
student interest and the production of Masters’ theses and dissertations focused on
corporations; and the placement of doctoral graduates in corporations where they
maintained identities as anthropologists and began to produce literature on their own.
The academic departments that have become seats of graduate level teaching and/or
research in the anthropology of private sector organizations included the College of
William and Mary, Michigan State University, Northwestern University, Oregon State
University, the University of North Texas, and Wayne State University (where the first
undergraduate course on business anthropology was taught in 1984/85 by Marietta Baba).
A number of other universities have permitted doctoral students to conduct dissertation
research in corporations, or to focus on business-related phenomenon (e.g., Chicago,
Temple, Yale). As a result, the literature began to reflect more enduring and immediate
anthropological interests.

Boundary Crossing in a Global Context. In the 1990s, the literature tended to

focus more on cross-cultural phenomenon in corporate settings, including studies of
transplanted firms, firms based outside the US, and firms whose globally-distributed
employees work virtually. The Anthropology of Work Review dedicated a special issue to
these subjects in Winter/Spring, 1998 (edited by Tomoko Hamada). Over time, this
stream of research has followed the currents of social science literature generally, shifting
its attention to the construction of self, identity, and community in a world where
traditional frames of reference are dissolving, and new patterns emerge to startle and
intrigue. In each of the works described below, anthropologists discover individuals and
communities whose selves and lives are transformed through work in a multinational or
transnational business, suggesting that such organizations are becoming one of the most
powerful forces giving meaning and direction to human experience in post-modern
society.

Tomoko Hamada, who is known for her writing on Japanese companies in the
United States, describes a case of alleged (and ambiguous) sexual harassment within a

28
Japanese owned plant in the United States (Re-inventing Cultural Others in
Organizations, 1995). In this case study, an American female factory worker first aligns
with her Japanese bosses in preventing formation of a union at the plant, for which she is
rewarded with promotion to supervisory status. The woman is put-off, however, by
Japanese methods for training junior members of the management team which she finds
insulting, and she also is shunned by her former American peers who believe she has
turned on them. In the end, the woman files a sexual harassment lawsuit against the
Japanese plant manager, which is settled out of court, forcing the manager to return to
Japan in humiliation. Hamada tells the story from multiple points of view over time,
showing how different parties’ perspectives form and evolve as they interact with one
another, shifting individuals’ self-representations in the process. The zone of cultural
interaction is rife with paradox and inconsistency; new boundaries are constantly formed
and re-formed along with new political alliances. Cultural identities are in flux and are
created in situ; there are few static variables or invisible cultural assumptions that can be
counted upon to create conflict (although American individualism seems to be a powerful
theme in the case). People create multiple self-identities in the process of engagement
with intra and inter-subjective dialogues in this fresh post-modern tale of cross-cultural
encounter and betrayal in an American factory.

Douglas Caulkins sleuths the ‘unexpected’ entrepreneurs found in the

deindustrialized region of Wales and Northeast England, where government policies have
encouraged the development of indigenous, high tech start-up firms as a means of
internal job creation (The Unexpected Entrepreneurs: Small High-Technology Firms,
Technology Transfer, and Regional Development in Wales and Northeast England,
1992). Generally speaking, high tech entrepreneurs are not attracted to such ‘rust belt’
areas, but surprisingly a group of them have launched new firms in the deindustrialized
peripheries of the U.K. outside Southeast England. The entrepreneurs were ‘unexpected’
in a double sense – they neither intended to start their own firms, nor did the region
initially appear to possess the cultural or economic infrastructure to support them.
Caulkins discovered that many of the entrepreneurs were highly trained engineers who
only started their own firms after they encountered career obstacles at large corporations.
He identified four distinct types of career paths that resulted in different types of social
networks, each of which enabled the entrepreneurs in question to form a specific kind of
successful start-up. Caulkins examines the cultural ecology of these start-ups and their
prospects for growth on the basis of the entrepreneurs’ self-defined trajectories.

Carla Freeman (High Tech and High Heels in the Global Economy, 2000)
describes the pink collar female informatics workers of Barbados who have fashioned a
quasi-professional identity that distinguishes them from their blue collar sisters toiling in
nearby factories. A professional dress and demeanor complements the ‘cool’ look and
feel of their office environments, while reflecting and reinforcing the disciplined habitus
required by the informatics industry. Significantly, the production of their informatics
work cannot be disentangled from the women’s consumption practices; many of the
women engage in regular global shopping trips to purchase materials that will be
transformed into affordable articles of clothing to be purchased by their co-workers. The
informal economy of trade in clothes supplements the low wages earned in the formal

29
economy, while the low-priced fashions allow the women to stock their closets with an
array of stylish outfits. The informal economy thus supports the formal one, and it
appears that the latter could not be sustained without the former. Production and
consumption processes also mutually reinforce one another, while being enmeshed in
global flows of goods, services, capital, and people. Freeman’s engaging analysis is
edged with criticism, as she interrogates the relationship between the workers’ clothing
preferences and managerial intentions to discipline and control their female subordinates.

At the turn of the century, anthropologists also have been at the forefront of
inquiries on distributed work, a hallmark of the global economy. Anthropologist Bonnie
Nardi is known for her research on ‘information ecologies’, a concept that situates
mediated communication technologies within their contexts of use (Information
Ecologies: Using Technology With Heart, 1999). Nardi’s research has shown that
human face-to-face communication has advantages that cannot be replicated or
substituted by any of today’s communications media (supporting touch, shared activities,
attention management, and network development), but also has costs (disruption,
expense, effort) that may not always be sustainable over the long term. The social
linkages that are built and sustained by face-to-face communication are a necessary
prerequisite for effective distributed work. Therefore, a firm must understand the
ecological context of mediated communication so that effective choices can be made
regarding the types of technologies selected and the appropriate sequencing of face-to-
face and mediated communication events.

Marietta Baba, Julia Gluesing and their colleagues (The Contexts of Knowing:
Natural History of a Globally-Distributed Team, 2004) also study distributed work, and
provide an ethnographic account of an American-based global firm’s attempt to transfer a
marketing methodology to a French retailing company via a global virtual team. Internal
conflict breaks out within the team regarding the cultural appropriateness (phronesis) of
transferring certain aspects of the methodology, and this nearly brings about the team’s
destruction. Ironically, it was only when team members’ interests shifted from factional
conflict to more individualized self-interest that they were able to cooperate and
collaborate. The resulting move toward virtual community was enabled by the
corporation’s global incentive system and strategy, which threatened to undo the careers
of squabbling nationalists. This study challenged conventional management theory by
demonstrating the mutable character of key variables over time (e.g., interdependence),
showing that agents’ behavior causes variables to fluctuate, meaning that a variable
cannot be set at one point and assumed to remain stable, as is the case in many theoretical
models. The ethnographic account also revealed that the geographical distribution
patterns of people and resources on the ground are relevant to the processes of distributed
cognition, and to the ways in which leaders exploit historical, cultural, and linguistic
resources to further their own agendas.

The literature described above marches to the beat of many drummers. There are
multiple audiences, with different research problems, goals, and languages, including
cultural anthropology; science, technology and society studies; the anthropology of work;
organizational behavior; applied anthropology; and others. The result is a fragmented

30
literature that is difficult to access and somewhat awkward to summarize or synthesize.
Yet, understanding may be enhanced through the juxtaposition of diverse intellectual
currents, and one approach that may provide a pathway toward such articulation is the
recent (or renewed) tendency of anthropologists to study geographic regions in the US
that are characterized by distinctive industrial, corporate and/or work behavior, and then
to join forces or at least read and reflect upon each other’s work, and compare what they
have discovered and learned from each other. This stream of organizational behavior
literature is described next.

Regional Perspectives on Work and Corporations. Another Warner legacy was

the regional contextualization of industrial phenomena (e.g., the Yankee City studies).
Anthropologists have continued this tradition, but have modernized it by reflecting new
themes of global integration (e.g., via technology, or immigration) that find expression in
regional economic patterns. Of special interest are geographic areas that generate
distinctive economic forms, such as Silicon Valley with its high technology start-ups.
Some anthropologists have invested a decade or more in their efforts to describe and
explain such regions and the companies they create. Significantly, when individual
anthropologists or groups collaborate in studying the same region, or compare their
observations across regions, more significant discoveries are possible.

A prime example of collaboration in regional studies is the ongoing research

focused on Silicon Valley. Anthropologists began studying Silicon Valley in the early
1980s with Kathleen Gregory’s dissertation, entitled Signing Up: The Culture and
Careers of Silicon Valley Computer People 18 . This study was one of the first to depict in
detail the social structures, processes, practices, and systems of meaning underlying the
remarkable capacity of this unique region to generate large numbers of technology-based
start-up firms, despite their high risk of failure. In her pioneering research, Gregory
explained the importance of computer professionals’ commitment to new technology
‘projects’ rather than firms per se; it was this connection to a project that enabled people
to move around from firm to firm, an essential element of the dynamism of the region.
Gregory did not completely unpack the ‘project’; that was not her focus. Further insights
into the substantive nature of these projects had to wait until later, and they turned out to
be crucial.

Nearly twenty years after Gregory’s study, in a special issue of the Anthropology
of Work Review edited by J.A. English-Lueck (Doing Good: Work as Mission in Silicon
Valley and Beyond, 2001), several anthropologists took up the thesis that high technology
work, based in firms such as those found in Silicon Valley, may be framed in moral terms
that relate to the social benefits technology promises to deliver to its producers and
consumers. Based on long-term ethnographic research in the Silicon Valley region, and
on studies of specific firms such as Apple, a number of anthropologists have discovered
that the language and culture of high technology work is permeated with a sense of
‘doing good’, a social construction with roots that connect Silicon Valley to notions of

18
Eleanor Wynn, the first anthropology intern to study at Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC)
(discussed in greater detail below), helped Gregory to gain access to Silicon Valley firms for this landmark
study.

31
technical ‘progress’ grounded in the Industrial Revolution. Authors contributing to the
special issue illustrate various aspects of this construction. For example, Chuck Darrah’s
informants (Techno-Missionaries Doing Good at the Center) engage in emotion-laden
descriptions of Silicon Valley as a future-oriented, progressive geographical locus whose
power derives from the innovative potential that may be realized in cultural diversity. Or,
maybe not -- residents are just as likely to disagree with this premise, and argue with each
other over it. Darrah postulates that the zealotry bred by life in the Valley may be a
reaction to the invisibility of most people’s work (e.g., making microprocessors for
automobiles), the fragility of living on an earthquake fault at the edge of the Pacific
Ocean, and/or the banality of spending much of one’s day dealing with the logistical
hassles of moving people around a region that is overcrowded with other people,
highways, and automobiles.

In another piece appearing in the same issue, E. Gabriella Coleman writes about
the practices of hackers 19 affiliated with Linux (many of whom presumably live in
Silicon Valley, and whose products are used by Silicon Valley companies). Linux is a
firm whose productive output depends primarily upon the voluntary contributions of
thousands of software developers working together over the Internet to generate
technically excellent and economically competitive software that is used by major global
corporations such as IBM. Linux-based products now are competing with Microsoft on
the open market in a David versus Goliath-style drama that has thousands of computer
industry watchers on the edge of their seats. Linux grew out of the open source code
movement. Open source code makes the core computer programming of software
products freely available over the Internet, as guaranteed by an ingenious legal
instrument called the ‘copyleft’. No one can copyright code that has been copylefted, so
it remains free. Coleman compares the hackers’ practices of production and moral
notions of freedom to those of medieval guilds; both developed methods that are
technical and aesthetic in nature. The hackers are motivated to high levels of
performance because of their love of programming – for them it is a means of artistic
expression and a means of technological innovation. Due to the copyleft and the Internet
over which code is shared, there has been an explosion of free software projects, each of
which is like a mini-guild. The projects turn out to be the central organizing mechanism
through which the mini-guilds are embodied -- each has its own source code, technical
documentation, organizational structure, technical emphasis, computer language
preference, and style of development. Newcomers to a project must prove themselves
through an apprenticeship in which they demonstrate their commitment and skill through
collaborative learning. Coleman points out that with Linux, there is no commodification
of software, yet the products still circulate in the market. Further, the technology does
not set the moral or social aspects of work; these are shaped by the community of practice
(i.e., the hackers). She also argues that the hackers’ high performance proves that
intellectual property protection is not a requirement for the creation of cutting-edge
technical products. The hackers are not in a crusade against capitalism, but neither are

19
In this context, hacker does not mean the criminal who illegally gains access to someone else’s computer
for ill-gotten gain, but rather an individual who is an expert and insider in the occupational culture of
computer programming.

32
they reifying it. Rather, their work appears to represent a ‘qualified means’ (perhaps an
alternative) by which participation in the market can best be carried out.

The Silicon Valley work suggests that some organizations (e.g., Linux) have
found (or individuals within them have found) a means by which to enable or enhance a
sense of moral purpose or mission in the experience of work, and that these organizations
enjoy an increased level of effort, productivity, and/or innovation gains resulting from the
motivation that derives from such moral enhancement. The moral sources of economic
performance may be realizing an additional boost under late capitalism as a result of a
process through which work becomes sacralized, much as some consumption experiences
have experienced sacralization during the post-Fordist era (see discussion in next section
on consumer behavior). Sacralization does not mean that work is somehow religious or
spiritual, but rather that one’s work and/or work products come to represent something
that transcends ordinary experience, that they (by some process) have become more
powerful and extraordinary than that which is merely the banal self of everyday life. If
some individuals or groups regularly experience their work or work products in this way,
there could be a payoff from which some corporations or other organizations may derive
benefit.

On the darker side of regional studies, long-term investigations of older regions

depict work that has become, perhaps, increasingly profane. Based on ten years’ of
research in the region, Donald Stull and Michael Broadway describe the modern meat
and poultry industry as it has developed within the American central plains
(Slaughterhouse Blues: The Meat and Poultry Industry in North America, 2004). The
study takes an unflinching look at the process of meat production today, comparing it
with the slaughterhouse experience described by Upton Sinclair 70 years ago. Many
things remain unchanged, especially the rigidly organized, labor-intensive factories that
turn cattle and chickens into human food on ‘disassembly lines’. This is ugly, grueling,
dangerous work, where getting product out the door counts more than workers’ physical
safety. Language and cultural differences between largely Anglo managers and primarily
Asian and Mexican hourly workers mean that there are two different workforces in a
plant, with very different views about the way in which a plant’s ideals of safety,
productivity, quality, and loyalty should be put into practice. These differences
exacerbate the plants’ productivity and safety problems.

Building on the corpus of Stull’s work over much of the 1990s, Mark Grey
(Immigrants, Migration, and Worker Turnover at the Hog Pride Pork Packing Plant,
1999) takes a closer look at the experience of Mexican immigrants inside this same
industry and region. Despite its low wages and poor working conditions, the
meatpacking industry attracts significant numbers of immigrant workers. It also
experiences some of the highest turnover rates in American industry, sometimes
surpassing 120% per year. Turnover contributes to high accident rates and poor
productivity, but management is not fully motivated to invest in strategies that would
reduce turnover significantly, due to the steady flow of low wage migrants from Mexico.
Turnover is, in part, a reaction to poor working condition and labor relations in the plant.
The management does not allow individual workers to personally care for or improve the

33
condition of their cutting tools, thus contributing to physical strain, injury, and accidents.
These physical woes, in turn, contribute to turnover. Grey discovered, however, that
turnover also is a strategy used by migrants for their own purposes. They work until they
have saved a nest egg, then travel back to Mexico with these monies, where they reunite
with their families, rest up from the hard work in the plants, and then travel north again,
when they are sure to be rehired. This is a strategy that enables the immigrants to earn
and save far more money than they would in Mexico, while not being forced to remain
completely trapped in low wage, dead-end jobs. Anglos workers in the plant resent the
immigrants’ ability to escape managerial control and create a new kind of ‘seasonal
work’ for themselves.

While the Silicon Valley studies and that of Donald Stull are longitudinal
inquiries that represent basic research funded from various sources over many years, the
work of Mark Grey is more strategic in nature, focused on an underlying problem and
undertaken at the request of Hog Pride’s management 20 . As Grey himself explains, he
had an opportunity to interview and observe the managers during his sojourn at the plant,
and he discovered to his surprise that they were disinterested in making changes that
would enable maximum reductions in worker turnover (he still made recommendations
along these lines). The managers did not want to invest the funds required to reduce
turnover below 60% annually, since this would cut into profit margins; they would prefer
to reduce turnover moderately, and continue to rely on a steady stream of low wage
immigrants to ‘make their numbers’.

This paper and others like it suggest that anthropologists are, at last, ‘studying up’
(i.e., conducting research on individuals and groups whose social status and/or power in
the context of the research site may be above that of the anthropologist) 21 . However the
paper also raises issues regarding the costs that accrue to this privilege. Management, as
Grey suggests, is ubiquitous in problem-oriented research in corporations. They provide
access to the company, informants, documents and archives, artifacts, and may review
manuscripts for publication 22 . An academic anthropologist cannot even get approval
20
Strategic research may combine both ‘basic’ and ‘applied’ goals; it pushes the envelope of knowledge,
but also focuses on pressing problems or issues. Sometimes the invitation to begin a strategic study is
offered by the corporation, but at other times the anthropologist requests entry, with funding from federal
agencies and/or an academic institution. Strategic research has been supported by grants and contracts
from the firm, federal agencies (e.g., NSF, NASA), and sometimes consulting contracts. In addition, firms
hired anthropologists full-time to conduct such research in-house (e.g., GM, IBM, Motorola, Xerox
PARC). The training of students on such projects may be permitted; dissertations have been completed as
a result of these endeavors, and graduates often go on to work in the corporations. In many strategic
studies, anthropologists gain access to corporate field sites in exchange for their agreement to provide
recommendations addressing the problem under investigation; most often, these recommendations are not
published, but are considered proprietary. University-based anthropologists retain the right to publish
research results, although the company usually has the right to review and comment on the publication
draft, so that proprietary information is not released to the public.
21
Even though many other disciplines are too, and doing it even more rigorously and critically than
anthropologists at this point; e.g., policy studies, operations research, finance, critical management studies
(they ‘study down’, but are critical of management); the list goes on, we are johnnies-come-lately by far.
22
It is recognized that there are many levels of management in a corporation, and that in large corporations,
there may be substantial differences in power and authority between levels. Generally speaking, it is the
higher levels of management that have sufficient control over funds and/or access that are required to grant

34
from her institutional review board without management sign-off on a study, and without
this, there are no publications. Management also may provide needed funds to support
research, in the form of grants, contracts or consultancies. There are many risks inherent
such situations. Management may try to influence the project or its findings in subtle and
not-so-subtle ways. Or, they might cancel or re-direct a project in mid-stream if they
don’t like the way its going or the sponsor gets reassigned or fired. A key issue is that no
matter what problem the anthropologist is investigating, there is a good chance that
someone in management is going to be involved in the problem (i.e., one of the causal
factors), and may be right at the heart of it. This is due to the fact that anthropologists
typically do not take a management-centric view of the situation, as observers from other
disciplines might, and when such a view is abandoned, it turns out that serious problems
often involve management in some way (how could it not be so, when management is in
charge of the company?).

Obviously, it is a delicate matter to negotiate criticisms of management when

management has so much power in the context of the anthropologist’s work. Reactions
to criticisms from management are unpredictable, depending upon the overall context,
and on the relationship between the management that is sponsoring the research and the
management that is being criticized. It might be feasible to present the criticism in an
ethically responsible manner (e.g., without identifying individuals or subgroups, and only
identifying policies), and with felicitous results. Or, it might be that the anthropologist
gets backed into a corner, where it is obvious that a particular individual is culpable in a
particular case. Indeed, the management may ‘set up’ the anthropologist for such a
dilemma, without the anthropologist’s prior knowledge. Possibly, the management could
become hostile toward the anthropologist and reject both her and her findings in a
defensive backlash. More likely, the findings and recommendations will be ignored, as
the recommendations are found to be too costly and/or infeasible for political and cultural
reasons related to the self-interests of those in power. All of the factors mentioned above
make this work difficult, frustrating, and risky, and could help to explain why there is not
more of it after all these years. Some anthropologists have concluded that strategic
research on organizational behavior is impossible because of the contradictions just
described; others have decided that it is too important not to take the risk.

Anthropologists have not been silent on these matters, and indeed these issues
have been subjects of considerable angst in the literature for several years, as more
anthropologists have ventured into the world of modern organizations (see for example
special issue of the Anthropology of Work Review edited by Linda Hogle and Gary
Downey, Fall 1999). Tensions between anthropologists and powerful others in fact have
prompted some highly respected corporate-based anthropologists to leave the field
altogether (as discussed below). It is likely that the problems described above are one
reason why anthropological studies of organizational behavior have not flourished in the
way that studies of consumer behavior and design have in recent years. These latter
areas also require encounters with management, but they are less likely to run headlong

entry to anthropologists for purposes of research, whether basic or strategic. In this paragraph, references
to management pertain to those managers with sufficient authority and power to grant entry, and to whom
anthropologists ‘report’ for research purposes (e.g., submit reports).

35
into criticisms of management since their focus is more squarely on products, services,
and consumers.

Another reason for the difficulty anthropologists have had in studying

organizational behavior and management over the years may relate to the lack of
receptivity anthropology has experienced in management departments within business
schools, in contrast to a more positive response in marketing departments. The difference
may relate to the positivist nature of management as a field 23 , compared with marketing
which has made room for interpretive approaches that resonate with the more artistic and
creative side of that discipline (e.g., in advertising). Management, after all, is about
control, and anthropologists who have studied corporations never have agreed that
‘culture’ can be controlled by management. Indeed, we have asserted the opposite --
culturally constituted meanings and social practices are naturalistic phenomena that defy
the rationalist grasp of managers. Also, the anthropologists themselves may be difficult
to control (as described below in the discussion of Xerox PARC). Thus, the
anthropological approach to corporations is counter-cultural to management, and has not
been embraced by many management departments, nor is it embraced by many practicing
managers in the US (although there continue to be exceptions, and these may be growing
in number in some places).

Returning to the question of boundary crossing, there is one other especially

salient boundary that has been crossed in the literature on corporations -- that which
separates management and the worker. During much of the 20th century, anthropologists
were more or less partisans in the continuing struggle between these two classes of
employees that co-exist in business organizations. In Warner’s era, anthropologists often
were management-centric in their views, following Mayo’s influence; Marxists held
sway in the years between 1960 and 1980. The labor-management struggle has
continued, as evidenced in some of the literature discussed above (Hamada, Coleman,
Grey), but emphasis on it is muted, and anthropologists are no longer so polarized. The
American workforce’s participation in unions is at its lowest level in the past half-century
or more, and, almost by default, the focus of anthropologists who work inside businesses
is not labor relations. What’s more, theoretical developments in the social sciences have
encouraged the representation of social actors (workers and managers) as agents with
complex agendas, while methodological trends have encouraged research collaboration
with these same social actors; this in turn has meant that more points of view are taken
into account in the conduct of research. Thus, rather than focusing either on workers or
managers and ignoring or caricaturizing the other, anthropologists have tended to talk to
both groups and include their voices in published work. As a result, we see that
worker/agents may take advantage of situations to their own gain (Grey, Hamada), derive

23
A subfield called ‘critical management studies’ has developed in conjunction with the growth of critical
theory. Its themes are 1) that power may be abused in organizational contexts, leading to the mistreatment
of people, and the need for utopian thinking, and 2) that scholars should align their interests with those of
the mistreated (see John Jermier, Critical Perspectives on Organizational Control, 1998). This area of
research and theorizing is stronger in Europe than in the United States. Business anthropologists in the US
have not been heavily involved in this movement thus far.

36
pleasure from creative interactions with markets (Freeman, Coleman), and be capable of
overriding management to assert their own interests (Baba). We also discover that
management/agents can be pawns in their own (or others’) game (Briody/Baba, Hamada),
are constrained by forces beyond their control (Caulkins), and may be motivated by
social goals that transcend the individual quest for money and power (English-Lueck,
Darrah). In short, we have a more subtly textured view of the actors and relations among
them, which is an indication of theoretical and intellectual maturity in this subfield.

Ethnographically-Informed Design of Products, Services, and Systems.

Another stream of research and practice that flowed from W. Lloyd Warner’s original
invention is sometimes known in the vernacular as ‘design ethnography’, but may be
more accurately described as ethnographically-informed product, service, and system
design (including work systems). The emphasis of research described in this section rests
on the notion of a marriage between ethnography and design, a novel concept often
attributed to collaboration between anthropologist Lucy Suchman and Rick Robinson (the
latter founded E Lab, later acquired by Sapient). Design is a profession in its own right,
and it cannot be limited to the design of products, services and systems. Many other
things can be designed – work processes, organizations, cities, policies, anything that
humans can make or imagine. Designers are considered ‘creatives’ (i.e., there is an
artistic aspect to their work), and their marriage with intellectuals and researchers
(anthropologists) is an interdisciplinary challenge. The creation of ‘design ethnography’
thus represents the birth of a new interdisciplinary subfield that joins together
anthropology and/or other qualitatively-oriented social sciences with the design
profession (see Susan Squires and Bryan Byrne, eds., Creating Breakthrough Ideas: The
Collaboration of Anthropologists and Designers in the Product Development Industry,
2002).

While on the surface, design of products and services may seem far removed from
the Hawthorne Project, its roots can be traced back to the decades-earlier efforts of
Frederick Taylor and Elton Mayo to improve interactions between people and equipment
in the production process. These early streams of investigation on the ‘human factor’ in
production eventually gave rise to the subfield of ‘human factors’ research, a
multidisciplinary off-shoot of psychology that identifies aspects of human psychology
and its context that must be taken into account in the design and development of new
products. ‘Human factors’ is both a field of study, and an area of research and
development in corporations that produce advanced technology for the market.

In the 1970s, one company that was committed to pushing the envelope of
knowledge on humans factors (broadly defined) surrounding advanced computing was
Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center (PARC). PARC was interested especially in human-
computer interaction and the development of artificial intelligence to support this
interface; they also funded graduate student interns in this and other areas related to
computing. The first anthropology graduate student intern to work at PARC in the late
1970s, Eleanor Wynn, focused her dissertation research on office communications, which

37
aligned with Xerox’s interests in office automation and the ‘paperless office’ concept. 24 .
Wynn was followed by Lucy Suchman in 1979, an anthropology graduate student at UC
Berkeley, who initially was interested in office work practices, but later became intrigued
with the idea of machine intelligence in a computing context. Suchman did not come to
PARC to study ‘human factors’, but her work radically reconstituted the nature of the
design industry, nevertheless.

Suchman established her formidable reputation at PARC by videotaping pairs of

users attempting to make copies of documents using an expert help system, and then
comparing the users’ conversations and actions during this process with the machine’s
automated instructions (Plans and Situated Actions: The Problem of Human Machine
Communication, 1987). Suchman had been influenced by Garfinkle’s
ethnomethodology, which provided the methodological framework for this investigation.
Contrasting the two points of view side-by-side (i.e., those of the users and the machine),
Suchman portrayed communication break-downs between them, as humans moved
fluidly among several different levels of conversation (e.g., simple requests for action,
‘meta’ inquiries about the appropriateness of a procedure, and embedded requests for
clarification of procedures), while the machine was severely limited to producing
responses that its designer had programmed into it in anticipation of stereotypical
responses that users ‘should’ make. While these observations might not seem
revolutionary now, they were a lightening bolt at Xerox PARC, and led the corporation to
change the design of its copiers to make them simpler to use. This research also gave
Suchman a reputation for bold and fresh insight, and enabled her to expand the role of
anthropology at Xerox PARC.

Suchman attracted other anthropologists whose research further enhanced the

reputation of PARC, including Jeanette Blomberg and Julian Orr (some of Orr’s work
was discussed in the previous section). Building on Suchman’s research, Jeanette
Blomberg initiated a series of studies investigating the use of technology in
organizational context (The Variable Impact of Computer Technologies on the
Organization of Work Activities, 1988). Her research argued for the necessity of looking
beyond the ‘human-machine dyad’ in understanding how new technologies affect work
and workers. This broader definition of the human-machine problematic suggested the
need for a new technology design strategy that made visible the social, organizational and
interactional dynamics of the workplace (An Ethnographic Approach to Design, 2003).
The approach Blomberg developed with her colleagues Randy Trigg and Lucy Suchman
integrated techniques and perspectives from work-oriented or participatory design
originating in Scandinavia (Pelle Ehn, Work-Oriented Design of Computer Artifacts,
1988) with ethnographic studies of technologies-in-use. A central characteristic of their
approach involved cycling between ethnographically-informed workplace studies and the
development of design concepts and prototypes, with the active participation of both
workers and technology designers. Hugh Beyers and Karen Holtzblatt (Contextual
Design: A Customer-Centered Approach to Systems Design, 1998) commercialized
many of the work-oriented design ideas pioneered by the Work Practice and Technology

24
Wynn subsequently helped Gregory make contacts in the Silicon Valley computer industry for her
dissertation research.

38
group at Xerox PARC and the participatory design movement more generally through
their firm InContext Enterprises.

The work of this cohort of anthropologists at Xerox PARC, together with several
others who joined both PARC and the Institute for Research on Learning (e.g., Susan
Irwin Anderson, Melissa Cefkin, Francoise Brun-Cottan, Chuck and Candace Goodwin,
Bridgett Jordan, Patricia Sachs) became known around the world for its innovative
integration of anthropology and ethnography into the product and service development
stream of a major corporation. A breakthrough came in 1989, when the Doblin Group of
Chicago asked Xerox PARC to partner on a project for Steelcase, the office furniture
manufacturer (see William Reese, Behavioral Scientists Enter Design: Seven Critical
Histories, 2002). Steelcase wanted to understand how the workplace of the future would
evolve and what kinds of work environments and designs it should be thinking about over
the long term. Jay Doblin was aware of Suchman’s group at Xerox, and wanted to bring
ethnographic skills into the engagement. Xerox PARC agreed to co-fund the project,
which became known as the Workplace Project. The project was situated in an airport,
which was believed to have properties reflecting the workplace of the future (e.g., high
fluidity of people and information, workflow extending into multiple kinds of space via
electronic means). Suchman served as lead on this project for several years, and through
it she assembled a talented interdisciplinary group of social scientists (including several
anthropologists) and designers whose work would revolutionize the design industry. One
of the individuals involved was Rick Robinson, then at Doblin, who subsequently went
on to co-found E Lab in Chicago, an entrepreneurial firm explicitly dedicated to the
concept of equally balancing all product design projects with ethnographic research and
design talent The notion that all new product and service concepts should emerge from a
contextually-rich understanding of the client’s natural world, developed through
ethnographic field research at client sites, captured on videotope, and analyzed using
anthropological theory and methodology, was first conceptualized by Suchman’s group
in the Workplace Project, but it was Rick Robinson who took this concept to the market
and made it profitable.

The research in question often is undertaken by interdisciplinary teams involving

anthropologists and representatives of other disciplines (e.g., psychologists, designers,
engineers, even clients may be involved). Ideally, this research seeks to acquire deeply
nuanced, visually-based, contextualized knowledge of the consumer’s or worker’s world,
and to secure an understanding of underlying factors that influence the consumer’s
behaviors (which assumes some knowledge of social and cultural contexts in which the
behavior is situated). The goal is to know both what the consumer is doing and why she
is doing it, and from this base of knowledge to create new ideas for product and service
design concepts and improvements (see Christina Wasson, Collaborative Work:
Integrating the Roles of Ethnographers and Designers, 2002). This approach, or a paler
facsimile of it, has been copied by scores of firms all over the world, not all of which take
seriously the need to analyze data using anthropological theory and methodology,
however. E Lab was purchased by Sapient in 1999, but the idea of ‘design ethnography’
now belongs to the world.

39
 Ironically, the researchers at Xerox PARC did not conceptualize themselves as
‘applied anthropologists’, for the most part, even though they arguably had a greater
impact on business than any other group of anthropologists since W. Lloyd Warner and
his generation. The Xerox PARC group’s view was that they were part of the community
of scholars engaged in the anthropology of science, technology and society studies, a
field that was on the rise in anthropology during the 1980s and 1990s, and is enjoying an
academic renaissance at the present time. In those days, Xerox PARC was a relatively
independent organization that permitted its scientists a great deal of intellectual
autonomy. And indeed, perhaps it was that very autonomy which contributed so much to
the wealth of creativity and high value-added contributions this group made during its
reign over the span of more than a decade. With increasing global competition, however,
PARC and many other industrial labs came under increasing pressure to focus scientists’
efforts more sharply on the company’s critical priorities. Suchman’s group was no
exception. Although details remain to be written, reportedly tensions arose between
Xerox PARC’s management and Suchman’s research group regarding its future direction
and plans. When the issues could not be resolved to everyone’s mutual satisfaction, the
group elected to disband itself, and the individual members went their separate ways,
unleashing a diaspora of ‘creative destruction’ – the diaspora both dismantled the greatest
business anthropology resource known since the Human Relations School, while
simultaneously releasing the creative talent of many anthropologists (and their ideas) to
engage in other pursuits.

Today, the notion of integrating ethnography (and, it is hoped, anthropologically-

informed analysis) into the design and development of new products, services, and
workplaces or practices, has become accepted practice in high technology companies in
the United States. Susan Squires, for example, describes work that represents the present
form of ‘design ethnography’ in new product development (see Doing the Work:
Customer Research in the Product Development and Design Industry, 2002). Squires
visits a family kitchen at 6:30 am with her video camera partner to observe and interview
a former focus group participant in her natural setting, with her two sons. Many
discoveries are made: the boys do not eat the ‘wholesome breakfast’ that Mom prepares;
Mom eats it herself, apparently unaware of what she is doing; the boys actually eat other,
not-so-wholesome food (purchased by Dad), or nothing at all. In the midst of it all,
Mom-in-law calls-up to check on what Mom is cooking. Later, at one of the boys’
schools, Squires finds that the boy who ate nothing is consuming his lunch at 10:30 am.
Squires provides a contextual analysis of this plus other field data, relating her
discoveries to structural strains in American society that pit working women’s realities
against older values regarding protection of family members. The outcome of the
research is a new product, Go-Gurt, a yogurt based snack that tastes good, is nutritious,
and can be consumed on the go.

Direct observation of natural behavior in the field enables anthropologists such as

Squires to gain access to a level of consumer behavior that is not reflected in focus group
dialogue, where participants often share idealized representations of their activities, and
may not be able to report on behavior that is out of conscious awareness. Video taping
routines in the home or other natural settings for later analysis permits highly detailed

40
analysis of behavior and comparison across numerous field sites. Especially valuable is
the comparison of survey and focus group data with analysis of ethnographic material;
theoretically-grounded knowledge of the broader socio-cultural context and its emerging
trends is necessary to explain discrepancies between these sources and relate them to
client needs. Ethnographic research places the consumer in a wider context that explains
why people do what they do, not only what, and also provides a deeper understanding of
the value of certain products and services in people’s lives.

In a very different application, Patricia Sachs’ work at Nynex illustrates the way
in which an anthropological analysis of ethnographic data can inform the re-design of
work systems (see Transforming Work: Collaboration, Learning and Design, 1995).
Customer repair work at Nynex became disjointed and inefficient when a new ‘trouble
ticketing system’ was introduced that repair broke work down into small pieces to be
distributed to disassociated individual workers. If a worker did not complete a repair job
by the end of his shift, the job was re-cycled to another worker, without an opportunity
for the two workers to talk to one another. An activity analysis conducted by Sachs
showed that the whole activity surrounding repair work, especially making sense of a
problem through conversations among multiple workers, is crucial in solving a customer
problem efficiently. The new information system disrupted the natural activity pattern
and made the problem resolution process much less effective.

The value of incorporating ethnography into product development and work

practices research has been widely recognized in the design industry, so much so that
new firms have arisen that specialize in design research and many of them explicitly
include ethnography. To what extent these ‘ethnographers’ are anthropologists is a point
of contention. Sometimes it appears that being an ‘ethnographer’ means a willingness
and ability to go to a customer’s location and observe, using a video camera. Contextual
analysis of findings is strictly optional, and not well understood or necessarily valued by
the design firm or its clients.

Ethnography for new products, services and systems or practices is generally

focused on the individual or group level of analysis; i.e., the user and her interaction with
a product or service, or the work group, user group, or customer group in context. This
focus may be distinguished from the research stream in the previous category (i.e.,
organizational behavior) which has been oriented toward an entire occupational category,
or the enterprise or industry level of analysis (e.g., computer professionals, a
biotechnology firm, the meatpacking industry). There are both theoretical and
methodological affinities between these two streams (e.g., an occupation engages in a
certain form of work practice), but there also are points of distinction. One point of
distinction is an emphasis on ethnographic methodology in design work; for example, a
hallmark of Suchman’s group was close analysis of videotapes and transcripts (e.g.,
frame-by-frame analysis of video). This emphasis could have (inadvertently) made
design research vulnerable to representation by some as a methodology, per se, which in
turn could have had the unfortunate effect of turning it into a methodology in some
minds; i.e., ‘design ethnography’ that can be done by anyone who has a video camera.
This did not happen to research at the organizational level of analysis, which draws upon

41
a wide range of methodological traditions from many different disciplines, and also has
been much slower to diffuse.

Consumer Behavior and Marketing. In the Fordist era, firms were dominated by
a producer’s view of the world. Consumers and the marketplace were viewed as territory
exterior to the business, a place that products and services were sent outward to. Often,
firms made products first and then looked for the consumers afterwards, dictating what
consumers would have to accept. Now, because of ever-intensifying competitive
pressures, companies have been forced not only to listen to what consumers want, but
also have come to view consumers as potential sources of innovation that they must draw
knowledge inward from. This new perspective on the value of consumers, and the need
for creative exchanges with them, has transformed the way consumer behavior is
conceptualized and acted upon as firms create new products and services and take them
to market.

Marketing also has changed. In the past, this field was dedicated to the
description of consumers’ decisions to purchase products – who buys what, and what
factors influence the purchasing decision. Statistical analysis of survey data related to
consumer demographics was the predominant methodology. The consumer was a
number on a spreadsheet. Firms seldom looked behind the numbers to understand who
the customer really was, or why consumers made their purchasing decisions. But the
shift to a consumer-orientation has encouraged new approaches that go beyond mere
description of purchasing outcomes. Now, firms are interested in gaining a holistic
understanding of consumers’ lives in context, and finding out what this may teach them
about new opportunities to create or improve products, or how to make new sales. There
also has emerged a realization that the purchasing decision is but a single point in a much
more complex and expansive cycle of consumption that includes many other aspects
(e.g., production, acquisition, actual consumption or use, disposal), all of which must be
understood if products are to be improved for consumers’ well being (and the firms’ as
well). As a result, there is a growing receptivity to inductive, qualitative approaches to
consumer behavior that permit exploration of new research questions and theory building.
This means that anthropology and ethnography are in vogue. Top business schools are
teaching future business leaders the value of participant observation, close reading, and
interpretive summary, while the faculty are following modern consumers into cyberspace,
adapting their methods as they go (e.g., ‘netnography’, ‘cyber-interviewing’; John
Sherry, Jr. and Robert Kozinets, Kellogg on Marketing, 2001).

One of the first movers in this new marketplace for consumer knowledge was the
entrepreneur-anthropologist Steve Barnett, who began in the late 1970s and early 1980s
to develop innovative uses for an anthropologist’s window on consumer behavior. At a
series of entrepreneurial firms where he directed teams of anthropologists (e.g., the
Cultural Analysis Group at Planmetrics, Research and Forecasts [a division of Ruder,
Finn and Rotman], Holen North America), Barnett invented what were initially
unorthodox ways of observing consumers and translating their behavior patterns for
applications in marketing and advertising campaigns for major clients such as Campbell
Soup, Procter & Gamble, Royal Dutch Shell, and Union Carbide. For example, in the

42
early days Barnett invented the ‘unfocus’ group, in which a cross-section of a firm’s
market is placed in a video observation room with a collection of objects and then given a
(usually bogus) task of some sort; e.g., write a booklet for middle school students
describing how electricity is generated, or build a ‘safe’ nuclear reactor using kitchen
gadgets. Analysis of the videotape rendered ideas to be turned into advertising images;
e.g., a campaign to raise electricity rates drew on consumers’ lack of knowledge on the
subject, or a campaign to gain approval for a new nuclear energy plant was based on
consumers’ desire to ‘lock’ any radiation inside. Some academic anthropologists were
quite uneasy with this kind of activity, believing that events of the type described above
did not meet the proper standards of informed consent. However, Barnett was not doing
‘research’ in the way this term is generally defined, so it is not clear that such standards
would be applicable. Barnett developed the technique of placing video cameras in
consumers’ homes and in shopping locations, and interpreting thousands of hours of
videotape with frames drawn from anthropological theory (e.g., symbolic action and
ritual). Such approaches are now standard in the industry. Drawing on the ‘paper trail’
Barnett skillfully left behind as proof of his own marketing know-how, John Sherry
describes numerous ethnographic projects undertaken by Barnett for various clients in the
1980s and 1990s (Contemporary Marketing and Consumer Behavior, 1995). In the early
1990s, Barnett moved to Nissan Motor Company, where he became Director of Product
Strategy, helping Nissan to reconceptualize the automobile as a cultural artifact.
Barnett’s creative talent helped to transform anthropology from an academic discipline
engaged with the theoretical significance of consumption to one of the most sought after
professions at the cutting-edge of marketing and advertising. He blazed a trail that many
other anthropologists were soon to follow.

That consumption is a thoroughly cultural phenomenon has been recognized by

anthropological theorists for some time. American and European theorists have
underscored the centrality of consumption in the production and reproduction of cultural
patterns of meaning and practice (e.g., Marshall Sahlins, Culture and Practical Reason,
1976; Mary Douglas and Baron Isherwood, The World of Goods: Towards an
Anthropology of Consumption, 1978; Pierre Bourdieu, La Distinction: Critique Sociale
du Jugement, 1979). The British anthropologist Daniel Miller argues that this ‘turn’
represented a metamorphosis of anthropology, from a less mature state in which mass
consumption goods were viewed as threatening (i.e., signifying both the loss of culture
and a threat to the survival of anthropology), to a more enlightened outlook that frankly
acknowledges consumption as the local idiom through which cultural forms express their
creativity and diversity (Daniel Miller, Acknowledging Consumption, 1995). This rather
amazing about-face has permitted a confluence of interests between anthropology and the
field of marketing, which in turn has shed new light on territory stretching far beyond the
mere consumption of goods in context. Material goods and services in all phases of their
lifecycle (design, acquisition, maintenance, disposal) reflect cultural categories and
principles, and their usage reflects cultural purposes.

Anthropologists have contributed much to an emerging interdisciplinary theory of

consumer culture, which may be defined as a family of theoretical perspectives that
define the relationships among consumer behavior, cultural meaning, and the market

43
(Eric Arnould and Craig Thompson, Consumer Culture Theory (CCT): Twenty Years of
Research, 2004). This body of literature provides evidence of the role that material
goods and services play in the definition of the self and the creation of a coherent sense
of identity, even if one that is fragmented. Consumption is especially integral to cultural
patterns in the advanced capitalist societies of the West, where individualism is prevalent
and so much about the individual is ambiguous at birth. Consumption also is a generative
source of new cultural patterns that can reconfigure blueprints for action and
interpretation. Consumers are not passive adopters of products, but active innovators
who also resist, mutilate, and reconfigure what they find in the market to suit their
emerging interests. As active co-producers, consumers have powerful impacts upon
products, services, and corporations. Anthropologists also have been intellectual leaders
in explaining the ways in which institutional and social structures influence consumption
(e.g., ethnicity, gender, class, age; see Janeen Costa, The Social Organization of
Consumer Behavior, 1995). Their research has illuminated structures that channel
consumer thought and action, and the influence such structures have on consumer
experience (e.g., John Sherry, Jr. ed., ServiceScapes: The Concept of Place in
Contemporary Markets, 1998). Indeed, there is sufficient literature now to underpin the
production of a fulsome textbook that skillfully fuses anthropology and marketing into a
seamless whole (Consumers, Eric Arnould, Linda Price, and Georgbe Zinkhan, 2002).
Another useful resource for classrooms is Ann Jordan’s Business Anthropology (2003).

The confluence of anthropological and marketing interests was furthered

especially by the work of anthropologist Grant McCracken, who developed a theory to
explain the ‘manufacture and movement’ of meaning in the world of goods, including
mechanisms by which meanings are transferred from cultural contexts to consumers in a
two stage process. McCracken postulated that meanings initially reside in the culturally
constituted world, from which they are first moved to consumer goods by way of a pair
of mechanisms – the advertising system and the fashion system. In the advertising
system, meanings are consciously attached to goods to differentiate them and enhance
their attractiveness to consumers. The fashion system not only produces waves of new
designs, but also cohorts of opinion leaders (e.g., experts, journalists) to comment on
these designs and their meanings, so that consumers will have a respected source to
legitimize the meanings. Once meaning is attached to a good through these mechanisms,
the meaning is then transferred to consumers by several other mechanisms in the second
stage of the process. McCracken describes the mechanisms at this stage in terms of
symbolic action or ritual, including a possession ritual (e.g., announcing one’s inclusion
or exclusion in a social group through a purchase), an exchange ritual (e.g., insinuating
symbolic properties on to another person through a gift), a grooming ritual (e.g., coaxing
value out of a good through utilization, such as polishing one’s car), and a divestment
ritual (e.g., erasing the aura of a former owner). This theoretical framework has been
highly productive in explaining empirical phenomena and generating hypotheses for
further research.

The emerging theory of consumer culture also was advanced by an important

contribution from Russell Belk, Melanie Wallendorf, and John Sherry, Jr. (The Sacred
and the Profane in Consumer Behavior: Theodicy on the Odyssey, 1989). In this

44
seminal piece, anthropologist John Sherry and his sociologist and psychologist colleagues
report on a summer spent touring sites of consumption across the United States in an RV
(i.e., the Consumer Behavior Odyssey). One of their significant observations was a
purported shift in the boundary demarcating the sacred and the profane in American life,
with certain consumer experiences being edged into what they defined and described
empirically as ‘sacred’ space. Their paper provides theoretical and empirical evidence of
dual processes – a secularization of religion and a sacralization of the secular. As sacred
institutions become less potent as a social force, consumers long to experience what they
can only imagine. Consumption becomes an effort to obtain closure between reality and
some imagined ideal state. Thus, in various cases, what appear on the surface to be
ordinary consumption events turn out to be, for their participants, extraordinary and even
transcendent moments that promise powerful new purposes and directions in life, at least
for that instant. In McCracken’s model, this paper contributes both to an understanding
of the culturally constituted world in which consumer meanings are constructed, and also
helps us understand how those meanings may be moved to products by savvy marketers
who can endow products with a ‘sacred’ aura through creative advertising campaigns.

Another significant contribution of anthropology has been to critique and expand

constructs underlying consumer behavior and marketing theory, based on empirical
research in non-Western societies. For example, Eric Arnould was among the first
anthropologists to interpret his extensive, long-term ethnographic studies in West Africa
for marketing audiences. In an early paper (Toward a Broadened Theory of Preference
Formation and the Diffusion of Innovations: Cases from Zinder Province, Niger
Republic, 1989), he problematized the notion of ‘preference formation’ (i.e., how a
consumer develops likes and dislikes, an idea that is central to diffusion theory) by
comparing the standard Western view of this construct with both a local construction that
is compatible with pre-market socio-centric values, and an Islamic ethno-nationalist view,
in which individuals achieve status through innovations based on ‘Meccan’ goods. Since
then, Arnould has published an extended series of papers that draw upon ethnographic
sources to shed new light on marketing concepts ranging from cross-border trade to
relationship management (e.g., West African Marketing Channels, 1995), enabling an
empirically-based globalization of the marketing literature.

The British anthropologist Daniel Miller is an especially prolific scholar, with

multiple volumes on various aspects of consumption, spanning the late 1980s to the
present. Beginning with his important Material Culture and Mass Consumption (1987),
Miller has shown how commodities, as other material forms, are capable of acting as
mythic structures, as classificatory systems that establish homologies among different
models of sociality, and as a means of objectifying moral values. For example, in The
Theory of Shopping (1999), Miller connects shopping to sacrificial ritual. He notes that
sacrifice has two central features – it places the sanctifier in a relationship with a
transcendent entity and thereby sanctifies the former, and it marks the transition from
production to consumption (e.g., first fruits sacrifice). In shopping, which usually is
carried out by women, the shopper is linked through bonds of love and devotion to a
family, either an existing family, or one that she hopes to have one day. It is the
underlying relationship that guides the woman’s purchases, which are thoughtful and

45
thrifty. And as in sacrifice, purchase of the commodity transforms it from an object of
production to an object of consumption. While consumer goods may be mechanisms of
alienation, discrimination, or control, this case suggests that a mature anthropology does
not make such judgments a priori.

Anthropologists also have produced literature exploring more explicitly the

mechanisms by which advertising firms move cultural meanings from their context into
the realm of goods and services. In an a volume based on observations by
anthropologists based in advertising firms (Timothy Malefyt and Brian Moeran, eds.,
Advertising Cultures, 2003), Steve Kemper enhances our understanding of the
relationship between the global and the local by analyzing the presentation of goods by
advertising firms to traditional populations in the developing world (How Advertising
Makes Its Object). He uses the case example of pressed power and scent in Sri Lanka,
where the widespread diffusion of television has opened opportunities for marketers to
offer modern products to villagers for the first time. As Kemper explains, the economic
powers in the village (senior males) could interpret certain products (cosmetics for young
women) negatively, and refuse to provide monies for purchase, unless their
advertisements are culturally sensitive. The effective advertisement used neither the
‘global’ image of a sophisticated urban woman, nor the potentially condescending ‘local’
image of a traditional village girl, but rather created something that captured both the
‘local idiom’ while managing to be ‘generic’ at the same time – the ‘sidevi look’, which
combined images that are modern enough to be attractive to a young woman, but still
innocent enough to avoid offending her father. Kemper explains that most advertising
firms in the developing world end up creating such images that blend local and generic
themes, so that the end result is neither the global homogenization that is feared nor the
local uniqueness that existed in the past. This explanation provides an organizational
mechanism to account for the ‘glocalization’ phenomenon that anthropologists have
reported in other contexts.

Anthropologist Barbara Olson (The Revolution in Marketing Apparel: A

Narrative Ethnography, 2002) provides an insider’s story of the role an advertising
agency can play in detecting cultural shifts taking place in the market, and translating
those shifts into changes in marketing technology that also moves products to the
consumer and facilitate further cultural change. Olson has a unique vantage point as an
account executive in an ad agency, one of whose clients was the brassiere manufacturer,
Warner. When Warner first came to Olson’s agency in the 1960’s, its image was that of
a prudish, old-fashioned maker of ‘firm’ products for older women. Because these were
the days of women’s liberation and bra burning, Warner was worried that their market
was going to disappear. At her suggestion, Olson’s agency began using anthropological
techniques to gain a better understanding of the customer at the point of sale – inside the
‘upstairs’ department stores (meaning, stores for upper middle class women). What they
learned from fieldwork was that these stores had experienced staffing cut-backs, sales
women were harried and fatigued, and had little time to provide individual attention
required to show customers brassieres. In those days, bras were kept in drawers, out of
sight, and customers had to take them into dressing rooms privately to try them on.
Olson’s agency suggested that Warner put the bras on hangers and let the customers

46
handle them without sales help – a somewhat ‘radical’ self-service concept that was
already in place at ‘downstairs’ stores serving working class women. But the idea was
nixed out of hand by Warner’s male hierarchy; they believed their upscale customers
would never try on a bra that had already been tried on by another woman. Certain they
had the right idea based on fieldwork, however, Olson’s agency formed an alliance with a
female department store buyer and persuaded Warner to try the idea in test markets. It
was a sensation, and took off beyond all expectations, changing forever the way bras
were marketed across the industry. After the Warner’s campaign, it was commonplace
for ‘upstairs’ stores to show lingerie in public. Consumers wanted convenience more
than they wanted privacy. Note the role played by the agency in changing the minds of
Warner executives. In the past, it was not unusual for (male) corporate executives to
make decisions for (female) consumers about whom they knew little or nothing (other
than what their wives might say). Olson’s agency (using anthropology, and a woman
anthropologist too) stopped Warner from making this mistake. This example reveals the
way in which anthropological approaches are changing business practice, and how these
practices in turn influence cultural patterns.

The literature in consumer behavior and marketing produced by anthropologists

has been well received by marketing departments and corporations, with the result that
anthropologists now hold positions in the marketing departments of several major
business schools (e.g., University of Pennsylvania, Northwestern University, University
of Nebraska, University of Utah 25 ). It would appear that anthropology now is a
permanent addition to the disciplines that comprise the academic marketing field. Some
of the ethical and political difficulties that confront anthropologists studying
organizational behavior are avoided by those focusing on consumer behavior, as access to
corporations may not be required (although this is less true if the anthropologist is a full-
time practitioner). This is a distinct advantage that recommends this type of work. There
are drawbacks, however. One relates to the uneasiness that some anthropologists sense in
the use that may be made of their work in ethically questionable sales (e.g., products that
may cause harm). Yet, such risk is inherent in the production of all knowledge and its
utilization, and this is no different. A more troublesome issue concerns the pre-fabricated
consumption ‘experiences’ that are becoming almost a total institution in America. Not
only do these threaten a ‘numbing down’ that may mask social control; they also may
encode sacralization messages that, in fact, are hollow. In truth, the idealized images that
consumption seeks to quench can rarely be satisfied by the act of consumption alone.
The desire to consume is insatiable. While this may be a place we have been before,
anthropology has not been so entangled in the mechanisms by which consumption is
produced, and for some anthropologists, it is not a comfortable place to be.

Convergence of the Domains

During much of the Cold War era, corporations and consumption were neglected
subjects in anthropology, even though it was obvious to all that these forces powerfully
shaped the lives of anthropologists and the peoples we studied. W. Lloyd Warner’s

25
In 2005-06, this list will change as John Sherry, Jr. moves to become Chair of Marketing at Purdue and
Eric Arnould moves to the Marketing Department at the University of Arizona.

47
discovery of the corporation as one of two distinctive American institutions was forgotten
as anthropologists interested in modern societies aligned against capitalism, and many
deemed research inside businesses ‘unethical’. Consumption was at best esoteric exotica,
for other reasons discussed previously. This rather strange state of affairs in which
anthropologists seemed to disregard some of the most potent cultural forces of our age
was bound to change sooner or later.

Over the course of the past twenty years, the relationship between business and
anthropology has come of age. That is to say, a productive relationship has formed,
yielding advances in the state of knowledge and practice. This has happened because of
changes in the world, and changes in anthropology. The opening of the post-Fordist era
meant destruction of an older economic order and the birth of a new one, with the
inclusion of Asia and other parts of the developing world as major economic and
technological platforms of global production and consumption. Ever curious, and going
where the action is, anthropologists have been true to the disciplinary mission -- seeking
the edge of the frontier and exploring the unknown. Our epistemological strengths enable
us to go where few have gone before, and that is exactly where we are in the world of
corporations, design, and consumers. The discipline has adjusted to admit observations
from these field sites for a variety of reasons. There is, perhaps, less theoretical and
philosophical polarization now, as the end of the Cold War and the rise of critical theory
gradually have expanded the ‘zone of contact’ between those who were aligned with
Marxian ideology and those committed to other theoretical and philosophical frames.
Management journals now publish critical theorists who ‘study down’ in companies,
while anthropology journals publish cultural materialists who ‘study up’ in the same
types of firms. Boundaries are permeable and lines between categories are blurred, inside
anthropology as everywhere else. Another influence on the relationship between
business and anthropology has been the diaspora of the so-called ‘institutional
anthropologies’. Post-modernism and critical theory in other disciplines have had the
interesting effect of making anthropology very attractive elsewhere (even as it sometimes
appeared that anthropology itself was about to self-destruct). A centrifugal pull outward
toward other fields has been in motion for the past two decades, leading many
anthropologists to become hybrids, complete with graduate degrees in other fields (e.g.,
medicine, law, social work, education). One kind of hybrid is the business type, but this
is just a specialized instance of a much wider phenomenon that is in the process of
remaking anthropology, and has accompanied the rise of applied and practicing
anthropology more generally. Hybrids admit external influences into anthropology, and
if/when these reach a critical mass, hypothetically, there could be a tipping point at which
anthropology changes in a qualitative way. A final force for change is the pragmatic
need to place academia’s graduates. If graduates cannot find jobs, then academia
ultimately will shrink, so it is in the interests of academic anthropologists to gradually
explore the new terrain of corporations, design, and consumption, and academic
administrations will support this if it bears the right kind of fruit (stratified by institution,
of course).

A look back over the long history of entanglements between business and
anthropology shows many ironies. One is that the small world investigated by Warner

48
and company (i.e., labor-management relations in the context of Mayo’s Human
Relations movement) held the promise of leading them perhaps to a deeper understanding
of modern institutions. Warner attempted to fulfill this vision in his Yankee City studies,
but anthropology turned its back on these interests, abandoning them to sociology and the
policy disciplines. It is ironic that the ‘turn’ we have seen the past twenty years toward
consumption studies, which did not even exist in Warner’s time, now constitute perhaps
the most ambitious theoretical agenda for exploring modern American society that
anthropology has yet produced. While there are a relatively small number of
anthropology scholars at the forefront of modern consumption studies, their work has
inspired a vast body of interdisciplinary research that enables us to better comprehend
the mechanisms through which markets mediate the creation of meaning and social
practice within a broader socio-historical frame of globalization and market capitalism.
This did not happen because anthropologists decided to study modern society, but
because anthropologists finally acknowledged consumption as relevant to their interests.
In America, it also must be acknowledged that it happened because anthropologists
joined the fields of consumer behavior and marketing (i.e., in business schools).

Another irony lies in a backward look at the Hawthorne studies. Anthropologists

were not running the show in those days, and today we know that ‘the boss’ was wrong.
Mayo (the boss) saw the BWOR workers as ‘maladjusted’, but he was misinformed. The
workers knew what they were doing. The problem is, no one told American managers
the truth. Most managers are not trained to grasp the idea of ‘cultural logic’ on the shop
floor or in the office, even though they are trained to grasp that same notion in relation to
the marketplace. That is ironic. If alternative explanations of Hawthorne had been
advanced in the 1930s and anthropology had played a more decisive role in shaping the
theory of organizations over the next several decades, the workplace that we know might
be very different today, and anthropologists who study organizational behavior might be
thriving like their counterparts in marketing. We must ask ourselves about the long-term
implications of an anthropology that is perpetually marginalized in studies of private
sector organizations and management.

What seems clear from an overview of the literature is that the worlds of
consumers and producers are not two separate things. Consumption and production are
intertwined, perhaps most clearly in the design process, which brings the producer
(designer) and consumer (user) together in a collaborative juxtaposition. The service
economy also represents the joining of these worlds, as one conceptualization of service
is the simultaneous production and consumption of an economic activity within the
context of a relationship between a producer and a consumer (e.g., teaching/taking a
course). All of this suggests that the intersection of these two worlds is expected to
become increasingly apparent as the 21st century evolves away from a Fordist producer-
orientation, with its mechanistic and functionalized view of the world, and toward a more
integrated, holistic perspective encouraged by a consumer-orientation.

Thus, while the three domains described herein will continue as distinct subfields
with their own literatures, increasing areas of interaction and overlap among them are
predicted. Anthropology, as a holistic discipline, is in a good position to conceptualize

49
the connections among the domains; indeed, they already were apparent in this article.
For example, both design and consumption are activities that often take place within
organizational contexts. Understanding these contexts -- the resources or opportunities,
as well as the risks or constraints they pose – are significant considerations for
anthropologists seeking an integrated assessment of human behavior in its natural setting.
Further, organizations themselves are human constructions that are objects of design, and
they also are sites of consumption. With respect to their designed nature, the formal and
informal structures and policies of organizations are continuously being formed and
reformed. These unfolding processes could become sites of ethnographic research,
toward the goal of improving outcomes in organizational decision-making as it affects the
design of new products and services, and the offering of these outputs to market.

Consumption also should become increasingly relevant as a focus of

anthropological and ethnographic inquiry within organizational settings. As corporations
out-source their services to one another, each organization ‘consumes’ their suppliers’
services. While this may sound somewhat abstract and ‘business-to-business’ in nature,
‘on the ground’ it can become very individualistic and person-to-person; say for example,
someone in Chicago trying to obtain help over the telephone from someone else in
Bangalore. This interaction represents the consumption of one organization’s service by
another organization. If we begin to conceptualize the convergence of consumption and
production, we may be able to bring to our study of organizations the theoretical and
methodological insights gained through the study of consumer behavior, a theoretical
maneuver that has not been optimally exploited in the study of organizations. An
example of the potential of this kind of cross-over was provided earlier in the notion of
the sacralization of work in America. Carla Freeman’s research provides another
example of the potential of investigating consumption practices within a production
context. Daniel Miller discussed many additional examples.

Since the broader context of our lives is connected, there should be resonance
among the various facets of our experience. And if globalization indeed means that
boundaries are blurring, then the boundaries between employees and consumers, between
the interiors and the exteriors of the firm, are blurring as well, and anthropologists who
are interested in organizational behavior, ethnographically-informed design, and
consumer behavior, may gain insights by spending more time talking together and
reading each other’s work.

Marietta L. Baba

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Further Readings and References:

Dubinskas, Frank. 1988. Making Time: Ethnographies of High Technology

Organizations. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.

Eddy, Elizabeth M. and William L. Partridge, Eds. Applied Anthropology in America.

New York: Columbia University Press.

Malefyt, Timothy D. and Brian Moeran. 2003. Advertising Cultures. New York: Berg.

McCracken, Grant. 1988. Culture and Consumption: New Approaches to the Symbolic
Character of Consumer Goods and Activities. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University
Press.

Miller, Daniel. 1987. Material Culture and Mass Consumption. Oxford: Basil
Blackwell.

Rohlen, Thomas. 1974. For Harmony and Strength: Japanese White-Collar

Organization in Anthropological Perspective. Berkeley, CA: University of California
Press.

Schwartzman, Helen. 1993. Ethnography in Organizations. Newbury Park, CA: Sage

Publications.

Sherry, John, Jr. Contemporary Marketing and Consumer Behavior: An

Anthropological Sourcebook. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications.

Squires, Susan and Bryan Byrne. 2002. Creating Breakthrough Ideas: The
Collaboration of Anthropologists and Designers in the Product Development Industry.
Westport, CN: Bergin and Garvey.

Suchman, Lucy. 1987. Plans and Situated Actions: The Problem of Human-Machine
Communication. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

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