Anthropology in Business

Often “business anthropology” and “corporate anthropology” are used interchangeably. In my experience, these are two very different fields of study in the Anthropology. However, too many times, I've read and met anthropologists and anthropology students who think that advertising is business anthropology. There is definitely a role for ethnography in both academic and applied research in advertising. But in my experience, advertising is a sub-field of Marketing, which in turn is a sub-field of creating and managing a business enterprise.

Business anthropology, from my 40 years of experience as a consultant, applied anthropologist, and adjunct business professor, treats the company as an "organic social" entity. As a social entity, it can take many different legal forms and organizational structures. Business anthropology focuses on the way a social group(s) engages is economic exchange, it is transactional in Malinowski's functional sense. 

Corporate anthropology is the study of a legalistic and political organizational structure in the modern marketplace. In the broader anthropological sense, academic and applied studies of corporations are conducted from the Radcliffe-Brown structural perspective to determine how this social structure functions.

There is definitely a need for and market for both business and corporate studies by anthropologists. The way one approaches these organizations differ and the focuses are different. Business anthropology would be a sub-discipline of Economic anthropology. Corporate anthropology would be a sub-discipline of Social and Cultural anthropology.

Applied anthropologist who consult for small businesses should approach their clients with an open mind about the sociocultural system that they will find and the problems they will be asked to address. They should not assume that a corporate approach will  solve the problem or that it can be resolved from an advertising approach.

The Chicken and Egg problem: Culture vs Strategy

In Business Anthropology it is important that we speak in simple language to our clients and seek to inform through clarity rather than impress through obfuscation. "Corporate Culture" and its relation to "Corporate Strategy" is a case in point. The question often comes up in the business community, What is Corporate Culture and Why is it resistant to good strategy?

A recent book entitled "Leverage" addresses this question in this interview from the Economist

From the point of view of the Applied Business Anthropologist, we might say that a simple definition of corporate culture, from a lay point of view, is

 "That's how WE do things around here and have done so ever since I've been here." 

At the same time, from a technical anthropological point of view, an applicable definition comes from Structural - Functional theory. We can begin by saying a corporation is a social institution made up of the following, as defined by Bronislaw Malinowski,

"Each institution has personnel, a charter, a set of norms or rules, activities, material apparatus (technology), and a function." (A Scientific Theory of Culture and Other Essays)

The business enterprise is an institution that has a corporate culture.  Its function is the creation of profit for its owners. It does this by investing in personnel, material apparatus to be used to perform activities that generate a product based on a certain set of norms, rules, and processes, to produce a product or service for sale at a price that is greater than the total cost of production. The owner's of the business are organized under a charter (Articles of Incorporation and By-laws) recognized by the State and empowered by the State to conduct such business under the laws of the state. The corporate culture is how all of this is done to maintain the institution.

A strategy MUST arise from the institutional base that leaders have to work with or else the strategy will fail. A good and effective strategy recognizes the basic elements of management as taught in B-School. "What are the institution's Strengths and What are its Weaknesses". A good strategy uses the former to offset the latter. The second step of the strategy is to know your business environment -- that is, "What are the opportunities for us to make a profit or increase our profits?" and, "What are the threats to our position in the market and to our profits?" All of this must be done within the principles established in the Charter and the Laws that govern the institutional Charter.

The Corporate Culture is conservative, it represents the lessons from the past that have worked and its goal is long term, .i.e. to survive. A Corporate Strategy is a plan to use what we have today to insure that we will achieve our long term goal tomorrow. That is, the relation between Culture and Strategy is a Chicken and Egg problem.

Today's Corporate Culture is Yesterday's Strategy Made Manifest,    Tomorrow's Corporate Culture is Today's Strategy Made Manifest.

Culture: Is it of any scientific value or just a hollowed out concept?

I have posted a link on several anthropology groups on LinkedIn which lead people to this blog and my posting,  "Anthropology needs a common professional vocabulary”.  I have received some interesting responses. One, in particular, states

"As life is dynamic, sop [sic] is the evolution of terminology [sic] to handle the changes involved. to abandon the meaning of established terminology is to abandom [sic] the research done using those terms, ..."

 

leads me to the following response.

This is a great observation but it doesn't go far enough. There are unintended consequences as well. As the terminology changes it also sucks out the underlying insight that promoted its use in the first place. The terms either become "hollow" or "rarefied" to the point that they are meaningless.

Take "culture" as used today by the profession. "Culture" has had a very important role in the evolution of anthropology and our interpretation of humanity as more than a species of animal in biology's taxonomy of life. When Tylor defined the term, it meant all of those traits that seemed to distinguish "humans" from other animal species. Today, culture is used as an excuse or justification for differences in behavior especially for minorities (that is ANY sub-group within a larger group).

Kroeber, borrowing from Spencer, defined "culture" in terms of its locus in human experience as something that is "Superorganic". That is, culture is something which exists outside the organic individual human animal. This insight builds on two terms -- Culture is the term that Tylor applied to non-literate and pre-literate peoples for "civilization" and the Superorganic placed the emphasis on Tylor's concept of "shared values".

Malinowski and his contemporary, Talcott Parsons, expanded the definition further by linking the organic (biological and psychology needs) to the Superorganic as the mechanism for "sharing" and "capturing and preserving" experience. For Malinowski it is the "institution" and "institutional complex" where this takes place. The "institution" builds on Tylor and Kroeber by laying the foundation for structuring the elements in Tylor's "culture" into a researchable and analytical object defined in terms of its output/function/purpose in supporting the individual and the group. Culture is to be found in the institutional Chart.

Parsons and his colleagues took a slightly different approach. They focused on the behavior that leads to the satisfaction of organic needs and how these are institutionalized in society to form an action system -- a flow of energy and function that serves to maintain a social system. And Culture is found in the those elements that make up the Pattern Maintenance function.

All of this is built on the Tylor definition of "Culture". If we were to take the present day term "culture" we might and do come to the same conclusion that differences in "culture" produce differences in behavior at the organic and societal (supra-organic) level. But today's definitions will not explain "why?".

Why is this? I would hypothesize that it is because structural/functionalism fell out of favor in the 1960s and on. It lost its favor because the stress or focus was on stability. The question was "Why do cultures persist despite strong environmental pressures from other cultures to force change?" This is the heart of the work of Edward H. Spicer's "persistent culture" concept.

In the mid 1960s, in light of the Viet Nam war, civil rights movement etc. structural/functionalism became associated with a philosophical position which favored the status quo. Culture is conservative. The world and its problems of inequality, in the view of many, called for a radical solution - a solution that would break the gravitational pull of tradition and culture. The question changed from a "Why?" question to a "How? question. The question thus became a solution. “How can we propel mankind into a more equitable and "just" orbit?” (The space age was just emerging at this time).

Marxism and other theories that focused on power relationships took over the social sciences. "Power" replaced "culture" as the ideological style of the social sciences and has found a strong home within academic anthropology and its institutions. Rather than scientific, these theories are divisive. They are loaded with ideological content. 

Anthropology has become fragmented into philosophical camps and concepts, such as "culture", "structure" and "function," have become just so many hollowed out or rarefied words.