Anthropological Ethics -- Privacy in a Social networked World

Today the American Anthropological Association has revised its ethics code.

One of the key issues is "privacy." and informed concept. While this is an important issue for academic researcher, how does it relate to the applied business anthropologist hired by a private business or by the government regulatory agency overseeing the industry in which that the private business operates?

Here is an example of how modern technology and data mining are changing the landscape of "privacy" and the practical application of informed consent.


Wall Street traders mine tweets to gain a trading edge

What are you thoughts?

Should this be a topic for academic basic research - the practice of data mining and how business ethics addresses the issue.

How does it fit with the AAA's position on IRBs and the Common Rule?

The Superorganic World of Transfer Pricing

Business anthropology is an emerging sub-discipline in anthropology. As an academic discipline, business anthropologists study business practices and organizations from a cultural and cross cultural perspective. As an applied discipline, the Business anthropologist works with business owners and corporations to solve cultural and cross cultural problems that arise in the course of international business and/or working with a socially and culturally diverse workforce, market place and business environment.

One problem unique to the international business corporation is the impact of "transfer pricing" on the corporation's organizational structure and operational processes. This is a concept that the business anthropologist should become familiar with when working with international\global corporation.

Transfer Pricing is an accounting tool used in international business to account for sales between a parent company and its subsidiaries located in a different tax jurisdiction. Transfer pricing deals with the problem companies face when they have operations in several different taxing jurisdictions and engage in intra-company sales of goods and services. It can also be a tool that can be used to maximize corporate income taxes savings.

A recent NPR interview on Fresh Air with reporter Jesse Drucker, from Bloomberg News, describes how this tool is being used by such global corporations as Google,Forest Laboratories and other companies to save billions of dollars of taxes.

What every applied anthropologist should learn about money!

In a recent question posed in the Systems Thinking World interest group on LinkedIn, I was struck by what I consider to be an area missing in the standard training of an applied anthropologist. This training gap applies specifically to a problem such quoted below.

On the surface this might be taken to a simple cross-cultural problem in a business context.The question is:

What should you do if you meet this situation when you are in a foreign-owned enterprise: A foreign home company set up a new brand company in China five years ago! However, till now, the Chinese brand company size was still same as before. Compared with the other similar company, this Chinese brand company never grew up. The profit that they earned has to submmit to the foreign home company by a kind of form call technical support cost.

My first questions to the reader are:
How would you attempt to address this question?
Is this a matter of cross cultural mis-communication?
Is it an example of foreign exploitation or even racism?
and, What theory or tools would you be using to assess the problem?

As I first read it. I thought about these questions and how I might have attempted to address one or the other. Maybe both. But then I paused and remembered my MBA training, especially accounting. In the world of business, accounting is the lingua franc. If you go to the site you can read my answer. Here is where the answer lay - it is a linguistic problem.

In this particular case, we have a common situation found in international business where a profit can be quickly transformed into an expense and even a loss for tax purposes. The situation is called, "transfer pricing" and is a little magical trick of removing a profit on the balance sheet and transferring it to a liability on the Income statement.

What I want to stress here is that every applied anthropologist should take a basic course in financial accounting, not to become an accountant, but to learn the language of money. Especially, the grammar of money and when to bring in an interpreter.

I am not attempting to justify exploitation such as described in the original question. What I am criticizing is that so much of the ideological criticism by anthropologists directed toward corporations and international businesses, attacking capitalism vs labor, etc. is based on the critic's linguistic ignorance of the language spoken by those they criticize. Traditional ethnography would require that the ethnographer have a basic understanding of the native language before attempting to interpret the alien culture.

What I am proposing is that any applied anthropologist who expects to influence a client who works in the real world should be familiar enough with the language of money to know when it is time to call in an accountant.

Is Applied Anthropology a Profession?

My question is based on my dissertation and subsequent career path as well as monitoring of the anthropological profession for the past 30 years. My dissertation began as a study of voluntary associations as particular type of socio-cultural adaptation to the pressure for change in a complex society - sort of a "superorganic" adaptation. The final product entitled, Anthropology and the Social Engineer: A Case Study of the Professionalization and Elaboration of the Social Scientist's Role, drew upon the research done by sociologist and anthropologists who studied modern professions such as medicine, accounting, engineering for a theoretical framework. They define a profession as a subset of an occupation. My own field work in the areas of social program design and evaluation and research into the organizational development of American anthropology confirmed the idea that a professional organization is a special case of the voluntary association form of social organization.

One of the major findings of this research is that a professional tends to express the very sense of "calling" and "commitment" to the ideology of the discipline they pursue that people report in their religious experience. These professions call upon members to subordination of their individual bias to a set of the collective standards established by discipline (faith) and to maintain a special relationship to the lay public being served. This is similar to what one finds in the clergy.

Just as the Church's greatest weapon against the apostate is "excommunication," so too the greatest weapon against a professional is the threat of ostracism, e.g. a lawyer being disbarred or a doctor having his/her medical license pulled. This is usually caused by an extreme breach of professional ethics or standards.

My question is to ascertain how others think and feel about the following situation.

If the AAA, SfAA, or NAPA have codes of ethics but no authority to enforce them and no formal requirements for membership other than paying dues, then are they a profession or simply a voluntary association?

My observation over the past 30 years is that the profession seems to rest solely and exclusively in the academy. Specifically it rests in the university department which can "license" practitioners with tenure and expel members by rescinding tenure. But where else is there a similar professional control over the practice of anthropology?

A truly professional "applied anthropology" or "practicing anthropology" would model itself after the other service professions such as medical, law,social work,engineering, etc. These professions are organized to insure a form of self government to protect members from government interference in their practice, and protect the public they serve from quacks and unethical practitioners by controlling membership.

Androidology or How much longer will humans control the planet?

The recent victory of the machine over the human,

IBM Watson vanquishes human 'Jeopardy!' foes

raises questions about the place of humans in the evolving global culture. While it may seem to be a wonderful advance in human creativity one wonders about its long term impact on the humanistic side of human life.

Is it time that we create a new science, Androidology which would be the study of the evolution and development of self actualizing machines capable of performing the functions that biological organisms currently perform. This is an interesting question when we consider the implications of these devises on the power relationship between humans.

Western culture is beginning to experience what many non-western cultures have long experienced under western colonization. The value of the average human is no longer determined by one's contribution to the local society. Instead, it is determined by a global market which places humans against humans, and humans against capital in the form of technology.

One aspects of an androidology will be determining the evolutionary mnemonics of the android species. For example, Jennings Explains Jeopardy Loss to Watson And 'Know Your Meme' explains his comment in Final Jeopardy comments on the similarities and differences between his Jeopardy strategy and Watson's strategy.

How will androidology relate to anthropology and the other social sciences? Will it compete with the humanistic side of anthropology and the other social sciences?

What happens when humans are bred and enculturated by androids just like what we do with our domesticated animals?

Nuclear Winter -- Can this be avoided?

Nature has demonstrated what a catastrophic explosion can do to the environment and life on this planet.

According to the United States Geological Survey (USGS), the eruption of the Tambora Volcano in Indonesia in 1815 lowered global temperatures by as much as 5ºF and historical accounts in New England describe 1816 as “the year without a summer.”

Growing up during the height of the Cold War and learning to "duck and cover" in elementary school. I am fully aware of the dangers of nuclear war not just to the combatants but also to the planet. I remember waiting for the Russian ships to challenge the American blockade of Cuba during the Cuban missile crisis.

While anthropologist, especially archeologist, have studied climate change among "primitive" cultures and extinct civilizations, there has been very little anthropological attention given to the culture of nuclear warfare and the threat it poses to the planet. The threat of volcanoes are natural phenomena; nuclear war is a superorganic threat. Both can have the same effect on the planet. The former is beyond our immediate control, the latter should be under our control.

What does anthropology have to contribute to our understanding of process that leads societies and cultures to embark on a military policy based on nuclear weaponry?

Richard Rhodes has studied the history of nuclear weaponry and the political and military maneuvering associated with it, from the building of the first A Bomb to today's proliferation of nuclear technology.

Rhodes presents one scenario that illustrates the danger facing the planet if a nuclear exchange between India and Pakistan were to take place.




This is an example where the insights of anthropology might be applied to help to prevent that one mistake that might bring about the results projected here or in other hot spots such as Israel and Iran, North Korea and the US.

Can anthropologists identifying the socio-cultural forces that might be employed to resolve the outstanding issues that make this scenario a real possibility?

Here is a related resource that gives a perspective of how those charged with the nuclear weaponry have seen their mission during the Cold War period:

How the USAF Envisioned Nuclear War

Second Life and Anthropology

The virtual worlds of the Internet pose an interesting challenge to modern American Anthropology. Comprised of memes in a virtual electronic universe, the Internet is a transorganic organism that is changing how organic human beings and superorganic institutions conduct their relationships. As Internet technology spreads around the planet and as the means for accessing becomes more diverse, powerful and cheaper, it becomes easier for individuals and institution to form, develop, and evolve relationships unconstrained by physical time and space. One of these virtual worlds is Second Life.

Here is an example from the FRONTLINE program Digital Nation showing how IBM (a global superorganic institution) has moved into this new world.

Watch the full episode. See more FRONTLINE.

The anthropological question is: Is Second Life, a social network or an alternative socio/cultural universe? How does Second Life compare to Facebook as a human enviroment and as a superorganic institution?