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Leonardo M Alves's Blog
Anthropology studies the human being widely through scientific and humanistic methods. So, how does this discipline apply to business organizations?
Marietta Baba, anthropologist and professor at Wayne State University, offers a definition suitable for Corporate Anthropology in her essay Business and Corporate Anthropology (1986:1) as “the practice of applyinganthropological theories and methods in problem-solving activity in the private sector organizations.”
Anthropology applied to business administration now works on two fronts: human resources and organizational management; marketing and consumption.
History
History of business anthropology developed along the discipline’s general history. The pioneer anthropologist, Bronislaw Malinowski (1884 – 1944)studied the western Pacific Kula trade ring, where he describes an economic non-Western system. The social scientist Thorstein Veblen (1857 – 1929) in his The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899) began consumer studies.
Anthropology had been applied in the colonial administration, but its own ethical self-criticism led to reject supporting exploting ventures. Corporate anthropology declined fromWorld War II to the late 1970s, but it was again employed to business environment and used by companies like Xerox, IBM and Microsoft.
A classic case of the incipient and corporate anthropology is the Hawthorne study. In 1928 Western Electric Company began an ambitious scientific management project for its 20,000 employees at the Hawthorne plant near Chicago.
The first method was typicallyTaylorist, with measurements of variables (lighting, breaks, incentive pay) to increase productivity. The resulting data seemed contradictory and without any clear correlation. They called the industrial psychologist at Harvard, Elton Mayo (1880 – 1949) to analyze the results. Mayo tried to change the methodology, with interviews with physiological measurements, but it still yielded not the expectedresponses. Mayo approached the anthropologist W. Lloyd Warner (1898 – 1970) in 1931 to help in the search.
Lloyd Warner used the organizational ethnography and systematic observation and perceived among other things, there was a collective culture guiding employee behavior beyond individual interests. Lloyd Warner also noted the researchers’ presence altered the employee performance – the Hawthorneeffect – and that informal organizations emerged parallel to management, with its own goals and values. Resulting from the work of Lloyd Warner and Mayo arouse the human relations school in business administration and organizational anthropology.
Human Resources and Organizational Study
Each institution has its corporate culture and no better than a culture professional to study it.
Businessanthropology uses tools such as organizational analysis, mapping power relations; studying roles played within groups, communication channels, personal and collective values within an organization.
An example of this application: If a company wants to know if the motivational speaker who hires employees to work or not, an anthropologist would follow the team before, during and after these talks andassess whether it is possible or desirable to employ them in the future.
Through observation-participant anthropologist makes analysis of administrative processes and practices. Unlike the production engineer’s drawing board, while taking advantage of quantitative data from this methodology, the organizational anthropologist evaluates these factors qualitatively, seeking to maximize theirefficiencies.
By being sensitive to human diversity, anthropologist is valuable for team training. It also facilitates changes, both in new procedures and in mergers and corporate re-structuring, especially in global companies, which involves such different cultures.
People management is another application for business anthropology, finding talent, developing potential and managing human diversity....