what’s in a name? editors’ introduction to the journal of business anthropology brian moeran and christina garsten welcome to the journal of business anthropology – an open access journal which aims to publish the very best ethnographic research on business organizations and business situations of all kinds, together with groundbreaking theoretical insights and reflections on what such research has to tell us. for this we need your help and support. we do not yet know who you are. anthropologists (and, if so, of what persuasions)? scholars in fields other than anthropology (if so, which)? students (at what level: undergraduate, graduate or doctoral)? people employed in, or running their own, businesses (small or medium enterprises, large corporations, family firms)? practitioners? consultants? stock market analysts? civil servants? ngo, aid or charity workers? event managers? marketing gurus? publishers? journalists? detectives? librarians? wo/men on the verge of a nervous breakdown? internet surfers looking for an alternative to facebook and ‘twittering’? hopefully, together you are all of these (without the nervous breakdown) ⎼ and more. hopefully, too, what we have to say will be of interest to you and encourage you to contribute – and contribute regularly – to the jba. without your articles, case studies, field reports, and book reviews, this journal will go the way of most new products and page 1 of 19 jba 1(1): 1-19 spring 2012 © the author(s) 2012 issn 2245-4217 www.cbs.dk/jba journal of business anthropology, 1(1), spring 2012 2 sink into oblivion. at the same time, supply must also meet demand. otherwise, however great our dedication and enthusiasm as editors, the journal will have a short shelf life in the supermarket of ideas. we hope, therefore, that you will join us in making the jba stimulating, intellectually rewarding, exciting to read and reflect upon – and not just another journal that you occasionally turn to once a year, or less, when looking for something specific (like project camelot, or dinner at claridges?). in beginnings, we must, as editors, have hope. it is our business, though, to make sure that a journal devoted to the anthropological study of business be based on more than hope. its offerings must first strike a chord, then play a symphony, in which ethnographic practices, anthropological curiosity, and good old theory come to form a pleasing unity in performance. it is with this in mind that we have taken advantage of the freedom of open access to break up the jba into complementary parts. we publish field reports and book reviews as they come in. case studies and special issues, too, are published on line as soon as they have been reviewed and revised, and we intend to run a news and information section that outlines activities, people and organizations with an interest in business ethnography. as for regular issues of the journal itself, the first two or three will contain articles written to establish the field of business anthropology. where did it arise? which scholars and organizations were and are involved? how has it been affected by, and how does it affect, other branches of the discipline? to what particular forms of social practice does it apply? what methods should it use, and what barriers does it face in applying those methods? what are its overall strengths and weaknesses? but this is only the beginning. as editors, we want to push the boundaries in later issues of what we perceive to be theoretical and methodological limitations in both business anthropology and in anthropology as a whole. we also want to bring together different geographical and disciplinary traditions in the broad field of ‘business anthropology’, in order to explore its untapped potentials. in other words, we believe that it is time we practised more fully the basic tenet of anthropology – that it be truly comparative. what’s in a name? why do we need to establish the field? for two reasons: firstly, because the discipline of anthropology is fragmented (more of which below); and secondly, because the concept of a ‘business anthropology’ does not yet appeal to and encompass all those who, knowingly and unknowingly, might constitute its field of interests. this is the basis for the launching of the jba, which is designed to draw together people from all walks of life (that is, you) and provide them with material that they can read, discuss, and share with others like them. hopefully (yes, that word again), you will realise that what you might perceive as ‘differences’ are not as different moeran & garsten / what’s in a name? editors introduction to the journal of business anthropology 3 from one another as you first imagined. as an anthropologist, for example, you might have seen yourself as being of the ‘organizational’ rather than ‘business’ persuasion, until the journal shows you that all anthropology is concerned with organizational forms of one sort or another, and that what makes ‘organizational anthropology’ different is its primary focus on business organizations. similarly, as a manager, you might think of yourself as a businessman (or woman), as well as manager, but not as an anthropologist. such differences in perception, as we will show below, are often made out to be more ‘different’ than they actually are. in our opinion, there is a double confusion surrounding the name of ‘business anthropology’. the first concerns the word ‘business’, which reflects some of the terminological uncertainty over anthropologists’ study of work and its surrounding institutions in contemporary societies. in addition to ‘business anthropology’, we find ‘industrial anthropology’, ‘corporate anthropology’, ‘organizational anthropology’, and ‘enterprise anthropology’, as well as the ‘anthropology of work’, ‘anthropology of management’, ‘applied anthropology’, and ‘economic anthropology’, to name but some of the variations associated with the concept of business and anthropology. for better or for worse, the aim of the jba is to subsume all these terms under the single heading of business anthropology. why do we feel that to do so would be advantageous? because the discipline of anthropology has fragmented, and continues to fragment, into so many sub-disciplines (cognitive, educational, feminist, humanistic, legal, media, medical, political, psychological, symbolic, urban, and so on, anthropologies) that it is virtually impossible to keep up with the research conducted and theories developed in each – practices and theories that might – or again might not, we just don’t know – contribute significantly to our studies of and reflections on business in general. given that there are already so many specialised versions of anthropology studying more or less the same field of business relations – corporate and organizational, economic and applied, industrial and work – why not bring them together under a single parasol (in our present spirit of hopefulness, we prefer an image of sunshine to rain)? there is, after all, something to be said for strength in numbers – especially when business anthropology also encompasses parts, at least, of other sub-disciplines: consumer, design, development, marketing, media, and visual anthropologies among them. by doing so, we do not wish establish or stake out yet another sub-discipline – there are too many of them as it is! – but rather to suggest that business anthropology is not a marginal enterprise, but solidly rooted in mainstream anthropology. at this point some of those among you may well argue that we are proposing a new form of intellectual imperialism (more of which a little later). there is nothing to connect the social relations found, for example, on a norwegian oil rig or in a peruvian craft market; in a tea journal of business anthropology, 1(1), spring 2012 4 plantation in the himalayan foothills or in a bulgarian rose field; or among drivers of a camel train in the saudi arabian desert. our counterargument is that, indeed, there is. riggers, weavers, dealers, planters, farmers, and camel drivers are all involved – or, in melissa cefkin’s formulation, engaged – in business of some sort or other. they all trade. and in trade they engage in practices that form many of the building blocks of anthropological theory: material culture and technology; gifts, commodities and money; labour and other forms of social exchange; (fictive) kinship, patronage, quasi-groups, and networks; rituals, symbolism and power; the development and maintenance of taste; and so on. precisely because business anthropology is an anthropology of trading relations, it also reaches out to other disciplines such as business history, cultural studies, management and organization studies, some parts of sociology, and even cultural economics. the jba’s parasol may be broad indeed, but, unlike those found on a greek island beach, it is forever free! the second confusion concerns the word ‘anthropology’, and, more specifically, ‘anthropologist’. what we aim to show is that distinctions between anthropologists and other professions are not always that clear cut. in her everyday practices and planning, for example, a manager is in many ways an anthropologist who talks and listens to the people with whom she deals, who tries to understand what they are not saying and why, and who plans organizational and business strategies accordingly. she experiences three ‘constants’: exposure to others, revalidation of formal accounts vis-à-vis informal practices and perceptions, and self-reflexive scrutiny of her role. as linstead (1997) further points out, managers all have ‘some degree of ethnographic skills’ (see also moeran 2007). indeed, it is becoming both commonplace and necessary for top-level managers to engage in a sort of ethnographic practice to understand, interpret, and figure out how their strategies can best tune in with expectations of potentials partners and clients. this form of knowledge creation, what holmes and marcus call ‘paraethnography’ (2006), has integrity in its own right, an integrity with which anthropologists have a keen familiarity. similarly both detective and journalist make their living out of asking questions, not of one, but of numerous persons, each of whom provides a different facet in his explanation of the matter at hand. detective and journalist observe the scenes to which they are called – a murder here, a plane crash there – and try to find out what (surviving) participants saw or did not see, where they were at the time of the incident, who and what they know about what and whom. like the anthropologist, each makes note of what is said and not said; each reads between the lines and writes a report; eventually, each is a seeker of truth about what was once called ‘the human condition’ (see, for example, van maanen 1982; hannerz 2004). moeran & garsten / what’s in a name? editors introduction to the journal of business anthropology 5 these are not the only professions to practice ethnographic methods. advertising executives, too, resemble anthropologists in several important ways. as steve kemper (2003: 35) points out, advertising executives are folk ethnographers who, like anthropologists, ‘get paid for making claims about how the natives think’. both need to learn about those whom they intend to study, before carrying out their research in the field (or market). both zigzag back and forth ‘between the observation of facts and theoretical reasoning, where new facts modify the theory and (modified) theory accounts for the facts’ (hylland eriksen 1995: 18). both are driven by experience, politically mediated, historically situated and ‘shaped by specific traditions of their respective professions – including narrative and rhetorical conventions’ (malefyt and moeran 2003: 13) as timothy malefyt and brian moeran further observe, both pay at least surface attention to the idea of ‘culture’ and, in seeking to understand it, intervene in areas far beyond the strictly defined boundaries of their expertise (mazzarella 2003). as anthropologists, therefore, we should be careful not to make a fetish out of our practices. one or two things that need to be said… it is customary for those introducing the subject of business anthropology to go back to its perceived origins, and thereby (like auctioneers selling an art object) to establish a ‘pedigree’ for their nascent sub-discipline. there are now quite a few – in our view, almost too many – historical overviews of anthropologists’ encounters with the business world (e.g. baba 2000, bate 1997, burawoy 1979, holzberg and giovannini 1981, schwartzman 1993, wright 1994, among many). in this first issue of the jba, however, we have included two articles – by marietta baba and melissa cefkin – which add significantly to these discussions. refreshingly, baba introduces documentation on the part played not only by american scholars such as elton mayo and lloyd warner, but also by two ‘british’ social anthropologists, malinowski and radcliffe-brown, in the early engagement of their discipline with business interests. this is an important point because, right from its origins in the mid-19th century, anthropology in the united kingdom was predicated on its practical use to ‘the utilities and requirements of society’ (reining 1962: 594). it was, in short, an applied science. these overviews, together with other histories of the development of anthropology as a discipline (e.g. kuper 1983), have concentrated on certain ‘facts’, which have been cited so frequently that they now form ‘myths’ – in the sense of a particular ‘mode of signification’ or ‘form’ (barthes 1957:193). these include: british anthropologists’ dealings – some would say ‘complicity’ – with their country’s colonial administration; american anthropologists’ involvement in the ‘hawthorne studies’ at the very beginning of the 1930s and elton mayo’s human relations school; the founding of the society for applied journal of business anthropology, 1(1), spring 2012 6 anthropology in 1941 and of the tavistock institute in 1946; max gluckman and the manchester factory shop floor studies of the 1950s and 60s; the involvement of the carnegie corporation and rockefeller foundation in the funding of anthropological research; the call to ‘study up’ (nader 1972). such ‘myths’ extend even to the division of anthropologists’ engagements with industry, work and business into historical periods. the net effect of such ‘myths’ is not one of which, as editors of a new journal that seeks to define the field of business anthropology, we disapprove. indeed, we are publishing two articles here precisely because they throw new and scholarly light on what has often in the past been given the ‘light fandango’. we feel, though, that perhaps it is time to move away from what might well seem like an underlying insecurity of such myth making and to celebrate the fact that we can and do contribute research that is important for the discipline of anthropology as a whole and, by our own argument, for you, our readers, in your varied walks of life. enough, then, of myths. it’s time to look into the future and theorise our current research. for this, though, we need broad scholarship. and here we have to face what strikes us as an unfortunate development in the discipline of anthropology, as well as in its branch of business anthropology. during the past two to three decades, it seems to us that american anthropology has turned in on itself; its proponents have talked mostly to themselves and often ignored the work of those who live and work elsewhere. this may be seen in the list of contributors to each issue of journals such as american anthropologist and american ethnologist. perhaps because of their titles, these tend to publish the work of ‘american’ scholars – by which we mean those born, as well as of foreigners employed, in the united states – and largely ignore that of anthropologists in the rest of the world. having said that, we also have to admit that many europeans have not been entirely au fait with developments in business anthropology in the united states. this is, as we said, unfortunate, but, on the plus side, we might note that there are recent and welcome signs of change on both sides of the pond, and we hope that publication of the jba will contribute to the coalescing of such geographical fragmentation – in part, at least, brought on by the disciplinary fragmentation referred to earlier – into a single shared approach to anthropologists’ study of the business domain. such fragmentation has not been entirely unexpected. after all, anthropology has developed at different historical stages in each of the countries concerned (e.g. brazil, france, sri lanka, sweden, or japan), under different social, linguistic, and educational conditions. each has, in its time, produced, and still produces, extremely able anthropologists. yet, with important exceptions (one thinks of pierre bourdieu, ulf hannerz, and fredrik barth, for example), their work has rarely been read, or paid attention to, outside their national boundaries. two factors are helping moeran & garsten / what’s in a name? editors introduction to the journal of business anthropology 7 change this landscape. first, more and more scholars living and working outside the powerful anglo-american axis are communicating in english (thereby, admittedly, reinforcing the power of the centre). second, they are forming, and actively participating in, regional associations of anthropologists in, europe (easa, or the european association of social anthropologists), scandinavia, south america, south east asia, as well as in activities hosted by the all-embracing world council of anthropological associations. it is to support this development that we intend in the future to include an essay on one national or regional anthropology in each of the early issues of the jba. it is not simply in its methodology, but in its general approach and attitude, that anthropology needs to be holistic. this strikes us a particularly important in the context of the phrase ‘business anthropology’. it is our abiding impression that the anthropological study of business is an american development, and that the businesses studied are themselves either american or located in the united states. in a way, this is fair enough. it is in the usa that applied anthropology, in its multiple forms, has been most institutionalised in the tertiary education system (baba 2006). but other anthropologists in other parts of the world have also been conducting research on different aspects of business relations: for example, norwegian herring fleets (barth 1966), labour migration in uganda (elkan 1960), family firms in the lebanon (khalaf and schwayri 1966), and transnational mining and the ‘corporate gift’ (rajak 2011). so, while lloyd warner and his colleagues at first harvard, and then chicago, conducted pioneer ethnographic studies of corporations like ibm, sears & roebuck, and western electric, the studies mentioned here makes clear the fact that ‘business’ does not consist solely of corporations (although the limited stock company probably is the most extensive social formation throughout the world). other social forms such as family, extended kinship, residential community and networks also play an important part in business relations. in some respects, perhaps, we are espousing here a straw man argument. after all, members of epic, as described by melissa cefkin in her article in this issue, are not just american by birth or employed in the united states. they include numerous europeans (who held their own epic meeting in barcelona in may 2011) and japanese. but when we read their work (in, for example, cefkin 2009), we find ourselves hard put to find references that are not american. the same is true of american submissions to the jba. this saddens us, given how much attention overall european and other scholars pay to american authors’ work. the time has come to reach out across the seas and engage in comprehensive scholarship. journal of business anthropology, 1(1), spring 2012 8 small is still beautiful? we do not wish to imply that all anthropological scholarship in the united states is so introverted. this would be doing extreme injustice to people who, by the very nature of their profession, should be, and are, looking outwards beyond their own national, university, and other group boundaries. take, for example, marietta baba and carole hill’s (2006) examination of developments in applied anthropology in britain, russia and the united states during the past century and more. not only do they gently chide those of their american colleagues who might imagine that there is ‘one true way’ to practise anthropology; they carefully trace how theory and practice came to be separated in the discipline, with ‘pure’ forms adopted by scholars (wishing to be) employed in elite universities, and ‘applied’ forms left to the hoi polloi lower down the academic hierarchy. the idea that an ‘applied’ anthropologist, of whatever ilk, is somehow faintly disreputable, and not true to her discipline, is by no means new. in the words of evans-pritchard (1946: 93): it may be held that it is laudable for an anthropologist to investigate practical problems. possibly it is, but if he does so he must realise that he is no longer acting within the anthropological field but in the non-scientific field of administration. yet, evans-pritchard himself worked for the government of what was then the anglo-egyptian sudan, while most of his generation of anthropologists in britain – including john barnes, john beattie, raymond firth, meyer fortes, maurice freedman, w.r. geddes, max gluckman, edmund leach, lucy mair, clyde mitchell, s.f. nadel, and isaac schapera – engaged in applied anthropology at some point in their careers (benedict 1967: 584). the same can be said of such american anthropologists as conrad arensburg, ruth benedict, elliot chappel, george foster, burleigh gardner, laura nader, frederick richardson, donald sayles, sol tax, lloyd warner, and william foote whyte, among many, many others. this denigration of the practical uses to which anthropology may be put surfaces even more clearly in the field of business. why so? here, there is in fact a double set of beliefs, each of which reinforces the other. firstly, anthropologists who work in, or with, various forms of business organizations are tainted by their perceived ‘commercialism’: in batteau and psenka’s words, by ‘getting their hands dirty’. the implication here is that either they are paid by the business organization concerned, or their research will be used to further that organization’s business aims and profits (usually, it is further implied, at the expense of some underprivileged group or other). in this respect, the world of anthropology resembles that of cultural production in general, where we find a distinction clearly made between ‘creative’ and ‘humdrum’ personnel (caves 2000), with the former praised for their lofty ‘artistic’ moeran & garsten / what’s in a name? editors introduction to the journal of business anthropology 9 ideals and the latter damned for being concerned with financial administration. ‘pure’ anthropologists, then, are to film directors and editors, for instance, as ‘applied’ anthropologists are to producers and publishers. the sub-text here is that money is the root of all evil. ironically, this uneasiness in exploring the boundary zones of applied and ‘pure’ anthropology has stalled the investigation of what business anthropology is, and what its scholarly potentials are. the second set of beliefs centres on the well-known fact that anthropologists have tended to carry out their fieldwork in pristine wildernesses inhabited by ‘primitive’ peoples, who had no knowledge of, or little interest in, the modern industrial, highly urbanised societies from which they came. rather like william morris and others involved in the formation of britain’s arts and crafts movement in the latter half of the 19th century, these earlier anthropologists developed in their writings an implicit critique of both industrialism and, to a lesser extent, urbanization – writings that exhibited a fond romanticism for, and exoticization of, ‘the rest’ against ‘the west’. although anthropology has moved to embrace the study of complex societies and no longer concentrates exclusively on non-western or primitive societies (hannerz 1986), many of the discipline’s proponents seem to hold fast to a romantic idea that ‘small-scale’ is good, while ‘complex’ is somehow bad. better pigs and ancestors than mills in manchester; better the circulation of kula objects than of advertising agency accounts (moeran 1996). it is precisely because most business anthropology, as it has taken place hitherto, is conducted in highly (post-) industrialised countries like the united states and japan, that it receives the evans-pritchard treatment of faint, but damning, distaste. there is a way to overcome this prejudice, and that, we are convinced, is through the development of theory. by this we mean the need to face head-on ‘the difficulty anthropologists have had in giving a balanced attention to culture and to social structure; the relationship between actor and system, and between micro and macro levels in analysis; and our shifting understandings of what anthropology is really about’ and so ‘build a comparative understanding of human ways of life and thought’ (hannerz 1986: 363), in business as much as in society. precisely because business anthropology is not a discipline in itself, it must be firmly grounded in the theories and methods of anthropology as a whole. it needs more, not less, intellectual rigour than academic anthropology (benedict 1967: 586). in this respect, it will do us no harm to remind ourselves, as do batteau and psenka, that anthropologists have been thinking and writing about the comparative and theoretical implications of their research for many, many decades – in spite of appearances to the contrary in recent anthropology journal articles, some of whose authors seem reluctant to recall anything that happened by way of theorizing before the start of the present millennium, other than a journal of business anthropology, 1(1), spring 2012 10 token nod toward the publication of writing culture, edited by james clifford and george marcus, in 1985. let us, please, not emulate our students in thus ignoring time! the sun also rises? an appeal to theory in business anthropology is an appeal to the core of our discipline. whether we are ‘ivory tower’ academics or professionals – like the members of epic discussed by melissa cefkin in this issue – who make an everyday living out of practising anthropology on behalf of clients (e.g. sunderland and denny 2007), we need to bring in and update old theoretical formulations when they are appropriate and work, and to develop new ones as our ethnographic research requires. it is in this respect that we now turn to the anthropology of japan. our argument is that an intriguing set of historical turns in the anthropological study of japanese society and culture has spilled over into the study of business more generally. japan is in many ways the kuroko black-robed puppeteer in the development of what has now generally come to be referred to as ‘business anthropology’. let us try to explain what we mean. one theme focused on by pre-war pioneering scholars of japanese rural society such as ariga kizaemon and yanagita kunio was kinship and the traditional japanese ‘family’ system. there were obvious reasons for this that we need not go into here, but which had to do with japan’s development as the world’s first non-western industrialised society and a felt need to differentiate japanese society and culture from other industrialised societies and cultures in europe and the united states. over time, two competing theories of japanese kinship emerged: one stressing the patrilineal blood line and ‘lineage’, the other the economic functions of each family residence and the ‘extended household group’ (dōzoku). it was the latter theory – that the japanese household formed a political and economic ‘in-group’, whose members were related primarily, but not necessarily, by blood (nakane 1967) – which came to prevail and which was then applied to analyses and explanations of other social forms in japan (nakane 1972). in particular, it was argued that certain business formations imitated the japanese household system (or ie seido). one of these was the zaibatsu business monopoly, or financial clique, that emerged in the early pre-war stages of japanese industrial development. the way in which it hived off functional subsidiary companies, each of which was headed by a family member, resembled, it was suggested, the dōzoku extended household group (consisting of main and branch houses) that flourished in parts of japan during the feudal period. the formation of the keiretsu business groups after world war ii followed this pattern of ‘alliance capitalism’ (gerlach 1992). moeran & garsten / what’s in a name? editors introduction to the journal of business anthropology 11 japan’s traditional household characteristics were also seen to play an important role in the formation of the limited stock company. both formed closed ‘in groups’ whose members, it was said, were ‘permanent’ with ‘lifetime employment’. both looked after their members’ needs beyond their daily working conditions, by providing lodging, health care, and even marriage partners when so required. in these and several other ways, including the designation of ‘appropriate’ gender roles, both household and company were marked out as distinct from families and corporations in europe and the united states. japan’s business was based not on stock market, but on ‘welfare’, capitalism (dore 2000). these organizational arguments underpinning japanese business forms came, ironically, to be framed in cultural terms when, faced with the success of the japanese economy during the 1980s, american firms began to search for why they had failed so miserably to compete. the answer, it appeared, was ‘japanese culture’. japanese culture had something that american culture didn’t, but needed if it was to compete in the global marketplace. from this emerged the perceived need, following american understandings of japanese firms, for ‘corporate culture’. if japanese firms had their own cultures, and if they were successful, which they were, then american firms also had to have cultures to be successful (salaman 1997: 246-8)! this line of thinking gave birth to a whole new academic industry, but one which has virtually ignored – or misunderstood (bate 1997: 1157) – anthropology’s potential contributions to management and organization studies scholars’ understandings of culture (chapman 1997) – a theme pursued by czarniawska in this issue. the connections between anthropology and business in the study of japan, therefore, are of considerable historical depth and cast a shadow on the mid-1980s proclamation of the birth of ‘business anthropology’. let us not forget that both thomas rohlen (1974) and ronald dore (1973) had published the results of long-term anthropological fieldwork in a japanese bank and british and japanese factories in the early 1970s,1 while another english anthropologist, rodney clark (1979) wrote a definitive study of the japanese company at the end of the same decade. these pioneering works have been followed by many more during the past three decades (e.g. kondo 1990; roberts 1994; moeran 1996; wong 1999; matsunaga 2000; bestor 2004; sedgwick 2007; and so on). the trajectory of ethnographic studies on business in japan points to a basic anthropological insight – that business and trading relations are integrally interlinked with kinship ties, with households, and social networks. they are often best understood when related to social formations, although cultural aspects also play a role, of course – as we 1 robert cole (1971), a sociologist, also wrote about japanese blue collar workers based on ethnographic case studies conducted in two japanese companies journal of business anthropology, 1(1), spring 2012 12 can see in the role of religious beliefs, political ideologies, and systems of knowledge on the shaping of business relations and spheres. on ‘the cultural’ and ‘the social’ one of the major distinctions between american and european contributions to the field of business anthropology has been the relative weight given to ‘the cultural’, on the one hand, and ‘the social’, on the other. whereas, as we have seen, many american scholars picked up on the discovery of ‘culture’, not least ‘corporate culture’, as a key aspect of business, european scholars continued in the steps of their early ethnographic predecessors, and pursued the study and analysis of social structures. we do not wish to overstate the differences between american and european contributions to the field; there are certainly overlaps and mutual influences. but the fact remains that the theoretical legacy of mainstream anthropology, with its differing trajectories on the two continents, has contributed to a nuancing of the field of business anthropology. on closer examination, we find a variety of theoretical influences in the works of business anthropologists. all the more reason, then, to make use of these diversities to engage in comprehensive scholarship! anthropology’s ‘cultural turn’, as it developed in the us, has given rise to a plethora of insightful ethnographies of the cultural predispositions of business and finance. we may think of bill maurer’s (2005) work on local currencies and banking, caitlin zaloom’s (2006) study of how traders are remaking themselves to compete in the contemporary marketplace, and melissa fisher’s (2012) study of gender and finance on wall street. there is also karen ho’s (2009) examination of the everyday experiences and ideologies of wall street investment bankers, and annelise riles’ (2011) investigation into how legal thinking shapes global markets, while ellen hertz (1998) seems to have started it all with her ethnography of the shanghai stock market in the early to mid1990s. all of these have carved out the ethnographic study of cultures of business, trading and finance as distinctly anthropological (lately under the banner of ‘anthropology of finance’), and have yielded insights into the cultural, social and institutional contexts of trading. what they teach us is that if we start with what people in the markets tell us, and what we can observe by way of careful ethnographic observations and businessrelated problems on the ground, we are able to produce analyses that are relevant to anthropological theory, but also to the problems that all of us more ordinary souls are experiencing in markets here-and-now. in europe, the insistence on remaining with ‘the social’ has led the way to a relatively strong focus on the social underpinnings of exchange relations, much of it going back to barth’s (1963) studies of entrepreneurship and social change. barth’s legacy has had a strong impact on much anthropology in scandinavia, most notably in norway, moeran & garsten / what’s in a name? editors introduction to the journal of business anthropology 13 not least because he combined a keen eye for the local and the particular in trading relations with a view to large-scale social processes and social organization. hannerz’s (1992a; 1992b; 1996) theories about globalization occurring through frameworks of cultural flow also emphasised social networks and forms of connectivity as entry-points into the understanding of how globalization works. and in these processes, market relations were seen to contribute to organizing the transnational flow of people, ideas, and commodities. there is no denying that in contemporary societies across the world, we tend to grow up corporate, as it were. our social relations and our social lives are – whether we like it or not – moulded by the corporate frame. here is another version of the weberian ‘iron cage’ to scrutinize. we have over the years seen a growth in interest in how understanding the corporation as a driver of the globalization of markets and capitalism; as a shaper of contemporary ideologies and ways of thinking; and as exerting a strong influence on how employees are fashioned as corporate subjects. works that come to mind include gideon kunda’ s (1992) research on organizational culture and control in a high tech company; christina garsten’s studies of transnational organizational culture at another high-tech company, apple computer (1994), as well as of the making up of flexible employees (2008); and marianne lien’s ethnography of marketing practices in a norwegian food manufacturing company (1997), showing how marketing practice is accomplished and how practical marketing decisions are made. more recent ethnographies include those by jakob krause jensen (2010), who studied the corporate flexible regime at the danish electronics company bang & olufsen, and emil røyrvik (2011), who investigated managerial ideology in a norwegian oil company. as different in their theoretical orientations as these contributions are, all these works share a common feature: the grounding of the analysis of the organization as a social form. and by articulating the organizational framing of business–related activities, they reveal the workings of larger structures of power, as well as the limits and opportunities of individual agency. studies such as these also challenge the polanyian (1944/1957) notion that contemporary market exchange is disembedded and cut loose from social ties and constraints. instead, they reveal how social ties are both constitutive of corporate activities, and how they cut across organizations in ways that challenge their boundedness and unity. staying with the social is perhaps also one reason why the anthropology of business, as it is practiced in europe, is more closely connected to organizational anthropology. we should thus not be surprised to find that there is a strong affinity in much of european anthropological studies of business corporations with the field of qualitative organizations studies, and more specifically towards critically journal of business anthropology, 1(1), spring 2012 14 oriented studies of management and organization. the article by barbara czarniawska in this issue traces her own affinity with anthropology – albeit a somewhat personal one that anthropologists themselves may find surprising. an interest in social forms should not blind us to the trading that goes on in social networks across and beyond formally recognized organizations. keith hart’s (1973) path-breaking studies of the informal economy of the ‘positively employed’ (rather than unemployed) in ghana paved the way for many others to investigate the social relational components of informal economies, and how these are socially organized. one recent contribution is lotta björklund larsen’s study (2010) of the uses of informal market services in sweden and their fundamental relational component, not just to kin and neighbours, but also to the state. in studies of informal economy, it is precisely not the formal, but the hidden, the underground, the invisible, that is in focus – the maintenance of trading relations in the interstices of the formal economy. as eloquently pointed out by hart himself : ‘when we identify something as informal, it is because it fails to reproduce the pattern of some established form. the consequence for economic analysis is obvious. the ‘formal’ economy is the epitome of whatever passes for regularity in our contemporary understanding, here the institutions of modern nation states, the more corporate levels of capitalist organization and the intellectual procedures devised by economists to represent and manipulate the world. the ‘informal’ economy is anything which is not entailed directly in these definitions of reality …. it follows from this that informality is in the eye of the beholder.’2 plain talk we have here briefly outlined some of the paths already taken by those studying and writing about business anthropology, and suggested new ways forward into the future. our aim in launching the jba is to bring together fragmented anthropologies: in europe and the united states, on the one hand, but also in other parts of the world; their social and cultural forms of analysis, on another; and their numerous sub-branches – applied, development, economic, corporate, industrial, organizational, and so on – that might usefully be brought back together, on yet another. after all, these days, all of us would be hard put, if asked, to find any aspect of society and culture that is not in one way or another commodified and thus economic. as batteau and psenka point out in their 2 http://thememorybank.co.uk/papers/informal-economy/ (accessed 12 may, 2012). http://thememorybank.co.uk/papers/informal-economy/ moeran & garsten / what’s in a name? editors introduction to the journal of business anthropology 15 article published here, ‘numerous experiences and institutions uniquely human – religious meditation, familial intimacy, aesthetic contemplation, kinship, government – can and already have been commercialized, turned into a business, had profits extracted from them, and laid the foundations of new institutional régimes’. we are acutely aware of the fact that there is an awful lot more that we could – or perhaps, should – have discussed in this introduction to the first issue of the jba. we might have gone into more depth, for example, in our musings on the differences between business and organizational anthropology. we might, too, have taken up issues of ethics and contracts facing practicing anthropologists, as initiated by batteau and psenka. we have ignored ethnography and the methods that anthropologists now use to study the domain of business in the digital age. as barbara czarniawska points out, traditional ethnography – with its focus on a prolonged period of participant observation – faces problems of participation, time, space, and invisibility, when applied to studies of business organizations. but, as often as not, these require slight adjustments, rather than radical change. we plan to have others engage with such themes in later issues of the journal, so if you get an urge to write on these or any other topics, please feel free to do so. as we said at the beginning, we don’t yet know who you are (although we might entertain an idea or two about some of you). we don’t know if you are going to read the jba (although the fact that three case studies and two field reports were downloaded 2,000 times in just over two months suggests that somebody is!). more importantly, we don’t yet know if you will think the website and this first issue of enough interest to make you yourselves want to submit your own work for publication in the journal. all we can do right now is keep our fingers crossed and send the occasional prayer wafting aloft to our local deity (who sometimes seems like a cross between buddha and a bottle) that articles, case studies and field reports will magically appear out of cyberspace. this is your journal. however many stratagems we entertain as editors, they may well be spoiled by your indifference. so we trust that you will write for us, and write to us, so that the jba may flourish and not sink into titanic oblivion. and, when you write, please remember to write in plain english. one thing that can be said about anthropology in general is that, as a discipline, it has been blessed in the past by good writing, and by anthropologists who have been good writers. this is by no means the case nowadays, when the monograph is being ousted by the journal article, and freedom of expression by all kinds of restrictions. in spite of all appearances to the contrary in most academic journals, it is possible to express complex ideas in simple language. theoretical musings can be intelligible, divested of jargon. and articles in the jba, unlike articles in most other journals, really ought to say something that is novel, exciting, stimulating and provocative. they ought to strive to reach across to a journal of business anthropology, 1(1), spring 2012 16 variety of audiences. otherwise, there isn’t much point in publishing them in the first place – unless, of course, we are going to play the citation index game, which we’re not. so there! references baba, marietta 1986 business and industrial anthropology: an overview. washington, dc: american anthropological association. ----2000 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the social organization of japanese business. berkeley & los angeles: university of california press. hannerz, ulf 1986 ‘theory in anthropology: small is beautiful? the problem of complex cultures.’ comparative studies in society and history 28 (2): 362-67. ----1992. cultural complexity. new york: columbia university press. ----1992b. ‘the global ecumene as a networks of networks.’ in kuper, a, (ed.). conceptualizing society. london: routledge. hannerz, u. 1996. transnational connections. london: routledge. ----2004 foreign news: exploring the world of foreign correspondents. chicago: university of chicago press. hart, k 1973 ‘informal income opportunities and urban employment in ghana.’ journal of modern african studies 11, 61–89. hertz, ellen 1998 the trading crowd: an ethnography of the shanghai stock market. cambridge: cambridge university press. ho, karen 2009 liquidated: an ethnography of wall street. durham, n.c.: duke university press. holmes, d. r. and g. e. marcus 2006 ‘fast capitalism: para-ethnography and the rise of the symbolic analyst,’ pp 33-57 in m. s. fisher and g. downey (eds.) frontiers of capital : ethnographic reflections on the new economy. durham: duke university press. holzberg, c. and m. giovannini 1981 ‘anthropology and industry: reappraisal and new directions.’ annual review of anthropology 10: 31760. hylland eriksen, thomas 1995 small places, large issues: an introduction to social and cultural anthropology. london: pluto. kemper, steven 2003 ‘how advertising makes its object,’ pp. 35-54 in t. de waal malefyt and b. moeran (eds.) advertising cultures. oxford: berg. journal of business anthropology, 1(1), spring 2012 18 khalif, s. and emile schwayri 1966 ‘family firms and industrial development: the lebanese case.’ economic development and cultural change 15: 59-69. kondo, dorinne 1990 crafting selves: power, gender, and discourses of identity in a japanese workplace. university of chicago press. krause jensen, jakob 2010 flexible firm: 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world,’ pp. 55-74 in t. de waal malefyt and b. moeran (eds.) advertising cultures. oxford: berg. moeran, brian 1996 a japanese advertising agency: an anthropology of media and markets. richmond: curzon. ----2007 ethnography at work. oxford: berg. nader, laura 1972 ‘up the anthropologist – perspectives gained from studying up,’ in d. hymes (ed.) reinventing anthropology. new york: random house. nakane, chie 1967 kinship and economic organization in rural japan. london school of economics monographs on social anthropology no. 32. london: athlone. ----1972 japanese society. berkeley & los angeles: university of california press. polanyi, karl [1944] 1957 the great transformation. boston: beacon press. rajak, dinah 2011 in good company: an anatomy of corporate social responsibility. stanford university press. http://sro.sussex.ac.uk/10407/ http://sro.sussex.ac.uk/10407/ moeran & garsten / what’s in a name? editors introduction to the journal of business anthropology 19 reining, conrad c. 1962 ‘a lost period of applied anthropology.’ american anthropologist, new series, 64 (3): 593-600. riles, annelise 2011. collateral knowledge: legal reasoning in the global financial markets. chicago: university of chicago press. roberts, glenda 1994 staying on the line: blue-collar women in contemporary japan. honolulu: university of hawai’i press. rohlen, thomas 1974 for harmony and strength. berkeley & los angeles: university of california press. røyrvik, emil 2011 the allure of capitalism: an ethnography of management and the global economy in crisis. oxford: berghahn. salaman, graeme 1997 ‘culturing production,’ pp. 236-84 in p. du gay (ed.) production of culture/culture of production. london: open university/sage. schwartzman, helen 1993 ethnography in organizations. thousand oaks, ca: sage. sedgwick, mitchell 2007 globalisation and japanese organisational culture: an ethnography of a japanese corporation in france. london: psychology press. sunderland, patricia and rita denny 2007 doing anthropology in consumer research. walnut creek, ca: left coast press. van maanen, john 1982 ‘fieldwork on the beat’, pp. 103-51 in j. van maanen, j. dabbs, and r. faulkner (eds.) varieties of qualitative research. beverly hills, ca: sage. wong, heung wah 1999 japanese bosses, chinese workers: power and control in a hong kong megastore. london: curzon. wright, susan 1994 ‘”culture” in anthropology and organizational studies,’ pp. 1-31 in her edited anthropology of organizations. london and new york: routledge. zaloom, caitlin 2006 out of the pits: traders and technology from chicago to london. university of chicago press. *an earlier version of this paper was presented at the 110th annual meeting of the american anthropological association in montreal canada (2011), entitled “business, organizational and institutional anthropology: a century of anthropology in the making”. anthropology and business: influence and interests* marietta l. baba abstracts the premise of this article is that the expansive domain of business, as expressed in its market-transaction based, organizational, and institutional forms, has influenced the development or “making” of anthropology as a discipline and a profession for the better part of a century (i.e., since the 1920s). the influences were reciprocal, in that making anthropology played a role in forming the industrial order of the early 20th century and established precedents for the interaction of anthropology and the business domain that continues into the contemporary era. anthropologists acknowledge that the time has come for our discipline to attend to business and its corporate forms and engage them as legitimate subjects of inquiry (fisher and downey 2006; cefkin 2009; welker et. al. 2011), and this suggests that it would be prudent to examine the ways in which business is focusing upon anthropology, and the potential implications of such attention. throughout this article, the term “business” will refer to private firms as members of an institutional field, meaning “organizations that in the aggregate, constitute a recognized area of institutional life” (; i.e., the totality of relevant actors; bourdieu 1971; dimaggio and powell 1983:148). over time, this field has attracted prominent academic researchers (as will be discussed herein), who may become intellectual “suppliers” to businesses, and thus part of the field. therefore, the term “business” may include any organization or individual that is part of the field, including academic suppliers (see also discussion section). to page 1 of 52 jba 1 (1): 20-71 spring 2012 © the author(s) 2012 issn 2245-4217 www.cbs.dk/jba baba / anthropology and business: influence and interests 21 reflect the scope and complexity of the institutional field, the term “domain of business” may be used interchangeably with “business”. keywords business anthropology, industry, institutions, organizations “rules and rule-makers are necessary to order, and therefore to human freedom. business as a rule-maker, accordingly, stands high in responsibility among human institutions, as a source of goods and services, to be sure, but also as source of order and of freedom.” beardsley ruml, tomorrow’s business, 19451 introduction the early period in which anthropologists engaged directly with the business domain in the united states (1920-1960) often is dismissed as a marginal or failed effort from which little can be learned (e.g., see discussion in welker et. al, 2011:55). yet, during this early period of high activity, anthropologists, both academics and practitioners, established the foundations for many of our contemporary engagements with (and dilemmas concerning) capitalist enterprise, including ethnographic practice in consumer research, anthropologicallyinformed consultancy in advertising and design, corporate ethnography, as well as critical reflections upon anthropology and business (eddy and partridge 1978; easton 2001; mills 2006). further, during this early period, anthropological engagement with business interests and those of the state set in motion patterns of interaction that became institutionalized over the century and gradually defined anthropology as a discipline. it is worthy of note that american business interests had an influence on european anthropologists and institutions during this same early period, especially the 1920s and 1930s, through philanthropic funding of ethnographic research in the colonies, a subject that has been explored in the mainstream disciplinary literature (goody 1995; stocking 1995; see also mills 2002). it is seldom that the two streams of transatlantic business influence and interest with respect to anthropology – that in the united states and that in europe, especially great britain – during this early period are examined in parallel and with respect to global intellectual networks in anthropology that formed 1 beardsley ruml, phd university of chicago, was director of the laura spelman rockefeller memorial from 1922 to 1929, when this private foundation was redirected from its initial mission of social welfare toward a new purpose of establishing an empirical foundation for the social sciences. journal of business anthropology, 1(1), spring 2012 22 both as a stimulus to such interest and as a consequence of it. discussions of the early period often fragment history into particles that segregate business and industrial anthropology in the united states from colonial anthropology under the british. it is curious that more attention has not been devoted to understanding the global patterns of institutional influence that led to early encounters between anthropology and business on both sides of the atlantic, including interactions among corporations, private foundations, governments, academic institutions, and individuals during the early 20th century. this article will suggest that dynamic relationships among these actors reflected an effort to achieve the national and international agendas of early 20th century capitalist elites, with the “making” of anthropology2 playing a significant role. there are advantages to examining the early period of anthropology and business engagement in comparison to the more recent period of intensive involvement: i.e., circa 1980 to the present. probably the most important advantage is temporal distance that permits placement of our subject in a larger historical and social context, and time for deeper understanding. there have been numerous studies by historians and members of ours and other disciplines on the business elites and academic disciplines of that era, including re-studies of archival and experimental records (e.g., kohler 1978; bulmer and bulmer 1981; kohler 1987; gillespie 1991; kuklick 1991; goody 1995; stocking 1995; mills 2002, 2006). these provide multiple points of view on the context and role of anthropology and its relationship to business and other disciplines. also, the fact that we are not as directly entangled in the specific issues and debates of the early period, provides us with a relatively less compromised vantage point from which to contemplate our forebears. history may gain for us the kind of cultural “distance” that enables juxtaposition and thereby makes the “familiar” just strange enough to lessen the risk that we will continue to reproduce that which we thought we had set aside. in this article whose larger purpose is to introduce the new journal of business anthropology, we will explore three themes related to the early period of business and anthropological engagement: first, the interrelationships among anthropological and business interests in the united states and europe during the 1920s through 1940s as part of the “making” of anthropology as a social science discipline during that period; second, the contextual factors that shaped these relationships 2 the construct “making” anthropology is understood to reflect the force of a selected set of influences shaping the discipline and related professions of socio-cultural anthropology during its formative years, not in some “totalizing” manner but in the sense of a significant set of factors among others. baba / anthropology and business: influence and interests 23 and some of their consequences for various parties; and third, the implications of such patterns and relationships that continue to have relevance to our discipline in the present. business in its economic, organizational and institutional forms for the purposes of this article, business is not conceived of as a singularity, but as a form of human endeavor that is richly diverse in representational dimensions, including the economic, organizational and institutional. business in its economic form is conceptualized in the broadest sense as trade, commercial transactions or engagements (e.g., buying and selling of goods and services in the marketplace, and organized economic activities attendant to such practices [oxford english dictionary 2011 online version3]). anthropologists have longstanding interests in economics to the extent of establishing a subfield of economic anthropology whose literature is fundamental to the anthropologies of business (wilk and cligger 2007). since globallyintegrated business systems have extended their reach to humanity in virtually every community around the world, anthropologists have acknowledged economic and market activity as specifically connected to the business and corporate realms which organize such endeavors, and the study of these phenomena is entering the mainstream of disciplinary anthropology (e.g., see fisher and downey 2006; ong and collier 2006; welker et. al. 2011). an important reason why globalization brings business and the corporate form to the foreground is that global market transactions are more likely to be pursued or conducted by formal organizations that are required to manage the complexity of trade integrated on a worldwide scale (theoretically, bringing transactions inside a firm reduces transaction costs [williamson 2005])4. firms (e.g., companies, corporations, partnerships) are embedded within and across societies, and during the late 20th century they emerged as powerful institutional actors, whose influence reaches beyond the marketplace and into virtually every aspect of modern life (scott 2001). the increasing power of business in society stimulates diffusion of business-oriented rules, norms and constructs into society and academia (e.g., the “anthropology of finance”, “audit culture”, “consumption studies” all find their origins in the worlds of business). in recent years, organizational science has more or less abandoned the notion of studying organizations in isolation from other 3accessed november 24, 2011 4 such an arrangement requires the presence of a business firm to govern the internal agents conducting the transactions. journal of business anthropology, 1(1), spring 2012 24 social phenomena, and has been examining them through the lens of new institutional (or, in economics, neo-institutional) theory (menard and shirley 2005; scott 2008). while there is no consensus on new institutional theory across the social sciences, business organizations (along with individuals and nation-states) classically have been viewed as the principal institutional actors (a social actor with interests and agency); organizations may hold coercive power over individuals, while nation-states may compel organizations. businesses as social actors often are significant forces in field sites that are of interest to anthropologists. new institutional theory specifically is an approach which suggests that organizations such as businesses are socially constructed and “involved in an arena of social or cultural production and the dynamic relationships among them” (dimaggio 1979:1463). pierre bourdieu (1971, 1984), an influential theorist in contemporary anthropology, contributed significantly to the foundational construct of the institutional field, one of the most important ideas in new institutional theory (scott 2008:183). viewing business from a new institutional perspective renders it a scholarly field of interest and inquiry that has brought about a shift in our disciplinary perspective, from that of business as an external and potentially hostile “other” with which anthropologists have had an arm’s length relationship, to that of business as part of a larger macro-social reality, and within which anthropologists may hold engaged positions (cefkin 2009; welker et. al. 2011). due to this evolving situation, the domain of business now is being recognized as deserving of our understanding, interpretation, and critical assessment, yet this dawning awareness brings its own quandaries with respect to positionality and ethics, some of our discipline’s major issues at this time. each of these conceptions of business economic transactions integrated across the globe; organizational actors endowed with governance systems; institutions engaged in an arena of social and cultural production – will be engaged to examine interactions with early and mid-20th century anthropologies. we will investigate how and why the interaction began, where it led, and what may be its significance for the present. the construct “business anthropology” attention here is not focused on categorical definitions of “business anthropology” or “business anthropologist”.5 just as there are many 5as a heuristic for the general reader, the term business anthropology may be considered to be inquiry or practice within the business domain that is baba / anthropology and business: influence and interests 25 “anthropologies”, there are many “business anthropologies” or anthropologies of business. one point of our complicated history is that multiple forms of the phenomena glossed as business anthropology have emerged and are evolving over time, and their contours and edges may overlap or become blurred in a manner that makes separation of one genre from another difficult or counterproductive (although that does not mean that attempts to do so have ended). for example, the turn to critical anthropology over the past two decades, together with a surge of interest in capitalism within the discipline (blim 2000), has engendered a literature of critical reflection upon anthropological engagement with business and corporations, including that by authors who currently practice or have practiced inside companies (e.g., see fisher and downey 2006; cefkin 2009; suchman forthcoming). whether or not these writings represent “business anthropology” may not be the most salient question; rather, this literature must be included in any consideration of the field of anthropology and business. anthropology and business: our legacy of theory and practice the received view of anthropology’s relationship with the domain of business usually begins with western electric’s hawthorne project (1927-1932) and the subsequent rise (and fall) of elton mayo’s human relations school, with numerous anthropologists and others contributing to this project (eddy and partridge 1978; burawoy 1979; holzberg and giovannini 1981; schwartzman 1993). these activities not only initiated studies of human and social behavior in corporations, but also launched anthropologically-oriented studies of consumption, branding and advertising through the successful spin-off of a consulting firm by anthropologists at the university of chicago (i.e., social research, inc.; see eddy and partridge; easton 2001). the spin-off company was able to form and succeed when the center of empirical research in social science shifted from harvard to the university of grounded in anthropological epistemology, methodology and/or substantive knowledge. it is worthy of note that a cultural-cognitive category glossed as “business anthropology” probably was in use during the early period of business and anthropology engagement (1920-1960), since at least one occurrence of the term was identified in a search of five major journals in anthropology published between 1940 and 1960 (the society for applied anthropology was created in 1941). the journals included american anthropologist, annual reviews in anthropology, anthropological quarterly, the applied anthropologist (later human organization), and current anthropology. at least one article was identified that contained the term “business and industrial applied anthropology” (see nash, manning. 1959. applied and action anthropology in the understanding of man. anthropological quarterly 32(1):67-81.). journal of business anthropology, 1(1), spring 2012 26 chicago, attracting anthropologists including radcliffe-brown, warner, burleigh gardner who started-up the firm, and others (gillespie 1991:254). the recounting of these events may mention transatlantic ties between hawthorne era researchers such as elton mayo and w. lloyd warner and british social anthropologists bronislaw malinowski and a. r. radcliffe-brown (e.g., see partridge and eddy 1978; schwartzman 1993). gillespie’s (1991) re-study of the hawthorne project is especially thorough in detailing connections between hawthorne researchers and british social anthropologists.6 these scholars were linked together by intellectual interests in the empirical study of social phenomenon, which represented a new wave of social science contrasted with previous scholarship oriented toward archival records and philosophical arguments. they also shared a framework of ideas related to functionalist theory that may be traced to the french sociologist emile durkheim (harris 1968; goody 1995). functionalism, the theoretical basis of social anthropology at that time, is one of the oldest ideas in social science, relying upon an organic analogy to understand relationships in society. radcliffe-brown’s structural-functionalism drew from durkheim’s notion of “solidarity” to suggest that “social systems” display a sort of “unity” in which all parts “work together with a sufficient degree of harmony or internal consistency: i.e., without producing persistent conflicts which can neither be resolved nor regulated” (radcliffe-brown 1952:181; c.f., harris:1968:515-16). early studies by malinowski did not differ much from the durkheimian notion of function, while his later work was influenced by freud, and he developed the idea that individual bio-physical needs were satisfied within the social organism via institutions and symbolic projections. these ideas were foundational in the theoretical work of elton mayo and w. lloyd warner (gillespie 1991), and are reflected in the close 6 malinowski established a personal friendship with mayo on his way from melbourne to the trobriand islands (mayo was based at the university of queensland in brisbane). it may have been malinowski who convinced mayo to leave queensland by cajoling him to visit melbourne and write a book (gillespie 1991:98). radcliffe-brown recruited warner to doctoral studies in anthropology on a visit to berkeley where warner was a student, and r-b subsequently became warner’s adviser in australia (the two men also overlapped at the university of chicago, where r-b lectured between 1931 and 1937 [see for references baba 2009b; see also partridge and eddy 1978]). warner met mayo when the former was appointed as an instructor at harvard following his fieldwork in australia, and sought out mayo in the business school hoping to find funds to support a community study (gillespie 1991:155). the role of australia as a meeting point in the development of these networks has been noted in the history of the hawthorne project by gillespie (1991). baba / anthropology and business: influence and interests 27 relationships established among these four individuals, particularly between radcliffe-brown and warner and between malinowski and mayo. anthropology and business: the financial nexus what typically is not captured in historical narratives of our legacy is the full extent of the linkages among the aforementioned social actors on both sides of the atlantic, and especially the social and economic context for these connections. if the framework of our early history is expanded to include its financing where the funding came from, what motivated its trajectory, how funding policies emerged and what they signified intellectually some interesting issues emerge that have bearing upon the present. the role of rockefeller philanthropy in the history of anthropology has been discussed previously (stocking 1995, goody 1995, mills 2002); however these accounts do not examine the background against which the rockefeller foundation made decisions as an organization, nor do they fully explore the implications of the funding patterns in anthropology, including their consequences for anthropological practice. one of the interesting aspects of the four careers mentioned previously (i.e., malinowski, mayo, radcliffe-brown and warner) was their shared experience with a specific funding source, including both the laura spelman rockefeller memorial (hereafter referred to as the memorial) 7 and other branches of the rockefeller philanthropies (e.g., the division of studies). in the literature, much attention has been given to the memorial, and this is warranted considering the magnitude of its financial contributions. under the directorship of beardsley ruml (1922-1929), $21 million for social science research was disbursed by the memorial. more than half of this amount went to just five institutions chicago, columbia, the brookings institution, the london school of economics (lse), and harvard (bulmer and bulmer 1981:386). each of the principal figures in the early history of anthropology and business were affiliated to at least one of these institutions (warner and radcliffe-brown at chicago, malinowski at lse, 7 the memorial was created in 1918 in memory of the wife of john d. rockefeller. sr. (laura spelman rockefeller) following her death in 1915. it was initially capitalized with $74 million, and expended $50 million over the 11 years of its existence, after which its operations were consolidated into the rockefeller foundation proper. after this point, a further $10 million were given by it to the spelman fund in new york to pursue specialized work in public administration; these efforts were separate from the memorial (bulmer and bulmer 1981:351). journal of business anthropology, 1(1), spring 2012 28 and mayo at harvard).8 however, it is also important to recognize that the memorial was not the only rockefeller entity supporting anthropology during the early period. the rockefeller foundation and its division of studies provided a five year grant to the australian national research council for anthropological research in the region, to include both social and biological anthropology (kohler 1987:156-58). this funding benefitted radcliffe-brown during his five year stint as chair of anthropology in sydney between 1926 and 1930 (stocking 1995:340-341). overall, this funding record suggests that rockefeller philanthropy provided significant financing associated with the early field research and academic appointments that in one way or another are connected to the historical roots of relationships between anthropology and the business domain, not only in the united states, but elsewhere around the world (i.e., rockefeller funding supported fieldwork in africa as well as australia). this financial support is all the more significant because there were virtually no other substantial sources of funding for social science research available at that time (goody 1995, stocking 1995). government funding for research was non-existent, universities were poorly equipped to support social science research, and other foundations did not support social science inquiry (with the exception of russell sage, which funded survey research [bulmer and bulmer 1981]). in the 1920s, several forces converged toward creating a favorable climate for support of social science research (bulmer and bulmer 1981, kohler 1987). prior to the 1920s, private foundations had not shown much interest in funding university-based research, as academic scientists were viewed as individualistic in their interests and not oriented toward pursuit of the social goals that animated philanthropists (e.g., public health, education, social welfare [kohler 1987]). at the same time, university researchers were wary of interference from private research sponsors. world war i had altered these perceptions, as academics and foundation personnel worked together and formed relationships that built trust. the national research council (nrc) emerged as an intermediary through which foundation funds could be provided to university researchers by a mutually agreeable model. the foundations’ goal would be to develop the larger community of science, and academic researchers would be protected from interference by private sponsors (kohler 1987:140142). these developments had an influence on social science disciplines. the rise of the natural sciences championed by the nrc 8 gifts from the rockefellers helped to establish the university of chicago, the harvard business school (the base from which mayo conducted his research) and the brookings institution (bulmer and bulmer 1981; gillespie 1991). baba / anthropology and business: influence and interests 29 created pressure for a similar pathway in social science, and some fields followed suit with efforts to take a more rigorous (positivist) approach (statistics, psychology, economics, sociology [for discussion on sociology see ross 1991:247-256]). some prominent scholars believed that social science would develop along the lines of natural science, ultimately enabling prediction and control of human and social phenomena. a more rigorous approach to social science also was more expensive. funds were needed to support fieldwork, statistical documentation and analysis, equipment, and assistants to engage in the more routine tasks. however, neither universities nor governments offered funds to underwrite the cost. the most important source of funding for social science research in the 1920s was the laura spelman rockefeller memorial, mentioned previously. its strategy for funding social science was developed by beardsley ruml, a psychologist who received his phd from the university of chicago. during world war i he had been assigned to devise psychological tests for the military, one of the first instances of applied psychology in the united states. ruml entered the scene when the memorial’s leadership determined that its record of accomplishment was not sufficiently distinguished, and the management began a search among their philanthropic networks for a suitable director.9 ruml, who was then employed as an assistant to the president of the carnegie corporation in new york, was known as a bright and capable “idea man” who would be able to re-conceptualize the trajectory of the memorial.10 he was appointed its director in 1922. ruml had considerable autonomy in developing and implementing his ideas for re-directing the memorial, provided that these ideas were approved by key memorial trustees with the confidence of john d. rockefeller jr., who also was president of the memorial but did not engage in day-to-day affairs. two trustees in particular were critical – arthur woods, the acting president of the memorial until 1929, who also was a vice-president of the colorado fuel and iron company (significance to be discussed below), and raymond fosdick, another trustee, one of rockefeller, jr.’s closest advisers. fosdick was a wilsonian democrat who was sympathetic to social 9 the memorial was administered from the offices of john d. rockefeller, jr. 10 ruml later became dean of the newly reorganized division of social sciences at the university of chicago in the 1930s, and it was one of the faculty seminars devoted to problems in the social sciences held within this division that provided the basis for radcliffe-brown’s lectures on social anthropology theory that ultimately were published posthumously as a natural science of society; eggan 1957. journal of business anthropology, 1(1), spring 2012 30 science and backed most of ruml’s proposals (bulmer and bulmer 1981:359). ruml ran the memorial as a small, entrepreneurial organization in which he was closely involved in all of the major decisions. he retained highly centralized responsibility and control in management, and his influence with the key trustees endowed him with substantial power in directing the memorial’s resources. ruml’s early report on scientific research for 1919-1922, written soon after his arrival in 1922, signaled the direction in which he intended to move (c.f., bulmer and bulmer 1981:361): “such research (i.e., scientific) has had rather immediate relations to measures of human welfare. the memorial’s interest in scientific research is essentially humanitarian, having as its foundation a belief that knowledge and understanding of the natural forces that are manifested in the behavior of people and of things will result concretely in the improvement of conditions of life.” this statement indicates that ruml intended to honor the memorial’s standing commitment to humanitarian goals and human welfare, while at the same time suggesting that these goals could best be achieved if greater attention were given to scientific research as a foundation for understanding the forces underlying the behavior of people. this was a controversial argument, not only because ruml’s intention would divert funds from the direct support of social welfare (e.g., aid for the needy), but because he was aligning with other forces that envisioned the social sciences as developing in parallel with the natural sciences. as bulmer and bulmer (1981:363) note: “the purpose of developing a body of fact and principle to be utilized in the solution of social problems would in no sense be an exclusively academic interest in the advancement of social theory and social philosophy. it would be a practical interest in human welfare, in the furtherance of which the development of the social sciences was an essential means to that end.” the memorial’s goals for the future of social science were to become significant in the later intellectual and practical development of anthropology, particularly as these relate to anthropology’s relationships with business, as we will discuss shortly. the context of the ludlow incident there was yet another aspect of controversy that created a delicate situation for ruml. previously, the rockefeller foundation had attempted to support a specific line of social science research that ended baba / anthropology and business: influence and interests 31 in a political and public relations debacle, forcing the foundation to withdraw from the project. to gain perspective on this latter situation requires a digression. the ludlow incident, sometimes referred to as the “ludlow massacre” (the quotation marks suggesting that its status as a massacre is contested) took place during a highly compressed time of rapid industrialization in the united states (1880-1920) when fundamental areas such as steel, energy, automobiles, and other consumer durables manufacturing were experiencing expansion and complex changes in their organization and management, including the rise of a professional managerial class, both middle and upper management. in conjunction with these changes, the “scientific” management movement and its intellectual leader, frederick w. taylor, were on a mission to dismantle the “secret knowledge” of craft-based work through its reorganization in factories, mills and mines, based on efficiency principles and managerial controls (taylor 1911, braverman 1974, gillespie 1991). the careful assignment of a specific worker to a specific production task on the basis of skills and/or temperament was supposed to end the craft-domination of production and also ensure that workers were more satisfied with their job roles and compensation, which was to be incentive-based (e.g., by the piece). craft-based workers in companies (e.g., miners) resisted these changes, without much success. on a collision course, the skilled trade labor unions, especially the nationally organized american federation of labor (afl), were on a drive to organize workers in trades across america, but their efforts were met with strong resistance from companies (mills 1994). members of trade unions regularly went on strike against their employers, and violence sometimes broke out. these strikes were not legal, and violence often occurred as union members clashed with private security guards, state militia, and even federal troops. sometimes, people were killed in these struggles. prior to the great depression of the 1930s, american workers 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. the involvement of political radicals (e.g., socialists, communists, anarchists) in some unions heightened tensions with business managers and executives. one of the most notorious and violent clashes involving an effort to organize workers into a union was the “ludlow massacre”. a strike for improved wages, better working conditions and union recognition erupted into violence on april 20, 1914 at the rockefeller-controlled colorado fuel and iron company (c&fi) in southern colorado when state militia and company police opened fire on the miners’ tent camp journal of business anthropology, 1(1), spring 2012 32 (gillespie 1991:23).11 several people were killed in the clash, including two women and eleven children who suffocated in a pit dug under their tent during a fire storm. john d. rockefeller jr. was publicly blamed for the deaths, a situation that appears to have haunted him for many years afterwards. the public outrage that followed this incident and an investigation by the u.s. commission on industrial relations are worthy of note for two reasons. first, they point toward a shift in public attitudes regarding large corporations and their relationships with other stakeholders in society; and second, they suggest a serious issue facing the rockefellers and other public figures whose moves were scrutinized critically by the press, the public and politicians. the first point illustrates one of the trends in the progressive era toward critiques of corporate excess (sometimes ignited by “muckraking” journalists) and reforms aimed at curbing the more egregious practices of bare-knuckled capitalist competition. this was the period during which congress enacted the first anti-trust laws to ban certain forms of monopoly that were defined as illegal (i.e., the sherman anti-trust act of 1890). business executives became aware of the negative consequences of public opinion, and began to court public favor, in part to avoid anti-trust action (brody 1980:51). the rockefellers’ standard oil company did not escape an anti-trust breakup by the us supreme court in 1911. however the rockefellers later endeavored to address the concerns of the public and congress with respect to the ludlow incident through various actions, some of which were accepted while others failed to win approval. among the failed attempts, the one that is central to our purposes in this article was an action taken through the newly formed rockefeller foundation (rf).12 in the aftermath of the ludlow incident, the economic research division of the rf called upon william l. mckenzie king, a canadian politician and expert on industrial relations to formulate an industrial relations plan for cf&i and to conduct a detailed study of the entire field of industrial relations.13 this action by the rf was a failure, however, as labor leaders and congressional 11 rockefeller interests owned a controlling share the colorado fuel and iron company, which was managed by john d. rockefeller, jr. from his office in new york (zinn 1990). 12 the rockefeller foundation was established in 1913 in the state of new york as a means to accumulate the wealth of john d. rockefeller, sr. 13 industrial relations was an emerging area of professional specialization that paralleled the rise of industrialization. it rationalized labor relations policy through the development of a professional group of managers whose careers were dedicated to labor-management relations, underpinned by research and publications, college-level courses, and professional organizations (gillespie 1991:16-17, 28-30). baba / anthropology and business: influence and interests 33 liberals reacted angrily, charging that the rf was a vehicle for the family’s private interests (bulmer and bulmer 1981:350).14 the rockefellers already had been unsuccessful four years earlier in their efforts to have their foundation incorporated by the u. s. congress due to charges that such foundations were “built on the ill-gotten gains of ‘robber barons’ and that philanthropic programs would be used to undermine the democratic process” (gillespie 1991:23). the plan to work with w. l. mckenzie king only exacerbated congressional suspicions, leading the us commission on industrial relations to call in john sr. and his son to answer questions about the independence of the foundation. these events had a profound influence on the rf and john jr., as they made clear that grants involving controversial subjects required judgment by competent and clearly independent bodies. it also chilled the atmosphere at the rf for further investigations in the area of social science, and all such investigations were discontinued by 1920 (bulmer and bulmer 1981).15 the context of industrial welfare the prosperity of the 1920s encouraged more progressive business leaders to advocate for a regime of industrial welfare as a means to ameliorate workplace strife and achieve peace that would facilitate higher productivity and profits. this early form of “welfare capitalism” (i.e., a welfare regime that relies upon market forces [esping-andersen 1990:22]) engaged corporations in providing for the well-being of each 14 ultimately, john jr. brought mackenzie king to cf&i to establish an “industrial democracy” plan with grievance mechanisms, employee representation, wage guarantees and fringe benefits (burawoy 1979:234). 15 the rockefellers were resilient in their efforts to respond to public opinion, and john jr. especially appears to have been inspired to find a way to redress the grievances of ludlow. he began to lecture around the country on the subject of an employee representation plan introduced at the cf&i company in the aftermath of the bloody miners’ strike. such plans gave employees a voice in determining their working conditions and the adequacy of mechanisms for uncovering and adjudicating grievances within the company (although not allowing formation of a union [brody 1980:55-56]). this was a capitalist form of “industrial democracy” which was widely praised as the united states moved onto a war footing in world war i and the federal government urgently desired industrial peace for war production. the us government adopted a variant of this idea; in over 125 cases, the war labor board ordered companies to install shop committees along the lines described by rockefeller jr. a number of large companies voluntarily introduced such plans in 1918-19, and after the war crisis, 317 companies joined the movement by which working people elected their fellow workers to represent them to management (brody 1980:55). journal of business anthropology, 1(1), spring 2012 34 company’s employees and their families. the enlightened self-interest of this ideology held that an employee whose immediate material needs and future family responsibilities were assured by the company would be more productive, more likely to be retained in the firm, and less likely to be swayed by union arguments (brody 1980:52-53). the ideology also responded to adverse public opinion regarding “robberbarons” and greedy capitalists, and tried to persuade the public not only with words but with a visible transference of some portion of wealth to the working class. john d. rockefeller, jr. was one of the leading proponents of industrial welfare policy. he espoused the belief that industrial strife was the result of a lack of understanding between the various parties to production, and espoused the philosophy that, instead of conflict, industry leadership should treat workers as human beings: “it follows, therefore, that the relations of men engaged in industry are human relations. men do not live merely to toil; they also live to play, to mingle with their fellows, to love, to worship. the test of success of our social organization is the extent to which every man is free to realize his highest and best self…if in the conduct of industry, therefore, the manager ever keeps in mind that in dealing with employees he is dealing with human beings, with flesh and blood, with hearts and souls; and if likewise the workmen realize that managers and investors are themselves also human beings, how much bitterness will be avoided). rockefeller (1916:21; cf burawoy 1979:234) industrial welfare programs included not only employee representation as the most idealistic benefit (see for description footnote 19), but material enhancements such as stock purchasing plans, homeownership plans, pensions, insurance against accidents, illness, old age and death, as well as improvements in plant conditions and safety, medical services and visiting nurses, sports teams and classes, land for gardening, and assistance to working people for various problems. the welfare programs of the 1920s were considered to be effective although expensive, as the drive toward unionization that had once been so compelling for trade skilled workers in the progressive era now seemed to stall, and union membership finally failed to make any headway during the 1920s. it seemed that management had discovered a means to draw workers closer to them, a means that granted management full authority over the terms of employment. this means was based on an emerging field of industrial psychology, pioneered by the “scientific” management of frederick taylor with his time and motion studies, and baba / anthropology and business: influence and interests 35 carried on in practice by industrial relations professionals. industrial welfare (or “welfare capitalism” as it came to be known later on) was at its height during the 1920s, when beardsley ruml was devising his strategy for funding the social sciences. yet, there was no systematic empirical foundation for the welfare programs enacted by corporations, and therefore these programs tended to be designed and implemented on an ad hoc basis, with features that did not vary consistently with circumstances. ruml’s strategy to institutionalize social science research the laura spelman rockefeller memorial’s project to support social science research did not follow strictly the model established by the national research council with its scientific advisory committees. rather, the memorial’s approach was modified by the entrepreneurial action of beardsley ruml, whose strategy was set forth in an important memorandum to the memorial trustees in 1922. in this policy document, ruml proposed to allocate $20 million over a ten year period to a program that would make a “substantial and permanent contribution to human welfare” and that would deal with fundamental social issues “not for their own sake but to produce results” (bulmer and bulmer 1981:362; emphasis added). the memorandum stated: “an examination of the operations of organizations in the field of social welfare shows as a primary need the development of the social sciences and the production of a body of substantiated and widely accepted generalizations as to human capabilities and motives and as to the behavior of human beings as individuals and groups. under the term “social sciences” we may include sociology, ethnology, anthropology, and psychology, and certain aspects of economics, history, political science and biology…all those who work toward the general end of social welfare are embarrassed by the lack of that knowledge which the social sciences must provide. it is as though engineers were at work without an adequate development in the sciences of physics and chemistry, or as though physicians were practicing in the absence of the medical sciences.” (ruml, memorandum 1922:9-10; cf bulmer and bulmer 1981:362). ruml’s memorandum was clear in its intent to develop a body of social fact and principle not solely for academic interest, or the advancement journal of business anthropology, 1(1), spring 2012 36 of social theory and philosophy, but because of a practical interest in human welfare and the need to further develop the social sciences as a means toward that end (bulmer and bulmer 1981:363). providing major support for social science was a departure from the memorial’s purpose, and it could not be justified unless there was a long-term payoff with respect to social welfare. ruml noted that universities were not well positioned to support social science research in that their facilities, equipment and staffing for the collection and tabulation of data were small, and the demands of teaching left little time for research. ruml still believed that universities provided the best auspices for social science research, but he wanted them to devise means through which to bring social scientists into more intimate contact with concrete social phenomena, and to be oriented toward the solution of practical problems (bulmer and bulmer 1981:364).16 one of his innovations was to propose the concentration of funding in “block grants” to selected institutions and permit the institutions and local advisory committees to make decisions about the allocation of resources to specific projects. support of specific projects would not be undertaken by the memorial, with the implication that academic institutions, not the rockefeller entities, would have decision-making control over the use of funds. yet, despite this novel structure, which gave the appearance of independence, ruml continued to play a major role in decisions about funding specific individuals. this may have been possible because of his advanced training in social science and his role as an applied social scientist in world war i (which set him apart from other foundation officials [kohler 1987]). following a survey to identify social science research being conducted by universities and non-university organizations and the appointment of an informal committee to advise on choice of problems, methods of organizing research, and selection of suitable individuals, beardsley ruml began to travel around the united states and europe visiting major centers of social science and meeting with its leading thinkers and actors (goody 1995). he was particularly interested in meeting social scientists who were proponents of methodologies that relied upon rigorous first-hand observation (copying schemes already 16 in consideration of these aims, some of the principles that would guide the allocation of funds included the ideas that research was to be conducted by organizations with continuity such as universities, combined with graduate and undergraduate teaching to encourage the production of more social scientists, and support for improvement of scientific publications (bulmer and bulmer 1981). support for scholarships would help to level the playing field between social science and the other sciences and humanities. baba / anthropology and business: influence and interests 37 effective in natural science and medicine), and those who had models for the practical role of the social scientist, given the disillusionment that many experienced with moralizing and simple political solutions common to the 19th century (bulmer and bulmer 1981:370-71). it was during the search for institutions and individuals to fund that ruml and his associates met three of the principals who are central to our narrative (i.e., malinowski, mayo, and radcliffe-brown), and decisions were made to provide them with substantial funding for their institutions and their research. the rockefeller philanthropies interacted chronologically in parallel with mayo et. al. and the british social anthropologists from 1922/23 up through the 1930s when foundation funding for the social sciences ended and transitioned to other sources. it is of some interest to compare the rockefeller interactions with each of these groups as a means to highlight their relationships. journal of business anthropology, 1(1), spring 2012 38 rockefeller philanthropy and the human relations school the interaction between rockefeller philanthropy and elton mayo began earliest, in 1922 when beardsley ruml met elton mayo in new york, just after the former had become head of the memorial (gillespie 1991:101). mayo, aged 42, was on a one-year leave of absence from the university of queensland where he was foundation professor of philosophy. his interdisciplinary teaching responsibilities at queensland had provided an opportunity for him to think broadly about society and its current problems, and he had set forth his ideas in a short book entitled democracy and freedom (1919). this work was enticing to beardsley ruml and others in his circle, suggesting that the workplace was the key to social cohesion, thus focusing attention on the problems of industrial work (ibid:98). mayo’s hypothesis was that existing methods of industrial relations reproduced society-wide class relationships and hostility, reinforcing class warfare. he blamed management in part for failing to consult employees in decision-making, and saw a role for intellectuals such as social scientists in bringing knowledge-based guidance to the relationship. mayo had spent time reading psychology and psychiatry, and had collaborated with a physician in the use of psychoanalytic techniques on patients in australia. he believed that industrial unrest was a manifestation of a psychological disorder and that psychological and psychiatric knowledge would be required to treat it. although the therapy was unspecified, mayo’s ideas paralleled those of other american proponents of industrial psychiatry that was being developed at the same time (ibid:99-100). mayo had met malinowski at this point and established a friendship with him, but was not yet reading anthropology. impressed with mayo’s thinking, ruml subsequently found a placement for him at the university of pennsylvania’s department of industrial research where he could pursue his ideas in companies around the philadelphia area. ruml provided mayo with an initial grant of $3,000, not from the memorial, but from the personal funds of john d. rockefeller, jr., who had taken an active interest in industrial relations since the ludlow incident. mayo made sufficient progress in philadelphia that he continued to receive funds from john jr.’s committee on benevolence in 1925 and 1926 $13,300 to cover his salary, expenses and personnel. the memorial trustees were wary of mayo’s research and its political implications and wanted to maintain distance from him (ibid:103).17 while in philadelphia, mayo began to 17because mayo’s grant was of limited duration, he was under pressure to show immediate results, while also pursuing his interest in development of an overarching theory. he adapted to this pressure by incorporating the idea of “psychopathology” that was diffusing through the american psychology, psychiatry and social work communities. it was during his time in philadelphia baba / anthropology and business: influence and interests 39 read anthropology, and to incorporate its literature into his theory, particularly writings on “primitive thought” (e.g., levy-bruhl), which mayo believed might be reflected in the “psychopathology” of industrial workers. he began to refer to his work as “anthropological” and this new thread became part of his critique of society (ibid:113). he also sent copies of his research reports to malinowski, piaget and janet. psychology, psychiatry and anthropology were not all of the disciplines mayo was integrating into his theory; he also incorporated ideas from human physiology as he studied the physical manifestations of worker fatigue (of particular interest to american industrialists). mayo became increasingly frustrated by the narrow scope of research required by company sponsors in philadelphia, and he did not want to neglect the broader ramifications of his work, which he believed were related to the development of class consciousness and the failures of democracy. thus ruml sought a new placement for mayo, and ultimately moved him to the harvard business school, with funding now shifting to the memorial, at $12,000 per year for five years.18 the harvard business school (founded in 1908 by a rockefeller donation) was dedicated to raising business leadership above the taints of the era by introducing professional training for future executives. research was needed to develop materials for teaching, and mayo’s research would be ideal for this purpose. mayo was appointed associate professor in industrial research by harvard’s president (ibid:116). through john d. rockefeller jr.’s networks (i.e., a meeting of personnel executives from major corporations in 1927), mayo met t. k. stevenson, personnel director of western electric and learned that the company was conducting experiments on the effects of rest periods on worker fatigue (ibid:70). shortly thereafter, mayo was invited to visit the company’s hawthorne plant in cicero il, and this was the beginning of mayo’s involvement in the hawthorne project. anthropology entered the picture when w. lloyd warner, then an instructor in anthropology that mayo successfully developed and tested a model of the relationship between working conditions and turnover in plants that included not only fatigue, but also a “psychopathology” variable (i.e., “reveries”, meaning bitter reflections) that he treated with various interventions. mayo believed that he was pursuing an objective, scientific approach to understanding the problems of modern capitalism, in which he was favoring neither management nor workers, and this belief gave him confidence in his results (gillespie 1991:110). 18mayo subsequently joined forces with l. j. henderson, a physiologist and biochemist at harvard, to establish a joint laboratory for physiological research, which received combined funding from the memorial of $42,000 per year for five years, plus an additional $35,000 to equip the laboratory. mayo and henderson hoped to conduct interdisciplinary research that combined physiology, biochemistry, psychiatry, psychology, and anthropology (gillespie 1991:118). journal of business anthropology, 1(1), spring 2012 40 at harvard,19 sought out mayo in hopes of securing funding for a community study. mayo was looking for someone to begin such a study in cicero, il, since he recognized that his own research needed a deeper understanding of the lives of the workers involved in the hawthorne experiments (for discussion see baba 2009b). mayo had realized in philadelphia that psychological and psychiatric theory required that he gain a better understanding of his subjects’ inner thoughts and lives, but he had been frustrated when workers would not or could not share their concerns and experiences with him (gillespie 1991:105-109). for this purpose, mayo employed a nurse in a factory as a “listening post” to gather information on workers’ personal thoughts and lives and to refer interesting cases to him for psychiatric treatment. now, mayo thought he might be able to engage an anthropologist to study workers in their community. drawing upon the memorial funds, warner visited hawthorne at mayo’s request and helped the company’s researchers design the final stage of the experiments, the bank wiring observation room (bwor). he declined to initiate his community study in cicero because, in his view, the community was part of greater chicago, a “total” study of which was beyond possibility and therefore unsatisfactory in yielding the research results he was seeking (i.e., social integration of a complex society [warner 1988]). warner also was concerned that the cicero was too “disorganized” (e.g., crime-ridden) to become his ideal research site. however, in designing the bwor, warner established a methodology with requirements that approximated ethnography, even though he did not carry out this method himself. the bwor design required one researcher to continuously observe and record the actions of workers on the job in conditions replicating the normal work environment, and a second researcher stationed outside the bwor to systematically interview the same workers (roethlisberger and dickson 1939). the synchronized analysis of observational and interview data created a unique empirical record that became a core component of the hawthorne project and established a standard for future ethnographic studies of work and a model for contemporary ethnography in organizations (schwartzman 1993). mayo and warner differed in their interpretation of data emerging from the bwor experiment. warner favored a “native’s point of view” interpretation that validated earlier hawthorne research reports which indicated that workers deliberately restricted their output, even if such resulted in lower wages, based upon their distrust of management : in other words, if production increased, management 19 warner was appointed first as a tutor and then as an assistant professor at harvard in the late 1920s after returning from fieldwork in australia (neubauer 1999). baba / anthropology and business: influence and interests 41 would cut the rate paid per piece of work. mayo, on the other hand, insisted that workers were behaving illogically based upon a “psychopathological” maladjustment to the industrial work regimen. he believed that the informal organization of the workforce (i.e., workers’ spontaneous social relationships) could facilitate or impede management’s goals, depending upon how workers were treated by management (schwartzman 1993). in the case of the bwor, the informal organization was working against management. mayo’s close relationships with western electric’s top leadership enabled him to gain control over the hawthorne data (which he moved to harvard), and ultimately, his analysis of the data prevailed (gillespie 1991). mayo’s analysis of the “psychopathology” of the bwor workers and his approach to ameliorate the situation launched a major intervention at hawthorne involving installation of a counseling program with non-directive interviewing of employees (schwartzman 1993). this approach to industrial relations problems became the basis for mayo’s human relations school of management, which was in vogue until organized labor and collective bargaining were well established in the united states (circa 1950s). the human relations school provided a theoretical framework for the industrial welfare movement, bestowing legitimacy upon its proponents and their policies (burawoy 1979:234). in developing his approach to the problems of industrial society, mayo incorporated the leading work by anthropologists and psychologists on social integration, including the writings of malinowski, radcliffe-brown and warner (gillespie 1991:185). mayo proposed an “administrative elite” that would engage in careful application of “scientific” knowledge related to social organization and control (gillespie 1991:187). mayo ultimately rejected the idea that workers had anything of value to contribute to the organization of work in a corporation. although their approach to “human relations” differed from that of mayo, several anthropologists and sociologists who were at harvard at the same time as mayo found his general approach to industrial relations sufficiently interesting to become involved in the human relations school (e.g., conrad arensberg, eliot chapple, burleigh gardner, f. l. w. richardson, w. lloyd warner and william foote whyte [partridge and eddy 1978]). the anthropologists’ approach was distinctive in that they placed more emphasis on social structure, systems relationships and human interactions than on psychology (schwartzman 1993). this theoretical orientation was influenced by the emerging school of british social anthropology, one of whose leading proponents (radcliffe-brown) lectured on social anthropology and social systems at the university of chicago from 1931 to 1937. in these lectures, radcliffe-brown outlined his theory of structuraljournal of business anthropology, 1(1), spring 2012 42 functionalism, which he viewed as a natural science of society (eggan 1957). while radcliffe-brown was lecturing at the university of chicago, w. lloyd warner also moved to chicago after completing fieldwork for his yankee city series in 1936. with this move, the center of empirical social science began to shift toward chicago, pulling along some of the anthropologists who formerly were working with warner. warner’s arrival at the chicago department of anthropology along with other colleagues created a critical mass that enabled the group to conduct research and consult with industry from an anthropological and ethnographic perspective. at chicago, warner founded the committee on human relations in industry, which supported and encouraged the work of many business and industrial anthropologists and sociologists. the distinctive human relations brand of this group (e.g., direct observation in the organization, measurement of behavioral interactions, equivalent time spent with workers and managers [see richardson 1978, baba 2006]) would not have been possible without the conceptual contributions of british social anthropology, and the methodological framework developed by w. lloyd warner at yankee city between 1931 and 1936 (to be discussed below). regardless of brand, all four social scientists who are central to our narrative (malinowski, mayo, radcliffe-brown and warner) embraced a functionalist theory of society in which an equilibrium state (i.e., all parts in smooth interaction to support the whole) was considered normal and conflict was seen as pathological or abnormal. this theory was well known and accepted in rockefeller circles, and also supported by industrialists and colonialists alike. through the human relations school they sought to re-make the bonds of durkheimian solidarity among workers and managers by fine-tuning labormanagement relationships or making other socio-structural adjustments. for example, the interactional studies of eliot chapple (schwartzman 1993) were aimed at (re)establishing control when “disturbing situations” arose: “if we look upon organization, therefore, as a system of relations of individuals in which the actual contacts imposed by particular technical processes provide the framework within which people have to reach an equilibrium, it can be seen that the frequency and extent of disturbing situations will determine the kind of teamwork which will result. thus by making a detailed study of the frequency of these contacts, the degree to which adjustment takes place between the individuals, and the amount of change which takes place as a result of the baba / anthropology and business: influence and interests 43 operation of the organization, we can set up a system of control by which an organization’s problems can be dealt with objectively” (chapple 1941:6; cf schwartzman 1993:19; emphasis added) the careful, quantitatively-based studies in corporations (e.g., chapple 1941, richardson 1978) and recommendations for improvements in organizations carried out by human relations school anthropologists and sociologists were perceived by them as advancing a science of society, and as contributing to the national welfare (i.e., promoting industrial peace and productivity; eddy and partridge 1978). these also were the goals of the laura spelman rockefeller memorial and its chief architect, beardsley ruml. admittedly, this branch of anthropology was not considered mainstream in the discipline at the time, but it was central to the early development of applied anthropology in america (eddy and partridge 1978), which was to become an important movement in the united states and established part of the platform for a resurgence of business anthropology during the 1980s (baba 1986; to be discussed further below). rockefeller philanthropy and british social anthropology the connection between rockefeller philanthropy and british social anthropology may be traced to september 1923, when beardsley ruml visited the london school of economics (lse) in his search for worthy targets of funding for the memorial. the school was part of london university, and in 1920 it was a leading center for the advanced study of economics, political science and sociology, attracting postgraduate students from all over the british empire and elsewhere. ruml was impressed by director william beveridge’s ideas concerning the development of the social sciences, which were harmonious with his own (bulmer and bulmer 1981:394), and with beveridge’s interest in “social biology” as part of the “natural basis” for social science. the two men established a cordial personal relationship (stocking 1995:396). ruml found that the lse was poorly endowed, lacked adequate facilities to house increased numbers of students after world war i, and many staff were part-time appointees. subsequently, ruml arranged for grants that provided the major portion of the funding received by the school during the 1920s. until the memorial was consolidated into the rf in 1929, the lse received $1.25 million from the it ($115,000 in 1924, $155,000 in 1925, $875,000 in 1927, and $100,000 in 1928; bulmer and bulmer 1981:395). of this total, $340,000 was for building extensions and improvements for the library, $200,000 for international journal of business anthropology, 1(1), spring 2012 44 studies, and $500,000 for the general endowment. the value of these funds may be compared to the total from all sources received in 1923 – £50,000. some of the funds received by the lse benefitted malinowski. a number of his research assistants were funded through the memorial’s grant to lse, as was his promotion to a full professorship. the establishment of the international institute of african languages and cultures at lse in 1926 was supported by funds from the memorial, with the colonialist proponent lord lugard appointed as chairman. the african institute also received funds from the carnegie corporation, commercial interests, and various british african colonies, and it awarded funds in consultation with these governments, which preferred useful projects and did not recommend those that were perceived to disturb state control over subject peoples (kuklick 1991:56). malinowski decided that he wanted direct support from the rockefeller foundation, rather than only the indirect support that he received through the lse and the african institute. joining forces with joseph oldham, a former protestant missionary and organizational entrepreneur, malinowski developed a formal proposal to the rf that was oriented toward carrying out systematic fieldwork in africa for the study of the tribal context of modern economic activities such as native mining labor (such a study already was underway in rhodesia by malinowski’s student audrey richards [stocking 1995:400]). the proposal sought to gain a “more enlightened understanding of african cultural values” and also to contribute to the training of administrators and missionaries. malinowski’s approach was based upon a functionalist20 conception of society and an interest in the study of cultural contact and change (ideas that now may appear contradictory), as well as the “mutual unification of knowledge by practical interests and vice versa” (stocking 1995:399), a hallmark of rockefeller support for the social sciences. this proposal was successful; the rockefeller foundation voted in 1931 to allocate $250,000 in matching funds to the 20 the functionalism of british social anthropology has been linked with colonialism, and critics have suggested that the “function of functionalism” was to “establish and routinize colonial order by clarifying the principles of traditional native systems through which ‘indirect rule’ could be carried on” (stocking 1995:368). the main point of indirect rule was to facilitate gradual evolution of colonial peoples from their own institutions to a form of rule “best suited to them” and one that involved them in “productive and profitable economic activity” (stocking 1995:384). malinowski was explicit in his statements and actions concerning the potential efficacy of functional theory, indicating that “the practical value of such a theory (functionalism) is that it teaches us the relative importance of various customs, how they dovetail into each other, how they have to be handled by missionaries, colonial authorities, and those who economically have to exploit savage trade and savage labor” (malinowski 1927:40-41; c.f. harris 1968:558). baba / anthropology and business: influence and interests 45 african institute over the next five years for the purposes set forth by malinowski (stocking 1995:401).21 by the 1930s, the colonies had become a suitable focus for funding, when an increasing number of intellectuals began to write about the “colonial question,” and the colonies were viewed as a whole upon which more interventionist and generally applicable policies might evolve (mills 2002:163). another point in malinowski’s favor was the mounting impatience of rockefeller foundation executives with a perceived “lack of cooperation” from anthropologists in the united states, and an attraction to malinowski’s functionalist fieldwork, which provided for direct observation of actual situations versus the antiquarian interests of some other anthropologists (goody 1995:20). meanwhile, radcliffe-brown had been in sydney, where his research on kinship systems also was supported by the rockefeller foundation through the australian national research council (nrc). the initial request for a chair of anthropology at sydney came from the australian nrc after several influential persons in the region (including malinowski’s father-in-law) decided that anthropology might be of use to the colonial administration. the first request for funding to the british commonwealth was scuttled after a british colonial officer sent to advise the commonwealth strongly urged that a “man of character” be appointed to the post (i.e., someone with a public school background rather than a university education [stocking 1995:339-40]). by a coincidence, however, the rockefeller foundation had initiated a new division of studies under edwin embree, the purpose of which was to develop the sciences underlying human behavior and to address related social issues such as race relations, ethnic conflict, crime, mental hygiene, and eugenics. in a survey of scientific institutions around the pacific basin that might be suitable as funding sites for this program, the rf signaled to the australian nrc that its anthropology program could be funded (kohler 1987:156-58). a new chair of anthropology at sydney thus was established in the mid-1920s, again through american sponsorship. the three electors for the new position chose radcliffebrown; he was the only applicant qualified for the post. the role was to focus on training in anthropology for new cadets and senior officers in new guinea and papua, training research workers among australian aborigines, and offering degree courses. radcliffe-brown was more or less unknown to the rockefeller foundation at this point, and to introduce him to foundation members and other americans, he was invited by the rf to stop off in the united states on his way to sydney. on this visit, radcliffe-brown toured american anthropology departments and met malinowski and warner. 21 at this point, the memorial had been consolidated into the rockefeller foundation. journal of business anthropology, 1(1), spring 2012 46 during his five year stint in sydney (1926-31), radcliffe-brown developed both a strategy and a means of gathering empirical data for supporting his structural-functional schema. stocking (1995:342-345) describes in some detail the process by which r-b developed his approach: collating and indexing the existing anthropological and ethnographic data of the region; ordering a series of connected institutions, beginning with kinship; identifying gaps in the record; sending out fieldworkers to fill in the missing data; defining and classifying elements of australian kinship systems; establishing principles underlying these systems. he concluded that there was a close correlation between the kinship terminology of a people and their social institutions, and this was not a survival from the past but an aspect of the social organization as it existed in the present (stocking 1995:342-343). while this work later was criticized as idealistic, it became the standard framework for studying australian social structure. radcliffe-brown’s functionalism became well known in rockefeller circles and viewed approvingly. eventually, however, his critical statements regarding the implementation of colonial policy and his personal life style that emulated the british elite irritated the australian establishment. a pending review by australian officials of the “conditions” of award and the “methods” for administration of grants led r-b to attempt to by-pass the australian nrc and appeal directly to the rf for funding an independent institute of anthropology (stocking 1995:349). when this action became known by the australian nrc, a crisis in public relations ensued, leading home states to withdraw their subsidies. radcliffe-brown decided that his work in australia was complete, and accepted an offer from the university of chicago (discussed above). the rockefeller foundation declined to fund r-b’s proposal to undertake investigations of native peoples “area by area and tribe by tribe” (stocking 1995:401). their reasons for so doing may have included bickering among british and american anthropologists about the appropriate institution(s) to carry out such an ambitious scheme, and the timing of the proposal (early 1930s) when reduced income due to the great depression forced the rf to reconsider its social science program ( for discussion see stocking 1995:403). in 1934, the rf’s social science division decided to terminate its anthropology program, although certain institutions, such as the african institute, continued to receive funding via previous and terminal grants until the end of the 1930s. by that time, the rockefeller philanthropies (including the memorial plus other entities) had contributed more than $2 million in support to the lse (goody 1995:13). baba / anthropology and business: influence and interests 47 of special note was an increase in tension between malinowski and radcliffe-brown with respect to their views regarding the relationship between anthropological research and policy. this issue is significant to the relationship between anthropology and business because it may have influenced the relationship between mainstream anthropology and applied anthropology, especially in the united states, with applied anthropology in america directly allied to business and industrial anthropology in its early days. malinowski aggressively promoted the practical value of anthropology and believed that “practical anthropology” could address contemporary problems, even to the extent of attempting to “control” change in other societies. radcliffebrown, on the other hand, had a more complex view which suggested that social anthropology might provide a “scientific basis for control and education of native peoples” if the british empire would make provision for scientific study rather than relying upon american interests to provide financial support (stocking 1995:351-52). he espoused this view in 1931, immediately after completing his term in sydney, where he was enmeshed in the practice of anthropology. earlier, however, he had insisted that pure science must develop prior to the application of knowledge, and that anthropologists should not be involved in policy interventions. illustrating these differences are comments by radcliffebrown and malinowski regarding a policy document attached to a proposal from the african institute: radcliffe-brown stated the then-contemporary position regarding “pure” anthropology, and his belief concerning the need for anthropologists to refrain from becoming involved in practical problems involving the utilization of knowledge: “i think it would be better if the institute’s investigations all dealt with the subject in a purely scientific way, confining themselves to the precise observation that is taking place and not concerning themselves with what is good and bad in the original society or in the changes that it is undergoing, nor with the practical problems. the task of the anthropologist should be to obtain exact knowledge, impartially presented, in such a form that it can be immediately utilized by those who are actually concerned with native government and education.” (c.f., goody 1995:21) malinowski, on the other hand, commenting on the same proposal, did not agree with radcliffe-brown regarding the relationship of the anthropologist to questions of social change and “control”: “there is no doubt we are all aiming at the same thing, that is, a thoroughgoing study of several tribes from the point journal of business anthropology, 1(1), spring 2012 48 of view of contact with european culture, the ensuing changes and the possibility of controlling these changes…i think the institute’s investigators should be as fully aware of practical problems and of the “good” and “bad” in the original society and in the changes, as is possible.” (in goody 1995:21-22; quotation marks in the original) these differences sharpened during the 1940s, when funding for fieldwork in british social anthropology shifted from the rockefeller foundation and other private interests (e.g., carnegie) to the british colonial social science research council (cssrc), a government body that was patterned after the social science research council in the united states, an institution that also had been founded and supported by the rockefeller foundation (bulmer and bulmer 1981, goody 1995). during the 1940s, anthropologists at the london school of economics, particularly protégés of malinowski such as raymond firth and audrey richards, were most closely associated with the research supported by the cssrc, with the dual agenda of promoting social science and addressing practical problems (a continuation of the rockefeller strategy, and quite similar to the goals of the american society for applied anthropology [baba and hill 2006]). the british government was under increasing pressure from the united states to demonstrate that its colonies were developing economically, and the cssrc intended to direct its research agenda toward a framework to further efforts in this area (mills 2002). anthropologists at the london school of economics (e.g., firth and richards) were reformers who believed that they could work in cooperation with colonial bureaucrats to improve the situation in the colonies for subject peoples. other anthropologists, such as max gluckman at oxford ,22 did not approve of anthropological involvement in colonial policy or pragmatic problems of the state, and later on this non-involvement stance would extend to encompass british corporations as well (mills 2006). the oxford anthropologists (including radcliffe-brown) wanted to gain control over cssrc funding, and to determine its uses themselves; ultimately, they were successful in gaining greater influence over cssrc funding decisions, through the intermediation of the association for social anthropology (with radcliffe-brown as honorary president). the position taken by the oxford anthropologists appeared reasonable to them at the time, although in retrospect it seems that regardless of whether or not they agreed to work on colonial 22 gluckman, who founded the manchester school of anthropology, developed his own dialectical integration of marxian thought and durkheimian structuralism, and was an open political activist who supported radical causes related to social justice (firth 1975).22 baba / anthropology and business: influence and interests 49 “problems”, they would have been complicit in the agenda of the british colonial state by accepting its funding, conducting research in the colonial arena, and thereby legitimizing state structures through the development of anthropological theory (macdonald 2001, mills 2002). the point of the narrative is that the rockefeller philanthropies had an important influence on the development of british social anthropology during its formative years. the laura spelman rockefeller memorial was significant in selecting the lse as one of its centers for the establishment of social science and providing a block grant that contributed an initial $1.2 million during the 1920s to the research of numerous scholars, including malinowski. this followed the formal guidelines of the memorial. the memorial also courted malinowski as an individual, inviting him to visit the united states in 1926, during which visit malinowski established his own relationships with foundation personnel (goody 1995:13). malinowski’s views regarding the conduct of social science with respect to empiricism and the relationship to policy were closely aligned with those of ruml and his foundation colleagues, and they contrasted with the perspectives of other leading anthropologists at the time, including those in britain and the united states (e.g., radcliffe-brown and other anthropologists involved in the american anthropological associated [goody 1995, stocking 1995, mills 2002]). the convergence of malinowski’s energetic pursuit of rockefeller funding for his own research and the timing of the memorial’s consolidation into the rockefeller foundation made it possible for the foundation to fund malinowski’s proposal as a matching grant to the african institute (stocking 1995:398-401), not as part of the lse block grant. malinowski managed to achieve a privileged position with respect to the rockefeller foundation, not only due to superior maneuvering but as a result of a closer alignment of perspectives, as stocking makes clear (1995). thus, when the rf terminated its funding to anthropology at the end of the 1930s and the british cssrc was launched in the 1940s, the most likely organization to receive british government funding for colonial research was the african institute, led by malinowski’s protégés, as it was already well funded and staffed, and known to be the most dynamic research organization of its kind (kuklick 1991). as the case has been made cogently by mills (2002), the fieldwork and scholarship supported by the cssrc were an important component in the process of legitimizing social anthropology as an academic discipline in britain, which was requisite to the expansion of university posts (see also baba 2009a). thus, even though malinowski and radcliffe-brown diverged on anthropology and policy, both contributed to british social anthropology, and the rockefeller foundation was an institutional force in the “making” of this journal of business anthropology, 1(1), spring 2012 50 foundational theory, which itself was instrumental in shaping the human relations school. the rockefeller foundation also was instrumental in the career and intellectual influence of radcliffe-brown. r-b’s chair in anthropology at sydney was funded by the rockefeller foundation, and his research in australian kinship systems was underwritten by the foundation as well (although not by the lsrm). it was during the sydney period that r-b developed evidence for the theory of structuralfunctionalism, which was more closely aligned with an emerging positivist perspective on society as a “natural system” than the psychologically-oriented functionalism of malinowski; i.e., society was a “system” reflecting underlying principles, with social structure a primary explanatory variable with respect to similarities and differences across societies (see harris 1968:522). a positivist orientation for the social sciences – to enable these fields to develop general principles or law-like generalizations and even the possibility of “controls” – was a long term goal of the rockefeller foundation. radcliffe-brown was a proponent of these aims, and his intellectual achievements were nurtured and supported by the foundation and its allies. the invitation to radcliffe-brown to join the faculty at the university of chicago in 1931 was especially significant because it provided an opportunity for him to develop a more general scientific presentation of his findings and link them to ideas concerning natural systems. the chicago period also engaged radcliffe-brown in the debate between history and science within american anthropology. it was at chicago that radcliffe-brown wrote his article on “patrilineal and matrilineal succession”, which sets forth a systematic, “social structural” approach to kinship. this approach emphasizes the “jural” aspects of kin relations as “systems of socially recognized rights and duties attributed to categories of persons and enforced by legal or moral ‘sanctions’” (stocking 1995:357).23 this work played a role in orienting american anthropology toward the scientific side of the debate and away from history. the earlier emphasis on historical reconstruction gave way to studies of people within the contexts of the cultures in which they lived (partridge and eddy 1978:19). anthropology’s reputation as a social science was established, and the next generation of american anthropologists was subtly influenced. radcliffe-brown’s contributions at the university of chicago took place during a time when beardsley ruml held the position of dean of 23radcliffe-brown also “broke a taboo” by revising the definition of culture from the omnibus form it had taken under tylor to a more theoretical construction as a set of rules of behavior, common symbols and attached meanings, and common ways of feeling and thinking (stocking 1995:359). baba / anthropology and business: influence and interests 51 the division of social science. thus, although ruml did not fund radcliffe-brown directly through the lsrm, he was in a position to advance r-b’s intellectual agenda once it was developed, and to promote it within the united states where it had a serious influence on american anthropology in the mid-20th century (stocking 1995:359; see also harris 1968:518-534). w. lloyd warner: the tertius among the quartet of principals discussed in this article, there was one who was linked to the others in a way that bridged the transatlantic division between studies of modern industry and those of colonial society in a way that the others did not. w. lloyd warner, student of both radcliffe-brown and malinowski, and colleague of mayo, linked the intellectual networks in a deliberate manner that was intended to discover whether the techniques of ethnography could be engaged in a complex society. according to mildred warner, in her biography of warner (1988:41): “lloyd wanted to use his knowledge of murngin social organization to obtain a better understanding of how men in all groups, regardless of place or time, solve the problems confronting them. his investigations of a simple society, he hoped, would equip him to analyze more complex forms of social organization. he also wanted to use it as a kind of screen through which to pass american contemporary industrialized society to ascertain what, if anything, he could find that would be analogous to the primitive, or what had been observed in the primitive, the detail of which might be discernible in the american society.” warner was the first to demonstrate that anthropological and ethnographic techniques could be translated to modern contexts, not only in communities (the lynd’s qualitative study of middletown preceded him; lynd and lynd 1929), but in a large corporation, with proof of concept (roethlisberger and dickson 1939; schwartzman 1993).24 24although warner was theoretically and methodologically-oriented, and denied being motivated by the practical uses of anthropology, his statements on this subject must be qualified given his lengthy and substantive involvement with the human relations school and social research, inc. there was something about practical problems that drew warner’s attention; charles baldwin, the roommate of radcliffe-brown and warner in sydney suggested journal of business anthropology, 1(1), spring 2012 52 warner’s position, with intellectual ties to malinowski (who taught him at berkeley while warner was a graduate student [partridge and eddy 1978:15]), radcliffe brown, and mayo in the early days of the discipline may have placed him in a position to become a tertius, an idea taken from the work of georg simmel meaning “the third”. in burt’s (1992) work on “structural holes”, the tertius gaudens takes advantage of an insularity or buffer that exists between non-redundant contacts in different social networks (the hole) where each set of actors within a given network could benefit through connection with the other. however, as we have seen, in the 1920s and 1930s, it could be argued that there was no significant insularity or buffer (no “structural hole”) to fill among prominent anthropologists on either side of the atlantic, unless that hole were a conceptual one related to ideas about policy and these were not divided by the atlantic. instead, warner could have played the role of a tertius iungens (obstfeld 2005) an innovator connecting people by facilitating new forms of coordination among those who otherwise would be disconnected. if warner’s “fundamental purpose in studying primitive man was to know modern man better”, as he claimed in the yankee city series (warner and lunt 1941:3), then perhaps he might have bridged the distance between the theoretically and methodologically-oriented british social anthropologists and americans studying corporations, such as those involved in research at hawthorne, leveraging different knowledge(s) held by one to benefit the other. warner began to act as a tertius iungens when he consulted with hawthorne researchers in the design of the bwor. in this role, his field experience in australia enabled him to guide the project in setting up the experimental procedures for gathering and analyzing data in the plant (roethlisberger and dickson 1939, gillespie 1991, schwartzman 1993). there had never before been a study that combined a methodology developed in anthropology (i.e., systematic behavioral observation and interviewing, and detailed recording of social interactions within the bwor and between the bwor and other groups) together with research goals and objectives established by industry (e.g., correlating the structures and practices of informal groups with production output). the result was part of the invention of business anthropology (the first hybridization of anthropology and business), but it did not accomplish the goal that warner set for himself, which was to translate anthropological methods to the scope and scale of a modern community. that it was warner’s american background (e.g., pragmatism), although warner himself denied it (warner 1988:41). baba / anthropology and business: influence and interests 53 warner’s more significant act as a tertius iungens was performed though the yankee city study (1931-1936), a landmark research project also funded by the rockefeller foundation, at first through mayo’s rockefeller grant at harvard (gillespie 1991:156). yankee city adapted the methods developed for study of small-scale society within colonized nations for the study of complex society in colonizer nations.25 in this project, warner devised a sophisticated ethnographic methodology for studying the institutions that integrated a complex society, particularly social class and rank order, which warner discovered were not determined by economic factors as initially thought, but by a complex array of social and economic influences. warner’s methodology (including interviews and observations) enabled him to see yankee city as a “total system of interdependent, interrelated statuses” that would represent the social system of the “total community”, much as the map of a good cartographer might reflect the physical reality of land or sea (warner 1941:796). important insights emerged from warner’s approach to the study of class, rank and status – findings that would not have been possible without the theoretical framework and methodological rigor that warner brought to the project. for example, one of his findings was that shoe operatives in yankee city factories were more likely to orient their associations downward in the overall class hierarchy compared with the general adult population of their social class (warner and low 1947:159). warner concluded from this that the factory workers were losing status as a group, and that they were finding solidarity among themselves, because it did not appear that they could rise any higher. such findings drew attention to his work and made it controversial (baba 2009b). warner also had devised an approach to the study of companies from a macro-societal perspective, without the necessity of becoming embedded inside the organization. warner’s students and colleagues began to adopt his approach to community studies in their own research (e.g., arensberg and kimball 1938, dollard 1937, davis et. al., 1941, whyte 1943). the methodological and conceptual advances of these efforts helped to ground and legitimize what was to become applied anthropology in the united states (partridge and eddy 1978:19, singer 2008), enabling this movement to emerge under its own banner when british anthropology largely disassociated itself from applied endeavors after the demise of colonialism following world war ii (baba and hill 2006). 25 in the yankee city series, published in five volumes between 1941 and 1959, warner and his colleagues explain how a group of anthropologists-in-residence may engage in a comprehensive socio-structural analysis of a small town, and in the process explain what appeared to be improbable events (e.g., a community-wide strike, the formation of an industrial union in a “stable” town) through the lens of social anthropology and economic history (warner and lunt 1941; warner and low 1947 [see baba 2009b]). journal of business anthropology, 1(1), spring 2012 54 at about the same time that warner published the first volume of the yankee city series (volume 1, 1941), the society for applied anthropology (sfaa) was formed at harvard (1941). this event took place after the american anthropological association (aaa) declined a proposal from second generation anthropologists to recognize anthropology as a profession and establish a section devoted to applied anthropology (trencher 2002:451). the sfaa was initiated by anthropologists who were among the leaders of their time, including conrad arensberg, gregory bateson, ruth benedict, margaret mead, george murdoch, and julian steward, among several others. they believed that anthropological (and other sources of) knowledge should be directed toward social problems, as they made clear in their mission statement: “to promote scientific investigation of the principles controlling the relations of human beings to one another and to encourage the wide application of these principles to practical problems” (arensberg 1947) this mission was realized in warner’s leading edge work at yankee city,26 which offered a systematic social science framework for advancing the understanding of a complex society, while at the same time exploring the underlying reasons for contemporary social problems and issues. this was not only the mission of the sfaa, but also what the rockefeller foundation had been striving to accomplish. the applied movement flourished in the united states after world war ii, during which anthropologists demonstrated their practical value to the nation (singer 2008). despite warner’s contributions to application, he was not a proponent of applied anthropology. like his mentor, radcliffe-brown, warner maintained a strong interest in theoretical inquiry throughout his career, and he believed in the priority of theory (see baba 2009b). yet, he also retained an affiliation with colleagues who pursued more practical interests (e.g., he collaborated with the human relations school; he consulted with other anthropologists at social research, inc. [easton 2001[). as a member of the department of anthropology at the university of chicago, this “dual identity” was possible for warner; a theory-practice relationship was an element of the university’s foundation. at the time that the sfaa was created, the majority of anthropologists did not embrace the idea of applying anthropological 26 the yankee city series was published by yale university press; malinowski was a faculty member at yale. baba / anthropology and business: influence and interests 55 knowledge outside the boundaries of the discipline (see mills 2002, trencher 2002). early anthropologists gave priority to the pursuit of theoretical questions and assigned applied matters to their graduate students or others whom they believed were less qualified (kuper 1983), even though policy advice to colonial administrators was central to their arguments about the value of anthropology (stocking 1995). likewise, the anthropologists of the mid-20th century continued to view applied anthropology as a secondary or derivative endeavor whose status was not equivalent to that of “pure” theory (bennett 1996). this schismatic dualism reflected a two-tiered structure in which more elite or prestigious members of the discipline chose theoretical pursuits if they could, and had “right of first refusal” to applied projects, otherwise, such endeavors were assigned to those of lower rank. a product of colonialism, this “class structure” came to resemble a sort of “apartheid” situation in the united states, in which certain elite academic departments specialized in “pure” theory and other departments offered degrees in applied anthropology (baba and hill 2006). the separation of theory and practice that materialized within anthropology was not envisioned by the rockefeller foundation when they planned the “science of society”. within anthropology, there appears to have been a particular aversion to applying knowledge in the domain of business, both in the united states and in great britain. that is, even within applied anthropology in the united states, the application of anthropological knowledge within corporations or the marketplace was not considered a standard “domain of application” after the collapse of the human relations school (i.e., circa the 1950s [see baba 2006]). this situation remained the status quo until well after 1980. large corporations sometimes were conceived of as “harm industries”, even beyond the technical definition of this term (e.g., benson and kirsch 2010) whose products or processes could damage anthropologists’ research participants, especially in developing nations where multinational companies crossed paths with anthropologists (sherry 1983). anthropological portrayals of business management have been critical of managerial interactions with workers, the latter sometimes represented as targets of actual or potential schemes such as deskilling (e.g. lamphere 1979; see also baba 2006). the human relations school itself was part of the problem. critics of this school have remarked negatively on its proponents’ failure to acknowledge the unequal power relationships within the corporations they studied, and their willingness to support these relations through manipulative activities (this included not only mayo, the intellectual leader of the school, but also the anthropologists who were part of it [burawoy 1979]). a strong marxian inflexion in american anthropology after the 1960s (ortner 1984), together with a vietnam-era aaa ethical code that forbade research that journal of business anthropology, 1(1), spring 2012 56 could not be disclosed publicly (i.e., proprietary research) may have exacerbated what was already a chilly attitude toward businesses and studies of business after world war ii (e.g., mills 2006; see also baba 2006). nevertheless, despite these strong headwinds (some generated, ironically, from resistance to projects supported by the rockefeller foundation), there emerged after the middle 20th-century several forces that altered the disciplinary orientation toward the business domain. one of the most prominent was change within the discipline itself, most notably the postmodernist and critical movements that brought about a “crisis of representation” with significant consequences (marcus and fischer 1986, clifford 1988). while there is insufficient space for a full discussion, two developments may be mentioned briefly: a diaspora of anthropologists from traditional field sites moving into new venues in which they hybridized anthropological theories and methods with those of other disciplines (i.e., the institutional anthropologies such as medical, education, legal; bennett 1996, baba and hill 2006); and a loosening of the relationship between anthropology and ethnography, permitting experimentation and hybrid approaches (marcus and fischer 1986). at the same time, we have witnessed a continuing flow of phd graduates from american academia with a steady erosion of academic appointments available to them (baba 1994, 2009a). the hybridization of anthropology has resulted in part from the entrepreneurial engagement of some of these graduates seeking new career niches beyond the academy. some hybrids have formed in the business domain, creating new areas of practice such as design ethnography or marketing and advertising anthropology (e.g., squires and byrne 2002, malefyt and moeran 2003). these areas of engagement exist not only because of changes in anthropology, but also as a result of developments in capitalism toward a globally-integrated form that more readily incorporates anthropological knowledge(s) and techniques (baba 2006, cefkin 2009). as anthropologists have taken up engaged positions within businesses, the applied and practicing movement in the united states has expanded to encompass business anthropology (e.g., baba 2005a), while at the same time the entire discipline has become more inclusive of the institutional anthropologies. these shifts reflect new realities confronting professional associations and their memberships, as well as those of academic institutions and their constituencies (brondo and bennett forthcoming). as the discipline changes, the bright lines dividing “pure” theory and “applied” anthropology are blurring. increasingly, anthropologists are concerned with the public interest and urgent social problems (brondo 2010), and it is questionable that socio-cultural anthropology baba / anthropology and business: influence and interests 57 has a “purely” theoretical mission in the 21st century. at the same time, the numerous institutional anthropologies and their links to the mainstream of the discipline are proliferating as anthropology engages in more interdisciplinary discourse. this is a tendency that is developing across the social sciences and humanities (see national science foundation 2011). the schismatic dualism that has separated theory and practice in socio-cultural anthropology since its origins may be capable of rapprochement (schweizer 1998); such may already be underway in medical anthropology (singer 2008). discussion this article has considered the intersection of one specific dimension of the domain of business and the discipline of anthropology during the early decades of the 20th century. the focus has been on rockefeller philanthropy as a representation of larger interests in the united states and great britain, and the rise of three academic subfields: the human relations school, british social anthropology, and applied anthropology. the connection of anthropology and the business domain in the first and third of these subfields has been well recognized (roethlisberger and dickson 1939, partridge and eddy 1978, schwartzman 1993, baba 2006, cefkin 2009). the relationship of british social anthropology to our discipline’s engagement with business has been somewhat more obscure (although not invisible [partridge and eddy 1978]). the parallels between the human relations school and british social anthropology are apparent, and the role of applied anthropology is implicit: both theoretical frameworks operated inside hierarchical social systems, under pressure to solve problems of elites during times of high turbulence, developed translational and interventionist approaches that were supposed to enhance order and management, and cooperated with regimes that failed due to uprising from below and subsequently were criticized for it. applied anthropology was created in the context of the first subfield as a means to negotiate the complex relationships among institutional actors implied by the context, and it carried the mark of this circumstance when it moved across the atlantic later in the century. this article has elaborated upon the interactions among these subfields through discussion of mutual influences among four principal actors and the institutions to which they were attached. the influences and interests that brought anthropology and the business domain together emerged from the contexts of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, in which american industry was struggling with national expansion and aspirations toward internationalism, and british colonialism was facing demands for change. they cannot be understood apart from the social and political dynamics of serious laborjournal of business anthropology, 1(1), spring 2012 58 management conflict in the united states and mounting pressure on great britain to foster more vigorous economic activity within its colonies. an intention of this article has been to suggest that our relations with businesses or any other institutional actor(s) should be reflected upon critically within a larger macro-societal framework and a long-term time horizon. the project of the memorial to establish a “science of society” was an innovative idea intended to address the vexing problems of the era, harnessing the best thinking available at the time. the memorial was not the only move that the rockefeller foundation made in the direction of the social sciences. the social science research council (ssrc) also was established in 1923, funded through the memorial a more explicit alliance between professional academic social scientists and members of the elite (fisher 1993). the ssrc brought together representatives of different disciplines to deliberate on advancing social science through cooperative research. this body was central in the shift from pure and purposive science to more multi-disciplinary, problemoriented research (fisher 1993:9). the formation of the memorial at the same time as the sscr is an indication of the rise of an institutional field dedicated to the funding of social science research. the institutional field has become a key construct in the literature of organizational and institutional theory (scott 2008). initially conceived by bourdieu (1971, 1984), an institutional field suggests a diverse array of social actors working together within a specific domain or arena, including financiers, producers, suppliers, intermediaries, regulators, and competitors (or other opposition) – all of the actors engaged within the domain and especially those competing for the same resources (scott 2008:182). bourdieu employed the analogy of a game with players, rules, competition and contest, as well as stakes. as the organizational theorist richard scott (2008:183) has written: “…fields are not placid and settled social spaces, but arenas of conflict in which all players seek to advance their interests; some are able, for longer or shorter periods, to impose their conception of ‘the rules of the game’ on others.” fields not only develop around markets, technologies, and policy domains, but also in the context of central disputes and issues. in the case study presented in this article, we observed some of the actors involved in shaping the emergence of an institutional field around the funding of social science research, as it was conceived by an elite segment of society. the set of actors involved in establishing this field included individuals such as john d. rockefeller jr., memorial board baba / anthropology and business: influence and interests 59 trustees such as arthur woods and raymond fosdick, a network of philanthropic foundation officials at other agencies, and industry actors such as corporate personnel executives. the members of this set were faced by a number of collective action problems (e.g., industrial strife and unionization drives, absence of an empirical science to validate or legitimize their approach to problems, the need for research to ground collegiate courses in management). some of the most powerful members of the network (i.e., those in the office of john d. rockefeller jr. – the staff of the memorial) took action by bringing into their midst an institutional entrepreneur, beardsley ruml. such entrepreneurs have an interest in particular types of institutional arrangements and are able to leverage resources to create new institutions or transform existing ones (maguire, hardy and lawrence 2004:657; garud et. al., 2007:957). they tie together the workings of otherwise divergent interests to “create a whole new system of meaning” which can become the basis for institutional change (garud et. al., 2007:957). ruml addressed several of the collective action problems within his network, proposing a “new system of meaning” whereby a social welfare charity would provide financing for a “science of society” to be legitimized by block grants, but with considerable discretion reserved for ruml and his staff. this “new system” would be supported not only by the memorial, but by the larger field – john jr. and the rockefeller foundation, the networked corporations and their executives, administrators of universities that received memorial funding, and eventually the social scientists that wanted to be funded themselves. even agencies of the british government became part of this field with the rise of the cssrc (the counterpart of the ssrc). the institutional field that emerged was defined by the mutually supportive relationships among actors that gave rise to a new “science of society”, but it also depended upon the movement of other institutions in the same general direction (e.g., the nrc). especially important in conceptualizing institutional fields are inter-organizational structures of dominance and patterns of coalition, and the centrality of power and processes of control that take shape within the field (fligstein 1991). a given organization, or set of organizational actors will endeavor to direct the actions of an institutional field, with more or less powerful or prestigious actors working to shape the direction of a field’s development. during the 1920s, the laura spelman rockefeller memorial and beardsley ruml, with his positioning close to the advisors of john d. rockefeller, jr., were among the key actors shaping the basic direction and institutional logic (i.e., the symbolic constructions and material practices that constitute the organizing principles [friedland and alford 1991:248; scott 2008]) of the new “science of society”. ruml’s memorandum and his practices defined the formal and informal rules for grant-making, the requirement journal of business anthropology, 1(1), spring 2012 60 for grantees to propose relevant research and “deliver” results, and the relative valuation and monetization of social science projects. this institutional logic was specific to the policy domain of the social sciences, which was intended to be problem-oriented and not driven by the quest for pure knowledge (fisher 1993). within anthropology, the institutional logic was accompanied by a pattern of competition for funding, tinged with political overtones, and a shifting network of alliances that seemed to play individuals against one another (goody 1995, mills 2002). fisher’s (1993:12) commentary on the politics of the ssrc is relevant: “during the 1920s and 1930s ‘social studies’ experienced what with hindsight can only be described as a revolution. an unprecedented amount of resources and the social crises during these years combined to catapult these disciplines toward respectability within the academy and society. much of the impetus came from the belief common to many social scientists, foundation officials and government officials that the social sciences could solve social problems. social control based on scientific research was a dominant theme. by the end of the 1930s, social scientists had struck a new bargain with society. the majority had agreed to become technocrats serving an alliance of class and corporate state interests. others became more vociferous and more strident in their opposition to applied research and retreated further into their respective disciplines.” from our vantage point in the 21st century we may recognize some of those oppositional “others” within the anthropological mainstream. the arena of contestation over the “rules of the game” in anthropology gave rise to tensions that morphed into a disjuncture between the theoretical and practical dimensions of the discipline that is still sorting itself out (mills 2002, baba 2005b). in that sense, the legacy of rockefeller philanthropy has had significant and lasting consequences. the article suggests that the consequences of rockefeller philanthropy were both subtle and profound, largely though the process of selectively supporting, encouraging and promoting the work of some anthropologists and not others. the result was to influence intellectual interests, whether intentionally or not (kohler 1978:513, bulmer and bulmer 1981:400-401), and regardless of whether or not the time was auspicious. those who were granted funds became more influential than those who did not have them. for example, malinowski’s influence and that of his students through funding of the african institute and rfmodeled cssrc are well known (stocking 1995, goody 1995, mills 2002). funding for the african institute weakened support for other baba / anthropology and business: influence and interests 61 areas of anthropology, while african institute fellowship recipients became leaders of the next generation of anthropologists (kuklick 2008:71). radcliffe-brown became a gatekeeper of field research directions in the pacific through his role in site selection as chair of the committee of anthropological research of the australian nrc (stocking 1995:340-41). later he was supported and encouraged to disseminate his ideas about society as a natural science. the rf appeared to be disinterested in helping academics do what they wanted to do. however, academics could not do much without financial support, and what academics wanted to do was carefully vetted to align with rf’s long range goals (bulmer and bulmer 1981:402). influence upon academic research by interests outside the academy, especially if those interests appear to represent elite or capitalist classes, has been criticized from various perspectives (bulmer and bulmer 1981:400-401). harold laski of the lse was one of the first, raising concerns about hopes that would remain unfulfilled and fears about increasing predispositions toward pragmatic work (laski 1930). some years later, e. c. lindeman (1936) worried about small and unrepresentative groups, unanswerable to anyone, exercising power over cultural institutions by virtue of their wealth. marxist critics also have been active in viewing agencies such as the rf as “means by which private capitalistic business enterprises and entrepreneurs exercised domination over intellectual life” (1979; cf bulmer and bulmer 1981:401). in retrospect, these concerns seem to resonate with some of what has been written in this article. at the same time, however, the critics may have underestimated the capabilities of the contra players to resist the influence of the mighty, as well as the intricate consequences of cultural competition. this article has discussed the complexity of the processes by which anthropology was influenced through rockefeller philanthropy, and some of the reasons why the rockefeller vision was not fulfilled in anthropology. while non-anthropologists such as mayo were actively maneuvered toward supportive venues, and readily met the criteria established by ruml, the three anthropologists had more complex interactions with rockefeller. malinowski was the closest parallel to mayo with respect to his embrace of the rockefeller vision. but according to stocking’s account (1995), malinowski and his students eventually became disillusioned and frustrated with the difficulty of the policy agenda. his propensities for successful entrepreneurial action invited institutional competitors with quite different political and ideological commitments. malinowski was criticized for his position regarding applied anthropology by the elite of the discipline, because at the time, practical application was considered antithetical to a true science (kuklick 2008:74). in this debate lies the heart of a schism journal of business anthropology, 1(1), spring 2012 62 within anthropology that has lasted for nearly a century, and has been one of the discipline’s distinguishing features. the dispute between malinowski and radcliffe-brown over policy anthropology widened a rift between “pure” theory and applied anthropology that was produced under colonialism. this rift was not on the rockefeller agenda, and it worked against anthropology as a social science, in the sense that a positivist approach rests upon minimal standards which are dependent upon some means of empirical testing and logical proofs toward which application could contribute (schweizer 1998:45; baba 2000). warner, the tertius iungens, is perhaps most emblematic of the complexity and ambiguity surrounding the relationship between the rockefeller interests and anthropology. warner played a major role in establishing anthropology as a discipline that could legitimately investigate the urgent issues of contemporary society. yet, he expressed a divided allegiance with respect to theory and practice, espousing the priority of theory on the one hand while collaborating with practitioners on the other, and never explicitly articulating a vision beyond their separation. such a dualism might seem to conform to the two-tier model of british social anthropology, but warner also was able to innovate in his praxis by bringing together new approaches to the fundamental study of society while focusing upon and explaining social problems (e.g., warner and lunt 1941; warner and low 1947; baba 2009b). the intricacies and apparent contradictions of warner’s relationship with the emerging institutional field of social science research represents a particularly interesting case study of the way in which private interests may influence an academic discipline, and how the members of such a discipline may respond and resist simultaneously.at this point, the coevolution of anthropology, society, and economy has taken us to a contemporary era in which we acknowledge anthropology’s reengagement with business organizations (cefkin 2009; welker et. al. 2011). on this occasion, it is appropriate to reflect upon our positionality with respect to the institutions of the private sector, and to gaze through the lenses of history as another means to do so. are we, as fisher (1993:11) suggests, merely technocrats who stand as intermediaries between societal elites and society at large? do we believe as some members of our field continue to insist that we are independent and have the capacity to define our own relationship to other sectors, on our own terms? or are there other perspectives which may suggest more variegated positions that in the long term could be more fruitful for all of the actors if we could only connect them? we should at least consider the ways in which others view us, not only the ways in which we view ourselves (e.g., as critics, interpreters, ethnographers, culture-brokers, or whatever), since baba / anthropology and business: influence and interests 63 eventually our collective efforts will be examined, perhaps re-studied, and written about by social historians of the future and they will interpret our position for us. as anthropologists involved in a reengagement with business, whether practitioners or not, we should place our position within the long view and gain others’ perspectives as we consider our positionality. the case study presented in this article suggests that anthropologists and other social scientists are not always in a position to view all of the influences and interests that move around us. institutional fields are likely to be directed by actors that we do not control and may not even be aware of, although members of our discipline have become more sophisticated and self-conscious than we were decades ago when we began such ventures (e.g., see malefyt and moeran 2001; cefkin 2009; suchman forthcoming). the question may not be whether we know the “rules of the game” or whether we can play by them. clearly, we do know (some of) the rules. a more important question may be do we understand the direction of a field’s powerful players and the institutional logic of the field over the long-term? do we know the nature of the game that the elites are playing and the stakes in the game? the answers to these questions may not be entirely visible from our position on the game board, just as it is often not possible to readily “study up”. if anthropology (of/and/in) business has an interest in addressing such questions, we should consider new and emerging institutional theories and methods that transcend the “glocal” and dependency upon specific business domains, and engage in the analysis of businesses as social institutions. this is the direction that warner and low (1947) attempted when they re-studied yankee city following c. wright mills’ critique of warner’s first yankee city volumes (mills 1942), and it is the approach of some 21st century anthropologists – understanding businesses as integral to society, interpenetrated by cultural-cognitive frames of meaning, constituting normative orders, and refracting the regulatory regimes of their sectors, thereby viewing businesses as intertwined in social and economic transformations (e.g., see downey and fisher 2006, zaloom 2006, ho 2009, fisher forthcoming). these approaches offer a view from “up” – beyond business – that enable anthropologists to respond to questions about the workings of business within institutional fields. triangulation among and across their frames of reference is a point of access to institutional fields that anthropologists of the past may not have recognized, but is relevant now to all of us. as we begin to take businesses seriously as dominant institutional actors then we become more serious players ourselves. journal of 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bryan byrne 2002 creating breakthrough ideas: the collaboration of anthropologists and designers in the product development industry. westport, ct: bergin & garvey. stocking, george w. jr. 1995 after tylor: british social anthropology 1888-1951. madison, wi: university of wisconsin press. suchman, lucy forthcoming consuming anthropology. barry, andrew and georgina born (eds.) interdisciplinarity: reconfigurations of the social and natural sciences. routledge. taylor, frederick winslow 1911 the principles of scientific management. new york: harper. trencher, susan r. 2002 the american anthropological association and the values of science, 1937-70. american anthropologist 104(2):450462. warner, mildred hall 1988 w. lloyd warner, social anthropologist. warner, w. lloyd 1941 social anthropology and the modern community. american journal of sociology xlvi(6):785-796. warner, w. lloyd and j. o. low 1947 the social system of the modern factory. the strike: a social analysis. new haven, nj: yale university press. warner, w. lloyd and paul s. lunt 1941 the social life of a modern community. yankee city series, vol. i. new haven: yale university press. welker, marina, damani j. partridge and rebecca harris 2011 corporate lives: new perspectives on the social life of the corporate form. current anthropology 525:53-316. baba / anthropology and business: influence and interests 71 welker, marina, damani j. partridge, and rebecca hardin 2011 corporate lives: new perspectives on the social life of the corporate form. current anthropology 52s:s3-s16. whyte, william foote 1943 street corner society. chicago, il: university of chicago press. wilk, richard r. and lisa c. cliggert 2007 economies and cultures: foundations of economic anthropology. boulder, co: westview. williamson, oliver 2005 transaction cost economics. in: handbook of new institutional economics. menard, claude and mary m. shirley (eds.) dordrecht, netherlands: springer, pp. 41-65. zaloom, caitlan 2006 out of the pits: traders and the technology from chicago to london. chicago: the university of chicago press. zinn, h. 1990 the politics of history. university of illinois press. marietta l. baba is dean of the college of social science, professor of anthropology, and professor of human resources and labor relations, at michigan state university. dr. baba is the author of more than 75 scholarly and technical publications in the fields of organizational and institutional anthropology, anthropology of policy, culture and technology, and evolutionary processes. dr. baba can be contacted by email at mbaba@msu.edu. mailto:mbaba@msu.edu vi opdaterer systemet vi opdaterer systemet... rauli.cbs.dk opdateres og er snart tilgængeligt. vi opdaterer systemet vi opdaterer systemet... rauli.cbs.dk opdateres og er snart tilgængeligt. vi opdaterer systemet vi opdaterer systemet... rauli.cbs.dk opdateres og er snart tilgængeligt. vi opdaterer systemet vi opdaterer systemet... rauli.cbs.dk opdateres og er snart tilgængeligt. vi opdaterer systemet vi opdaterer systemet... rauli.cbs.dk opdateres og er snart tilgængeligt. vi opdaterer systemet vi opdaterer systemet... rauli.cbs.dk opdateres og er snart tilgængeligt. vi opdaterer systemet vi opdaterer systemet... rauli.cbs.dk opdateres og er snart tilgængeligt. building momentum for the jba elizabeth k. briody spread the word! in the last regular issue (fall 2013), editor brian moeran reached out to jba readers with the call and challenge: “just be active!” his idea is both highly relevant and relatively straightforward. he seeks ongoing dialogue and exchange among the journal’s authors and readers, using the journal as a platform. the jba offers a continuum of possibilities from opinion pieces to essays to full-length articles associated with the area of business anthropology. writers can submit case studies, field reports, book reviews, as well as theoretical, methodological and practice-oriented pieces. all is beautifully laid out on the jba website where readers and prospective authors can get much more information. i have heard some discussion about the potentially-limiting nature of the journal’s title. the argument goes that “business anthropology” is a somewhat narrow field of study, which has likely affected the number of submissions and leads one or two correspondents to argue for business ethnography, rather than anthropology. au contraire! as moeran indicated (p.119): “…download statistics suggest that articles in the jba are being read by thousands.” the issue, therefore, is neither one of size, nor of focus. the jba is still in its relative infancy and requires ongoing efforts to raise awareness about it. so many fascinating issues and topics are ripe for examination – in consumer matters, product design, technology, organizational culture and change, finance, advertising, page 1 of 6 jba 2(1): 5-10 spring 2014 © the author(s) 2014 issn 2245-4217 www.cbs.dk/jba journal of business anthropology, 3(1), spring 2014 6 teaming, leadership – the list goes on and on, as the spring 2014 issue of practicing anthropology, edited by amy goldmacher and amy santee, shows with its exclusive focus on the private sector. we also need anthropological analyses, and not just ethnographies, for business anthropology to be able to hold its own vis-à-vis other disciplines, as well as within anthropology itself. the problem here has been that anthropology has been slow to understand the area of study and practice of business anthropology. for decades there was a reticence to move into for-profit corporations as employees, contractors, or consultants. not until the number of graduating anthropologists far exceeded the availability of new academic jobs did this pattern change. since the 1980s, business anthropology has generally been an area of job growth. today, increasing numbers of students and faculty members are entering this world through new course designs, readings, guest (business) speakers, internships in corporate firms, class projects for business clients, m.a. theses and ph.d. dissertations tied to business issues, and business consulting arrangements, to name but a few. many courses are cross-listed with other colleges of the university including business, engineering, design, and labor relations. how fortuitous, since so many graduates are finding employment in the private sector, working across disciplines and functions. and, speaking of cross-listed courses and cross-disciplinary work, jba leadership in conjunction with the university of hong kong school of modern languages and cultures, held a creative engagements workshop in hong kong on april 25-26, 2014 (see figure 1). dixon wong heung-wah and brian moeran were the organizers. the purpose of the workshop was to initiate cross-disciplinary discussions, bringing together anthropologists and those in management and business studies. the focus was to consider and learn about the strengths and weaknesses of each other’s approach. figure 1: creative engagements workshop at the university of hong kong briody / building momentum for the jba 7 workshop participants tackled numerous topics using a “sparring pair” framework. for example, nigel holden and mitchell sedgwick discussed their views of “cross-cultural management.” holden emphasized rediscovering the role of language in economic exchange, with translation in a business context analogous to knowledge transfer. sedgwick suggested, not too differently, that a combined emphasis on language, culture, and meaning would be most helpful for management today. in another pairing, david tse and timothy malefyt discussed “business and the senses.” tse talked about “passion” embedded in selected business organizations, such as apple, as well as organizations lacking in passion. malefyt pointed out the power of ritual when associated with brands – using the gillette art of shaving brand as a case. this brand was (and still is) successful, malefyt argued, because it encouraged consumers to “get into ritual” by reconnecting through daily practice and memories with how shaving used to be done in the days of one’s father and/or grandfathers. participants in the two-day workshop included: allan batteau, elizabeth briody, nigel holden, kineta hung, dan kärreman, shige makino, timothy malefyt, brian moeran, mitchell sedgwick, david tse, david (bert) westbrook, and dixon wong. some graduate students from the university of hong kong also attended: wendy wei wei, ching-fang chang, and samuel wong. (see figure 2, taken shortly after the workshop concluded.) the work of the participants goes into full gear now. they are expected to engage with their partners over the next several months and produce essays that will appear in jba’s fall 2014 issue. figure 2: selected participants from the creative engagements workshop. as the field of business anthropology continues to develop and become more visible, understood, and appreciated, it seems to me that the journal needs to align, as much as possible, with that evolution. my role as a member of the jba’s editorial leadership is to strengthen journal of business anthropology, 3(1), spring 2014 8 business anthropology as an area of study and application. i believe we should “stay the course” set by editor moeran but at the same time, improve the journal’s marketing through our own professional networks.  for those readers who are in the academy – whether anthropologists or not – spread the word that the jba is an open, inclusive, and exciting place to publish. consider submitting your own work. work with your students on a submission, keeping in mind the broad continuum of submissions we seek. encourage your advanced students to develop a manuscript for the journal.  for those readers who work in the private sector – whether anthropologists or not – join in our discussions and debates. consider submitting a piece to the jba based on your own experiences, analyses, and views as they pertain to culture and business. tap into your colleagues’ knowledge about business culture by co-authoring a piece with someone whose background and training is different than yours. for example, if you are an anthropologist, help jba readers understand how you learn from others at your place of employment, or alternately how others learn from and react to your perspective. certainly there must be lessons for our readership? if you are a business scholar or a business person, help us to understand your point of view about the culture of business, the strategies that have made a difference in your work, and the ways in which you could benefit from, or have benefited from, anthropological insights. in this issue turning now to the spring 2014 issue, we have a variety of interesting works for you. first up is christina wasson’s response to moeran’s call to just be active! she is interested in the “new wave of scholarly interest” in private-sector firms among academic anthropologists, but wonders why there has been little engagement with those studying and working in such firms for decades. wasson likens this emerging pattern to what happened in the area of public anthropology which, fifteen years ago, developed largely in isolation from the long tradition of applied anthropology. wasson also reflects on perceptions of applied work by academics, pointing out that those perceptions vary from high to low. she proposes a way to understand the cultural logic behind such perceptions and recommends tracking the patterns as they develop over time. next in the issue is a series of opinion pieces focusing on business history. written by business historians and those interested in the historical changes within business contexts, these short discussions are sure to fill in knowledge gaps and broaden perspectives on corporate entities. greg urban has done a fine job of both soliciting (with some briody / building momentum for the jba 9 help from moeran) and introducing these pieces so i will say nothing further about the content here. however, i want to point out that part of the purpose in connecting with these business scholars was to get them thinking of ways in which greater integration between anthropology and business might occur. alisha winn presents an historical case of the atlanta life insurance company of atlanta, georgia, usa. throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, this firm provided insurance to african americans – initially in the form of sick and burial benefits, and later, mortgage loans, venture capital, loans for churches, and support for black educational institutions. the issue winn wrestles with involves the “philosophical contradictions facing black business owners during jim crow” (the period during which laws mandated racial segregation in public facilities, preventing african americans from participating in an open business market). she asks: “were atlanta life leaders’ seemingly altruistic actions a genuine strategy to strengthen the black community? or were they designed to increase wealth and power for themselves?” clearly, black entrepreneurial businesses played multiple roles within a constrained social, political, and economic context. the next article is by kevin browne who focuses attention on the home as a site of consumer research in business anthropology. browne draws on the theoretical work of latour, ingold, and munn in particular. using concepts such as “paths,” thresholds,” and “leakage,” he discusses the constantly changing character of the home due to the activity and movement occurring there, and contrasts this view with “modernist theories of architecture and domesticity” which view the home as a locus of stability. his analysis has implications for consumer research: residential spaces can be made more “livable” and a “greater sense of place” can be derived from them. an essay, written by gitti jordan, begins with an assertion that corporate managers have changed: they now understand the value of ethnography to business as done by anthropologists. jordan, of course, is referring to the managers of large global corporations including microsoft, intel, xerox, and nissan where she and other business anthropologists have worked in sizeable numbers. in those workplaces and others, anthropologists have learned to formulate and deliver effective and persuasive responses to the objections businesspeople have articulated about the downsides of ethnography. her comments then turn to the concept of “sociodigitization.” citing the work of arthur, she points to the digital networks that “operate autonomously” and that affect humans at work, play, and rest. moreover, she suggests that this “new kind of open system” makes it difficult to test hypotheses. instead, anthropological skills will be of great value at earlier project stages where they can be used to identify “otherwise unknowable hypotheses and approaches.” journal of business anthropology, 3(1), spring 2014 10 finally, the spring issue concludes with a commentary by gillian tett. she talks about the changing relationship between western business interests, and anthropology. those associated with each group have come to understand and appreciate each other better. business people are discovering that knowledge of cultural issues can be quite useful in both diagnosis of “how the world works” and in understanding customers. anthropologists are finding that business setting can offer opportunity and challenge, making for interesting careers. tett identifies several aspects of the anthropological perspective, including comparison, holism, and a focus on power structures, that position anthropologists to develop the insights they do. and there you have it. enjoy! anthropology with business: plural programs and future financial worlds bill maurer & scott d. mainwaring abstract how can we imagine and perform an anthropological practice with business, that is, not from a distanced perspective but through a mutual infolding and engagement? how might such an arrangement then be exemplary for novel economic experiments of the kind anthropologists often describe? reflecting on several years' of collaborations with each other, the authors recount their relationship as an experiment in novel engagements with economic things (money, corporations, universities, accounting principles, computers, etc.) in an industrial and university site. the paper puts forward a theoretical argument about exaptive and nonadaptive plurality that opens new pathways for alternative and sometimes quite conventional values. the context is a specific set of projects around money and payment. the intellectual background is the anthropology of finance and alternative economies. keywords money, finance, intel, ethnography, value page 1 of 20 jba 1 (2): 177-196 autumn 2012 © the author(s) 2012 issn 2245-4217 www.cbs.dk/jba journal of business anthropology, 1(2), autumn 2012 178 introduction the occasion of this journal invites reflection on the possible prepositions linking anthropology and business. the first, most obvious, is that a journal of “business anthropology” would concern various anthropological approaches to business, or anthropologies of business. yet at the same time, as many anthropologists working in industrial and business settings have discovered and even celebrated, working on business often entails working in business (cefkin, 2009). gaining access and rapport, the anthropologist works alongside colleagues in industrial settings, participating, observing, and along the way getting caught up in various business ventures. there may still be the assumption, however, that the anthropologist will pull away again, leave the business setting for the academic halls and the journal articles, step outside the temporality of quarterly performance goals or the annual report and back into the slower time of the classroom, peer review, publication and the historical, ethnographic and scholarly archives. academic knowledge after all is supposed to endure, and to transcend the moment. business knowledge is for use, in the present or near future: of necessity and for publicly traded companies, by law tied to quarterly earnings statements and the fiscal year. an academic article in the social sciences is deemed a classic if people are still reading it in 20 or 30 years. a corporation’s long-range product roadmap may extend, at most, 10 years, and in many industries its time horizon is much shorter. business and anthropology inhabit different temporal horizons. in this essay, however, we reflect on another temporality and another prepositional relation of anthropology and business: anthropology with business. “with,” for us, implies an ongoing relationship, the entanglements of kinship and alliance more than observation or canned participation. we speculate on our own collaboration as a process of being drawn into relation with each other’s projects and perspectives, an exchange which, while not altogether mutual or equal, not without its frictions and contradictions, nevertheless has opened up plural possibilities for our own work, for the work of others around us, and for our respective institutional locations (in the largest public university system, and in a gigantic publicly traded it company). because our collaboration is about money – what it has been, what it is becoming, what it might be in the future – it contributes to specific plural and diverse economies for money, for finance, for knowledge production. this essay is thus an anthropology of finance. it is about our own relations of credit and debt with each other and between our respective institutions, and the parallel movements we have been tracking of alternative financial and monetary practices and technologically-mediated means of value transfer. the business propositions of the products we have been involved in are all related maurer & mainwaring/ anthropology with business 179 directly to new financial systems and new technologies of money. one of the aims of our work has been to bring to scholars’ and start-ups’ attention the back-offices and hidden infrastructures of money. and along the way, our collaboration has resulted in novel institutional arrangements for the financing of research in academia and industry, arrangements that brought others into our orbit and these back-offices of money and payment. payments innovations are not unrelated to the financial crisis. coincident with the financial crisis has been both the decline in the use of credit cards and the rise of prepaid instruments, on the one hand (jacob & lunn, 2011), and the explosion in social media, on the other. the payments industry itself is shifting from being primarily based on a business model that relies on interest and credit, to one more centrally concerned with fees and, increasingly, access to transaction data. in the consumer finance domain, “bad bets” (on subprime mortgages, on riskier clients) are giving way to “big data” (world economic forum, 2011). the anthropology of finance as a field is roughly coincident in time with our collaboration: we began thinking together about various technological futures for money at the same time that maurer was compiling several review essays of disparate anthropological studies in financial spaces and worlds (maurer, 2005; maurer, 2006). a couple of anthropologists were just completing their dissertations on financial topics (ho, 2009; zaloom, 2006). science and technology studies (sts) scholars who had begun to investigate finance were reaching out to anthropologists, and “social studies of finance” (ssf) was developing as a subfield at the intersection of sociology and sts. sociologists and sts scholars associated with michel callon, bruno latour, donald mackenzie and david stark had just founded the association d’études sociales de la finance (aesf) in 2000. stark hosted a conference in 2002 at columbia that brought many of the "social studies of finance" scholars together. but the real origin point of the aesf was the collaboration of a group of interdisciplinary parisian graduate students (muniesa, lepinay, godechot, tadjeddine, deblic and grossman among others) without the involvement of senior scholars. the socializing finance blog was initiated in 2007 by daniel beunza and yuval millo who are of the same generation. it was only later that social studies of finance became narrowly identified with 'performativity' and with established names like callon, stark, latour and mackenzie.1 1personal communication, martha poon. as with many interdisciplinary endeavours, anthropology’s contribution had been and to an extent remains its signature methodology, ethnography, as well as its knack for defamiliarization. journal of business anthropology, 1(2), autumn 2012 180 also coincident with our collaboration was the global financial crisis that began in 2008. indeed, one of the major “outputs” of our collaboration, a conference titled, everyday digital money,2 took place just as the foundations of wall street were shaking. anthropologist keith hart, our keynote on 24 september 2008, just 9 days after lehman brothers failed, threw out his prepared remarks and spoke off the cuff about the growing financial calamity. since that time, anthropologists have assumed public roles in the debate over finance. the financial times’ reporter gillian tett, an anthropologist by training, became a leading guide through the unfolding debacle and became herself a topic in the academic debates over how to study finance (mackenzie, 2009). karen ho’s well received book chronicling the lives of financial professionals during an earlier crisis garnered her several televised media appearances. david graeber’s (2011) book, debt: the first 5000 years, hit the bookstores and barricades as the occupy wall street movement took to the streets. these are just a few examples of the public face of the anthropology of finance since the crisis. in other quarters, anthropologists have worked behind the scenes, with regulators, financial engineers, investors, and start-up companies. our collaboration is one example, and it spawned others, as we discuss below. also behind the scenes have been the intellectual disagreements within this nascent scholarly community. while some make bold pronouncements about crisis, financial abstraction and whatnot – we will not cite any names here – and others (roitman, 2013) seek more modestly to correct them, another couple of debates have been taking place under the tent. donald mackenzie’s (2009) review of gillian tett’s (2009) book helped crystallize one, and annelise riles (2010) made another, related debate more explicit. these debates are instructive for thinking about anthropology and business collaborations like ours, so, before detailing our own work as an emergent economic actor of a particular sort, let us briefly review those debates. first, have the ssf scholars and anthropologists “gone native?” that is, in their careful dissection of the methods, tools and calculative rationalities of financial practice, have they lost sight of the larger picture of expropriation, inequality, instability and crisis? if one starts from the assumption that all financiers are bad, then the nuanced accounts of the lives and tools of the bankers and traders are apologias for their recklessness and immorality. is “good,” that is, prudent, morally sustainable finance, possible? those like mackenzie and tett who would answer yes have faced criticism from more marxist colleagues. the 2 http://emoney.typepad.com maurer & mainwaring/ anthropology with business 181 socialising finance blog had a discussion on this exact topic after a 2010 conference in paris restaged what has become a familiar debate: the political economists accuse the ssf scholars of getting lost in the technical details of finance to the detriment of political critique.3 this is clearly a concern in any anthropology/industry collaboration. such collaborations can allow a degree of access that makes it easier to get caught up in the technicalities to the detriment of seeing the “larger picture.” second, related to the first, has the focus on technical procedures and financial models placed the focus on the technoscientific aspects of finance to the neglect of the legal, regulatory, and politico-ethical worlds that create the playing field for finance? if one focuses on the technical aspects of their work, then the contracts, documentary practices and political battles about regulation get sidelined – and here is a place where anthropology might actually make a difference (riles, 2011). ironically, however, because of this stance riles has similarly been seen as too cosy with finance, not critical enough, or participating in finance’s own obscurantism. it seems you just can’t win in academic fields predicated on clear lines of demarcation between analyst and subject of inquiry, where “impurity” still means “danger” (after douglas, 1966). this is unfortunate, and speaks to a larger failure of critical imagination. riles’s work seeks to capture an analytical language and practice that would accept, with the possibility of transforming, the world-changing potential of the tools that build financial architectures. it offers a politics without guarantee – and this is what is most disturbing to people who still dream of a simpler, manichean world of good guys and bad guys. in a time when all our lives are bound with finance, a strictly denunciatory position is difficult to sustain. anthropological and other social research on finance had accurately charted the risks of the shadow financial system of derivative trading and other off-balance sheet activities (green, 2000, pryke & allen, 2000, maurer, 2002), the problems inherent in the mortgage market in the united states (langley 2008), as well as more general issues around securitization (maurer, 1999). all before the crisis hit. normative claims about the evils of finance cannot take the place of empirically rich, analytically informed research on financial actors, institutions, formulae and their effects. if it feels like going native, then either we are in the good company of some of our anthropological 3 daniel beunza provided a perspective on this paris conference on his blog, socialising finance. see http://socfinance.wordpress.com/2010/05/21/political-economistsdenounce-social-studies-of-finance-for-overlooking-the-political/ http://socfinance.wordpress.com/2010/05/21/political-economists-denounce-social-studies-of-finance-for-overlooking-the-political/ http://socfinance.wordpress.com/2010/05/21/political-economists-denounce-social-studies-of-finance-for-overlooking-the-political/ journal of business anthropology, 1(2), autumn 2012 182 forebears, or we are striving for a form of collateral, collaborative praxis that might hold hope for a new financial future (riles, 2011, miyazaki, 2007, jensen & winthereik, 2012, gad, 2012, holmes & marcus, 2008). the ssf and riles approaches both ring true to us, perhaps because of the financial/intellectual/institutional intertwining that we discuss here. we do not see them as opposed so much as aspects of different facets of practice. in other words, from our vantage point, they are both “correct” insofar as they accurately map the worlds we have inhabited together in our collaboration. in writing of the forms of collateral knowledge that undergird contemporary finance, riles, like maurer (2005b), finds a collaborative endeavor, and sees in it the possibility for new, joint work actually to reimagine aspects of the financial markets and financial regulation. as she writes on her blog, itself an effort to address and invite in new audiences with which to begin to think together with: “thinking together about theory and practice can produce kinds of insights and solutions that neither side could imagine alone. of course how to do this, when the temporality, the standards of evaluation, and the political pressures of our careers as thinkers in the academy or in government or in the market are so different is not easy. working through these challenges is its own challenge for our field”.4 in what follows, we document our own collaborations over the past 5 years – how they emerged, evolved, shifted, expanded, contracted. we discuss how, in seeking to delineate and understand “alternative” financial and monetary practices – that is, self-reflexively oppositional ones – we became an instantiation of what we had set out to discover. this has implications for understanding financial and economic worlds as plural and diverse rather than reducible to one logic or set of practices. critics like those we have alluded to will undoubtedly see us as pollyannaish at best or coopted dupes at worst. but we ask that such critics forestall judgment for now, if only to be able to take us – at first – as an object of inquiry, worthy of deeper investigation. as we came more and more into contact with alternative financial worlds and especially new payment infrastructures, and as our work impacted how others were understanding, designing and deploying those infrastructures, the very idea of one logic became impossible to sustain. reading gibson-graham at intel 4 (http://collateralknowledge.com/blog/2012/01/broadening-the-methodsfor-studying-financial-regulation/) maurer & mainwaring/ anthropology with business 183 one day early in 2007, mainwaring came to visit maurer in his office at uc irvine. he was accompanied by hsain ilahiane, an anthropologist currently at the university of kentucky who was spending a year as a “visiting researcher” at intel. the encounter was unexpected (by maurer, at least). mainwaring had come to talk about money. maurer had just completed a review essay on the anthropology of money (maurer, 2006). and mainwaring was just beginning a project through intel labs’ peoples and practices research (papr) group on “everyday digital money.” over the course of the discussions that ensued, the project’s title was renamed “personal digital money.” we will not go into the details here, but suffice to say that mainwaring was engaged in an attempt to shift the conversation at intel about digital and electronic forms of value transfer, away from just being about security and efficiency, and toward the actual uses to which people were putting new electronic forms of payment, and their broader cultural context. included in this was an opening-up of the conversation at intel about money itself an open-up that maurer had also been simultaneously trying to facilitate in anthropology (see e.g. guyer, 2004: 175). what was happening at intel labs at the time was a willingness to experiment with different disciplines and methodologies. having ilahiane formally ensconced at intel as a visiting researcher was an example of this experimentation, since normally such visitors would have been engineers or computer scientists, under short-term consulting contracts. this was not taking place at intel writ large, but in small corners of it, like papr. the effort to open the door to nonengineers at intel has precedent in institutional novelties like xerox parc, famous for inventing the giant green print button on photocopy machines as well as graphical user interfaces that gave rise to the windows and apple operating systems. parc brought social scientists into the fold, notably, lucy suchman, whose plans and situated actions: the problem of human-machine communication (suchman, 1987) quickened intellectual and design activity around the new field of human computer interaction (hci). also in the early to mid-1980s, the associate for computing machinery (acm)’s “social and behavioral computing” group reorganized itself as the special interest group in computer human interaction (sigchi, or simply chi), whose conferences became important venues for a new approach to computing that placed human interaction, culture and society at the center of analysis. at intel labs, as elsewhere in industry, hci permitted a new flexibility in the approach to computing and design problems. but it was atheoretical. or, rather, it was not specifically bound to any particular theoretical approach. “theory” was something to be brought in to spark new conversations but not necessarily new commitments. intel has a journal of business anthropology, 1(2), autumn 2012 184 history of this kind of engagement before mainwaring’s work with ilahiane and maurer. under the visiting researcher model, academics like ilahiane got to sit in the cubicles and conference rooms while also serving as ethnographic guides for intel researchers in the field. this model was based on an explicitly longer-term time frame than a simpler consultancy agreement, with one year at least being committed to the corporation in exchange for a salary and a different kind of research experience than the ordinary academic sabbatical. as part of the personal digital money project, maurer’s role was different. it was a short-term consultancy. maurer’s job was to bring “theory” in this open-ended fashion to mainwaring’s group. this made it fun for maurer – the opportunity to engage in an unfamiliar institutional space with, as one of us put it, “very adult undergraduates.” it made it fun for mainwaring, too – the opportunity to stretch his wings and think outside the boxes of the engineers. but it was challenging. it was hard for maurer always to know what was happening on the intel side. it was hard for mainwaring to fit the activity into the accountability frameworks the industrial organization required, harder than, say, providing a back-to-office report (btor) after a short stint of corporatestyle field research of 2-3 weeks. we will return to these points in the next section. at the start of what would become their long-term collaboration, maurer spent several days at intel labs outside of portland, oregon, running a small seminar with mainwaring and one of his colleagues, wendy march, a design researcher. ilahiane dropped in and out from time to time, but he was involved in some other projects at the time of maurer’s visit. hovering in the background was maria bezaitis, mainwaring and march’s then-supervisor, who prodded us to create a material record of our discussion and to sharpen our theoretical focus. for maurer, the initial encounters were strange: it was hard to figure out what this lab and this activity in the lab was for, how it contributed to intel’s business of making silicon chips; it was also hard to figure out the supervisory relationships and the expectations among everyone. for mainwaring, the stakes were higher: this was his job, after all, and he had to answer to supervisors. the “collaboration” did not always feel mutual, harmonious, or truly collaborative. social scientists at intel usually focus on bringing their methodological toolkits to the table: how to design and implement semistructured interviews, how to take ethnographic fieldnotes, how to see differently in the field. maurer brought a reading list of work in the anthropology of money and the social study of finance. we engaged in three days of discussion. we recorded the conversation and used intel’s resources to have it transcribed. some of what follows captures the dialogue we were starting to have. the topic was alternative economies maurer & mainwaring/ anthropology with business 185 and alternative forms of money and finance. mainwaring had a vague sense that understanding “alternative economies” could help differently enframe emerging electronic money systems than intel’s standard focus on such matters as processing power of encryption. mainwaring and ilahiane had just completed some fieldwork on the brand-new mobile phone-enabled money transfer service, m-pesa, a product of kenya’s main telecommunications provider, safaricom (see mas & morawczynski, 2009, jack, suri, & townsend, 2010, kuriyan, nafus, & mainwaring 2012) and related projects in south africa, and had explored islamic conceptions of debt and credit in morocco. mainwaring and march had also done work in japan on the use of nearfield communications (nfc) smart cards that are used for transit but also for small purchases, and were exploring new online-based lending and sharing communities like kiva.org and a time banking community in redmond, oregon. maurer’s reading list included works by scholars writing about local exchange and trading systems (lets),5 as well as writing on alternative economies, non-economic uses and meanings of money, and theoretical work that seeks to question the verities of economic theory (mainly from geography). so first we start with alternative. what is alternative? what is alternative. different notions of alternative. so alternative in the sense of alternative to the formal economy which would just mean the informal economy or alternative in the sense of alternative to the whole notion of there being an informal or formal economy in the first place? this was [inaudible]? this was in the williams et al.6 and williams et al basically say that while for some participants lets systems help them get into the formal economy you know they learn some skills and then they can get a job or it actually employs them and they have a real job. and while for others lets systems were helping them to kind of almost formalize what already existed as an informal economy. for most of them they weren't in it for either of those 5 local exchange and trading systems (lets), the brainchild of michael linton, are formalized barter networks that employ a software platform to keep track of trades within the system. linton was one of the other keynotes at mainwaring and maurer’s everyday digital money conference in september 2008. mainwaring was interested in lets as well as time banking as alternative means of economic value creation and exchange, and the fact that they rely on information technology made them potentially more legible to intel than other alternative financial arrangements. 6 the text we were discussing was williams, aldridge, & tooke, 2003. journal of business anthropology, 1(2), autumn 2012 186 reasons. they were doing it for the pleasure of community and connection. so it was a step towards the formal but then also? for some it was a step towards the formal but for some it was a way of formalizing the informal. also enriching the informal because we could draw more people into it then too. but for many it was really the importance was to one side of the formal/informal business altogether. it wasn’t about economy or making money or anything like that or even i need someone to babysit my kid. it wasn’t about that. it was just about creating a diffused sense of social connection, and meaning and obligation and community and local identity. this is a snippet of the kinds of discussions we had. running throughout, the work of j.k. gibson-graham (gibson-graham, 2006) served as a kind of touchstone, helping to orient us toward the possibility of what they call plural and diverse economies. here we were discussing jane guyer’s ( 2004) reformulation of paul bohannan’s (1959) classic article on the tiv multi-centric economy. maurer was describing how he teaches bohannan and guyer to his undergraduates: start with bohannan, then: then give them her [guyer]. and so once their minds have been blown by the possibility of multi-centric economy, she takes that and opens it up and says, aha, but this multi-centric economy actually only works in relation to the external linkages that it had with europe. mmm-hmm. so then [...] maybe [the] western european derived economy isn’t as homogeneous, blah, blah, blah as we think. enter gibsongraham. [...] you can see how you can sort of, it helps you sort of open up an argument about economy and give you another sort of set of conceptual tools then to think about it. mmm-hmm. along the way, this all led to the idea for an internal white paper that would be circulated at intel. again, gibson-graham were central: the more immediate thing is we wanted to do an internal white paper, where we can put up on the internal website for people saying, “okay you’ve spent…you know six months now on charity, purity, community, why should intel care?” uh-hum and that’s…i think with the paper… maurer & mainwaring/ anthropology with business 187 yeah, yeah. i mean even what’s….what’s here, even before we started talking there was a narrative in a paper, right? and with some of the stuff we talked to today, there’s more of…you know in a way a framework that consists of series of matrices. but then that speaks to some of this charity literature and some of this sort of diverse economy literature. i’m not sure which one is the white paper? you know or which piece is the…’cause this…the narrative here you could imagine being sort of the flesh, like the ethnographic meat on an academic paper that starts from gibson and graham and sort of gives a matrix of charity and giving and all the mechanism and means and modes or whatever. or this could be a white paper all by itself, i don’t know, i don’t what the form of white paper is…is, you know. well internally it’s whatever we want to make up. yeah. it’s just something to…so what concerned me is…that i haven’t written the damn thing, it’s way overdue. but it’d be short…people have short attention spans here, they want it to get to the point quickly, they don’t want…they want novelty. they want non-obviousness. yeah. so i want to…so one cut is…you know top level, “i want to blow your minds intel!” we decided we would write a paper called, how do you hear theory? or, reading gibson-graham in industry. we submitted an abstract to the ethnographic praxis in industry (epic) conference. it was not accepted. another paper of ours, based on mainwaring and march’s research in japan, was accepted at chi, and went on to win a best paper award (mainwaring, march, & maurer, 2008). we never wrote the first paper. but the abstract for that never-written paper is instructive, now, for thinking about anthropology with business in the domain of money and finance. our abstract read: what does it mean to hire someone to “be theoretical?” this paper reports on a collaboration between industry and academia in which an anthropologist was invited into an existing collaborative group not to provide methodological expertise but to prod the group with theory. in this case, the anthropologist introduced the group to theories of alternative economies. this included the work of j.k. gibson-graham, a scholarly personality made up of two distinct individuals – julie graham, an economist, and katherine gibson, a geographer. gibson-graham criticize/s unitary or homogenous accounts of “the economy,” journal of business anthropology, 1(2), autumn 2012 188 instead offering a vision of proliferating, diverse “economies” not captured by standard or critical analysis of capitalist social formations. by bringing gibson-graham and other theorists to a group discussion about diverse and plural economies, the collaboration permitted the hearing of theory in a context that mirrored the form of that which the group was investigating. hearing theory did not just mean finding an existing framework to help sort out data, but opening the conversation to new ways of thinking and representing. in some ways, the theory brought to the table was the least appropriate for an industry setting because of its denseness. while academic collaboration in industrial work is not new, this one is unusual because of the location of an academic as theory-bearer rather than methodology-sharer. anthropology in industry has often meant ethnography as a tool or a means to an end. here, however, anthropology means listening to theory, not mining for methods. as such, the collaboration about diverse economies participates in a diverse economy of its own: unlike methods, which can be transported, adapted and put into play in new contexts, the uses of theory are rarely self-evident at the start and the ends are uncertain. this requires that theory be heard differently. and hearing theory in industry may also work to shift the conversation about the uses of theory in the academy, as well. it has the potential to soften or altogether obviate the divide between “theoretical” and “applied” work while finding new hybrid industry/academic spaces within which to do and hear theory. years later, in 2011-12, other colleagues of mainwaring’s, at maurer’s instigation, began reading gibson-graham, this time in relation to questions about intel’s supply chain and its relationship to some of its suppliers. they are discovering all kinds of relations beyond “the give and the get” (as one puts it) of market transactions. and in many ways they are inhabiting a different world from where we were in 2008, one where chinese suppliers are central to it manufacturing, where new disruptive entrants like facebook and google are starting to occupy the platform provision role that had been intel’s mainstay, where intel’s own “ecology” of businesses (moore, 2006) and services is no longer centered on intel itself but dissipates into a proliferation of start-ups fed by venture capital, angel investors, philanthropic capital, and prize competitions, these last two at least relative novelties in the financing of industrial activity. the animating problem, however, was still similar to what it was for us in reflecting on what we were doing back in 2008. diversity, variation and adaptation maurer & mainwaring/ anthropology with business 189 one of many ironies is that we never really did deal in a sustained way with gibson-graham. their work was successful in motivating us and inspiring us, but we never engaged with it in a deep, theoretical way. we were not reading the work the way they had intended it to be read. in our intel seminar, it wasn’t really clear to mainwaring and march why we were reading it except that maurer was supposed to be bringing “theory” to the table, and here was “theory” embodied in gibsongraham and some other articles and books. no matter how ethnographic these works may have been, they were to be read for their “theoretical” content, not least because this was the directive given to maurer, to bring “theory” to intel. since the reading was not tied to a concrete activity “in the field” or specific analysis of data previously collected, it felt like we reading for the love of reading. this seemed to go against the surrounding institutional context and prescripts. for example, we also needed credibility within intel. there was to be an intel open house where the personal digital money project would be presented to the wider intel community. we needed an image that would capture what we were doing. we took gibson-graham’s diagram of the “economic iceberg” (see gibson-graham 2006). the point of the economic iceberg is to show that most accounts of economic activity, whether critical or not, focus on wage labor in the capitalist firm as the paradigmatic mode of value creation and expropriation. this is only the tip of the iceberg one can see above the ocean’s surface, however. below the water line, a whole profusion of economic activity is going on, sometimes articulated to what is happening above water, but very often not. gibson-graham sought to uncover and describe a proliferation of diverse and plural economies irreducible to one logic or form. they invoked one version of darwinian evolutionary theory that emphasizes variation rather than teleology: stephen j. gould’s spandrels and “exaptations,” not richard dawkins’s “adaptations.”7 the open house was about visibility and tangibility. it was important to have ideas visually communicated about the project, and the open house was an important thing in terms of managing intel’s expectations. what were intel’s expectations? that the activity we had been engaged in was “research,” that the team had “academic partners,” and that the academic partner had access to the kinds of economic alternatives and value formations intel was interested in. it was also important that the academic partner was credentialed in a way that is legible to intel. in doing this dance of accountability, of course, we ourselves exemplified gibson-graham’s argument, and doubly so. first, adding accountability in this fashion “formalized” our own intellectual and 7 see gould & lewontin, 1979 and gould, 1991 on this debate. journal of business anthropology, 1(2), autumn 2012 190 monetary exchanges (insofar as maurer’s consultancy contract animated, authorized and formalized both), placing us above the water line of the economic iceberg, looking down beneath the surface at the supposedly more social, “authentic,” more “real,” less formal, alternative forms of value creation and exchange. but second, what we did ended up being an example of what gibson-graham described as taking place below the water line: an experiment in novel engagements with economic things (money, corporations, universities, accounting principles, computers, etc.). for mainwaring had hoped that he could lead specific interlocutors at intel to reflect on new relationships of ownership. academic partnerships at intel were not new, as we have noted. but ours was a little different in its reflexivity. we were suggesting that intel could think differently about the value that corporations get from academic research beyond, say, the leakage of intellectual property. the latter has been traditionally the corporation’s chief concern with such collaborations. and we were talking about, bringing to light at intel, alternative economies while unintentionally becoming one ourselves. we were creating in our own collaborative relationship just such an alternative. we were becoming an instructive example of what we were talking about. still, however, labs are tracked by how many invention disclosures they generate, because they can be counted – not at all unlike publications for academics. mainwaring’s intel colleagues wanted ideas and theory, and to explore at a deeper level the complex realities of diverse forms of value and economy. at the same time, they were always aware that this was a consulting contract with specific deliverables that fed into a larger audit culture about demonstrating in the right way to the rest of intel that we were doing “research,” and the right kind of research. for intel, the discovery of economies below the water line potentially has “real” value apart from protest or opposition to a dominant economy or value formation. in money and finance, our work helped tell a different story, about a system that could make, handle, manage money and finance in a more humane way, or to serve human agendas. our project was also legible to intel in that it served intel’s aim of trying to predict the future, to envision change before it happens, and to see how random mutations open up new pathways. here, gould’s spandrels meet dawkins’s adaptations, as every potentially nonadaptive element may open up new channels or paths for future value(s). becoming-with business and finance while we were working out our own collaboration with each other and with intel, we were also becoming actors in the infrastructures of maurer & mainwaring/ anthropology with business 191 payment systems. immediately on the heels of the personal digital money project, maurer founded a research institute devoted to new mobile phone enabled payment systems, the institute for money, technology and financial inclusion (imtfi; see schwittay, 2011). it is funded by the bill and melinda gates foundation. a program officer found out about maurer’s work on money through another intel colleague not connected to the project with mainwaring. mainwaring serves on the board. the institute’s mandate is to create new partnerships with other academic and research institutes in the global south, to foster their own research agendas within an overarching rubric around new technologies of payment and banking. this, then, led to new collaborative relationships with industry. it was striking to maurer at least that industry participants at the everyday digital money conference found it really difficult to figure out how to collaborate given the constraints of non-disclosure their employers set upon them. they discovered in the academic setting a space of (relative) freedom to find new ways of talking to each other. this became one of the raisons d’etre for the institute, written into its subsequent funding applications. providing industry researchers a space of freedom to pursue their own priorities ended up being built into the institute’s mandate. for example, one industry researcher, in the process of switching jobs, sought funding from imtfi for research in afghanistan. as maurer wrote in his proposal for imtfi’s funding renewal: this project demonstrated the value of providing support to industry professionals outside of their regular work – and thus not subject to any restrictions that might be placed on them by their employer. it created new audiences for imtfi research and helped inform these audiences about specific elements of the financial inclusion agenda that had been opaque: from the basics, like the costs to the poor of dealing exclusively in cash or gold, for example, to more specific issues like the need to devise sms/ussd8 interfaces and the need to consider how funds in a mobile money system are backed and how the float is managed. for example, at a public presentation of the afghanistan research, several audience members commented via twitter that they would require additional training in how to program for sms applications if they intend to get involved in this space, rather than focusing on the operating systems of high-end smart phones (like the iphone’s ios). 8 sms, short message service, refers to the basic text-message capability of simple mobile phones. ussd, unstructured supplementary service data, refers to an even more basic protocol that allows the phone to communicate with the mobile carrier’s towers. journal of business anthropology, 1(2), autumn 2012 192 this snippet from the proposal shows both the justification of supporting industry researchers in terms of providing that space of freedom, and the unintended effects of doing so (written here as if they had proceeded exactly according to a preordained plan!). note that those effects included opening up into mobile financial services the idea of programming in “old” languages in order to design new services, a reaching below the waterline, perhaps, of gibson-graham’s iceberg, into oddly non-market, “merely” operational protocols like ussd, or delving more deeply into the weirder aspects of “market” relations like the funds float in a mobile money system.9 with a design colleague, camellia george, mainwaring produced a video (and comic book) imagining a world of future moneys and finances where people would use multiple public and private currencies simultaneously and in conjunction with one another, in arrangements with merchants providing loyalty discounts, and with alternative financial institutions, banks and brokers offering savings and investment products.10 for 2008, it seemed far-fetched. in a world where a social networking service, facebook, now offers prepaid credits, where there is open speculation that apple will buy a bank, and where personal, transactional data is becoming a new coin of the payments realm, it was prescient. in the context of our work, we have been able to interact with both the platform development side of mobile payment systems, and the regulatory side (see, e.g., kendall, maurer, & machoka, 2012). independently of this, our collaborations with others at uc irvine and intel labs have resulted in another institutional/financial arrangement, a research center devoted to “social computing,”11 harking back to the old pre-chi “social and behavioral” moniker but distinctly different in orientation. where chi’s progenitor emphasized the gap between the human and the computer, the paradigm of social 9 it is beyond the scope of this paper, but the float in mobile money systems – the funds held on behalf of all the clients using the service who have uploaded value into their accounts – is generally not allowed to be intermediated. that is, the float cannot be leveraged by the mobile network operator (i.e., the operator cannot earn interest on it) nor can the operator use it for any of its regular expenses. regulations in many countries demand it be placed in a special kind of trust account, thus removed for a time from capitalist economic relations. this is an alternative economy within the mobile money economy. 10 see navigating future moneyscapes, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7yt4q_ykgl4 and http://emoney.typepad.com/blog/2008/07/navigating-futu.html 11 see http://socialcomputing.uci.edu http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7yt4q_ykgl4 http://emoney.typepad.com/blog/2008/07/navigating-futu.html http://socialcomputing.uci.edu/ maurer & mainwaring/ anthropology with business 193 computing we are now seeking to formulate focuses on the entanglements. our own entanglements in a way provide inspiration. how can we assess the multiple engagements with economic things that is our ongoing collaboration? this brings us back to the debates over the anthropology of finance, and to a prepositional commitment to anthropology with business. isabelle stengers draws on gilles deleuze’s “thinking par milieu”. the double entendre captures both the middle and the surround. “‘through the middle’ would mean without grounding definitions or an ideal horizon. ‘with the surroundings’ would mean that no theory gives you the power to disentangle something from its particular surroundings” (stengers, 2005:187). we are both in the middle and not capable of being disentangled from our habitat, the surround that we ourselves have helped co-constitute and in which we operate. at the same time, there is no easy merging of perspectives or positions here: we both still occupy our separate institutional locations, with their demands, pressures, mandates at cross-purposes, divergent temporalities, and so on. we “intervene in [each others’] ethos” (p.189), one might say. and in that intervention, we format financial and monetary relations for each other, for the world of payments around us, an exaptation that nonetheless opens up multiple and diverse pathways. we would like to think that what we are doing matters at this historical juncture, too. there are at present critics on the left and right – and far right and far right – arguing for the end of credit altogether, for the demise of state-backed currencies, for no final settlement on the one hand and for a nostalgia for “community” on the other, that risks sliding into the most reactionary forms of exclusion. the public sector is eviscerated, and the additive ecology of money and finance we were looking at back then at intel, is now looking more and more like a supplantive, competition-driving-out-alternatives ecology where private currencies and payment systems actively seek to replace public ones, to squash variation and plurality in the name of “freedom.” we, too, have found a kind of freedom in our collaborative endeavor, each in our respective yet ever-more conjoint institutional locations. that freedom is of a specific kind, however, and may not be seen as “freedom” in the traditional, liberatory sense: not an unencumbering, but a re-encumbering in an explosive proliferation of plural possibilities and relations. references journal of business anthropology, 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(1991). exaptation: a crucial tool for evolutionary psychology. journal of social issues, 47, 43-65. gould, s. j., & lewontin, r. c. (1979). the spandrels of san marco and the panglossian paradigm: a critique of the adaptationist programme. proceedings of the royal society of london, series b, 205 (1161), 581-598. doi:10.1126/science.24.602.58 graeber, d. (2011). debt: the first 5000 years. brooklyn: melville house. green, s. (2000). negotiating with the future: the culture of modern risk in global financial markets. environment and planning d: society and space, 18 (1), 77-89. retrieved from http://www.envplan.com/epd/fulltext/d18/d205t.pdf guyer, j. i. (2004). marginal gains: monetary transactions in atlantic africa. chicago : university of chicago press. retrieved from http://books.google.com/books?id=oygroi_tpyc&printsec=frontcover&dq=marginal+gains&cd=1#v=onepage&q=&f= false ho, k. (2009). liquidated: an ethnography of wall street. duke university press. retrieved from http://www.amazon.com/liquidatedethnography-street-franklin-center/dp/0822345994 holmes, d. r., & marcus, g. e. (2008). collaboration today and the reimagination of the classic scene of fieldwork encounter. collaborative anthropologies, 1, 81-101. doi:10.1353/cla.0.0003 jack, w., suri, t., & townsend, r. (2010). monetary theory and electronic money: reflections on the kenyan experience, 96 (1), 83-122. maurer & mainwaring/ anthropology with business 195 jacob, k., & lunn, a. (2011). exploring the new face of retail payments. chicago fed letter, the federal reserve bank of chicago, september (290a). jensen, c. b., & winthereik, b. r. (2012). monitoring movements: building partnership through aid infrastructures. cambridge: mit press. kendall, j., maurer, b., & machoka, p. (2012). an emerging platform: from money transfer system to mobile money ecosystem. innovations: innovations: technology, governance, globalization, 6 (4), 49-64. langley, p. (2008) the everyday life of global finance: saving and borrowing in anglo-america. oxford: oxford university press. mackenzie, d. a. (2009). all those arrows. london review of books, 31 (12), 20-22. retrieved from http://www.lrb.co.uk/v31/n12/donaldmackenzie/all-those-arrows mainwaring, s., march, w., & maurer, b. (2008). from meiwaku to tokushita!: lessons for digital money design from japan. conference on human factors in computing systems. retrieved from http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1357058 mas, i., & morawczynski, o. (2009). designing mobile money services: lessons from m-pesa. innovations: technology, governance, globalization mit press, (march 2007), 77-91. maurer, b. (1999). forget locke? from proprietor to risk-bearer in new logics of finance. public culture, 11 (2), 365-385. retrieved from http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/public_culture/v011/11.2maurer.html maurer, b. (2002). repressed futures: financial derivatives’ theological unconscious . economy and society , 31 (1), 15–36. retrieved from http://www.anthro.uci.edu/faculty_bios/maurer/maurerrepressed futurese&s.pdf maurer, b. (2005a). finance. in e. james g. carrier (ed.), a handbook of economic anthropology (pp. 176-93). cheltenham, uk: edward elgar. maurer, b. (2005b). mutual life, limited: islamic banking, alternative currencies, lateral reason. princeton: princeton university press. maurer, b. (2006). the anthropology of money. annual review of anthropology, 35 (1), 15-36. doi:10.1146/annurev.anthro.35.081705.123127 miyazaki, h. (2007). between arbitrage and speculation: an economy of belief and doubt. economy and society, 36 (3), 396-415. doi:10.1080/03085140701428365 moore, j. f. (2006). business ecosystems and the view from the firm. the antitrust bulletin, 51 (i), 31-76. journal of business anthropology, 1(2), autumn 2012 196 pryke, m., & allen, j. (2000). monetized time-space: derivatives – money’s “new imaginary”? economy and society, 29 (2), 264-284. retrieved from http://docserver.ingentaconnect.com/deliver/connect/routledg/03085 147/v29n2/s4.pdf?expires=1270003613&id=55927360&titleid=737&a ccname=university+of+california&checksum=46c4d8ee5e03af29e6a 91d267434f91f riles, a. (2010). collateral expertise. current anthropology, 51 (6), 795818. doi:10.1086/657627 riles, a. (2011). collateral knowledge: legal reasoning in the global financial markets. chicago: university of chicago press. roitman, j. (2013). anti-crisis. durham, nc: due university press. schwittay, a. (2011). the financial inclusion assemblage: subjects , technics , rationalities. critique of anthropology, 31 (4), 381-401. doi:10.1177/0308275x11420117 stengers, i. (2005). introductory notes on an ecology of practices. cultural studies review, 11 (1), 183-196. suchman, l. (1987). plans and situated actions: the problem of humanmachine communication. cambridge: cambridge university press. tett, g. (2009). fool’s gold: how the bold dream of a small tribe at j.p. morgan was ... new york: simon & schuster. retrieved from http://books.google.com/books?id=9aqocmei7m8c&pgis=1 williams, c., aldridge, t., & tooke, j. (2003). alternative exchange spaces. alternative economic spaces (pp. 151-167). london: sage publications. zaloom, c. (2006). out of the pits: traders and technology from chicago to london. university of chicago press. retrieved from http://www.amazon.com/out-pits-traders-technologychicago/dp/0226978133 bill maurer is a cultural anthropologist who conducts research on law, property, money and finance, focusing on the technological infrastructures and social relations of exchange and payment. he is the director for the institute for money, technology and financial inclusion at the university of california, irvine. bill can be reached at wmmaurer@uci.edu. scott d. mainwaring is a senior research scientist in interaction and experience research (ixr) at intel labs and serves as the intel pi for the new intel science and technology center (istc) for social computing at the university of california, irvine. he may be reached at scott.mainwaring@intel.com. http://www.imtfi.uci.edu/ http://socialcomputing.uci.edu/ maurer & mainwaring/ anthropology with business 197 vi opdaterer systemet vi opdaterer systemet... rauli.cbs.dk opdateres og er snart tilgængeligt. too rare to be a token: an anthropologist in a management department alex stewart howard aldrich and i recently demonstrated the minuscule impact of anthropology in management publications, in contrast with the current flowering of business anthropology, and with the impacts of economics, psychology and sociology (stewart & aldrich, forthcoming). we considered eight qualities of anthropology that could be obstacles to its impact: left wing ideology, exotic (read irrelevant) expertise, ethnography as the primary source of data, field access challenges, the lengthy duration of ethnographic fieldwork, solo rather than multiple authorships, complex and contextualized findings, and greater emphasis on scholarly books than on journal articles. we concluded that none of these is an insurmountable obstacle to collaboration between management and anthropology researchers. hopefully our outlook will be read as optimistic. this essay has a hopeful cast as well, as i reflect on nearly 30 years as an anthropologist in management departments. aldrich and i encouraged management scholars to engage with anthropologists, and suggested ways to do so. here, my intended audience is anthropologists who might consider a career in a management department.1 i organize 1 considering the large numbers of business anthropologists in industry (briody, 2014), we can hope that a few of these at least would (like malcolm chapman, page 1 of 19 jba 3(2): 140-158 fall 2014 © the author(s) 2014 issn 2245-4217 www.cbs.dk/jba stewart / to rare to be a token 141 my thoughts around the eight potential obstacles, from the perspective of the anthropologist rather than that of the management researcher. first, however, a sliver of my biography is needed as a context for my comments. if i had tried to render my record opaque when i entered the market for business school faculty, i could scarcely have done a better job. in truth i could have left myself as even more of an outsider, because i took an m.b.a. at the all-but-dissertation stage for my doctorate, and i wrote my dissertation on an auto parts firm. however, my degrees (from york university in toronto) reflected a zig zagging route: b.a., m.a. in social anthropology with east asian languages; m.b.a. with a concentration in entrepreneurship; and ph.d. in political science, with a major field of canadian politics and a minor field of social anthropology. my dissertation was also considered “qualitative”―a term heard more frequently in business schools than in anthropology departments. i then compounded these liabilities by publishing, as my first work on business, a scholarly book (stewart, 1989). if i have survived such an inauspicious start, and also the later mistakes i confess to in this essay, surely other anthropologists can do better than i. potential obstacle: sympathy for the poor and left wing ideology. not only was i educated first in the social sciences, but in canada at the time of the vietnam war, and in a university widely regarded (not completely correctly) as left wing. when i joined the m.b.a. program i was, therefore, not surprised to notice the different political orientation. a purpose of the program, it seemed, was to socialize management novitiates into positive views of markets and firms. rather unexpected was my self-perception of a participant observer going native. the business school world began to feel more and more normal. one reason was realizing that business school professors are scholars first, and business professors second. i had expected they would focus their writings on matters of imminent practical utility, but found little difference from anthropologists in the value they placed on writings intended primarily, or only, for other academics. teaching in business schools is long on the merits of markets, but management journals sometimes publish critiques of corporations and of capitalism itself. therefore, one way to reconcile the worldviews of anthropology and management was to become a “critical management scholar” (to use its current name; stewart & aldrich, forthcoming). this was not an option for me, since i had slid too far into a managerial timothy malefyt, and brian moeran, among others) consider a business school position. in stewart and aldrich, we cited many works by business anthropologists, such as elizabeth briody. with a different purpose in mind, i do not do so here. however, these writings and the developments they reflect encourage me to think that such readers might exist. journal of business anthropology, 3(2), fall 2014 142 mindset. instead, my solution was to focus on entrepreneurship. i thought then, and i think now, that this is a way to support the creation of new wealth, broadly conceived, by people and communities in need. moreover, thanks to my anthropological background, my conception of entrepreneurs was eclectic, including swat pathans, melanesian bigmen, and diverse micro-enterprising actors (stewart, 1990; 1991). potential obstacle: ethnography as the data source management departments do not understand ethnography. method discussions in “qualitative” articles focus almost exclusively on data interpretation and analysis.2 as a signal to editors and reviewers that a study has methodological merit, an established canon of works will be cited. the customary references are on grounded theory (by anselm strauss with juliet corbin), and case study research (by kathy eisenhardt, and by robert yin). this is not a canon one learns in anthropology. that is unsurprising. none of these works pays attention to the quality of the fieldwork data. judging by the “qualitative” studies that make it into management journals, and the manuscripts i am sent to review, weak fieldwork data cripple the majority. when i encounter a study based on high quality fieldwork, such as that by salvato and corbetta (2013), i am surprised. my frustration with inapt routines for assessing ethnography led me, with john van maanen’s encouragement, to write a short book for his “qualitative methods” series. the ethnographer’s method3 (stewart, 1998) remains―i think―the only comprehensive statement of method criteria for traditional ethnographic research. when i wrote it, i harbored no illusions that its prescriptions would be met with broad acceptance. still, i had hoped the book would inspire a debate. this never materialized. the book received only one book review, in the journal of marketing research. it was ignored by all of the journals in anthropology, sociology, ethnography or qualitative method. kindly excuse a few personal observations for a moment. i believe they refer to problems stemming in part from my affiliation with a business school, leading to the ecological fallacy of assuming that i would be imposing a conventionally quantitative and constraining methodological template. to the contrary, as eric arnould―the book’s 2 the same focus and the same blind spot are found in the debates about grounded theory between adherents of barney glaser or anselm strauss (glaser, 2008; heath & cowley, 2004). 3 the title is an anthropological allusion. malinowski (1922/1961, p. 6; cited in stewart, 1998, p. 65) asked, “what is then this ethnographer’s magic?” and he answered, shortly thereafter, that it is “a patient and systematic application of… common sense and well known scientific principles… the principles of method.” i do note that some “rhetorical fancy may well be at play in this passage, but not as much as it might at first appear.” stewart / to rare to be a token 143 sole reviewer―realized: the book is an “unapologetic defense” of ethnography, and ethnography as understood by anthropologists (2000, p. 279).4 by contrast, an article by lazaraton (2003, p. 6) concluded that my book “implies that evaluating various characteristics of methodological rigor is sufficient for ensuring ‘quality’ research.” here is what the book says on this matter: “method is a necessary, but not a sufficient, contribution to the caliber of an ethnography” (stewart, 1998, p. 65; see also p. 14). perhaps i have failed to this point to proffer hopeful signs for anthropological ethnographers in management. however, there are grounds for optimism. unlike adherents to the canonical citations in management (corbin and strauss, and so on), anthropologists know that ethnography needs prolonged fieldwork, the search for disconfirming observations, good participative role relationships, and attentiveness to context. (these are the first four, and most important, requirements for good ethnography that i propose in the ethnographer’s method.) anthropologists also bring a broad method toolkit to the field―they may, for example, be adept at social network analysis (stewart & aldrich, forthcoming). therefore, they could surprise the reviewers for management journals by submitting high quality work. my view is these journals reject “qualitative” studies more frequently than other works, but only because these submissions are weak. a study based on bad data cannot be remedied. if anthropologists do seek to publish in management journals, i suggest that they study the theories and norms in these outlets, team up with a scholar in management, or both. potential obstacle: access to business field sites. you would think that being in a business school would help to open up doors for field research on management. i suspect this is generally true. nonetheless, their possible disadvantage has not stopped scholars in departments of anthropology or sociology from producing ethnographic studies of management (e.g. kondo, 1990; moeran, 1996; miyazaki, 2013; riles, 2011; yanagisako, 2002).5 moreover, not all business schools are well connected with business practitioners. worse, the blindness of business schools to ethnographic requirements can be actively harmful. at a critical time in my career, a senior colleague explicitly blocked my access to the main organizations of any scale―other than the university―for many miles. on balance, being in an urban area with multiple field sites is probably more important than being in a business school. being in a regionally well-regarded university is probably more important. being in the right place at the right time―luck―is probably 4 arnould’s review is explicitly favorable (“i like the book”, p. 279), so i am biased in its favor. you can bear that in mind when i say that it has an accurate summary of the book. 5 the reader might have noticed: these ethnographies are all set in japan. journal of business anthropology, 3(2), fall 2014 144 even more important. access for my 1989 book was opportunistic, as it was for many ethnographic studies of management, which were born from pre-existing roles such as employment, consulting, or family connections (e.g., dalton, 1959; gouldner, 1954; lépinay, 2011; pettigrew, 1985; ram, 1994; zaloom, 2006). as anthropologists well recognize, access tends to be a drawn-out process, fusing chance encounters between organizational gatekeepers and an agent―the would-be ethnographer―in search of possible field sites (as with kunda, 2006). potential obstacle: fieldwork duration. publication pressures in business schools direct their denizens to short duration projects with near-term potential for journal submissions. this behavior is driven in part by a failure to recognize the value of scholarly books, which can better accommodate reporting the results of longerterm fieldwork (discussed below). professors in anthropology departments are more aware than their cross-campus colleagues of the need to accommodate such fieldwork. with decisions under their jurisdiction, such as the scheduling of teaching duties, they can offer more flexibility than other departments. further, departmental members who bring in external grants may be able to head for far-off field sites. these prospects vary by the national funding systems and by the institution’s procedures, resources, and research focus. unfortunately, anthropology departments cannot accommodate all their long-term field research needs with leaves or sabbaticals. they may be no more likely than other departments to manage the administrative and resource challenges. even at harvard, “by and large we [anthropologists] are treated like everyone else” (personal communication, john comaroff, 1029-14).6 the only feasible options, even for those in anthropology departments, may be to work with locally accessible sites that can be studied intermittently, deploying some of the tools of “rapid appraisal” such as ethnographic interviews (spradley, 1979; stewart & aldrich, forthcoming; for the challenges of “episodic” fieldwork see whyte, 2013). potential obstacle: solo authorship. anthropologists are much more inclined than management scholars to produce solo authored writings (stewart & aldrich, forthcoming). one reason for the pattern of multiple authors in business schools is that a common practice in evaluating faculty merit is to treat co-authorships equally with solo authorships. a modest exception is for cases of promotion and tenure, when authorship sequencing can be viewed as 6 thanks also for their assistance to patrick gray (university of wisconsin milwaukee), danilyn rutherford (uc-santa cruz), and albert schrauwers (york university). stewart / to rare to be a token 145 evidence of the candidate’s own contributions and solo authorships can be evidence of the likelihood of continuing “productivity.”7 however, when co-authorships are generally rewarded equally with solo authorships, solo authored works are disadvantaged. worse yet, a pattern of solo authorships may be viewed unfavorably when departments hire a new faculty member. from the perspective of current members of the hiring department, their personal career interests are best served if the newcomer can help to augment their own publication records. for this reason, researchers with a track record of collaborative publications are attractive recruits. i was a slow learner in this regard. for most of my career i was skeptical about the multi-authored model. i lacked ideas for collaborative projects, and my colleagues were unclear about how to work with me. my first collaborative effort was with len sayles, who had been one of the pioneering anthropologists in management, and recently retired from columbia (sayles & stewart, 1995). more recently i have learned to work with colleagues, both within and outside my department. with my departmental colleagues, one of my roles has been (ironically, it appears) the “numbers person” for bibliometric studies. many anthropologists would be at home with the preparation this has required: becoming familiar with some of the literature on the sociology of knowledge and scientometrics, with such databases as the web of science, and with basic social network analysis. with my external colleagues, i found by chance a collaborative approach that has worked well and that i recommend: i brought in major scholars as second authors (anne miner of wisconsinmadison, mike hitt of texas a&m, and howard aldrich of unc-chapel hill). even if you should initiate the project and exert the majority of the energy, collaborators such as these more than earn their authorships with outstanding contributions to the publications. potential obstacle: complex and contextualized findings. “anthropologists prefer depictions of idiosyncratic social processes to models of predicted or indeed predictable outcomes” (stewart & aldrich, forthcoming). management researchers instead prefer parsimonious modeling of generalizable relationships (arnould & thompson, 2014). of course there are limits to simplification about business. by the time i joined the business school, a “search for universals” in management had been displaced in favor of “contingency theory” (thompson, 1967, p. vii). this school of thought avoided universal prescriptions, but it still showed a bias for simplifications of its own. at this time―the 1980s―i worried that management thought was being reduced to the once-ubiquitous two 7 anthropology departments are probably not immune from this tendentious term. much as i value scholarship, i doubt that many of a university’s stakeholders regard our publications as the only, or even the most important, of our contributions. journal of business anthropology, 3(2), fall 2014 146 by-two matrixes of the sort found in hofer (1975), in which questions of business strategy are explained by such matrixes as: “degree of product differentiation” (“high” and “low”); “nature of buyer needs” (“primarily economic” and “primarily noneconomic”) (p. 802; also thompson, 1967, pp. 72, 86, 134 for other examples). fortunately, management scholars would come to recognize “problems with contingency theory”, as it “underrepresents the complexity of relations between [such variables as] technological uncertainty, structure, and organizational effectiveness” (schoonhoven, 1981, title and p. 369). even popular management books may resist excessive simplifications. katzenbach and smith’s the wisdom of teams, for example, shows the marks of smith’s anthropological background (e.g. the call for managers to “find [the real teams], watch them in action, check their results [and] talk to them”, 1993, p 263). we might also recall the “top dog… [among] management gurus… peter drucker… [who] is one of the few thinkers from any discipline who can claim to have changed the world” (micklethwait & wooldridge, 1996, p. 63). drucker’s (1973) classic work management: tasks, responsibilities, practices (given to me by my father, a manager, who had read the book), runs 839 pages with not a single two-by-two or figure of any sort. drucker’s success suggests an opportunity for anthropologists. many fields in management, such as international and cross-cultural studies, lend themselves poorly to broad-brush modeling or heuristics. such simplifications have not been lacking―sadly, some have been highly influential, such as the “national cultures” approach popularized by hofstede (brøgger, 2013; mcsweeney, 2002). by anthropological standards, business school research on global cultures or countries has been dilettantish. management has nothing along the lines of bashkow (2004), burton, moore, whiting and romney (1996), or hays (1993) (as examples). fortunately, the superficiality of the literature in a niche can open up possibilities. more nuanced and scholarly work on this and other topics could make a well-recognized contribution, provided that the managerial relevance of the subtleties is clear enough. relevance will trump elegance for many readers. potential obstacle: more books, fewer articles. books can be “meritorious.” most management departments do not encourage, and may actively discourage, book publication (cotton & stewart, 2013). yet all is not lost for the wayward anthropologist hoping for merit rewards or for tenure in management, based partly on book publications. if the tenure case reaches the university level, the committee will likely have professors from the social sciences and humanities who value scholarly books. the case may very well reach that level if the departmental and college committee recognize that, having hired an anthropologist, they should consider the way anthropologists work. stewart / to rare to be a token 147 everything depends on the receptiveness of people in the particular institution. in tenure decisions “excellence becomes whatever a majority of voting tenured faculty members in a particular department at a particular time say it is” (whicker, kronenfeld, & strickland, 1993, p. 26). moreover, authors of scholarly books have a prospect of gratifications, irrespective of institutional rewards. some of management’s most highly cited works are books: porter (1980, with 6,349 web of science citations as of 10-24-2014), pfeffer and salancik (1978, with 5,544), thompson (1967, with 5,437), and march and simon (1958, with 5,390 citations) (see generally bedeian & wren, 2002).8 these hugely cited books are conceptual syntheses, not field studies. the most highly cited books about management that are based on intensive field studies are burns and stalker (1961, with 2,588), kunda (2006, with 697), bower (1986, with 634), and pettigrew (1985, with 577). (kunda is rather peripatetic, serving at times as a “labor studies” professor.) it is hard to argue that the time spent producing a book will be better rewarded than the same time spent writing articles. clearly, the best approach is to publish some articles and then an affiliated book―common practice in anthropology (e.g. articles associated with kondo, 1990; moeran, 1996; riles, 2011). however, this was not my own practice. still, my books have been helpful and i do not regret doing them. they were among the reasons i made tenure at texas tech and full professor at marquette.9 they gained me the assistance―testimonials, coauthorships, and reference letters―of prominent scholars. examples include the efforts of howard stevenson (sarofim rock chair at harvard business school) and anne huff (then of the university of illinois) to persuade sage to publish team entrepreneurship. that book then led to my first position in a doctoral department, after its head, carlton whitehead, read the book and liked it. it led to other connections, with john van maanen of mit and howard aldrich of cornell and unc-chapel hill. if you send a scholar a book in the post you will get more attention than if you send a paper by email. potential obstacle: exotic expertise. though i did not foresee it when i switched to political science for my 8 these books are more highly cited than the most highly cited management articles i can find, using the web of science’s “ts = topic” searches and sorting by the most cited first. the most cited management article is in the topic field of “strategic management”: teece, pisano and shuen (1997) with 4,491 citations. the next highest is also in the same field, with a similar topic: eisenhardt and martin (2000) has 2,183 citations. the next is in “human resource management”: huselid (1995) has 1,751 (all citations as of 10-25-2014). 9 at texas tech my tenure was supported by shelby hunt. i mention this because shelby, a prominent marketing scholar, is sometimes thought to be opposed to ethnography. he is not; he opposes work that is hostile to science, to markets, or both. journal of business anthropology, 3(2), fall 2014 148 ph.d., my first two degrees in social anthropology would become the basis for my scholarship, just as my m.b.a. would become the basis for my teaching. my studies in those first two degrees could certainly be labeled “exotic.” in those days (and currently) my regional interest was east asia, and i completed 12 credit hours in classical (bce) chinese as well as modern chinese and japanese. within the anthropology department, the most prominent professor, p. h. gulliver, had been an africanist, as had several of his colleagues. much of a semester in one course consisted of the intensive study of evans-prichard’s the nuer, published in 1940: we lived in an ethnographic present. this was not all bad―the assumption was that we learn enduring social principles from the study of any culture at any time.10 although i accepted this assumption, my interests at the time were turning towards the domestic. i wrote my masters’ thesis on french-english relations in the conservative party of canada. this was the start of a gradual transition to the study of contemporary organizations. to label the shift a “gradual transition” is to gloss over how lurching and murky was the path. at many twists and turns i needed a mentor but lacked one, at least for the challenge at hand. for example, how do you prepare a job talk for a business school? how do you present in a management conference? what business school specialty should i choose? any anthropologist entering a business school must answer this question. on that question i received kindly advice from my professors, but i was not always amenable to their suggestions. i was not sufficiently interested in business-government relations; international business seemed too economics oriented; consumer behavior was too micro for my tastes. in retrospect, i might have thrived in marketing. although it was not yet apparent, anthropologists would turn out to make important impacts in marketing, and especially in consumer behavior (compare arnould & thompson, 2014). i made my choice―perhaps a romantic one―in favor of entrepreneurship, and it was housed within management. housed, that is, in the few places it existed; in the early 1980s it was still a marginal field with few entry-level jobs. challenges of writing in business schools. having chosen a specialty, another challenge will loom for the business school anthropologist: writing for business school journals. how do you learn to write in accordance with their customs? to what extent do you write as an anthropologist? what topics do you write about? on the first question, everyone can learn, painfully, by reading reviews and rejection letters. as i have suggested, i would have learned faster if i had been a co-author at this time. on the second and third questions, i received signals, such as invitations to speak on panels, that there was a niche for translations and 10 i was delighted to be able to buy or trade for “e.p.’s” witchcraft, oracles and magic among the azande (evans-pritchard, 1937) and the sanusi of cyrenaica (evans-pritchard, 1949), both of which adorn my shelves. (their titles are hard to match in the business literature.) stewart / to rare to be a token 149 syntheses, for management scholars, of anthropological knowledge. because there are still so few anthropologists in management, i suspect there remain many such opportunities. more recently, as an example, i have begun to draw out the implications of kinship studies for so-called “family business.”11 although i made my living at times with these translations, i found three problems that you should bear in mind if you also wish to do something similar. first, being in a business school and not an anthropology department, writing for journals that are ill prepared to review anthropological manuscripts, means that you need to be your own most scrupulous reviewer. for me, the thoughts that an anthropologist might chance to read my writings, and that my management colleagues have nobody else to count on, has inspired a sedulous, perhaps overly pedantic, style. second, my introductory papers (introducing the anthropology of entrepreneurship in stewart, 1991, and the anthropology of “family business” in stewart, 2003) have been better received, certainly more cited, than my more adventurous work on similar topics (stewart, 1990; 2010). at times this made me wonder if i would have been better off in an anthropology department. then i would reassure myself that at least i am free from the fashions and contestations in those departments. however―and this is the third problem―we have scholarly fashions of our own in business schools. at a crucial phase in my career, as an assistant professor at texas tech, i felt a pressure to become a more conventional business school researcher. perhaps this pressure existed only in my imagination. regardless, i suspect that many anthropologists would have similar experiences. hopefully they would resist this pressure better than i did, as i believe i would have been better to stick with my core, anthropological, strengths. challenges of teaching in business schools. unlike the social sciences, in which undergraduates read scholarly writings, business education largely reserves such exposure to the doctoral level. therefore, a challenge facing early-stage business school instructors, including many of those with training in business schools, is learning to teach in a practice-focused classroom. in certain fields, such as economics, synthesizing and explicating current theory can be a feasible approach. in well-established management fields, such as organizational behavior and strategic management, professors differ on their assessment of the managerial relevance of these literatures (starkey & madan, 2001). for some, a heavy dose of research findings should be included in the 11 much of my current reputation rests on my work in this area, but i do not believe the term is scientifically helpful. it is a folk term treated as a taxonomic term. if―as so often claimed―the great majority of businesses worldwide are “family businesses” it is hard to argue that this classification tells us much of anything. yet i do believe that the interfaces of kinship and business are complex, crucial, and worthy of scientific (i.e. ethnographic) study (stewart, 2014). journal of business anthropology, 3(2), fall 2014 150 classroom mix. some of my colleagues may think the same of entrepreneurship, but i am skeptical. if you believe, as i do, that your teaching role (doctoral teaching excepted) is to coach your students towards successful venture starts, you will be hard pressed to find your teaching materials in academic research. on balance, i find this to be a license for exploration and learning on my part as well as my students. the cost of freedom from textbooks or articles is the need for some general business knowhow. how much is needed depends on your subfield of management. relatively more such knowledge is needed in entrepreneurship and strategic management. more is needed in international business than in international management. (the former includes topics such as hedging exchange rates; the latter focuses on “softer” topics like organizational and so-called “national” culture.) relatively less is needed in human resource management, business ethics, and (probably) organizational behavior. specialized scholarly expertise in these fields will need to be transmitted. however, as in any field of learning, little is really transmitted if it is not actively learned in terms and in contexts that students already understand to some degree (bain, 2004). the good news about the need for active and student-centered learning is that we, as instructors, do not need to have―and could not have―all the knowledge necessary in our subjects. we do need to learn how to teach accordingly, to draw on what our students care about and know, and this is yet another lesson that it took me some time to learn. but as we shift towards such a teaching approach, away from the professing expert approach, we also accumulate knowledge. in my field of entrepreneurship instruction, there are many ways to accumulate general business and venturing knowhow that follow, as by-products, from doing our jobs. here are some of the ways that we learn, based on my experience:  completing an mba. this was my path, but these days you would also consider moocs. they lack much credentialing panache but they let you fill in the idiosyncratic gaps in your knowledge.  working in a business. in my case, right after my m.b.a., i reported to the general manager of a highly autonomous division of magna international, leading to my ph.d. dissertation and my first book, team entrepreneurship.  teaching a practice-focused approach to entrepreneurship. like other fields, you can learn by teaching, both in the preparation and in the interaction with students.  developing the infrastructure for an entrepreneurship program. for example, i helped to launch an angel investor network, and a small incubator with links to mentors and community resources, in collaboration with a clinical professor. stewart / to rare to be a token 151  doing fieldwork in entrepreneurial ventures, possibly in collaboration with doctoral students.  advising dozens or hundreds of semester-long consulting projects for business owners.  starting and running a teaching program for business owners. you probably should wait a while before trying this.  starting a side business. if you have a day job the challenge is to take this seriously enough, as you do not need financial success. in my case i found another opportunity: marrying or otherwise cohabiting with an entrepreneur. the opportunity might have you passed by, but if so you could encourage your partner to become an entrepreneur! i was lucky on this score. anthropology is well suited to practical entrepreneurship education. anthropologists should be predisposed to current approaches to teaching entrepreneurship that are found within universities and institutions such as venture accelerators. current thinking emphasizes the practice-based discovery of what particular customers truly want and will pay for (neck, greene, & brush, 2014). therefore, entrepreneurship education spends less time than in the past on business plans. instead, it encourages an incremental learning process, as the would-be startup seeks market validation of its viability (rencher, 2014). the scholarly rationale for this approach is that “entrepreneurs who engage in experimentation and who interact early and often with customers will be able to overcome many of the hurdles associated with starting a venture” (fisher, 2012, p. 1046). in popular business writings this approach is branded as “lean”: lean startups, lean customer development and so on (alvarez, 2014; ries, 2011). figure 1. business model canvas, adapted from osterwalder & pigneur (2010) key key value customer customer partnerships activities propositions relationships segments key channels resources cost structure revenue streams startup capital competitive environment journal of business anthropology, 3(2), fall 2014 152 a widely adopted, focal heuristic in this approach is the “business model canvas” (osterwalder & pigneur, 2010).12 the version that i teach with is shown in figure 1. the bottom two “blocks”, for startup capital and competitive environment, are my additions based on teaching experience. i also have my students complete either an “art” project that conveys the hoped-for experiences of the customers13, or (for those reluctant to use other media), the “empathy map” of the customer’s subjective states (e.g. “what does she think and feel?...what does she hear?...” osterwalder & pigneur, 2010, pp. 130-131). i add this assignment because a primary foundation for a successful business model is the match between the “value propositions” (“the bundle of products and services that create value for a specific customer segment” and (by definition) the “customer segments” (osterwalder & pigneur, 2010, p 22). the challenge this project creates is showing that this match is not a figment of the would-be entrepreneur’s imagination. an outstanding project will reflect an understanding of the hoped-for customer experience and its meaning(s) in terms of the customer’s own “heartmind” (心xin, to adopt the classical chinese conception). before anthropologists could coach their students with this approach, most would need prior preparation for some of the blocks. nonetheless, they bring a great deal to the table from the start. their fit applies most obviously to the five blocks that are, in my view, the crucial foundations of the model. the fulcrum of the model is the fit between the “value propositions” and the “customer segments.” these marketing issues are the sweet spot for business anthropologists (sunderland & denny, 2007). among the reasons for their competency is their approach to learning what consumers in their natural settings actually do, not just what they say. “key activities” is a stumbling block for many students, who underestimate what tasks a firm must carry out in order to provide the value propositions. this is a stumbling block as well for disciplines that treat the firm in abstract terms. anthropologists are inclined to envision the full human scope of the organization. once the key activities are recognized, the key resources needed to carry them out must be identified. many of these are intangible, such as forms of intellectual property. here again, anthropologists might not know the terminology current in business, but they are well prepared for topics of this sort. moreover, they are accustomed to learning local jargon. lastly, in any venture there will be gaps between its legacy and readily found resources 12 osterwalder, pignuer, bernarda, and smith (2014, p. 61) have added a “value proposition canvas.” 13 “art” projects have included many media and media combinations. marquette is certainly not an art school, but some of these projects have been outstanding, including two wonderful videos of dance performances. stewart / to rare to be a token 153 and the needed key resources. these gaps are filled with key partnerships. anthropologists are attuned to social networks, and alert to under-recognized social actors. in fact, this alertness to what others neglect is an important quality of entrepreneurs, and hence also of their teachers. final thoughts: the management anthropologist role i hope i have made clear that there is no such role. all roles are to some degree constructed, not givens, yet the metaphor itself implies there are scripts to be enacted (zaleznik, 1965). my colleagues, my editors, my overseers, and i had none of these. nor would you, the anthropologist who thinks of joining a management department. organizations develop established routines for dealing with under-represented members, but management departments (and probably marketing departments as well: arnould & thompson, 2014), do not have routines for dealing with anthropologists. like me, you would not even be a token. you could, of course, learn from the mistakes i have made. however, much will depend on the particular department that would hire you. lacking recognized scripts, anthropologists and their institutional colleagues are challenged to improvise. they are challenged to make “mutual accommodations,” to use burns and stalker’s (1961) term for coordination in “organic” organizations. my employers and i have done so, or i would not have lasted in my profession. sadly, universities worldwide are increasingly caught up in movements towards bureaucratic performance appraisal. they are becoming, in burns and stalker’s terms, more and more “mechanistic.” this does not mean, however, that their systems of formal assessment and accountability are, or can be, rigidly established (at least, not in north america; i am less hopeful about the uk). a university is a complex organization, but an odd one: a “loosely coupled” 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ed., handbook of organizations. chicago: rand mcnally and company, 574-613. zaloom, caitlin. 2006. out of the pits: traders and technology from chicago to london. chicago: university of chicago press. alex stewart has made his academic career in business schools: brock university, texas tech university, and marquette university. his education in social anthropology (york university, toronto) has been the foundation of his scholarship dating from his dissertation (1987) to the present. recent and continuing interests include the relationships between kinship and entrepreneurial activity. an interest in china, begun as an undergraduate, has recently been rekindled, and he hopes to work on kinship, entrepreneurship, and environmental (non)sustainability in the chinese context. he is professor of management and coleman foundation chair in entrepreneurship at marquette university in milwaukee, wisconsin. he can be reached at alex.stewart@marquette.edu mailto:alex.stewart@marquette.edu business literature and understandings of business james g. carrier business is not just sets of activities and relationships. it is also a cultural category, an aspect of people’s understanding of the world and what is in it. such understandings are interesting in their own right. in addition, however, they are useful for helping us to make sense of people’s actions and orientations in various parts of their lives. my purpose here is to illustrate how we might approach those understandings, the sorts of questions we can ask about them, and the sorts of things we might learn from them. a simple example of those understandings springs from the fact that, for many people, the realm of business is associated with a set of values and practices that is taken to be characteristic of the realm of economy generally. social scientists have long been interested in people’s experiences and views of that economic realm, and especially the ways that they contrast with the social realm. talcott parsons (e.g. 1959: 261) pointed to an aspect of that contrast when he argued that these two realms are organised on radically different principles and entail radically different sorts of relationships. david schneider (1980 [1968]) applied parsons’s argument to american culture when he described how people’s un derstandings of the economic realm, the realm of business, are crucial for their understanding of the family, the essence of the social realm. less grandly, this distinction can help account for the attraction of fair page 1 of 13 jba 2(2): 120-132 fall 2013 © the author(s) 2013 issn 2245-4217 www.cbs.dk/jba carrier / business literature and understandings of business 121 trade foods and other aspects of ethic al consumption (carrier 2012). people also understand business in terms of companies, their employees, products and the like. they learn about these things because they insistently confront businesses in their economic transactions, and they learn about them as well in tales that are told about businesses in particular and business in general. those tales are my concern here. i draw on them as they are told in the united states, the country i know best, and i present them with a modest end in view, only to suggest the ways that a consideration of them might be stimulating. i do so with a brief set of reflections on some of those tales, springing from what i call ‘business literature’, pu blications that describe how businesses operate and how they ought to operate. at its broadest, that definition includes things like descriptions and prescriptions about the organisation of supply systems, employment practices in light of labour law, how to organise an advertising campaign and how to keep accounts. such works tell us something of how businesses are organised and how they operate, but their technical orientation means that they are relatively unlikely to attract a broader readership, and so are relatively unlikely to tell us much about ideas and understandings that have a broader currency. those ideas and understandings are more likely to be revealed in a different sort of business literature, my focus here. that is writing intended for a more general readership that presents business activities. it can range from newspaper articles about a firm or industry to books that offer extended studies of firms or events in the commercial world. perhaps the most visib le form this sort takes is books that may have been intended for upper-level managers and those who aspire to join them, but that have attracted broader interest, the sort of things that are part of wall street reading lists (e.g. sorkin 2013). that broader interest suggests something about the relationship of those works to public understandings of business. firstly, it suggests that those works do not simply repeat what everyone knows, for if they did so, they would be unlikely to generate much interest. secondly, however, it suggests that they roughly conform to those public understandings, for if they did not, they would likely be relatively incomprehensible to the general public and hence would not attract readers. taken together, these observations suggest that this sort of business literature would be a useful point of entry to common understandings of the nature of business. i said that my purpose here is only to suggest the sorts of directions in which a consideration of that literature might lead. that means i do not intend a thorough and careful analysis of that literature. it is vast and i have neither the knowledge nor the wit for journal of business anthropology, 2(2), fall 2013 122 such a task. equally, because my purpose is to be provocative, i attend only to aspects of that literature itself. i do not attend to who reads it, how and why they do so, what they learn from it, and how it affects their thinking. such analysis would be necessary for any sound description of the literature and its effects, and if my provocation here works, people will be motivated to undertake that analysis. i said that the sort of business literature that concerns me is likely to present novel observations or interesting tales, presented against a background of common understandings of what business is and how it operates. while those observations and tales deserve attention, here i am concerned with that background, and with t he assumptions that are part of it. these assumptions amount to understandings that people are likely to take as fairly self-evident, simply part of the way things are, and hence not requiring explicit consideration. such assumptions are the sort of thing that, as pierre bourdieu (1977: 167, emphasis omitted) put it, ‘goes without saying because it comes without saying’, which means that they are part of what he (1977: 164) calls the orthodox, that which commands the assent of thoughtful people, or doxa, that which is taken for granted as part of the natural order of things. the background assumptions that concern me revolve around the general conception of the world of business as one of firms, each of which is run by a boss and each of which is in competition in the market with entities like itself. the firm and the boss in business literature it is common to associate the firm with the boss, often to the extent that the boss subsumes the firm. this is especially so in the case of firms that become newsworthy, usually because they are taken to be extraordinarily succ essful, and as i said, i take business news as part of business literature, especially when it appears in mass media. one obvious example of the newsworthy firm is apple inc., subsumed under the identity of its late boss, steve jobs. an earlier example is general electric company in the united states, often subsumed under the identity of jack welch, its boss in the 1980s and 1990s. one form of this conflation of boss and company was laid out in detail by paul hawken, one of the bosses of smith & hawken, an american company that sold garden paraphernalia between 1979 and 2009. hawken was not just one of the bosses of the firm. in addition, he was a business consultant who was the focus of a series of television programmes in the 1980s, which he then turned i nto a book, growing a business (hawken 1987). as i have discussed his presentation of the relationship between business and boss in that book at some length elsewhere (carrier 1997b), i will be brief here. for hawken, the business is the extension and expression of the boss, carrier / business literature and understandings of business 123 just as apple was presented as the extension and expression of steve jobs. as hawken (1987: 61) put it, the business is ‘an uncluttered expression of yourself [i.e., of the boss].’ this association of company and boss recurs through his book, perhaps most notably when he (1987: 60) relates the decision to found smith & hawken. his tale includes moral anguish, five hours in a bath trying to figure out what to do and, ultimately, the conclusion that it was all really very simple: he and his partner had given their word and had to honour it. hawken’s recounting of his bath presents an image very different from tales of steve jobs and jack welch, and those image s reflect different sorts of ideas about what makes a good boss. the differences, however, rest on a common assumption: in crucial ways, the company is the boss. this association of company with boss is apparent also in accounts of important commercial events. one such account is by two reporters at the wall street journal, bryan burrough and john helyar. they wrote a book that reached a broad readership, barbarians at the gate (1990). it is the story of the take-over of the american firm rjr nabisco in 1988, at the time the most costly company acquisition in history. that book is a complex tale, full of company directors, managers of banks and investment funds and all the rest, but the core of the story revolves around a boss. he is ross johnson, head of rjr nabisco at the time of the take-over. johnson lost his job as a result of the acquisition and it turned out that rjr nabisco and many of its employees suffered because of johnson’s actions. it appears, then, that what often holds for the very successful, like jobs and welch, holds also for the unsuccessful: the story of the company is the story of the boss. there are good reasons why company and boss should be associated in this way in the business literature. at the most general level, it helps to make a good story, one that revolves around individuals, clear protagonists who drive events. that sort of story is likely to be more appealing, and hence attract a broader readership, than one that revolves around more abstract processes and relationships, if only because it allows for a presentation of events that is simpler, and hence more compelling (carrier 2009 ). more substantially, the association of boss and company accords with an important american belief in the virtues of being one’s own boss and running one’s own business (berthoff 1980 ), the sort of belief that helps explain a regular feature of the business section of the new york times, ‘you’re the boss’ (e.g. emerson 2013 ). this association takes institutional and financial form in a practice that became increasingly common in the final third of the twentieth century: the linking of the boss’s pay to the performance of the company. this was advocated as a way to encourage bosses to act to improve the company’s performance on the stock market, shareholder value, journal of business anthropology, 2(2), fall 2013 124 rather than being the steward of an enterprise in which many sorts of people have an interest. whatever its logic, however, it reflected and solidified the conflation of company and boss. i have invoked bourdieu’s point about the importance of what goes without saying. that point takes on additional significance when we recall that it is part of what he says about misrecognition, in which the society engages in ‘the naturalization of its own arbitrariness’ (bourdieu 1977: 164). to say that misrecognition is the naturalisation of the arbitrary is to say that it involves treating as part of the natural order of things a set of processes and relationships that are arbitrary in the sense that they are social conventions. bourdieu, then, suggests that we should approach what goes without saying in terms of what it obscures and the assumptions on which it rests, but that it does not explain or justify, part of the process by which those things come without saying. perhaps the most obvious thing that the conflation of boss and firm omits is the fact that the firm is an institution that survives because a variety of people 0 within it work in a complex division of labour. these people must figure out what they need to do and figure out how to do it, a process that can involve coping with and correcting the mistakes of their superiors. this is the sort of thing that is described in a different sort of business literature by scott adams, whose cartoon character dilbert (www.dilbert.com) provides one of the most sardonic commentaries on american business. moreover, the ways that people figure out th eir work and how to do it is not something that is always apparent to the firm’s management. as david halle (1984) shows in his study of a chemical works in the us, those who are interested in their work may well find out ways to do it better and more easily than management, or the procedure manual, dictates ‒ improvements that may be neither visible nor comprehensible to their superiors. put in different terms, the personification of the company in the boss ignores the importance of the routine operations on which the company relies for its survival, as well as the employees who carry out these operations. in one sense, this ignoring is not surprising. it reinforces the conceptual boundary between management and labour ‒ in this case the people who direct the company and the people who are supposed to carry out those directions ‒ and it does so by making that labour invisible. as well, it reinforces an assumption that has attracted less attention than the boundary between management and la bour. that is the assumption that the boss can control the company, or, indeed, that a company with more than a handful of workers can be controlled in any straightforward way. a different sort of business literature points to some of the reasons why that control is problematic. it does so when it identifies http://www.dilbert.com/ carrier / business literature and understandings of business 125 the attributes of people’s tasks and work relations that affect how they go about their jobs, effects that exist independently of the policies and directives through which the company seeks to control its workers. two fairly old examples of this different sort of business literature are gerald mars’s cheats at work (1982) and terrence deal and allan kennedy’s corporate cultures (1982). mars is concerned with the nature of the work group, especially the degree to which it is structured and bounded, and he relates these attributes to the ways that people in those groups behave in their work. deal and kennedy are concerned instead with the importance of the de cisions that people typically make in their jobs and how long it normally takes them to find out if the decisions were good or bad, and they relate these attributes to the ways that people carry out their tasks. while cheats at work and corporate cultures are interesting in the tales that they tell and the arguments that they make, they are pertinent here because they point to forces within the firm that exist fairly independently of company policy and that affect the way that workers carry out their tasks. in doing this, they suggest that the image of the boss that i have described can seriously exaggerate the boss’s ability to control the firm’s employees, and hence to control what the firm does. something else that attests to the uncertain nature of contr ol of the firm is the recurring efforts that companies have made to secure it. those efforts range from things like the moving assembly line and the principles of scientific management early in the twentieth century to things like flat company structure and quality circles late in that century, efforts overlain by the oscillation between organising the company in terms of product lines and in terms of function or, indeed, in adopting a matrix structure that combines the two. if asserting and maintaining control were reasonably straightforward, these sorts of changes in policy and practice would not be necessary. it seems, then, that those who focus on the boss have absorbed but not understood weber’s model of bureaucratic organisation. they have absorbed his idea of a bureaucracy as a machine that responds impersonally and efficiently to the commands issued by those at the top. they have not understood that weber was presenting an ideal type that exists nowhere. outside the fanciful world of the organisationa l chart, firms of any size are likely to resemble weber’s bureaucracy less than they do a feudal system, in which different parts of the firm have their own interests and orientations and sources of support and influence. often enough, those parts have to be induced rather than commanded, tolerated or even worked around, rather than controlled. the assumption that a firm can be controlled in a fairly straightforward way helps account for the growing attention late in the twentieth century to the idea of ‘best practice’, the belief that journal of business anthropology, 2(2), fall 2013 126 there is a best way for firms to do things. this marks that assumption because it rests on two further assumptions. the first is that best practice is objectively valid. the second is that firms deviate from it because they do not know what it is, and that if they did know of it they would be able to implement it. another piece of business literature was influential in the emergence of the idea of best practice, thomas peters and robert waterman’s in search of excellence (1982). in this book, the authors identified 32 firms that were said to be very successful and identified eight practices that were central to their success. like many works in the business literature that present accounts of successful firms, in search of excellence has a methodological flaw. it investigates successful firms and adduces practices that are taken to account for that success, but does not investigate other firms that employ these practices to see if they also are successful. this flaw means that the claim that a successful company does x may be true, but is no ground for assuming that x causes that success. even so, works like in search of excellence remain popular, and one reason that they are so is that they refle ct and reinforce the assumption that firms resemble weberian bureaucracies that respond to the decisions of the bosses who run them. in saying this i do not mean that conforming to best practice makes no difference. in fact, it is likely that conformity, o r at least appearing to conform, increases the chance that a firm will do well. the reason, however, may well not be the one that underlay in search of excellence. paul dimaggio and walter powell (1983) point to that reason in their consideration of the fact that companies in an industry tend to be organised in the same way: steel firms tend to resemble each other, as do banks, mining companies and the rest. dimaggio and powell say that this conformity commonly is justified by arguments about the firm and its profitability: steel firms adopt the same organisation because it is the best way to organise and run a steel firm. they argue, however, that a different factor is at least as important, a factor that one might call more social than technical, more concerned with commercial fashion than with economic rationality. that is, that firms that appear to conform to industry fashion will be taken more seriously than those that do not. having a firm be taken seriously is important . banks will be more willing to lend to it; suppliers and purchasers will be more willing to deal with it. in pointing to the complex factors that shape the firm and that are external to it, what dimaggio and powell say further challenges the literature’s focuses on bosses and the firms that they control. carrier / business literature and understandings of business 127 the firm’s world bosses may be better or worse; jobs at apple and welch at ge, even hawken at smith & hawken, are likely to stand scrutiny better than johnson at rjr nabisco. but the focus on johnson in barbarians at the gate, like the focus on jobs, assumes and solidifies the centrality of the boss. i turn now to a different matter, the world in which the firm exists. in much of the business literature, that world is one of other bosses in charge of other firms, competing in their efforts to increase their profit and so be successful bosses of successful firms. there are many ways that a company can increase its profit, but what commonly attracts attention is innovation, especially of a new product, the sort of thing that often is presented as the key to jobs’s success at apple. innovation needs to be distinguished from improvement. that is the gradual increase in efficiency, and hence profitability, that comes from figuring out better ways to do what the company already is doing. innovation, on the other hand, entails producing something new that leads to a qualitative improvement in the company’s position in a competitive market. in the case of jobs, it was the mac computer with its graphical user interfa ce, which was intended as a qualitative improvement over the competing computers on the market, especially those that used the operating system produced by microsoft, another company subsumed under the identity of another boss, bill gates. innovation is the focus of its own thread in the business literature. a popular example of this is by clayton christensen, the innovator’s dilemma (1997), which describes how difficult it can be to maintain a firm’s position in the face of innova tive competitors. this book is interesting in part because the change in its title reflects the assumptions that the boss subsumes the firm and that firm can be controlled. its original subtitle was when new technologies cause great firms to fail, which stressed the historical analyses that are the core of the work and the intellectual puzzle that those analyses posed. however, later editions abandoned that stress and had the subtitle the revolutionary book that will change the way you do business . it is understandable that the successful boss is seen as one who innovates in a competitive market, for a successful innovation brings substantial benefits. it can give the boss and the company ‘brand leadership’, perhaps even a ‘category buster’, producing someth ing that comes to be identified with, or even defines, a class of product. examples from the united states include the model t automobile that ford produced, which came to define ordinary people’s cars, campbell’s soup, which came to define ready-made soup, and pampers, which came to define disposable nappies. having such a product makes it more likely that the firm will be a success, for it can charge a premium for that product based on the appeal of the brand, journal of business anthropology, 2(2), fall 2013 128 independently of the quality of the product. as with the conflation of the company with the boss, so the image of the boss as innovator that i have sketched is a partial one, and as with that conflation, the partiality is revealing. in particular, the stress on innovation directs attention outward, f rom the company to the market where it competes with other companies. one effect of looking outward echoes the effect of conflating the company with the boss, for it sleights the fact that the company is an institution. as well, it portrays the source of company profit and success in ways that echo common assumptions about the virtues of the free market, full of potential purchasers who are ready to buy from firms that offer new and appealing products, and hence encourage efficiency and innovation (carrier 1997a: 1–4). this sort of view is not just found in popular american culture, of course. it is part of an important stream in economics, illustrated recently in mass flourishing: how grassroots innovation created jobs, challenge and change, by an economist awarded a nobel prize, edmund phelps (2013). the image of the successful boss as one whose innovation serves consumer demand focuses on the product and its virtues. it assumes, of course, that purchasers are conce rned with the material qualities of what is on offer at what price, which is central to the innovator’s dilemma. the business literature is not alone in this assumption. it is what underlies organisations like the consumers union (now consumer reports) in the us and the consumers’ association in the uk, which regularly inform their members of the prices and material attributes of various items offered for sale. there are potential purchasers who approach objects in this way, and their existence helps to justify the focus on innovation in firms’ success. however, this stress on material attributes and prices leaves out a great deal, and so shows a further aspect of the partiality of the stress on innovation. the main thing that it leaves out is advertising. as vance packard (1957) noted long ago, much of this is concerned less with describing a product’s material attributes than it is with bestowing desirable images on it. as the old adage has it, you don’t buy the steak, you buy the sizzle. and as ian jamieson (1980) observed, while some firms in some countries are good at building a better mousetrap, others are better at encouraging the world to beat a path to their door. to return to steve jobs, that popular symbol of innovation, his real strength, according to some commentators, lay in his ability to pitch the new products that his company made (dargis 2013). what i have said about advertising illustrates how the stress on products and innovation directs attention away from other activities that are important for a company’s profit. some of these activities carrier / business literature and understandings of business 129 may seem more dubious than advertising a new model of automobile by associating it with young, stylish people with lots of friends. apple, for instance, certainly produced things that were seen to be innovative. however, a significant part of the company’s success was the result of their efforts to reduce costs. they have done this through complex corporate organisation that appears intended primarily to assure that company profits are realised in jurisdictions with corporate tax rates lower than those found in the places where the company is based and where they conduct much of their trade (schwartz and duhigg 2012, 2013). as well, they have done this by having much of what they sell produced in countries with cheap labour and weak or non-existent unions and factory regulation (duhigg and barboze 2012). conclusion as i said at the outset, my purpose here has been illustrative and provocative rather than rigorous and demonstrative. accordingly, i have presented no careful consideration of a survey of business literature and its readers. rather, i have sought to illustrate the ways that business literature can help us to consider business as a cultural entity, something that is presented, and likely to be understood, in terms of that literature. as part of my intended provocation, i have approached that literature obliquely, concerned not simply with that about which it speaks, but also, and more especially, with that about which it is silent. borrowing from bourdieu, i suggested that those silences point to the taken-for-granted, what goes without saying, because it comes without saying. the speaking and the silence that i have used to illustrate how we might approach business literature revolve around the conflation of firms and bosses, and see them as confronting other firms with other bosses, all seeking product innovation in their competitive struggles. while speaking of firms in terms of their bosses can be taken as simple synecdoche, at times the image of the boss subsumes the identity of the company almost entirely. similarly, speaking of innovation in competitive struggle can be taken as synecdoche for conventional competition for market advantage. however, the stress on innovation is so common that more seems at work than the desire for a simple shorthand. equally broadly, those silences elide the institutional nature of the firm, the fact that firms rely on their workers and that firms of any size are complex and, often enough, unruly, so much so that no boss can run it, or perhaps even grasp it. they also elide the ways that a firm’s success springs from much more than the attributes and prices of what it offers to potential purchasers. anything that persuades those purchasers to buy, like anything that reduces a firm’s journal of business anthropology, 2(2), fall 2013 130 costs, will contribute to the firm’s profit, which is the definition of its degree of success. i want to close by speculating on why the sorts of images, and their silences and assumptions, that i described are as popular as they are, given how implausible they are. perhaps the best way to begin to answer that question is to obse rve that those images appear to relate to very small businesses. in them, bosses are relatively able to grasp what the business is and to shape its operations, so that the conflation of boss and firm is plausible. appropriately, in growing a business, hawken’s tales are mostly about founding smith & hawken, not about running it as a fairly large retail mail -order firm. as companies become larger, however, those images become less reasonable. the same is true once a company passes out of the hands of the founder: one of the most difficult challenges any company faces is surviving the departure of the person who started it. it appears, then, that the images i have described reflect something like the assumption, or perhaps the wish, that all businesses are like small businesses. this is the personal world that concerned adam smith (1776: bk 1, ch 2, para 2), when he observed that ‘it is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest.’ however, it is hardly the world that most people who read these words, or read the business literature, confront. that world is one in which we get our dinner from employees who may take our money, but who own neither the things we buy nor the money we give them. in its turn, this personal view reflects the positive value placed on the individual and individual autonomy that is especially strong in the united states. references berthoff, rowland 1980. independence and e nterprise: small business in the american dream. in small business in american life (ed.) stuart w. bruchey, pp. 28–48. new york: columbia university press. bourdieu, pierre 1977. outline of a theory of practice. cambridge: cambridge university press. burrough, bryan and john helyar 1990. barbarians at the gate: the fall of rjr nabisco. new york: harper & row. carrier, james g. 1997a. introduction. in meanings of the market (ed.) j.g. carrier, pp. 1–67. oxford: berg. carrier, james g. 1997b. mr smith, meet mr hawken. in meanings of the market (ed.) j.g. carrier, pp. 129–57. oxford: berg. carrier / business literature and understandings of business 131 carrier, james g. 2009. simplicity in economic anthropology: persuasion, form and substance. in economic persuasions (ed.) stephen gudeman, pp. 15–30. oxford: berghahn. carrier, james g. 2012. introduction. in ethical consumption (eds) j.g. carrier and peter luetchford, pp. 1–35. new york: berghahn. christensen, clayton 1997. the innovator’s dilemma. boston: harvard business review press. dargis, manohla 2013. portrait of the artist behind apple. the new york times (15 august). movies.nytimes.com/2013/08/16/movies/ashton-kutcher-in-abiopic-about-steve-jobs.html deal, terrence e. and allan a. kennedy 1982. corporate cultures. reading, ma: addison-wesley. dimaggio, paul and walter powell 1983. the iron cage revisited: institutional isomorphism and collective rationality in organizational fields. american sociological review 48 (2): 147–60. duhigg, charles and david barboze 2012. in china, the human costs that are built into an ipad. the new york times (26 january). http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9c02e2d71438f93 5a15752c0a9649d8b63 emerson, melinda f. 2013. how to run a facebook commerce store. you’re the boss, the new york times (2 august). http://boss.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/08/02/how-to-run-a-facebookcommerce-store/ halle, david 1984. america’s working man. chicago: university of chicago press. hawken, paul 1987. growing a business. new york: simon and schuster. jamieson, ian 1980. capitalism and culture: a comparative analysis of british and american manufacturing organizations. sociology 14 (2): 217–45. mars, gerald 1982. cheats at work. london: george allen & unwin. packard, vance 1957. the hidden persuaders. new york: david mckay company. parsons, talcott 1959. the social structure of the family. in the family (ed.) ruth nanda anshen, pp. 241–74. new york: harper and row. peters, thomas j. and robert h. waterman, jr 1982. in search of excellence. new york: harper and row. phelps, edmund 2013. mass flourishing. princeton, nj: princeton university press. journal of business anthropology, 2(2), fall 2013 132 schneider, david 1980 (1968). american kinship. (second edition.) chicago: university of chicago press. schwartz, nelson d. and charles duhigg 2012. how apple sidesteps billions in taxes. the new york times (28 april). www.nytimes.com/2012/04/29/business/apples -tax-strategy-aimsat-low-tax-states-and-nations.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0 schwartz, nelson d. and charles duhigg 2013. apple’s web of tax shelters saved it billions, panel finds. the new york times (20 may). www.nytimes.com/2013/05/21/business/apple-avoided-billions-intaxes-congressional-panel-says.html?pagewanted=all smith, adam 1776. inquiry into the nature and causes of the wealth of nations. numerous editions. sorkin, andrew ross 2013. the essential wall street summer reading list. the new york times (1 july). http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2013/07/01/wall -street-must-readsfor-everyone/?_r=0 james g. carrier has taught in papua new guinea, the united states and the united kingdom, and done research in those countries as well as in jamaica. that research has focussed on economy and political economy and their relationship with other areas of life. his recent publications include a handbook of economic anthropology (edward elgar, 2005; revised edition 2012), virtualism, governance and practice (edited with p. west, berghahn, 2009), ethical consumption (edited with p. luetchford, berghahn, 2012) and the handbook of sociocultural anthropology (edited with d. gewertz, bloomsbury, 2013). he may be reached at jcarrier@brookes.ac.uk http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2013/07/01/wall-street-must-reads-for-everyone/?_r=0 http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2013/07/01/wall-street-must-reads-for-everyone/?_r=0 mailto:jcarrier@brookes.ac.uk vi opdaterer systemet vi opdaterer systemet... rauli.cbs.dk opdateres og er snart tilgængeligt. vi opdaterer systemet vi opdaterer systemet... rauli.cbs.dk opdateres og er snart tilgængeligt. vi opdaterer systemet vi opdaterer systemet... rauli.cbs.dk opdateres og er snart tilgængeligt. vi opdaterer systemet vi opdaterer systemet... rauli.cbs.dk opdateres og er snart tilgængeligt. vi opdaterer systemet vi opdaterer systemet... rauli.cbs.dk opdateres og er snart tilgængeligt. vi opdaterer systemet vi opdaterer systemet... rauli.cbs.dk opdateres og er snart tilgængeligt. opinions: business history and anthropology walter friedman, louis galambos, eric godelier, gwendolyn gordon, geoffrey jones, per h. hansen, eric w. orts, daniel pope, philip scranton, jeffrey l. sturchio, and r. daniel wadhwani. with an introduction by greg urban business anthropologist, meet business historian greg urban, arthur hobson quinn professor of anthropology, university of pennsylvania what ethnographer studying an organization hasn’t wanted to jump into the time machine, travel back to then, figure how we got from then to now? take anthropologist jakob krause-jensen. his book, flexible firm: the design of culture at bang & olufsen, exemplifies the best of modern anthropological corporate ethnography. to grasp the cultural processes inside this danish company, known for its elegant design of high-end audio equipment, krause-jensen, like other ethnographers, looked to the past. bang & olufsen, he reports, was founded in 1925, selling innovative technology for connecting radios to electrical grids. how did it transform itself from those technological beginnings into a paragon of the danish design movement? what response did it make to the popular audio electronics coming out of japan? when did its management come to be concerned with creating a distinctive corporate culture? business anthropologists often, maybe even always, pay attention page 1 of 64 jba 3(1): 15-78 spring 2014 © the author(s) 2014 issn 2245-4217 www.cbs.dk/jba journal of business anthropology, 3(1), spring 2014 16 to the history of the firms they study, as krause-jensen did. however, many of us have little familiarity with business history as an academic endeavor. sensing an opportunity, brian moeran and elizabeth briody wondered whether the journal’s readers might benefit from interacting with business historians. just possibly, they thought, historians would find some nuggets of value in this encounter as well. because i had recently edited a volume1 that included contributions from historians, brian and elizabeth asked me to assist in putting together a collection of informal opinion pieces on business history. the result is the set of essays that follows. louis galambos and jeffrey sturchio, in the opening piece, begin with an observation. modern business organizations, they tell us, despite their often global reach, are insular: “the main points of reference for most employees … are their supervisors and fellow workers, the main concerns on a day-to-day basis the mundane tasks of meetings, presentations, memos and ‘deliverables.’” in short, these organizations form communities, or, one might even say, tribes. what better argument could there be for why we need anthropologists studying corporations, why we need the journal of business anthropology? lest you think: “they are historians; what do they know about the social life inside corporations today”; let me add that, yes, galambos is a distinguished professor of history at the johns hopkins university, and, yes, sturchio holds a phd in the history and sociology of science. but galambos has also worked closely with former merck ceo, roy vagelos, and jeff sturchio is also himself a businessman. in fact, jeff has spent much of his life inside corporations. for many years, he was employed at merck, eventually working his way up to vice president for corporate social responsibility. jeff knows what corporations are like from the inside. he qualifies as at least an honorary “native ethnographer.” while he and galambos make a case for business anthropology – why the study of corporate culture and social life is critical – they also exemplify in their essay what business history is and how it complements business anthropology. they tell the story, beginning in the latter nineteenth century, of how business firms came to incorporate the professions; lawyers and engineers initially, with accountants somewhat independent, then later scientists, psychologists, and other professionals, and most recently ‒ and notably for readers of this journal, of course ‒ anthropologists. if firms were only insular, only inward focused, they could not succeed, galambos and sturchio argue, at “delivering the products and services that their customers value enough to purchase.” drawing inspiration from intel’s chief corporate anthropologist, genevieve bell, 1 greg urban (ed.), corporations and citizenship. philadelphia: university of pennsylvania press, 2014. opinions: business history and anthropology 17 they show that, by embedding the professions in firms, business organizations countered their own inherent insularity. they brought the world outside corporate walls to the inside. are salesmen professionals in the sense galambos and sturchio intend? probably not. but a similar process of corporate internalization has taken place. as walter friedman recounts in the next essay, the united states moved from “having an economy populated by peddlers and traveling salesmen to one with highly managed salespeople at places like national cash register, burroughs, chevrolet, and ibm.” during his graduate school days at columbia university, friedman had become interested in “how well the image of the salesman depicted in sinclair lewis’s novel babbitt (1922) corresponded to reality.” but the focus of his book, like so much of business history, concerned change. how did the practice of selling shift or transform over time. as friedman tells us, his method for studying change, in keeping with the historian’s traditional craft, was to look at written sources – all sorts of documents, from scripts used to sell singer sewing machines, to national cash register’s internal company magazine, to court cases and published personal memoirs. business anthropologists more typically engage in the observation of activities and interactions, sometimes as participants, or conduct interviews with those who are so engaged. however, in the area of method, as subsequent essays make plain, some overlap has developed. oral histories today are coming to be accepted sources within business history, just as the ethnographically describable usage of documents has become a focus of interest for some anthropologists.2 friedman’s essay also allows us a peek at the scholarly training of a business historian. a key influence in friedman’s case, as in that of so many business historians, was alfred dupont chandler, considered by many the pre-eminent business historian of his time. friedman foregrounds the big research questions chandler asked: “why did large companies emerge in certain industries and not others? why did companies differ in their organizational structure? why did large companies emerge in some countries and not others?” the first and third of these questions concern change, but the second looks like a traditional social scientific, even anthropological, question. this latter similarity may not be coincidental. friedman notes that chandler, while a student at harvard, came under the influence of sociologist talcott parsons. parsons, in turn, had played an indirect role in shaping american anthropology. among his most celebrated students was clifford geertz, the one anthropologist with whom business historians are most familiar ‒ at least to gauge by the number of citations 2 see, for instance, annelise riles (ed.), documents: artifacts of modern knowledge. ann arbor: university of michigan press, 2006. journal of business anthropology, 3(1), spring 2014 18 in the accompanying essays. from the perspective of scholarly lineage, therefore, business history and modern cultural anthropology share descent from a common recent ancestor. a distinct, less america-centric, perspective on business history appears in the essay by eric godelier, professor of management, business history and social sciences at the école polytechnique in france. godelier notes that, in france, anthropology and history have been in dialog since the 1960s, when claude lévi-strauss and ferdinand braudel “entered into a famous polemic on the importance of history for anthropologists.” braudel, of course, was known for his work on the history of capitalism, lévi-strauss as the founder of anthropological structuralism. most of godelier’s essay, however, explores the possible benefits for business historians of engaging with anthropological concepts. his notion of “concepts” is of a high order ‒ culture, myth, institutions. he seems to be suggesting that business historians ought to think more like anthropologists. indeed, his one mention of alfred dupont chandler occurs in the context of proposing that chandler’s work might be examined within the framework of business myths. in their essay, anthropologist gwen gordon and legal scholar and social theorist eric orts, both at penn’s wharton school, team up to look at the connections between history and anthropology, as godelier proposes, though mainly in the u.s. context. they argue that anthropology since the 1990s has taken a “historical turn,” in which culture itself comes to be understood as “inherently historical.” instead of encouraging historians to think like anthropologists, as godelier does, they advocate that anthropologists think like historians, at least when it comes to the study of business organizations. their main criticism of anthropologists – and here they explicitly exempt business anthropologists ‒ is that they tend to reify the corporation, treating it as a “seemingly seamless, timeless” entity in the world. for the most part, gordon and orts claim, anthropologists, apart from those explicitly self-identifying as business anthropologists, tend, on balance, to vilify corporations, as well as those who work within them. this attitude manifests itself, in turn, in “self-flagellation hindsight marked by the mea culpa tone sometimes found in the work of academic scholars”3 who undertake corporate research. instead, gordon and orts propose, the corporation is actually a historically shifting reality, not an immutable one. by examining the quotidian practices inside corporations, such as business anthropologists now do, anthropology can help to demystify and historicize the corporate form. if gordon and orts argue that anthropologists could benefit from historicizing their understanding of culture, the following essay by per h. 3 melissa cefkin m (ed.), ethnography and the corporate encounter: reflections on research in and of corporations. new york: berghahn books, 2009, p. 18. opinions: business history and anthropology 19 hansen of the copenhagen business school and r. daniel wadhwani of the university of the pacific and copenhagen business school looks at ways in which business historians have taken up the culture concept. they are also brutally frank in their assessment, observing: “business history, as it was practiced for most of the 20th century, had little interest in anthropology and a very one-dimensional view of culture.” only more recently, they observe, has the situation changed. in their narrative, business history as a discipline took off in the 1920s, with the harvard business school publishing the bulletin of the business historical society beginning in 1926. until the 1960s, research in business history, they tell us, stressed “the agency of actors, the importance of mind and will in economic processes.” in their view, this changed dramatically in the 1960s and 70s with publication of chandler’s books. structure came to replace agency. hansen and wadhwani are correct, no doubt, that little interchange between anthropology and business history took place during this period. however, i note that the 1960s and 70s were also the heyday, within anthropology, of structuralism, whose main proponent was french anthropologist, claude lévi-strauss, the key thinker foregrounded in godelier’s essay. the fields at this time, therefore, were developing in parallel fashion. as hansen and wadhwani explain, however, the situation began to shift in the 1990s. a “cultural turn” took place in business history that complemented the “historical turn” in anthropology pointed out by gordon and orts. the two fields discovered one another. it is against this backdrop that brian moeran and elizabeth briody came to conceptualize the present collection of essays. the time seemed ripe for a meet and greet in the journal of business anthropology. in that meet-and-greet spirit, hansen and wadhwani propose three specific areas in which conversation might unfold. first is the “uses of history approach,” in which historians focus on the instrumental and even conscious deployment of history to achieve goals. this resonates with business anthropology and, indeed, with anthropology more generally, which has long been concerned with the uses of narratives in relationship to ongoing social processes. the second potential area for discussion concerns what hansen and wadhwani dub “contextualization,” although the meaning of the term is different in these two disciplinary (dare i say it) “contexts.” for historians, the word often refers to epoch, a stretch of past time cutting across some expanse of social space, and is typically beyond the actors’ control. for anthropologists, context is more often local and manipulable, as, for example, in the interpretation of a segment of spoken discourse based on the environment of other words in which it occurs, people present, occasion, and physical surround. journal of business anthropology, 3(1), spring 2014 20 lastly, hansen and wadhwani, in keeping with other essays assembled here, point to a recent blurring of distinctions in method, with more business historians using oral histories to understand corporate pasts. geoffrey jones, author of the next essay, in fact, reports that his recent studies, “a company history of the anglo-dutch consumer goods giant unilever since 1965, a history of the global beauty industry, and a forthcoming history of green entrepreneurship, have relied to a growing extent on interviews with managers and entrepreneurs.” jones is the isidor straus professor in business history at the harvard business school, the position once held by the celebrated alfred dupont chandler, and so it is only fitting that his essay, like that of hansen and wadhwani, should provide an overview of the discipline since the 1920s. but the two stories they tell, while factually perhaps the same, are strikingly different in at least two important respects. first, the account by jones is soul-searching, the story of a discipline burdened by a “permanent identity crisis,” whose practitioners bemoan “that few people read most of their painstaking studies.” business anthropologists will recognize in these remarks some of their own angst as regards positioning within the broader field of anthropology. jones remarks that at harvard, he is in the business school, where managers get trained. before that, he had taught in europe in economics departments. he was never a faculty member in a department of history. the relationship to academic history is, as he describes it, fraught. much the same can be said of business anthropology, though its position within academic departments of anthropology may be gradually improving. second, jones’s story is distinctive not just owing to the narrative of business history’s marginalization. more significantly, and unlike many others, his story highlights the need for “generalization and conceptualization,” and a tolerance for “abstraction.” anthropologists have for some time been fearless when it comes to conceptualization and abstraction, as can be seen in the exemplary ethnography with which i began this introduction. while a first-tier ethnographer of the bang & olufsen company, krause-jensen is no stranger to abstract theory. on the contrary, substantial sections of his book are focused on it, as when he takes to task the basic underlying assumptions approach to corporate culture promulgated by edgar schein. his ethnographic account, too, is interwoven throughout with conceptual discussions. here then is a possible area of convergence between business history and business anthropology – one, in fact, that harkens back to the relationship between chandler and geertz as students of talcott parsons. indeed, jones, together with walter friedman, would like to see within business history “a renewed focus on central issues” capable of capturing broader scholarly attention ‒ “innovation, entrepreneurship, and globalization”; “business and the environment, government, and democracy.” opinions: business history and anthropology 21 if the kinship between anthropology and business history traces back to talcott parsons, the broader relationship between the parent disciplines has decidedly more ancient roots. i recall, as an undergraduate at the university of chicago, taking a class in anthropology in which the professor told us straightforwardly: herodotus was the first anthropologist; through his travels, he documented the variation in customs around the ancient world. period. having already read the persian wars in a required humanities seminar, i was mildly surprised. in that context herodotus was unquestionably a historian. there was no reference to his study of exotic customs. the focus was his narrative line. so i was delighted that philip scranton, board of governors professor of history emeritus at rutgers university, and editor-in-chief of enterprise and society: the international journal of business history, opened his essay with a quote in which herodotus gets described as “a reporter, an anthropologist, an ethnographer, a historian.” in addition to providing a nuanced account of how business history and business anthropology intersect, scranton offers a key theoretical insight ‒ one at a high level of abstraction, as jones calls for, and one susceptible to generalization. actors, he asserts, “retrospectively fashion rational orderings of non-linear, indeed chaotic or sloppy, efforts.” to counter such rational unfolding narratives, he proposes that researchers “marshal documentation that presents agents looking forward into buzzing alternatives, armed with fragmentary information, rule-of-thumb analogies, and incomplete knowledge about the backgrounds of, and environments for, decision-making.” only in this way can we hope, ultimately, to comprehend “historical dynamics.” scranton offers us a peek, along these lines, at his recent research on the jet propulsion industry in britain, france, and u.s. from the second world war to the early 1960s. as he dug deeper in the archives, he explains, he found information contradicting the “triumph of reason” stories told about the development of jet propulsion. “the closer to the design offices and engine test-beds i could get,” he writes, “the more unruly the development process appears.” he was able, finally, to uncover the “cascades of errors, failures, and fixes that, in time and at staggering costs, yielded reliable military jet engines.” one senses here a kinship with older anthropological accounts of “primitive” rituals and myths, communal life pulsating with primary process, steeped in affect, best by chance. at the same time, the historical dynamics in scranton’s case are distinct. whereas a reflexive orientation to preserving the past, carrying out the rituals as the ancestors had done, prevailed in the societies studied by early anthropologists, business corporations today, and the jet propulsion industry studied by scranton in particular, are explicitly ‒ what i would call metaculturally ‒ oriented to producing the new, bringing into this world what has not heretofore existed. indeed, corporations, one might contend, are key institutional journal of business anthropology, 3(1), spring 2014 22 loci for the creation of new culture. how fitting that in the final essay of this collection, daniel pope, history professor emeritus at the university of oregon, should single out scranton as “one of the leading figures in newer ‒ perhaps more anthrofriendly ‒ scholarship in american business history,” setting scranton’s work in opposition to the older chandlerian paradigm. he observes that, while in his scholarly writings scranton did not acknowledge anthropological debts, his “attention to language and imagery, labor, gender, technological change and resistance, consumer behavior, style and fashion” should make cultural anthropologists feel comfortable. taking off from scranton, pope reviews a spectrum of writings in this newer vein, from accounts of consumption, to studies of advertising, research on work and labor, and even two firm-specific books: one on rca and the other on wal-mart. reading his vivid overview, i note that pope’s understanding of cultural anthropology is strongly influenced by geertz. he goes so far as to confess that, in his own book on the advertising industry, he pled nolo contendere to charges of economic determinism, apparently suspecting that anthropologists would shriek with horror at such an abomination. he has since learned, he explains, that “advertising history can be sensitive to cultural context without neglecting its business functions.” readers of this journal will be well aware that anthropology spans a breath-taking range of theoretical orientations, including those that could be labeled economic determinist. in concluding this introduction, i find myself in awe of the stature and accomplishments of the business historians who contributed to this collection. from galambos to pope, assembled here is a veritable who’s who of business history. i have half a mind (perhaps it is my better half) to leave this introduction at that, and let readers loose on the essays themselves. the other half of my mind, however, houses an anthropologist trained in the 1970s, one hardly averse to what jones calls “generalization and conceptualization;” one, moreover, with a high degree of tolerance for “abstraction.” so i will sally forth, weaving together some threads from these provocative essays. the essays suggest a threefold comparison between business history and business anthropology: as regards object of study, methods for studying it, and concepts pertaining to it. these essays by and large take the object of business historical study to be the past, and of business anthropological research to be present-day culture. further, they take the methods to be the study of written documents in the former case, spoken words, behaviors, and material artifacts in the latter. the essays speak to some measure of boundary blurring, as already noted. so much seems straightforward. more difficult is the conceptual realm. as pope asserts in his opinions: business history and anthropology 23 opening remarks, historians have been “resistant to the siren calls of theory,” instead burrowing into sources, constructing evidence-based narratives.” yet references to concepts and generalizations abound in these essays. one key notion is change. the word appears on many of the subsequent pages. several essays link business history to the study of change, implicitly assuming that anthropology, even in its newfound orientation to historical time, is interested in something else. what is that something else? in traditional anthropology, the something else is continuity or persistence. indeed, in some ways when anthropologists even today look at history, they are really most interested in ferreting out if not continuity, then at least the patterns of culture and social relations that constrain the direction of change. we might say that the complementary questions posed by our disciplines when we examine a stretch of historical time are: what’s different (history), and what’s the same or similar (anthropology). amidst the discussion of concepts, from institutions, culture, and myth to context, power, and rationality (along with irrationality), i single out one as central in the encounter between business historians and anthropologists. this is the idea of contingency, that chance intervenes, that trajectories are not wholly determined. business historians appreciate this much more than anthropologists do. in the anthropologist’s study of social and cultural patterns in the present, contingency is not readily discernible. we discover pattern; we do not perceive the chance that may have produced it. in my view, this is why history is so indispensable a complement to anthropology. at the same time, pattern is constraining of change and resists the entropic forces of contingency. for this reason, i – and here i plug my own idiosyncratic theorizing4 – find that the proper object of study for anthropology and perhaps also history is cultural motion, how and why cultural elements (whether symbols such as corporate logos, values, sayings, stories, or patterns of social relations) tend to move across space and through time. a careful ethnographic study of a business corporation or of any community, for that matter, reveals a culture that is far from uniformly distributed in the present. we discover differing degrees of dissemination, varying pathways along which culture moves. we find that culture gets corrupted and changes in the course of its movement. we suspect the same is true of long-term historical trajectories. what forces account for the persistence of pattern? what forces account for changes? these are questions both disciplines can and ought to ask. so much for pontification. onto the substance of the encounter: business anthropologist, meet business historian. 4 for example, greg urban, metaculture: how culture moves through the world. minneapolis, mn: university of minnesota press, 2001. journal of business anthropology, 3(1), spring 2014 24 * * * life in the corporation: lessons from business history louis galambos, co-director, institute for applied economics, global health and the study of business enterprise, johns hopkins university, and jeffrey l. sturchio, senior partner, rabin martin, and visiting scholar, institute for applied economics, global health and the study of business enterprise, johns hopkins university few who have not worked in or studied modern multinational corporations up close realize how insular they can be. despite being global organizations that may operate in more than 100 countries, with tens of thousands of employees who interact daily with millions of customers and countless politicians, regulators, policy influentials, journalists, investors, advocates and community representatives, there is a strong cultural bias to look inward rather than outward. the main points of reference for most employees in corporations are their supervisors and fellow workers; the main concerns on a day-to-day basis the mundane tasks of meetings, presentations, memos and “deliverables.” to an extent surprising to those on the outside, the quotidian rhythms of corporate life are dominated by priorities, processes and practices that are too readily divorced from the world in which the corporation’s customers and communities live. if these tendencies operated without mediation, it would be hard to understand how most businesses could succeed at delivering products and services that their customers value enough to purchase. what successful corporations learn to do is find ways to bridge the gaps between internal structures and the external world of customers and other stakeholders who buy their products and provide the revenues that keep the corporate engine running. as genevieve bell, intel’s chief corporate anthropologist, astutely observed in a recent new york times profile: “my mandate at intel has always been to bring the stories of everyone outside the building inside the building – and make them count.5 5 “the watchful lab of dr. bell,” new york times, 16 february 2014, p. bu1. http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/16/technology/intels-sharp-eyed-socialscientist.html?src=xps. you may find amusing an earlier commentary on the emerging role of anthropologists in business, which noted that they “…are no http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/16/technology/intels-sharp-eyed-social-scientist.html?src=xps http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/16/technology/intels-sharp-eyed-social-scientist.html?src=xps opinions: business history and anthropology 25 this is a profound insight about how people inside the corporation make sense of their world and connect it to the many worlds outside their organizations. our view is that dr. bell’s observation applies beyond the perspective of business anthropology. indeed, it helps us to understand how life inside the corporation is informed by the wants and needs of the communities in which businesses live and work and of the consumers who buy and use their products and services; the interests and insights of the professional and disciplinary communities that relate to corporate operations and management; and the broader cultural and economic contexts of the multinational environment in which modern corporations create and add value to society. what are the social processes by which corporate executives “bring the stories of those outside the building inside the building”? how do they “make them count”? we believe that two of the most important mechanisms by which senior executives and managers learn about critical external trends and interpret them for their internal constituencies are through the relationships of professionals who have come to populate a range of specialized functions within the corporation over time and the social networks (both inside the organization and across organizational boundaries) that play an important role in effecting corporate change. another, related theme is how corporate cultures – and the way senior leaders express their key tenets – provide an important guide to the myths, heroes, rituals and practices that frame the context in which individual professionals pursue their work.6 in this brief commentary, we will explore the evolution of these three themes – the evolving roles for professionals in business, the critical function of social networks in understanding how companies function, and the enabling power of a common cultural vision – from the perspective of business history, a discipline that has developed in parallel with business anthropology. as business historians, we are concerned mainly with explaining change over time by understanding the complex, contingent interaction of economic, social, cultural and political factors on organizational practices.7 these perspectives complement those of ethnographic research on the corporation and provide useful lessons that longer detached, pith-helmeted observers, but are getting involved in shaping corporate strategy.” “off with the pith helmets,” the economist, 11 march 2004. 6 for a classic account, see terrence e. deal and allan a. kennedy, corporate culture: the rites and rituals of corporate life (new york: basic books, 1982). 7 there is a rich and growing business history literature. for an introduction, we recommend the following books, which also illuminate further the themes of this essay: franco amatori and geoffrey jones, eds., business history around the world, comparative perspectives in business history (new york and cambridge: cambridge university press, 2003); kenneth lipartito and david b. sicilia, eds., constructing corporate america: history, politics, culture (new york and oxford: oxford university press, 2004); and philip scranton and patrick fridenson, eds., reimagining business history (baltimore, maryland: johns hopkins university press, 2013). journal of business anthropology, 3(1), spring 2014 26 resonate with the approaches of business anthropologists.8 let’s turn first to an historical perspective on the role of professionals in business.9 in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, most american businesses had minimal contacts with the professions. the three dominant professions of the nineteenth century were the clergy, doctors, and lawyers. only the law was at that time of particular interest to businessmen, few of whom had any professional training. lawyers had become increasingly important to large enterprises, and the railroads had generated so much legal business that they had begun to absorb all of the time of their leading attorneys. in effect, the railroads began gradually to internalize the legal function. similar changes took place in industry as the merger movement took hold and the legal business of the major firms rapidly expanded, along with the output of their goods and services. accounting, like law, was one of the three professions that glided into the business system with a minimum amount of friction. the traditional accounting firms had a long history of service to business and they maintained a degree of separation from their clients, in part to satisfy their professional values and in part to assure investors that their financial reports were accurate. as industrial firms expanded, however, they began to bring accountants as well as lawyers into the firm. they helped control the sprawling operations of national and international businesses and provided an interface with the company’s auditors. in both cases, as well as with later professional groups, as firms expanded their activities, the internal economy of the organization began to provide a rationale for bringing these functions inhouse.10 engineers were the third group that moved rather effortlessly into modern business – particularly in the technical industries that drove the 8 we are tyros when it comes to the subject in which regular readers of this journal are expert, but we found the following studies instructive: oana brindusa albu et al., “what is business anthropology? an ethnographic study of an explorative workshop,” journal of business anthropology, case study #5 (spring 2013); clifford geertz, the interpretation of cultures (new york: basic books, 1973); fred luthans and ivana milosevic et al., “reclaiming ‘anthropology: the forgotten behavioral science in management history’ – commentaries,” journal of organizational ethnography 2, no. 1 (2013): 92-116; brian moeran and christina garsten, “what’s in a name? editors’ introduction to the journal of business anthropology 1, no. 1 (spring 2012): 1-19; and greg urban and kyung-nan koh, “ethnographic research on modern business corporations,” annual review of anthropology 42 (2013): 139-158. urban and koh’s review – focusing on the intercalating effects of corporations on their stakeholders and environments, as well as the inner working of corporations as small-scale (or even large-scale) societies – was particularly helpful as we thought about how business history can speak to business anthropology. 9 the next three paragraphs draw on our unpublished paper on “cracks in the glass ceiling: business and the professions,” presented at the annual meeting of the organization of american historians, april 2014. 10 paul miranti, accountancy comes of age (chapel hill: university of north carolina press, 1990). opinions: business history and anthropology 27 second industrial revolution and transformed the economic landscape from the mid-nineteenth century until world war i (from railroads, telegraphs and the telephone, to chemicals, electricity and the automobile). while the engineering culture embraced “workmanship,” those values actually blended rather easily with the corporate cultures of their employers. there may have been grumbling, but there was not a revolt. there was also widespread recognition in many of the nation’s largest firms, from about 1900 on, that science-based innovation could be a fertile source of profits or a dangerous source of competition. but even the largest firms were slow to internalize research, in large part because the executives were uncertain whether they could successfully manage talented scientists (or even scientists who were not very talented). it was difficult to hire them if you were not trained in science and even more difficult to develop budgets for what they did. all too often the scientific research embodied uncertainty, rather than the more calculable category of risk. when internalization of research became necessary, businesses had to create an entirely new organizational role – the research manager – to handle the interface between the scientists and the firm’s executives. over time, following the example of pioneers like willis whitney at general electric, c. e. k. mees at eastman kodak, and charles reese at dupont, executives in industrial sector after sector came to see both that scientific research could be made to contribute more predictably to product/process innovation and market growth, and that research managers could become just that – managers of a new function that became integral to the firm’s competitive fortunes. this transformation occurred fairly rapidly in historical terms: from fewer than 50 industrial research laboratories in american industry in 1900, the number grew to nearly 300 on the eve of world war i and nearly 1000 by 1929.11 from the 1940s on, the borders between business and the professions rapidly eroded. the incorporation of specialized new roles in the functioning of the corporation continued apace, catalyzed by the expansion of business education after world war ii and the impact of the g.i. bill and the economic expansion of the 1940s and 1950s. in those years, the masters of business administration became a common doorway to a business career, and as the new, giant multi-divisional firms spread through the american economy and overseas, the demand for new 11 arnold thackray, jeffrey l. sturchio, p. thomas carroll and robert bud, chemistry in america, 1876-1976: historical indicators (boston, d. reidel, 1985), table 5.4 pp. 345-46. the general electric experience was typical of what was happening during these decades: w. bernard carlson, innovation as a social process: elihu thomson and the rise of general electric, 1870-1900 (new york: cambridge university press, 1991); ronald r. kline, steinmetz: engineer and socialist (baltimore, maryland: johns hopkins university press, 1992); and george wise, willis r. whitney, general electric and the origins of u.s. industrial research (new york: columbia university press, 1985). david a. hounshell and john kenly smith, science and corporate strategy: du pont r&d, 1902-1980 (new york and cambridge: cambridge university press, 1988), do an excellent job of describing and analyzing this aspect of corporate evolution. journal of business anthropology, 3(1), spring 2014 28 mbas seemed to grow even faster than the rapidly expanding supply. this new generation of business leaders was less hostile to well-educated professionals than their predecessors had been. recognizing that they operated in a knowledge economy, they were open to substituting professionals in human resources for the old industrial relations crew that had been handling unions and collective bargaining. this was one of a range of transitions that brought a new level of professionalization to america’s businesses. staff work was transformed in the so-called “american century” of business expansion. master’s degrees proliferated, and even ph.d.’s found new homes and new respect in postwar business. marketing became a social science, and psychologists, sociologists and even anthropologists found their niches as companies brought new rigor to understanding their markets and consumers. companies recognized the need for personnel trained in economics and statistical analysis. the relationships between science and business were no longer strained as they had been in most firms before wwii. in some industries, in fact, the scientists were in such strong positions that they dominated the exchanges with departments of marketing and production. in part, this was a cultural phenomenon, reinforced by successful additions to the bottom line. by the end of the twentieth century, the professions were deeply planted in american business.12 these new professional cadres brought with them new networks of relationships whose influence crossed the boundaries between the firm and its outside environments. these connections brought new knowledge and new perspectives to managers of business organizations as they navigated the competitive landscape. indeed, the extent to which they were able to bring the outside in (in genevieve bell’s provocative metaphor) proved in many cases to be an important new source of competitive advantage. the business history literature provides many examples of the importance of these professional networks. an early case is that of the synthetic dyes industry, where relationships among academic laboratories, government institutions and entrepreneurial companies help to explain the complex evolution and shifting leadership within this industry across germany, great britain and the united states during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. companies that maintained close ties – usually through their own scientists – with the centers of new organic chemical knowledge fared better than those that looked inward.13 12 this story is the focus of louis galambos, the creative society – and the price that americans paid for it (new york and cambridge: cambridge university press, 2012). see also galambos, “technology, political economy and professionalization: central themes of the organizational synthesis,” business history review 57 (winter 1983): 471-493. 13 johann peter murmann, knowledge and competitive advantage: the coevolution of firms, technology and national institutions (new york and cambridge: cambridge university press, 2003). opinions: business history and anthropology 29 the importance of these social networks – centered on professional scientists who made the transition to industry and involving a complex mix of academic, government and medical institutions – also emerges from case studies of the evolution of the vaccine business of merck & co., inc. over the century from 1895 to 1995 and the transition to biotechnology in the pharmaceutical industry during the period from the 1970s to the 1990s.14 in the latter case, pharmaceutical firms that prospered in the shift to molecular genetics and recombinant dna technology were those that developed internal capabilities to assess the new science while also working creatively to develop alliances with small, entrepreneurial biotechnology firms to innovate in new therapeutic categories. the ability of corporate scientists to move across the boundaries between the academic and industrial communities and to interpret the languages and cultures of each to the other was a critical element explaining the differential success of large pharmaceutical companies in adapting to the new world of biotechnology. this point about the creative power of networks across organizational boundaries applies with equal force to other areas of corporate activity, as well as to the workings of the internal networks that enable corporations to get things done. informal networks operate side by side with formal hierarchies within the modern corporation. just as r&d leaders depend on key individuals on their teams who have close ties to a range of external experts to import new insights and information into new product development, so do leaders of finance, marketing, production and other functions. in analogous ways, internal networks function to accelerate the diffusion of new ideas, methods and processes throughout the organization. we’re all familiar with the role of key individuals in our own organizations: they always seem to know just whom to call, or which article to read, to solve a vexing problem. the intriguing aspect of how these networks operate is that the more diverse the connections we have, the more likely networks will yield just the right insights for critical problems.15 malcolm gladwell’s book, the tipping point, explored these issues in a captivating way, and there is a growing academic literature on the power of networks for understanding what urban and koh call the “inner workings of corporations as small-scale (or even large-scale societies).”16 14 louis galambos and jane eliot sewell, networks of innovation: vaccine development at merck, sharp & dohme and mulford, 1895-1995 (new york and cambridge: cambridge university press, 1995); and louis galambos and jeffrey l. sturchio, “pharmaceutical firms and the transition to biotechnology: a study in strategic innovation,” business history review 72 (summer 1998): 250-278. 15 this is the argument of mark granovetter’s classic paper, “the strength of weak ties,” american sociological review 78, no. 6 (may 1973): 1360-1380; see also his subsequent paper, “the strength of weak ties: a network theory revisited,” sociological theory 1 (1983): 201-233. 16 urban and koh, “ethnographic research on modern business corporations,” (note 8 above). see also malcolm gladwell, the tipping point: how little things journal of business anthropology, 3(1), spring 2014 30 how then does the culture of these corporate societies have an impact on the work they accomplish, the commitment and cooperation of the professionals who drive those accomplishments, and the effectiveness and efficiency of the internal and external networks that enable companies to innovate and operate efficiently?17 we can only adumbrate these ideas in this essay, so let’s focus on the role of the ceo as kulturträger. because of his or her central role in providing vision and leadership for the organization, the ceo plays a critical role in articulating and promulgating key cultural values for people at all levels of the modern corporation. this is just one element of the complex role of the modern ceo, who has to find the right balance among innovation, control and efficiency to ensure optimum and sustainable outcomes for the diverse shareholders and stakeholders that every corporation has.18 an intriguing example of how successive ceos used narrative and myth about organizational values and strengths to focus the efforts of their corporations comes from hewlett-packard, where john young used the theme of quality from 1980-1992 to address the challenges that hp faced during his tenure. he was succeeded by lewis platt, who focused on re-engineering from 1992-1999, and then carly fiorina, whose narrative during her tempestuous tenure from 1999-2005 centered on reinvention. these overarching themes enabled young, platt and fiorina to rally the entire organization around strategic visions tailored for the particular competitive and cultural challenges faced over a 25-year, transitional period. it would be interesting to contrast this sharply can make a big difference (boston, massachusetts: little, brown & co., 2000); robert cross, andrew parker, lisa sasson, eds., networks in the knowledge economy (new york and oxford: oxford university press, 2003); robert cross and andrew parker, the hidden power of social networks: understanding how work really gets done in organizations (boston, massachusetts: harvard business review press, 2004); and the work of sinan aral at new york university, e.g., david lazer, alex pentland, lada adamic, sinan aral et al., “life in the network: the coming age of computational social science,” science 323 (6 february 2009): 721-723; and aral and dylan walker, “identifying influential and susceptible members of social networks,” science 337 (20 july 2012): 337341. 17 we have found ken lipartito’s essay on “culture and the practice of business history,” business and economic history 24, no. 2 (winter 1995): 1-41, helpful in this regard. also, a recent article in the harvard business review posits an important role for “sensemaking” in applying the human sciences to help business organizations understand how to navigate unfamiliar social or cultural contexts and challenges. this seems close to the spirit of how we see the role of professionals and networks in creating and adapting corporate culture to help businesses achieve their objectives; see christian madsbjerg and mikkel b. rasmussen, “an anthropologist walks into a bar….” harvard business review, march 2014, reprint r1430f. 18 louis galambos, “what have ceos been doing?” journal of economic history 48, no. 2 (june 1988): 243-258; and galambos, “the authority and responsibility of the chief executive officer: shifting patterns in large us enterprises in the twentieth century,” industrial and corporate change 4, no. 1 (1995): 187-203. opinions: business history and anthropology 31 focused vision with the reality that people experienced at different levels within hp at this time.19 there are many other examples of this use of visions and values to reinforce cultural direction within modern corporations – one other case of interest was how raymond v. gilmartin renewed george w. merck’s famous apothegm that “medicine is for the patients, not the profits” (from a 1950 speech to the medical college of virginia) early in his tenure as ceo at merck & co., inc., and made it a central element of his articulation of the company’s overarching values. finally, we agree with ronald kroeze and sjoerd keulen that “leading a modern corporation is history in practice.” drawing on their study of the uses of narrative by leaders at several dutch corporations, they conclude that history is an important source of the traditions and symbols needed for communication; for strengthening the shared understanding of the institution’s identity; and for connecting that past with the present and future of the corporation.20 as we’ve tried to show in this essay, we also think there are important lessons from business history about the impact of new professional roles in the corporation, about the “hidden life” of social networks, and about the role of corporate culture in reinforcing the daily practices of corporate life. we hope we’ve shown enough congruence between these historical perspectives and the approaches that business anthropologists have taken in their ethnographic research on the corporation to encourage our readers to undertake some cross-disciplinary explorations of their own. * * * how business methods change: the cases of salesmanship and forecasting walter friedman, director of the business history initiative, harvard business school i became interested in studying the history of business while getting my doctorate at columbia in the 1990s. after a class on the 1920s, i grew particularly curious about how well the image of the salesman depicted in sinclair lewis’s novel babbitt (1922) corresponded to reality. but i had little understanding of the broader transformations that were occurring 19 see sotirios paroutis, max mckeown and simon collinson, “building castles from sand: unlocking ceo mythopoetical behaviour in hewlett packard from 1978 to 2005,” business history 55, no. 7 (2013): 1200–1227. 20 ronald kroeze and sjoerd keulen, “leading a multinational is history in practice: the use of invented traditions and narratives at akzonobel, shell, philips and abn amro,” business history 55, no. 8 (2013): 1265-1287. journal of business anthropology, 3(1), spring 2014 32 in business in that period. so, like many history students, i turned to the work of alfred d. chandler jr. starting in the 1960s, chandler had developed a series of landmark books, the most famous of which was visible hand: the managerial revolution in american business (1977). that book provided the best general overview of the evolution of business in the united states ‒ and still does. i was particularly struck by chandler’s methodology. like many historians, chandler believed in deep primary research, making use of annual reports, correspondence, the diaries of businesspeople, industry trade journals, advertisements, board meeting minutes, company by-laws, reports from the bureau of corporations, and anything else he could find. but his work had other distinguishing characteristics. it was driven by big research questions: why did large companies emerge in certain industries and not others? why did companies differ in their organizational structure? why did large companies emerge in some countries and not others? in answering these questions, chandler believed in taking a comparative approach, looking at how entrepreneurs, companies, or countries were similar or different from one another. chandler was also interested in studying business functions (management, production, and distribution, for instance) and how they evolved over time. this emphasis arose in part from studying with sociologist talcott parsons. parsons convinced him to think about society as a structure of interrelated parts ‒ and to think about institutions and their evolution over time. were they like organs in the human body? what do they do? how did they grow and change? he was also influenced by the work of economist joseph schumpeter, who emphasized the role of entrepreneurs in the “creative destruction” inherent to capitalism. entrepreneurial activity, schumpeter argued, created “new combinations” that brought about new products, processes, or markets and disrupted old methods of doing business.21 chandler’s book strategy and structure (1962), for example, examined the question of why large firms developed different organizational structures. why did some adopt a multidivisional structure and others did not? what did the strategy of the firm have to do with its structure? in the book, chandler profiled the evolution of management at four companies (dupont, general motors, standard oil, and sears). the british economist barry supple remarked on the comparative aspect of the book. “strategy and structure was novel because, as chandler pointed out, it concentrated on a comparison of the ways in which different enterprises carried out the same activity ‒ administration ‒ rather than studying how a single firm undertook all its 21 on schumpeter, see the biography by chandler’s long-time colleague, thomas k. mccraw’s prophet of innovation: joseph schumpeter and creative destruction (cambridge, mass.: harvard university press, 2007). opinions: business history and anthropology 33 functions.”22 as a trained historian, chandler argued for the necessity of collecting large amounts of empirical facts about the operation of firms ‒ and then using these facts to formulate conceptual conclusions. “each case study [in this book] presents the events from the point of view of the busy men responsible for the destiny of their enterprise,” chandler wrote. “only by showing these executives as they handled what appeared to them to be unique problems and issues can the process of innovation and change be meaningfully presented.”23 after columbia i was lucky enough to go to harvard business school on a postdoctoral fellowship and to work with chandler. the book i eventually produced, growing out of my dissertation on salesmen, was deeply influenced by chandler’s approach. for one thing, it explored the evolution of an economic function (selling) over time. birth of a salesman: the transformation of selling in america (harvard, 2004) was a history of the rise of sales management in the late nineteenth century and the early twentieth. how did the u.s. move from having an economy populated by peddlers and traveling salesmen to one with highly managed salespeople at places like national cash register, burroughs, chevrolet, and ibm? why did methods of selling change over time? i looked at all sorts of documents, including sales scripts from singer sewing machine, encyclopedia britannica, and other firms. i located diaries of nineteenth-century salesmen and memoirs of commercial travelers. i included a detailed study of national cash register, a pioneer of systematic approaches to sales management. my chapter on ncr was written largely through an analysis of its internal company magazine (the ncr), court cases involving the company, and published recollections of former employees. sometimes, in the book, ephemeral items proved highly important. i took an interest in joke-books written for traveling salesmen to read on trains. at first these seemed relatively marginal to my subject. but the more of them i saw, the more i realized that they were essential to the traveling drummer’s repertoire. how else could a stranger, in the late nineteenth century, make a connection with an unfamiliar general storekeeper? a good joke ‒ about a mother-in-law or other third party ‒ might help break the ice. i tried to be comparative in my approach. i analyzed how ideas about salesmanship varied in different types of business. how did the sale of books and perfume, sold door to door, differ from the sale of large computer systems? what industries developed sales forces and which did not? which industries relied more on advertising? i also returned to my original cultural interest in babbitt, but tried 22 barry supple, “scale and scope: alfred chandler and the dynamics of industrial capitalism,” economic history review xliv 3 (1991): 500-514. 23 alfred d. chandler, strategy and structure: chapters in the history of the american industrial enterprise (cambridge, mass: mit press, 1962; edition used, 1995), p. 7. journal of business anthropology, 3(1), spring 2014 34 to relate it to broader trends. why did the image of the salesman change so much over time? in yankee folktales, the figure of the salesman was that of a powerful stranger, who would arrive in town unannounced and trick people into buying things. by the early twentieth century, in babbitt, the salesman was no stranger at all, but rather a town booster and archetypal american. however, he was also weaker, a follower of news slogans and advertisements. after world war ii, with the character of willy loman in arthur miller’s death of a salesman, the salesman became a tragic figure, as disposable as the products he sold. in many ways, the broad changes in the realities of business ‒ the demise of itinerant peddlers, the growth of national sales networks, and the rise of sales management—resonated with cultural representations. selling became more central to the american economy, while salesmen became more heavily managed and more replaceable. while i pursued my own interests, chandler’s work ‒ functional, comparative, and highly detailed ‒ was an important guide. the same was true for my second book. fortune tellers: the story of america’s first economic forecasters (princeton, 2014), was also about the evolution of an economic function ‒ in this case forecasting ‒ over time. it looked at the first generation of forecasters who started their predictions in the early twentieth century and continued on, for the most part, until the great depression. in researching this book, i also looked at a range of primary sources. these included correspondence (sometimes from angry subscribers), get-rich-quick pamphlets, bulletins from the national bureau of economic research and the econometric society, and early forecasting charts ‒ some of which were beautifully done prints with vibrant colors. the main sources for the book were the weekly forecasting newsletters themselves ‒ including the babson report, the brookmire forecaster, and the harvard economic service’s weekly letter. i also researched government archives, both in the u.s. and abroad, as forecasting became tied to public policy. i tried to shape the book around central research questions: how did the forecasting field, once based on intuition and inside knowledge, become one with highly technical macro-economic models? what made one forecaster more successful than another (especially given the fact that there was little data about which forecasters were accurate)? what was the relationship of forecasting and meteorology, another science developing in this period? when did the u.s. government become interested in economic forecasting and why? i also tried to make the book comparative in nature, especially in terms of understanding how forecasts were produced. one forecaster, roger babson, believed that a careful study of past economic patterns, revealed in numeric data series (an amalgam of output, prices, and crop yields) would repeat endlessly into the future. another, warren persons, opinions: business history and anthropology 35 of harvard, argued that the future could best be understood by finding analogous instances in the past. was 1921 most like 1884? or 1893? finding the right analogy would help uncover the future. still a third forecaster, irving fisher, thought that past trends and analogous events were useless in understanding the future. he instead developed a mathematical model that aimed to track when credit flows were healthy and when they were overextended. he also tried to understand what caused economic growth: patents? managerial innovation? financial reform? each forecaster i profiled in the book introduced a different way to think about the economic future ‒ and each forecasting method has had its own legacy, down to today, a time when forecasts are omnipresent. one of the reasons chandler’s work has proven so enduring and inspirational stems from the fact that his approach was multidisciplinary. he gained a lot through his reading of sociology and of economics. these disciplines helped him to conceptualize large economic institutions and to understand the dynamism of capitalist economies. in turn, his work has found a wide-ranging audience among historians, sociologists, management scholars, and economists. capitalism and business enterprise ‒ the focus of his work ‒ are such complex and multifaceted subjects, it is not surprising that different perspectives provide insightful approaches. hence, i am optimistic that there is much to be learned from collaboration between anthropologists and historians interested in business. * * * is business anthropology useful for business historians? potential highways and dead-ends eric godelier, professor of management, business history and social sciences, école polytechnique, france educated as an economist, although surrounded on all sides from when i was very young by anthropology, graduated as a historian, and now teaching multicultural management and corporate culture, i have always had both my research and my professional career nourished by multidisciplinarity. for this reason, it is a great pleasure to be able to contribute to this special issue of the jba, although it is clearly impossible to propose here a complete and systematic synthesis of the various relations that might be built between business history and business anthropology. nevertheless, i will continue since i have been invited to write some informal remarks for readers of the jba ‒ to make some suggestions for future and possible fruitful exchanges between our journal of business anthropology, 3(1), spring 2014 36 disciplines. such reflection could lead to discussing the possibility ‒ and the opportunity – that an ethnographical approach might have in creating historical knowledge, and especially, ‘workable’ know-how. in this respect, it seems important to separate methodological issues from conceptual debates. the usefulness of ethnography for modern business history… and vice and versa the field of business history is broad and varied. depending on the topics, periods and objects studied by business historians, potential contacts with business ethnography could be very helpful, or alternatively lead to dead-ends. in france since the 1980s, many business historians have been innovating by doing fieldwork and developing a kind of methodology very similar to those used by (anthropological) ethnographers. in his book organizational ethnography,24 daniel neyland presented a set of instructions, or guide, for how to become an organizational ethnographer. in many respects, the ‘ten sensibilities’ he described (for instance, location and access, field relations, questions of knowledge, observing and participating, and so on) could be used directly by business historians involved in the history of recent organizations, since these days more and more business historians are requested to contribute, in one way or another, to official celebrations ‒ much of the time as providers of facts for legal debates, or of official corporate culture assessments and values. moreover, some business historians have been designing action research programmes, in order to be able to enter organizations or corporations and to move undercover therein. indeed, in many respects, the problems they face in being accepted inside organizations are very similar to those encountered by anthropologists. how can they move beyond official structures and formal manifestations of such structures to arrive at an understanding of people’s everyday behaviour? frequently, business historians have to face the problem of evaluating their personal and professional relationship with an organization’s leaders and values. therefore, using the experience and methodological knowledge accumulated by anthropologist ethnographers could be helpful. by suggesting that all social scientists should go behind the screen, anthropology ‒ and its methodological branch, ethnography ‒ has strongly pushed for an in-depth research process. classical ethnography demands a long stay in the field. through daily observations of individual or collective behaviour, one should get as close as possible to people’s intimacy, their values, and culture. in the end, this should also be the ultimate target of business historians: to discover the actual elements, 24 daniel neyland, organizational ethnography. sage, london, 2008. opinions: business history and anthropology 37 actors, and structures present and to get as close as possible to history and historical ‘truth’. last but not least, from a business historian’s perspective, ethnography could be helpful for the design and maintenance of an intellectual and methodological distance between observer and observed. here georges devereux has frequently explained the influence of psychological problems on anthropology.25 moreover, ethnography could prevent business historians from falling into ethnocentrism. new research topics in business history ‒ like technology transfers between various countries or corporations, sending top managers and leaders abroad to work, corporate globalization ‒ could benefit from the experiences of ethnography, which raises, for instance, the question of indigenous management and the technical or intellectual tools needed to analyse it.26 at the same time, however, i think that ethnography could also benefit by learning from history and business historians. in france, anthropology and history have been engaged in more or less continuous discussion, and occasional arguments, for several decades. in the 1960s, claude lévi-strauss and ferdinand braudel entered into a famous polemic on the importance of history for anthropologists.27 lévi-strauss’s conclusion was that history is needed because ethnography is dealing with historical objects, but that its use should be limited. for his part, braudel insisted that anthropologists study history in depth in order to put their field research and scientific object of enquiry into context. once they become interested in business and corporations, therefore, business anthropologists should in one way or another take time for a precise consideration of history. archives, oral interviews with informants, and global history all have to be mobilized as complementary sources of information, evidence, and proof. since the early 2000s, more and more business historians have developed a sophisticated approach of this nature to the study of oral sources and their importance in business history. in so doing, they are trying to improve the status of oral history in business history, as well as in history in general.28 this short, though obviously incomplete, set of methodological issues could, i think, be a first cornerstone of a future and fruitful dialogue 25 see, for instance, g. spindler (ed.), the making of psychological anthropology. berkeley: university of california press, 1978. 26 see, for instance, d. marsden, ‘indigeneous management and the management of indigeneous knowledge’. in s. wright (ed.), anthropology of organizations. london: routledge, 1994 (2nd edition 2002), p. 41-55. 27 c. lévi-strauss, ‘l’anthropologie sociale devant l’histoire’. annales esc, xv, 1960, p. 625-37. 28 f. descamps, l’historien, l’archiviste et le magnétophone. de la constitution de la source orale à son exploitation. paris: comité pour l’histoire économique et financière de la france, 2001. journal of business anthropology, 3(1), spring 2014 38 between business anthropology, ethnography, and business history ‒ especially if they engage in new exchanges of concepts. concepts and critiques in my opinion, several concepts could be imported from anthropology and used by business historians. amongst them, i would like to select three of what i consider to be the most important: institutions, culture, and myths. first, institutions. when working on organizations, business historians need intellectual tools to describe and define their objects of study: for instance, small and medium enterprises, large corporations, associations, or public bodies. it is very difficult to find a single and precise definition of enterprise and entrepreneurship ‒ either in history, or in economics or management sciences. each discipline tends to emphasize just one aspect of the enterprise: like, for instance, organization structures, material or informal resources, information, influence on market regulation, decision processes, leadership, and so on. any one of them is able to provide something more synthetic, and even a single definition of enterprise and corporation. the concept of institution here could prove very helpful, and yet business historians are not very comfortable about using it. for instance, in the introduction to giants of enterprise, r. teldow underlines the fact that: “no theory of institutions which does not take account of talent, genius, idiosyncracy, and, at times, idiocy of the individual leader can explain how america came to do best what it does best. […] this book is thus the story of individuals and institutions. but the individuals take center stage, while the institutions, both public and private, provide the background” (p. 3). again, teldow underlined the fact that there was ‘no typical american business executive’ ‒ a statement which could be understood to imply that there were no social regularities. does it mean that energy and ambition are stronger in some parts of the population than in others? if this assumption is true, it becomes impossible to conclude that there is no social or cultural regulation intervening in the social selection process.29 if this process is purely hazardous, it is impossible to explain the obvious differences. we need a more complex model to describe and analyse the origin and path of an entrepreneur’s social and economic success. 29 of course, it is also possible to use racist theories, which have tried from a very long time ago to explain social inequalities and differences by the concept of socalled ‘natural differences’. opinions: business history and anthropology 39 one possible solution can be found in mary douglas’s work on norms, values and institutions. in her famous book how institutions think,30 she explains how institutions frame people’s representations, values, and behaviour through a process of selection and institutionalization of cultural and symbolic items. this leads to a naturalization of forms of representations used by community members. she described how, at some point, the metaphors and myths used get solidified, accepted, and reinforced by most people in the community. at this point, it becomes hard for any individual to escape the patterns and categories of thought defined by these institutions. this is the sense of douglas's assertion that ‘institutions think’. within these categories and agendas, individuals may even make rational benefit cost calculations amongst alternatives without considering the categories themselves. this powerful intellectual frame is becoming more and more widespread amongst french business historians. second, culture. another concept originally stemming from anthropology is that of ‘culture’. nowadays, more and more business historians in france ‒ indeed, around the world ‒ are in some way dealing with, or even focusing on, culture.31 this is also an accepted ‘truth’ in organization studies,32 where more and more publications are presenting historical research on worker communities, corporate culture, leadership values, multicultural management, and so on. since the mid-1980s, many have been influenced by geert hoftede’s research on values and cultural hierarchies,33 while others make use of edward t. hall’s work on ‘nonverbal’ communication, language, and culture.34 nevertheless, since publication of culture: a critical review of concepts and definitions by a. l. kroeber and clyde kluckhohn,35 one needs to be more careful with this concept. many definitions used by business historians are still imprinted by essentialism and western ethnocentrism. a closer dialogue with anthropology would enable them to develop a more rigorous approach to the study of culture in business and organizational studies, the history of corporations, multicultural management, and the globalization of management practices and tools.36 30 mary douglas, how institutions think. syracuse university press, 1986. 31 one could have a look at the business history conference (bhc) online website, or at its meetings. see for instance my book on corporate culture: la culture d’entreprise. paris: ladécouverte, 2006. 32 s. wright (1994), ‘culture in anthropology and organizational studies’. in her edited anthropology of organizations. london & new york: routledge, 2nd edition, 2002, pp. 1-31. 33 geert hofstede, culture's consequences: international differences in workrelated values. beverly hills ca: sage publications, 1980. 34 for instance, e. t. hall, the silent language. new york: anchor books, 1959; or the hidden dimension. new york: anchor books, 1966. 35 a. l. kroeber and clyde kluckhohn, culture: a critical review of concepts and definitions. new york: vintage books, 1952. 36 for instance, see the open website: mtpf.mlabhttp://www.questia.com/searchglobal#%21/?publisher=vintage%20books journal of business anthropology, 3(1), spring 2014 40 this brings me to my last example of possible exchanges between anthropology and business history: the concept of myth. official biographies of famous entrepreneurs often emphasise the importance of loneliness, poverty, and strong spirit of the young creator. these elements are symbolically summarized by the ‘garage’, which allowed the business innovator to start up his activity.37 in the united-states, bill hewlett and dave packard, bill gates and numerous others are supposed to have used the family backyard for their first step towards success and wealth. they are often presented as former students who left college or university before graduating, or, sometimes, after being sent down because of bad results or inappropriate behaviour. for instance, andrew carnegie, a scottish immigrant from dunfermline, was recruited as a simple telegraphist, before becoming a tycoon in the steel industry. henry ford, left school at the age of 16 and created his industrial empire. in france also, it is possible to find similar cases. louis renault failed to enter the école centrale, a famous french school for engineers, but was later regarded as a genius in mechanics. charles pathé was a fairground entertainer who became a famous millionaire in 1913. to this list, one might also add coco chanel. most of these people have become business heroes, both in public opinion and in the world of management. how could this have happened? how does someone with officially few or no technical, commercial, financial, or managerial knowledge become a successful entrepreneur and managerial hero? obviously the world of business creates its own myths and heroes. business historians could use the frame of historian p. veyne,38 and of anthropologist lévi-strauss,39 to understand what managerial myths reveal about entrepreneurship – whether among individuals or communities – and, in the process, what they hide from public opinion and society at large. for instance, steve jobs or bill gates presents himself as a mythic person: a young creator, ‘self-taught man’ in the computer industry, and adventurer. very often, as i said, creators represent themselves, and are represented by others, as bad students, reluctant to follow the rules of education institutions, and therefore rejected by the official system.40 the implicit messages in such myths are innovation.net/fr/introduction.html 37 for instance, the palo alto garage where hewlett and packard started its business in 1939 with a $538 investment was, in 1987, designated as a california state historical landmark. 38 did the greeks believe their myths ? an essay on the constitutive imagination. chicago: university of chicago press, 1988. 39 c. lévi-strauss and d. eribon, de près et de loin. paris: odile jacob, 1988. 40 in november 2006, steve balmers came to the polytechnique where he presented himself ‘as a student who failed to graduate’. nevertheless, later in his speech, he mentioned the fact that his father had supported him financially during his studies in harvard, and that he had passed all the credits of the stanford mba except two. instead of finishing these two courses, however, he decided to help bill gates to create microsoft. as a result, therefore, he did not officially graduate. opinions: business history and anthropology 41 clear: social promotion is based on personal merit and democratic criteria. in a way, social rules and institutions have no negative influence on the new businessman. if someone is smart and dynamic enough, he (or she) will be promoted. a second aspect of myth that might be considered by business historians is mythic innovation. with the macintosh, apple became the first computer corporation to develop a commercially successful pc with a graphical user interface. once again, it is possible to find some elements of the myth: innovation opposed to inertia and business conservatism (symbolized by ibm); or the dwarf surpassing the giant (rank xerox or ibm). obviously, using an anthropological framework here could be very useful for business historians. and yet, it is important to define the concept of myth and what it means.41 one definition might present a myth as a particular kind of narrative. a good example of this is that of the greek gods, which provides a model for the origins of mankind and the natural world. nevertheless, myths are not tales as such, because they tend not to be pure invention. and yet they are not lies, either, because they are also partly true. often, within the myths, actual facts are mixed with things – i use this word intentionally – but in an obviously unrealistic way. but, even if they speak about the past and try to explain it, myths cannot be said to be history, for they are but barely based on precise and proven facts (dates, testimonies, objective sources). myths also have no fixed length in either time or space. talking about the past, they offer a picture of a perfect world, seen as a universal and original matrix. last, even if they present ‘holes’ ‒ improbabilities or dead-ends in the panorama ‒ myths are regarded as truths by members of a specific community. therefore, community members believe in a myth, not through an explanatory process, but mainly through adherence to it. thus, only aliens would be able to observe what they would then refer to as ‘imperfections’, ‘irrationalities’, or ‘superstitions’. but the most difficult thing of all is that myths cannot be reduced to a static or pure old-fashioned form of folklore. they produce knowledge and actions which are able to evolve. this leads us to ask what the main characteristics of myths might be. lévi-strauss underlines the function of structuration: myths are used to explain some parts of reality and to hide others. by doing this, they structure the categories of the human mind. in this respect, g. dumezil, too, showed that myths are not totally linked to reality and social organization. it is possible to see them as a symbolic model of the actual. lastly, therefore, we might say that myths have two functions: they provide a kind of coherent structure of facts and 41 there are numerous definitions and debates in social anthropology, as well as in sociology and linguistics, about myths. my definition here is based on what is commonly shared among social scientists. see p. smith, ‘mythe: approche ethnosociologique’. encyclopaedia universalis, 2007. journal of business anthropology, 3(1), spring 2014 42 explanations of the world; and they are useful to help communication within a group. myths thus have an origin: they are diffused and institutionalized.42 nowadays, these representations and myths are clearly having an influence on corporate history researchers. for instance, it is interesting to read alfred chandler’s enormous work on management capabilities and communities within this analytical frame. in a way, strategy and structure: the visible hand and scale and scope sometimes present leaders and managers as extraordinary individuals, at others as lonesome innovators. but stories are not myths, and through their work business historians could explore the roots of several business myths. in this way they could develop a positive critique of the concept and contribute to a better understanding of business myths. indeed, some scholars in management studies have already made a really interesting contribution on such topics.43 in conclusion, let me say that the aim of this short opinion piece was not to make a conclusive contribution to the potential relationship between anthropology and business, but to suggest ways in which these two disciplines might in the future share some common objects of interest, and so develop fruitful intellectual exchanges. the huge variety of topics, methodologies, and intellectual tools developed by business historians around the world could supply such exchanges with renewed perspectives. as mentioned earlier, in 2011, french business historians published an online book on the history of french management models and thought between the eighteenth and 21st centuries. one aim of this project was to design a kind of genealogy and history of social and political networks, the sources and trajectories of management techniques, models, and representations in france and around the world. obviously some common elements could represent a starting point for new discussions between business historians and business anthropology and ethnography. * * * 42 this section was inspired by paul veyne, les grecs ont-ils cru à leur mythes ? paris: seuil, coll. « points », 2nd edition, 1992. (translated into english in 1988 by paula wissing: did the greeks believe in their myths? an essay on the constitutive imagination. chicago: chicago university press, 1988.) 43 the author would like to thank jim march for confirmation that the texts on management myths were only published in french: j. march, ‘les mythes du management’, les annales de l’école de paris, vol. v, 1999, pp. 387-394; j. march, t. weil, le leadership dans les organisation. paris: presses de l’emp, 2003. opinions: business history and anthropology 43 history and the anthropology of firms: a legal perspective gwendolyn gordon, assistant professor of legal studies and business ethics, and eric w. orts, guardsmark professor of legal studies and business ethics and professor of management, both at the wharton school of the university of pennsylvania many years ago, social theorists noted the wary, dawning recognition on the part of both historians and anthropologists of the possibility that “history itself was inherently cultural, and culture, inherently historical” (dirks, eley, and ortner, 1994:6). there was some hesitation at the start of anthropology’s version of a “historic turn” (mcdonald 1996), a shift in the field that, as sherry ortner observed, might have been characterized equally validly as “a move from structures and systems to persons and practices” as the more obvious “shift from static, synchronic analyses to diachronic, processual ones” (1994:402). anthropologists’ wariness of the unruly prodigal concept of “culture” was also encouraged by this historical shift. an historical perspective raises questions about the durability, contingency, and cohesiveness of “culture” (dirks et al 1994). with the shift to historicity occurring, as it did, simultaneously with a number of other challenges and changes to the discipline (perhaps most notably the insistent incursions upon anthropological theory of postmodernist critiques), some measure of disciplinary discomfiture was to be expected. much of this self-conscious reassessment persists and is apparent in anthropology’s intermittent disciplinary re-positioning and boundary-policing in relation to the discipline of history, a theme which has been present ever since maitland’s claim that “anthropology must become history or be nothing” (comaroff 1982:142, paraphrasing maitland 1936: 249). an equally present anxiety appears in “studying up” to gain access to and represent elites, such as the “bosses” of business firms, who often tend to be the focus of the work of business anthropologists (e.g., carrier 2013; see also nader 1972, gusterson 1997). the combination of these two persistent forms of disciplinary discomfort contributes to a uniquely generative ground for a reconsideration of the potential for methodological cross-fertilization between anthropology and history with respect to business enterprise. when anthropologists get uncomfortable, it seems, they get introspective. this is as true for the growing importance of anthropological ways of looking at business today as it was for the earlier engagement of anthropologists with historiography. as historiography was becoming an established, valued tool for anthropologists, anthropologists debated the proper relationship between the two disciplines. for jean and john comaroff, using history involved reading journal of business anthropology, 3(1), spring 2014 44 archival records ethnographically, on the theory that “once the motives, intentions, and imaginings of persons living or dead are allowed to speak from the historical record, it becomes impossible to see them as mere reflections of monolithic cultural structures or social forces” (1991:10). this kind of history was at odds with a history that made fine distinctions between “reality” and “representation,” as well as with the persistent popular division of representation into realism (factual, documentary) and rhetoric (evaluative, interpretive, expressive). if forms of representation were “part of culture and consciousness,” then historical consciousness could not be confined to “one expressive mode” (1991:35). meanwhile, ortner and others argued that the key theoretical difficulty giving rise to the day’s anthropological insecurities was the seeming inability to account for several interrelated features of social life: (1) the way that society, while “a human product,” seemed also to bind the scope of human action and thought; (2) the way that society (as an earlier anthropology had emphasized) was “an objective reality” that was nonetheless somehow also constructed; and (3) the way that human beings, in one view the authors of society, were also and at the same time “a social product” (1994:402, quoting berger and luckmann 1967:61). an uncritical anthropological accounting of history alone – history as a preface – was no solution to this conceptual difficulty. the efforts of ortner, dirks, and others promoted a variety of historical anthropology characterized by “a kind of dislodging of a whole series of assumptions about what culture is and how it works” (dirks et al 1994:6; see also spear 1994). now, however, the “depthless subject with no sense of history” lamented by dirks et al (1994:14) has been revealed anew as problematic. today, in the wake of a seemingly endless tide of corporate and financial perfidy and disaster, business institutions (and the people acting within them) have tended to become a flat subject for too many anthropologists. we, of course, exclude the editors, contributors, and readers of the journal of business anthropology, whose work has valiantly countered this trend within mainstream anthropology. in 2009, marina welker described two dominant analytics in the critical anthropological literature of business entities: a “bad apples” approach that focused on individuals – ceos or financiers as supermen and/or psychopaths – and an institutional approach that diminished the importance of individual agency, instead pointing to larger forces in examining the negative social effects of firms. the dominance of these two approaches meant that even when the individuals involved with the management and governance of corporations were imagined as “coherent political actors” (dirks et al 1994:14), they were either inflated into the bad actors whose personalities overwhelm the businesses in which they operate or deflated into actors whose political and moral preferences were necessarily ineffective in the face of the deterministic force of shareholder value (welker 2009:148). the analysis of the innards of the opinions: business history and anthropology 45 business firm becomes, in either of these views, nursery rhyme simple: if the firm is bad, and you have directive agency within it, you must be bad. if the firm is bad, and you are good, you must lack the agentive power to change its behavior. it becomes very difficult to imagine the firm otherwise. here is where the early debates regarding to the importance of individual agents in understanding the persistency and contingency of cultural life gain new legs. the historical anthropologies developed by comaroff and comaroff (1991, 1992), ortner (1989), moore (1987), and others who have followed them hold aloft at once the “real” and the “constructed” nature of social life. they demonstrate that an examination of the quotidian practices of seemingly seamless, timeless entities will be one way to work toward their demystification, their disaggregation – and their historicization (cf. orts forthcoming). we believe that the same will be true in particular of anthropological investigations of business firms in their historical context, which should include an appreciation of their intricate legal structures and complex evolution. teemu ruskola (2014) advances a similar point in relation to comparative legal research on the business corporation, emphasizing the necessity of efforts to render and keep visible the historical contingency and the cultural specificity of liberal theories of enterprise organization. the stakes are great. the citizens united case, for example, might be considered a paradigmatic result of a “just-so” reading of the idea of business firms as legal persons and the possibilities of corporate citizenship (sepinwall 2012). on a close analysis, however, the case reveals significant theoretical questions about how we conceive of the social construction of business firms and the legal rules that govern and constrain them (orts 2013: 239-50). anthropological research on business might be seen to play a similar role, contextualizing and denaturalizing assumptions implicit in liberal theory. greater attention to comparisons and historical context will likely bring more critical attention to the way we – anthropologists, historians, legal scholars, and the public – imagine and naturalize business firms. the paucity of counter-narratives to entrenched economic theories of the firm has limited a number of disciplines (orts 2013: ix-xviii). legal scholars have worked to develop legally grounded theories of the corporate form, its “personality,” and its place in society (ho 2012; iwai 1999; millon 1990, 2001; orts 1998, 2013; ruskola 2000, 2005, 2014). anthropologists have also begun to work to develop alternative theories (see, e.g., aiello and brooks 2011, dolan et al 2011, foster 2010, gordon forthcoming; see also urban and koh 2013). part of the continuing task of theorizing contemporary firms involves a descriptive analysis of how social and ethical commitments become drawn and redrawn by the various participants in business firms, including owners such as shareholders and creditors, managers and other employees, and other journal of business anthropology, 3(1), spring 2014 46 constituent groups (gordon forthcoming; orts 2013). historically and legally informed ethnographic research is particularly well-suited to make contributions to this field. to be sure, the business firm – or more specifically, and more usually, the multinational corporation – has been commonly cast as a type of acceptable anthropological “other.” despite the importance of business firms and corporations in our daily lives, and despite their powerful presence in ethnographic explorations of the effects of global capitalism – and despite, too, decades of real interest of ethnographers in the effects of corporations (e.g., fortun 2001, kirsch 2006, nash 1989, sawyer 2004), particularly in japan (e.g., allison 1994, clark 1979, moeran 1996, rohlen 1974) – there have nevertheless been very few anthropological views on these organizations that move beyond an exegesis of their harmful effects. as welker et al. note, we have yet to see the emergence of a sustained line of scholarship and inquiry that would extend to the corporation the same critical weight or significance accorded the nation-state. . . . to date, one cannot discern a coherent set of research questions or competing schools of thought characterizing the anthropology of corporations. (2011:s4-s5) anthropology has lacked, in other words, both a depth and a diversity of approaches to the question of corporate and other business forms. welker (n.d.) has analogized the difficulties in the anthropological study of the corporation to the difficulty that abrams noted in scholarship of the nation-state. scholars, while ostensibly disaggregating the state in theory, found it necessary in practice to act as if “the state” were a bounded, agentive, solid entity (abrams 1988). welker likens this to current characterizations of the corporation: failing to demystify it, anthropologists have tended to represent it as smooth, all-powerful, and unknowable (n.d.:7-10; cf. ballard and banks 2003:293-4, subramanian 2010:480). unlike the anthropology of the nation-state, however, the anthropology of corporations and other business firms has remained ahistorical and under-theorized. yet anthropologists are particularly well-suited to destabilize the paradigmatic conception of business firms as all powerful, all encompassing, and an overwhelming force – a notion that welker et al. conjecture is connected to “a parochial view that derives from the peculiar legal career of corporations in the united states” (2011: s5). the suggestion of these and other anthropologists of large-scale elites for countering the aggrandizing effect of more abstracted impressions of business firms is underlain by the same methodological insight reached by ruskola (2014) – the understanding that careful attention to the quotidian particularities of business firms can be central in historicizing them (see e.g. aiello and brooks 2011, ehrenriech 2010, miyazaki and opinions: business history and anthropology 47 riles 2005). the idea is to “shift away from default conceptualizations of corporations as solid, unified, self-knowing, and self-present actors that relentlessly maximize profits and externalize harm,” as well as to turn from an overemphasized denunciation of business harms at the expense of a more agnostic inquiry that may include the social benefits of business as well (welker et al 2011: s5-s6). we recommend an historical anthropology of business that concerns itself with the shifting stability of business enterprise (gordon forthcoming), as well as a theoretical view that holds simultaneously in sight “top-down” and “bottom-up” perspectives on the history and present context of business firms (orts 2013: 9-17, 253-56). as the development of the use of historical methodologies in anthropology makes clear, the various ways in which one might engage with the shards and the stories of the past have deep theoretical implications in addition to the practical ones. historicizing the business firm, in steering clear of representations characterized by either a monolithic smoothness or an unrealistic supposition of contingency and malleability, requires, as ortner argued, “the retrieval of both dimensions – everyday practice and tacit consciousness on the one hand, purposeful projects and strategic consciousness on the other” (2001:82). in the process, our knowledge of business institutions and the participants in them will likely be advanced in surprising and deeply revealing new directions. references abrams, philip 1988. “notes on the difficulty of studying the state (1977).” journal of historical sociology 1(1): 58-89. aiello, leslie c., and james f. brooks, eds. 2011. “corporate lives: new perspectives on the social life of the corporate form.” current anthropology 52(s3). allison, anne 1994. nightwork: sexuality, pleasure, and corporate masculinity in a tokyo hostess club. chicago: university of chicago press. ballard, chris and glenn banks 2003. “resource wars: the anthropology of mining.” annual review of anthropology 32: 287-313. benson, peter, and stuart kirsch 2010. “capitalism and the politics of resignation.” current anthropology 51(4): 459-486. berger, peter, and thomas luckmann 1967. the social construction of reality. garden city, new york: doubleday. carrier, james g. 2013. “business literature and business understandings of business.” journal of business anthropology 2(2): 12032. cattelino, jessica r. 2011. “one hamburger at a time: revisiting the statesociety divide with the seminole tribe of florida and hard rock journal of business anthropology, 3(1), spring 2014 48 international.” current anthropology 52(s3): s137-s149. clark, rodney 1979. the japanese company. new haven: yale university press. comaroff, john. l. 1982. “dialectical systems, history and anthropology: units of study and questions of theory.” journal of southern african studies 8(2): 143-72. comaroff, jean, and john l. comaroff 1991. of revelation and revolution, volume 1: christianity, colonialism, and consciousness in south africa. chicago: university of chicago press. comaroff, john l., and jean comaroff 1992. ethnography and the historical imagination. boulder: westview press. dirks, nicholas b., geoff eley, and sherry b. ortner 1994. “introduction to culture/power/history.” culture/power/history: 3-46. dolan, catherine, and dinah rajak 2011. “introduction: ethnographies of corporate ethicizing.” focaal 60(1): 3-8. dolan, catherine, christina garsten, and dinah rajak, eds. 2011. “corporate ethicizing.” focaal 60(1). ehrenreich, susanne 2010. “english as a business lingua franca in a german multinational corporation: meeting the challenge.” international journal of business communication 47(4): 408-431. ferguson, james 1994. the anti-politics machine. minneapolis: university of minnesota press. fortun, kim 2001. “advocacy after bhopal.” environmentalism, disaster, new global order: chicago and london: university of chicago press. foster, robert 2010. “corporate oxymorons and the anthropology of corporations.” dialectical anthropology 34(1): 95-102. gordon, gwendolyn, forthcoming. “the contingent corporation: ethnographic insights into the nature of the firm.” greenhouse, carol 1996. in a moment’s notice: time politics across cultures. ithaca: cornell university press. gusterson, hugh 1997. “studying up revisited.” polar: political and legal anthropology review 20(1): 114-119. ho, virginia harper 2012. “theories of corporate groups: corporate identity reconceived.” seton hall l. rev. 42: 879-951. ho, virginia harper 2013. “of enterprise principles and corporate groups: does corporate law reach human rights?” columbia journal of transnational law 52: 113-72. iwai, katsuhito 1999. “persons, things and corporations: the corporate personality controversy and comparative corporate governance.” american journal of comparative law 47: 583-632. opinions: business history and anthropology 49 jain, s. lochlann 2011. “survival odds.” current anthropology 52(s3): s45s55. kirsch, stuart 2006. reverse anthropology: indigenous analysis of social and environmental relations in new guinea. stanford: stanford university press. maitland, f.w. 1936. selected essays. cambridge: cambridge university press. mcdonald, terence j., ed. 1996. the historic turn in the human sciences. ann arbor: university of michigan press. merry, sally engle 2011. “measuring the world.” current anthropology 52(s3): s83-s95. millon, david 1990. “theories of the corporation.” duke law journal 1990: 201-262. millon, david 2001. “the ambiguous significance of corporate personhood.” stanford agora: an online journal of legal perspectives 2. miyazaki, hirokazu, and annelise riles 2005. “failure as an endpoint.” global assemblages: technology, politics, and ethics as anthropological problem: 320-31. moeran, brian 1996. a japanese advertising agency: an anthropology of media and markets. london: curzon. moore, sally falk 1987. “explaining the present: theoretical dilemmas in processual ethnography.” american ethnologist 14(4): 727-36. nader, laura 1972. “up the anthropologist.” reinventing anthropology: 284-311. new york: pantheon books. nash, june c. 1979. “anthropology of the multinational corporation.” the politics of anthropology: from colonialism and sexism toward a view from below: 421-446. nash, june c. 1989. from tank town to high tech: the clash of community and industrial cycles. albany: suny press. ortner, sherry b. 1989. “cultural politics: religious activism and ideological transformation among 20th century sherpas.” dialectical anthropology 14(3): 197-211. ortner, sherry b. 1994. “theory in anthropology since the sixties.” culture/power/history: 372-411. ortner, sherry b. 2001. “specifying agency: the comaroffs and their critics.” interventions 3(1): 76-84. orts, eric. w. 1998. “shirking and sharking: a legal theory of the firm.” yale law & policy review, 16: 265-329. orts, eric w. 2013. business persons: a legal theory of the firm. oxford: oxford university press. journal of business anthropology, 3(1), spring 2014 50 orts, eric w. (forthcoming). rethinking the firm: an interdisciplinary interpretation. oxford: oxford university press. partridge, damani james 2011. “activist capitalism and supply-chain citizenship.” current anthropology 52(s3): s97-s111. rohlen, thomas p. 1974. for harmony and strength: japanese white-collar organization in anthropological perspective. berkeley and los angeles: university of california press. ruskola, teemu 2000. “conceptualizing corporations and kinship: comparative law and development theory in a chinese perspective.” stanford law review 52: 1599-1729. ruskola, teemu 2005. “home economics: what is the difference between a family and a corporation?” rethinking commodification: cases and readings in law and culture. new york: new york university press. ruskola, teemu 2014. “what is a corporation? liberal, confucian, and socialist theories of enterprise organization (and state, family, and personhood).” seattle university law review 37: 637-662. sawyer, suzana 2004. crude chronicles: indigenous politics, multinational oil, and neoliberalism in ecuador. durham: duke university press. sepinwall, amy j. 2012. “citizens united and the ineluctable question of corporate citizenship.” connecticut law review 44: 575-1725. silbey, susan s., and austin sarat 1987. “critical traditions in law and society research.” law and society review 21(1): 165-174. spear, thomas 1994. “history or anthropology?” (book review). journal of african history 35(1): 133-34. subramanian, ajantha 2010. “comment.” current anthropology 51(4): 479-480. urban, greg and kyung-nan koh 2013. “ethnographic research on modern business corporations.” annual review of anthropology 42: 13958. welker, marina, damani j. partridge, and rebecca hardin 2011. “corporate lives: new perspectives on the social life of the corporate form.” current anthropology 52(s3): s3-s16. welker, marina 2009. “‘corporate security begins in the community’: mining, the corporate social responsibility industry, and environmental advocacy in indonesia.” cultural anthropology 24(1): 142-79. welker, marina n.d. “notes on the difficulty of studying the corporation” (unpublished manuscript, n.d., part of the third annual adolf a. berle jr. symposium). * * * opinions: business history and anthropology 51 can business history and anthropology learn from each other? per h. hansen, copenhagen business school, and r. daniel wadhwani, university of the pacific and copenhagen business school let’s admit it up front: we are business historians and no experts on business anthropology at all. however, reading through some of the scholarly literature on business anthropology, we have come to believe that there are certain similarities in intellectual concerns and practices between it and our own field of business history. some of these similarities reflect common origins and longstanding concerns of the two disciplines. historians, like anthropologists, are fundamentally concerned with context and with idiographic understanding, and complain incessantly about how simplified and stylized versions of history and culture appear in the nomothetic approaches that predominate in other business disciplines. but this sense of similarity has also grown as business history itself has evolved to embrace cultural – one might even say anthropological – interpretations of the history of enterprise. in a way, business history and business anthropology may seem an odd couple to compare because, until recently, few would have seen any meaningful relationship between the two whatsoever. business history, as it was practiced for most of the 20th century, had little interest in anthropology and a very one-dimensional view of culture, while anthropology, on the other hand, did not see business as an object of study until the late twentieth century. nevertheless, we believe that today business historians and business anthropologists actually have something to offer each other as well as other fields within organizational, business and management research. in this essay we first briefly describe the development of the field of business history in the 20th century and why the moment might be right for a meaningful exchange with business anthropology. then we proceed to discuss three issues that we think are important for both business history and business anthropology and from which the disciplines might have something to learn from each other: the uses-ofhistory approach, contextualization and empirical material. business history as a field like all other academic fields and disciplines, business historians have spent a great deal of time figuring out exactly ”what is business history.” it journal of business anthropology, 3(1), spring 2014 52 is, of course, like shooting at a moving target, since the field, like most others, has developed significantly over time with respect to topics, research questions and analytical strategies. as an institutionalized field, business history came of age, perhaps, before world war ii when harvard business school began publishing the bulletin of the business historical society in 1926. the interest in the history of business, however, had earlier origins in nineteenth-century historical schools of economics that viewed historical studies of enterprise and entrepreneurs as an important counterweight to classical and neo-classical economics’ highly theorized and equilibrium-oriented views of markets. in history, these scholars saw the opportunity to emphasize instead the agency of actors, the importance of mind and will in economic processes, and a capitalist economy fundamentally characterized by disruption and change rather than equilibrium. it was, in fact, this sense that history was fundamentally practical, in dealing with “real” contexts and real people in the economic world, as opposed to the abstract and highly theorized nature of economics that shaped its early establishment as a discipline in a few business schools. in the postwar period, the discipline was particularly shaped by schumpeterian ideas about entrepreneurs and entrepreneurship, which itself was deeply indebted to the nineteenth-century historicist tradition. schumpeter called for and briefly inspired a wave of cross-disciplinary research that sought to examine entrepreneurship and its role in economic change and development (wadhwani 2010). beginning in the 1960s, however, the focus of the field shifted in two ways. one was that it became increasingly focused on economic explanations and economic methods, particularly with the rise of the new economic history. the other, ultimately more influential development for the field, was that this focus shifted from understanding of entrepreneurial actors and their contexts to the organization of big business – primarily driven by alfred d. chandler and his work on strategy and structure (chandler jr. 1962), the visible hand (chandler jr. 1977), and scale and scope (chandler jr. 1990). as a result, business history became increasingly focused on structure rather than individuals. it was with chandler’s work that business history for the first time became recognized outside of the small group of practitioners. the reason was that the consulting firm mckinsey & company discovered chandler’s strategy and structure and decided to use it as a manual for consulting with big business in north america and europe. thus, probably for the first time ever, business history was used in a normative way to prescribe solutions to companies’ strategic challenges. not surprisingly, this increased the status of business history in business schools, but also reinforced its narrow focus on the strategy and structure of large firms. opinions: business history and anthropology 53 from the 1960s to the 1980s – or even the 1990s – business history could not have been further away from anthropology. if anything, most business historians at the time got their inspiration from functionalist transaction cost economics au ronald coase (coase 1937) and oliver williamson (williamson 1985). most business historians subscribed to the basic, realist assumptions of neo-classical economics about rational, atomistic, utility-optimizing individuals – even with a dose of skepticism due to the messiness of business life, as shown by the empirical material. during these years, the rift between business history and mainstream history grew, with little intellectual or methodological exchange between them. thus, business history was little affected by the development of the new social history or the new cultural history. it also continued to subscribe to an objectivist view of the nature of firms and enterprise. the linguistic turn and hayden white’s work on meta-history (white 1973) and narratives almost completely bypassed business historians without its being noticed, as did the growing use of ethnographic methods by historians. however, during the 1990s something began to happen, and it could be argued that it was the so-called “cultural turn,” with inspiration from semiotics and anthropology, that set things in motion. part of this development came from the history discipline where cultural history and the related approaches became quite widespread during the 1980s and 1990s. another part of the inspiration came from organizational scholars, especially from critical studies, who began taking an interest in historical perspectives on organizations (rowlinson and procter 1999, rowlinson and delahaye 2009). it could, perhaps, be argued that the ground was fertile for a cultural turn in business history because quite a few business historians had been inspired by douglass north’s work in new institutional economics (north 1990, north 2005). while north’s approach to nie initially mostly led to analyses of the role of formal institutions, his own increasing emphasis on informal institutions and mental constructs and mindsets might have paved the way for a more intense focus on culture, norms, materiality and practices in business history. while the inspiration from anthropology should not be overemphasized, there is no doubt that clifford geertz’ the interpretation of cultures (geertz 1973) ‒ with its focus on thick description, meaning construction and a search for understanding rather than generalization ‒ became an important, and sometimes the only, work of reference for cultural approaches in history. the attention paid to geertz was not least mediated by the micro-historical approach made popular by nathalie zemon davis’ (davis 1983, davis 1987) and carlo ginzburg’s (ginzburg 1980) pathbreaking studies. the move towards cultural approaches in business history should not be overstated, however. in the oxford handbook of business history journal of business anthropology, 3(1), spring 2014 54 published in 2008 the section on “approaches and debates” has chapters on “business history and history,” “economic theory and business history,” “business history and economic development,” “business history and management studies,” “the historical alternatives approach,” and “globalization,” while any hint of cultural thinking is relegated to the very last chapter – 25 – “business culture” (jones and zeitlin 2007). likewise, in the chapter on “business history and management studies,” there is a section on “stuck elsewhere: business history between history and economics,” but culture is mentioned only very briefly and anthropology not at all (kipping and üsdiken 2007). still, there is a realization among a growing sub-group of business historians that economics alone, and functionalist social science more generally, cannot deliver if one wants to understand the actions and worldviews of historical actors. if one wants to understand how and why historical actors made and gave sense to their world, and how and why formal and informal institutions developed and changed the way they did, business historians have to search for the construction of meaning and to understand the practices of historical actors. this search necessarily must go beyond the generalizing ambitions of economics, and focus on the specificity of time and space – in other words context, one of the issues we discuss briefly below (bucheli and wadhwani 2014). thus, some business historians have begun publishing articles and books that are at least to a certain degree inspired by an idea of the world – including the past – as basically culturally constituted. business historians who are following these ideas are increasingly moving away from the traditional realist version of business history and are taking up narrative approaches that include the uses of history in and by organizations, actors and societies. these ideas on narratives and the uses of history are especially being pursued and developed at the center for business history at the copenhagen business school with which we are both affiliated (hansen 2006, hansen 2007, mordhorst 2008, hansen 2012, hansen 2012, mordhorst 2014). we thus find ourselves at a moment in the evolution of the discipline when we think we may have a lot to learn from (and perhaps also to offer to) business anthropology. in the remainder of this essay, we briefly consider the three issues along which such an exchange could be productively organized: the uses of history approach, contextualization, and empirical material. the uses of history approach historians and anthropologists alike agree that history matters. however, more often than not, this agreement is based on different visions of what is meant by history and how exactly it matters. for the anthropologist history matters as ”living history,” that is how historical narratives and opinions: business history and anthropology 55 rituals impact the lives of living agents in, say, an organization (bate 1997). traditionally, historians think – for obvious reasons – that history matters in and by itself; we write history on the premise that it is important to understand the origins and evolution of the present. however, for some business historians the turn toward culture has created an area of potential common ground with anthropologists in the newly emerging interest in the ”uses of history.” in a uses-of-history approach, history – not the past, but narratives about the past – is seen as a way in which the human actors we study make sense of and give sense to their world. as far as we understand it, this is what anthropologists mean when they refer to “living history,” and it seems to us that it most often indicates an unconscious use of history. however, actors and organizations often use history consciously in order to achieve certain objectives. when analyzing uses of history we therefore find it useful for analytical purposes to distinguish between phenomenological and instrumental uses of history. instrumental uses refer to the conscious use of history to achieve for instance strategic goals, while phenomenological uses of history refers to the deep embeddedness of all historical actors in historical narratives they cannot get out of. actors can, so to speak, become trapped in their own historical narrative, and it is only by using history instrumentally and consciously that they can become aware of this entrapment and restory their organization in order to affect change. the danish novelist martin a. hansen once said: “tradition is the fateful shape of history when it is not studied.” the quote illustrates how an organization or a person can become trapped in its own historical narrative, in tradition. business historians have begun to examine the uses of history because it is both a potential enabler and a constraint on the perceptions, choices and actions of actors. thus, historical narratives and sites of memory and identity create both remembering and oblivion, and path dependence that can be a strength for an organization under stable conditions when everything is going well, while it can turn into an obstacle to change when needed, due, for instance, to external pressure. in our own work we have found the “uses of history” line of thinking helpful in order to explain and understand how historical narratives shape organizations’ and actors’ choices (hansen 2006, hansen 2007, mordhorst 2008, khaire and wadhwani 2010, hansen 2012, schwarzkopf 2012, bucheli and wadhwani 2014, mordhorst 2014)(linde 2009). it strikes us that the “uses of history” approach could emerge as an important area of common interest for anthropologists and historians. the anthropological studies we have read have a deep understanding of how history, in the phenomenological sense described above, influences the way people make sense of their world and therefore how they act. from our perspective history comes to us in the shape of historical narratives and it is an important point that neither societies, nor journal of business anthropology, 3(1), spring 2014 56 organizations exist outside history. history is always with us in our ideas, perceptions and practices, and from our perspective a particularly promising field of future research lies in exploring when and how organizations use history consciously and instrumentally to achieve strategic or other goals, and to exercise and legitimize power. contextualization context is another area where the anthropologist and the historian have a shared view or concern. context is important, we claim, because of the specificity of both anthropological and historical arguments. as idiographic disciplines the aim is not to present generalizations but to get a deep understanding of the subject that we analyze. as such, time and space are not abstractions but quite the opposite, they are crucial for understanding the actors and institutions that we examine. although any historian and anthropologist would instantly agree on the importance of context, things tend to get complicated when figuring out how to deal with it. contextualization is not taught in historical method courses in history department, and it is our sense that historians and anthropologists treat context quite differently. thus, there may be lessons for both fields in discussing the ways we contextualize. it is our impression that most historians tend to look at context as structures and institutional frameworks conditioned by historical development – as something almost outside of the actors’ world. anthropologists, on the other hand, tend to see context as something that is constituted by the actors themselves as they go about living their lives. it is an open question which approach is the most fruitful, but there is no doubt that the question itself merits further discussion. we see the problem of contextualization as in fact involving two related issues, each of which deserves both more reflection and constitutes shared challenges of research for historians and anthropologists. the first of these is the question of how actors make sense of their context. insisting that actors and actions need to be understood in specific times and places inherently raises the question of how the actors themselves thought of their “place” and their “time.” on this issue, we think our fellow historians could learn much from ethnographic approaches in understanding context more critically. the second contextualization issue is the question of the contexts in which we choose to place our subjects. historians and anthropologists do not and cannot just recount our subjects in their own contexts. for historians, this contextual decision is closely tied to how we periodize our subjects, particularly the assumptions we make about the relationship between our own period and that of the actors we study. in this regard, we think anthropologists may usefully borrow from historians in understanding how temporal boundaries, like cultural ones, operate in opinions: business history and anthropology 57 defining the contexts in which we place our subjects (bucheli and wadhwani 2014). any discussion of context, of course, also raises the question of the texts on which we base our interpretations. it is to the empirical bases of our disciplines that we turn next. empirical material while historians and anthropologists tend to share some basic assumptions that history and context matter, one longstanding difference arises in the types of empirical materials we tend to prefer in examining how these things matter. while both disciplines are strongly empirically oriented, historians mostly rely on documents while anthropologists seem to us to use interviews and observation as their empirical foundation. historians are usually skeptical of interviews – oral history – because we prefer empirical material created in the time we study. in this sense, historians have much to learn from anthropologists in the critical use of non-written empirical material. as historians’ interest in the “uses of history” by actors grows, we will need to confront the question of the many forms that these uses take, and in this sense anthropological sources and methods certainly provide one way forward. but historians also have much to offer anthropologists when it comes to the creative uses of written documents in research. while historical research sometimes continues to be inhibited by what ludmilla jordanova (jordanova 2000) has aptly called “the cult of the archive,” the evolution of history as a discipline has in fact been characterized by a dynamic expansion in the range of sources historians use and genuine creativity in their analysis and interpretation. history, as a discipline, has expanded well beyond it’s original practices of examining official political documents to embrace a wide range of sources for what they can tell us about the social and cultural lives of the subjects of study. even more importantly, historical practices of interpreting these sources have evolved in ways that allow reading sources “against the grain” and in taking into account the voices of those other than the powerful. as business historians and anthropologists delve more deeply into the uses of history by actors and into the questions of context, an engagement with these practices could prove particularly fruitful. conclusion in this brief essay we have tried to raise a few questions about where business history and business anthropology have a shared interest. to a certain degree, both fields exist on the margins of the social sciences in journal of business anthropology, 3(1), spring 2014 58 business schools, but we feel very strongly that we both have much more to say than what is recognized by mainstream business school disciplines. if business anthropology and business history are to increase our influence in the world of business education and research, one obvious starting point may be to engage in a fruitful conversation between our two fields. we hope that this essay will contribute in a small way to that conversation. references bate, s. p. (1997). “whatever happened to organizational anthropology? a review of the field of organizational ethnography and anthropological studies.” human relations 50(9): 1147-1175. bucheli, m. and r. d. wadhwani, eds. (2014). organizations in time. history, theory, methods. new york, oxford university press. chandler jr., a. d. (1962). strategy and structure. chapters in the history of the american industrial enterprise. cambridge, ma, mit press. chandler jr., a. d. (1977). the visible hand. cambridge, ma, the belknap press. chandler jr., a. d. (1990). scale and scope. cambridge, ma, the belknap press. coase, r. (1937). “the nature of the firm.” economica 4(16): 386-405. davis, n. z. (1983). the return of martin guerre. cambridge, ma, harvard university press. davis, n. z. (1987). fiction in the archives. pardon tales and their tellers in sixteenth-century france. stanford, stanford university press. geertz, c. (1973). the interpretation of cultures : selected essays. new york, basic books. ginzburg, c. (1980). the cheese and the worms: the cosmos of a sixteenthcentury miller. london, routledge. hansen, p. h. (2006). “networks, narratives, and new markets: the rise and decline of danish modern furniture design, 1930-1970.” business history review 80(autumn): 449-483. hansen, p. h. (2007). “organizational culture and organizational change: a narrative analysis of the transformation of savings banks in denmark, 1965-1990.” enterprise & society 8(4): 920-953. hansen, p. h. (2012). “business history: a cultural and narrative approach.” business history review 86(4): 693-717. hansen, p. h. (2012). “making sense of financial crisis and scandal: a danish bank failure in the era of finance capitalism.” enterprise & society 13(3): 672-706. opinions: business history and anthropology 59 jones, g. and j. zeitlin, eds. (2007). the oxford handbook of business history, oxford, oxford university press. jordanova, l. (2000). history in practice. london, arnold. khaire, m. and r. d. wadhwani (2010). “changing landscapes: the construction of meaning and value in a new market category—modern indian art.” academy of management journal 53(6): 1281-1304. kipping, m. and b. üsdiken (2007). “business history and management studies.” the oxford handbook of business history. g. jones and j. zeitlin, oxford university press: 96-119. linde, c. (2009). working the past. narrative and institutional memory. new york, oxford university press. mordhorst, m. (2008). “from counterfactual history to counter-narrative history.” management & organizational history 3(1): 5-26. mordhorst, m. (2014). “arla and danish national history. business history as cultural history.” business history 56(1): 116-133. north, d. c. (1990). institutions, institutional change and economic performance. cambridge, cambridge university press. north, d. c. (2005). “institutions and the performance of economies over time.” handbook of new institutional economics. c. menard and m. m. shirley. dordrecht: 21-30. rowlinson, m. and a. delahaye (2009). “the cultural turn in business history.” entreprises et histoire 55: 90-110. rowlinson, m. and s. procter (1999). “organizational culture and business history.” organization studies 20(3): 369-396. schwarzkopf, s. (2012). “what is an archive and where is it? why business historians need a constructive theory of the archive.” business archives (105): 1-9. wadhwani, r. d. (2010). “historical reasoning and the development of entrepreneurship theory.” the historical foundations of entrepreneurship research. h. landström and f. lohrke. cheltenham, edward elgar: 343362. white, h. (1973). metahistory: the historical imagination in nineteenthcentury europe. baltimore, md., the johns hopkins university press. williamson, o. (1985). the economic institutions of capitalism. new york, the free press. * * * journal of business anthropology, 3(1), spring 2014 60 business history and business anthropology geoffrey g. jones, isidor straus professor of business history, harvard business school business historians are concerned with the historical evolution of firms and business systems. like business anthropologists, they have always sought to observe what really happens. typically, as they deal with the past, they have done this though research on the written archives of firms (and other institutions such as industry associations and governments) rather than ethnography, although it has become increasingly common to employ oral history in studies dealing with recent decades. my own recent studies, including a company history of the anglo-dutch consumer goods giant unilever since 1965, a history of the global beauty industry, and a forthcoming history of green entrepreneurship, have relied to a growing extent on interviews with managers and entrepreneurs.44 the substantive difference with business anthropology is the emphasis on change over time. the value added of business history is the insight that things change, and that what we see today is contingent on events that have happened in the past. the discipline has a lengthy history dating from the 1920s. this essay will focus on how the subject developed, not least to see if there are lessons business anthropologists might learn.45 i will leave it to others to discuss specific research methodologies. the story is one of paradoxes. as a discipline, business history has generated an impressive wealth of knowledge about the history of business, especially in the united states, europe and japan. individual business historians have made an enormous impact on other disciplines, especially management studies. yet the story of business history as a discipline can hardly be described as a triumphant one. although dealing with a central reality of modern life, capitalism and firms, professional business historians have spent decades bemoaning that few people read most of their painstaking studies. the subject appears inflicted by a permanent identity crisis, unsure of its borders and identity. in the crowded academic world of impact factors, this situation only seems to be getting worse. the peculiar origins of the discipline are part of the explanation. it emerged as a discrete subject at the harvard business school in the late 1920s. it was the creation, then, of the most prestigious university in the 44 geoffrey jones, renewing unilever (oxford: oxford university press, 2005); idem, beauty imagined (oxford: oxford university press, 2010); idem, profits and sustainability (forthcoming, oxford university press). 45 this essay draws extensively on the introduction to walter friedman and geoffrey jones (eds.) business history (northampton, ma: edward elgar publishing, 2014). this essay is fully documented. opinions: business history and anthropology 61 united states, and its pioneering and equally prestigious business school, but this not necessarily a recipe for success. the subject emerged as a result of the personal enthusiasm of the first two deans of the harvard business school, edwin gay and wallace donham, who believed that history had an important role to play in management education. donham arranged for the foundation of the isidor straus chair in business history in 1927. the school’s baker library became (and has remained) a major repository of manuscripts from the history of railroads, textiles, and other industries. harvard university at that time had an eclectic group of faculty members who were interested in business and economic history. essential to the growth of the field were the works of a range of european-born theorists, including joseph schumpeter and alexander gershenkron, both of whom taught in the economics department at harvard, and the sociologist, talcott parsons. but the core group of scholars was at harvard business school. n. s. b. gras, a canadian-born business historian who became the initial occupant of the straus chair, taught the first course on business history at the school and was known for his highly detailed empirical studies. gras sought to focus the field on organization and management, and was noted for his conservative ideology. arthur cole, a business economics professor and librarian at harvard business school, helped to nurture the field. he stimulated interest in the topic of entrepreneurial history and helped to organize a research center in entrepreneurial history, which lasted from 1948 to 1958. the center was funded by the rockefeller foundation and included a multidisciplinary team of scholars, including joseph schumpeter. this was a hybrid heritage. the new discipline researched the history of business using archival research, yet few of its practitioners were trained in history or worked in history departments. the initial location was in a business school, which trained future managers, and was never likely to prioritize the study of history. the intellectual inspiration was interdisciplinary. this was very helpful for understanding firms and their impact, but troublesome gaining traction as a mainstream academic discipline. from the beginning, the subject was led by dedicated scholars who saw the virtue of their field, but seldom received the accolades given to the stars of academia in higher profile subjects. a number of the key challenges facing the subject were quickly identified. in an article written in 1952, for example, fritz redlich, an influential member of the harvard group who was characteristically never tenured, expressed admiration for the rich empirical work of his colleagues, but also perceived a need to push the field forward theoretically. he wanted to make history more than a mere recitation of facts by employing theory and by generalizing. he argued that theory, drawn often from other disciplines, could help business historians to formulate problems and to make sense of change over time. however, journal of business anthropology, 3(1), spring 2014 62 redlich cautioned, it was important not to be so theoretical as to lack concreteness. the real question of the field, he summarized, was, “how then is theory . . . to be wed with the idea of historical uniqueness?”46 this was a defining insight, but also one that was to prove challenging to execute. there was a lengthy period when enthusiasts for the subject resembled prophets in the wilderness, believing strongly that they had something to say, but with no one listening. the most striking achievement, in retrospect, was the subject’s interest in entrepreneurship, and that this differed between countries, and that firms were not uninteresting black boxes responding to supply and demand, but living entities who differed in their characteristics and pursued different strategies from one another. this was at a time when neoclassical economics was wholly unable to identify entrepreneurs and firms as objects of interest. business historians proved unable to shift the situation. the situation was further complicated by the fact that as the subject emerged beyond the united states, its intellectual focus was different. in europe, business history emerged not out of business schools, but from the study of economic history. this strongly affected its intellectual goals and approach. in most of northern europe, economic history was taught as a social science with closer links to economics than history. in my own case, before i arrived at the harvard business school i had never taught at a business school, or a history department, but rather in economic history or economics departments. this helped shape my own work in the history of international business, where i was enthusiastic about integrating history with the main economics theories of the multinational enterprise.47 however, in the united states, the border between business and economic history became very strong as the latter became dominated by econometrics. it was not until the 1960s that business history entered a golden age, which lasted for around three decades. the key figure was alfred d. chandler, whose most famous work appeared in three books about the rise of big business and the coming of a managerial class, beginning with strategy and structure published in 1962.48 chandler was trained in history at harvard university, and taught in the history department of 46 f. redlich, “the role of theory in the study of business history,” explorations in entrepreneurial history, 4,3 (1952), p. 137. 47 geoffrey jones and peter hertner (eds.), multinationals: theory and history: (aldershot: gower, 1986); geoffrey jones, multinationals and global capitalism (oxford: oxford university press, 2005). 48 alfred d. chandler, strategy and structure: chapters in the history of industrial enterprise (cambridge, mass.: mit press, 1962); the visible hand: the managerial revolution in american business (cambridge, mass.: harvard university press, 1977); and scale and scope: the dynamics of industrial capitalism (cambridge, mass.: harvard university press, 1990). opinions: business history and anthropology 63 johns hopkins university before taking the straus chair at harvard business school. however he had taken a sociology course at graduate school with talcott parsons, and this exercised a huge impact on both his interest in organizations, and his willingness to conceptualize. so sweeping were these books that they set the terms for the field with the questions they raised: what was the relation of a firm’s structure and strategy? why did massive business enterprises develop in some industries and not others? how did the rise of big business in the u.s. compare with that elsewhere? these characteristics of chandler’s work ‒ big and important themes, empirically based arguments, comparative methodology, firm-centered studies ‒ were inspiring to many scholars, not only business historians, but also those interested in strategy, entrepreneurship, and institutional economics.49 however, his work had limited impact on history as a discipline, and is now largely forgotten. chandler escaped the trap of the subject’s marginalization. however, the sheer impact of chandler’s work was not without problems. it out-shone other work. there is a notable tendency, especially in disciplines such as strategy, to end the citation of business history research with chandler, as if the subject had faded away. this is far from the case. there was other exciting work when chandler was writing, by lou galambos, mira wilkins and many others. there has been a huge outburst of creative research since the 1990s, as the focus on large organizations has given way to more attention being paid to entrepreneurs, networks, business groups and other types of institution and organizational forms. these years have also seen a widespread institutionalization of the field, with new journals, associations and conferences. it has proven hard, however, to duplicate chandler’s huge influence on managerial and social sciences. this is curious. from the 1980s many social sciences discovered that “history matters,” and began developing theories that related directly to the traditional domains of business history, often undertaking their own empirical research rather than looking to research by business historians. the law and finance literature, for example, had an enormous impact with the argument that the legal tradition countries inherited or adopted in the distant past has a longterm effect on financial development. why wasn’t business history able to benefit from this new interest in history? the problem, in my own view, is fundamentally methodological. rich and nuanced empirical research has still not been translated sufficiently into convincing general propositions and concepts. more seriously, much business history research is still written as descriptive case studies which most social scientists are unable to identify 49 for a recent survey of this influence, see william lazonick and david j. teece (eds.), management innovation: essays in the spirit of alfred d. chandler (oxford: oxford university press, 2012). journal of business anthropology, 3(1), spring 2014 64 as scholarly research. the biggest problem of all, however, has been a diffusion of research focus. chandler’s influence was so dominant that the next generation of business historians ran in all directions away from the study of large organizations. as a result the subject lost focus. a recent conference was even called the “business history of everything.” a recent editorial of the journal of business history review, written by myself and walter friedman, called for a renewed focus on central issues that would gain the attention of scholars beyond the field. three of the issues they identified ‒ innovation, entrepreneurship, and globalization ‒ were strongly represented in the past of the discipline. three others ‒ business and the environment, government, and democracy ‒ were more radical departures for the field.50 going forward, there has long been a widespread recognition that business history needed more generalization and conceptualization to enhance its impact. there was also a widespread recognition that the theories developed in cognate social sciences could be a valuable tool to achieve this greater conceptualization. yet there was no consensus on how to extend the forging of stronger links between theory and history. different business historians looked to different social sciences, and different theories, for inspiration. the willingness to tolerate abstraction varied. more challenging still was the distant relationship with the discipline of history which, especially in the united states, has a preoccupation with culture, gender and the marginal at the expense of any interest whatsoever in business. attempts to realign the research agenda of business history to issues related to culture, politics, gender relations, and the like have produced important scholarship but added to the diffuse nature of the field. the story of business history as a discipline, then, is one of mixed news. since the 1920s business historians have achieved much through their willingness to confront and understand the complexity of business, rather than rely on simplified models and unrealistic assumptions. it has proved a real struggle to get a wider circle of scholars to listen to much of this research. finally, however, it is important to end on a positive note. in particular, business history has gained immensely through collaboration with other disciplines, when done right. this special issue presents a great opportunity to start another dialogue beneficial to both parties. * * * 50 “business history: time for debate,” by the editors of business history review. opinions: business history and anthropology 65 business history and anthropology philip scranton, board of governors professor of history emeritus, rutgers university, and editor-in-chief, enterprise and society: the international journal of business history “we do not know in what guise herodotus traveled... as a merchant? probably not, since he had no interest in prices, goods, markets... as a tourist? no, tourists travel to rest, whereas herodotus works hard on the road – he is a reporter, an anthropologist, an ethnographer, a historian.” ryszard kapuściński, travels with herodotus (new york: knopf, 2007, 79)51 in kapuściński’s view, history, anthropology, journalism and ethnography once blended together seamlessly in herodotus’ chronicles of ancient wars, politics, customs and follies. yet in his era, and for two millennia thereafter, businesses remained intellectually peripheral to proper european histories; meanwhile, developing alongside 19th century colonialisms, anthropology explored the west’s cultural and spatial peripheries. unsurprisingly, america, a “business civilization,”52 provided the terrain (and the origin tales) for business history as a discipline, as well as a venue for considering business practices anthropologically, as cultural performances thick with rituals and totems. for the last half century, building links between history and anthropology has also been urged, both by postcolonial anthropologists re-emphasizing power, context, and change over time, and by historians making the ‘cultural turn,’ stepping away from narratives anchored in ‘past politics.’ clifford geertz sensed the deeper resonances (or shared constraints) that kapuściński highlights: “dealing with a world elsewhere comes to much the same thing when elsewhere is long ago as when it is far away.” yet, geertz continued, “‘we’ means something different, and so does ‘they’, to those looking back than it does to those looking sideways, a problem 51 for biographical information about this remarkable “literary journalist” from poland (1932-2007), visit http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ryszard_kapu%c5%9bci%c5%84ski 52 see james truslow adams, our business civilization: some aspects of american culture, new york: boni, 1929; herman krooss, american economic development: the progress of a business civilization, englewood heights, nj: prentice hall, 1966; and robert heilbroner, business civilization in decline, new york: norton, 1976. announcing his flashy monthly business magazine, fortune, in 1930, henry luce positioned it as presenting “the challenging personalities, significant trends, and high excitements of this stirring civilization of business.” [quoted in nigel thrift, “performing cultures in the new economy,” annals of the american academy of geographers 90(2000): 674-692, quote at 678.] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ryszard_kapu%c5%9bci%c5%84ski journal of business anthropology, 3(1), spring 2014 66 hardly erased when, as is increasingly the case, one tries to do both.”53 there would be no anthropology-history merger and no harmonization, but ambiguous encounters and serial appropriations multiplied instead. perhaps anthropologists wished to delve into historical time, but without utilizing historians’ research methods; certainly cultural historians sought to appropriate anthropological concepts, but rarely plunged into learning fieldwork techniques and applying them. nevertheless, a considerable body of “historical anthropology” has emerged, including a journal,54 alongside a stream of anthropologicallyinflected historical essays and monographs.55 (i don’t know whether historians and anthropologists have constituted joint efforts for research and mutual edification, though there are a few joint graduate programs. if such projects happened, reviewing their results could be valuable.) nonetheless, in all this connectivity, businesses barely surfaced, but that near-silence is now ending.56 perhaps fruitful collaboration between anthropology/ethnography and business history is feasible, but it would, i’d imagine, involve a demanding double-move. first, business historians would have to generate research initiatives that, far more than to date, address nonwestern, colonial and post-colonial sites of business activity and organization. this would displace our durable emphasis on western traders’ and multinationals’ incursions ‘elsewhere’; and prioritize those local/regional/transnational networks activated before, during, and after 53 clifford geertz, “history and anthropology,” new literary history, 21(1990): 321-35, quote from 323. in part geertz traced the new intersections to “a collapse of the natural dispersion of feeding grounds” that handed france to historians and samoa to anthropologists (324). 54 history and anthropology, which reached vol. 25 in 2014. my walk-through of the journal’s last 20 years unearthed a handful of articles referencing business matters, chiefly tourism, but just one that speaks directly to business history: manos spyridakis, “the political economy of labor relations in greek shipbuilding: an ethnographic account,” h&a 17(2006):153-170, which treats the decades after 1970. there does not appear to be a journal of anthropological history, suggesting a thinner reach by historians toward anthropology (especially scholars addressing postcolonial questions). for work in this vein, see eric tagliacozzo and andrew willford, clio/anthropos: exploring the boundaries between history and anthropology, stanford: stanford university press, 2009. for a business history approach to tourism, with some anthropological resonances, see the business of tourism: place, faith and history (philip scranton and janet davidson, eds.), philadelphia: penn press, 2009. 55 since the late 1980s, i have introduced cohorts of beginning graduate students to rhys isaac’s the transformation of virginia (chapel hill: university of north carolina press, 1982), in order to underscore the multiplicity of methods and rhetorics scholars can employ in addressing historical questions. many found it provocative and insightful, but others rejected isaac’s explicit attention to methodology and his fabrication of social/cultural structures from scattered images and texts. for an appreciation of isaac’s “melbourne group,” see geertz, “history and anthropology,” 325-29. 56 reasons for this are amply outlined in alan macfarlane, “historical anthropology,” cambridge anthropology 3:3 (1977): 1-17. opinions: business history and anthropology 67 periods of euro-american dominion. in my view, michael miller has brilliantly accomplished this in his revelatory europe and the maritime world,57 where readers learn about complex asian, african and middle eastern production, trading, credit and transport systems within which westerners struggled for profit and advantage. miller’s persistent and insightful engagement with diverse cultures and practices in the indian ocean region – including rituals, symbols, conventions, taboos, and kinship ties – draws business history and anthropology together in richlyimplicative ways. re-visioning business activity from the perspective of the “locals” – regional elites, religious communities, autonomous business groups – shifts the interpretive motif from europeans “acting on” others to the immense complexities of westerners and easterners “acting with” one another. to be sure, miller’s mastery of multiple languages and the literatures detailing non-western trading/shipping operations sets a very high bar for emulators, but teamwork is feasible. second, anthropologists could usefully expand historically the recent proliferation of business ethnographies, reinforcing critical scholarly perspectives while drawing on historical periodizations and promising initiatives in social theory.58 in so doing, they might find it useful to return from post-colonial domains to the industrial/commercial west, to its urban business centers, and its complex organizations seeking to shape capitalist futures. scholarly investigations can document and critique their ritual and symbolic endowments and their transformations, treated contextually and dynamically.59 this historicizing potential may be seen by contrasting two works by anthropologists: karen ho’s riveting liquidated: an ethnography of wall street and melissa fisher’s remarkable women of wall street.60 ho secured employment as a securities analyst early in graduate school, aiming to undertake wall street participant fieldwork, but was laid off before her two-year ‘apprenticeship’ could be completed. determined to explore this tribal environment of intense pressure and insecurity, she returned to “the belly of the financial markets”61 for almost two more years, before leaving to finish her doctorate. the monographic outcome is deeply historical, as ho 57 new york: cambridge university press, 2013, paper 2014. 58 there seems to me to be a substantial gap between scholarly assessments, like brian moeran’s the business of ethnography (2005), and the many online purveyors of business anthropology as services for corporate marketing, strategy, or product development. this gap lay just beneath the surface of the jba’s 2013 forum on “ethnographic methods in the study of business,” notably when setting the cruise ships and gm accounts alongside the austrian dissertation project and gary fine’s reflections on kitchen work. theoretical work that seems to me valuable in this arena has been offered by richard sennett, ulrich beck, bruno latour, and zygmunt bauman, among others. 59 some suggestions along these lines, admittedly framed for business historians, can be found in philip scranton and patrick fridenson, reimagining business history, baltimore: the johns hopkins university press, 2013. 60 both duke university press, ho in 2009, fisher in 2012. 61 ho, ix. journal of business anthropology, 3(1), spring 2014 68 chases wall street rhetorics, values, and concepts back through the twentieth century (e.g., “shareholder value”), analyzes prior cycles of boom and bust, explores key investment banks’ institutional histories, skewers entrenched, gendered customs/expectations, and then, from a post-2008 crash perspective, reviews her 1990s fieldwork experiences as historical evidence. fisher works a different frontier, researching the first generation cohort of women wall streeters from the 1960s forward, by way of archival research, extensive interviewing of articulate veterans, and fieldwork in financial women’s professional and political associations. her monograph unfolds chronologically, moving from women’s experiences to contexts to institutions, from celebratory events to support networks to the challenges of family and motherhood. its conceptual spine is the intersection of feminism and market dynamics, in shifting economic and institutional environments where women are “the other” just about always. ho’s book provides a historicized anthropology and fisher’s exemplifies an anthropologized history, each distinct and both compelling. a related and vivid analysis that engages consumption rituals historically is milena veenis’s material fantasies: expectations of the western consumer world among east germans, in which coca cola cans and blue jeans figure prominently amid a cold war culture of suspicion and betrayal.62 after this extended opening, i expect it’s time to respond to the editors’ requests to contributors, which were: first, how do i approach the study of business and the economy?; second, what such an approach can and cannot offer anthropologists; and third, what i think anthropologists do well (or badly) that business historians might pay attention to (or ignore). on the first count, i approach business and economic matters warily and with skepticism, especially toward narratives and evidence that emphasize rationality, planning, efficiency, success, and the visions/wisdom/insights of managers, investors, and entrepreneurs. much business activity is repetitive and uninteresting routine, and much of what happens outside that area is messy – actions that are unpredictable, irrational, conflictual, deceptive, unintended, catastrophic, and thus intriguing. historically, as patrick fridenson and i have suggested, actors retrospectively fashion rational orderings of non-linear, indeed chaotic or sloppy, efforts. these tidy tales prove useless to later actors, as they misconstrue the past in the service of creating logical paths to the present.63 thus one key to restoring or reconstituting historical dynamics is to marshal documentation that presents agents looking forward into buzzing alternatives, armed with fragmentary information, rule-of-thumb analogies, and incomplete knowledge about the backgrounds of, and environments for, decision-making. 62 amsterdam university press, 2013. see also milena veenis, “cola in the german democratic republic: east german fantasies on consumption,” enterprise and society 12(2011): 489-524. 63 see scranton and fridenson, reimagining, sections 1.5, 2.11, 3.11, and 4.4. opinions: business history and anthropology 69 thus, in my current research on the cold war development of jet propulsion by corporations and military forces in britain, france and the us (ca. 1942-62), i distrusted from the outset various “triumph of reason” stories deployed in institutional histories, read with caution stacks of technical journal articles, yet found in participants’ memoirs tales hinting at the hazards and uncertainties of urgency-driven innovation. the closer to the design offices and engine test-beds i could get, the more unruly the development processes appears. ultimately, access to declassified archival documents and to project histories drafted during testing, redesign and production (or soon after) revealed cascades of errors, failures, and fixes that, in time and at staggering costs, yielded reliable military jet engines. some managerial teams proved consistently effective (general motors – allison division, and pratt & whitney, for example), others were better at design and testing than at production (general electric, at least initially), and some were simply underpowered, or hopeless in their overconfidence (westinghouse, curtiss-wright).64 little of the above links to anthropology directly, but midway through the research i revisited publications by several of the xerox parc anthropologists, when preparing to discuss john seely brown and paul duguid, the social life of information, in a graduate “history and theory” colloquium. this led me to look more closely at an aspect of jet propulsion’s material culture: the forms and procedures french and u.s. air forces used to track their jet engines in use and repair, and to analyze their collective performance. i pulled the essay collection, anthropological perspectives on technology, off the shelf and revisited contributions by richard wilk, lucy suchman, richard gould and the editor, michael brian schiffer.65 this led to drafting a speculative essay asking ethnographicstyle questions of historical, technical jet propulsion documents; it would probably not stand close scrutiny by anthropologists, but has triggered energetic seminar discussions among historians.66 64 similar distributions of competence and resources occurred in the uk, with rolls-royce leading the pack. in france, one nationalized company (snecma) did most of the heavy lifting, whereas hispano-suiza copied uk engines through licenses, and turbomeca focused on small, lightweight propulsion units for trainer aircraft and helicopters. for examples of this project’s research findings, see philip scranton, “technology-led innovation: the non-linearity of u.s. jet propulsion development,” history and technology 22:(december 2006): 337-67; idem., “turbulence and redesign: dynamic innovation and the dilemmas of us military jet propulsion development,” european management journal 25 (june 2007): 235-48; and idem., “mastering failure: technological & organizational challenges in british and american military jet propulsion, 1943-1957,” business history 54 (july 2011): 479-504. 65 see wilk, “toward an anthropology of needs”; suchman, “building bridges: practice-based ethnographies of contemporary ethnography”; gould, “from sail to steam at sea in the late nineteenth century”; and schiffer, “toward an anthropology of technology,” in apt, albuquerque: university of new mexico press, 2001. 66 philip scranton, “histories and historical ethnographies of technical practice: managing jet propulsion in the us and france,” forthcoming entreprises et journal of business anthropology, 3(1), spring 2014 70 next, what can this approach to business history (and the history of technology, evidently) offer anthropologists? three things, most simply – encounters with power, access to institutional dynamics, and perspectives on contingency. probing businesses historically opens the way to appreciating how power is achieved, exercised and reproduced/destroyed in social and economic relations, within and among organizations. power operates in business, in fair measure, through rituals and artifacts: the hiring relation (and the firing memo/exit interview), the annual review, seating arrangements at key meetings, budget battles in product development or marketing, the annual bonus, the hand-tailored suit, the $1000 bottle of burgundy, the rolex, bentley, and penthouse apartment. yet power exists only in its performance and can vanish overnight following a merger, a hostile takeover, a bankruptcy declaration, a criminal indictment. these dynamics capture the contingency of corporate existence, just as the unexpected flood, lawsuit, or vengeful ex-employee can expose the vulnerabilities of small enterprises. though big business may seem monumental and durable, this is far from accurate when viewed over time. few of the top 50 us corporations in 1960 still figure in current-day lists of america’s major companies, something a review of the frequent rotation of the dow industrial index’s membership would emphasize. currently its 30 components include microsoft, nike, visa, wal-mart, and walt disney, none of which featured as economic leaders a half-century ago. among other possibilities, business history can help anthropologists grasp the centrality of failure in capitalism, a dimension equally as important as competition, innovation, or hierarchy. last, what do anthropologists do well that business historians should appreciate (i’ll avoid the “do badly” invitation)? this, too, seems pretty straightforward to me. business historians can readily become overly focused on organizational forms/structures, quantitative measures of performance, and the politics of enterprise (internal, sectoral, and state-related). narrating change is central and change is frequent. however, more complex analyses can arise through taking into account aspects of business culture which make communication, identity, and continuity feasible, and perhaps the roles their inflation or breakdowns play in fostering or forcing change. these non-economic elements in business activity profoundly condition how managers frame and solve problems, how investors (and regulators) value information and commit to action, or how entrepreneurs conjecture present options and future goals. they are embedded in institutional rituals historians easily overlook, bubble up in relational imagery (businesses as “a family” or as a “warrior clan”67), and animate descriptions of corporate life that histoire, (no. 70, summer 2014). 67 for the latter see scott patterson, the quants: how a new breed of math whizzes conquered wall street and nearly destroyed it, new york: random house, 2010. opinions: business history and anthropology 71 invigorate anthropological fieldwork accounts. reading contemporary business anthropology can serve as a “sensitizing device,” as anthony giddens put it,68 enabling historians to recognize and research aspects of business behavior that would otherwise be taken for granted and passed over. such reading has been invaluable in my own work, and has solid potential to enrich business history research hereafter. what i do wish, though, is that sustained opportunities could be framed for colleagues in anthropology and business history to talk and work together to explore collaborations in research and conceptual development. that truly would be a treat. * * * business history and business anthropology: some reflections and suggestions daniel pope, professor emeritus, university of oregon historians have been notoriously resistant to the siren calls of theory. we burrow into our sources and revel in constructing evidence-based narratives. this, of course, has left plenty of room for implicit (perhaps even unconscious) theorizing to creep through the rear door of the narratives we construct. the field of business history, however, is one area that acquired its own paradigm close to half a century ago. alfred d. chandler, the late straus professor of business history at harvard business school, outlined it in pathbreaking books and articles in the 1960s and filled it with rich detail in his 1977 masterwork, the visible hand: the managerial revolution in american business, awarded the pulitzer prize in history. broadening his approach to encompass other advanced economies, chandler followed the visible hand with scale and scope: the dynamics of industrial capitalism in 1990. chandler convinced business historians that the rise of big business firms was the central phenomenon of capitalism since the mid-nineteenth century. big businesses were qualitatively different organizations from lesser ones, marked by administrative coordination of activities, a separation of ownership and management, and organizational structures that evolved in tandem with their growth strategies. new technologies were usually the catalysts of organizational change and a flurry of them around the 1880s set a wide range of industries onto the big business path. for a field that had been mired in rather sterile controversies between left-wing and populist critics of robber barons and those who offered eulogies to captains of industry, chandler’s weberian approach 68 anthony giddens, the constitution of society, cambridge: polity, 1984. journal of business anthropology, 3(1), spring 2014 72 (as filtered through his own mentor, talcott parsons) was bracing. it seemed to discard moralizing for rigor and downplayed personal idiosyncrasies while delineating patterns of development. perhaps most importantly, the chandlerian perspective focused squarely on the most evident reality of the post-world war ii era, the prominence of giant corporate enterprises in economic and social life, in the united states and in other advanced capitalist nations. indeed, chandler’s approach spread beyond the confines of business history. influential articles by louis galambos, for instance, outlined an “organizational synthesis” approach to modern american society. a decade before the visible hand, robert wiebe had undertaken the search for order (1977), a general history of the gilded age and progressive era in the united states with a distinctly weberian emphasis on the growth of large-scale organizations. powerful and persuasive as it was (and still in many respects remains) to most business historians, to cultural anthropologists the chandler paradigm must have seemed quite forbidding. chandler himself, open-minded and receptive to varied approaches that differed from his own, had no intention of building a moat around the edifice he constructed for business history. nevertheless, cultural factors played only a secondary role in explaining the rise of big business. to invoke them, chandlerians sometimes suggested, was to substitute vague handwaving for explanation. instrumental rationality determined business strategies and those strategies in turn shaped organizational structures. consumers and workers stood in the margins of the picture when they appeared at all. consumer preferences were largely exogenous. they could and did influence corporate choices, and marketing was a crucial corporate function, but the substance of producer-consumer interactions was rarely given center stage. chandler himself and many of his disciples paid little attention to work and labor below the ranks of management. the chandlerian firm dealt with challenges in recruiting, managing and retaining a workforce, negotiated with unions, encountered strikes, but these activities did not weigh heavily in setting the patterns of corporate development. the iron cages of bureaucracy may have been redesigned into managerial cubicles and suites, but the social interactions within them dropped out of the narratives. in discarding the heroes and villains approach, the chandler paradigm, one business historian joked, threatened to be the field’s neutron bomb ‒ leaving structures standing while killing off the humans. business historians rarely employed anthropological theories. indeed, the names of clifford geertz and marshall sahlins, to choose two prominent and provocative figures, do not appear in searching the database for items in the business history review or enterprise & society, the field’s two premier u.s. journals. conversely, alfred chandler’s name is entirely absent from the anthrosource and anthropology plus databases. somewhat ironically, the rise of the big business paradigm, with its apparent separation from anthropological perspectives, came at a opinions: business history and anthropology 73 moment when other subfields of history were moving closer to those perspectives. the “linguistic turn,” the influence of foucauldian concepts like micropolitics, normalization and the gaze, and the “return to narrative” in the 1970s and 1980s, all pointed in the direction of “cultural studies,” a watchword that invoked the culture concept ‒ even if it might (as an historian i can’t speak with any authority on this) broaden and blur it beyond anthropological recognition. within business history, chandler’s work had never met with unqualified acceptance, although it loomed large even to those who doubted aspects of it. in recent decades, however, the paradigm has undergone what richard r. john, in an important 1997 article, called “elaborations, revisions [and] dissents.” he pointed out the crossdisciplinary impact of chandler’s approach and, as well, its influence on management itself, but in his list of fields affected, anthropology is missing. john’s article was anything but an attack on his own doktorvater. in the first two sentences, he quite rightly labeled the visible hand “magisterial,” “pathbreaking,” and a “landmark.” yet the article signaled new inflections and new directions for the field of business history. in several respects, these have more potential than chandler’s own work to serve in a rapprochement of business anthropology and business history. i will briefly note some of the revisions and dissents that richard john referred to and point to a few of the works that may be particularly stimulating for business anthropologists. why has the paradigm shifted? in the last few decades it has been hard to ignore the travails of big business firms, especially in manufacturing. when general motors, a leading exemplar of chandler’s doctrines, goes bankrupt attention must be paid. the benefits of recent technological change seem to accrue to entrepreneurs more than to managers, and the new protagonists of business dramas are more apt to be wearing t-shirts than gray flannel suits. new york skyscrapers give way to silicon valley campuses, with their swimming pools and volleyball courts (along with, in the case of google, a replica dinosaur skeleton, perhaps to remind denizens of their pre-postindustrial ancestors’ fates). on a more academic plane, those tendencies which had nudged other historical subfields toward cultural approaches infiltrated the gates of business history. perhaps most important, a sense that chandlerian business history was too strongly determinist led many to turn to examining contingent factors and even to examining “alternative tracks,” to borrow the title of a stimulating study by gerald berk (1994) of a railroad line whose business strategies contradicted the pattern of railroad growth that chandler and his followers had traced. one of the leading figures in newer ‒ perhaps more anthro-friendly ‒ scholarship in american business history is philip scranton. in several influential works, scranton has given close, detailed accounts of textile and carpet production in the philadelphia area. in his scholarship, firms journal of business anthropology, 3(1), spring 2014 74 engaged in batch production of specialty goods ‒ the kind of manufacturing that clustered around pennsylvania ‒ were not bit players strutting briefly on the business stage before vertically integrated mass production firms pushed them to the wings. in endless novelty: specialty production and american industrialization, 1865-1925 (1999), he broadens his geographic scope and describes a wide range of industries where batch production prevailed over mass production. in one of his books, figured tapestries: production, markets and power in philadelphia textiles 1885-1941 (1989), he acknowledges debts to scholars in half a dozen disciplines; anthropology is not among them, but with its attention to language and imagery, labor, gender, technological change and resistance, consumer behavior, style and fashion, scranton’s work exemplifies many of the qualities that should make cultural anthropologists feel comfortable in its milieu. another historian whose scholarship captures many current motifs of business history is regina blaszczyk. her first book, imagining consumers: design and innovation from wedgwood to corning, made the case that success in household goods ‒ from tableware to plumbing fixtures ‒ depended less on economies of scale, scope and speed (key success factors in the chandler paradigm) than on knowledge of consumer desires and an ability to accommodate them. firms sensitive to style and fashion trends and flexible enough to produce what consumers wanted, she argued, were those that thrived in such industries. she explains how firms learned about their consumers, and while cardcarrying anthropologists are not present in her story, the “fashion intermediaries”‒ “practical men, shopkeepers, salesmen, retail buyers, materials suppliers, art directors, showroom managers, color experts” ‒ parallel the “native informants” who used to serve the pith-helmeted ethnographers in their fieldwork. blaszczyk extended her approach to business history in an overview of american consumer society, 1865-2005: from hearth to hdtv. again, consumer agency, interaction between producers and consumers, and a diverse and shifting set of motives and satisfactions in consumption are themes. anthropologists interested in material culture will be impressed with a history that pays close attention to what people actually had and used in their homes and what those goods meant to them. more celebratory of the society it portrays than i would be, blaszczyk nevertheless recognizes some of the problematic aspects on consumerism in this fine synthesis. the role of intermediaries is also a central concern of william leach in land of desire: merchants, power, and the rise of a new american culture (1993). for leach, the intermediaries ‒ brokers, in his terminology ‒ aided business in general, not necessarily particular firms, by advancing the values and institutions of consumer culture. these brokers included, in leach’s conception, window dressers and art school opinions: business history and anthropology 75 instructors as well corporate lawyers and investment bankers. much more critical of business than blaszczyk, leach nevertheless shares her concern with the material and visual environment of consumption, and in particular the role of these intermediaries in creating a commercial culture of “light and color” in the early twentieth century. as these examples suggest, the study of consumption has become a major feature of american business history as the paradigm has yielded to more diverse approaches. advertising and marketing as business practices and strategies had, of course, been significant parts of the field’s agenda, but in the last quarter-century or so, the perspective has shifted and expanded, without abandoning the insights of the chandlerian approach. i may confess that my own book on the history of advertising, the making of modern advertising (1983), took a narrower approach. unimpressed with studies of advertisements that focused almost entirely on their styles and symbols, i began my book with a “no contest” plea to an accusation of economic determinism. in the intervening years, i’ve learned that advertising history can be sensitive to cultural context without neglecting its business functions. anthropologists can benefit from many such works. here are some examples. roland marchand’s two classic works, advertising the american dream (1985) and creating the corporate soul (1998), are perhaps most notable for incorporating perspectives from art history and art criticism, but to my mind they also excel in depicting the cultural significance of advertising and public relations. his masterful dissections of the “social tableaux,” “parables,” and “visual clichés” of interwar promotion stand as models of analysis of communicative action. also of likely interest to anthropologists in advertising the american dream is marchand’s depiction of advertising agency life in the 1920s, a remarkable piece of retrospective ethnographic analysis of a business subculture. another work in the history of advertising that successfully blends cultural and business history is pamela laird’s advertising progress: american business and the rise of consumer marketing. laird’s consideration of the multiple meanings of progress in gilded age and progressive era america, and her examination of the material culture artifacts of businesses ‒ trade cards, store displays and the like ‒ in late nineteenth century america, provided a deeper insight into the messages and meanings of advertising than narrower examinations of advertising simply as a business strategy. work and labor is the other area that has benefited most from recent developments in business history. a fascinating example of this is an article by kenneth lipartito that blends business history with the history of technology and gender analysis as well as labor history, “when women were switches: technology, work and gender in the telephone industry, 1890-1920.” (american historical review, 1994:4, 1075ff) lipartito offers a subtle, elegant account of the bell system’s choice to journal of business anthropology, 3(1), spring 2014 76 stay with manual operators (labeled “hello girls”) well after mechanical switching equipment became available. gendered assumptions about women workers, a ready supply of them, and fears that telephone callers would have difficulties interacting with mechanized systems all went into bell’s decision. ultimately, however, the advantages of mechanization won out in the world war i era as the supply of “suitable” young women shrank and the expansion of the system made manual switching increasingly impractical. the perspective of labor historians has broadened too, and several recent studies take business strategies and corporate cultures into account in complex fashion. because of their attention to these factors, they may also interest business anthropologists. i am less familiar with the literature of labor history than consumption history, but i would like to recommend three books. the subtitle of jefferson cowie’s capital moves: rca’s seventy-year quest for cheap labor summarizes his thesis, but this is a sophisticated marxist treatment of the company’s shifts from camden, new jersey, to maquiladora production in ciudad juarez. gender and urban history complicate and complement the story of the company’s labor policies and strategies. bethany moreton, to serve god and wal-mart: the making of christian free enterprise, provides a nuanced and not entirely unsympathetic reading of the corporation that is, in many respects, as much a cultural as a business institution. the regional subculture of the ozarks, the rise of evangelical protestantism, the synthesis of free market and social issue conservative politics, and women’s changing roles in the family as well as the labor force, are not merely contexts for wal-mart’s growth. in fact, moreton shows, the company has been an active player in shaping those phenomena. moreton is a contributor to a volume edited by labor historian nelson lichtenstein, wal-mart: the face of twenty-firstcentury capitalism; and lichtenstein, in turn, is the author of an excellent general history of the retail giant, the retail revolution: how wal-mart created a brave new world of business. finally, joseph mccartin’s collision course: ronald reagan, the air traffic controllers and the strike that changed america might seem from its title like a conventional labor history of a strike, with a nod to national politics. however, in fact, it is a densely textured story of a subculture, mainly male, of men at their intense, demanding jobs, in the labor organization they founded, and in their hours with family and friends. the controllers’ work and lives ‒ and their interactions with the federal government and the airline industry ‒ brought a generally conservative group (the union had endorsed reagan in the 1980 presidential campaign) to its disastrous 1981 strike. the strike in turn reshaped labormanagement relations in the succeeding generation. oral histories are a key source for this historically-grounded study. business anthropologists may not come away from mccartin’s book with a deep sympathy for the opinions: business history and anthropology 77 controllers’ struggle, but they will certainly gain insights into the cultural dimensions of labor-management relations. are business history and business anthropology ready to tie the knot? probably not. our disciplinary backgrounds, research sources and standard modes of explanation ‒ diachronic for historians, synchronic for anthropologists ‒ will likely preserve a degree of distance. that business anthropologists are more likely to be working for firms than business historians is another indication of the gap. no anthropologist is among the authors of essays in franco amatori and geoffrey jones’s business history around the world. the recent oxford handbook of the history of consumption, edited by frank trentmann, has thirty-five contributors, none housed in an anthropology department. (both of these volumes, incidentally, can be highly recommended for any anthropologist who is looking for a “state of the field” overview.) nevertheless, trends in business history have enabled it to draw closer to anthropology, to make use of anthropological concepts and methods, and to create historical studies that anthropologists with an interest in business should find stimulating and appealing. i’ve offered some suggestions for those who may want to explore the terrain. in return, i’m sure the journal of business anthropology and practitioners in the field can provide me and other historians with comparable insights from their side. historians and anthropologists ought to do business with each other. references amatori, f. and jones, g. 2003 business history around the world. cambridge, england and new york: cambridge university press. blaszczyk, r. 2009 american consumer society, 1865-2005: from hearth to hdtv. wheeling, ill.: harlan davidson. blaszczyk, r. 2000 imagining consumers: design and innovation from wedgwood to corning. baltimore, md.: johns hopkins university press. chandler, a. 1990 scale and scope: the dynamics of industrial capitalism. cambridge, mass.: belknap press, 1990. chandler, a. 1977 the visible hand: the managerial revolution in american business. cambridge, mass.: belknap press. cowie, j. 1999 capital moves: rca’s seventy-year quest for cheap labor. ithaca, n.y.: cornell university press. galambos, l. 1970 “the emerging organizational synthesis in modern american history.” business history review 44 (3): 274-285. john, r. 1977 “elaborations, revisions, dissents: alfred d. chandler, jr.'s, ‘the visible hand’ after twenty years.” business history review 72 (1): 151-200. journal of business anthropology, 3(1), spring 2014 78 laird, p. 1998 advertising progress: american business and the rise of consumer marketing. baltimore, md.: johns hopkins university press. lichtenstein, n. 1999 the retail revolution: how wal-mart created a brave new world of business. new york: metropolitan books lichtenstein, n. ed. 2006 wal-mart: the face of twenty-first century capitalism. new york: new press. lipartito, k. 1994 “when women were switches technology, work and gender in the telephone industry, 1890-1920.” american historical review 99 (4): 1074-1111. leach, w. 1993 land of desire: merchants, power, and the rise of a new american culture. new york: pantheon books. mccartin, j. 2011 collision course: ronald reagan, the air traffic controllers and the strike that changed america. new york: oxford university press. marchand, r. 1985 advertising the american dream: making way for modernity, 1920-1940. berkeley: university of california press. marchand, r. creating the corporate soul: the rise of public relations and corporate imagery in american big business. berkeley: university of california press. moreton, b. 2009 to serve god and wal-mart: the making of christian free enterprise. cambridge, mass.: harvard university press. scranton, p. 1997 endless novelty: specialty production and american industrialization, 1865-1925. princeton, n.j.: princeton university press. scranton, p. 1989 figured tapestries: production, markets and power in philadelphia textiles 1885-1941. cambridge, england and new york: cambridge university press. trentmann, f. 2012 the oxford handbook of the history of consumption. oxford and new york: oxford university press. wiebe, r. 1967 the search for order: 1877-1920. new york: hill & wang. greg urban is the arthur hobson quinn professor of anthropology and former chair of the department of anthropology at the university of pennsylvania. a specialist in linguistic and cultural anthropology, urban studies the processes of cultural motion, with a focus on the forces that impel that motion through space and time. he has done extensive research among indigenous populations in brazil, and is now also interested in modern business corporations as institutional loci for the creation of new culture. among his books are: metaculture: how culture moves through the world, metaphysical community: the interplay of the senses and the intellect, and, as editor, corporations and citizenship. he may be reached at gurban@sas.upenn.edu mailto:gurban@sas.upenn.edu horizons of business anthropology in a world of flexible accumulation allen w. batteau & carolyn e. psenka abstract classically, anthropology supplied a cultural critique, by contrasting the noble savage to contemporary institutions and exposing the effects of structures of authority. this understanding of humanity was expanded a hundred years ago by boas’s embrace of cultural and linguistic variety within a common humanity. similarly, the classical role for business anthropology and other forms of applied anthropology has been to identify areas in contemporary enterprises and institutions where improvements could be made. today anthropologists’ engagement with the contemporary world of business in a régime of flexible accumulation is expanding our understanding of the human project, interrogating the régimes of value and extension whose scale is global and whose scope penetrates to the deepest levels of consciousness. using contemporary ethnographic insights from the authors and other anthropologists, this article suggests an enlarged understanding of and direction for business anthropology at the frontier of anthropology that uses classic anthropological approaches to investigate the sites where new human possibilities are being assembled and created. keywords authority, business anthropology, ethics, flexible accumulation, global networks, value, value-régimes page 1 of 19 jba 1 (1): 72-90 spring 2012 © the author(s) 2012 issn 2245-4217 www.cbs.dk/jba batteau & psenka / horizons of business anthropology in a world of flexible accumulation 73 anthropology’s shifting gaze over the past century, anthropology has had a fickle relationship with business. a century ago the anthropological project sought to expand our understanding of humanity, a project within which modern institutional forms including factories, financial institutions, and public agencies did not have a high priority. when lloyd warner shifted his anthropological gaze to yankee city (warner and lunt 1939), it was still using the same field methods and theoretical equipment that he used among the murngin (warner 1937). although the human relations school began a project of interrogating business institutions and customs in the 1940s, bringing abilities to conceptualize human action within social systems to the study of contemporary institutions, this was always relegated to the subaltern status of “applied anthropology,” i.e., not having an enduring contribution. who reads burleigh gardner (1945, 1977) any more? in fact, many anthropological scholars do read burleigh gardner, not only his “the anthropologist in business and industry” (1977), but also classics such as deep south (davis, gardner, and gardner 1941). the anthropology of business, in contrast to management consulting and opportunistic ethnographies that lack theoretical and intellectual inspiration, is informed by a 100+ year history of the development of anthropological theory. “business anthropology” is a relative newcomer in our discipline: literature references to “business anthropology” date back only to 1980, yet have grown steadily since 1985. in this article we would like to locate the growth of business anthropology with respect to other anthropological traditions, to the corporate world, and also to some unique challenges that business anthropology faces. two key issues emerge from this triangulation. the first is the extension of anthropology’s theoretical foundation, based on the study of small-scale societies, to a global scope that may benefit from integrating concepts and techniques from other social sciences such as critical management studies into this endeavor. the second issue is the ethical and conceptual dilemmas that require “getting one’s hands dirty” through immersion in the corporate world, a pollution issue that anthropology should reflexively examine. contemporaneous with some shifts in the global economy that we will note momentarily, anthropological research into business, the subfield of “business anthropology,” and the employment of anthropologists within business, has steadily grown, as has the diffusion of anthropologist’ interest in the “corporate form” (partridge, welker and hardin, eds. 2011). the event horizon of business anthropology goes back nearly 80 years, with a notable acceleration of interest in the 1990s. the social system of a modern factory by warner and low (warner and low 1947), was probably the first ethnographic study of a journal of business anthropology, 1(1), spring 2012 74 contemporary business institution. this, and the hawthorne studies (roethlisberger and dickson 1939) inspired by warner’s yankee city colleague elton mayo, produced a broad interest in business and industrial anthropology, a history that is recounted in marietta baba’s introduction to the napa bulletin on the subject (baba 1986), as well as in her article in this issue of the jba. however, as america flexed its cold war muscles in the 1960s and 1970s, leading to such calamities as the vietnam war, american anthropology moved away from interest in contemporary institutions, with indigenous field sites representing “real” anthropology. only in the 1980s did the ethnographic gaze turn toward “high-tech” settings and “corporate culture” as new exotica (kunda 1992; barley 1983; barley and kunda 1992). in the 1990s, as the supply of doctorates outstripped the demand of professorships, closerto-home research became accepted. demographics and shrinking euroamerican empires, rather than any ideological shift in academia, made an anthropology of business respectable. from the early 1970s onward, a macro trend underlying all of these events is the globalization that led the decline of u.s. corporate hegemony. as u.s. manufacturing faced increasing difficulty in competing with the japanese and other industrial nations, “cultural” explanations came to the fore as a key to competitiveness (see the editors’ introduction to this issue); these “cultural” explanations by “native” (i.e., corporate) experts had more in common with pop psychology than with holistic and foundational inquiry into human diversity (baba and hill 2000). the new global régime brought normative instability to societies and flexible deprivation (the obverse of david harvey’s “flexible accumulation), to workforces and consumers as by-products of this supposed economic “progress.” as fordist methods of production proved too rigid for a rapidly changing world of global competition, new models of accumulation replaced older models. these new forms of value, in which potentially anything can be commodified, are a central part of what geographer david harvey (1989) calls “flexible accumulation” – a shifting of surplus extraction away from fordist locations of production toward distribution and consumption and, we would add, toward potentially every episode and event in the human project. numerous experiences and institutions uniquely human – religious meditation, familial intimacy, aesthetic contemplation, kinship, government – can and already have been commercialized, turned into a business, had profits extracted from them, and laid the foundations of new institutional régimes. such developments are among the central concerns of business anthropology. understanding these disparate developments as part of a larger project of challenges to humanity is a batteau & psenka / horizons of business anthropology in a world of flexible accumulation 75 fundamental issue that anthropologists currently working in the world of business are examining. business anthropology can support this project through three approaches. foremost among these is development of the concept of value. david graeber, for example, in toward an anthropological theory of value (1989), integrates the perspectives of marx and mauss to demonstrate that value is meaning-in-action: an ongoing human creation, rather than an a priori configuration. similarly, jonathan parry and maurice bloch, in money and the morality of exchange (1989), demonstrate that market transactions are but a subset of the circulation of value within human societies, and arguably less important than other forms of exchange. as a case in point, a leading edge of business innovation is the commodification of new values and multiple groups are now contending to become arbiters of new constructions of value. some innovations in value from the contemporary business world include evanescent “friends” on facebook, illusions of mastery through hand-held “apps”, and a fairy-gold economy of financial “derivatives,” many times larger than the substantial economy of goods and services. to take note of just one the new forms of value, the immediate and constant access to one’s “friends” (in the facebook sense) has created new opportunities for immediacy while extinguishing the charm of distance and altering the meaning of friendship. moreover, through social media the capitalist economy discovers yet another avenue for colonizing users’ consciousness. that this is accomplished through a language of “connection” and “empowerment” only obscures its basically capitalist character. the business model underlying social media is that the mouse-clicks and personal data required for access to facebook are aggregated and sold to advertisers for purposes of targeted marketing in the economy of goods and services (batteau forthcoming). emphasis on value contrasts multiple value-régimes, most notably the contrast between commodification and gift economies. neoliberal orthodoxy assumes that “the economy” equals monetized flows of commodities, yet ethnographic examination, for example of commodities traders on the london futures exchange, reveals a foundation of social relationships among brokers based on sharing of information and other goods (zaloom 2006). indeed, in any business, there is an articulation between the circulation of commodities and the circulation of non-monetized intangibles, even if the latter of these (sharing information, sharing access, sharing tangible goods) has atrophied under the onslaught of commodification. journal of business anthropology, 1(1), spring 2012 76 the second approach to the project of examining challenges to humanity, we argue, is the growth of tightly coupled networks circulating not only information and objects across the world, but also value and authority. the interconnectedness of these global networks is a new thing in the history of humanity (mayntz and hughes 1988:5). humans, of course, have had global networks for millennia, as eric wolf has discussed (1982). however, it has only been since the industrial revolution that these networks have become tightly coupled, in a way that when combined with complexity becomes, as sociologist charles perrow has shown in normal accidents (1984), a recipe for disaster. tightly coupled systems quickly ramify anomalies, and complex interaction works against understanding these anomalies. perrow’s insights into the hazards of complexity and tight coupling can be extended to many aspects of contemporary life. there are numerous examples in recent years of anthropologists who have studied the complexity and tight coupling of contemporary industry. constance perin, for example, in shouldering risks (2004), examines how nuclear power plant operators must compromise multiple (employer, regulatory, informal) régimes (of employment, government regulation, corporate policies, and professional standards) in order to maintain safe operation. alejandro peréz, an airline captain and cultural anthropologist, describes how the interaction of flight automation, linguistic differences, and cultural misunderstandings created a “death spiral” leading to the 1995 crash of american airlines 965 in the mountains near cali, colombia, killing 159 of 163 persons on board (peréz-chávez and psenka 2003). carolyn psenka (2008) describes the linguistic, semiotic (what is an example of a semiotic compromise?), and engineering compromises that created the space shuttle, a “monumental technology” that could not live up to its avowed purpose of providing safe, reliable, and affordable space transport. building on the work of charlotte linde (1988) and frances trix (1993), margaret karadjoff examines the face-to-face interaction of an emergency room work group, highlighting the inherent relational work necessary to achieve/maintain medical safety in a complex and emergent environment. the significance of safety as an outcome of local social interaction coupled with complex technological systems in delivery of health care in a trauma center is illuminated in this conversational analysis. supply chains and finance are other venues where contemporary trends in business mix cultural complexity with tight coupling. this brings us to the third approach pillar of business anthropology: analysis of authority. following weber, authority can, ideally-typically, be charismatic (e.g, an entrepreneurial start-up), patrimonial (e.g., a family business), or rational-bureaucratic (a large, batteau & psenka / horizons of business anthropology in a world of flexible accumulation 77 mature corporation) (1978). to these familiar concepts business anthropology adds insights into negotiations of authority across multiple cultural régimes, where shared understandings are emergent and negotiated rather than assumed. batteau’s analysis (2000) of the dynamic interplays of régimes of authority within what is sometimes called “corporate culture” is an example of this. batteau achieved such insights from prolonged immersion in the corporate world at multiple sites that allowed an ethnographic breadth and depth unavailable to documentary or survey analyses. in the final section of this article we contrast this ethnographic immersion with other approaches to the corporate world, drawing a parallel between early ethnographers such as malinowski and boas, on the one hand, and “armchair anthropologists” of the corporate world, on the other. theorizing business anthropology surveying recent work on business anthropology, we look to the comprehensive account of the history of the field by marietta baba (1986). applied anthropology, as baba has demonstrated, is the foundation for “pure” anthropology, and the interplay between “applied” and “theory” has been explored by goldschmidt (2001) and baba (1998). the contributions of applied work to theory development are most recently evident in anthropology’s attention to “corporate lives.” in 2008 the wenner-gren foundation and the school of american research convened a symposium on “corporate lives: new perspectives on the social life of the corporate form,” subsequently published as a special issue of current anthropology. the special issue presented twelve articles on diverse aspects of corporate organization in the developed and developing world. several of these articles tacked the conceptual, methodological, and ethical issues involved in research in, of, and for institutional actors. jane guyer, for example, in “blueprints, judgment, and perseverance in a corporate context” describes the opportunities, dilemmas, and perplexities afforded her as a member of the international advisory group on the chad-cameroon oil development and pipeline project of the world bank. this advisory group, appointed by the world bank, advised the two governments on the social and environmental consequences of an exxon-mobil project spanning more than a decade. guyer describes the difficulty of extrapolating professional ethics based on the academic work of individual field-scholars to the practical work team-based, ongoing development projects, where engagement is the price of access, and where standing aloof might constitute a “sin of omission” (2011). numerous “midstream dilemmas” of negotiating within a complex and journal of business anthropology, 1(1), spring 2012 78 powerful array of corporate forces will be familiar to any anthropologist who has had a long-term engagement in an organizational context, as an appended comment by melissa cefkin (an anthropologist employed by ibm) attests (2011). another article, by gabriela vargas-cetina, “corporations, cooperatives, and the state,” examined shepherds cooperatives in sardinia (2011). this article showed how sheep-herding, traditionally a patrimonial activity, had been transformed by being organized into cooperatives, which subsequently found themselves negotiating with other businesses, political parties, trades-unions, the sardinian and italian state, and most recently the european union. quite frequently the dictates of the corporate form – whether represented by governments, parties, or international alliances – overshadowed the priorities of the shepherds. from our perspective, the article in the collection that gets to the heart of the matter is sally engle merry’s “measuring the world: indicators, human rights, and global governance” (2011). merry interrogates the “audit culture” that is increasingly adopted as an acontextual approach to measuring such complex constructions as justice, health, and human rights. derived from the invention of doubleentry bookkeeping in 15th century venice (poovey 1998), and fueled by the 19th century development of statistical methodologies (porter 1995) and the 20th century development and diffusion of computational devices, the use of abstract quantitative indicators is a triumph of technocratic rationality, dissolving, if we may paraphrase marx and engels, all relationships, nuances, and human subtleties in the icy bath of statistical compilation.1 merry notes the analogous character of indicators with the cash nexus in modern economies, which also permits the comparison of incommensurables. the extension of such numeric measurements beyond their original home in corporate governance to all aspects of society, creating an “audit culture” that anthropologists such as annelise riles (2004) and marilyn strathern (2000) have examined, is a mark of how rationalization and the corporate form have burst traditional restraints and are pervading all aspects of life. we will comment on the fundamental irrationality of this rationalization in our concluding section. these treatments of the corporate form build on an established theoretical foundation of understanding the cultural bases of contemporary institutional forms. marshall sahlins, for example, in “la pensée bourgeoise: western society as culture” (in culture and practical 1 “[capitalism] has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervour, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy bath of egotistical calculation.” (communist manifesto) batteau & psenka / horizons of business anthropology in a world of flexible accumulation 79 reason, 1976) examined the symbolic basis of distinctions of foods, fashions, and fabrics, to demonstrate that material and “symbolic” exchange are two sides of the same coin. mary douglas, in how institutions think, (1986) applied concepts such as identity and cultural difference to demonstrate that even rationalized authority is culturally motivated. anthropologists of business build from the solid foundation of our discipline’s concepts and concerns, and have been making a contribution to extending those concepts. if we can conclude, from this recognition by wenner-gren, that business anthropology has become an accepted optic within the anthropological gaze, then we have some heavy lifting ahead of us. as the plurality of voices in this arena multiplies – sometimes harmoniously, sometimes contrapuntally, sometimes off-key, and sometimes singing to oneself – we need to negotiate just what is business anthropology, what are its conceptual and ethical boundaries, and within those boundaries what constitutes good work. we should also examine both “what is business?” and “what should its anthropology look like?” the world of business is notable both for creative destruction, for advancing the frontiers of accumulation, and for flexibility by creating new forms of value while destroying the old. goods and services that once commanded high prices are now given away free, and externalities that were once ignored are now commoditized. definitions and social constructions of value – valorized difference – are at the core of the human project (graeber 2001). identifying business anthropology as good anthropologists we ought to examine this species “business anthropology.” what genus is business anthropology a species of? what can it be contrasted to? and, what are the epistemological consequences of its identity? the anthropological family has at least three genera within which business anthropology might belong: applied, practicing, and academic. the first of these, applied anthropology, has a rich and noble tradition, arguably more ancient than academic anthropology, particularly if one insists that anthropology is a field science. missionaries, colonial administrators, and traders with inquisitive and open minds were looking into and describing indigenous customs centuries before any academic department of anthropology was founded. as marietta baba has discussed, the earliest academic anthropologists obtained their purchase on tribal knowledge in service of colonial administrations. the marked and junior status of applied anthropology was several decades away. journal of business anthropology, 1(1), spring 2012 80 as applied anthropology became more academic, with growing numbers of faculty teaching it, a number of anthropologists involved with public agencies, consultancies, large corporations coalesced and created the national association for the practice of anthropology, whose bulletin is now in its 26th year. at least at the levels of professional networks, publications, and other totems, practicing anthropology has an identity distinct from applied anthropology. both of these contrast, of course, with “pure” or “theoretical” anthropology, whose ritualistic marking is rarely commented on.2 one aspect of practicing anthropology that needs to be investigated more closely is that it is frequently work for hire, and the ethical quandaries involved when one joins or contracts with an organization. “work for hire” is a legal phrase, which indicates that the “work product” – a report, an invention, a computer program, a database – is owned by the contracting party, while the contractor – the anthropologist – has only those rights that are stipulated in the contract. potentially, she may not use any idea, inspiration, or ethnographic observation derived in the course of the contract. needless to say, this is severely constraining to those committed to free intellectual inquiry: the contractor does not own her data. other disciplinary/industry collaborations – physiologists working for pharmaceutical companies, for example – have long since negotiated this issue, but for anthropology the discussion is only beginning. for business anthropology, many times ethnographic authority can only be purchased by signing an employment contract. these contracts stipulate activities one does within the organization and how information acquired there can be used: “participant observation” and “collecting field notes” are rarely included in standard employment contracts. frequently employment contracts include a “non-disclosure agreement”, a gag order that raises eyebrows with irbs. collisions between the aaa code of ethics and corporate employment contracts are inevitable, and we need case studies of how these collisions have been successfully and unsuccessfully negotiated. for anthropology, the dilemma is especially pointed if the contracting party is engaged in a dubious venture, whether promoting gmo foods or selling cigarettes. yet more controversial projects, such as the human terrain systems program, call for even more in-depth soulsearching within the profession, particularly as the profession is represented by organizations such as the aaa, sfaa, or napa. what are the ethical implications of an organization supporting, rejecting, or 2 “purity”, as mary douglas (1966) and many others have commented, is less an empirical description than a ritualized state, which one achieves in diverse cultures through various rites of purification. manuscript submission to a peer-reviewed journal might be considered such a rite. batteau & psenka / horizons of business anthropology in a world of flexible accumulation 81 remaining indifferent to ethical challenges? jane guyer’s comments on “sins of omission” are pertinent here. anthropology, we would argue, is not the exclusive domain of organized anthropology, inasmuch as there are many worthwhile activities that represent themselves as anthropological without the countenance of formal anthropological organizations: “high-tech anthropology,” a phrase trademarked by menlo innovations (a software company in ann arbor, michigan), and the entire ethnographic praxis in corporations (epic) conference of anthropologists and ethnographers working in private firms and consultancies (discussed by melissa cefkin in the following article), are but two examples of how anthropology’s vitality extends well beyond the purview of organized anthropology and its journals. from an academic point of view, business anthropology presents a double challenge. on the one hand, as we have observed, the values of academia and the values of business are sometimes in conflict. in academia, open inquiry and collegiality are valued. when these values rub up against business, where lines of authority and restrictions on the flow of information are sometimes paramount, mutual mistrust is inevitable. this mistrust can and frequently is negotiated, successfully, by individual practitioners and managers; it is often negotiated by drawing conceptual or social boundaries and compartmentalizing, for example, between postmodernist critiques and market development. open inquiry becomes problematic when one has schedules to keep and sales targets to achieve. on the other hand, intimate experience with the world of business opens the door to cultural knowledge that is sometimes obscured by the shared epistemic assumptions of anthropology and contemporary institutions. annelise riles, for example, uncovered shared technocratic assumptions of anthropology and financial executives in the bank of japan, assumptions that have been more ably critiqued by non-anthropologists (roszak 1969, arendt 1961, foucault 1991, or hayek 1944). she was able to do this only by situating herself on the front lines of creative destruction – the implementation of a new settlements system in the bank of japan – and by interrogating it with an ethnographic imagination that embraced a wider cultural context. this wider cultural context included japanese assumptions about kinship, motherhood, and households, seemingly irrelevant to technocratic procedures yet, as she demonstrated, critical for unraveling the intertwining of anthropological and technocratic epistemologies. although riles probably does not consider herself a “business anthropologist,” her anthropological inquiry into contemporary developments in business and finance must inform the ethnographic imagination of any anthropologist who is working, whether from an academic or practitioner stance, in contemporary issues of finance. journal of business anthropology, 1(1), spring 2012 82 as for the distinction between “pure” and “applied” science, as many have remarked, is less a matter of epistemology than of social networks and status hierarchies; “applied” is often out in front of “pure” in terms of discovery and conceptual breakthrough. borrowing from batteau and eaton’s research on identity in crisis situations, identities are constructed from classificatory distinctions, roles and norms, social networks, and totemic objects, which naturalize – i.e., universalize – what are actually local distinctions (batteau and eaton 2012). in other words, the theoretical/applied distinction is simply an academic convention. thus the identity of business anthropology depends only in part on the practice and scholarship of trained anthropologists in the business world, being also a function of the ethics, networks, and classificatory distinctions drawn by numerous parties. like any other identity it can be broadly construed as anyone with a humanistic and cross-cultural interest in the business world, or narrowly as only those who designate themselves as “business anthropologists.” it can be positively construed, bringing anthropological enlightenment to dominant institutions where such is in short supply, or negatively portrayed as consorting with anthropology’s other. so where should we locate “business anthropology?” some firstrate books on issues in the business world – karen ho’s liquidated, caitlin zaloom’s out of the pits, gillian tett’s fool’s gold, and lipuma and lee’s financial derivatives and the globalization of risk – have used the anthropological gaze to examine contemporary developments in the business world. the challenge of business anthropology is to be able to embrace sophisticated works such as these while placing them in a pragmatic framework of changing customary ways of doing business. dirty hands anthropology can use its considerable insights into human diversity to include the world of business and the corporate form in its research, and so extend an understanding of the social values of business beyond privatized accumulation. to do so, as anthropologists we must be willing to work inside business, to get our hands dirty, and not simply observe the corporate world from a comfortable distance. twenty years ago, when batteau was the director of training for a software company, he met an anthropologist who styled himself a business anthropologist. when asked if he had ever worked in a business, this anthropologist responded, incredulously, “why would i want to do that?” in much the same spirit of sir james g. frazier’s “good heavens, no!” when asked if he had ever met a savage. malinowski and boas rightfully dismissed batteau & psenka / horizons of business anthropology in a world of flexible accumulation 83 such “armchair anthropologists” from having any serious contribution to make to the field. classical ethnographic fieldwork involves an engagement of all five senses and a personal vulnerability that lent depth and additional dimensions of meaning to the account. this is sometimes called “getting your hands dirty,” a pollution metaphor that is worth interrogating. classical ethnographers transgressed the line between savagery and civilization, and returned with a richer account for having done so. similarly, the anthropologist of business who is willing to get her hands dirty, transgressing the divide between academia and the world of business can return with the hard-earned privilege of providing insight into some of the most critical ethnographic facts of our world today. for many academics, at least in the liberal arts, the world of business is an other, an alien tribe poorly understood and best kept at a distance. this is an academic convention that anthropologists are not obliged to accept. the acceptance of personal vulnerability gives additional force and depth of meaning to what might otherwise be “academic” (in the worst sense of the word) results. when an ethnographer immerses herself in the field, exploring the minutiae of customs, whether in a tribal village or a factory, to the extent that she begins to question her conventional assumptions, then she begins to see that all cultural forms are conventional, and that there is no human reality that is any other than socially constructed. fieldwork, as many have written, is a lifetransforming experience, unavailable to those who study these realities from a distance. some of these critical realities of contemporary institutions today might include the manner in which wall street investment banks impose their habitus on the remainder of the world, how technological innovation in manufacturing is shaped by patrimonial networks, or how instrumental rationality embeds fundamental irrationalities. please allow us to conclude by expanding on each of these. karen ho, in liquidated, describes how investment bankers’ trading mentality, a “strategy of no strategy” and a preference for shortterm gains, is translated into a rhetoric of “shareholder value.” shareholder value meant a high p/e ratio, which could be achieved only in the short term by canceling long-term investments and “liquidating” many components of the business. by situating herself in the back office of bankers trust, an investment bank, karen ho could observe up close how this habitus was constructed out of the experience of trading on the new york stock exchange. when she herself was “downsized” (i.e., dismissed) by bankers trust, she acquired a better understanding of the depth of meaning – or lack thereof – of such experiences. although in journal of business anthropology, 1(1), spring 2012 84 many industries being laid off can be a devastating experience, in investment banking it is no big deal, inasmuch as on the street there are other investment houses waiting to hire, and in addition severance packages are adequately generous. first-hand authority such as this has always been cultural anthropology’s greatest strength, but like any other worthwhile relationship, it is obtained only at the price of personal vulnerability (ho 2009). similarly, numerous studies of technological innovation, beginning with the tavistock’s studies of sociotechnical systems and including studies that we have done within the air force and nasa, have found that technological innovation has primarily a social – not technological – rationale, drawing on classic constructions including mythmaking and totemism. carolyn psenka, for example, has demonstrated that in the construction of the space shuttle, numerous local traditions and identities were orchestrated into a monumental and technologically sophisticated artifact, with a patina of organizational rationality. even rocket science is local knowledge, which psenka learned only by being there (psenka 2008). yet today we live in what many have characterized as a “technological society” (ellul 1964[1954], and many others), and the manner in which large-scale and monumental systems orchestrate language, culture, and identities is (or should be) a critical anthropological concern. these assemblages derive either from the business world or the hybrid of business and government at times called the military-industrial complex. yet to the extent that these complex systems are tightly coupled (in the spirit of technocratic efficiency), suggests that, following perrow (1984), they are failure-prone, although most organizational failures are prosaic rather than catastrophic. expanding on this, we might conclude with the observation that business today, along with most other areas of institutional life, has largely adopted a rational organizational form, a fact that is so pervasive that it requires an anthropological gaze, surveying the entire career of h. sapiens, to see it as remarkable. charles perrow has remarked (1991) that in the contemporary world, “organization” has replaced “society” as a principle source of order; in today’s world, “getting organized” is usually seen as a practical necessity. “organizations are the key to society because large organizations have absorbed society. they have vacuumed up a good part of what we have always thought of as society, and made organizations, once a part of society, into a surrogate of society” (perrow 1991:726) batteau & psenka / horizons of business anthropology in a world of flexible accumulation 85 “getting organized” creates an array of contradictions among rationality, command and authority, resistance and adaptation, and inclusion, which members of organizations must then negotiate (batteau 2010). organizations are more successful at propagating an ideology of technocratic order than they are in sequestering and distributing the resources required for creating and maintaining order. this fundamental contradiction – the irrationality of technocratic rationality, if you wish – is basic to organizational life, notable only because organizational legitimacy is founded on rational order. this points to one of the key dilemmas of business anthropology: namely, at what level does the ethnographer engage within the organization, and how does one traverse organizational boundaries? “level” here refers both to depth of immersion and altitude within the hierarchy. these are negotiated at every level with far greater difficulty than the traditional village ethnographer who (following malinowski) might pitch her tent on the margin of the tribal settlement. organizations are very protective of their boundaries, both external and internal, and every boundary-crossing must be negotiated: both to get in the front door, as previously noted, and also to gain access to new levels, upward, downward, and sideways. some, such as kathleen gregory, solve this problem by pitching their tent (figuratively speaking) in a neighboring town where numerous organizational members live, and interviewing them in community settings. others, such as psenka, use sanctioned gateways, such as training classes. sometimes we discover, with respect to some organizations, that (echoing gertrude stein’s comment on oakland, california) “there is no there there.” the organization is sufficiently a-social, with informal interaction practically nonexistent, and employees so alienated, that immersion yields few new insights. yet this finding itself is an insight, purchased only through (attempted) immersion, and reinforcing batteau’s comment that “organization is a process, not a state.” (2000:728). extending this, one of the most insidious aspects of organizations is their capability to rationalize all aspects of human existence. rationalization, borrowing from max weber, is the imposition and extension of instrumental rationality on activities formerly governed by traditional, patrimonial, religious, or charismatic orders. healing, for example, for thousands of years was a craft governed by the traditions of the healing arts, cultivated by shamans, midwives, and granny-women. when healing became institutionalized in the 19th century, with the professionalization of physicians and the creation of hospitals, it began submitting to rational order, although the prestige of the medical profession and its ancient traditions gave physicians and surgeons the upper hand within these organizations. fast-forward to the late 20th century, and negotiations between those committed to the journal of business anthropology, 1(1), spring 2012 86 healing arts – nurses, physicians, and surgeons – and those committed to cost-cutting – institutions, corporations, governments – are the decisive arenas where lives are saved or lost. instrumental and technocratic rationality, as merry described, is very effective at imposing narrow, quantifiable outcomes, even if at the expense of an organization’s avowed raison d’être. when taken to its logical (and shall we say “rational?”) conclusion, technocratic rationality creates a totalitarian régime. some critical challenges that, we would suggest, business anthropology is uniquely qualified to research might include:  how the business world is creating new forms and relationships of value, and how these are negotiated at institutional boundaries? for example, how did facebook get to be so big so fast, and what does it really mean from an anthropological perspective that facebook is a $100 billion company?  what is the relationship in large technical systems between utilitarian and totemic logics? most analyses of large technical systems (e.g., mayntz and hughes 1988) focus on their functionality; the fact that these tend to be national and monumental projects suggests additional dynamics.  what is the translatability of different institutional forms such as co-ops across multiple legal régimes? how might these maintain their integrity faced with the hard power of competition from multinational corporations and the soft power of global philanthropies and audit cultures?  what are some examples from the developing world of successful resistance to technocratic and neoliberal rationalization? what lessons could the developed world draw from them? these empirical and conceptual challenges – the world-bestriding power of investment élites, the ad hoc and ritualistic aspects of the assemblage of monumental and large-scale technologies, and the magical conjurations of technocratic rationality – are issues that humanity is confronting today. these are issues of which anthropological study is only beginning to take note, although other conversations, most notably the european group on organizational studies (egos) and the mouvement anti-utilitariste dans les sciences sociales (mauss), are using the ethnographic lens to interrogate contemporary institutions. our challenge and invitation to anthropology is to get your hands dirty, to transgress the boundary between academia and business, to understand better this brave new world of flexible rationalization. batteau & psenka / horizons of business anthropology in a world of flexible accumulation 87 references arendt, hannah 1966 the origins of totalitarianism. new york: harcourt, brace, and world. baba, marietta 1998 theories of practice in anthropology: a critical appraisal, 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durham: duke university press. karadjoff, margaret 2010 patient safety as an interactional achievement: conversational analysis in the trauma center of an inner city hospital. phd dissertation, department of anthropology, wayne state university, detroit, michigan. kunda, gideon 1992 engineering culture: control and commitment in a high-tech corporation. philadelphia: temple university press. linde, charlotte 1988 the quantitative study of communicative success: politeness and accidents in aviation discourse. language and society: 375-399. mayntz , renate & thomas p. hughes (eds.) 1988 the development of large technical systems. boulder, co: westview press. merry, sally engle 2011 measuring the world: indicators, human rights, and global governance. current anthropology 52, supplement 3, s83-s95. parry, jonathan, & maurice bloch (eds.) 1989 money and the morality of exchange. cambridge university press. batteau & psenka / horizons of business anthropology in a world of flexible accumulation 89 partridge, damani j., marina welder, and rebecca hardin (eds.) 2011 corporate lives: new perspectives on the social life of the corporate form. current anthropology 52:53. peréz-chávez, alejandro and carolyn psenka 2003 una etnographía del diálogo de los pilotos: el sinestro del veulo american airlines 965. anthropos editorial: méxico: universidad iberoamericana (technología, ciencia, naturaleza y sociedad; 12). perin, constance 2004 shouldering risks: the culture of control in the nuclear power industry. princeton university press perrow, charles 1984 normal accidents. new york: basic books. ----1991 a society of organizations. theory and society 20, 725-762. poovey, mary 1998 a history of the modern fact: problems of knowledge in the sciences of wealth and society. university of chicago press. porter, theodore 1995 trust in numbers: the pursuit of objectivity in science and public life. princeton university press. psenka, carolyn e. 2008 a monumental task: translating complex knowledge in nasa’s human space flight network. phd dissertation, department of anthropology, wayne state university, detroit, michigan. riles, annelise 2004 real time: unwinding technocratic and anthropological knowledge. american ethnologist 31(3), 392-405. roethlisberger, f. j., and william j. dickson 1939 management and the worker: an account of a research program conducted by the western electric company, hawthorne works. cambridge ma: harvard university press. roszak, theodore 1969 the making of a counter culture: reflection on the technocratic society and its youthful opposition. garden city, ny: anchor books. sahlins, marshall 1976 culture and practical reason. university of chicago press. strathern, marilyn 2000 audit cultures: anthropological studies in accountability, ethics, and the academy. london: routledge. trix, frances 1993 spiritual discourse: learning with an islamic master. philadelphia: university of pennsylvania press. vargas-cetina, gabriela 2011 corporations, cooperatives, and the state: examples from italy. current anthropology 52, supplement 3, s127s136. warner, w. lloyd 1937 a black civilization: a social study of an australian tribe. new york: harper and brothers. journal of business anthropology, 1(1), spring 2012 90 ----& j. o. low 1947 the social system of the modern factory. new haven ct: yale university press. ----& paul s. lunt 1939 the social life of a modern community. london: oxford university press. weber, max 1978 the types of legitimate domination, in economy and society, chapter 3, sec. 1-4 of part 1: conceptual exposition, vol. 1:212245, e. roth and c. wittch (eds.) translators e. fischoff et. al. berkeley, ca: the university of california press. zaloom, caitlin 2006 out of the pits: traders and technology from chicago to london. university of chicago press. allen w. batteau is an associate professor of anthropology at wayne state university. a graduate of the university of chicago (phd, 1978), he is the author of the book technology and culture (2009, waveland press) and numerous articles on organizational culture. from 2001 to 2009 he led the university’s institute for information technology and culture. a.batteau@wayne.edu. carolyn e. psenka earned her phd in cultural anthropology from wayne state university in 2009. her dissertation, a monumental task: translating complex knowledge in nasa’s human space flight network, examined knowledge management practices with nasa’s space shuttle program. dr. psenka has done extensive ethnographic research in public, private, and government institutions. c.psenka@wayne.edu. mailto:a.batteau@wayne.edu mailto:c.psenka@wayne.edu vi opdaterer systemet vi opdaterer systemet... rauli.cbs.dk opdateres og er snart tilgængeligt. vi opdaterer systemet vi opdaterer systemet... rauli.cbs.dk opdateres og er snart tilgængeligt. incarnation inc. managing corporate values emil a. røyrvik abstract this article describes the substantial efforts put into creating and managing a comprehensive ‘value-based’ corporate culture and identitybuilding program, and reflects on how both the making and the reception of the programme can be understood in light of the three main ways of talking about value/s (economic, moral, meaning). through the program’s use of technologies of production and enchantment, including the magic of advertising, the argument unfolds the program’s processes of valuation through both making visible and creating social relations. the article explores valuation as social practices involved in representation and signification. it argues that the preoccupation with making value visible in an industrial production company is symptomatic of the contemporary ‘economy of signs’, and that resistance towards these efforts shows that valuation in this context is considered more as accurate representation than as signification. keywords management, corporations, valuation, representation, signification, branding, identity page 1 of 24 jba 2(1): 9-32 spring 2013 © the author(s) 2013 issn 2245-4217 www.cbs.dk/jba journal of business anthropology, 2(1), spring 2013 10 introduction in social studies of phenomena, actors, and activities rendered in some sense as ‘economic’, key debates have revolved around the concept of value. the polysemy of the concept – simply outlined, for example, by the difference it connotes as ‘value’ in the singular and ‘values’ in the plural – suggests the complexity and challenges involved in studies of value/s. within sociology alone, eight different literatures have been identified. while not speaking systematically with each other, they are all ‘concerned with how value is produced, diffused, assessed, and institutionalized across a range of settings’ (lamont 2012: 203). however, an emerging common thread in social science perspectives on value/s is to study them as social practices (helgesson og muniesa 2013). striking a similar note in anthropological theorizing about the multiple meanings and discourses of valuation, as well as seeing value/s as social practices, david graeber (2001) identifies three main ways of talking about value: the sociological or moral sense of ‘good’, ‘proper’ or ‘desirable’ values in human life; the economic conception of value that highlights measures of the degree to which objects are desired; and finally, the linguistic or semiotic sense, inherited from saussure, of value as ‘meaningful difference’. value, values and valuation might thus mean a number of things, reflected also in the plurivocality of the terms in various languages. still, a burgeoning literature in the social sciences suggests that such terms are the outcome of extensive institutional effort and social practices devoted to ‘rendering heterogeneous resources commensurable’ (styhre 2013: 52). emphasising how value/s are intimately connected to commensuration, scholars have suggested that valuation could be viewed as processes that bring ‘order to mere differences’, and that it is concerned with ‘how people, things and idea(l)s are ordered in relation to one another’ (kjellberg and mallard 2013: 17). and this again, of course, relates value/s to basic social processes of objectification and classification, although classification and valuation are not exactly the same thing. a fruitful distinction between classification and valuation is that valuation aims more towards signifying the world than accurately accounting for it. as suggested by kjellberg and mallard (2013), one way of highlighting both the link between them and their distinctiveness is to suggest that, as ordering activities, classification and valuation differ in their relative emphases on representation and signification respectively. where classification emphasizes representation over signification, valuation activities are constituted relatively more around signification than representation. however, these differences should be considered more by degree and overlap than by clear cutting divisions. graeber situates the work of marilyn strathern (e.g. 1987, 1988) in the semiotic saussurean tradition. in strathern’s perspective, the social røyrvik / incarnation inc. 11 world is ultimately and invisibly constituted by relations, rather than by things and persons, and while the perceptible world is the vehicle of meanings, the latter originate in a culturally produced and reproduced system of signs (gell 2006). using the work of nancy munn, in particular (e.g. munn 1986), graeber outlines a theory of value that rather departs from the importance of human actions, and invites us to start ‘from the assumption that what is ultimately being evaluated are not things, but actions’. it is here, too, that we recognize the overall starting point of this article, considering valuation as social practice, and in particular social practices that are focused on ordering by means of signification. in strathern’s perspective, objectification is a key concern – understood as the revelation or making visible of underlying relations in perceptible appearances that are vehicles of meaning (gell 2006). in terms of value, this perspective indicates that social relations take on value by being identified vis-à-vis others (graeber 2001: 47). in the approach of munn and graeber, value is rather seen as the actions of creating relations, so that the making visible is simply an acknowledgement of value already present as a potential. according to this perspective, value becomes ‘the way people represent the importance of their own actions to themselves’ (ibid.). this is done through some socially recognised forms, but the value does not originate in the forms themselves. in this article i will ethnographically describe and analyse the social practices of some significant valuation processes in the hydro corporation. i will explore the social practices of managers and members in the company involved in forging and disseminating the so-called ‘hydro way’ – a comprehensive ‘value-based management’ cultureand identity-building program. rather than framing the topic in terms of the extensive literatures on ‘corporate and organizational culture’, the article explores the forms of valuation involved in how managerial and corporate members communicate, in their own terms, ‘who they are’ and ‘what they do’ – both to themselves and to external audiences – and it questions the constructions of value/s these give rise to. this focus is in line with a suggestion for critical challenges to research in business anthropology: ‘how the business world is creating new forms and relationships of value…’ (batteau and psenka 2012: 86). the article analyses the hydro way valuation processes in light of the representation-signification spectrum, and investigates the relative emphases, the organizational supports of valuation, and how valuation processes are interrelated. an underlying assumption of the concerted management actions involved in the hydro way – also signified in the double meaning of their concept of ‘value-based management’ – is that there is a spillover effect or causality between exchanging and enabling unequivocal sociological/moral values, on the one hand, and the creation of economic journal of business anthropology, 2(1), spring 2013 12 value for the company, on the other. i also describe some of the varied reactions instigated among members of the corporation by the hydro way, and argue that, even in such a primary case of ‘instrumentalisation of relations’, there is still some room for ambiguities, ambivalence, and resistance. based in norway, hydro was founded in 1905 – the same year the country celebrated its independence from sweden – and is today a leading actor in the global aluminium production industry, employing 22,000 people in more than 40 countries worldwide. hydro might be considered the most important corporation in the development of the modern, industrial state of norway; yet it had a global outlook from its inception, and today the majority of its employees and operations are found abroad. significantly, hydro is a primary example of the particular nordic model of ‘democratic capitalism’, where ‘democracy’ is perceived as the highest system value of capitalism, and where the corporation is seen to have a broad social role and mandate as a vehicle for societal development and growth. this article focuses on hydro’s own substantial means and efforts at representing and reconstructing itself by means of various languagebased idioms. thus i want to elaborate upon some of the corporation’s explicit ‘communications’, ‘profiling’, and ‘branding’ media material – such as brochures, posters, and pictures – and, not least, on how the major hydro way program, which inscribed the guiding principles for all of this material, was brought into being. before i present the empirical sections, analysis and conclusions, however, i will first contextualize the study within a broader framework and critique of corporate management. value-based management the focus on ‘value-based management’ is part of the historical unfolding of the seminal managerial revolution (shenhav 1999), which in its present state is dominated by creating ‘shareholder value’ (ho 2009). highlighting some of the corollaries of a focus on ‘value-based management’, boltanski and chiapello’s analysis of the ‘new spirit of capitalism’ underscores what they label the modalities of control in ‘neomanagement’, entailing the significant transition from control to selfcontrol. ensuring self-control is achieved by subsuming the inner life – the emotions, values, and personal relations of workers – under productivity and profit motives (boltanski and chiapello 2007: 78–86). they identify, for example, the practice of organizing workers in so-called ‘autonomous teams’, where developing trust and moral contracts is a central and significant mechanism to induce people to control themselves. this is similar to reed’s (2011) summary of ‘neo-bureaucratic control regimes’ as including a focus on ‘team performance’ and peer-group regulatory mechanisms. røyrvik / incarnation inc. 13 an additional characteristic of the new type of ‘managementality’ (sørhaug 2004) is that it also enables relations based on ‘mimetic desire’, the principle of desiring what you think others desire and which makes people ‘want to want’ (ibid.: 104, my translation). in mimetic desire seduction is the basis of power; thus managementality encompasses both (self)discipline and seduction. the managerial technologies occasioning these effects are, in large part, various communications ‘tools and efforts’, employed in this case to create and disseminate the hydro way throughout the organization. as will be shown later, the programme can be seen to utilise the modalities of neo-management and mimetic desire by subsuming the inner life of members (especially their moral values and the making of meaning), and by embedding the organization in the consumption culture and commodity flows that breed mimetic desire. following anthropologist tian sørhaug, i work from the notion that, although leadership is performed in a multiplicity of ways in highly heterogeneous contexts, a cross-culturally universal feature of leadership could be its significance as ‘incarnations of organizational processes’ (sørhaug 2004: 31, my trans., italics in original). that is to say, more or less coordinated human interaction, which at least to some degree is directed towards common values, goals and tasks, is carried forward by or embodied in particular persons. leadership or managing emerges when certain people take or get responsibility for regulating internal and external organizational boundaries in order to facilitate order and direction, and so serve as personal guarantors for organizational structure and strategy. these tasks are difficult for managers to distance themselves from, and thus management is a function with which one not only identifies, but becomes identical (ibid.). while i have analyzed some of the ‘incarnations’ incorporated in managing in hydro elsewhere (røyrvik 2008), i will here understand the hydro way programme as consisting of managerial efforts directed towards reifying and standardising managers somewhat paradoxically as the ‘incarnations of organizational processes’ in a depersonalizing sense. in correspondence with a view of ‘technology’ as cultural efforts aiming at interpretation and mastery of both nature and culture, the ‘communications’ analyzed in this paper are seen, in line with wagner’s analysis of culture (1981), to consist of undertakings aimed at direct interpretation and mastery of hydro’s own cultural values, practices and images. as such, hydro ‘communications tools and efforts’ are examples of aspects of both gell’s ‘technology of production’ and the ‘technology of enchantment’ (1988). the former is defined as ‘i.e. roundabout ways of securing the “stuff” we think we need; food, shelter, clothing, manufactures of all kind’ (ibid.: 7), but also includes the production of signs, that is, communication. for its part, the ‘technology of enchantment’ is the ‘psychological weapons which human beings use to exert control over the thoughts and actions of other human beings’ (ibid.). gell considers this form of technology to be the most sophisticated that journal of business anthropology, 2(1), spring 2013 14 we possess, and includes in it ‘all those technical strategies, especially art, music, dance, rhetoric, gifts, etc., which human beings employ in order to secure the acquiescence of other people in their intentions and projects’ (ibid.). the practices of managing hydro ‘communications’ – where hydro is seen as a whole, a corporate body – are also a form of managing value/s in all the three senses outlined above (sociological, economic and semiotic). they also contribute, on behalf of the hydro legal person, to constructing a type of corporate identity and impression management that takes on value/s through various forms of creation, classification and valuation processes. chief among these processes are the creation and control of information flows, and efforts at symbolically attracting, engaging and reassuring both internal audiences and external ‘stakeholders’ (shareholders included), in order to legitimize their role in various economic and societal markets, communities and contexts. a closer look at the empirical setting and material follows. value integration the hydro way the data in this article are drawn from long-term, multi-sited ethnographic research in collaboration with hydro during the period 2000-2010, with a particular focus on management in a set of the corporation’s industrial projects and production plants in norway, spain, china, and qatar. framed as an ethnographic extended case study, participant and non-participant observation (in offices, meetings, project sites, plants), document analysis (internal and external), and interviews (with corporate [central] managers, local managers, project managers, experts, and operators) were the main methods employed (for detailed descriptions, see røyrvik 2008, 2011). while investigating the internal actors, networks and actions of managers and members of the organization involved in realizing new projects and building new plants, i became increasingly fascinated by both the centralized and local, concerted and emergent, efforts at representing and signifying the value/s of the company both internally and externally. one of the centralized and major initiatives to this end was the so-called ‘hydro way’. in conjunction with hydro’s growing internationalization, especially through its 2002 acquisition of the major german international aluminium company vaw, which lifted hydro to become the world’s third largest integrated aluminium company, hydro top management realized the increasing requirements put on its managers and employees to be able to manoeuvre and move between many different cultural and knowledge traditions and a variety of organizational environments and circumstances. against this background, more of which is discussed below, top management highlighted the importance of ‘value-based management’ røyrvik / incarnation inc. 15 and ‘value integration’ in enabling a purposeful hydro community. the hydro way was the answer to the challenge. value integration is noted in the literature on the knowledge economy (sørhaug 2004: 323) as a major means of sustaining purposeful communion in the face of complexity, diversity, and requirements of flexibility. as such, the hydro way constituted an ambitious effort to manage (economic, moral, meaningful) value/s in a diverse and complex cross-cultural context, such as that afforded by the world-wide hydro corporation. when i visited hydro’s investment projects and production plants in china for the first time, the new hydro way communications material had also been produced and distributed in chinese. everybody i talked to locally was very positive about the material. they had read it and praised hydro for making it available to them. in particular, they were impressed and felt motivated by its contents, and could identify with the values promoted by hydro. when talking about values, they referred variously to different elements of the ‘package’ that comprises the hydro way. as outlined in the quite extensive 30-page brochure ‘hydro way – the principles and believes we live by’, ‘the hydro way is built on a solid foundation: the four talents of our company, our mission and our values’ (p. 4). in a newer, updated and more compact version, the hydro way is defined somewhat differently, as ‘our way of working’.1 in china, herman, the european expat general manager of one of the hydro plants, discussed the hydro way in relation to his newly hired chinese organization and employees: “you know, they have strength. they are very enduring. you can give them five days of manuals to read and they read five days – what we won’t do, what nobody should do, and so on. they really study. if you give them the hydro way, this brochure, i see some of the people are really, really reading this, and translating it into chinese. and they are willing to work very thoroughly with the details of it.” the elements of the ‘hydro way foundation’ are described in the following manner: ‘hydro’s mission is to create a more viable society by developing natural resources and products in innovative and efficient ways’. what it calls its ‘institutional talents’ are described after asking the question: ‘what are the talents at the root of who we are?’ its answer is fourfold. ‘an ability to develop source business; a drive to optimize; an instinct to commercialize; a passion for social commerce’. finally, the hydro values are highlighted as: courage, respect, cooperation, determination and foresight. all of the elements are elaborated upon and illustrated in the brochure with examples from the corporation’s business operations. in the new version, from 2007 onwards, the same mission and 1 this version can be found at: http://www.hydro.com/en/about-hydro/thehydro-way/ (accessed 24 november, 2012). http://www.hydro.com/en/about-hydro/the-hydro-way/ http://www.hydro.com/en/about-hydro/the-hydro-way/ journal of business anthropology, 2(1), spring 2013 16 values are listed, but the talents are somewhat changed. they are now described as in the hydro poster below. figure 1: the 2007-2012 version of the main elements of the ‘hydro way – our way of working’ (source: hydro). the change in the language of the talents was in many ways appropriate (although it was changed back to almost the same as its original version in late 2012). when talking informally about the hydro way and its talents, many experienced managers and experts said that they did not know their meaning, although they had some vague ideas about it. the phrases, in their opinion, were strange. several also found the whole endeavour of ‘branding’ the hydro culture unfamiliar, as sigurd, one of hydro’s premier technological experts, once said during lunch at one of the company’s plants: “yes! the hydro way. my god, on behalf of that stuff one could easily crack two jokes or ten. that’s for sure… but, on the other hand, if one starts thinking through what it means, what it means to each and everybody, then an hour around the lunch table passes quickly.” hans, another corporate manager, and internal ‘owner’ of several of the røyrvik / incarnation inc. 17 company’s plants, was critical of the hydro way effort. “writing down the hydro culture in this way is futile. you cannot export culture like that. it is only when these things are discussed and implemented locally that they have any meaning. when everybody asks what it means for their particular job, for their tasks and activities. if this is done, this whole hydro way business may have an impact.” the hydro corporate facilitators who were responsible for creating and disseminating the hydro way programme were also self-critical in this respect. as one of them said: ‘one area where we could have done a better job is in implementation of the hydro way, to facilitate processes to include the hydro way in daily local work.’ as my impressions accumulated, the hydro way was indeed discussed locally, not least in the china projects and plants. intimately related to the questioning highlighted above, a favourite internal critique of hydro by its own managers was that ‘way too much work is spent on internal processes’. hans, for example, once came back to china from a top managers’ summit in europe and noted: “a german style ruled that meeting, four days in a mediocre town hotel. the awards dinner normally takes us to outstanding places with a very formal dinner, but this time we stayed on the ground floor of the hotel, too. for a week i’ve been back and ‘brainwashed’, back in china, but instead of charged batteries, at least mine seem more on the half empty side. why? i think that we hydro managers are too much occupied with internal programs or initiatives, so that we have no time to do business with customers.” one of the corporate top managers saw the hydro way programme in the perspective of globalization: “when we grow mostly abroad, when most of our employees are non-norwegian, and hydro increasingly becomes a global company, we need to enable better communications, improve at identifying and communicating what our values and our way of doing things are. because hydro still is also norwegian based, and that inheritance we want to preserve.” at one of the company’s intranet ‘netcafés’, where top managers occasionally meet the whole organization ‘online’, and answer questions about issues of importance to the employees by means of a web-based ‘chat-tool’, the hydro aluminium president answered a question concerning hydro culture and values in a global context in the following way: “when we developed the hydro way, we based this on both our norwegian heritage and experiences from our units with strong roots in local communities. the hydro way is the glue in the journal of business anthropology, 2(1), spring 2013 18 organisation, and through our interaction within the sectors and business units, we develop the hydro way further. we emphasize the rotation of people across the organisation as carriers of culture. another tool is the best practice systems to better share and develop our experiences and practices. in addition, we have leadership programs to strengthen our organization and the way we operate.” at both the hydro xi’an and suzhou plants in china, the local ‘human resource’2 managers conducted quite extensive programs of ‘cultural education’ for their employees. using a variety of forms of quizzes, competitions, and reward schemes, the employees learned extensively about hydro, hydro managers and managing styles, as well as norway and norwegian culture. as one of the norwegian expats put it: ‘i am confident that, by now, these chinese employees knows a lot more about hydro history than most of our employees back home in norway. they are very thorough in their approach to these softer issues.’ all of these centralized and local efforts of communicating who ‘we’ – that is, hydro – are relates to the corporation’s ‘presentation of self’. however bizarre this conception might sound, it should be a rather simple observation that the instrumental form of social organization that we call ‘the corporation’, which was conceived with the legal rights of a person, is also in need of an ‘identity’. in our contemporary world the ‘identity’ of a corporation is designated a ‘brand’. hydro has even won prestigious awards for its branded ‘identity’. the valuation processes involved in forming a corporate identity, and the value/s it creates, represent and signify, are part and parcel of the problem investigated here. i will describe further hydro’s corporate rhetoric of representing itself as an objectified cultural whole, as one entity of social relations with identity, an ‘id-entity’. i will show how this is done through objectification and the ‘ordering of mere differences’, in the sense of both creating and making visible social relations. this way of valuation is co-constituted through an extension of the concept of objectification – through what anthropologist tord larsen calls ‘acts of entification’ (2010). in processes of entification ‘… something inchoate congeals into a thing (latin: ens), a unit, a category with discernible boundaries’ (2010: 155). entification highlights the ‘thing-making’ aspects of such processes and relates to the making of identity through conceptualization and externalization. here we can understand entification especially as a concept that expands on the notion of objectification as signifying and the making 2 notice the significance of the term in how it implies human beings perceived of as potential resources, a reification of relations that can be fruitfully contextualized with heidegger’s analysis of technology as a ‘standing reserve’ (1977; cf. røyrvik 2011). røyrvik / incarnation inc. 19 visible of social relations. entification, seen as a process of making something inchoate into a ‘thinglike conceptual entity’, can be considered both as a precondition of thing-making and a prerequisite for management. a distinguishing feature of entification is that qualities can be attached to and detached from objects, the self included, more or less by both strategy and will (larsen 2010). below i present some of hydro’s major efforts at revealing, representing. and communicating its corporate ‘branded’ id-entity through technologies of production and enchantment; and at seeking interpretation and mastery of its own value/s, while highlighting some tensions in the corporation’s acts of entification. the brand process: making value visible the hydro way communications material and platform was intentionally created to convey ‘our way of working’ and ‘who we are’, and was brought into being through an extensive so-called ‘brand process’ throughout hydro, with the aid of the prestigious new york-based ‘siegelgale’ consultancy company.3 based upon extensive hydro executive interviews, focus group interviews throughout the global organization, and surveys of hydro internal audiences, in addition to gathering viewpoints from customers, partners and suppliers, siegelgale presented a total ‘communications platform’. siegelgale was chosen, according to the hydro facilitator for the process, because she felt they ‘had to go to london or new york to get a consultancy that was global enough in its approach and outlook, to encompass and represent the whole of the globalized hydro organization’. the brand process illustrates how ‘corporate culture’ as a managerial tool has come to be favoured by consultants (czarniawska 2011: 126). although the consultancy company’s final presentation found strong resonance with the 200 top managers who were present at the first ‘launch’, there was subsequently considerable discussion among members of top management about some of the chosen values and talents. for example, siegelgale had proposed ‘discipline’ as one core value, but it was later changed to ‘determination’ before the hydro way was officially launched. the hydro facilitator herself regretted this change, because she felt ‘discipline’ was something that adequately captured hydro culture and its norms. however, the top managers argued that it led to associations of forms of authority with which they did not feel comfortable, and with which they did not want to be identified. the proposed value of ‘collaboration’ was also changed into ‘cooperation’ before the official launch. the facilitator regretted this adjustment, too, because she contended that ‘cooperation’ signalled a weaker and less binding form of ‘collaboration’. in addition, the phrasings of the four 3 ‘clarifying the potential of the norsk hydro brand’, internal report, hydro & siegelgale, 2003. journal of business anthropology, 2(1), spring 2013 20 ‘talents’ have varied somewhat over time. notwithstanding these discussions, the hydro way ‘brand’ platform was disseminated thoroughly throughout the company. as indicated above, a variety of different developments instigated the brand process. one was the fact that hydro was becoming an increasingly global, or ‘glocal’ (robertson 1995), actor; another the need for identifying a common foundation to legitimize the inclusion of three main businesses in one company (fertilizers, oil and energy, and aluminium); while a third important impetus was the view that three external factors ‘pushed’ hydro to re-define itself. in the words of the siegelgale report: three external forces have conspired to put hydro at a crossroads, where the company must take a fresh look at how it will create value in the future. 1. a more demanding shareholder places pressure on hydro to emphasize profits first, which calls into question traditional values; 2. the trend to internationalize challenges hydro as a norwegian institution; 3. a growing sustainability imperative defies hydro to live up to its stated commitment to economic, social and environmental responsibility.4 after analysis backed by empirical data, and illustrated by quotes from hydro managers, the four ‘institutional talents’ referred to above were outlined and rationalized in the report. i will here present a few statements and quoted illustrations of each of the talents. unquoted statements below are headlines, bullet-points of analysis, or declarations made in the report. talent #1 – a bias towards developing “source businesses” hydro is drawn to businesses that govern the creation of future value and which have a fundamental, rather than an incremental, influence on society […] certain values, endemic to norway, contribute to hydro’s natural inclination to nurture source businesses: -a long-term view—hydro tends to measure value over time rather than overnight. seriousness of purpose—hydro people take their work, and the company’s role in society, seriously. “working at hydro, you have an understanding that what you are doing is important. it makes a difference, everyday, in the lives of millions of people.”—agri employee 4 italics in the original throughout, unless stated to the contrary. røyrvik / incarnation inc. 21 “hydro would never manufacture something like toothpaste. it just wouldn’t happen. we are too serious for that.”—corporate employee the concept of ‘source business’ is difficult to understand at face value, even for experienced managers, although it is vividly acknowledged and illustrated when unfolded in a dialogic context. in conversation with the hydro way facilitator, she at one point lamented: “of course, introducing the hydro way in such a culture as ours, it was unfamiliar for many people. for most of our staff what hydro is doing is self-evidently important and beneficial to society. it does not need any form of ‘profiling’ or ‘branding’. you know what we say, that hydro has ‘a very high level of its low profile’. this is because what we do permeates society fundamentally.” according to the hydro way facilitator, hydro has so much power in and impact on society that it necessitates a form of humbleness and unobtrusiveness in the company’s representational idioms. its actions speak for themselves. nevertheless she defended the hydro way, and this talent was later renamed ‘building businesses that matter’. the second talent was presented in the siegelgale report in the following way: talent #2 – a drive to optimize hydro is naturally inclined to make the most of what it has. hydro was founded on the idea that nature’s yield could be improved through the application of science and technology. values such as frugality and thrift grew in an environment where resources were not expendable. some of the quotes from hydro managers’ supporting the analysis were the following: “norway is an agricultural society and even our business structure is agricultural. think about what counts on a farm – thrift, frugality – it’s puritanical.” —corporate executive. “i don’t want to create something fancy for the sake of something fancy. that’s wasteful.” —aluminium executive. “there’s a classic viking poem called the golden middle way which states that not enough is not good, but too much is not good either. that still applies.” —o&e partner. “we’re a company that appreciates things. we don’t squander assets. we get the most – or try to get the most – from our resources.” —agri executive this talent later changed its expression to ‘making the most of what’s available’ (before being changed back again). an anecdote that briefly illustrates some of these ‘talents’ and their accompanying internal journal of business anthropology, 2(1), spring 2013 22 tensions happened when i was doing participant observation at the corporate headquarters in oslo. alexander, a storyteller by nature, and i were informally discussing the big qatalum project in qatar – inaugurated in 2010 and the largest aluminium plant in the world built in a single phase. he had recently returned from his first trip and was excited by the meeting with the company’s partners in qatar, as well as by his encounter with arab culture. he spontaneously confided something that was of some surprise to him. “you know, we actually had to travel first class. all three of us travelling from norway, we had to book first class seats on the plane.” “oh, that sounds horrible,” i shrugged. “well, you see, we also had to upgrade our hotel standard down there considerably from that which we ordinarily use, because otherwise it would have been very wrong in relation to our partner qatar petroleum. how the standards of this and that are supposed to be. they would have noticed at the other end.” telling this revealed something about what alexander, and presumably his colleagues, considered how the ‘normal’ way things were done in hydro related to other standards (of this and that) – and presumably also, wittingly or not, what they wanted to communicate as normal. both the impression of the hydro way process and product and this anecdote involving alexander were reinforced by president and ceo, eivind reiten, when he emphasized in an interview with me the fact that he considered the organization to be ‘deeply serious and sober’. the third ‘institutional talent’, the ‘instinct to commercialize’ – later changed to ‘always looking for commercial solutions’ (before reverting to its original form) – was according to the brand analysis by siegelgale not yet ‘fully realized’. hydro’s ‘commercial potential was widely acknowledged’, and was evident especially in highly profitable businesses like oil and energy, as well as in the company’s ‘entrepreneurial bent’, but it still had not been fully realized in terms of ‘profit potential’. in terms of stock values and market capitalization, this was realized most extensively in the years following publication of the report in 2003 until the financial crisis of 2008. the fourth talent, ‘a passion for social commerce’, was also something of a confusing concept for many hydro managers. in the siegalgale report, it was described as follows: talent #4 – a passion for ‘social commerce’ since its inception hydro has fused business performance and societal contribution into a single discipline. business demands and societal demands are viewed as inseparable and interdependent. røyrvik / incarnation inc. 23 some quotes from employees and managers illustrate this talent.5 “i would like to resolve the stupid tension between money and society because they are one and the same.” —corporate executive. “we see the world through one lens where there is no distinction between business performance and social contribution. they are mutually supportive.” —corporate employee. “i don’t think we have the capacity to isolate business needs from social needs—not without a lot of trial and some pain.” —aluminium executive “for better, for worse, we’ve used profit in ways that let us contribute more over time—not just to customers and shareholders, but to people generally.” —o&e employee. “we helped build a country not just a company. it is in our blood to see the world of business through the lens of society.” —corporate executive. “the very premise of our existence was to help found a nation, not just make money.” —o&e employee. in conversation with the head of hydro communications, she emphasized that concepts like corporate social responsibility more often than not becomes an ‘add-on’, something on top of, or beside, the daily operations of a corporation. a communications manager can be considered as a ‘reputation manager’, and thus the person responsible for ‘impression management’ in the presentation of the ‘corporate self’. in the terminology of gell, this role might have been labelled something like the ‘chief technology of enchantment officer’. in hydro, ‘impression management’ stressed the integration of aspects of corporate social responsibility with the company’s daily operations and the fact that it was an inherent part of doing business. a manifest consequence of this was that the annual reporting on such issues was not extracted, taken out of its business context, or given a separate section in the corporation’s report. rather, it permeated top management’s reporting of business operations, in which those concerned tried to convey how csr was integral to its corporate activities. in a news post on the hydro website, they praised their own branding efforts: hydro praised for innovative branding. ‘hydro really knows what branding' means,’ asserts the american branding expert karen romer in a double-page spread in the norwegian daily business paper, finansavisen, on wednesday. the paper cites hydro as an example of valuable brand building and coordinated communications without parallel in norway. finansavisen points to 5 i have omitted some of the quotations included in the report. journal of business anthropology, 2(1), spring 2013 24 the fact that hydro’s profiling of its values through ‘the hydro way’ and marking of its centennial has attracted the attention of communications strategists and branding experts. ‘there's a common theme running through all of norsk hydro's communications, both internally and externally. the result is extremely good, and it was surprising that they have ventured to take such a novel approach,’ says branding expert and advisor karen romen. ‘this is related to experience marketing, and i haven't seen anything comparable in norway. this is quite unique, and the management of norsk hydro really seem to know what branding is all about,’ she says. mediums and messages in addition to its textual representations, hydro, as a corporate body, communicates both internally and externally by a variety of means – from pictures and short movies to internet, and intranet (for example, through ‘netcafés’). in conjunction with its centennial celebration, for example, hydro launched a corporate-wide photo contest, ‘capturing hydro’, where employees were invited to ‘visualize viability’. professional photography artists were also invited to make works based on their own chosen hydro context. photos and movies are also actively used through various advertising and profile campaigns and movies disseminated through their internal and external website. the profiling photographs used by hydro are now aligned with the long-since established advertising standards of putting the products into the everyday lives of people. although delivering ‘source’ solutions, and not end customer products, the imperative of ‘people’s everyday lives’ and their commodity exchanges seem also to have become a key legitimizing idiom for hydro business. advertising makes technology meaningful (and thus valuable in one sense), and according to roy wagner ‘… interprets [it] by creating for its audience a life that includes them… it does so by objectifying the products and their qualities through the means of personal impulses, situations, likes and dislikes’ (1981: 62). for gell (1988) there is an intimate relationship between technologies and magic, and magic in modern societies finds one of its prime forms in advertising. for him, magic as an adjunct to technological processes continues because it serves symbolic and cognitive functions. in gell’s perspective magic comprises a symbolic ‘commentary’ on the technologies of production, reproduction and enchantment – a commentary which idealizes situations and goes ‘beyond the frontiers of the merely real’ (1988: 8). this magical commentary ‘inserts the ideal in the real’, and provides also the imagery of ideal, costless, and unhampered production. taking his cue from malinowski, who also suggested that magic in modern societies did not disappear but rather diversified and became more difficult to identify, gell discloses how the røyrvik / incarnation inc. 25 ‘flattering images of commodities purveyed in advertising coincide exactly with the equally flattering images with which magic invests its objects’ (1988: 9). similarly, in wagner’s perspective, advertising also ‘works like magic’ in its simulation of culture, and manages to objectify qualities of a product in terms of situational imageries (see figure 2 below). ‘the product becomes the means by which the advertiser’s magical vision of life can be the consumer’s own life: all the consumer has to do is to believe in the magic and buy the product’ (wagner 1981: 66). this in turn brings forth the ‘meaningful’ (and valuable) product as a projection of everybody’s everyday life. figure 2: typical profiling pictures used by hydro in its self-representation and ‘communications’ activities. also for a ‘source’ industrial business, not selling finished end-customer products, it seems to be of vital legitimizing concern to place their products in the context of the everyday life of consumers, consumer culture, and commodity exchanges (pictures source: hydro). in line with these arguments, we can better understand hydro’s efforts in their managerial representation and dissemination of signs and technologies of enchantment (and production). the aspects of everyday life that seem to be of most importance today for economic actors, including a company like hydro, are indeed consumer life and culture. it is interesting in our case then to realize that no consumer ever buys a hydro product as such, although they do buy products of which hydro has delivered some fundamental underlying component. hydro does not need particular people as consumers to buy its products, and thus does not need to sell them anything. the corporation’s profiling efforts cannot, journal of business anthropology, 2(1), spring 2013 26 therefore, be perceived to be attempts at enchanting the consumer, but rather to legitimize its key place and role in society. and when ‘society’ is reproduced to a large extent through consumer culture, the idioms of this sphere seems to be the only, or at least the most effective, means of also representing and communicating hydro’s role and contributions. hydro rhetorically adapts its ‘source business’ to the idiomatic vernacular of ‘magic’ commodity exchanges. if we are to believe gell in his conclusion that the ‘propagandists, image-makers, and ideologues of technological culture are its magicians’, and that ‘technology and magic, for us, are one and the same’ (1988: 9), it is understandable that also hydro engages in waving the enchanter’s wand. id-entifying values the extensive managerial efforts and intentions invested in the hydro way programme and material can be analysed as concerted actions to achieve ‘value-based’ shared meanings, corporate communion and identity, and to create ‘legitimate authority’ (arendt 2006) by grounding power in shared values. based on the extensive ‘brand process’, hydro chose its values, mission and talents. it seemed that most members recognized themselves in the ‘hydro way’, identifying a link between the signs and the reality they experienced, although it seems as if it was those involved in the corporation’s china ventures who felt most embraced. still, as we have seen, managers and other members alike expressed some scepticism at this major effort of externalizing and explicating ‘the hydro values’ of ‘who we are’ and ‘what we do’. illustratively, an extensive list of potential values emerged during the branding process, and thus several other values could have been chosen. as the siegalgale report argued, ‘the idea of ensuring viability by developing natural advantage implies particular values’, and subsequently it listed a range of values – from ingenuity and pragmatism to responsibility and empathy. although ‘respect’ and ‘cooperation’ were finally chosen, if the imperatives of the contemporary ‘economy of signs’ more or less dictates the forging of corporate ‘branded identities’, we may ask ourselves why the report did not include, for example, a word about the company’s particular ‘democratic capitalism’ and ‘participative’ value tradition of which it has been so proud and which it sees as constitutive of its work life relations and managing? in hydro’s quest for an ‘identity’, objectified as an instrument for bringing about shared understandings and ways of working – indeed for explicating and valuating ‘who we are’, and ‘what we do’ – i have suggested that identity becomes objectified to a certain degree through what was discussed above as ‘acts of entification’ (larsen 2010). the objectification entailed the valuation processes of making visible and creating valued and valuable social relations, and would seem to highlight something new when conceptualized as ‘entification’. this concept refers røyrvik / incarnation inc. 27 to the rendering of qualities as ‘detachable properties’ that can be attached and detached at will, and thus be instrumentally subjected to choice, change, and control. larsen argues that ‘entification is a prerequisite of management and governmentality. and as the demand for management increases, so does the number of manageable entities…’ (2010: 155-6). in light of the self-critical assessments of the hydro way made by people in hydro, we might note that they reflect the inherent potential for ‘overstretch’ or ‘dangers’ of entification. in practice, they do not argue that ‘anything goes’, or that this is the hydro way of being and doing which is seen as detached from hydro everyday practices. indeed, in some senses the situation is rather to the contrary. departing from the perspective of strathern, we might thus with the hydro way case see that making visible relations can in some sense ruin or debase them through acts of entification. we might argue that, when the hydro way valuation practices were perceived to move valuation too far towards the signification end of the representation-signification spectrum, both managers and other members in hydro showed some resistance, as they insisted for the most part that the hydro way had to represent ‘what we are’ and ‘what we do’ quite accurately for it to take on value for them. if the relative emphasis on signifying overshadowed representing hydro precisely, people perceived the value to diminish. this means that they considered valuation processes as (also) fundamentally constituted by representation. the very thorough ‘brand process’ that was both built upon and grounded in the hydro way, signifying communications material in its members experiences, also testifies to this. and yet in strathern’s concept of objectification value is also taken on in social relations, partially by being simultaneously detachable from them. ‘value is thus constructed in the identity of a thing or person with various sets of social relations in which it is embedded, and its simultaneous detachability from them’ (strathern 1987: 286). however, we might argue that, with acts of entification, a new layer of agential utility-based attachment and detachment is added to the valuation processes. the hydro way was depicted as valuable by members as an ‘elevation’ or explicating ‘concentration’ of ‘true’ experienced qualities. outside of the practical contexts and actually occurring relations and circumstances, it was to some extent seen as useless, sometimes laughable, and also with a potential to undermine social relations and thus to punctuate power/authority. thus, an(other) unintended consequence of the hydro way’s potential capacity to undermine power relations (for example, through management becoming the laughing stock of members) is that it might provide a space for resistance. it seems like the creational project and production ethos of the corporation (røyrvik 2011) to a large extent favours a perspective of value as the power to represent and create accurately, as well as to keep, a tight relationship between signs and referents. as such, it may function as an antidote to journal of business anthropology, 2(1), spring 2013 28 ‘sliding off’ towards a more pure sign-based view of value, characteristic of current financialised capitalism and its focus on ‘value appreciation’ (ibid.) – even if parts of management do that. the hydro way also has two radically different use contexts: internal and external. in both contexts, the hydro way might be seen as ‘objectified signs of the corporate self’, produced to some extent through acts of entification, but the relations of the sign to practical experiences of ‘reality’, or between signifier and signified, are different. while being awarded prizes externally for its ‘branded identity’, internally these forms of identity creation and revelation were viewed with a healthy scepticism. in line with larsen’s proposition that ‘identity discourse becomes a symptom of the very ailment it seeks to cure…’ (2010: 157), this might signify that those concerned perceive the thematization, instrumentalization and aesthetization of identity as somehow potentially undermining revered qualities, practices, and relations, and thus as something to be treated carefully. internally, members insisted upon a ‘representational’, and in one sense non-arbitrary, relationship between the signifier (the hydro way material) and the signified (the meanings of hydro values and cultural practices as experienced by members). members’ reactions were in these senses somewhat in tune with larsen’s conclusion: ‘when identities become instrumentalized, they no longer define our selves and attune our perceptions of the world. but they gain in visibility as calculable entities within the reputation economy’ (ibid.: 159-60). in the economy of signs, expectation-based value appreciation has to a large extent substituted production-based value creation, and the product is partly just an ‘excuse’ for value appreciations. and hydro succeeded tremendously in the value appreciation game. following its turn to value-based management and ‘shareholder value’ in 1999, the market value of the company increased in the years up to the financial crisis of 2007 by about 600 per cent, well ahead of competitors. we might thus argue that, in terms of economic – or rather financial – valuation, external audiences – in particular, financial markets – were certainly seduced by the (depersonalized) signification of value-based management. inside hydro, the corporation’s continuing conspicuous concerns with process and product quality, its relationship to knowledge-based projects and production, and possibly also its ‘closeness to nature’, as well as a far-away from end-customer position, all contribute to continued resistance against the notions of identity branding in the sense developed by, for example, naomi klein (2001). in the case of consumer brands like ‘lacoste’ or ‘tommy hilfiger’, the sign engulfs and usurps the ‘material’ product, and for significant purposes the brand has itself, through a process of entification, become the product of exchange in an economy of signs. still, in hydro, the brand ‘adds value’, but it is a value derived from underlying, purportedly ‘real material’, qualities of the product and its røyrvik / incarnation inc. 29 underlying relations. thus the distinction between image and product is still maintained, though not completely naturalized. for internal purposes in hydro, valuation processes are more related to the creation of valuable relations and to their accurate representations, than on signifying and making social relations visible. and as the financial crisis showed, when hydro stocks plummeted along with those of most other companies, the seductive allure of value appreciation is indeed questionable. resistance and crisis of authority? both the hydro way material itself, and in particular managers’ and members’ responses to it, instantiate at some levels within the corporation and instrumental domain itself a resistance to commodification and aspects of neo-management, as well as to valuebased managementality. although the hydro way also sought to position hydro within consumer culture and commodity exchanges, it comprehensively aimed at embedding the values and activities of hydro in wider moral, symbolic and societal contexts. it did not seek to do away with all other considerations (ethical, transcendental, etc.), other than the free circulation of commodities. rather, in line with its tradition as an exponent of democratic capitalism, it seemed to aim at re-embedding hydro activities in such broader circumstances (røyrvik 2011). the reactions instigated by the hydro way material among members also attest to such an interpretation of resistance (towards the seductive significations of managementality) and re-embedding. even though the material itself to some extent was ridiculed, it was nevertheless perceived as valuable and useful to invoke in practical social relations and concrete situations of communicative interaction – not least in the creation of new organizations and production plants: for example, in china. in such situations, the hydro way was seen as a reminder of the larger social circumstances in which hydro activities are embedded. the hydro way case illustrates how valuation processes can be seen as interrelated. in the programme, all three of the main modes of talking about value, the sociological or moral, the economic, and the semiotic are accentuated. the hydro way programme is in large part about creating meaning and shared understandings, and it is constituted by an ‘array of signs’ that seeks, through various modes of appearances, to make visible underlying relations, and to include and enroll new relations to become vehicles for shared meanings. furthermore, managerial effort is invested in the hydro way to both initiate discussions and take on values of sociological/moral concern, as the hydro way ‘mission’, ‘values’ and ‘talents’ are all expressions of morality. finally, the hydro way is not least enacted to create economic value, because one pronounced aim of the programme was to improve the organization so that it would also perform better in economic terms. to the extent that it succeeds in this, the hydro way also instantiates perspectives on value/s as the power to journal of business anthropology, 2(1), spring 2013 30 create and make visible new social relations through managers’ and members’ actions and assessments of what they are doing. at the same time, the hydro way might be seen to instantiate a crisis of (neo)management or ‘managementality’. indeed, it exemplifies the modern crisis of ‘legitimate authority’ (arendt 2006) in a new way, in that it seeks to standardise and, in one sense, depersonalize the relations of management and relations between managers and members. it acquires this depersonalisation by ‘distilling’, ‘extracting’ and standardising the incarnation process, whereby leadership crossculturally has been seen to personify organisational processes. through the hydro way, incarnation is externalized into the significations of various technologies of production and enchantment. in some ways it turns objectification – the revelation and/or creation of relations – into ‘entification’, where the sign to some extent might be seen to usurp the relations it wants to reveal/create. a potential effect is that it might become a symptom of the problems it seeks to solve, and undermine the goals it wants to achieve. nevertheless, the material also indicates resistance, both among managers and other members, towards commodification and a fullfledged and detached ‘entification of relations’. both managers and members were not completely seduced by the significations of ‘managementality’ in the depersonalized, incarnated hydro way. the case illustrates how different types of valuations as social practices are interrelated and have context-specific trajectories and emphases in a profit-making corporation. it indicates that corporations might evaluate the importance of their own actions and so come to represent their role in society quite differently. references arendt, h. 2006 ‘what is authority?’ pp. 91-142 in her between past and future. new york: penguin. batteau, a. w. and c. e. psenka 2012 ‘horizons of business anthropology in a world of flexible accumulation.’ journal of business anthropology 1(1): 72-90. boltanski, l. and e. chiapello 2007 the new spirit of capitalism. london and new york: verso. czarniawska, b. 2011 ‘organization theory meets anthropology: a story of an encounter.’ journal of business anthropology 1(1): 118-140. gell, a. 1988 ‘technology and magic.’ anthropology today 4(2): 6–9. røyrvik / incarnation inc. 31 gell, a. 2006 ‘strathernograms, or the semiotics of mixed metaphors,’ pp. 29-75 in e. hirsch (ed.) the art of anthropology: essays and 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(eds.) managing modernity. beyond bureaucracy? oxford: oxford university press. robertson, r. 1995 ‘glocalization: time-space and homogeneityheterogeneity,’ pp. 25-44 in m. featherstone, s. m. lasch and r. robertson (eds.) global modernities. london: sage. røyrvik, e. a. 2008 directors of creation: an anthropology of capitalist conjunctures in the contemporary. phd dissertation, norwegian university of science and technology (ntnu). isbn 978-82-471-1301-1. røyrvik, e. a. 2011 the allure of capitalism. an ethnography of management and the global economy in crisis. new york and oxford: berghahn books. shenhav, y. a. 1999 manufacturing rationality: the engineering foundations of the managerial revolution. new york: oxford university press. strathern, m. 1987 ‘conclusion,’ pp. 278-302 in m. strathern (ed.) dealing with inequality: analysing gender relations in melanesia and beyond. cambridge: cambridge university press. http://dx.doi.org/10.3384/vs.2001-5992.13111 http://dx.doi.org/10.3384/vs.2001-5992.13111 http://dx.doi.org/10.3384/vs.2001-5992.131111 http://dx.doi.org/10.3384/vs.2001-5992.131111 journal of business anthropology, 2(1), spring 2013 32 strathern, m. 1988 the gender of the gift: problems with women and problems with society in melanesia. berkeley: university of california press. styhre, a. 2013. ‘the economic valuation and commensuration of cultural resources: financing and monitoring the swedish culture sector.’ valuation studies 1(1): 51-81. sørhaug, t. 2004 managementalitet og autoritetens forvandling: ledelse i en kunnskapsøkonomi. bergen: fagbokforlaget. wagner, r. 1981 the invention of culture. chicago: university of chicago press. emil røyrvik is a senior research scientist at sintef technology & society, norway. his research is on ethnography and anthropological theory in the context of management, organization and political economy. he has recently published a chapter in organisational anthropology: doing ethnography in and among complex organisations (pluto press, 2013, eds. garsten and nyqvist), an article in culture unbound: journal of current cultural research (2012), and a monograph, the allure of capitalism: an ethnography of management and the global economy in crisis (berghahn book, 2011). he may be reached at emil.royrvik@sintef.no http://dx.doi.org/10.3384/vs.2001-5992.131151 http://dx.doi.org/10.3384/vs.2001-5992.131151 mailto:emil.royrvik@sintef.no vi opdaterer systemet vi opdaterer systemet... rauli.cbs.dk opdateres og er snart tilgængeligt. the senses in anthropological and marketing research: investigating a consumer-brand ritual holistically timothy de waal malefyt abstract the study of the senses encompasses a range of approaches from the social sciences and humanities. anthropology, in particular, turns our attention away from previous considerations of the senses as biologically determined and universally fixed, to more interactive, adaptable and fluid concepts of the senses that are continuously shaped by culture, geography and history. alternately, business marketers increasingly explore the senses and consumer’s sensory response to brands as a means of eliciting deeper, more personal experiences with products and services. while anthropologists regard the senses as a form of social interaction, marketers seek to maximize consumer-brand relations by targeting specific sensory responses to consumption. this study integrates both views in an ethnographic investigation of a brand ritual. it examines the sensorial dimensions and symbolic associations of a shaving ritual that foster skills and reformulate time, which inform culturally situated notions of self-presentation and identity. this study advances a more holistic sensory approach to brand rituals as a means of enhancing consumer brand relationships and experiential consumption studies. page 1 of 26 jba 4(1): 5-30 spring 2015 © the author(s) 2015 issn 2245-4217 www.cbs.dk/jba journal of business anthropology, 4(1), spring 2015 6 keywords anthropology of the senses, brand, consumer behavior, ritual, sensory marketing introduction the study of the senses, once the domain of psychology and studies on perception, has expanded to encompass a range of approaches from the social sciences and humanities. disciplines such as anthropology have joined history, sociology, geography, design, religion, and cultural studies to reveal the extent to which the senses are constructed and lived variously in different cultures, subcultures, and historical periods (howes 1991, 2003). anthropology, in particular, turns our attention away from previous considerations of the senses as biologically determined and universally fixed, to more interactive, adaptable, and fluid concepts of the senses that are continuously shaped by culture, geography, and history (bendix 2005; brenneis 2005; classen 1997; geurts 2002; howes 1991, 2003, 2005; hsu 2008; ingold 2000; stoller 1989, 1997; synnott 1991). for sensory anthropologists, the human sensorium, which straddles the divide between mind and body, cognition and sensation, is viewed as a cultural construction that is “socially made and mediated” in interaction (hsu 2008:433). anthropological investigations of the senses inform how culture-specific concepts and practices of sensory experience shape people’s day-to-day interactions and mark what is meaningful in life. contemporary marketing also advocates that products of all sorts―from the advertising of bathroom fixtures to chewing gum, and fabric conditioner to cars―can evoke strong sensory responses and consumption experiences that appeal directly to consumers (howes 2013). krishna affirms that “products are sensual in nature… the more a firm can create, accentuate, or highlight the sensuality of their products, the more appealing these products can be for consumers” (2010:1). creating sensations, or bringing attention to existing sensations, can increase the appeal of products or services to consumers (hultén, broweus and van dijk 2009; krishna 2010). marketers view consumers’ sensory response to brands as a means of eliciting deeper, more personal relations with products and services, and as a way to drive product purchase and enhance brand loyalty. the greater the number of sensory modalities stimulated at any one time, the richer the consumer’s experience will be (bahrick and lickliter 2000; schifferstein and spence 2007; spence 2002; stein and meredith 1993). the hope for marketers is to unite all the senses in a cascading effect and create a “supreme sensory experience” that wins over the consumer (hultén et al. 2009). this essay examines the rising interest in sensory approaches to consumer behavior. it incorporates sensory approaches of malefyt / the senses in anthropological 7 anthropologists that regard the senses as a form of social interaction, with marketing interests in the senses that seek to maximize consumer brand experience through targeting specific sensory responses to consumption. while an anthropological approach seeks a more holistic and integrative understanding of the ways that humans actively sense and make sense of their world, a marketing approach applies those experiences in terms of expanding consumption opportunities in novel ways. as a way to integrate these two theoretical viewpoints and develop a sensory-rich approach to consumer research, this essay investigates a consumer-brand ritual for a men’s grooming product. ethnographic analysis of a shaving ritual highlights the qualitative aspects of consumer sensory engagement, which are less available through marketing approaches of experimental design or statistical studies of the senses. towards an anthropology of the senses within the last two decades anthropologists have increasingly focused their attention on the human sensorium as a cultural category for investigation. in the 1980s and 1990s, an “anthropology of the senses” was established by the work of classen (1993, 1998), howes (1991, 2003, 2005), stoller (1989, 1997), feld (1982), and feld and basso (1996). sensory studies have since expanded to include a cultural history of the senses (classen 1993, 1998, 2012), the sensual revolution (howes 2005), sensuous scholarship (stoller 1997), sensuous geography (rodaway 1995), a sociology of the senses (synnott 1993; vannini, waskul, and gottschalk 2012), the senses and perception (ingold 2000), senses of place (feld and basso 1996), the sensorium of contemporary arts (jones 2006), sensory architecture (malnar and vodvarka 2004), sensory ethnography (pink 2004, 2009), and ways of sensing contemporary society (howes and classen 2013) among other studies. while acknowledging different challenges to sensory studies, these views champion a more multi-sensory orientation towards theory, cultural understanding and fieldwork practices. sensory anthropologists distinguish themselves from those adopting other approaches to the senses by taking a decidedly social and cultural approach. anthropologists claim that sensory experience is generated between and among people, places and events, rather than in an individual’s body (hsu 2008). as opposed to dividing the body and mind, and treating the senses as biological vehicles that merely channel information to the brain, anthropologists and sociologists regard the active interplay among sensory experience, emotion, memory, and cognition as deeply contingent upon situated meaning and context. vannini and colleagues posit: “as we sense we also make sense” (vannini et al. 2012:15). scholars regard human sensing as an interpretive process, and therefore explore the interactive ways that the senses are socially patterned within culture; how the senses are culturally ordered and journal of business anthropology, 4(1), spring 2015 8 variously ranked across cultures; and the ways in which the senses are linked to emotion, memory, and experience. anthropologists note the ways humans attend to what is cued by culture, rather than hold that humans perceive and understand the same experience universally. in particular, anthropologists seek to learn how culture-specific concepts and practices of sensory experience shape people’s day-to-day interactions and mark what is meaningful in life. this practice is indicated cross-culturally in consumption by what people may consider to be “good” or “bad” food, or by what is regarded as beautiful or not. in such interactions meaning is emergent and produced interactively among people, places, events, and materials, which vary by cultural context. herzfeld (2001:244) explains that: “to stare at someone may signify rudeness, curiosity, flattery, or domination, depending on the circumstances and the culture. downcast eyes, in contrast, may suggest modesty, fear, contemplation, or inattention. and these are simply the possibilities for cultural coding, within which personal idiosyncrasies may produce further variation…” the senses thus play a vital role in coding, producing and maintaining different perceptual modalities, which mediate daily experience and vary by culture and situation within culture. cultural orders and the senses anthropologists also investigate the ways that perception and the senses are ordered and ranked by cultural contexts and social interactions. the patterning of sense experience is not universal, but rather, “varies from one culture to the next in accordance with the meaning of and emphasis attached to each of the modalities of perception” (howes 1991:3). people of one culture may prioritize the senses in particular hierarchies, with various associative meanings over other cultures. the anlo ewe children of ghana, africa, for instance, incorporate all five senses―including a “sixth sense” of moral and bodily-enacted balance―to navigate their world, different from western children who are taught to rely on vision and audition as primary modes for learning (geurts 2002). in papua new guinea, the kaluli people have developed fine acoustical skills to traverse the dense and visually obscure rainforests. acoustic orientation to their world not only enhances kaluli perceptual inputs, but also culturally structures folklore, dance and body décor (feld 1982). in indian ceremonies, the sensual concept of rasa blends the tasting of food and beverage with pleasure, leading to a heightened emotional appreciation of the entire event. food, along with enjoyment of the ceremony, is literally and metaphorically “tasted, ingested, and excreted” in a “snout-to-bellyto-bowel” mixing of intimacy and shared bodily substances among audience and performers (schechner 2007:10). the songhey sorcerers of malefyt / the senses in anthropological 9 africa learn power in healing rituals and history of their culture by “eating and tasting it, ingesting odors and tastes, savoring textures and sounds” (stoller 1997:3). even in western culture, apparently “universal” color schemes can be politicized with alternative cultural meanings. ireland, known as “the green isle,” is variously identified in the different ways people “see green.” color is used as an identity marker, from the ban on the wearing of green during british colonialism, to green signifying the color of the republican revolutionary organization, to green marketed in outsiders’ construction of celebrating irishness, such as turning the chicago river green for st. patrick’s day and drinking green beer (wulff 2011). these examples inform different modes of cultural perception, as culture-specific concepts and practices generate particular forms of social interaction for what is meaningful in life, how emotions are expressed, and how people should interact with material things. the senses in marketing corporations are also increasingly paying attention to consumer experience through sensory modalities. “sensory appeals are everywhere, they are increasingly personalized and they are intensifying,” writes journalist postrel (2003:5). business consultants hultén and colleagues posit that recent sensory awareness has launched “a new epoch in marketing,” where “the five senses will be at the center of a firm’s marketing strategy and tactics” (hultén et al. 2009:2). sensory marketing, they hold, supersedes mass and relationship marketing because it involves “heightened consumer involvement with objects on a personal level” (2009:5). the marketing belief is that the greater the number of a consumer’s senses engaged, or the deeper engagement of a particular sense, the stronger an emotional impression is made between consumer and branded product (hultén et al. 2009). marketing research confirms that consumers’ heightened sensory experience results in increased engagement and greater emotional involvement with products (krishna 2010; schifferstein and spence 2007). a cursory view in the field of scent demonstrates the range of specific effects of scent on product evaluation and consumer decisionmaking (bone and ellen 1999; mitchell, kahn, and knasko 1995; spangenberg, crowley, and henderson 1996). scent can attract attention, evoke memories, and affect consumer decisions for items that are familiar and unfamiliar (morrin and ratneshwar 2000, 2003). indeed, marketers note the ways that scent influences consumer memory for selecting certain branded products. in one experiment, scented pencils evoked greater recall from subjects than unscented pencils, even after a prolonged period of time (krishna, lwin, and morrin 2010). marketing research on the senses also explores multisensory combinations or consumers’ cross-modal sensory responses. experimental research on multisensory experience shows the powerful journal of business anthropology, 4(1), spring 2015 10 effect of congruence between touch and smell, such that the input of one sense affects a consumer’s perception of another sense, as in scented gel packs perceived to aid in the treatment of pain (krishna, elder, and caldara 2010). in another instance, researchers discovered the relationship between perceptions of touch and taste: for example, that mineral water served in firmer cups tasted “better” to subjects than water served in flimsy cups (krishna and morrin 2008). other experiments have focused on consumer response to visual written information and verbal system processing (paivio 1971, 2007). humans respond “better” to active pictures that enhance their memories and thus affect their behavior. for instance, imagery of dynamic action built into signs can influence consumers’ perceptions and reactions, affecting their responsiveness to various signage (cian, krishna, and elder 2014). nevertheless, sensory anthropologists may inquire how these structured investigations might be contextualized and applied more holistically to everyday consumer situations. when, for instance, does everyday consumer enjoyment of a brand begin, and what are the sensory dimensions that subjectively lead to positive “peak experiences” (privette 1983)? a sociologist recalls his total enjoyment of coffee as greater than any one, two or several isolated sensory cues that might be evaluated separately: “i genuinely enjoy the total sensual experience of fresh-brewed morning coffee. the taste of coffee incorporates its smell, but the smell of the coffee i drink is quite different from the tantalizing aroma of brewing coffee, a scent that, in fact, seems to awaken my senses… i know that the smell of brewing coffee anticipates and lubricates how i both taste and smell coffee when i drink it… [t]he flavor of coffee also includes the feel of hot liquid. in the morning, it has to be hot. i occasionally enjoy iced coffee, but iced coffee would never satisfy me in the morning, regardless of environmental temperature. even the weight and feel of the mug are significant. i find it hard to get a satisfying swig from those dainty, undersized, bourgeois espresso cups...” (vannini et al. 2012:5). in this instance, the taste, smell, weight and temperature of coffee, in addition to morning time, blend into a full sensual, contextual, and temporal coffee experience, not reducible to isolated variables in experimental design or laboratory settings. applying contextual features to sensory inputs expands our knowledge of what perceptual features make a beverage enjoyable, and under what social situations they occur. marketing researchers note in controlled studies that sensory interactions influence consumer visual perceptions, such that taller glasses appear bigger and to hold more liquid (krishna 2012), or that the texture and feel of the glass impacts impressions of quality and taste (krishna and morrin 2008). nonetheless, how might these insightful sensory revelations in controlled settings be applied more broadly to malefyt / the senses in anthropological 11 everyday consumer experiences? coors, for instance, uses cold-activated bottles and cans, in which the visual imagery of the mountains on the label turns from white to blue when the container is at the proper cold temperature (elliot 2009). the guinness “ritual” involves multiple sensory touch points, sequencing six steps to drafting the “perfect pour” that join haptic, visual, gustatory, and temporal cues―from holding the glass at 45 degrees to pouring for a duration of 119.5 seconds (guinness storehouse). how might consumer studies of these sensory dimensions of beer enjoyment reveal other perceptual meanings under different social settings? addressing the lacuna in holistic sensory experience, this article seeks to inform sensory studies along the lines of everyday consumer practices. in particular, domestic rituals of consumers are one such practice by which cultural relevance, sensory order, temporality and situated meaning, along with human sensory variance to product use and enjoyment, frame consumption in terms of everyday situations. marketing researchers have examined everyday experience along multisensory lines to elaborate deeper dimensions of art appreciation in museums (joy and sherry 2003). other ethnographic investigations of consumers’ sensory reactions to homecare products include the study of scents of detergents, commissioned by lever brothers (pink 2004). a study of daily rituals, this essay claims, can join sensory, temporal, symbolic and communal dimensions of consumer experience to afford a holistic framework by which researchers can more deeply investigate products and brands in everyday settings. ritual analysis anthropological studies have long examined ritual for its cultural representations of social phenomena, such as mitigating sacred and profane cultural boundaries (douglas 1966), enacting social dramas to resolve conflict (turner 1967, 1969), or performing grand political displays of power (geertz 1981). from its functional role in maintaining social solidarity (durkheim 1912/2001) to mystifying society for perpetuating dominant hierarchies (eliade 1998) to offering transcendent religious ideology for its members that translate enduring messages, values, and sentiments into observable action (rappaport 1979), numerous investigations have explored ritual for its sacred, religious and ideological dimensions. indeed, bell’s (1992, 1997) thorough historical review of ritual informs us that numerous anthropological theories, from evolutionism to post-structuralism and beyond, employ ritual analysis to evidence their particular approach to cultural and theoretical analysis. appositely, consumer researchers of ritual have shifted their focus away from larger symbolic meanings in religion, cosmologies and belief systems to examine, instead, its everyday occurrence. whether highly journal of business anthropology, 4(1), spring 2015 12 stylized, or casual and informal, rook situates ritual as “expressive of symbolic activity” in everyday life (1985:252). goffman’s “sociology of occasions” (1967:2) explores how rituals are performed in ordinary occasions and employed strategically to organize daily face-to-face social interactions. sherry’s seminal work on everyday gift exchange highlights rituals in “naturalistic” settings of shopping occasions (sherry 1983). indeed, rituals are broadly evident in consumerist society and are found in production, such as in aiding the internal development of commercial advertisements in ad agencies (malefyt and morais 2010), and in consumption, where they may organize food preparation and consumption (farb and armelagos 1980), mediate christmas myths (miller 1995) and consumer spending patterns in japanese culture (moeran and skov 1995), or celebrate thanksgiving’s “material abundance enacted through feasting” (wallendorf and arnould 1991:13). rituals also moderate consumer activities such as travel and tourism (graburn 1977, 1983; maccannell 1976), and exchanges between buyers and sellers at local festivals, swap meets, restaurants and museums (belk, wallendorf and sherry 1989). in these and many other examples, rituals share a property of transforming participants from one (emotional) status to another by moving them through symbolic space (douglas 1966; turner 1969). importantly, this transcendent property distinguishes ritual from ordinary repetitive habit, since “standardized, repetitive action lacking such symbolism is an example of habit or custom, not ritual” (kertzer 1989:9). yet, missing from these and other ritual studies are the attendant sensorial dimensions that concomitantly deliver transformational experiences for participants. from a sensory approach, rituals are observable practices (bourdieu 1977) that, in addition to being symbolically rich, are “something experienced in the doing” (senft and basso 2009:3). rituals are symbolic action “thick with sensory meaning” (grimes 1995:965). moreover, they arouse in the senses a particular quality that “awakens alertness” (hsu 2008:439). rituals are intentional sequences or series of behaviors that reformulate experience out of existing materials (schechner 2002); and therefore may be examined here as situated practices that employ both sensory qualities and symbolic meaning to reformulate a new sensory/symbolic order for participants. this study explores ritual as an everyday practice that informs personal transformations through sensory skill development and symbolic associations, which orient socialized constructions of self-identity in the world. methodology, rituals of shaving in 2010 ethnographic research was conducted among twenty-four men aged 18-49 in the new york, new jersey, and connecticut region of the us. research was conducted on behalf of a men’s hair-care and grooming malefyt / the senses in anthropological 13 company by an anthropologist (the author) of an advertising in-agency ethnographic group. the hair-care company had recently purchased a premium-priced shaving brand and sought to understand why a segment of men who regularly purchased this brand spent more time and money on shaving equipment, appeared to develop strong brand affinities, and shared their opinions and experiences with other men in online communities, when the majority of men disliked shaving and were reluctant to spend a premium on shaving equipment. in other words, who were these high-involvement shaving enthusiasts in a consumer category that is notorious for low-involvement? the research objective sought to bring these shaving enthusiasts to life. men were pre-screened by a market recruiter for attitudes and behavior towards grooming and product use. half the men recruited expressed positive attitudes towards shaving and purchased the premium brand, while the other half disliked shaving and purchased a minimum of grooming products. ethnographic interviews were conducted in the homes of the 24 men and lasted for about three hours. interview questions were formulated around general attitudes towards shaving, appearance, and use of grooming products. in-home research included observing men demonstrate their shaving equipment and grooming regimens. curiously, what made the brand a ritual for the shaving enthusiast was not explicitly the brand advertising and packaging, which stipulates a 4-step order of pre-shave moisturizing, lathering, shaving and aftershave, leading to the perfect shave. rather, the ritual was developed and improvised by the men themselves, who described a personal interest in grooming and personal care. these men evidenced a strong predisposition toward ritual involvement in their attitude toward self, work and others, prior to discovering the shaving brand. they embraced what might have been routine behavior, and made the brand more sensorially engaging and personally fulfilling by adding their own refinements and by developing their own skills; they made the brand more meaningful emotionally with their own symbolic references. without a predilection for self-improvement, explorations into shaving that fostered skill development and augmented the ritual would not have occurred. in other words, by blending various aspects of time, effort, symbolism, and branded materials into sensorial practice, their practice became a ritual in the “making” (ingold 2013). this investigation of a men’s brand ritual posits that the extended experience of engaged effort applied to sensorial perceptions, personal care, brand materials, setting and symbolic references, leads to personal transformation and ritual development. ethnographic interviews with shaving enthusiasts examine here the process by which ritual behavior becomes a unified experience in: 1) consumer pre-dispositions towards appearance and self-presentation; 2) skill development through sensory journal of business anthropology, 4(1), spring 2015 14 awareness; 3) meaningful symbolism evoked through memories; and 4) discursive vocabularies and shared skills that fostered online communities. 1. presentation of self to others among the shaving enthusiasts interviewed, appearance was central to their sense of self and to perceptions of performance in the world. beyond solving a functional problem of providing a close shave, their descriptions revealed deeper, more engaged interactions with the entire grooming process. clothes, hair and shaving played a key role in defining who these men were in terms of self-identification and performance in the world. attention to daily attire and grooming were essential practices in their “presentation of self” to others (goffman 1959). these men also expressed a higher level of satisfaction with shaving, compared to the other men we interviewed. alternately, the low-shaving involvement men spoke of shaving as “a chore,” of skipping days, and minimizing their time and money spent on shaving. men who disliked shaving referenced the positive aspects of shaving mostly in terms of completion―in “getting it done”―or in the absence of negatives (no nicks or cuts). in contrast, the shaving enthusiasts discussed the “extra shaving effort” as a form of future payoff. their increased effort in grooming and appearance led them to feel like “better” men, in what they described as a performanceoriented, competitive work world: frank, a 29-year-old attorney explained: “we have casual friday instituted at my office. people walk around in jeans. but i don’t do it. a tie is not expected, but i like to go above business casual. people my age don’t care, but the senior people do, even if they don’t say it. the way you dress affects the way you behave. i feel more comfortable, competent and ready. when i’m dressed right, i feel ready to meet people and do things.” jeremy, a 28-year-old grade school teacher elaborated: “most of the teachers at my school are in jeans and a polo shirt. i’m usually overdressed compared to them. i act more mature and feel more mature when i’m wearing dressed clothes. it affects me and the mood i’m in. i feel like accomplishing more. when i was in student government, i would also dress up going to meetings. it would affect how people listened to me. depending on meetings in school, i dress to the position of power. i feel it’s reflective of my position.” another respondent, david, 35 year-old legal aide commented: “people tell me ‘nice tie’ and it feels good! if you want respect then it not just acting it, but looking it. you have to dress the part! to look good is a form of respect… it’s not shallow, you feel better, more confident. when you get up in front of people, you can see that he’s confident even when… say, if he’s dumb (laughs). the malefyt / the senses in anthropological 15 cover of a book is more interesting than what’s inside.” joseph, 49 year-old technology manager at a local nj college explained: “i wear a tie to work. it adds to the professionalism. people are then dealing with someone, not just ‘a guy.’ it adds to the sense that you are someone, doing a job well done. people respect you more when you have a shirt and tie. i don’t want to look like a common slob. people treat me differently. clothes make the man, and well, a close shave makes the man, too. i like to be formal… people tell me ‘nice tie’ and it feels good. if you want respect, then its not just acting it; you have to look it. i’m indulging myself, but it’s a necessary indulgence.” as these comments reveal, men’s heightened involvement in appearance is evident in their responses to work, dress, and the role of grooming in their lives. attention to appearance and dress not only transformed these men to be “ready for the day,” but also identified them as men for whom care and attention to appearance were important for success at work. in this regard, the practice of morning shaving translated into enhancing the social self and influencing concepts of success in the world. 2. sensory dimensions of ritual skill shaving enthusiasts also informed us of their increased attention to sensory inputs. men spoke of being “more aware” in the steps of what they were doing while they were shaving. men attuned to various aspects of the brand with greater acuity. in the packaging, they identified the glass container, script writing, list of natural ingredients, and set of directions as features that enhanced the brand’s value to them. men further described the importance of sounds, movements, textures, feels, and scents in their daily practice of shaving as helping them develop skills. some men enjoyed stirring the brush and “frothing up the lather,” and applying scents of lavender, sandalwood, ocean kelp, or eucalyptus and citrus. still others described listening to special mood songs, such as ones by frank sinatra, or using no music at all, and attuning to the sound of the blade gliding over the skin, touching one’s face for assurance. the sensory dimensions of the brand features joined behavioral skills to aid in the transformation of the self: joseph, the technology manager commented: “i have to shave in the morning, every morning. it wakes me up… it lifts me up. the warm lather on my face, i enjoy it. a good shave is a good start to the day… i can’t shave with music. the audible feedback of the blade gliding on the skin is tremendous. i enjoy the feedback of it. it’s like comparing the sound of a harley to that of a vespa. you learn to recognize the right sound, the sound of your equipment, and you know you are doing it right.” peter, a website developer in his early 20s remarked: “i used to hate journal of business anthropology, 4(1), spring 2015 16 shaving. then i learned about (the brand) and it’s a nice, pleasing way to start my day. to me, my morning routine helps wake me up. there’s an olfactory component to it, like smelling morning coffee or soap in the shower. this is another experience like that. i use the eucalyptus citrus smell. it kind of smells like an old fashioned barbershop and there is something invigorating about that. i find it pleasant every morning.” men also tuned to the brand’s visual signals, such as the cursive serif fonts on the packaging, with more acuity. some spoke of the moisturizing preshave lotion packaged in a heavy glass jar as being more “old-fashioned” and “genuine” than if it were made of plastic. a grade school teacher, paul, explained: “this (the brand) has utility, but there’s more aesthetic to it. it’s like a grapefruit. you have to meticulously cut out the little pieces. the little bit of labor makes it more rewarding at the end. this takes time, the art of shaving is like art and isn’t just slapped together. it takes time… it puts me in the mood of accomplishing something.” he added: “this may look more complicated than it is. it takes four steps to it, but there is a benefit in the complexity. it’s really not that complicated. the benefit of the brush is that you enjoy the fruit of your labor. you are creating the air, the foam, the fluffiness, and you’re putting it on and know it’s going to work. it’s like making coffee. i get raw beans, grind them up, then add the water, and wait. this is a couple of extra steps, but you get the benefit of having a better shave.” in the process of enjoying the brand and the shaving experience, these men also drew out the best of its qualities by adding their own skills. beyond following the four-step process, some men embellished the ritual sequence, adding refinements to enhance the sensory experience. one man spoke of adding a few drops of olive oil to the shaving lather to “further soften whiskers.” another man pre-warmed a frothing cup with hot water for “better foam.” these men demonstrated greater focus, selfawareness and judgment, which led to skill in developing their overall appearance. skill is experiencing new sensations in familiar patterns by “fine-tuning” perceptual systems to new kinds of information (ingold 2000:166). in this way, shaving skill embodies a situated sensory practice for a new self to emerge. 3. shaving rituals as symbolic “time machines” men also related their current shaving practices to past memories, images and reminiscences, real and imagined, which drew them into sentimental experiences with shaving. shaving was a symbolic link to other places, times and memories of significant others in their lives. malefyt / the senses in anthropological 17 paul commented: “when i go to the (the brand) store and purchase the royal shave, it carries a regality to it. when i use it i’m reminded of old-time traditions. it means to me someone that is experienced, meticulous, and effective. it’s sort of the british banker world in the 1900s.” david, a 35 year-old attorney mentioned: “my sister got me a gift certificate and i went to (the brand) store to get a shave. the store felt old fashioned, a real plus. shaving is not a new thing. men have done it before and have an edge in doing it. i can picture my grandfather doing it, just like i am doing it today.” frank, a 29-year-old attorney, said: “this reminds me of the time of my grandparents, of going to barber shop. the barber was a professional, like a physician. that is all they did, all the time. this (the brand) feels more professional. this makes me a professional.” joseph, a 49-year-old technician waxed nostalgia over manual shaving. when shown an electric brush prototype that would have eased shaving, he remarked: “please don’t say it’s a battery operated brush. it defeats the whole purpose of shaving. there’s a sense of accomplishment in using the brush, and making your own lather. the minute you put a battery in it, it’s like you’re not doing anything. you’re then letting the machine take over once again. machines do enough for us. (instead) it's a sense of identifying with your dad and granddad. you’re doing something the same way that they did it. it’s sort of a bond, even though they are not here with us. it's a sense of identifying with them.” citing the work of levi-strauss, miller (2009), relates the symbolic use of time in rituals as effective “time machines.” like a time machine, regular repetitive rhythms of ritual “suppress the linear narrative of unstoppable time that ultimately marches on and leads to our end,” and draws men into a cycle of timelessness. the repeating of a common routine “makes it timeless, and oneself in it, timeless too” (2009:165-6). moreover, branded objects stand as symbolic vehicles to further draw men into the ritual circulation of the time machine metaphor. objects stand for particular lives or experiences of familiar others (for instance, “my grandfather used to shave with a brush,” or “use a double edge razor”), which keep alive not only items, but also personal memories of others. ritual activates an emotional context via scents, gestures, feelings, and images that place men within re-lived experiences. the sensory experiences activated in daily rituals help “reproduce regimes and routines” of the mediated self in “temporal textures” of everyday life (strove, trentmann, and wilk 2009:5). 4. communicating rituals via online communities journal of business anthropology, 4(1), spring 2015 18 shaving enthusiasts also discussed their brand preferences, shaving techniques and experiences with other men in online shaving sites. from discussions with others, men developed new linguistic descriptors and shaving vocabularies, in which they described particular sensations, evaluated experiences, and shared insights on product features. men spoke of the importance of facial hair being properly “hydrated” so as to “reduce pull” and “drag,” and “limit ingrown hair irritation.” men also discussed “shaving in passes,” “letting the weight of the metal razor” do the work, “working with the grain” and not “bearing down.” others described “unlearning bad habits of rushing,” or “using 3045 degree angle,” and “rocking the blade down to proper angle.” others described the “deep satisfying sound” of shaving with a heavy metal blade, versus a light sound of plastic blades. men also debated the numerous single blade options. among them were fixed head and adjustable razors, and three piece, two piece, and one piece razors that hail from the middle east, japan, or germany. some discussed vintage single blade razors, such as gillette’s “super speed” models from the 50s and 60s. other brands discussed were personna blades from israel, derbys from turkey, and feathers from japan. german merkurs were debated as “the standard,” whereas japanese feathers were discussed as “the sharpest blade for experts.” as men communicated shared experiences, discussions helped strengthen their own brand opinions and personal experiences of shaving. online discussion of shaving then becomes a “circulation” of various experiences and perspectives across subjects and distant spaces (senft and basso 2009). rituals help synthesize difference in geographies and backgrounds through a common “translation” of experience across communities. evident here, shaving enthusiasts develop skills and a repertoire of linguistic distinctions that enable them to enhance their experience. differentiating stimulus properties also lets men develop more finely tuned preferences (cooke, janiszewski, cunha, nasco, and de wilde 2004). in online shaving groups, men discuss techniques and skills, and compare one brand’s characteristics to another. learning an acquired skill that can be traded and shared has the potential to expand online relationships and sociability (kozinets 2009). also, by generalizing a “point of view” (oakdale 2009:162), discussion offers a means of producing alignments of perspectives, even as men express differences that effectively negotiate new social relations and new types of social identities (senft and basso 2009). discussion: contextualizing a holistic experience through time and skill this study investigates the somatic interactions of human “sensing and malefyt / the senses in anthropological 19 sense-making” (vannini et al. 2012) with time, effort, context and material culture, such that a study of the senses would be incomplete without examining the larger context of interactions. a sensory account of ritual incorporates the multiple “agents” that shape a holistic experience of interaction, joining the pleasure of experience with the effort of exertion in what borgmann (2000:420) terms a “symmetry of experience.” just as people interact and manipulate everyday objects to suit their needs, objects also shape people in prompting certain responses from them (latour 2007). in this investigation, certain men choose a premium-priced shaving brand from among the plethora of grooming products available to them, because the brand does more than function efficiently; it requires of them increased time and focused effort that, in return, awakens sensual pleasures and memories, and fosters skills (ingold 2000), which relate to socialized concepts of the self. meaningful symbolism and sensory experience coalesce in ritual exertion. what objects prompt from users in ritual effort not only promises to enhance their sensory experience in the present, but also to transform, or at least activate, their memories of the past. since “sensing is thinking” (vannini et al. 2012:152) the ritual act of shaving initiates meaningful thought for consumers. memory in shaving rituals responds as a “culturally mediated practice that is activated by embodied acts and semantically dense objects” (seremetakis 1994:90). evocative scents, images, actions of lathering up foam, the morning time itself, reveal a congruence of multiple factors that coalesce in a unified experience of “focal things and practices” (borgmann 2000) not reducible to the effects of one or several isolated senses or symbolic associations. interactions are layered and intermingled with context and action, so that “the memory of one sense is stored in another; that of tactility in sound, of hearing in taste, of sight in sound… the awakening of the senses is the awakening of the capacity for memory, of tangible memory; to be awake is to remember, one remembers through the senses, via substance” (seremetakis 1994:28). a sensory study of consumer rituals thus joins physical effort, material objects, and symbolic analysis in a symmetrical view of consumption. the multiple effects of symbolic and sensory symmetry can be analyzed further in terms of time practices, skill acquisition and online communities, which add to the holistic ritual experience of shaving. time as a ritual practice of agency consumers in everyday life often refer to time as an agent that operates against them. expressions of being rushed, feeling “time-poor,” or “out-oftime,” are references to something outside of their control and shaped by external forces (strove et al. 2009). however, this study shows that some journal of business anthropology, 4(1), spring 2015 20 men “make time” to organize daily rituals and consumption practices by creating “focal practices” with “things” in time. for these men, the daily ritual of shaving makes time, where branded objects “play a critical role as a kind of compass or clock across their life course” (strove et al. 2009:6). these men use material objects, such as brands, as “communicators and stabilizing devices which they employ to attain, reproduce and challenge temporal identities” (ibid.). one such temporal identity constructed through ritual is the presentation of self (goffman 1959), which is organized by time, effort, and skill into an agent of “success” in the world. time and effort in shaving are characteristic of a practice that orders and organizes sequential rhythms of ritual into perceived outcomes of success in the world. we can further examine types of temporal practices of “making time” into concepts of “success.” ritual activates symbolic associations of “time as success” in ways that operate both retrospectively and prospectively (senft and basso 2009). in this study, men use a shaving ritual to “look back” in time to other persons and ideals, but also, at the same time, “look forward” to anticipate future outcomes (hirschman 1987). in looking forward, men take time in shaving to anticipate success in the competitive work world. time spent grooming in the morning is not time lost, but rather leads to a better “presentation of self” at work (goffman 1959). time and effort thus anticipate a future reward of a better self in a cultural category that projects male performance as a form of display in the work world. time spent shaving also references retrospective constructions of heritage (hall 1983; zerubavel 1981) that are oriented towards past images of success. men in this study referenced symbolic linkages to traditional images of male success, such as the “experienced, meticulous, and effective… british banker in the nineteenth century,” or “the professional barber,” who, in turn, makes them “professional.” time, in this sense, recategorizes the effort of ritual practice into “active metaphors” (cotte, ratneshwar, and mick 2004) that reference western cultural markers of success in the world. the sensory aspects of the shaving ritual thus generate time-practice as a marker of success in the world by anticipating a better future self at work and a past heritage of success, adding to the “symmetrical experience” of exertion (borgmann 2000). skill as a ritual practice of agency ritual action carried out in sensory practice also fosters the development of certain skill sets that lead to constructions of success in the world. the acquisition over time of consumer sensory skills, such as holding the blade at a proper angle, listening to different sounds when moving the blade across skin textures, adding emollients to foaming cups to further soften whiskers, are active practices of skill development that create “an education of attention” (gibson 1979:254). beyond merely increasing perceptual awareness, the continual refinements of hand motions, malefyt / the senses in anthropological 21 holding positions, and facial postures in shaving rituals has the effect of “fine-tuning” the shaver’s physical effort in novel acts of creative discovery, beyond following rote instructions or simply imagining an outcome. the development of skill, which ingold describes (2000:352-4), can be further analyzed here as a distinct characteristic of shaving ritual skill. first, skill is the applied effort of mind, body, and senses all holistically working together. the intentionality of shaving and functionality of carrying out steps are brought into use congruently, not one first or the other: mind and body, perception and sensing, work harmoniously in a total experience of shaving. second, skill is highly contextual of engagement with its surroundings. ingold references bateson’s example of the woodcutter at work notching a tree in a whole man-axe-tree system (bateson 1973:433; in ingold 2000:352-3). likewise, men in this study create a whole man-blade-shave contextual system that encompasses an entire field of relations of morning time, effort, situation, and attention in practice. third, skill involves more than heightened attention and sensory awareness of behavior. it requires specific care, judgment, and dexterity applied to an ongoing process of “hands-on” training. initial concern for appearance led these men to develop care and attention to grooming skills, which fostered judgment over how they looked in presentation of self to others. fourth, skill carries its own intrinsic intentionality and reward in its practice, apart from pre-set ideas or plans before it. in other words, skill and pleasure unfold each time in the doing that is not reducible to some pre-existing formula. fifth, skill is, therefore, an act of “making,” which generates its own reward that is pleasurable as an integrated mind, sense, and body experience (see ingold 2013). as skill in a product category increases, consumers can better appreciate, and therefore get more out of, the consumption experience (clarkson, janiszewski, and cinelli 2013). communal practices of agency developing skill in brand rituals also offers a sensory framework for increased enjoyment in terms of sharing experiences with others. this includes distinct opportunities for communal participation, structure, discursive themes, pragmatic outcomes, and processes (basso 2009:1617; oakdale 2009:153). wine connoisseurs, for instance, develop an appreciation for wine that sets wine tasting apart from everyday drinking. tasters of wine “become aware” of the special qualities, not only of the wine, but also of their group (vannini et al. 2012:54; also schechner 2002). as a shaving community, men not only discuss shaving results, but also sensory awareness comes to the fore, placing expectations on shaving performance and equipment, and expressing an evaluative judgment on the qualities of the shave experience. similarly, the “burning man” community in kozinets’s (2002) ethnography, and the “mountain journal of business anthropology, 4(1), spring 2015 22 men” of belk and costa’s (1998) investigation, disregard commercial structures to create their own community of fellow participants with cocreated skills in which these activities occur. a shaving ritual thus can elicit the holistic dimensions of practice that coalesce in a context of pleasure. applying sensory skills of shaving within a temporal, skill, and social framework, places greater expectations on judgments of the products so that brands “perform” beyond their functional role. providing pleasure to consumers rejoins brand features in a temporality and effort of occasion. uniting the full range of sensory cues with heightened awareness of symbolic associations means that rituals reformulate experience in ways that create a new order out of existing materials (schechner 2002). ritual is therefore not merely “acted out,” or “performed,” as in some pre-existing mental text or script. rather, time and effort occasioned in bodily practice bring skills into use in-the-moment, through sensory involvement and pleasure. the anticipation of shaving becomes a “forward-oriented process,” inviting forms of improvisation and minute adjustments to the person’s own rhythm (hallam and ingold 2007). this creates an emergent experience in a consumer brand practice that may continually grow and give pleasure to the user. this investigation of a men’s shaving practice affords a new approach to ritual. in this study, ritual is not a disembodied metaphoric projection acted out as a pre-existing mental schema (lakoff and johnson 1999), or a rote social pattern followed automatically (durkheim 1912/2001). rather, it is an individualized practice, situated in time and sensory enjoyment that proceeds along in thought and feeling through movement (sheets-johnstone 1999). branded materials, bathroom setting, temporality of morning, skills of the enthusiast, as well as symbolic associations of memory evoked in scents, textures, weight and feel of product materials, carry a precision in their embodied manipulation that “corresponds” (ingold 2013) in a natural “symmetry of exertion.” this leads “focal practices and things” to unite in a pleasurable whole experience (borgmann 2000:421). conclusion this article has explored the interactive ways humans “sense and make sense” (vannini et al. 2012:15) in a consumer brand ritual. it has argued that rituals develop through a set of sensory practices, temporality, skills, and situated use of material objects that inform an orientation and attitude towards work, life, and social relations. individual sensory practices lead to skill development, a sense of self-confidence, performance, and outlook on life in an everyday activity. even assemblies of online communities are involved in further shaping sensual rituals. this occurs because of the characteristic ways in which an individual is socialized in a particular culture to perceive and interact with materials, malefyt / the senses in anthropological 23 ideas, and other persons. how social orders shape sensory orientations is profoundly linked “with a society’s epistemology, the development of its cultural identity, and its forms of being-in-the-world” (geurts 2002:2356). a sensory orientation to personal rituals represents a critical dimension of how culture and psyche continually interact to “make each other up” (ibid.:236). in this study, men’s concepts of self, ideas of identity and success, and relations to others join commodity objects in a premium shave brand to form a holistic ritual process that is part of a social transformation, which displays sensory consequences. in western society, concepts of success and identity are ideologies rooted in material culture (miller 1995). concepts of success here are not associated with intangible values of consumption, but rather given meaning in sensory practices that men believe help achieve certain and necessary personal transformations in appearance and self-confidence. in this study, extra effort, temporal procedures, acquired skills, and symbolic images are applied earnestly in ritual practice towards an everyday transformation, which is a viable means of reconfiguring the self by sensorially attuning bodily habits into a mode of performance, self-improvement, and perceptions of success in american society. such notions evidence in modern capitalistic society the existence of particular sensory orientations and sensory orders that are practiced by men in daily rituals to transform the self. future implications it appears we are in the midst of a major social transformation in which a growing virtual world of digital relationships is replacing, or at least modifying, tangible relationships with people, places, things, and events (horst and miller 2012). the so-called “socio-digitization” of society reflects the wholesale transformation of a geophysical world into digital representations, where new technologies are reshaping social relations and constituting new social domains on a global scale (latham and sassen 2005). perhaps this study of a group of men engaged in a premium, ritually involved shaving brand reveals a counter-practice that resists such ubiquity of digital representations and involves, instead, situated pleasures, acquired skills, and physical presence in real time. against rising digital transformations found in the use of mobile devices, social media, chat rooms, and online dating sites that no longer allow direct access to the world through our senses, a sensory-based ritual practice, of the kind discussed in this study, may be one means for consumers to relocate the self in real time, engaged in a range of temporal sensory activities for the simple pleasure of it. rather than acknowledge that the human environment is transforming wholesale into a digital environment, we need more investigations to show the countervailing measures and resistant consumer movements, such as the slow food movement and alternative eating practices (pollan 2008), or communityjournal of business anthropology, 4(1), spring 2015 24 supported agriculture practices (thompson and coskuner-balli 2007), that are informed by traditions, fostered by acquired skills, and that celebrate sensory-based orientations of pleasure, such as found in this consumer-brand investigation of a daily ritual. an “anthropology of the senses” (howes 1991, 2003) does not leave off where marketing science begins. an anthropological study of the senses can integrate consumer behavior studies within a holistic perspective of adaptive representations of ourselves to ourselves through meaningful sensory and temporal 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fordham university business school in nyc. previously, he worked in advertising for over 15 years as director of cultural discoveries for bbdo worldwide advertising in nyc, and at d’arcy, masius, benton & bowles in detroit. he holds a ph.d. in anthropology from brown university, is coeditor of advertising cultures (2003), co-author of advertising and anthropology (2012), and was co-chair of epic conference for 2013. he is frequently cited in business week, the new york times, usa today, and other media. he may be reached at timothy.malefyt@gmail.com mailto:timothy.malefyt@gmail.com vi opdaterer systemet vi opdaterer systemet... rauli.cbs.dk opdateres og er snart tilgængeligt. vi opdaterer systemet vi opdaterer systemet... rauli.cbs.dk opdateres og er snart tilgængeligt. ethical considerations in global multi-stakeholder work contexts julia c. gluesing abstract economic integration and globalization has brought increasing ethical complexity into business anthropology as more anthropologists work in or research multinational enterprises that cross multiple boundaries. ethical challenges arise from the predominant neoliberal viewpoint in these enterprises, the embeddedness of ethics in culture, and from intercultural nature of multi-stakeholder environments. using an example of one research project in an mne, this article illustrates the ethical challenges of the mne work context and how these challenges can be resolved and discusses current ethical dilemmas and the future implications for the growth and practice of business and organizational anthropology. keywords globalization, ethical complexity, neoliberalism, multinationals, multistakeholder environments page 1 of 17 jba special issue 1: 79-95, spring 2014 © the author(s) 2014 issn 2245-4217 www.cbs.dk/jba journal of business anthropology, special issue 1, spring 2014 80 introduction as the processes of economic integration and globalization have accelerated remarkably over the past twenty years, multinational enterprises (mnes) stand at the center of trade, investment and the transfer of knowledge and technology. everyday, mnes cross many boundaries on multiple levels: political, legal, and economic boundaries at the national, regional and community level, various external and internal organizational boundaries, the boundaries of language, and multiple cultural boundaries ‒ all of which must be recognized, negotiated, and integrated in some way to get work done on a global scale (leung et al. 2005). since the 1990s, anthropologists have been writing about and investigating mnes as the primary vehicles for the movement of information, symbols, capital, and commodities in global and transnational spaces (appadurai 1996). for business and organizational anthropologists the complex global arenas of mnes mean that there are multiple stakeholders in any research project that crosses global work contexts, creating ethical complexity. this article is about one global research project, called ati, which illustrates from a business anthropologist’s first-hand experience and perspective the reasons for and challenges of ethical complexity in the mne multi-stakeholder work context and discusses how the multidisciplinary research team addressed these challenges. the example concludes with a discussion of current ethical dilemmas and their implications for the future of anthropological work in, and study of, business and organization in global mne multistakeholder work contexts. the ethical challenges of complex global business there are three primary reasons why mnes create an ethical complexity that poses challenges for business and organizational anthropologists: (1) there is a perspective of neoliberalism in mnes that generates the prevalent ethical principles for decision making; (2) ethical judgments are embedded in culture and are especially difficult to grasp when multiple cultural arenas are involved; and (3) ethical conduct in mnes is also an intercultural phenomenon that requires negotiation across cultural boundaries. the first reason for ethical complexity is the predominance in mnes of the neoliberal perspective. neoliberalism is based in the belief that freely adopted market mechanisms are the optimal way of organizing all exchanges of goods and services, and includes the conviction that the only legitimate purpose of the state is to safeguard individual, especially commercial, liberty, as well as strong private property rights (hayek 1979; bourdieu 1998; friedman 2006). the neoliberal perspective is a difficult one for anthropologists to sort out, because neoliberalism incorporates many concepts that anthropologists might agree with, such as the active creation of social and economic order. but it is also gluesing / ethical considerations 81 universalist in its advocacy for a corporate form of agency, in which people should see themselves in a means-end relationship with the world, and see themselves as though they were a business (gershon 2011: 539). mnes develop codes of ethics, especially ethical principles for decision making, from two main schools of thought based in formalism and utilitarianism: rules and results (jackson 2007). ethics in business has generally meant rules about how the company and its employees should act internally, and toward consumers and others in the marketplace because of what is “right” or simply because of what is required by law. these rules are usually made by management and are generally meant to apply corporate-wide, across the mne. however, recently, the code of ethics is shifting somewhat from a universally “right” and “wrong” basis for action to one that emphasizes sustainability, such that what is ethical is that which produces a sustainable operating environment, whether it is social, economic, political, or environmental, or even all of these in combination. ethics is becoming intertwined with operational sustainability, or results: the new ethics is a conduct of business that enables a company to optimize its returns to shareholders, employees, customers, business partners, local communities, and the environment. it is a dynamic standard for pursuing profitability and growth that allows future generations an equal opportunity for growth and development. (laszlo and nash 2007:2) the challenge for anthropologists in the prevalence of neoliberalism and this shift to sustainability is the very dominant and dynamic nature of this view of ethics. for researchers, the “new ethics” means that within the mnes people’s views, especially managerial decision-makers, are likely to be changing in adaptation to the current global and local business environment. ethics becomes a moving target. the second reason mnes create ethical complexity is the relationship of culture and ethics itself and the many cultural arenas that are likely to be involved in any research to be conducted in mnes. there is general agreement among sociologists and anthropologists that ethical ideas, beliefs, views, or judgments and the practices that accompany them derive from general social practices and accords, or to say it another way, are “socially constructed” (abend 2008). why particular groups of people have the moral views that they do, and what the effects of these views are on behavior, interaction, structure, change, and institutions is a dominant topic of ethnographic work. what makes it so challenging in the context of mnes is the sheer number of groups with whom one must become acquainted, at least superficially, in order to sort out the ethical viewpoints that must be managed to conduct a research project. thirdly, the process of globalization, with mnes as drivers of this journal of business anthropology, special issue 1, spring 2014 82 process, can be understood as the intensification of exchange, both economic and social, across national borders (scherer and patzer 2011). this process increases the number of interactions of people and organizations from different cultural and national backgrounds. ethics becomes intercultural in nature and anthropologists who want to do research in mnes can find themselves in the challenging position of having to negotiate ethics within the mne as well as among stakeholders outside the mnes, such as universities and funding agencies, whose views might and do conflict with one another. not only do anthropologists have to try to understand the different ethical standards and viewpoints of multiple stakeholders, but they also have to become the negotiators for reconciliation of these multiple ethical standards if research is to go forward. ethical complexity in the ati research project the story of a united states national science foundation (nsf) funded research grant called “accelerating the diffusion of innovations: a digital diffusion dashboard methodology for global networked organizations,”1 provides a very real illustration of the ethical complexity in multinational enterprises, and is a good example for a discussion of the ethical dilemmas anthropologists face in conducting research, especially in interdisciplinary research teams with multiple stakeholders. background the idea for the research project came about when my colleagues (from the academic disciplines of information systems, communication, and engineering) and i had been consulting and teaching in the automotive industry for over a decade. we had observed that, despite the increasing ubiquity and sophistication of information technology (it), organizations were not taking advantage of the capabilities inherent in their information infrastructure to manage their global innovation processes and networks. we thought that the information technology infrastructure could be used to investigate the diffusion of innovation in multinational corporations, which are global networked organizations. we believed that a company could use its it infrastructure not only to create, transmit and store communication messages, but also to learn something about how the innovation of new technology was proceeding across the company’s global product development network. these ideas formed the basis for our nsf proposal to develop a new methodology for investigating and leveraging a company’s it infrastructure to accelerate the diffusion of an innovation. we proposed to develop it-based methods by tapping into the company’s infrastructure and to validate our methods using ethnography. the nsf funded the grant for three years beginning in 2005, 1 http://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showaward.do?awardnumber=0527487 http://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showaward.do?awardnumber=0527487 http://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showaward.do?awardnumber=0527487 gluesing / ethical considerations 83 and the grant received a two-year extension to continue the research until 2010. the digital diffusion dashboard (ddd) nsf grant focused on one automotive innovation with several sub component systems, which had the pseudonym advanced technology innovation (ati) to comply with corporate confidentiality requirements (which will be discussed later in this article as part of the ethical issues faced by the researchers). the ati product innovation was not a top-down mandatory component built into a vehicle, for example, like a safety belt or an air bag. rather, ati was a bottom-up innovation, which was shaped and reshaped by a team of specialized engineers from different disciplines to determine its system compatibility, and its final functional features for customer appeal and competitive advantage. an auto product development innovation team must persuade members of the social system targeted for adoption ‒ such as engineers who specialize in the engine, transmission, chassis, and electrical subsystems for a new vehicle program ‒ of the value of adopting its new technology, and how it will meet or exceed anticipated user needs, as well as satisfy the requirements for engineering cost, timing, weight, performance, safety and regulatory specifications for inclusion on a vehicle. the adoption or rejection of such innovations can be a long, difficult and arduous path ‒ especially when the team is globally distributed ‒ taking anywhere from three to five years from idea to production in a vehicle that is ready for marketplace introduction. using it-based methods, we designed and tested a set of indicators, which we assembled into a prototype “digital diffusion dashboard” (ddd) to help innovation managers visualize, monitor, and manage their global innovations and accelerate innovation in a global networked organization. we created simple, clear, and reusable dashboard indicators that we thought would help open a new frontier for both scholars and practitioners alike by demonstrating how to leverage a company’s data resources ‒ primarily email ‒ to visually manage the diffusion network as it emerges, and to monitor the consequences of implementation efforts during the diffusion process. the indicators made visible the ati team’s network of interactions, the main topics of their conversation, and how they felt about their work over time. ati managers linked the indicators to their own business performance metrics to get an overall sense of how the innovation diffusion process was proceeding. the multiplicity of stakeholders: study teams, corporate, and government stakeholders automotive product development is most certainly a complex multistakeholder research context. the research involved the following primary stakeholders who all had their own views about ethics and ethical behavior: two collaborating study teams, corporate management, journal of business anthropology, special issue 1, spring 2014 84 including the legal staff and human resource departments, the study participants themselves (the ati product development innovation team), the university institutional review boards (irbs), and the governmental funding agency, the nsf. the research team also referenced the american anthropological association (aaa) code of ethics in considering and making decisions about ethical issues during the course of the research. the two teams who collaborated to conduct the nsf ddd study were the university-based researchers and the internal corporate research team. the university team included two other professors and me as the principal investigators on the grant, plus graduate and undergraduate research assistants. we led the study and were responsible for the study design, software choice, indicator selection, all research approvals, and for training the internal research team how to install and use the software for the study. we were also the people who had to negotiate our way through the difficult ethical landscape. the internal corporate research team consisted of five company engineers who managed the internal corporate it resources, databases, and security for the study. this team also performed the dashboard testing and indicator validation, and facilitated access to research subjects and settings for the ethnographic research. the members served as internal technical experts regarding the product development process and as liaisons to the university research team. on the corporate side, the primary stakeholders were corporate management, the legal staff and the human resource departments. the spokespersons for corporate management were the seven people who reported to the chairman as global vice presidents. they assumed the overall corporate oversight and support for the research and had very practical ethical criteria for evaluating the outcomes. their motivation for participating as an industry partner for an nsf study was to gain access to leading edge university research. by providing in-kind resources in the form of managerial and employee time, as well as use of company facilities and equipment, they hoped to receive tools that might give them a competitive advantage. the legal staff got involved in the research to review and ensure the protection of the mne’s intellectual property and employee privacy rights, and in the implementation of regulatory compliance for the conduct of research across the multiple national locations. the human resources department was primarily concerned with protecting employee privacy rights and obtaining permissions for the research from employees. the global ati team members were the study participants, and consisted of 298 people distributed in locations around the world. this team was charged with navigating the innovation through the global product development process, obtaining buy-in from the component vehicle engineers, and persuading a target program team to adopt their innovation and include it in the vehicle that would eventually be gluesing / ethical considerations 85 produced and sold in the marketplace. there were two university institutional review boards that had to give their approvals for the research to begin and move forward. both of these review boards had their own systems for evaluating the research and for ensuring compliance with both university and u.s. federal government requirements. the nsf human and social dynamics program itself, which funded the study, was the last primary stakeholder. their interest was ensuring the study would contribute to the broader societal and public good, as well as advance graduate and undergraduate education and training. because the research project involved anthropologists, who were responsible for investigating the “whys and hows” behind the innovation process and validating the it-based dashboard metrics with “ground truth”, the aaa code of ethics was the guiding reference for ethical decisions on the research team, especially when the decisions concerned human subjects. the engineers and it specialists on the university and corporate research teams were most concerned with it security and intellectual property protections. the complexity presented by multiple stakeholders in the nsf research project resulted in ethical challenges throughout the five-year study, requiring that the university research team learn the ethical viewpoints of each of the primary stakeholders and serve as negotiators across the various group. ethical challenges the general neoliberal perspective of the corporate stakeholders in the mne meant that ethics was reviewed according to market criteria that ensured competitive advantage and minimized the impact of governmental regulations. ethical considerations included keeping all data gathered in the research inside the corporate it firewall and minimizing the potential of leaks that might occur in giving “outsiders”, the university research team and the nsf, access to confidential company information, especially information about a high-stakes innovation that was under development. the nsf also embodied some of the same free market concerns by seeking to ensure national advantage in the marketplace through funding of research in the corporate sector with an eye to fostering a faster development cycle of ideas to products in the nation overall, but, at the same time, the agency actively promoted by advocating a policy of open sharing of data from the research with other researchers both inside and outside the u.s. in fact, one of the elements of the nsf research proposal was the development of a database of descriptive information about innovations and their diffusion trajectories, which could be accessed and used by other researchers for future studies. there was an ethical challenge presented by the corporate desire to journal of business anthropology, special issue 1, spring 2014 86 protect its innovations, and the nsf focus on openness and sharing of research results. was it ethical to share corporate data, or not? the protection of human subjects was another ethical challenge for the university research team. the mne legal staff and the human resource staff were in agreement about protecting the privacy of the mne’s employees. however, the human resources rules and regulations were different in all the countries where the ati project was ongoing. that meant that the human resources policies in each country had to be reviewed and repaired, and legal negotiations had to be undertaken. the nsf had one set of rules, based on u.s. governmental regulations regarding human subjects research, and these rules were in turn incorporated into the irbs at the two universities as a requirement for government funding, but with different implementation practices in each. the irbs did agree that the it-based data gathering could be conducted, as long as no participant could be identified. the ethnographic data would have to be subjected to the approvals process for behavioral data at both universities, however. the research team had to contend with contradictory recruitment policies regarding research participation in each country as well. the recruitment policies in mne locations around the world varied and were often contradictory. for example, in the u.s. the policy was one of general informed consent with employees agreeing to participate in the research with the option to “opt out” at any time. in germany, however, it was just the opposite: employees were actively required to “opt in” to the research individually after the german workers council had approved the research project. over and above the general protection of human subjects, employees had their own personal safety and privacy concerns, which posed a challenge to both the university and the corporate research teams. the it-based data collection methods involved the automated gathering of employee email, a sensitive matter indeed. as far as corporate management was concerned, the mne owned all employee email and could access it and read it at any time. all employees, when they logged onto the corporate intranet, saw an automatic message saying that their email was company property and not their own and by logging on they acknowledge that fact. however, from the perspective of the employees, their email was still private, and they did not want “just anybody” accessing it and reading it, let alone analyzing it. human resource policies also supported this position, regardless of the corporate legal position. therefore, the university research team was faced with the task of convincing employees that their individual email would not be read by either of the two research teams, internal or university, or by anyone outside the company. the researchers gathered 45,000 emails to create the digital diffusion dashboard, and their links among more than 2,000 people across the enterprise communicating about the ati gluesing / ethical considerations 87 innovation project over time. the ddd metrics were designed to answer seven important evaluative questions that a manager might want to know about an innovation: 1. who is talking? who is talking about the innovation? what group of the company do they represent? what level of the company is talking about the innovation? 2. who are the champions? who is central in the network? 3. how is the team collaborating? who is involved in the network? are the right people talking? is anyone missing? 4. what is the “buzz” about the innovation? what are people saying about the innovation? 5. what is the emotion of the team? are people talking positively or negatively about the innovation? 6. what is the rate of adoption? is the innovation diffusing fast enough? is it spreading throughout the organization as it should? 7. what is the value proposition? what is the value of the innovation to the organization? while corporate management, human resources staff, legal counsel, and the universities’ irb boards considered much of this information sensitive and confidential, it was the participants themselves who especially expressed concern because their individual reputations and careers could be at risk. ethical concerns also arose for everyone because the participants’ email boxes contained email sent, forwarded, or copied from people who may not have consented to participate in the study. resolving the ethical challenges to respect the mne’s desire for data security and protection of intellectual property and the nsf’s desire for open data sharing, the university research team, in collaboration with the internal research team, agreed to keep the “raw data” inside the corporate firewall. this restriction meant that the researchers could create a database or publication that contained only the results of the study. the data leading to the results had to stay with the company. this decision specified that the researchers could not continue to analyze data after the conclusion of the study because they would not have access to it, and it meant that the nsf could receive and share results but would not have the promised database of descriptive data about the innovation. it also meant that the researchers could not call the mne or the innovation by their real names journal of business anthropology, special issue 1, spring 2014 88 but would have to use pseudonyms. the decision was an unusual compromise for the researchers who are accustomed to keeping the data they collect, but it applied only to the it-based data. the ethnographic data were another story. the anthropologists successfully presented their case to the mne, to the university irbs, and to the study participants for protecting and preserving their data, and not giving anyone inside or outside the corporation access to it. the aaa code of ethics2 was instrumental in supporting the argument. human subjects, participant recruitment, personal safety, and privacy concerns surrounding the collection of email data, were all resolved by establishing four procedures with the support of the it staff and through clear and honest communication with study participants, with approvals from corporate legal and human resources staff around the globe and the university irbs: 1. all ati team members received an emailed consent form, approved by the irb, which they returned with their consent or refusal to participate, which meant that everyone had to actively choose to “opt in”. team members who elected to participate in the study could also “opt out” at any time. 2. the research teams did not gather all email, only the email that was related to the ati innovation project. to collect only this subset of email, the ati team members participating in the study installed and activated email rules themselves (which again meant they had to actively choose to participate), using common project keywords (emic language). they copied their email, using a “dummy” email address in the “cc” field, to a centralized, secure server email box with restricted access. they could readily see the dummy email address in their email header and delete it if they did not wish to have a particular email sent to the dummy mailbox in the secure server. 3. two additional filters were placed in the rules. first, if an email was designated as personal, private, or encrypted, it was automatically excluded from data collection. second, all legal email around patents that was labeled as "privileged" was excluded from data collection. 4. the university team could not read any individual email. all email content was aggregated as frequency counts for single words or word pairs for analysis. no email message could be reconstructed. 2 the aaa code of ethics contains the following major guidelines:  do no harm.  be open and honest regarding your work.  obtain informed consent and necessary permissions.  weigh competing ethical obligations due collaborators and affected parties.  make your results accessible.  protect and preserve your records.  maintain respectful and ethical professional relationships. gluesing / ethical considerations 89 email was also anonymized for any public presentation, for example, user 1, user 2, user 3. after some deliberation, the university irb and the company’s human resource staff decided that because all the email was anonymized for analysis and no individual email could be reconstructed, there was no violation of confidentiality or privacy ethics from their points of view. the anthropologists on the research team did know who many of the participants were because they talked with them about the ati innovation project and shadowed them in their work, in accordance with informed consent and with all corporate and irb approvals of data collection protocols. however, the ethnographers were not able to connect any of the emails with the ethnographic data without the participants giving the anthropologists permission to look at their specific email. the anthropologists did not remove email data from the work site, not just because of both personal privacy and corporate security reasons, but also out of respect for participants in the study. the anthropologists wanted to encourage trust in the research team and between the team and participants. it took about eight months to resolve the challenges posed by the ethical complexity in the multi-stakeholder context of the ati research project, and was especially difficult for the anthropologists on the team, who were leading this aspect of the project.3 the project could not get started without negotiated agreements based on the various rules and regulations of the various agencies, governments, and the mne’s corporate legalities and policies. however, there were ongoing ethical decisions that had to be made as new challenges arose throughout the project. the anthropologists had to develop an approach to ethics that could serve as a reference for the project team, as they encountered these challenges and worked toward their resolution throughout the life of the project. what follows is an extended discussion of this approach and the dilemmas that are before all anthropologists who do this work. discussion and ongoing ethical dilemmas all of the actions the stakeholders negotiated to resolve ethical issues involved both complying with rules and regulations (which include ethical considerations, but cannot be equated with ethics) and considering the ethical decisions to be made within the specific circumstances of the work context. the anthropologists on the research team were the ultimate decision-makers in the project, primarily because they considered not only what was right by law and by rule, but also what 3 in another mne that was part of the same national science foundation grant, it took two years to negotiate intellectual property rights, involving the research team (especially the anthropologists who did not want to disclose interview data), corporate managers and legal staff in different countries, and both universities’ legal staff. journal of business anthropology, special issue 1, spring 2014 90 was ethical according to their own ethical values, the values of the people with whom they were working, and the values of the people they were studying. in other words, the anthropologists practiced what could be called situated and relational ethics, taking a pragmatic approach grounded in what they considered to be good anthropology. in business anthropology, research is generally conducted in the context of daily organization work, where the ethics of everyday activities are often ambiguous. therefore, a practical and situated ethics helps clarify ethical reasoning in the course of normal problems, or ethical dilemmas that workers and managers face in doing their jobs (alvesson and svenningsson 2003). explicit ethical codes espoused by organizational leaders and those who are part of formal organizational policy in an mne, as well as the formal code of ethics adopted by the american anthropological association, are of some value as guidelines. however, ethical judgments that are made as part of everyday work are emergent and practical. ethics are embedded in the situated, particular realities of a context in all its complexity, especially in mnes where multiple boundaries are crossed and different, often divergent, values and ways of understanding and working are likely to intersect. to negotiate the ethical complexity in the ati research project, the anthropologists had to use practical wisdom. in the nicomachean ethics, aristole (1999) outlines three types of intellectual virtual: episteme, techne, and phronesis. episteme is known as scientific knowledge (also called declarative knowledge, or know-what) and is considered to be universal and relatively context independent. techne, known as craft knowledge or technical art (also called procedural knowledge, or knowhow), is dependent on context, but oriented toward the production of something pragmatic. phronesis is practical wisdom. it is “concerned with action about things that are good or bad for a human being” (aristotle 1999: 89). phronesis has an ethical component. it is not the “right” way of doing things as might be specified by rules and regulations, or laws in a particular community, but the ethically good action a practical, wise person would take. phronesis puts practice in the foreground and closely connects ethics and action in situated circumstances, since it is “concerned with action and action is about particulars” (aristotle 1999: 92). in the ati project, ethical evaluations were situated and contextualized and discussed by the research teams, both internal and external, and communicated to other stakeholders, and perhaps even negotiated and modified based on stakeholder feedback. however, these evaluations did not mean “anything goes” in a relativist sense. some universals, such as “do no harm” or “be open and honest regarding your work” in the aaa code of ethics were strong points of reference to guide behavior. however, anthropologists, and other stakeholders, too, made ethical judgments and decisions based on the business, technical, and gluesing / ethical considerations 91 social context, which presented limited choices and possibilities for action. the identification and evaluation of ethical or unethical behavior was based on what was occurring in a specific situation within a particular context in the course of the ati project’s everyday work activities and the research activities involved. phronesis guided the anthropologists, and the other stakeholders as well, through the particularities of contextual complexity phronesis is developed through experience and cannot be taught as part of a university curriculum. it is gained by sharing situations, cases and stories, and is achieved through discussion with members of different kinds of organizations and who might hold different points of view. the anthropologists working on the ati project had to practice their trade in the mne, and reflect and talk about their work in general (without reference to confidential information) with other anthropologists and those outside the discipline in the workplace and on research teams. socialization and training must occur in practice, in an emergent way, in order for business anthropologists to develop phronesis, and to create an ethical community of practice. as nyberg (2008: 596) has so rightly stated: giving people time to reflect upon and discuss their activities does not necessarily change them but it does make change more likely. the alternative is to enforce disciplinary and controlling pressures to make people behave in certain ways. however, rules or principles will not get us there, since we cannot expect people to act ethically if there they are given no opportunity to exercise practical ethical judgement. this is the major point: following ethical codes does not involve choice, merely compliance; if one does not choose to act, one has not acted ethically. there will always be situations that codes of ethics cannot cover. in the complexity of life in an mne, “universal” rules can only take one so far and one cannot know or memorize them all. rules may even restrict the capacity to act ethically. it is the practical wisdom to handle particular situations that anthropologists wishing to work in or study complex, global multi-stakeholder organizational contexts must develop over time through practice. for academics who train anthropologists, the development of practical wisdom means that students have to be given the opportunity to practice in complex organizational settings under the guidance of experienced business anthropologists. there also must be an opportunity to reflect within the larger community of practice, and this generally takes place at conferences such as the ethnographic praxis in industry (epic). this reflection is important for students, but it is equally and especially important for business anthropologists who are already practicing in mnes or other large complex organizations. journal of business anthropology, special issue 1, spring 2014 92 doing “good anthropology” means tracking between the universal and the local, and between general and specific knowledge, “wherein specificity of insight lends credibility to general knowledge, and local knowledge holds the grains of universal wisdom” (gershon 2011: 550). good anthropology also means resisting the neoliberal perspective that tends to group together people, communities, or even nations in terms of business or market skills, treating them as though they were all alike, as corporate forms. gershon (2011) has advocated an “ethics of imagination,” in which anthropologists pay attention to social forms of organization, to epistemological differences, and to relationships with people as individuals. the ati researchers attempted to make ethical decisions based on a consideration of how people were related to one another in their organizational networks, both formal and informal social networks, and on an understanding of how people might be personally affected by the decisions, and the multiple ways they might view the situation and the decisions. this took time, which ultimately limited the scope of the research. however, acting within a central tenant of care, in which the researchers valued and respected the connection between themselves and the people they studied, was both a “practical” and “good” anthropology in this author’s opinion. phronesis as the basis of good anthropology is processual in nature as well as experiential and relational. complex global work is and will continue to be rapidly changing, so there will be no wisdom that is “once and for all”. as our working landscape becomes ever more digital and distributed, and we are faced with new ethical dilemmas posed by the internet, as well as yet unforeseen technological and societal developments, as practicing business anthropologists we must develop a “discourse ethics” (palazzo and sherer 2006; sherer and patzer 2011). discourse that includes storytelling and reflection fosters continual discussion of the situations encountered, and how best to act with wisdom where ethical dilemmas are posed and ethical decisions are required. in an almost postnational era of globalization, the complexity of our dynamic multi-stakeholder business environment requires an open and continual discourse to maintain practical wisdom in the face of the ethical challenges anthropologists face now and will face in the future. such a discourse ethics is both a constructivist and an intercultural philosophy of ethics that encourages both relativistic and universalistic debate of ongoing situated action that leads to practical knowledge consistent with aristotle’s concept of phronesis. conclusion this article highlights the three primary reasons for ethical complexity in multi-stakeholder work contexts: (1) the predominance of neoliberal thinking; (2) the difficulty of dealing with ethics that are culturally embedded and that also cross multiple boundaries at multiple levels; and gluesing / ethical considerations 93 (3) the intercultural nature of most interactions in these enterprises that necessitate continual negotiation. the example of the global ati project provides an illustration of the ethical challenges that result from this complexity and how these challenges were resolved through eight months of negotiation. the ati researchers considered the rules, regulations, policies, and laws in the mne, universities, funding agencies, and various codes of ethics to reach ethical decisions over the life of the project. which research practices are considered ethical, and in particular, what data ‒ including corporate data ‒ it is ethical to protect or consider confidential, is a matter of compromise across multiple views of ethics and is based in an attuned consideration of context. acquiring local knowledge and basing decisions in a system of “common sense” (geertz 1983: 73-93) worked for the team to resolve ethical dilemmas as they faced them. doing “good anthropology” and making “good ethical decisions” clearly involves more than expertise in international law or the rules and regulations or formal policies of international business. ethics in business anthropology is based on an understanding of context, in the ability of the anthropologist to dig deep to surface and learn about people’s perspectives and their reasoning, and how it is situated in particular contexts. ethics is about relationships and social organization, and about how people refer to the universal in making ethical decisions, while also paying attention to the particularities and constraints of the situation to know not only the right thing to do, but also the good thing to do in the circumstances under a tenant of care. as business and anthropology moves more and more into the global business arena, it will be increasingly important to teach and to learn through practical experience, reflection, and discourse, if we are to make wise ethical decisions in our own work, as it changes and adapts over time to new circumstances. references abend, gabriel. 2008. two main problems in the sociology of morality. theory and society 37:87-125. alvesson, matts and s. svenningsson. 2003. managers doing leadership: the extra-ordinarization of the mundane. human relations 56(12):14351459. appadurai, arjun. 1996. modernity at large: cultural dimensions of globalization. minneapolis: university of minnesota press. aristotle. 1999. nicomachean ethics, t. irwin, trans. 2nd edition. indianapolis: hackett. bourdieu, pierre. 1998. l’essence du néolibéralisme: le monde journal of business anthropology, special issue 1, spring 2014 94 diplomatique mars 1998. http://www.mondediplomatique.fr/1998/03/bourdieu/10167 friedman, thomas. 2006. the world is flat: the globalized world in the twenty-first century. london: penguin. geertz, clifford. 1983. local knowledge. new york: basic books. gershon, ilana. 2011. neoliberal agency. current anthropology 52:537555. hayek, friedrich a. 1979. law, legislation and liberty: a new statement of the liberal principles and political economy. volume iii: the political order of a free people. london: routledge. jackson, t. 2007. cross-cultural sensitivities in developing corporate ethical strategies and practices. in corporate ethics and corporate governance, w. zimmerli, k. richter and m. holizinger, eds., pp. 229-250. berlin: springer. leung, k., with r. bhagat, n. buchan, m. erez, and c. gibson. 2005. culture and international business. journal of international business studies 36:357–378. laszlo, christopher and jeremy nash. 2007. six facets of ethical leadership: an executive’s guide to the new ethics in business. electronic journal of business ethics and organization studies 12(2):1-7. nyberg, daniel. 2008. the morality of everyday activities: not the right, but the good thing to do. journal of business ethics 81:587-598. palazzo, guido and andreas georg scherer. 2006. corporate legitimacy as deliberation: a communicative framework. journal of business ethics 66:71-88. scherer, andreas georg and moritz patzer. 2011. beyond universalism and relativism: habermas's contribution to discourse ethics and its implications for intercultural ethics and organization theory. in philosophy and organization theory, research in the sociology of organizations, vol. 32, h. tsoukas and r. chia, eds., pp. 155-180. emerald group publishing limited. http://www.monde-diplomatique.fr/1998/03/bourdieu/10167 http://www.monde-diplomatique.fr/1998/03/bourdieu/10167 gluesing / ethical considerations 95 julia gluesing is a business and organizational anthropologist and research professor in industrial and systems engineering at wayne state university, where she teaches global perspectives in engineering management, global leadership, and qualitative research methods course in the global executive track ph.d. she was the principal investigator on a national science foundation grant, the “digital diffusion dashboard,” to study the diffusion of innovation across the global enterprise by tapping into an organization’s the information technology infrastructure. she has published professionally, most recently as an editor and contributing author of mobile work mobile lives: cultural accounts of lived experiences (blackwell 2008), and a contributing author in virtual teams that work: creating conditions for virtual team effectiveness (jossey-bass 2003), handbook of managing global complexity (blackwell 2003), and crossing cultures: lessons from master teachers (routledge 2004). julia also is president of cultural connections, inc., a research, consulting and education firm supporting global business development. she can be reached at j.gluesing@wayne.edu mailto:j.gluesing@wayne.edu vi opdaterer systemet vi opdaterer systemet... rauli.cbs.dk opdateres og er snart tilgængeligt. vi opdaterer systemet vi opdaterer systemet... rauli.cbs.dk opdateres og er snart tilgængeligt. opinions: the anthropology of finance one of the more salutory effects of the financial crisis in 2007-8 has been the realization, even by some economists, that numbers do not explain everything and that social forms and relations also play a major part in financial trading. here anthropologists (and some sociologists) have come to the fore. the jba therefore asked a number of scholars to write an opinion piece about different aspects of the anthropology of finance that interested them. here is what some of them kindly contributed. beyond culture and society: prospects for ethnographies of finance daromir rudnyckyj, university of victoria finance has recently attracted an upsurge of interest among ethnographically oriented social scientists and this attention has increased dramatically in the wake of recent financial crises that have swept across europe, the united states, and beyond. much of the recent sociological and anthropological work on finance has built on research that has sought to understand the effects of expert knowledge on human life and ways of living, especially in science and technology studies. social studies of finance have sought to open up the black box of finance to page 1 of 26 jba 2(1): 49-74 spring 2013 © the author(s) 2013 issn 2245-4217 www.cbs.dk/jba journal of business anthropology, 2(1), spring 2013 50 better understand the practices and assumptions that frame financial action (mackenzie, muniesa and siu 2008; miyazaki 2013; zaloom 2006). in parallel with the accelerating interest in finance in the human sciences, finance has also recently become a focus of popular political mobilization and increased public scrutiny. the occupy movement that emerged in large part in response to government action (and inaction) following the financial crises of the period between 2008 and 2011 makes it evident that finance wields disproportionate influence on human action compared to its outsized influence on human life (juris 2012). while some strategies of social scientific engagement with finance sought to demonstrate the social and cultural dimensions of financial worlds, more recent strategies have analyzed the networks and rationalities that comprise finance today. this essay seeks to raise a set of questions that might guide empirical social scientific work on finance. some recent sociological and anthropological work has identified the cultural forms and social structures that characterize spaces of finance. two distinguished sociologists, donald mackenzie and yuval millo, have documented the history of the chicago board options exchange, a key financial derivatives market. mainly based on interviews with key players and power brokers on the exchange, they deploy michel callon’s performativity theory (callon 1998), which asserts that economics ‘does not describe an existing external “economy,” but brings that economy into being: economics performs the economy, creating the phenomena it describes’ (mackenzie and millo 2003:108). in so doing, they demonstrate how the black scholes theory, originally a hypothetical model to account for the behavior of derivatives traders, increasingly influenced the world that it had previously purported only to describe. they note that ‘the markets gradually altered so that many of the model’s assumptions, wildly unrealistic when published in 1973, became more accurate’ (122). second, traders began to adopt the model as a ‘guide to trading’ (123). the model was no longer just used to describe the options trading market, but was instead actively used by traders to guide their action in the market. thus, they conclude, ‘gradually, ‘reality’ (in this case, empirical prices) was performatively reshaped in conformance with the theory’ (127). in so doing, mackenzie and millo also show how a space purportedly dedicated to the pure exercise of market principles is actually the site of an elaborate array of social codes, mutual obligations, and reciprocity (115-119). noting the importance of social relationships on the exchange, they suggest the irony inherent in the fact that ‘the very markets in which homo oeconomicus appears to thrive cannot be created (if they require the solution of collective action problems, as in chicago) by homines oeconomici. chicago practice (markets created by collective action) contradicts chicago theory, orthodox economics as famously pursued at the university of chicago’ (116). perhaps it should come as no surprise that two sociologists should enter into a space that might be seen opinions: the anthropology of finance 51 as the site for the exercise of pure market reason and find the central object of their discipline: society. an analogous approach is apparent in recent work by the eminent anthropologist arjun appadurai. appadurai seeks to decipher the cultural dispositions that precipitated recent financial crises in the united states. focusing mainly on the practices and orientations of wall street traders, appadurai argues that ‘it is possible to identify a series of magical practices…at the heart of global capitalism and, in particular, of the financial sectors. these practices are premised on a general, absolute, and apparently transcendent faith in the market’ (appadurai 2012:8-9).1 drawing heavily on weber’s famous arguments regarding the spirit of capitalism, appadurai notes that the resurgence of magic runs against weber’s own observations about capitalism. as he points out, weber identified protestant asceticism and the sober disavowal of any worldly manifestations of divinity as one of the key enabling conditions for the subsequent emergence of the spirit of capitalism (2012:8). weber, of course, also identified the elimination of magic by protestant reformers as a key condition of possibility for the emergence of worldly asceticism and ultimately the spirit of capitalism (weber 2001:71). thus, appadurai concludes that the ‘new religion of the market [that] treats the market as the source of certainty’ reverses ‘the weberian logic’ (2012: 9). according to appadurai, the problem is that instead of behaving rationally, the financial actors created the current and ongoing financial crises due to a mystical faith in the market. although not cited, appadurai’s arguments about financial capitalism seem to borrow more from marx than they do from weber. appadurai does not refer to marx in either essay, but the assertion of magic inherent in financial capitalism and his insistence that the market is treated in religious and mystical terms by traders and other actors, evokes marx’s famous arguments about commodity fetishism that were articulated at an earlier moment in the history of capitalism (marx 1977:163-170). the traders and financiers briefly described are depicted as being as mystified by the tools and techniques through which they apprehend the market, such as chartism (appadurai 2011:528), as the consumers of nineteenth century were by the proliferation of commercial merchandise following the industrial revolution. of course, in asserting the apparent magical nature of market capitalism to those who inhabit it, appadurai travels down a path well trod by anthropologists. indeed, the apparently magical nature of the market is evident in work ranging from studies of cargo cults and devil worship (taussig 1980; worsley 1957) to more recent invocations regarding post-colonial ‘occult economies’ (comaroff and comaroff 1 it is instructive to point out that this sentence appears word for word in both the cambridge anthropology and the public culture essays (2011: 527). journal of business anthropology, 2(1), spring 2013 52 1999). of course, a central concern of such studies has been to show how culture informs economic action. thus, just as the sociologists mackenzie and millo entered into the world of high finance and found society at the heart of the market, appadurai makes a parallel voyage and finds culture in similar sites. it is perhaps predictable that sociologists and anthropologists might enter market spaces and find the orienting objects of their disciplines, but it strikes me that empirical research might be able to offer more to understanding the worlds of finance than to simply identify the social or cultural action occurring therein. in this regard there are three sets of questions that might be useful in developing more robust interdisciplinary work on finance. first, how does one do empirical social scientific research in financial sites? that is to say, what ethnographic techniques are available to conduct ethnographic work on finance? in addressing this question, it would be germane to identifying continuities with previous anthropological modes of investigation and also identifying the sorts of innovations required in empirical research on finance. second, why should anthropology be attentive to finance? in other words, how does attention to finance advance disciplinary knowledge? as such, anthropologists could attend to how empirical work on finance might benefit research programs in other domains of the discipline. given that sites for the formation of expert knowledge – such as laboratories, hospitals, government offices, and corporations – are increasingly prevalent locations for the practice of anthropology, those working in these sites might identify continuities and obstacles to carrying out research in these sites. finally, how does attention to finance enable better understanding of capitalism? given the complexity and sophistication of economic practice, how might ethnographic work on finance contribute to enhancing our comprehension of capitalism today? previous diagnoses of capitalism may not provide the best arsenal of concepts to address the complexity of contemporary capitalism. work on finance might offer new tools to enhance our knowledge of how capitalism has changed. furthermore, proclamations that ongoing financial crises will lead to the ultimate downfall of capitalism, or even widespread policy transformations, are perhaps premature. yet transnational initiatives such as the occupy movement have made financial centers increasingly visible as critical sites of not only economic action, but political expression and ethnographic documentation. given this articulation, as well as an increasing awareness of the effects of finance on human life and action, it would seem an opportune moment for anthropology to consider what intervention the discipline might make. opinions: the anthropology of finance 53 references appadurai, arjun 2011 'the ghost in the financial machine.' public culture 23 (3):517-539. appadurai, arjun 2012 'the spirit of calculation.' cambridge anthropology 20 (1):3-17. callon, michel 1998 'introduction.' in the laws of the markets. michel callon, ed. pp. 1-57. malden: blackwell. comaroff, jean, and john comaroff 1999 'occult economies and the violence of abstraction: notes from the south african postcolony.' american ethnologist 26 (2):279-303. juris, jeffrey s. 2012 'reflections on #occupy everywhere: social media, public space, and emerging logics of aggregation.' american ethnologist 39(2):259-279. mackenzie, donald a., fabian muniesa, and lucia siu 2008 do economists make markets? on the performativity of economics. princeton: princeton university press. mackenzie, donald, and yuval millo 2003 'constructing a market, performing a theory: the historical sociology of a financial derivatives exchange.' american journal of sociology 109(1):107-145. marx, karl 1977 capital: a critique of political economy. new york: vintage books. miyazaki, hirokazu 2013 arbitraging japan: dreams of capitalism at the end of finance. berkeley: university of california press. taussig, michael t. 1980 the devil and commodity fetishism in south america. chapel hill: university of north carolina press. weber, max 2001 the protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism. london: routledge. worsley, peter 1957 the trumpet shall sound: a study of ‘cargo’ cults in melanesia. london: macgibbon & kee. zaloom, caitlin 2006 out of the pits: trading and technology from chicago to london. chicago: university of chicago press. * * * journal of business anthropology, 2(1), spring 2013 54 sovereign wealth funds: configuring an ecology of security aihwa ong, university of california, berkeley if the anthropology of finance has shifted from the polemics of exploitation to the pragmatics of capitalism, we are still somewhat influenced by the framing of economics in opposition to politics. our uscentric view of capitalism has been one that is antagonistic to the state, or of the state succumbing to the power of wall street, as in government bailouts of ‘too big to fail’ banks and corporations. conceptually, we have been overly influenced by ‘progressive’ views (marx, polyani, arendt) of the economy and politics as contradictory domains that ought to be resolved into a single entity. anthropologists writing on finance tend to anticipate that (‘over time’) one domain would collapse into the other. either the primacy of capitalism must give way to the primacy of sociality, or the creation of profits subsumed under the creation of social values. as ethnographers, we seem caught in a double-bind of financial wealth versus the human good, and suspended in the conceptual temporality of waiting for the endpoint (miyazaki 2006). a strategic ecology..... there is an alternate way of thinking about the relation of finance and politics fueled by the growth of sovereign wealth funds (swf) in emerging nations. are developing areas of the world simply victims in global capital flows, or are they developing powers to redirect circuits of capital and technology to shape an emerging space of the social good? if so, how do financial techniques form new ‘topologies of power’ (collier 2010)? in other words, how do financial practices shape a strategic correlation of governing and space beyond the nation-state? what new codings of capital are involved in this process of financial ‘reterritorialization’ (deleuze & guattari 1987)? and what kind of political values are being marked? foucault (2007) argues that modern political government is not about establishing singularity, but about strategically engaging multiplicity in conditions of heterogeneity and competition (see lazzarato 2008). his diagnosis of liberalism identifies a ‘centrifugal’ mechanism of security that constantly integrates diverse elements – techniques, institutions, and material resources – as a way of developing ‘ever-wider circuits’ (2007: 45). in other words, governing strategy strategically coordinates diverse agencies, methods, forms and actors to configure a space of security that extends beyond the territory of the state. anthropologists are perhaps conceptually and empirically alert to opinions: the anthropology of finance 55 how flows of practices, objects and actors shape emerging spaces for resolving problems of security and power. as stephen j. collier and i (2005) have noted, for the analyst and perhaps the technocrat, the space of problematization is the space of the assemblage; or the strategic configuration for problem-solving identifies a mix of politics and the economy with external relationships. in this opinion piece, i will discuss how state finance is involved in shaping a novel milieu, or ‘ecology of expertise’ (ong 2005). increasingly, strategies of governing and financial security reflect biological principles for intervening in conditions of variation, selection, and sustainability. an ecology of expertise is built when strategic interactions among flows of capital and technology (re)territorialize and (re)code complex interrelationships between governments and companies, venture capital and research institutions, economic growth and the social good. different domains of value creation are woven into a system of flexible and interdependent relationships, thus implicating them in a shared fate of competition, security, and sustainability. china's ‘superbank’ reconfigures financial flows when it comes to global financial markets, it is informative to contrast governing styles animated by either an ecological logic or a centripetal logic. the european project seems to pursue a centripetal mechanism that circumscribes a closed space for regulation according to norms of good and bad. nations that use the euro pool their sovereignty under a single supervisor to watch over their biggest banks. a journalist reports that brussels ‘has long either ignored financial markets or denounced them as an alien and predatory force.’ but now that the long-term viability of the euro is at stake, there is evolution in the thinking of the brussels bureaucracy.2 by contrast, an ‘anglo-saxon’ or ‘advanced liberal’ approach ‘governs through freedom’ (rose 1999) by retaining individual sovereign powers but focusing on building a transnational (i.e. distributed) common market. the logic is a financial system framed by common membership in the eu block, more or less. in so-called authoritarian asian regimes, a centrifugal logic – expansive, flexible, and attentive to how variation can work together, is also at play. there are forms of financing in the asia-pacific, from illegal financial schemes to legal sovereign funds (ong 2012: 31). here, i analyze the strategic deployment of sovereign funds by different countries that territorialize and code multiple crisscrossing relations of convergence and competition that shape an emerging financial region. a purely business definition of a financial platform assesses the soundness and 2 andrew higgins, ‘after fighting markets, europe now prefers working with them,’ the new york times, december 15, 2012, a8. journal of business anthropology, 2(1), spring 2013 56 scope of their financial activities.3 but th e flexi ble a s s em blage of funds, technologies, and expertise that control the diversity and quality of tradeable assets in east asia is closer to an emerging financial ‘plateau’ (deleuze and guattari 1987) that is challenging american domination of global markets. sovereign wealth funds consist of state-owned investment capital that draws mainly on surplus currency reserves. usually managed by central banks or special state corporations, swf are invested globally in order to benefit the state. after three decades of feverish growth in asian economies, state-controlled reserves have become critical players in shifting global financial flows and markets. the prc is the holder of the largest foreign exchange reserves in world history. at the annual gdp rate of 10%, china has high levels of savings and investment, as well as vast trading surpluses. the ‘superbank’ managing china's financial system is china development bank (sanderson & forsythe 2013). cdb made huge loans that financed the rapid urbanization of the country, and the rise of the property market and public revenues. the superbank has also made sent money around the world to secure china's long-term energy supplies, by financing infrastructural systems in venezuela and african nations. for some time now, chinese foreign exchange assets have bankrolled us bonds, thus helping to keep the american economy running. especially since the 2008 recession, swf from china, singapore, and the middle east have come to the rescue of failing banks and corporations in europe and help shore up debt-burdened countries such as greece. however, budgetary grid-lock in congress has convinced chinese monetary authorities that they need to explore other ways to use their money. affluent asian countries have begun looking for alternative investments to the ultralow-yielding u.s. government bonds as a way to enhance returns on the reserves. sovereign wealth funds from asia are quietly flowing into socalled alternative asset classes or property and infrastructural developments in global cities. in early 2013, china's state administration of foreign exchange (safe) invested through its company gingko tree (also owned by a singapore company), in university housing, water systems, and office buildings in london and manchester, to the tune of over $1.6 billion. a financial observer notes that ‘in fact, it is difficult to walk through the city of london without passing a building at least partowned by a foreign government pension or sovereign fund.’ in other words, london's property market is being supported by sovereign wealth funds from china, singapore, malaysia, qatar, and norway (mcmahon & wei 2013). 3 for a definition by the development bank of japan, see http://www.dbj.jp/en/co/csr/property/platform1.html http://www.dbj.jp/en/co/csr/property/platform1.html opinions: the anthropology of finance 57 besides foreign reserves, another circuit of money flows stems from asian companies. it is no longer the case that publicly traded companies anywhere have to turn to the stock exchanges in new york, london, or tokyo. new asian companies coming on the market are now listed in stock exchanges in hong kong, shanghai, singapore, seoul, and sidney, making them attractive global markets for trading stocks, commodities, and derivatives. it is also the case that asian stock exchanges have less rigorous trading standards than those enforced by regulatory agencies in the us. for instance, the securities and exchange commission (sec) has pressured auditors to investigate possible frauds by some chinese companies which are suspected of double book-keeping. furthermore, chinese laws ban the removal overseas of audit papers, thus preventing western auditors from examining the financial statements of chinese companies. because chinese stocks are considered too risky and volatile for western markets, the drive to de-list them from the new york stock exchange has driven companies to list themselves in asian markets. the relative weakness in regulatory oversight is overlain by the strengthening of technologies in asian financial centers. the triumph of electronics trading worldwide and the sheer volume of public companies in asia create opportunities for governmental action to coordinate trading activities and infrastructures that weave together a critical region of capital flows. hong kong, shanghai, singapore, and sydney have built electronic-trading platforms that greatly expand the volume, scale and liquidity of financial activities across the region. such state investments in high speed technologies thus underpin the rise of asian stock markets that are pulling huge volumes of international trading away from the west. compared to the euro zone, the centrifugal approach in asia accepts diversity in sovereignty and competitiveness in market positions within an evolving commercial ecosystem. an ecology of security another foucauldian intervention is to return capitalism to the problem of population as a bioeconomic problem, i.e. the political challenge of securing conditions of reproduction and security in the midst of diversity and contingency. it should, therefore, not be surprising that swf are deployed not only to mobilize financial markets, but also to grow bioeconomies that can promote values of sustainability. there is a perspective common in anthropology that biocapitalism centers on exploiting peoples and resources in emerging economies (sunder rajan 2006), and that ‘biovalues’ are commodities that threaten the common good (waldby & mitchell 2007). it would be helpful if, instead of thinking of biocapitalism and biovalue as external to the politics of life, we examine the novel conjunction of financial instruments, vitalist practices, and state power in the developing world. journal of business anthropology, 2(1), spring 2013 58 in recent decades, wealthy asian countries have begun to funnel surplus funds toward building biomedical hubs that promise to create security for populations beyond national borders. the most famous center is biopolis, grown from a multi-billion (us) dollar investment by the singapore government. although sited in a tiny island-state, biopolis is oriented outwards, connected to a multiplicity of researchers, institutions, and resources in asia and beyond (ong 2013). in china, state loans and facilities help sustain a private company, the beijing genome institute, that operates the largest ‘sequencing factory’ in the world from its headquarters in shenzhen. western observers have dismissed these ‘bioeconomies’ as purely commercial enterprises, but the drawing together of state finance, biomedical research and corporations is engendering values beyond anticipated profits. such reconfigurations of the economy and politics suggest that we rethink the notion of value that can be engendered through a series of public-private partnerships building on the recruitment of cutting-edge expertise. beyond investments for improving the content of human capital, the larger goal is to act on this capital through a series of techniques ‘to mobilise, solicit, incite, and invest ‘life’ (lazzarato 2008). one technique that intimately connects finance and life is fungibility. in economics, ‘fungibility’ is the quality of a value or good whose individual units can substitute for one another, such as bonds or crude oil. more broadly, fungibility refers to interchangeable or substitutable qualities in the satisfaction of a particular obligation or performance of a particular function. dna becomes fungible when its digitalized form becomes interchangeable with other types of economic, social and political values. but it is not simply the case that dna spreadsheets become the analogy of finance, selling security in uncertain markets. rather, the digitalization of dna is one among many logics that deploy human differences in the politics of managing life through diversity. the noncommoditized dimension of bio-values is the enhanced capacity of biotechnologies to calculate ‘potential biothreats’ (samimian-darash, 2013) and to thus perform as a technology of uncertainty in the region. * * * modern government, ideally, is about building new interrelations between the economy and politics, commodities and populations, between biocapitalism and biopolitics: in other words, about building ecologies of security in which they are entangled and interdependent. above, i have taken an ‘external’ or oblique approach to financial activities, examining not what is within financial markets, but the role of financial flows in animating new ecologies that, by putting into interaction diversity, competitiveness, and sustainability, are generative of values beyond sheer economic gains. on a broader level, a grasp of how contemporary spaces of opinions: the anthropology of finance 59 governing are strategically coordinated but separate domains, illuminates how financial approaches to risk-taking are not limited to arbitraging our future and making us victims of uncertainty. drawn into networks of security, financial mechanisms such as fungibility are productive of potential values for sustaining the social good in confronting the future. hope in finance is possible when we can test claims against incremental gains in experiments that integrate vitalist politics and sustainable growth. references collier, j. stephen j. (2010). ‘topologies of power: foucault's analysis of political government beyond “governmentality.”’ theory, culture and society 26 (6): 78-108. collier, j. stephen and aihwa ong (2005). ‘global assemblages, anthropological problems.’ in global assemblages, edited by a. ong and stephen j. collier, pp. 3-21. malden, ms.: blackwell. deleuze, g. and f. guattari (1987). a thousand plateaus. capitalism and schizophrenia. university of minnesota press. foucault, michel (2007). security, population, territory. lectures at the college de france, 1977-1978. trans. graham burchell. new york: palgrave-macmillan. mcmahon, d. & l. wei (2013). ‘china quietly invests in the u.k.’ the wall street journal. feb. 25, 2013, c1. lazzarato, maurizio (2008). ‘biopolitics/bioeconomics: a politics of multiplicity’ interactivist info exchange, maurizio lazzarato, ‘a politics of multiplicity’ on 2008-01-15 13:47:29. miyazaki, hiro (2006). ‘economy of dreams: hope in global capitalism and its critiques.’ cultural anthropology, 21 (2): 147-172. ong, aihwa (2005). ‘ecologies of expertise: assembling flows, managing citizenship.’ in global assemblages. edited by a. ong and stephen j. collier, pp. 337-353. malden, ms.: blackwell. ong, aihwa (2013). ‘a milieu of mutations: the pluripotency and fungibility of life in asia.’ easts: journal of east asian science, technology & society 7: 1–18. rose, nikolas (1999). powers of freedom: reframing political thought. cambridge: cambridge university press. samimian-darash, limor (2013). ‘governing future potential biothreats: toward an anthropology of uncertainty.’ current anthropology, 54 (1): 122. http://info.interactivist.net/ http://info.interactivist.net/article.pl?sid=05/10/18/0935231 http://info.interactivist.net/article.pl?sid=05/10/18/0935231 journal of business anthropology, 2(1), spring 2013 60 sanderson, h. & m. forsythe (2013). china's superbank. bloomberg, 2013 sunder rajan, kaushik (2006). biocapital: the construction of postgenomic life. durham, n.c.: duke university press. waldby, catherine and robert mitchell (2007). tissue economies: blood, organs and cell lines in late capitalism. durham, n.c.: duke university press. * * * japan at the ’end’ of finance hirokazu miyazaki, cornell university japan’s prime minister shinzo abe’s new economic policy widely, known as abenomics, has led to a dramatic stock market surge since december 2012. after a two-decade long recession and a deflation spiral that has lasted for over fifteen years, the japanese economy seems poised to regain its global preeminence. more significantly, abe’s economic policy seems to offer a model for other nations’ ongoing efforts to recover from the global financial crises of 2007-2008. is japan ’back’, as prime minister abe proclaimed in washington, d.c. on 22 february 2013?4 what is the significance of abenomics for the anthropology of finance? in my recent book, arbitraging japan: dreams of capitalism at the end of finance (berkeley: university of california press, 2013), i have chronicled the professional career trajectories of some of japan’s pioneering derivatives traders since the late 1980s. for the traders i studied, arbitrage, a key concept in financial economics and a wellestablished trading positionality in financial markets, has been a particularly compelling idea. arbitrage is a style of trading frequently adopted by professional traders to take advantage of a market price difference between two theoretically equivalent economic assets (such as a stock market index and futures contracts on the index). arbitrageurs detect arbitrage opportunities by computing the price difference between the two assets in a condition of no arbitrage, a condition in which there are no such arbitrageable price differences. in other words, arbitrage opportunities are defined in relation to their absence. moreover, arbitrageurs see themselves as taking advantage of and eventually eliminating arbitrage opportunities themselves. in this sense, arbitrage 4 ‘japan is back,’ a speech delivered at the center for strategic and international studies, february 22, 2013. http://www.mofa.go.jp/announce/pm/abe/us_20130222en.html http://www.mofa.go.jp/announce/pm/abe/us_20130222en.html opinions: the anthropology of finance 61 assumes an orientation toward its own end. in arbitraging japan, i demonstrate a variety of concrete manifestations of arbitrageurs’ highly sharpened sense of an end, from their routine switching of investment targets from one market to another (due to the decrease in arbitrage opportunities), to their understanding of tokyo’s downfall as a global financial center (due to its becoming a target of arbitrage itself), to their personal quests for spiritual ends (perhaps as efforts to sustain their own identity – yet another arguably arbitrageable difference). the japanese traders whose professional and intellectual lives i examined in arbitraging japan also have long anticipated the end of arbitrage (for them), and of financial expertise more generally. as one of the traders pointed out to me in the aftermath of the global financial crisis of 2007-2008. ’the subprime crisis revealed a simple fact: that is, that finance is nothing but a fraud … as it has turned out, finance was the arbitrage of knowledge gaps between those who know [those in the financial industry] and those who don’t [the public], not arbitrage between markets, and this fact has been revealed’ (miyazaki, arbitraging japan, p. 1). the philosophical and even spiritual elaborations of the idea of arbitrage among the japanese traders i have studied are perhaps extreme, and they are at least partially ironic results of the well-known japanese propensity to master, refine and innovate on imported knowledge, the widely acknowledged engine of japan’s postwar economic growth.5 yet, i suggest that the global financial crisis of 2007-2008 has intensified more generally the sense of the end of financial expertise implicit in financial concepts, such as arbitrage. there is a general sense of the failure of riskbased models of financial calculation and of the broad willingness to embrace radical uncertainty. in fact, abenomics is an example of this broad trend. after all, the core component of abenomics – that is, the large-scale quantitative easing policy that haruhiko kuroda, the new governor of the bank of japan, unveiled on 4 april 2013 – is nothing but an expression of a willingness to acknowledge the failure of conventional monetary policy tools.6 governor kuroda himself has acknowledged that there are limits to the efficacy of monetary policy and of the inflation targeting policy (the target is being set at two per cent), more specifically, to turn the deflationary spiral around. governor kuroda’s new policy is an effort to redeploy standard monetary policy tools in a zero-interest situation in which their efficacy is widely regarded as uncertain at best. in this context, kuroda has emphasized the importance of expectations (that is, expectations that 5 see, e.g., ezra vogel, japan as number one: lessons for america, cambridge, ma: harvard university press, 1979. 6 see hirokazu miyazaki and annelise riles, ’re-tooling expectations: abenomics and the politics of quantitative easing,’ unpublished manuscript, department of anthropology, cornell university. journal of business anthropology, 2(1), spring 2013 62 prices will rise in the future), and he has focused on boosting these expectations not only by exponentially increasing the size of quantitative easing, but also by drawing attention to the general role of expectations in the economy itself. in other words, governor kuroda’s new policy calls for more expectations for inflation and economic growth from the market. in this sense, abenomics stands at the end of monetary policy, and governor kuroda’s emphasis on expectations takes for granted the uncertainty not only of the efficacy of his own monetary policy but also of the future of the national and global economy. governor kuroda’s new monetary policy is a dramatic manifestation of what douglas holmes has called the ’economy of words’,7 in which central bankers increasingly focus their policy work on public communication. in light of the ethnographic observations i have made in arbitraging japan, however, governor kuroda’s monetary policy experiment can also be regarded as a manifestation of the financial market professional’s embrace of radical uncertainty and of the end of his own expertise. abenomics then confirms, once again, that financial expertise has come to an end. yet, what makes it particularly interesting for anthropological observers of financial expertise, is the way it projects the end of finance as yet another opportunity for financial imagination and expectation to reorient itself to the future.8 in this sense, abenomics has made japan resurface as a place of general interest where our common futures, financial and otherwise, are beginning to play themselves out. * * * the speculative ethic and the rise of financialism (in honor of carol breckenridge) benjamin lee, the new school for social research, new york in this opinion piece, i will present a framework for analyzing the development of what might be called a ‘speculative ethic’ for contemporary finance capitalism. the term speculative ethic naturally brings to mind weber’s protestant ethic, but it would seem a fairly long journey from weber’s calvinist ascetic to the ‘masters of the universe’ and 7 douglas holmes (2009). ‘economy of words,’ cultural anthropology 24 (3): 381-419. 8 see also hirokazu miyazaki (2006). ‘the economy of dreams: hope in global capitalism and its critiques,’ cultural anthropology 21 (2): 147-172. opinions: the anthropology of finance 63 ‘big swinging dicks’ of contemporary finance. the piece takes as its starting point what might be considered to be an unlikely conjuncture: that of von neumann and morgenstern’s theory of games and economic behavior and max weber’s protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism. the connecting idea is that of decision-making under uncertainty. in economics and finance, the phrase decision-making under uncertainty is inevitably connected to john von neumann and oskar morgenstern's theory of games and economic behavior. the impetus for their work was von neumann's interest in poker, especially bluffing, and their axiomization of expected utility laid the foundation for what becomes mathematical finance. the other axis is that of weber’s protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism. in much of the recent commentary on weber, the focus has been on his treatment of rationality; jurgen habermas’ theory of communicative action is probably the most prominent example of this line of thinking. what is often overlooked is that, in weber’s account, the motivating force for the instrumental-rationalization of work is the uncertainty over predestination. the calvinist believer cannot in principle know whether he will be saved, and it is his drive to make himself feel certain of god’s grace in the face of existential uncertainty that leads him to become an ascetic capitalist. the calvinist ethic is the first to directly confront uncertainty without the mitigation of ritual, magic, or good works, and in his comparative sociology of religion weber would argue that calvinism was historically unique in its embrace of uncertainty as a fundamental premise and structuring principle. weber’s breakthrough is to place uncertainty (not rationality) as the motivating force in the development of capitalism. these issues come to a head in von neumann and morgenstern’s formalization of expected utility and utility maximization. once von neumann and morgenstern established necessary and sufficient conditions for a mathematical treatment of expected utility, there was considerable discussion about how to relate the axioms to ‘rational’ decision-making. perhaps reflecting the poker origins of game theory, the ‘semantics’ for expected utility involved an agent choosing (i.e. betting) between lotteries with different outcomes, which would then allow for the construction of a ratio-scaled utility function for the agent. the original von neumann and morgenstern treatment presented four axioms: completeness, transitivity, independence and continuity, and it was soon pointed out that there were special circumstances in which some of the axioms seemed to fail, especially when choices between extreme alternatives were involved – such as death, or losing all one’s wealth or reputation. thus, in the basic formalizations presupposed by the development of modern finance, we see an interwining of speculation (betting on lottery outcomes), managing risk (searching for optimal equilibrium strategies), and the inability of risk management to deal with journal of business anthropology, 2(1), spring 2013 64 existential uncertainty such as situations where one’s life or reputation were at stake. the analogies between poker and finance run even deeper, highlighting the speculative and gambling origins of contemporary finance. game theoretic models of poker and mathematical finance both accept the basic von-neumann and morgenstern postulates, and their practitioners use the notions of optimality and equilibrium to create idealized models of interaction to identify ‘inefficiencies’ (i.e. excessive bluffing, or the mis-pricing of an asset) that can be exploited. yet in both cases, the construction of idealized static equilibrium models of optimal behavior presupposes the existence of dynamic social processes that can only appear as external ‘inefficiencies’ or ‘deviancies’. another line of thinking about decision-making under uncertainty is that of frank knight. in risk, uncertainty, and profit, knight distinguishes between risk, which is measurable uncertainty, – that is to say, unknown outcomes for which there is a known distribution of outcomes, either via a priori calculation or statistical enumeration – and uncertainty, which involves unknown outcomes that lack such ex-ante probability distributions. knight insisted that there was a qualitative difference between uncertainty and risk, and that utility maximization only applied to the latter, in which there were calculable probabilities, and not to the former, which included catastrophic non-insurable singularities and situations ‘in which one’s future (or his life) were at stake.’ the importance of knightian uncertainty is that it expands the notion of decision-making under uncertainty beyond the confines of standard decision theoretic approaches coming from game theory and rational choice. in normal cases of strategic interaction (low limit poker, for example), utility maximization might be a good idealization of the psychological processes involved; but as the stakes rise and personal identification makes the instance into a singularity – how many times in one’s life can one’s life, career, or fortune be at stake? – the possibility of a qualitative break with the norms of strategic rationality and the axioms of expected utility increases. this qualitative transformation highlights the difference between knightian uncertainty and standard approaches to decision-making; it pushes us into the realm of weber’s account of the existential crisis of the calvinist believer, and even of kierkegaard’s leap of faith and the teleological suspension of the ethical. our proposal is to place the rise of purposive-instrumental rationality within the development of decision-making under uncertainty, which we will also expand to include an existential dimension. the latter links the strategic dimensions of purposive-instrumental calculation with the embodied sensibilities of the habitus, and work (‘calling’) becomes the crucial mediation. if we adopt frank knight’s distinction between risk and uncertainty, the instrumental rationalization of work transforms the knightian uncertainty of salvation into the manageable risks of economic opinions: the anthropology of finance 65 activity. the ascetic protestant ethic is, drawing on a distinction made by jackson lears, a ‘culture of (self-) control’ or risk management in the face of a ‘culture of chance’ or uncertainty. most commentators on weber’s religious sociology emphasize the role of rationality in the rise of capitalism and thus focus on the culture of control, the means-end and instrumental rationality of work under capitalist production, thereby reinforcing the ideological downgrading of speculation and cultures of chance. yet it is our contention that cultures of control and cultures of chance interact with each other, with each culture of control (i.e. risk management) creating an image of a culture of chance that lies outside of it (i.e. uncertainty), but which it depends upon for its very functioning. building upon weber's insights, i would like to suggest that there has been an internal development within modern capitalism from its protestant ascetic roots in a production-centered capitalism to a speculative ‘ethic’ embedded within a circulation-centered capitalism. the secularist impulse of modern capitalism creates a new set of ethical principles attuned to a contractual model of society. the retreat of religion from economy and politics opened the door for a utilitarian and instrumental rationality to become a lynchpin in the construction of a contract model of society. the ascension of the civil rights and human rights movements, coupled with identity-based politics, makes life-style differences an increasingly important area of political and social concern. this transforms the conversation about secularism from its earlier focus on the boundaries of religion to the question of how democratic societies should respond to the growing diversity of life-styles and conceptions of the good. once secularism becomes disentangled from a (primarily western) confrontation with religion, the question of how to organize society to respond to competing notions of the good arises in a form familiar to euro-american social contract debates: what arrangement (of, for example, employment, health, and educational opportunities) would be fair to all the concerned parties? in other words, what would a just society look like? in 1971, on the ascending tide of these controversies and drawing directly from von neumann and morgenstern, john rawls published a theory of justice, which so captured the zeitgeist that it became a major force in policy discussions, and not solely within the academe. appealing directly to our intuitions about justice and fairness, it combined notions of social contract, instrumental rationality (in the form of constrained utility maximization), decision-making under uncertainty, and the diversity of life plans and notions of the good. read in this light, john rawls' a theory of justice becomes an articulation of an ‘ethic of fairness’ that ‘generalizes and carries to a higher level of abstraction the familiar theory of the social contract’ by introducing what he calls ‘the original position.’ this original position has two components: rational decision makers who choose the ethical principles for organizing society; and a ‘veil of ignorance’, which constrains decision makers by not letting them know what their position journal of business anthropology, 2(1), spring 2013 66 in society is, or what conception of the good they have. under this condition of secular decision-making under uncertainty, rawls says that rational persons would choose two principles of justice to organize the distribution of rights and obligations in modern society. the second transformation that occurred in the seventies was the ascension of a finance-driven, circulation-centered capitalism. the collapse of the bretton woods agreement, the oil shock of the early seventies, and the rise of derivatives, portfolio theory, and junk bonds transformed finance into the cutting-edge of global capitalism. the fulcrum of profit and power shifted markedly away from the production of commodities toward the circulation of capital. in the sixty-year period from 1947, the finance sector grew from 2.5 per cent of the u.s. gdp to almost eight per cent. but by 2000, the finance sector's share of corporate profits passed that of manufacturing; in 2006, it was almost 30 per cent, while manufacturing comprised 20 per cent, and it is estimated to have recently reached 40 per cent. as any number of commentators has observed, there is an ongoing geopolitical reorganization of the global economy, with nations such as china, india, and brazil producing more and more goods, while the united states and europe increasingly specialize in the allocation and flow of capital. the key discoveries that lay the foundation for modern finance occurred in the fifties and sixties and became the cutting-edge of financial practice in the seventies and onwards. as related in peter bernstein’s classics, capital ideas and against the gods, the linking of financial innovation and speculation transformed finance from a kind of sophisticated alchemy of hunches into a quantitatively driven engine of financial engineering; the advent of huge and expanding pools of mobile, nomadic, and opportunistic capital enabled a new breed of investors to speculate on short-term fluctuations in the prices of other assets. the rise of what might be called the world view of modern finance begins with the axiomization of expected utility in von neumann and morgenstern’s theory of games and economic behavior. this work provides the foundation for harry markowitz’s development of portfolio theory, which when augmented with a formal theory of arbitrage, would form the basis for the standard forms of asset valuation. markowitz’s key insight was to use the formalization of expected utility to construct portfolios of stocks that maximized expected return and minimized risk, given how much risk an investor was willing to take on. this ‘thick’ account of individual interest contrasted with the rawlsian account, in which the veil of ignorance produced what might be called a ‘thin’ account of individual interest.the key development was the creation of what has been called ‘risk-neutral’ valuations; these are constructed by imposing a non-arbitrage condition on the market – that is to say, no asset can have two prices/values that would allow one to buy at the low price and sell at the higher one. the construction of risk-neutral valuations is at the heart of modern finance – efficient markets, value-at-risk, capital asset pricing opinions: the anthropology of finance 67 model, black-scholes options pricing – and the use of the non-arbitrage condition in contemporary risk management is so ubiquitous that it has been called ‘the fundamental theorem of finance.’ the construction of this financial world view has involved two distinct moments of performativity. the first is the creation of a financial imaginary of the market in which individual performative acts of buying, selling, and promises (bets and contracts) are seen as instances of market activity. building upon risk-return models derived directly from von neumann’s axiomization of expected utility, asset prices are seen not as simply reflecting the value of individual companies, but rather as a set of complex inter-correlations (technically known as ‘beta’), which are then seen as constituting ‘the market’. the second step has involved taking this ‘market’ model of asset pricing and then imposing a non-arbitrage condition in order to create the risk-neutral valuations that drive the mathematics of financial engineering and risk management. but arbitrage has a self-cancelling quality. as soon as an arbitrage opportunity arises, traders rush to take advantage of it and close the arbitrage opportunity. if a performative is an act that creates what it refers to or represents, then arbitrage is a kind of negative performativity that cancels the difference that it represents. the combination of performativity and negative performativity creates a picture of an efficient market governed by general equilibrium conditions. but the non-arbitrage condition is also that which creates a financeinternal view of the world in which the social appears as ‘noise’ or exploitable inefficiencies.9 the non-arbitrage condition allows the formulation of general equilibrium conditions for asset pricing and the identification of inefficiencies (i.e. mis-pricings) that can be exploited for profit. in an age when shareholder value has become the mantra of finance, low valuations are mis-pricings that indicate mis-management; management’s goal is to increase shareholder value, which is directly reflected in share price and drives executive compensation. the risk-reward structure of portfolio valuation is now also a part of compensation policies, which rely upon the standard forms of asset valuation (such as capm for stocks or the blackscholes equations for options), and thereby link what at first appear to be only formal and idealized models and valuations with the nature of work itself. indeed, as karen ho points out in her ethnographic account of investment banks, shareholder value and efficiency intertwine to form the 9 traders often speak of arbitrage as a free gift; derrida’s analysis of the gift also imbues it with a self-cancelling performativity. in the christian tradition, the ultimate gift is that of god’s grace, the motivation for which in the calvinist ethic is unknowable and beyond human understanding and calculation. the performativity of ritual, covenant, and contract tracks weber’s move from catholicism to calvinism to modern capitalism, and suggests that there is an existential dimension to decision-making under uncertainty that is not captured by game theoretic approaches, but lies at the heart of the origins of modern capitalism. journal of business anthropology, 2(1), spring 2013 68 fundamental world view of contemporary finance. at the same time, their inculcation in corporate training and their role in compensation creates an ethos of short-term risk-taking and speculation, as indicated by the rise of a trading ethos in ceo ranks of investment banks. the repeated mantra in compensation negotiations is that they must be fair; the problem is to balance risk and return, while also taking into consideration those parts of the company which may supply services necessary for trading (the ‘backroom’), but which are not responsible for actual investment decisions. what these two transformations – the rise of fairness and finance – have in common is that they both occur in a secularizing environment in which a fully contractual model of social relations becomes increasingly dominant. paraphrasing weber, we might say that the performativity of contract has replaced other modalities of sociality, such as that of ritual in the catholic community or covenant among calvinists. the notion of contract has been expanding along two fronts: as a model for society and as a model of economic relations. this notion of the contract looks in two directions simultaneously: one focuses on how we can use a contractual format to acquire wealth, power, security, and autonomy; the other on legitimating tenets that attach these relations to the common good. a look at the discourses that surround the notion of the contract underscores the fact that both models are subsumed under a secular ethic of fairness, which serves as the main principle of legitimation through its attachment to the social good. the rise of what we will call a ‘speculative ethos’ links a secular model of decision-making under uncertainty with its counterparts in modern finance. yet, as in weber’s protestant ethic, work is the point where status, motivation, and identity meet, even as the ideology of efficient markets and shareholder value ties compensation to success in taking risks and speculating. * * * notes on the anthropology of gender in finance melissa s. fisher, new york university anthropological interest in finance has been growing for the past several decades, as the globalization of the economy, speculative stock markets, and new technologies increasingly occupy the minds of financiers, journalists, and social scientists alike. few anthropologists, however, have focused on the gendered subjects, practices, and effects of global finance. during the past decade, particularly in the wake of the 2008 financial opinions: the anthropology of finance 69 crisis, this situation has begun to change. several anthropologists, including myself, have produced fine-grained ethnographic accounts of the gendered norms of wall street. in this sense, anthropologists have considered market actors, such as investment bankers, who have availed themselves of wealth making opportunities. and feminist anthropologists interested in poverty, particularly among women in developing countries, have drawn attention to microfinance and gender. they have attended to the role of gender in neoliberal development institutions, such as the world bank, in which the poor, mainly women, are increasingly viewed as the subjects of financial opportunities. but few, if any, anthropologists have fully linked the gendering of finance ethnographically, in what chandra mohanty has described as the ’one third’ and ’two third’ worlds. rather, anthropologists tend to situate their ethnographic work on gender and finance in one of these two arenas: global capitalist financial spaces, or postcolonial regions. in a different but arguably related divide, few directly connect intimate and global financial spheres, so we know relatively little about how the ‘private’, feminized domains of family, debt, and caring fit within the apparatus and technologies of finance. this essay reflects upon what the anthropology of gender and finance is, and what it might become: which themes, subjects, and actors can we identify to be its present focus? is there a dominant research method? and what are some of the important issues, theories, and methods that are currently under-explored? my intention is not to engage in a complete overview of existing work within the anthropology of finance (see maurer 2013). nor is my purpose to consider all the scholarship belonging to the interdisciplinary field of gender and finance (de geode 2005; griffin 2009; mcdowell 1997; prugl 2012; sassen 1996). this piece also sets aside important work in feminist business history, sociology, and economics (blair-loy 2003; kwolek-folland 1994; nelson 2012). although anthropological studies are in conversation with these various bodies of scholarship, i draw attention to and build upon recent, innovative work within the discipline to signal possible new frontiers of research anthropology’s most significant contribution to the study of gender and finance is its signature methodology, ethnography. anthropologists (and sociologists), as bill maurer (2013) points out in his recent overview of the anthropology of finance, ‘have produced pioneering ethnographies of financial markets, often involving participant observation on the trading floor as well as in corporate offices.’ an important subset of this research focuses on the gendering of elite financial subjects, practices and networks on wall street and the city of london (fisher 2012; ho 2009; zaloom 2006). these works reveal a variety of performances of gender in finance and their relationship to the production of gendered spaces on wall street. for example, karen ho, in her ethnographic study of wall street, illuminates the spatial segregation within firms. ‘front office’ journal of business anthropology, 2(1), spring 2013 70 workers – mainly elite male investment bankers – are the most valued employees because the company understands that they generate revenue. ‘back office’ support staff, composed of people from middle and workingclass backgrounds, with an over-representation of people of color and women, are far less prestigious (ho 2009: 78-9). caitlin zaloom, in her study of traders, shows how masculine, aggressive risk-taking is crucial to the social and spatial constitution of the marketplace (zaloom 2003). such risk-taking traditionally reaps reward – in money, status, and the construction of a masculine self (zaloom 2006: 93). ethnographic studies of the financial industry in nyc, chicago and london thus reveal the ways the institutions and buildings in global financial cities – wall street investment firms, the chicago board, and merchant banks in london – were and continue to be gendered spaces in which (mainly) men perform hyper masculine performances, part of the male drama of capital that constructs women as inferior, ‘other,’ or ‘invisible’ (mcdowell 1997: zaloom 2006; fisher 2010). women’s entry onto wall street has made that gendering much more visible (fisher 2012). such works provide insight into the gendering of finance. however, ethnographers have not yet examined financiers’ lives ‘outside’ the workplace – for example, their family dynamics, civic obligations, and participation in social movements – and how they affect and are affected by financial practices. my book, a historical ethnography of the first generation of women to build professional careers on wall street, begins to fill some of these lacunae. i argue that over time the women enacted ‘market feminism’, incorporating tenets of american liberal feminism such as equal rights into wall street institutions, practices, and the global marketplace. as such my book opens a new vista on anthropological studies of finance, contextualizing the first generation of wall street women’s experiences, and expertise both within the gendered world of financial markets and the workplace, and also outside that world in the feminist movement that created the very possibility for the women to enter high finance in the first place (fisher 2012). but questions of worklife balance, intimate economies, and sexuality, for example, remain fertile areas of research (blair-loy 2003; wilson 2004). anthropologists are also looking at finance in everyday life – primarily in developing countries. during the past decade, particularly in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, gender and poverty have become increasingly linked. global institutions – the united nations, the world bank and goldman sachs’ 10,000 women project – have taken on the mantle of ending poverty, particularly amongst women in developing countries. in response, a small but growing number of anthropologists have conducted ethnographic studies of neoliberalism, microfinance, and gender (elyachar 2005; karim 2011). as lamia karim (2011: xiii) explains in her ethnographic study sited in bangladesh, the term microfinance ‘refers to a broad range of financial services to the poor such as credit, savings, insurance, and pensions’. initially presenting itself as a opinions: the anthropology of finance 71 social justice project, it is now a financial industry that views poverty as a new realm of profit and accumulation (roy 2012: 105). microfinance actors and institutions thus publicize the ‘empowerment’ of ‘third world’ women who take on micro-loans (karim 2011). ethnographies contrast this idealistic view with portraits of the often detrimental effects of microfinance on the lives of women. indeed, as julia elyachar documents in her ethnographic study of micro-lending in egypt, such practices can produce new forms of discipline on poor borrowers, since they can be imprisoned for failure to pay (elyacher 2005). it is important to look at these two bodies of work next to each other. those studying gender in global finance unpack the cultural work by which financiers produce the apparent separation between the economic system, on the one hand, and gender and society, on the other (de goede 2005). those engaged in the study of gender, development, and microfinance, illuminate the devastating effects of such financial practices and tools. collectively, then, they reveal the often enormous gap between the worldviews and actions of a wide range of financers and the effect their financial practices have on everyday people’s lives, both within and outside the united states (ho 2009; karim 2011). in her work on global finance, karen ho, for example, focuses on the relationship between the values and actions of investment banks, the corresponding restructuring of u.s. corporations, and the construction of markets, specifically financial markets booms and busts (ho 2006: 4). she shows how the severe dislocations social scientists of global capitalism write about – the dismantling of governmental safety nets; the wave of corporate restructuring and massive layoffs; the growing disparity between the wealth and poor – are, as she argues, ‘actualized’ or carried out by wall street actors (ho 2006: 4). her work relies largely upon the anthropological (and sociological) literature on the corrosive effects of global capitalism: for example, the impact of corporate downsizing on middle class managers and their family life in the united states (newman 1989). so (understandably, given the scope of her study), she does not pursue an analytics of financial practices in the sense of ethnographically tracking deal making, corporate restructuring, or the lives and livelihood of those impacted by mergers and acquisitions or downsizing. among studies of microfinance and other finance in everyday life, karim’s work centers on the negative consequences of microfinance on poor, rural women’s lives in, in her case, bangladesh. she addresses the gap between what is known about microfinance institutions from their sponsored research and public events, and their actual practices on the ground (karim 2011: xiv). her work moves us far in the direction of connecting the worldview of financiers and their impact of people’s everyday lives. yet her analysis relies (again, understandably, given the scope of her work) on the documents and public events of microfinance institutions rather than, or in addition to, in-depth fieldwork conducted within such firms. journal of business anthropology, 2(1), spring 2013 72 thus there is an opportunity for anthropologists of finance to ethnographically explore relationships between the gendered values and practices of market actors, the making of new forms of market rule, and the work-family lives of the recipients of old and new forms of financial practices. in particular, anthropologists are well placed to explore financiers and the impact of financialization on a wide range of recipients of various genders and sexualities: not only poor rural female recipients of microfinance loans, but also, for example, women of color in the united states dealing with the foreclosure of their homes; lgbt graduate students coping with staggering student debt; and families strategizing to use a range of governmental and non-governmental services (e.g. unemployment benefits; loans) to survive financially. indeed, as feminist literary scholar rebecca stern points out in her work on the impact of fraud on victorian domestic life, far from being isolated havens from public and private finance, homes are sites of purchase and exchange (stern 2008: 6). and in the contemporary era, inside the walls of homes, families manage childcare, use credit cards to buy furniture, and take on mortgages to finance homes. individual family members may interact with debt collectors, accountants, and/or loan officers working in institutions advertised directly toward ‘people with bad credit’ (see peebles 2010 for a review of the anthropology of debt and credit). anthropology may then be uniquely suited to study the gendered life of finance. in the shift from single to multi-sited fieldwork, anthropologists can and do engage in participation observation that crosses dichotomies like ‘global cities’ and ‘postcolonial regions’, ‘the domestic sphere’ and ‘global markets’ (marcus 1995). multi-sited ethnography thus provides the means to study a nexus of situated and gendered global ideas, institutions, actors and practices that financial projects draw together. anthropologists can stay close to heterogeneous gendered practices of finance, practices that do not fall tidily into the north and south divide. this essay has just begun to scratch the surface of what the anthropology of gender in finance might be. while pointing in some important directions for the future, it has not provided a complete overview of possible research sites, themes, and issues. there is, for example, new financial territory to be understood in terms of gender: for example, gendered subjects and relations in emerging centers of global finance such as singapore and dubai. indeed, the anthropology of gender in finance is not, nor should it be, a cohesive research program with a particular set of theories and intents. instead, it should continue to build upon the analytics and methods of the discipline, as well as engage in interdisciplinary research. given the increased interest – within and outside of contemporary scholarship – in the disparity between the wealthy and the poor and concerns with gender inequality, anthropological studies of gender, class, race, nationality, ethnicity, and sexuality in these sites are perhaps more necessary than ever. opinions: the anthropology of finance 73 references blair-loy, mary. 2003. competing devotions: career and family among women executives. cambridge: harvard university press. de goede. marieke. 2005. virtue, fortune and faith: a genealogy of finance. minneapolois: university of minnesota press. elyachar, julia. 2005 markets of disposession: ngos, economic development, and the state in cairo. durham: duke university press. fisher, melissa. 2010. ‘wall street women: engendering global finance in the manhattan landscape.’ city and society 22 (2):262-85. fisher, melissa. 2012. wall street women. durham and london: duke university press. griffin, penny. 2009. gendering the world bank: neoliberalism and the gendered foundation of global governance. new york: palgrave macmillan. ho, karen zouwen. 2009. liquidated: an ethnography of wall street. durham: duke university press. kwolek-folland, angel. 1994. engendering business: men and women in the corporate office, 1870-1930. baltimore: johns hopkins press. marcus, george. 1995. ‘ethnography in/of the world system: the emergence of multi-sited ethnography.’ annual review of anthropology. vol 24, pp. 95-117. maurer, bill. 2013. ‘finance 2.0.’ in handbook of economic anthropology, 2nd revised edition, edited by james carrier. northampton, mass: edward elgar. mcdowell, linda. 1997. capital culture: gender at work in the city. oxford: blackwell. nelson, julie. 2012. ‘are women really more risk-averse than men?’ in institute for new economic thinking research notes #12 (september). newman, katherine. 1988. falling from grace: the experience of downward mobility in the american middle class. new york: free press. peebles, gustav. 2010. ‘the anthropology of debt and credit.’ annual review of anthropology. volume 39, pp. 225-240. prugl. elizabeth. 2012. ‘if lehman brothers had been lehman sisters: gender and myth in the aftermath of the financial crisis.’ international political sociology. 6, 21-35. roy, anaya. 2012. ‘ethical subjects: market rule in an age of poverty’ in public culture 24. durham: duke university press. journal of business anthropology, 2(1), spring 2013 74 sassen, saskia. 1996. ‘towards a feminist analytics of the global economy.’ indiana journal of global legal studies vol 4 no. 1: 7-41 stern, rebecca. 2008. home economics: domestic fraud in victorian england. ohio state university press. wilson, ara. 2004. the intimate economies of bangkok: tomboys, tycoons, and avon ladies in the global city. berkeley: university of california press. zaloom. caitlin. 2006. out of the pits: traders and technology from chicago to london. chicago: university of chicago press. vi opdaterer systemet vi opdaterer systemet... rauli.cbs.dk opdateres og er snart tilgængeligt. the coming of age of anthropological practice and ethics elizabeth k. brody and tracy meerwarth pester abstract anthropology as a discipline is well over 100 years old; as a profession it is just gearing up. it is the diversity of anthropological work, not simply by subfield and geographic location, but by job function that has contributed to the field’s expansion. this growth has led to ethical questions and issues surrounding anthropological identity, adaptation, and collegiality, as increasing numbers of anthropologists are finding alternatives to the work of the professor. while the “split” or “divide” between academic and nonacademic work now seems narrower, much more needs to be done to acknowledge that practitioners are a growing and contributing segment of the field. as the career paths of anthropologists continue to differentiate, efforts will be necessary to unify anthropology so that the work of practitioners is considered on par with academics. this article takes on that challenge and proposes solutions to help practice and academia work together to advance the field. keywords anthropological practice, ethics, american anthropological association, general motors page 1 of 27 jba special issue 1: 11-37, spring 2014 © the author(s) 2014 issn 2245-4217 www.cbs.dk/jba journal of business anthropology, special issue 1, spring 2014 12 anthropology as a discipline is well over 100 years old; as a profession it is just gearing itself up.1 many aspects of anthropological work, along with the roles played by anthropologists, have changed over time. it is the diversity of anthropological work, not simply by subfield and geographic location, but by job function that has contributed to the field’s expansion. this growth has led to ethical questions and issues surrounding anthropological identity, adaptation, and collegiality as increasing numbers of anthropologists are finding alternatives to the work of the professor. while the “split” or “divide” between academic and non-academic work now seems narrower, much more needs to be done to acknowledge that practitioners are a growing and contributing segment of the field. more importantly, as the career paths of anthropologists continue to differentiate, efforts will be necessary to unify anthropology so that the work of practitioners is considered on par with that of academics. this article takes on that challenge and proposes solutions to help practice and academia work together to advance the field. an important dimension of anthropology’s coming of age is the rise and salience of anthropological practice, which is evident in such domains as student training, post-graduate employment beyond academic work, publications and visual media, electronic communication such as listservs and blogs, and professional associations. anthropological practice is defined by the national association for the practice of anthropology (napa), a section of the american anthropological association (aaa), as work done by anthropologists outside of academia. practitioners “apply their work often by working in tandem with community leaders, nonprofit institutions, companies, governments and other stakeholders, to understand, create, implement, and evaluate programs, products, services, policies, laws, and organizations.”2 we use the phrase anthropological practice to denote a focus on application with the intent to address a particular community, organizational, or societal problem. with change come periodic modifications in codes of ethics, defined as professional standards of conduct. professional standards of conduct are common to professional associations. indeed, many anthropology associations ‒ including aaa, napa, the society for applied anthropology (sfaa), the american association of physical anthropologists (aapa), and the society for american archaeology (saa) ‒ have developed their own standards (whiteford and trotter 2008). such ethical guidelines are designed to aid association members in the course of their work. members may consult such guidelines to discern and discuss an issue, decide on a course of action, teach, or make a judgment about an ethical 1 an earlier version of article (briody and meerwarth pester 2012) was delivered in november 2012 at the american anthropological association meetings. we appreciate the discussions and advice we received from barbara rylko-bauer, mary o. butler, riall w. nolan, and marc s. robinson. their comments, along with those of the journal reviewers, helped to make the article stronger. 2 practicinganthropology.org/practicing-anthro/ accessed april 26, 2013. http://practicinganthropology.org/practicing-anthro/ brody and pester / the coming of age 13 situation that they or their colleagues face. the aaa has been engaged in specifying, and subsequently revising, its code of ethics at least since 1967 – making it increasingly pertinent to the diversity of its membership. we examine the intersection of anthropological practice and ethical principles based on our work in the private sector at general motors (gm). our article is both a friendly test of the 2012 aaa ethics code (www.aaanet.org/profdev/ethics/) from a practitioner standpoint, and an opportunity to explore its boundaries. only a limited number of textual materials were used to inform the development of this new code. instead, the aaa ethics task force relied heavily on a “review of ethics statements from professional/academic organizations as well as concerns that had been raised through aaa annual meetings and correspondence.”3 our goal is to view the principles as a set and identify where the fit works well for practitioners, and where there are weaknesses or gaps. because we were researchers at gm r&d, an industrial research laboratory, there should be considerable alignment with the aaa ethical principles.4 we first provide some insights into the growth of anthropological practice. second, we describe the gm code of conduct and the aaa ethics code. third, we discuss four of the projects on which we worked while employed at gm. we examine these projects in relation to two different ethical systems – one through our employer and one through our professional association. in the process we debunk an old myth and pervasive stereotype that private-sector organizations, and by extension their employees, are not ethical. fourth, we suggest new avenues for the next iteration of the aaa code of ethics. finally, we outline some strategies for strengthening collaboration and understanding between practitioners and their academic counterparts. in that process, we propose realigning anthropology’s focus to be more holistic and inclusive of all kinds of anthropological work. the growth and growing pains of anthropological practice anthropology is growing in the u.s. as seen in the number of new phd and ma graduates. new phd anthropologists rose from 22 in 1950 to 555 in 2011 (www.nsf.gov/statistics/sed/2011/pdf/tab12.pdf ; givens and jablonski 1996). even more dramatic has been the rise in ma anthropology graduates. their ranks have soared from about 50 in 1948 to over 1,700 in 2007 (fiske et al. 2010:1), a 3,300 per cent increase! increasingly, these anthropology graduates have found employment 3 niel tashima, member of the aaa task force for comprehensive ethics review 2008-11, personal communication, april 30, 2013. 4 other practitioners do not necessarily have a research component to their jobs; they should examine and report on the aaa ethical principles for degree of fit with their work roles. http://www.aaanet.org/profdev/ethics/ http://www.nsf.gov/statistics/sed/2011/pdf/tab12.pdf journal of business anthropology, special issue 1, spring 2014 14 outside of academia. in the early 1970s, for example, 74 per cent of phd graduates worked in anthropology departments compared with 42 per cent in 1995; similarly, in the early 1970s, 13 per cent held nonacademic employment compared with at least 28 per cent in 1995 (givens and jablonski 1996). more recent data on phds reveals that 27 per cent work in the business, government, and non-profit sectors (rudd et al. 2008:25). while this statistic suggests little change from the 1995 survey, it actually reflects an undercount since it does not account for the many anthropologists employed within research and university settings who are not professors. the vast majority of phd anthropologists today work outside academic departments of anthropology. practitioners serve in a variety of roles including researcher, administrator, manager, organizational-development expert, trainer, and evaluator. applied ma programs are producing market-ready anthropologists who work in an array of jobs (harman et al. 2004; fiske et al. 2010). indeed, nonacademic work is even more pronounced among ma graduates where most are employed in the private sector, government agencies, international organizations, and nonprofit organizations, or are self-employed or independent consultants (fiske et al. 2010:28). in concert with anthropology’s changing demographics, an increasing number of anthropology graduate programs have been offering applied courses and internships. since the late 1970s, these programs have been training students to apply their knowledge and skills to community and organizational problems. most of these programs produce master’s level graduates, although a few also produce new phd anthropologists. the consortium of practicing and applied anthropology (www.copaa.info/) now counts 33 academic departments as members, including its first university from outside the u.s. – copenhagen university.5 the more mature applied anthropology programs ‒ such as those at the university of memphis, university of maryland college park, northern arizona university, the university of north texas, and the university of south florida ‒ contribute substantially to the high proportion of the ma graduates today. yet, these changes have not come without a cost. certainly academia faces important challenges. there are fewer and fewer fulltime, tenure-track faculty positions in anthropology. many members of the faculty are non-tenure track, part-time, or temporary ‒ a fact which affects research, teaching, and advising. additionally, many anthropology programs have not responded to student requests for practical career skills and exposure to applied work – in part because faculty often have “little experience or interest in applied work” (briody and nolan 2013:376). this pattern carries over into “discussion of the ethics of practice [which] tends to be hampered by the relative lack of 5 lisa henry, co-chair, personal communication, february 4, 2014. http://www.copaa.info/ brody and pester / the coming of age 15 understanding of and experience with what practitioners actually do on a daily basis” (nolan 2013:3). practitioners also have born some costs – one of which involves ethics. one of us (briody) graduated in 1985 with a phd and began to present results of her gm work at anthropology conferences and in university settings. some attendees were curious about what an anthropologist did at gm – a question that arose repeatedly during her gm career from 1985-2009. others either disparaged or voiced inaccurate assumptions about her work. she faced various allegations of unethical behavior as in these suggestive examples: • student question: “how can you work at a corporation (gm) that destroys the environment?” • professor’s assertion: “you have to publish what they (gm) tell you to publish.” she quickly absorbed a view held by many academically-based anthropologists and their students at that time that private sector work was tainted. practitioner research did not align with the principles of academic freedom. it was problem-oriented rather than theoreticallydriven (nolan 2013:394), and therefore not considered as scholarshipworthy. and, those studying corporate culture were reminded that they often overlooked a corporation’s tendency to give “primacy to profits regardless of human costs” (nash and kirsch 1994). cassell and jacobs (1987:1) suggest one explanation of this phenomenon: “on occasion, the concept of ‘ethics’ is used as a weapon: my beliefs differ from yours, therefore you are unethical.” a lot has changed since the start of the 21st century when one of us (meerwarth pester) began her career, working at gm from 2000-2007. in many locations – particularly those near applied programs – the lines between academics and practitioners are blurring. anthropology’s culture has evolved to become more inclusive. the number of new graduates, shifting employment patterns, and availability of more and more applied anthropology programs illustrate the transition of an academically-based discipline to a mixed model composed of academic anthropologists and practitioners. the convergence of these three factors has put pressure on the former to reach out beyond the classroom to connect their students with the different worlds of work. additionally, many practitioners have been enticed to reach into the classroom to offer their expertise and advice about how to apply anthropology in different work settings. all of this is very good news, given that the u.s. bureau of labor statistics expects that employment for both anthropologists and archaeologists will increase by 21 per cent between 2010-2020, a faster rate than the average for all occupations (www.bls.gov/ooh/life-physicaland-social-science/anthropologists-and-archeologists.htm). http://www.bls.gov/ooh/life-physical-and-social-science/anthropologists-and-archeologists.htm http://www.bls.gov/ooh/life-physical-and-social-science/anthropologists-and-archeologists.htm journal of business anthropology, special issue 1, spring 2014 16 yet, much more needs to be done to make anthropology a welcoming place for those engaged in a myriad of job functions who apply their knowledge and skills in innovative ways. we argue that the time for ignorance is over: a faculty career that begins with a phd advisor who guides the student into the profession, leading first to a postdoc or tenure-track assistant professor position, and then tenure in a smooth and linear way is a mythical model that does not offer practical guidance for the real career paths of anthropology phds. (rudd et al. 2008:25) graduate programs that do not help “prepare students for a range of occupational sectors are behaving irresponsibly” (bennett and fiske 2013:313). moreover, the time for disrespect – that only those “not good enough” for an academic appointment seek practice work (nolan 2013: 394; bartlo 2012:24) – is over. some anthropologists have a strong preference for practice over academic work, and are good at it. we see that anthropology has been embroiled in ethical issues with itself, with many resisting this wave of change within the field. denigrating practitioners’ work is neither professional nor collegial. moreover, it calls into question anthropologists’ ability to evaluate practitioner work neutrally and objectively. we believe that students and professors would benefit from a deeper knowledge of the ethics of practice, along with exposure to alternative models of anthropological work. ethics at work practitioners have complex relationships with their work organizations involving peers and those in their chain of command, and often external publics such as suppliers, customers, partners, regulatory agencies, policymaking bodies, and the media. their job responsibilities must consider not only the rules, processes, values, and expectations for conduct required by their employer, but those of other organizational entities or communities with which they interface. “dual-identity professionals,” such as practitioners working for a corporation, must deal with multiple ethical codes in their work; indeed, the work of practitioners is “inextricable from a variety of other goals and professional contexts” (albro 2009:17). another difficulty from a practitioner standpoint has been that the variation and complexity of anthropological work and careers continue to evolve without being fully connected with or captured by past aaa ethical codes (tashima et al. 2008). we now describe the two ethical codes pertinent to our work as practitioners. gm’s code of conduct brody and pester / the coming of age 17 many organizations specify in writing a code of conduct for employees. typically the code of conduct is linked thematically with the organization’s values and sometimes with the mission and vision. gm has a corporate code of conduct called winning with integrity.6 it consists of the following five broad categories of conduct: 1. personal integrity  understanding the rules  acting with integrity when the rules seem unclear 2. integrity in the workplace  fair treatment and respect  equal employment opportunity  health and safety  conflicts of interest  accuracy of gm information and use of gm property  litigation and investigations 3. integrity in the marketplace  gifts, entertainment, and gratuities  fair competition  insider trading 4. integrity in society and our communities  giving to u.s. government officials  avoiding improper payments to non u.s. government officials  export compliance 5. integrity toward the environment  gm environmental principles this code of conduct pertains first to the behavior of individual employees: they are expected to be aware of and understand corporate rules generally, and to act “with integrity.” however, it extends beyond individual choice to policies, procedures, and expectations evident within departmental, unit, and corporate arenas. fair treatment and respect, equal employment opportunity, and accuracy of gm information and use of gm property are important aspects of workplace integrity. health and safety, another dimension of workplace integrity, matter enormously at gm. avoiding conflicts of interest, insider trading, and improper payments to government officials globally are also part of the code of conduct along with supporting gm’s environmental principles. aaa’s principles of professional responsibility the preamble to the current version of the aaa’s statement of ethics frames anthropological work in terms of both research and practice. it 6www.gm.com/content/dam/gmcom/company/investors/corporate_governa nce/pdfs/winning_with_grity.pdf, accessed april 26, 2013. http://www.gm.com/content/dam/gmcom/company/investors/corporate_governance/pdfs/winning_with_grity.pdf http://www.gm.com/content/dam/gmcom/company/investors/corporate_governance/pdfs/winning_with_grity.pdf journal of business anthropology, special issue 1, spring 2014 18 also points to goals such as knowledge dissemination and the use of knowledge for solving human problems. seven principles “intended to foster discussion, guide anthropologists in making responsible decisions, and educate” are described, and supplementary resources and reference documents provided.7 the seven principles include: 1. do no harm 2. be open and honest regarding your work 3. obtain informed consent and necessary permissions 4. weigh competing ethical obligations due collaborators and affected parties 5. make your results accessible 6. protect and preserve your records 7. maintain respectful and ethical professional relationships. this ethics code emphasizes a primary ethical obligation to avoid harm and weigh the potential consequences of anthropological research. it supports transparency with respect to the goals, methods, and dissemination of the work, as well as informed consent. it describes anthropologists’ obligation to figure out the appropriate balance when trying to reconcile different ethical standards held by study participants, colleagues, students, funders, and employers. protecting and preserving one’s data is considered an ethical responsibility. professional relationships should be respectful such as when mentoring students, supervising staff, or working with clients, and ethical in terms of scientific and scholarly conduct. aligning gm projects with two codes of ethics in this section we summarize four of our applied research projects. we examine our actions on these projects in light of selected principles found in the aaa’s 2012 principles of professional responsibility and gm’s 2011 winning with integrity code of conduct. we assess the usefulness of these principles in guiding our work. project 1: decision paralysis on a gm global vehicle program gm was seeking ways of becoming a more competitive global firm. it was trying to coordinate vehicle design and engineering by having its own internal organizations, and later its strategic alliance partners, work together to develop global architectures for vehicles, share components, and reduce costs. it was believed that economies of scale would result because there would be less engineering and fewer expensive dies used in making parts. this project involved an examination of the work and interactions among three gm engineering organizations, which were 7 www.aaanet.org/coe/code_of_ethics.pdf, accessed april 26, 2013. http://www.aaanet.org/coe/code_of_ethics.pdf brody and pester / the coming of age 19 charged with developing a car that could be sold in several markets around the world.8 the anthropological role: an earlier version of this vehicle program had failed. this time around, it was hoped that this innovative approach to product development would be successful. the role briody played was to conduct a study of the vehicle program and offer consulting advice. she followed key guidelines to foster trust and rapport with members of the vehicle program and work with them on problem solving throughout all phased of the project: • maintaining study participant confidentiality • evaluating data as neutrally and objectively as possible • raising awareness of the findings through discussions, presentation, and internal reports • offering recommendations to improve decision making and governance of global programs • collaborating with program leaders on possible mitigation strategies in workshops. cultural issues: the engineers and business professionals assigned to work on this program were charged with creating successful vehicles. they had to apply their knowledge, expertise, evolving cross-cultural understanding, and good humor to their daily tasks over more than a twoyear period. yet, gm’s autonomous culture stood in their way. the firm had a longstanding tradition of autonomy in which individual organizational units operated largely independently. as the paradigm for global vehicle work emerged, a new corporate emphasis on collaboration and partnership integration was introduced which ran counter to the autonomous culture in place in the three engineering units. there was little agreement across organizational boundaries on the multitude of decisions that were supposed to be made, because unit work practices, assumptions, goals, and expectations were so different. moreover, the program manager did not have the necessary authority to make the hard calls when disagreements arose. as a result, no one was able to work collaboratively and productively across organizational boundaries on a consistent basis – despite valiant efforts – because employee allegiances were to their home units. the home units paid their salaries and determined their career path. consequently, decision paralysis set in, characterized by such factors as the amount of conflict, delays, rework, cost in labor hours, lack of an agreed-upon way of making decisions, and intervention in program decisions by corporate leaders. outcomes: when the program ultimately failed, with a loss of 2.2 million cars, the people working on it were not viewed favorably. the careers of those in the more senior positions on this vehicle program were 8 for more detail on this project, see briody (2013, 2010); and briody, cavusgil, and stewart (2004). journal of business anthropology, special issue 1, spring 2014 20 especially affected, because they were both few in number and highly visible within the corporation. some retired, some left the firm, and some stayed but no longer advanced up the career ladder. on the other hand, the program manager role and the structure of global product programs changed significantly after discussions with senior corporate leaders, internal presentations, and publication of technical reports. on future vehicle programs, program managers were given increased authority over decision making and resources. reporting relationships were streamlined when engineering, design, and manufacturing operations became global. such changes improved overall program effectiveness, as well as efficiency. ethics: aaa principle 7 (maintaining respectful and ethical professional relationships) and gm principle 2 (integrity in the workplace – fair treatment and respect) were consistent with the behavior and approach i tried to exhibit toward study participants who were also gm colleagues (see table 1). table 1: exploration of ethical principles by ethics code and gm projects principles meeting or exceeding practitioner expectations principles falling short of practitioner expectations projects project 1: decision paralysis on a gm global vehicle program  aaa 7  gm 2  aaa 1 project 2: productivity issues due to gm r&d workspace  aaa 7  gm 1  gm 2  aaa 1  aaa 2  aaa 4  gm 1 project 3: blaming behavior in gm truck plant  aaa 2  gm 1  aaa 1  aaa 3 project 4: collaboration as gm’s ideal plant culture  aaa 2  aaa 5  gm 1  aaa 1  aaa 2 note: we do not specifically address aaa principle 6 (protect and preserve your records) in these four projects. aaa principle 1 (do no harm) did not provide sufficient guidance for this project (see table 1). some “harm” came to those vehicle brody and pester / the coming of age 21 program leaders who were put in an untenable situation without the proper organizational structure and support. indeed, the study made explicit the structural, ideological, and behavioral weaknesses contributing to the program’s failure. aaa principle 1 should acknowledge that harm – job loss, for example – can and does happen, despite anthropologists’ best intentions and attention to best practices. anthropologists may not be able to change belief systems about perceptions of failure, including those who are the scapegoats. however, through their discussions, presentations, reports, and other means, they may be able to temper such beliefs by focusing the organization’s attention on the actual culprit – in this case, the lack of alignment between organizational goals and structure. had that alignment existed, and the appropriate incentives been established, those working on this vehicle program would have at least had a shot at being successful. project 2: productivity issues due to gm r&d workspace gm was planning to renovate parts of its warren, michigan r&d facility to ensure that its offices, laboratory spaces, and equipment were up-to-date given its research agenda. the renovation also would include general repair and maintenance. three constraints were expected to affect the renovation. first, a cap on costs would limit how much remodeling could be done. second, because of its historic designation, the r&d complex would be subject to the rules and regulations of the national register of historic places. a third constraint, leadership beliefs, also played a role in the planning. the vp with responsibility for r&d appointed a group to conduct a literature review of researcher workspace. the appointed group concluded that individual offices were the most suitable for researcher workspace.9 the anthropological role: following that literature review, gm’s anthropologists were called in – twice over a five-year period – by the vp’s direct report; the latter was the senior executive in charge of r&d. the assignment involved conducting two sequential field studies with the goal of identifying the most appropriate workspace for gm’s researchers in the u.s. and worldwide. in the first of these two studies, our team of six anthropologists explored many aspects of r&d researcher work through observations, interviews, photographs, and validation sessions (presentations with discussion) on the preliminary findings. in the second confirmatory study, we also included work diaries, photographs, video footage, and large-forum discussions with interns. because this project was high-visibility, those working at r&d were aware that the study was going on and typically were willing to participate in it. establishing rapport was easy because our team and all of the other r&d researchers worked in the same complex and knew each other – at least by sight. the nature of the project, with its potential to affect how r&d 9 for more detail on this project, see meerwarth, trotter, and briody (2008). journal of business anthropology, special issue 1, spring 2014 22 researchers did their work, made explaining the importance of the study straightforward. cultural issues: together, the three studies demonstrated both the overwhelming preference among researchers for private offices and the detrimental effects of cubicles on their productivity. the problem was that all the executives preferred cubicles for their aesthetics, that is, their “look and feel.” cubicles were far cheaper than offices per square foot. the vp, who also had considerable influence over the renovation budget, repeatedly expressed his preference for cubicles. he believed cubicles encouraged researcher collaboration, despite our evidence to the contrary. it was at the vp’s request that the three successive studies were carried out because, one r&d colleague joked to us, “he didn’t like the answers he was getting.” outcomes: the results of the first anthropological study, consistent with the early literature study, revealed that individual offices were the appropriate workspace for researchers. this study also yielded a cultural model of r&d workspace that underscored the values of productivity and pragmatism held by r&d researchers. the second anthropological study produced findings consistent with the first, even controlling for research site – warren and bangalore – and cohort differences. as the conclusions of each successive study were released, the vp expressed increasing annoyance and dissatisfaction. our relationship with the vp was affected; his behavior repeatedly indicated an inability to move beyond his initial preference for cubicles. none of us wanted to be at odds with a senior leader, much less someone in our own chain of command. ultimately, we ended up working solely with the senior executive and his staff who reported to the vp. these individuals were convinced of the validity and reliability of our studies. their interventions based on our work led to the construction of single offices in the newly-renovated area of the warren complex. in addition, the executive at the r&d site in bangalore used our data to justify building individual offices as his site was expanding. ethics: our actions were consistent with gm principle 1 (acting with integrity when the rules seem unclear) and gm principle 2 (integrity in the workplace – accuracy of gm information) as evident in table 1. we recognized the conflict with our vp and understood the potential difficulties of arguing for a position he did not support. however, we chose to present what we had learned as accurately as possible, thereby upholding gm’s code of conduct. we also attended to aaa principle 7 (maintaining respectful and ethical professional relationships) even though our relationship with the vp was strained. table 1 also shows that we followed aaa principle 2 (be open and honest regarding your work) and aaa principle 4 (balance competing ethical obligations due collaborators and affected parties) to the extent possible. however, both principles fell short of our expectations because brody and pester / the coming of age 23 there seemed to be no acknowledgment of the risks that anthropologists may face – in this case with sponsors; therefore the portrayal of the two principles did not seem to be balanced. disagreeing with a vp has a cost: it could have been, and some believe it was, a career-limiting move for our team. it would have been helpful to have some “reality check” as part of the principle on how sponsors, study participants, or other key stakeholders might respond. aaa principle 4 also references aaa principle 1 when it states: “anthropologists must often make difficult decisions among competing ethical obligations while recognizing their obligation to do no harm.” our team was brought in to advise gm management on a multi-million dollar renovation. our job was to gather data, make recommendations, and consult on the renovation – in short, to be proactive. our work was far more than doing no harm; it was about taking a stand based on the scientific evidence. finally, gm principle 1 (personal integrity – acting with integrity when the rules seem unclear), like aaa principle 4, also offers no guidance in negotiating the muddy waters of power and hierarchy. project 3: blaming behavior in gm truck plant this project stemmed from a request by one of us (briody) to conduct a cultural study of a truck plant. the study occurred at a time when the u.s. quality movement was in full swing and vehicle quality was becoming an increasingly important marketplace differentiator. there was significant competition from the japanese – primarily in car sales – which carried over into other product lines including trucks and buses. managers in the truck plant were trained in the philip b. crosby quality program. plant publications contained interviews with plant leaders on quality. signs emphasizing quality, along with plant audit scores, were posted. teambased problem solving on quality issues was inaugurated. thus, quality became the stated plant goal.10 the anthropological role: the study was designed to be both exploratory and inductive. the fieldwork began with no preconceived notions of what cultural themes or patterns would be found. the mentor briody was assigned was in charge of plant communications, including the plant newsletter. she introduced the anthropologist to employees whom she believed would help briody develop an accurate understanding of the culture. briody used those individuals as a foundation and expanded beyond them through their networks. establishing rapport and building trust with selected plant employees, including several uaw committeemen, and maintaining confidentiality, were relatively easy. her conversations with hourly employees and their supervisors in assembly, material handling, and repair occurred as people were working. she spent time at individual work stations along the assembly line, as well as 10 for more detail on this project, see briody, trotter, and meerwarth (2010). journal of business anthropology, special issue 1, spring 2014 24 on jitneys (as a passenger) that were used by material handlers to track down parts. cultural issues: briody’s analysis of the ethnographic data revealed an endemic practice of blaming. not only were plant employees seven times more likely to blame than praise each other, but the blaming was patterned. employees blamed those on the previous shift, not their own shift, and those upstream from them, but not those in their own work area or those downstream from them. employees also engaged in blameavoidance behaviors, such as hoarding parts or trading parts, because they were fearful of being held accountable for parts that ran short. while they repeatedly indicated they wanted to produce quality work, they were unable to do so because of the incessant demand to meet efficiency and production quotas. outcomes: three unexpected reactions to the release of briody’s internal technical report occurred. first, the plant manager spurned the findings and recommendations during a meeting with her and her manager. despite the fact that the plant manager had sponsored the project, assigned briody a mentor, and interacted with her on multiple occasions, he avoided all discussion of product quality and stridently asserted his plant’s strengths (only in logistics related to vehicle delivery). second, and most surprising, was the response of a newly-assigned plant manager at a nearby plant. he called briody after receiving a copy of the technical report and asked if the plant she had studied was his plant. briody explained that it was not. the plant manager spoke at length about the quality problems and blaming that were rampant in his plant. briody insisted that the study was not done in his plant; indeed, if it had been, he would have known about it. despite her protests, however, the plant manager continued to declare that the study must have been done in his plant because of the high level of accuracy of the findings. exasperated after 30 minutes of discussion, briody told him, “it could not have been your plant because i don’t do covert research.” that remark seemed to mean something. he thanked her for her time and hung up. a third unexpected and positive outcome from the release of the technical report was the review of the study at a gm board meeting. in doing so, it raised awareness of the anthropological study and definitively introduced the notion of culture into the highest ranks of the corporation. ethics: gm principle 1 (personal integrity – understanding the rules) guided briody’s approach (see table 1). the common practice included working through her own management to get the necessary permission to do the study, and then explaining to plant employees what she was doing in relatively simple terms:  introductions (“my name is elizabeth and i work at the tech center in warren.”) brody and pester / the coming of age 25  project description (“i am trying to learn about the plant’s culture – how this plant works.”)  confidentiality (“i won’t attach your name to what you tell me.”). briody’s approach was also consistent with aaa principle 2 (be open and honest regarding your work) both in terms of how she approached study participants, as well as how she addressed the concerns expressed by the newly-assigned plant manager at a nearby plant. on the other hand, table 1 shows that aaa principle 3 (obtain informed consent and necessary permissions) was highly problematic because of its insistence on the range of topics to be covered including: the research goals, methods, funding sources or sponsors, expected outcomes, anticipated impacts of the research, and the rights and responsibilities of research participants … the possible impacts of participation, and [the fact that] confidentiality may be compromised or outcomes may differ from those anticipated. the sheer number of plant employees, unrelenting work pace, and accepted plant practice of letting employees know a project was under way made satisfying the numerous formal requirements of informed consent impractical and countercultural. providing the breadth and depth of information required in the principle would likely have been viewed with suspicion and rejection, thereby compromising the anthropologist’s ability to gather valid field data. we also believe it is disingenuous for the wording of the principle to read that it is the “quality of the consent, not its format, which is relevant” when there is a clear expectation to use a lengthy and formal informed consent process. in addition to this principle, aaa principle 1 (do no harm) also came into play. the larger goal behind any applied research project is not to be passive, but rather to engage, to advise, to propose change, and often, to participate in the change process. the internal technical report offered specific recommendations to help address plant cultural issues – not just study these issues. project 4: collaboration as gm’s ideal plant culture gm’s automotive industry had lost ground to asian competitors who first spearheaded quality improvements and then became skilled at reducing waste and cost, reducing lead time to market, and learning effectively from their mistakes. despite dramatic improvements in product quality over the last few decades, the erosion of gm’s customer base persisted, and gm’s relationships with the uaw international union continued to be contentious. the purpose of this project was to identify and implement an ideal work culture in gm’s newest plant, and to develop interventions journal of business anthropology, special issue 1, spring 2014 26 that would help spread that ideal culture to other gm manufacturing facilities in the u.s.11 anthropological role: our six-member anthropological research team was involved in collecting ethnographic data in three assembly plants and one stamping plant. we sought out hourly, salaried, and executive employees and representatives of the uaw employees at their workstations, in their offices, in team/break rooms, in skilled-trades areas, in the plant clinic, in the cafeteria, in training facilities, and at union locals. the “joint” leadership team of gm’s newest plant, composed of both gm and local uaw leaders (who were able to work together cooperatively), repeatedly requested help from us, seeking insights, solutions, and best practices that could be put in place in the new plant. over the course of the project, we held 35 validation sessions during which attendees were asked to challenge, confirm, or expand upon our results. as the project moved into the application phase, gm manufacturing gained both active consultation and proactive action including the development of ten tools (or interventions) to help in the establishment of an ideal plant culture in the new plant. cultural issues: there was a belief that strong, healthy collaborative relationships were the missing ingredient in enabling gm to achieve and exceed its business goals. employees indicated their hopes for the future by moving from the “old way” in which relationships were divisive and exclusionary and caused by a directive and authoritarian management style, to a new or ideal way that supported and valued employee expertise and problem-solving abilities. the new plant’s joint leadership team, local uaw leaders, and senior gm manufacturing executives accepted the findings and recommendations. after the 10 tools had been tested in several plants, senior gm manufacturing leaders approached the uaw international with plans for a formal evaluation of the tools. problems surfaced when the uaw international, and their representatives in selected plants, argued against adoption of the research results and tools because the work was not carried out under the umbrella of the gm management–uaw international structure. outcomes: ultimately, uaw international leaders did not support the tool dissemination effort across gm’s u.s. plants. the project became politicized in that it was perceived as a management-only initiative. moreover, the gm-uaw negotiations were approaching – a time when positions harden and cooperation can be elusive. however, the tools and the cultural model on which they were based successfully contributed to a “culture of collaboration” at the new gm plant at lansing delta township in michigan, which has gone on to become the best manufacturing facility in gm. the approach, change model, and tools have since been applied successfully in several projects in the health and medical industry. 11 for more detail on this project, see briody, meerwarth, and trotter (2013); briody, trotter, and meerwarth (2010). brody and pester / the coming of age 27 ethics: aaa principle 5 (make your results accessible) and aaa principle 2 (be open and honest regarding your work) were helpful in guiding our project (see table 1). transparency about project goals occurred alongside rapport-building. we also shared what we were learning as quickly as possible. our validation sessions served to engage plant and senior manufacturing leaders with us in dialogue about our results, recommendations, and interventions. indeed, our project followed both a community-based participatory research design and an action anthropology approach to organizational change. later, we were able to make the tools publicly available and publish the results in our aaa award-winning book transforming culture. gm principle 1 (personal integrity – understanding the rules) also played a role in our orientation to the project. part of “understanding the rules” for any gm researcher includes the creation of an implementation component. the development, testing, and distribution of the tools fulfilled that purpose. two other aaa principles fell short of our expectations (see table 1). with respect to aaa principle 2 (be open and honest regarding your work), all of the stakeholders may not be known a priori such as at project launch or even at a later stage, and some constituency may be powerful enough to derail the work. despite being transparent throughout the project, our research team, gm plant management, gm senior manufacturing management, and the uaw locals were blindsighted by the uaw international’s reaction. this aaa principle should recognize that situations like this can and do arise – particularly during the application phase of a project. our criticism of aaa principle 1 (do no harm) as outlined in project 3 applies to project 4 as well. our team was invited to help with the start-up of a new gm plant. consequently, our role entailed far more than the “promotion of well-being, social critique or advocacy” because it involved active participation and decision making as both organizational insiders and consultants. new horizons on anthropology’s ethics we now turn our attention to the relevance and usefulness of the aaa code of ethics for anthropological practice. filling in what practitioners would consider to be weaknesses or gaps in the ethics code would be extraordinarily helpful. as we consider our four projects as a whole and their ethical interfaces, we see three ways in which the 2012 aaa ethics code could expand to accommodate anthropological practice. the three concepts we are proposing are fundamental to those engaged in applied research or anthropological practice generally. they are intricately interwoven with one another. without their inclusion, the aaa code does not adequately guide the work of the fastest growing segment of the field.12 12 these three key suggestions for revision of the 2012 aaa ethics code largely journal of business anthropology, special issue 1, spring 2014 28 recognize that practitioners may adhere to multiple ethics codes first, practitioners have dual or even multiple identities when it comes to ethics. in our case, we typically tried to use both the gm code of conduct and the aaa ethics code as our guides. while using multiple ethics codes often happens in the field in the “background” of practitioner work, not much has been written about the experience of this integration, its benefits, and challenges. the specific aaa and gm principles had important value for us as practitioners. separately, the two codes provided different perspectives on work and emphasized different domains. the aaa code is heavily research-oriented as indicated in the 65 occurrences of the word “research” and its cognates such as “research participants” and “researcher.” it is intended to guide the preparation and execution of anthropological research so that it is of high caliber. the aaa code is also intended to be a reference guide for the researcher prior to, during, and after the research has been conducted. the gm code is framed in terms of the concept of integrity regarding all aspects of employee behavior. it is particularly concerned with inappropriate actions of individuals, including those that are illegal, that would have a negative impact on corporate activities and image, as well as adherence to legislative and regulatory mandates. we were fortunate to have two distinct ethical codes on which to rely. when we viewed them together, we understood them as examples of point–counterpoint. each code complemented the other with the potential to offer specific guidance that the other code did not have. at the same time, the two codes had the potential for important overlap. when both codes sent the same message, our decisions were relatively easy. when the codes sent different messages, we were able to make comparisons and use the differing aspects to inform our decision. hardest was when one or both of the codes sent no particular message and we had to sort the issues out without the benefit of formal guidance. this latter issue is an important challenge for both codes. as practitioners, we became adept at comparing the two ethics codes during our work, discussing any ethical challenge, and reaching a decision. we believe that the aaa principles would be improved significantly by acknowledging that the aaa principles may not stand alone, but rather alongside employer or other codes, and that each contributes to a more mindful practice. this kind of formal acknowledgment is perhaps best suited for the preamble of the aaa ethics code. apply to napa’s “ethical guidelines for practitioners” (http://practicinganthropology.org/about/ethical-guidelines/, accessed february 4, 2014) and to sfaa’s “ethical and professional responsibilities” (http://www.sfaa.net/sfaaethic.html, accessed february 4, 2014). http://practicinganthropology.org/about/ethical-guidelines/ http://www.sfaa.net/sfaaethic.html brody and pester / the coming of age 29 include practice prominently in the aaa ethics code second, the aaa ethics code only minimally includes practice, and largely in the preamble. one indicator is that there is no mention of the word “application” and but one occurrence of the word “applied” (a reference to the fact that some anthropologists work in “applied settings”). this lack of attention to application is remarkable both because of the demographic shifts to practice work and the ongoing interest expressed by students in practice careers and experiences, and because application can serve as a feedback loop to theory. the aaa ethics code is not truly practice-friendly, in spite of such statements to the contrary as: “these principles provide anthropologists with tools to engage in developing and maintaining an ethical framework for all stages of anthropological practice – when making decisions prior to beginning projects, when in the field, and when communicating findings and preserving records.” the code virtually ignores the kinds of issues with which practitioners grapple on a regular basis. the “stages of anthropological practice” never extend beyond “dissemination of the results.” for example, there is no discussion of developing recommendations, working with stakeholders collaboratively, implementing interventions, or evaluating how well the interventions worked. this gap is problematic because during implementation, the focus is no longer on “research participants,” but on stakeholders “who have greater impact and control over what is being done in their communities” (kedia and van willigen 2005:349). stakeholder buy-in is essential; without it, the implementation effort will surely fail. the aaa ethics code fails to recognize that application should be addressed as carefully and cogently as basic research. moreover, the current aaa code shies away from the change nature of applied projects. there appears to be a reticence to influence or alter the culture of a particular group, organization, or community. only four occurrences of the word “change” appear in the aaa ethics code and none of them refers to changes in the culture of the group involved. there is no discussion of the notions of “planned change,” “organizational-culture change,” “cultural transformation,” or “community change” that are tied to applied research or practitioner work – despite the fact that applied research and action anthropology have been part of the discipline for many decades. indeed, change is part of practitioners’ cultural model of the work they do. thus, we conclude that change is not considered a priority within the ethics code, even if it enhances or improves the current state. similarly, specific interventions to address an issue or improve the effectiveness of an organization or community are neither fully comprehended nor valued within the code. this omission is surprising to practitioners like us. an “interventionist ethic” is part of many anthropologists’ “professional identity and sense of responsibility” (katz 2012:204). when employed in journal of business anthropology, special issue 1, spring 2014 30 the public, private, or non-profit sectors, job performance is largely a function of problem solving to change something such as work practices, processes, or policies. practitioners are actively engaged in what might become some aspect of the future state. deadlines are pending on delivering completed assignments and results, which will have an impact on decisions, strategy, direction, and a host of other factors that can make the former cultural processes and practices obsolete. moreover, new and urgent issues arise that need to be tackled. practitioners are part of ongoing change processes within an organization or community. they are also professionals whose work is designed to foster change. practitioners engaged in applied research typically intervene in the culture at hand and work on implementation of agreed-upon changes. (other practitioners whose job functions do not include research, such as consultants, administrators, or cross-cultural trainers, also operate within a paradigm of change.) consequently, practitioners are not only in the throes of change, but leading it and leading it away from the status quo. just as the code provides guidelines for basic research, it should also provide some guidelines for applied research and practice in both the preamble and in each of the individual ethical principles. do some good third, the current ethics code is preoccupied with the concept of harm. we count nine occurrences of the word “harm” or its cognates such as “harmful” in the ethics code. among them are these statements:  aaa principle 1: “anthropologists should not only avoid causing direct and immediate harm but also should weigh carefully the potential consequences and inadvertent impacts of their work.”  aaa principle 4: “anthropologists must often make difficult decisions among competing ethical obligations while recognizing their obligation to do no harm.”  aaa principle 6: “ethical decisions regarding the preservation of research materials must balance obligations to maintain data integrity with responsibilities to protect research participants and their communities against future harmful impacts.” this overwhelming emphasis on “harm” without a corresponding emphasis on “help” is unexpectedly imbalanced. we find that the emphasis on harm does not reflect fully what practitioners do and how they approach their work. we believe that anthropology’s new ethical horizon should move beyond the do no harm principle to do some good. practitioners routinely evaluate their options between these two poles as they settle on a course of action. however, their sights are set 180 degrees away from deliberately and intentionally causing any injury or damage. as a matter of fact, much of their inspiration springs from their desire to make a brody and pester / the coming of age 31 difference through their work. they are working inside some cultural system ‒ whether as employees, contractors, consultants, or even volunteers ‒ and trying to make it better in some way. while we realize the preference of some anthropologists to “work as outside critic” (rylkobauer, singer, and van willigen 2006: 183), practitioners accept the challenge of using their skills and knowledge to implement change and improve conditions for communities and organizations. rogers (2013) recently came to this conclusion as well in his work for a pharmaceutical company on experimental therapies. the ethics of practice is not well served by being defined in the negative, but rather “requires an active positioning of insights rather than a passive protection and representation of subjects” (madsen and hammershoy 2012). practical solutions for a divided field as practitioners, we see anthropology as a divided rather than a united field: in terms of the careers anthropologists follow; in their perceptions of and relationships with anthropologists whose work is different from theirs; and in their assessment of the usefulness and relevance of the current ethics code. anthropology’s identity, relevance, and impact would be better served with greater integration across the ideological boundaries of theory and practice, and with greater cohesion between academics and practitioners. fortunately, many academic anthropologists engage in applied research, teach their students about the value of practice and alternative models of work, and help bridge the divide between an “external” and “critical” view from the academy, and the “internal” and “instrumental” view from practice (rogers 2013). these applied academic anthropologists have worked tirelessly with practitioners in their classrooms, on projects, and on association committees to build connections and to expand learning and career possibilities. we know that there is more to be done to narrow the gap between practice and academia (bennett and fiske 2013; nolan 2013), and to create greater integration and cohesion among anthropologists. our focus on the intersection of ethics and applied research on four projects exposes some of the difficulties for practitioners with the new aaa code. from our work we propose three solutions. first, the ethics under which practitioners work needs to be incorporated into the aaa principles of professional responsibility. an analysis of our four projects in the form of a “friendly test” of the new principles has yielded some useful findings. foremost among them is that practitioners are closely tied to problem solving, collaboration, and change. not only do practitioners engage in problem solving and change efforts with others as a routine part of their work, they foster change in the organizations and communities in which they are involved. their work goes beyond the dissemination of knowledge. practitioners are not involved in promoting change for the journal of business anthropology, special issue 1, spring 2014 32 sake of promoting change. instead, they hope to improve current cultural conditions through their knowledge and expertise, and sometime mitigate the consequences of difficult circumstances, like disaster relief, public health issues, or organizational failure. explicitly recognizing the practitioner role as change agent is an essential addition to the ethics code. second, we note that ethics training is not yet a mainstay of anthropological education (trotter 2009). we believe that the ethics of both research and practice should be part of the graduate and undergraduate curricula, no matter what a student’s career path is likely to be. it turns out that applied programs are much more likely to offer ethics training (trotter 2009). an introduction to ethics through specific classes such as ethnography or pre-internship seminars, and scenariobased learning has become more prevalent. such classes and the required internship or practicum expose students to multiple ethics codes when working with study participants; they also introduce students to stakeholder groups (who may play a role in implementation) and to the job market generally. ethical dilemmas from practice can then be brought back into the classroom for discussion. in fact, one ethical problemsolving guide was designed by applied anthropology faculty in response to student requests; it has been used successfully by students and others to sort through complexities and conflicting ethical principles to arrive at an eventual resolution (whiteford and trotter 2008; bohren and whiteford 2013). third, anthropology needs to move beyond the do no harm principle. of course it is important to think through, plan carefully, execute effectively, and evaluate objectively any project or effort in which one is involved. in that sense, the do no harm principle continues to be helpful and relevant. however, as a guide it is limiting, because it does not encourage or motivate anthropologists to imagine the ways in which their work might make a positive contribution to organizations and communities. indeed, the ethics code currently can be interpreted as a justification for studying but not altering the status quo, rather than as a call to address issues of the human condition. therefore, we recommend a new principle: do some good. when used together, do no harm and do some good complement and balance each other. exposed to both principles, new cohorts of students will learn the value of careful preparation, thereby avoiding “harm to dignity, and to bodily and material well-being.” they also will learn the value of thinking and acting innovatively to find and implement solutions to cultural problems. the new principle could easily serve in an umbrella or overarching role for all of the other principles. do some good should apply broadly to all the aaa principles. in addition, problem solving with the intent to do some good has the potential to inspire all anthropologists. it is already the case that academic anthropologists do some good by educating their brody and pester / the coming of age 33 students, introducing them to professional conferences, and mentoring them through the grant writing and publication processes. the orientation to do some good can and should be expanded. we ask how might our proposed solution be put into practice? how might anthropology take on more of the attributes of a profession that is outwardly focused without losing sight of its knowledge-generation, testing, and documentation functions? we suggest increased bridge building between practice and academia, which can take a variety of forms. certainly practitioner participation in academia via guest lectures or mentoring, and within the aaa through serving on committees and task forces, is a key component. such participation raises awareness of anthropology’s diversity and provides the potential for future contact. bridge building also can enhance collegiality and understanding, and lead to joint collaborations. practitioners could consider the following:  inviting an academically-based anthropologist to shadow you for a day, assuming various permissions have been satisfied  organizing aaa workshops for academics on cutting-edge issues for practitioners  seeking an academic partner to participate in a practice-oriented project  initiating and co-authoring a journal article with an academic partner. academic anthropologists might consider the following:  using the classroom to explore ethical issues faced by practitioners with a practitioner present to guide the discussion  creating an alumni network to benefit student learning and the job search  soliciting funds for practitioners to visit campus, give talks, and advise students. such strategies will help reduce the parochialism that continues to exist within the discipline about practitioner work and its value – in itself an ethical problem – as we have described here. such strategies 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foundation. survey of earned doctorates. doctorate recipients by major field of study: selected years, 1981-2011, www.nsf.gov/statistics/sed/2011/pdf/tab12.pdf, accessed april 27, 2013. rogers, mark. 2013. how do you sleep at night? business anthropology roundtable. annual meeting of the society for applied anthropology, denver, co, march 19-23. rudd, elizabeth, emory morrison, joseph picciano, and maresi nerad. 2008. social science phds five+ years out: anthropology report. center for innovation and research in graduate education, university of washington, seattle, wa, february 14. rylko-bauer, barbara, merrill singer, and john van willigan. 2006. reclaiming applied anthropology: its past, present, and future. american anthropologist 108(1):178-190. tashima, niel, cathleen crain, elizabeth tunstall, kendall thu, and paul durrenberger. 2008. ethics and the anthropological profession in the 21st century. anthropology news 49(8):17. trotter, robert t., ii. 2009. formalizing ethics training in anthropology: an extension of methods education. anthropology news 50(6):32-33. van willigen, john and satish kedia. 2005. emerging trends in applied anthropology. in applied anthropology: domains of application. s. kedia and j. van willigen, eds. pp. 341-352. westport, ct: praeger. whiteford, linda m. and robert t. trotter, ii. 2008. ethics for anthropological research and practice. long grove, il: waveland press, inc. www.copaa.info/. www.gm.com/content/dam/gmcom/company/investors/corporate_go vernance/pdfs/winning_with_integrity.pdf, accessed april 26, 2013. www.sfaa.net/sfaaethic.html, accessed february 4, 2014. http://www.nsf.gov/statistics/sed/2011/pdf/tab12.pdf http://www.copaa.info/ http://www.gm.com/content/dam/gmcom/company/investors/corporate_governance/pdfs/winning_with_integrity.pdf http://www.gm.com/content/dam/gmcom/company/investors/corporate_governance/pdfs/winning_with_integrity.pdf brody and pester / the coming of age 37 elizabeth k. briody, ph.d., is a cultural anthropologist who has been engaged in cultural change efforts for over 25 years. she is founder and principal of cultural keys llc which helps organizations transform their culture, reach their potential, and attract and retain new customers. she has worked in health care, manufacturing, consumer products, service industries, research institutions, and other industries in the u.s. and abroad. her most recent book is co-authored with gary ferraro, the cultural dimension of global business (7th ed., pearson, 2013). she may be reached at elizabeth.briody@gmail.com. tracy meerwarth pester, m.a. is corporate officer at consolidated bearings co. as a business anthropologist, her interests include cultural modeling, cognitive anthropology, and symbolic anthropology. she coauthored the award-winning book transforming culture with elizabeth briody and robert trotter, ii (palgrave, 2010). with julia c. gluesing and brigitte jordan, she co-edited mobile work, mobile lives, napa bulletin 30, wiley-blackwell, 2008. her work appears in a variety of publications including human organization, journal of manufacturing management, and space and culture. she may be reached at tlm8@mac.com mailto:elizabeth.briody@gmail.com mailto:tlm8@mac.com elements of reflexive anthropology in three fieldwork studies of the workplace ghislaine gallenga abstract focusing on the ‘fictions’ between the ethnographer and her informants, this article deals with the delicate chemistry of fieldwork through an account of three field studies. the first explores power struggles in a bank in marseilles; the second looks at issues related to political and economic transition in romania through as seen through the lens of a metalwork factory; the last analyses ‘modernisation’ in the public sector in marseilles. these studies highlight some major questions raised in the field of reflexive anthropology, including the nature of the ethnographer/informant relationship, validation, gender issues, and the exploitation of the researcher. they reveal some of the difficulties surrounding the social construction of the ethnographer in the workplace and the negotiation of roles undergone whilst in the workplace. in these three cases the ethnologist was excluded from the field, forgotten about, and caught up in a conflict. keywords workplace anthropology, immersion, exploitation, reflexive anthropology. page 1 of 22 jba 2(2): 187-208 fall 2013 © the author(s) 2013 issn 2245-4217 www.cbs.dk/jba journal of business anthropology, 2(2), fall 2013 188 ‘in a science in which the observer is of the same nature as his object of study, the observer himself is a part of his observation.’1 (lévi-strauss, 1950: xxvii). the place of the researcher (dalla bernadina, 1989) in the preparation and the carrying out of ethnography has become, following postmodernist questioning of the role of the researcher, a much-discussed topic in the field of reflexive anthropology. however, most researchers place emphasis on the production of knowledge, rather than on the resulting textual analysis, provided that this reflexive approach works towards a better knowledge of the other while avoiding methodological narcissism (leservoisier, 2005; fainzang, 2002) or ‘an excess of reflexivity’, which occurs ‘when “i” takes up so much space in the writing that it replaces “they”’ (bouillon, fresia and tallio, 2005: 16). postmodernist views include the idea that an anthropological account should reveal the ‘fictions’ (geertz, 1998: 87) that emerge between the informant and the ethnographer by explaining interpersonal relations. in other words, this would amount to being more subjective in order to gain in objectivity. according to olivier leservoisier (2005), reflexive analysis is both a process allowing the objectification of research and a condition for knowledge production. as others are involved in the fieldwork process, the researcher is obliged to self-analyse because the collected data are dependent on her as much as they are on her informants. with postmodernist criticism of the status of written work and the scientific validity of fieldwork, reflexivity has become a major part of data analysis and presentation (davies, 2008). reflexive anthropology, however, has gradually been replaced, especially in the united states, by an anthropology of the self (collins and gallinat, 2010; coffey, 1999), which shifts focus onto the necessity of integrating the researcher’s personal experience and memories as ethnographic data. this reflexive approach, therefore, appears to be inherent in the discipline itself and unconnected to the specificity of the field in which research is carried out. however, depending on fieldwork settings, the researcher’s immersion will turn out to be either easy or awkward to some degree, and the roles s/he plays will vary considerably. i have often opted, during my research on the workplace, for the methodological approach of getting a job in the company to be studied – a choice which has advantages and disadvantages.2 all in all, the main benefit is that the researcher becomes integrated more easily (erikson, 2002). when s/he has a position in the company, informants will not resort to stereotyped attitudes for fear of reprisal from management, such as acting like model employees, because the researcher shares the same work obligations. 1 every time a french citation is quoted in english, the translation is mine. 2 for a summary of these issues, see le journal des anthropologues (43-44, 1991), and gallenga (2007a). gallenga / elements of reflexive anthropology 189 this method also enables the researcher to better contextualise informants’ accounts. the main drawbacks are that the ethnographer will only be assigned a subordinate role (krause-jensen, 2013b: 49) and that she will be constantly caught between her position as an employee and her status as a researcher. more often than not, fieldwork in the workplace involves ‘studying up’ (nader, 1974) and yet influential people in companies can often be difficult to observe. but are there specificities to immersion in the workplace? are the roles played by the ethnographer in the field less significant or different when research is carried out in companies? how are informants’ representations of the ethnographer influenced by the fact that she is occupying a working position? what do the fictions at play between both sides reveal about immersion? are these fictions heuristic, and to what extent do they contribute to a scientific validation of ethnography? in an attempt to answer these questions, this article will deal with the delicate chemistry of fieldwork in the workplace, firstly through an account of three of my field studies focusing on the ‘fictions’ between the ethnographer and her informants. the first explores power struggles in a bank in marseilles; the second looks at issues related to political and economic transition in romania through an examination of a metalwork factory; the last analyses ‘modernisation’ in the public sector in marseilles. secondly, i will demonstrate how this research highlights some of the topics tackled in the field of reflexive anthropology – the nature of the ethnographer/informant relationship, data presentation, gender, and exploitation of the researcher. this research also accounts for the difficulties inherent in the ethnographer’s social construction within a company, as well as the role negotiation faced by the ethnographer appointed to a working position. while each time i opted for the same methodological approach (getting a job in the company), there was a significant difference between these three cases when it came to fieldwork access. i was hired as an executive at the bank in marseilles, without making reference to ethnological research, because of my degree in economics. in romania, i was granted access to the field with no salary or stated mission from the company. finally, i benefited from a three-year cifre3 contract as a manager in a public transport company. these studies highlight some major questions raised in the field of reflexive anthropology, as mentioned above: the nature of the ethnographer/informant relationship, validation, gender issues and the exploitation of the researcher. they reveal some of the difficulties surrounding the social construction of the ethnographer in the workplace, and the negotiation of roles undergone whilst in the workplace. in these 3 ‘convention industrielle de formation à la recherche dans les entreprises’: a scheme supporting research in businesses, consisting of a grant allocated by the ministry of higher education with the sponsorship of a company. the scholar is employed on a three-year contract as an executive in the company. journal of business anthropology, 2(2), fall 2013 190 three cases the ethnologist was either excluded from the field, or forgotten about, or caught up in a conflict. three fieldwork settings in the workplace the anthropology of firms is a comparatively recently developed branch of anthropology in europe. initially limited to epistemological issues responding to social demand and questions of access to the field, it is now developing because of a number of applied anthropological research projects commissioned by institutions on interpersonal relationships in the workplace and aspects of globalisation. in france, there is very little recent literature exploring the art of conducting anthropological studies of companies. in the paper by nicolas flamand and monique jeudy-ballini (2002) which opened an issue of terrain a decade ago, the authors point out that this branch of anthropology is seldom taught and largely underrated in europe and is often confused with the anthropology of the working class or the anthropology of work. in the united states, on the other hand, the field of ‘business anthropology’ is widely taught, and hence more institutionalised (ibid. p. 6), and is focused on being useful, outcomeorientated, and linked to the world of consultancy ‒ issues which are still in their early developmental stages in europe. however, flamand and jeudy-ballini do not point to research in various other european countries ‒ in particular, perhaps, scandinavia (sweden, denmark, norway) ‒ where it is much more dynamic than in the rest of europe (gardner, 1977; moeran, 2006; garsten and nyqvist, 2013a; krausejensen, 2013a), and where we can even find articles establishing the state of the art of this field (garsten, 2011; moore, 2011). in north america, numerous articles have taken stock of ongoing developments in this field of anthropology, and not just in recent years (burawoy, 1979; baba, 1986;bate, 1997). books have been written on the subject, by whatever name, for a long time: a companion to organizational anthropology (caulkins and jordan, 2013), organizational anthropology, industrial work and life (mollona et al., 2009), and anthropology of organizations (wright, 1994) ‒ none of which should be confused with ‘organizational ethnography’ as such, which also incorporates studies from the field of management focusing on ethnographic methods (neylan, 2008; ybema et al., 2009). brian moeran points to these separate fields with a pun in his book title: the business of ethnography (2006), while christina garsten and anette nyqvist (2013b: 242) note that: looking to the future, we have identified three themes salient to anthropological studies in and among complex organisations. they concern the very sites of our enquiry, how we engage with the field and the tools we use to conduct our gallenga / elements of reflexive anthropology 191 studies. in france, while we can find a handful of studies on companies, there is no manual or reference work in this field to date. a scene of power struggles and secrets, the workplace is quite an unusual fieldwork setting and a potential ‘minefield’ (albera, 2001) with limited access. brian moeran (2006: 12) also comments on the fact that ‘the study of business organizations itself is fraught with difficulties. most companies are understandably reluctant to allow researchers free access to their premises, employees, or written records’. in addition, jakob krausejensen (2013a: 5) notes that ‘organizations are in some sense more clearly bounded than most other locations. it is necessary to get permission from high-standing employees to get access to the locality and to do research’. in the 1980s-90s in france, one of the main issues tackled by researchers was how to gain access to a company. the debate about the relevance of getting a job in a company for research purposes has highlighted the methodological difficulties of this type of fieldwork.4 a methodological as well as an ethical issue, the decision to get a job increases the risk of the ethnographer becoming manipulated, as is often the case, but it has direct consequences in this particular context, especially as far as data production is concerned. excluded from the field ‘an anthropologist has failed unless, when he says goodbye to the natives, there is on both sides the sorrow of parting.’ (e. e. evans-pritchard)5 i started working in the banking sector to support myself in the early 1990s. i approached this environment, which was to become the field for my research, as a manager and an authority figure. during job interviews i did not hide my interest in ethnological research. when i asked my superior for leave in order to participate in a conference, before being appointed to a permanent position, he answered bluntly: “ethnology is useless, especially if you work in a bank. we all have to make choices in life: either you wish to join the bank, in which case ethnology will not be of any use, or you wish to do ethnology, in which case you don’t work in a bank. we expect our staff to be motivated and dedicated. if i find out you have taken just half a day off for ethnology, i’ll simply fire you on the spot.” the status of ethnology within the bank had just been made abundantly clear! i was compelled to make a choice: give up anthropology or lose the 4 for a summary of these issues, see gallenga, 2007a. 5 quoted in dalla bernardina (1989: 13). journal of business anthropology, 2(2), fall 2013 192 opportunity i was offered. i decided to get round this impossible dilemma by pursuing my research in complicity with the bank manager6 (referred to below as deputy manager) and the rest of the staff, after telling them about the branch manager’s blunt warning. i had been hired because of my degree in economics and i was now offered promotion. as it happened, the deputy manager advised me to avoid mentioning it in order to make my integration easier without provoking my colleagues’ jealousy. she advised me to play the ethnology card: ‘tell them you are doing research on banking. no one cares about that, but don’t say you have been hired through the graduate training scheme.’7 ethnology thus became, at first, a way of defusing conflicts. i was facing a situation of paradoxical injunction. i could not comply with both the branch manager’s command (you are an executive, not an ethnologist) and his deputy’s recommendation (you are an ethnologist, not an executive). i decided to continue my research on the bank itself without informing the branch manager. any fieldwork relies on an implicit contract between the ethnologist and her informants (abélès, 2002). in this particular case, the fact that i had chosen the bank as my research topic prompted my colleagues to see this secret as an implicit contract. in return for their silence, they deprived me of my legitimacy as an employee. my position as a team leader made me an authority figure, but gave me no power over the staff. the employees found themselves in a situation of double constraint and had to deal with this challenging ambiguity. for them, i should either go back to a subordinate role or give up ethnology – in which case they would have acknowledged me as a superior. instead, they opted to denounce me via an anonymous letter sent to the bank’s regional headquarters. i was immediately ordered to explain myself to the branch manager, while the human resources department decided to expel me from the graduate training scheme without notice. my superiors thus denied me access to key information which i could have obtained through my position in the scheme. no one trusted me any longer. my superiors were concerned that i might take advantage of my knowledge. after its initial defusing effect, ethnology had become a weapon turned against me. convinced that i would leave when my research was finished, employees no longer showed any solidarity towards me, even though i had been working towards improving their working conditions. at work, the atmosphere was very tense and everyone was trying to push me into some kind of professional misconduct in the hope that i would get fired. actually, however, my greatest fear was that i would be forced to leave my 6 on the bank’s organisation chart, the bank manager is a deputy manager. apart from the branch manager and his deputy, the branch that i worked in had six employees, all female with the same status, and a sales representative. 7 ‘le vivier’: a pool of graduates who are trained to become branch managers. employees hired from the pool were destined to become executive or branch managers within two to five years after being recruited. gallenga / elements of reflexive anthropology 193 fieldwork site before i had had time to collect enough data. so, in an attempt to postpone my now inevitable departure, i turned to the unions in order to defend myself. this allowed me to study the inner workings of trade unions throughout their meetings and during negotiations with management representatives. this close-up observation of union practices was made possible by my dual position as both ethnographer and employee. when i deemed that my fieldwork was over (which is always difficult for a researcher to assess), i finally resigned and received ten times more compensation than the statutory redundancy payment. my active participation in the workplace may have biased some of my fieldwork results as i had partially contributed to the invention of the social environment i was studying. for example, i had talked one of my colleagues into refusing the branch manager’s suggestion to work late hours or saturdays. in a work context where relationships are strongly affected by the power struggles from which most conflicts arise, my ability to step back and to distinguish action from observation was inevitably challenged. after i left the bank, my former colleagues, concerned about my research being published, first asked me not to mention any informal practices involving breaking or ignoring the rules. then, following changes within the branch management structure, they turned to me again, asking for feedback about the deputy manager’s activities as they were trying to challenge her authority. in doing so, they acknowledged that ethnology was a weapon that i could have opted to use previously. an ethnologist forgotten o clipă de sinceritate te aduce la securitate.8 (‘one moment of sincerity and you will face the securitate.’ romanian saying) this exclusion of the ethnologist due to a lack of trust and a suspicion of spying happened again during my research in romania, but this time with the ethnographer being fully integrated. after the fall of nicolae ceaușescu, in 1992, i worked in a large metalwork factory of 7,000 employees who produced industrial taps in transylvania. my study was carried out in romanian without the help of an interpreter. the first stage of my stay allowed me to master the language while i was getting acquainted with the running of the factory. the company knew that the purpose of my presence was academic research, and had not specified any conditions for my stay with them except for the 8 an allusion to the chorus of a popular romanian song from before the revolution. la securitate (‘security’ in romanian), whose official name is departamentul securității statului (department of state security), was romania’s secret police during communism. journal of business anthropology, 2(2), fall 2013 194 impossibility of paying me a salary. in the ‘job interview’ described by jakob krause-jensen (2013a: 6) in his book, we find the same characteristics: no salary, appointment to a role, six month fixed term, and first position in the human resources department. during my fieldwork in the marseilles city transport company (see below), the director also appointed me to the department of human resources. it seems that the anthropologist is first and foremost defined by his alleged skills in social interaction. however, i was given total freedom for my work and offered two meals a day, in an area called the ‘protocol’ room where i was, more often than not, the only guest. from time to time, when prestigious (mostly foreign) guests were visiting the site, i was invited to dine with them and complied ceremoniously. once again, an implicit contract was established. management would use me as a symbol of openness in those times of political transition, in return for which i had no professional or academic obligation whatsoever. but such ‘total freedom’ was only relative and revealed a contradiction: in spite of his apparent open-mindedness and transparency, the chief executive tried to control my presence and my research methods. my research, then, took shape according to the constraints of the field, as is often the case. on my first day, after a quick tour of the site, i was ‘assigned’ to an office of a new department called ‘export quality’, in which i was to work until the end of my stay. this department had a highly symbolic place in the company’s organisation chart. recently set up (after 1989), it aimed at presenting the company as modern and open to the outside world, in order to boost exports. four french-speaking engineers worked there, including the wife of the department’s director. as the only two women present, we developed a special bond resulting from her wish to make my integration into the company easier, mainly by learning romanian. our respective statuses – woman and director’s wife; woman, french woman, ethnographer – modified our relationships with the opposite sex. hence i benefited from a rapport based on both my gender and my nationality. the department manager asked me to make a list of all enquiries related to my research. he explained: ‘we must be organised and i know all the departments: i will sort out enquiries between departments, then we will meet each manager accordingly to find answers.’ his insistent manner led me to accept his request, so i patiently waited for answers while narrowing my research to administration services. days and weeks went by and all managers said they were too busy to see me. only the trade union spared me some time for a few interviews after a month. i was being put to the test of time, which reinforced the initial implicit contract. methodology in anthropology is often misunderstood, whether it is its long term aspect or the absence of questions. malcolm chapman (2001) makes this clear when he recounts – in the context of a study carried out in a company with a fellow economist – his colleague’s response towards the methods of anthropology, especially the absence of gallenga / elements of reflexive anthropology 195 a questionnaire. all my questions remaining unanswered. when i repeated my wish to work in the foundry, as was initially agreed with the company’s management, i was told: “you won’t last long there. work is too hard in the foundry and you will give up after one week… there is no point in you going to the foundry because the workers won’t tell you anything or they will tell you lies. that’s normal, that is how things are here.” this comment spells out one of the characteristics of this fieldwork setting: the difficulty of accessing important information or even freelyspoken, off-the-record comments. i wanted to join the foundry because, unlike in offices, work was organised in shifts. my time was organised into two blocks: the export quality department from 7am to 3pm; and one afternoon or night shift in one of the foundries. during the last three months, i was given a shift as a worker, with the constraints of standards to comply with, in one of the factory’s foundries, from 3-11pm, or from 11pm to 7am. in this foundry, sections were all male (engineers or workers), except for two. i made casts of internal parts for industrial taps within a section composed entirely of female workers. i also got a position in the section dedicated to the preparation of moulds to be painted ‒ a section that consisted of both male and female workers. occasionally, i took part in the foundry’s extra shifts on saturdays. by sharing the workers’ daily lives (work, meals on the site, showers, activities and entertainment after work), i was able to gather information inside and outside the company. the post-totalitarian background required that all information be carefully corroborated. in this case, the argument of secrecy was turned back on its authors: i got no more lies in the foundry than i had in the office. this reserved attitude towards a researcher – a stranger and, what’s more, a foreigner – stemmed from the caution inherited from the previous regime: persistent fear and mistrust of the other, be s/he a stranger or a familiar face, potentially an informer working for the political police, the infamous securitate. although the securitate was officially abolished on january 1st, 1990, the use of this heavily connoted word was by no means anachronistic. for all my informants, the romanian intelligence service (s.r.i.) was but a new name for the old organization. while the director had accepted that i work shifts in the foundry, my arrival aroused many questions. my free access to information came up against more or less explicit obstacles during the course of my research. the arrival in the company of a foreign woman with ethnological purposes caused a stir in the factory. therefore i had to find strategies in order to pursue my study, as i will later relate, although it was the subject of many different interpretations, as the final purpose of any ethnological study is often misunderstood. everyone seemed to think journal of business anthropology, 2(2), fall 2013 196 that there were many potential uses in the gathering of facts concerning the company’s intimate reality. most importantly, the outcome of the study could become a potential threat (losing one’s job), as every worker or engineer was aware. my presence in the field was subject to checks and integration strategies, hence creating the ‘production of an ethnologist as an actor’ (althabe, 1990: 130). within this complex interaction, i was essentially perceived as a spy, a fact which dramatically influenced my status as a fieldwork observer. in addition, my status as a french person and a woman in a mainly masculine environment was also the subject of specific perceptions and strategies. in the shadow of the securitate9 one particular feature of this fieldwork was that it was almost impossible to distinguish truth from falsehood and to avoid being caught up in a pattern in which everyone manipulated one another – out of personal interest or due to the securitate’s orders. the ethnologist was obliged to question every piece of information given and received, becaused suspicion and fear of the securitate were still keenly felt. the figure of the foreigner as a potential spy not to be spoken to, and forty years of constant secrecy, were still present in the collective memory. i realised i was under surveillance, and this was confirmed by a few people who reported to me their conversations with the securitate: my mail was opened, i was followed in the street, and i found out that my work hours were known to a few people. this surveillance had an impact on my living conditions. rumours about my alleged activities circulated: for instance, that i carried in my handbag a powder compact fitted with a microphone recording everything all the time. my informants started to warn me frequently: ‘you might get your handbag stolen in the street’, or ‘when you go to bucharest, make sure you take all your work – tapes and documents – because you never know...’ these (more or less reliable) comments allowed me to assess what the securitate thought of me. initially considered as an industrial spy10 who was after information about romanian technology, later i coincidentally came to be seen as a political spy using the factory as a cover (because i had entered the country at the same time and around the same area as the former king mihai who was on a private visit). finally, following my participation in two conferences on ‘human relations in 9 although the securitate was officially abolished in january 1990, the use of this heavily connoted word is by no means anachronistic. for all my informants, the romanian intelligence service (s.r.i.) was just a new name for an institution whose structure and objectives were exactly the same as those of the former securitate. everybody still called this service by its old name. even though this term had no legal meaning any longer, it testified to a sociological reality and will therefore be used throughout this article. 10 the accusation of spying, of course, is not specific to research in companies as every ethnologist faces it sooner or later in his/her fieldwork. gallenga / elements of reflexive anthropology 197 business’ in bucharest, i was suspected of being a business spy, supposedly employed by a french firm planning to buy out the company at a knock-down price. even though these scenarios were not exactly the leads that the securitate was following, it is worth noting that i was never considered as an ethnologist or even a researcher in social sciences. my status within the company was also affected by allegations of espionage. this became clear in my relations with the unions, where i temporarily became persona non grata after union members had decided by a vote that i was a spy. my disgrace was ended after a chance encounter, in the protocol room, with the president of the federation to which the union was affiliated. such an atmosphere of suspicion, inherited from communist times and associated with romanians’ usual wariness of strangers (as being potential surveillance officers), was a more or less implicit hindrance to my freedom of access to information. i was strictly denied access to all statistics and to details about the management. as a ‘spy’ i was nicknamed ‘mata hari’ or ‘the pioneer’ because my presence on site was a novelty. my colleagues started being sarcastic to me, which eventually created a bond. they would jokingly say things like ‘your job title is “trainee turnătoare”, isn’t it?’ i was not supposed to learn that ‘turnător’ meant both ‘foundry worker’ and ‘informer’.11 no foundry workers had this word on their employee id card, as their position was clearly mentioned (for example, ‘electrician’, ‘section t1 worker’, and so on), but as i was not an employee i had no such card. an ethnographer ready for marriage living in similar conditions to the romanians made my integration easier. the foundry was entirely male except for the two sections where i worked – one entirely female, where i made moulds for internal parts of industrial taps; the other mixed, where i prepared them for the painting stage. the arrival of an ethnologist always arouses curiosity and provokes various representations about her. the gender issue, for example, influences the practicalities of research. the fact that i was a french female complicated my integration.12 it gradually dawned on me that integration based on representations of gender and symbolic relationships could hinder the progress of my study, since factors linked to my femininity and to flirting came into play and reached a level where they impeded my research. for the actors, there was a double logic – my integration required my taking up a local lifestyle, whilst simultaneously i was expected to correspond to a certain stereotype. romanians would generally agree that a french woman should have a certain style of clothing and education, as well as a high standard of living. similarly, they 11 from the verb a turna: to pour, to mould, to melt and, figuratively, to grass someone up. 12 for a detailed analysis see gallenga, 2007b. journal of business anthropology, 2(2), fall 2013 198 characterized my gender in terms of my supposed fragility and libertarian values. faced with this image of a liberated woman, i constantly had to erect a certain barrier towards the men. on this issue, i agree with the views developed by don kulick and margaret wilson (1995) about how anthropologists’ sexual identity in their own society affects the sexuality they are allowed to express in their fieldwork. in the offices, these expectations revolved around seduction and flirting, as dictated by stereotypes of my nationality. in the foundry, my integration did not depend on a stereotypical image of femininity: all discussions focused on the subject of sexuality in france and, in particular, of mine. men and women questioned me from different standpoints. men made advances towards me and women played the role of matchmaker. in such a coded situation, i was expected to find a husband in romania. this interest shown in my personal life allowed the female workers to play the role of protectors, watching over me like sisters, and to inform me about certain marital customs. in order to become totally integrated, i was to marry into the community. after several weeks working in the foundry, this situation became unbearable. i was making no progress in my research. at the start of every interview, male informants became flirtatious and women talked of finding my ‘other half’. one of my strategies for avoiding these complications was to change my appearance, so i chose to ‘neutralise’ my gender in order to shift my role and informants’ expectations, and get the research back on track. my strategy was to blur the boundaries of sexual categories. in externally adopting male characteristics, i tried to reverse the sex-orientated perceptions of my biological gender. i gave special attention to my clothing and appearance and decided to get rid of external signs of flirtation – lipstick, nail varnish, contact lenses, and so on – opting to tie back my hair, a very sexual attribute. then, taking this change even further, i took on the attitudes of the other sex and wore the blue work overalls reserved for the men. this evolution of my clothes was accompanied by social practices such as drinking ţuică13 on a daily basis in the foundry with the workers, smoking coarse filter-less carpaţi cigarettes and making male language practices such as swearing my own.14 all groups within the company defined me according to stereotypes of french women. my strategy was to blur the boundaries of sexual categories. as odile journet-diallo (1999: 21-22) puts it, my status was: vague in terms of the perception of physical characteristics hidden by appearance or clothes, but even more vague in terms of the symbolical categories which define a stranger not as 13 home-made plum brandy, the alcohol content of which can be as much as 85°. 14 for an analysis of swearwords in a work context, see agnès jeanjean, 1999. gallenga / elements of reflexive anthropology 199 transsexual but primarily as sexless. this status makes it possible to play around the established boundaries of gender. in externally adopting male characteristics, i tried to reverse the sexorientated perceptions of my biological gender. i was no longer a woman or a man, but a person without a well-defined gender. at the end of my stay, i was no longer a woman; neither was i a man; rather, i was just an ethnologist without a well-defined gender. it is through this process of ‘neutralisation’ of the ethnographer’s own sexual attributes that i managed to get around elements that disrupted my research, in order to focus entirely on studying the company. subsequently, i returned to romania for validation purposes and was well received by the management until they read my work.15 at that moment, it was made clear that ‘the company did not wish to see me’ and ‘barred me from entering the factory’ and, as if that was not enough, ordered me to ‘never set foot in the town again’. as françoise zonabend (1994: 10) points out: ‘because he often projects an image with which his informants have trouble identifying, the ethnologist becomes a sort of social con artist’. validation becomes problematic ‒ as was the case in minot’s research. similarly, malcolm chapman (2001: 30-31) recounts the villagers’ failure to understand lawrence wylie’s book. in the context of a company, philippe erikson adds: ‘but as soon as the contract ends, the doors are closed and it is paradoxically more difficult for an ethnologist to return “on visit” in a factory where he has worked than to a remote village in the bush where he used to live’ (erikson and ghasarian, 2002: 119). caught up in a conflict there is no sitting on the fence in speech: in sorcery, speech is war. whoever speaks is involved and the ethnographer is no exception. there is no place for a neutral observer. (favret-saada, 1977: 27) contrary to the above example, the integration of the ethnologist in a context of industrial action is never achieved and requires constant ongoing negotiation with the parties involved. the analysis of this strike is made in the context of a diachronic interpretation of the ‘modernisation’ processes of public service companies. i was working as a bus driver when a strike broke out at the marseilles city transport company. at the root of the conflict was the problem of a double status rule specifying that newly-hired bus drivers would not benefit from the same salary conditions or the same work hours as their colleagues. this exceptionally long 33-day strike, supported by all trade unions and 15 my research touched on aspects of the economic, political and social transition of the country. i focused on the paradox of this transition: romanian people were nostalgic about communism although they wanted capitalism. through their understanding of privatisation and the role of trade unions, the management interpreted my study as a questioning of their educational role in this transition. journal of business anthropology, 2(2), fall 2013 200 followed by an exceptionally large number of strikers, led to the abandonment of this double status and profoundly marked the history of the company. the strike that started in 1995, while i was conducting a study of the marseilles city transport company (rtm) for my phd (gallenga, 2011), made such a reflexive moment possible. in the context of this research, i was working on the notion of public service and more precisely on the meaning of this notion for those who carry it out every day. i had decided to take up various roles within the company.16 while management had fancied for a short while that i could conduct my study incognito as a bus driver, for example, it soon had to yield to my ethical motives. all my informants knew the real reason behind my presence amongst them. i had been working in the marseilles city transport company for over two years when the strike broke out. first i worked for a year in the rtm’s administrative office. then i got a position as a bus driver, which was my job when the strike started. when caught up in a conflict like this, how can the ethnologist complete her research? in the history of strikes occurring regularly in rtm, the strike of december 1995 was particularly memorable. it was exceptionally long (33 days), supported by all trade unions, and had a very high proportion of strikers. this was a major event in the history of the company, as well as for my study. paradoxically, my sitting on the fence and my wish to observe the conflict from within eventually led me to become a striker. the paradox of my position as a ‘participant observer’ was then revealed. i was caught up in a network of social expectations which pointed out that the actors – rtm management and trade unions alike – had failed to understand the participation of the ethnologist in the company in which she worked on two levels: first as an ethnographer, and second as an employee. caught in a conflict, these actors did not believe that it was possible to keep some distance and perspective. basically, all members of the company doubted the principle of professional secrecy that i guaranteed them. through my knowledge of the running of the company at various levels of the hierarchy, i became a symbolic resource fiercely coveted by both management and trade unions: i was told to get off the fence. every mention of my status as an ethnographer was interpreted as a blatant sign of betrayal, a diplomatic indication that i had chosen the opposite side. my methodological endeavours were turning against me. there was obviously no understanding of a researcher’s practice. however, this lack of understanding offered an opportunity for me to analyse the study situation – the backdrop to this interaction and the materialisation of the turmoil caused by the presence of an observer. during a strike, the power of collective challenges is so strong that it 16 i did all the required training courses, took the public service vehicle operator licence and worked as a bus driver, a station agent in the metro and a ticket inspector. gallenga / elements of reflexive anthropology 201 leaves no room for understatement. metaphorically speaking, a transformation occurred because of the strike: vague feelings caused by the presence of an ethnographer were suddenly expressed more clearly, mainly in an accusation of spying. the strikers’ main demand was the abolition of a ‘new status’ which penalised newly-hired bus drivers. it enabled the company to hire young drivers at a lower salary, with increased workload and reduced benefits package (social security, health insurance, choice of holiday periods). the aim of the strike was to reject this double status and go back to the previous situation – a common status for all employees appointed to the same role in the company. upon signing my contract, i was asked about my possible participation in a strike. as rtm had a long history of conflicts and strikes, it was very likely that one would occur during the next three years while i was there. the question was put to me bluntly and my answer was just as blunt. i told the ceo that i would rally to the majority. in other words, if the department or branch in which i was working voted in favour of the strike, i would join the strike – if not, i would carry on working. in any case, i would not take part in the vote, but the management (except the ceo) later disregarded this verbal agreement. in the absence of pre-established formulae for fieldwork practices, the ethnographer must constantly adjust to her own injunctions and often make quick decisions which modify the study situation. the study of a strike raises the question of the study’s feasibility.17 i chose to go on strike. the fact that i had manager status whilst being a bus driver triggered conflicting reactions among actors in the field. as i was the only executive apart from the bus depot manager, i could have positioned myself as a person in charge amongst the personnel. all of the staff, trade union representatives included, were confused by the presence of a newcomer who held a temporary contract, yet had executive status – as this was unknown within the company. the difficulty of identifying the newcomer became even more acute when ‘she’ declared that in addition to these peculiarities, ‘she’ was an ethnologist. these identifications were both revealed and blurred by the strike. the situation unfolded in three stages: firstly in my attitude at the outset of the strike; secondly in the resulting understanding of my position by the unions; and finally in management’s ceasing to understand my position. on the first day of the strike, my work hours were changed at the last minute. rtm management tried to break the strike by arranging for a manager to start work as the first buses were due to depart from the depot. according to management’s representations, my executive status would prevail. i was supposed to toe the company line and not strike. now, the ethnography of the conflict had already started and in order to 17 see gallenga, 2005. journal of business anthropology, 2(2), fall 2013 202 see it through to completion, it was essential that i stay on the scene and follow the unions getting the depot ready for the strike. my working hours had been changed as part of a deliberate strategy which ignored my position as an ethnographer. once again, my status as a researcher was pushed into the background as was the case during my previous studies. i encountered difficulties in integrating due to the ambivalence and peculiarities of my position: i was simultaneously a woman, a manager, a short-term employee, a striker, and an ethnologist to boot. this multiple identity was the cause of the exploitation of and misconceptions about the ‘neutrality’ i had to maintain. the management attempted to exploit me mainly as an executive rather than as an academic. i was told that ‘even though my heart leaned towards the strikers, however understandably, reason demanded that an executive hold rank’, whilst management could have said: ‘you are a researcher so stay out of all this’. my integration was difficult and i was once again considered as a spy and labelled with nicknames such as ’mata hari’ or ‘the mole’. however, having shown my ‘neutrality’ several times, i finally managed to get myself accepted by the union leaders, the unionists and the strikers. i was then able to follow the whole conflict – 33 days and nights – and attend all the negotiations at every level of decision-making. at the beginning of the strike, i had wanted to follow the perspectives of both strikers and management. however, management dissuaded me from doing this, going so far as to threaten me. in other words, it appeared impossible to carry out an ethnography of all sides of the conflict. however, i ensured that i positioned myself within the ethnographer’s atopy, as defined by naepels (1998: 193), or in what i call a ‘position of neutrality’. at the end of the strike, management tried to retain my wages for the days when i had been on strike. in its eyes, i was neither manager nor ethnologist, but simply a bus driver on strike. after this negotiation, there were still some months left on my contract. management suggested that i stay at home during this period to write up my observations. this was only a pretext, as it had no interest in the interim report that i was due to hand in at the end of the contract. whilst the theme of espionage also crops up within the context of a strike, its nature and the terminology linked to it differ significantly. what we have here is a contrast between the representations of the ‘spy’ within and outside of the company. on the one hand, during the first two studies mentioned above, the ‘spy’ was viewed as an outsider about whom all levels of staff had a more or less common understanding. on the other hand, in the case of the strike, the ‘spy’ was carrying out internal espionage. in this case, both camps saw the ethnologist as belonging to the opposite side, thus indirectly legitimising her presence. for the unionists, this suspicion of espionage was eventually ended because of ongoing interaction with the ethnographer. whereas the unions finally recognised her as an academic figure, this was not the case with gallenga / elements of reflexive anthropology 203 management, who continued to ignore her status. the response of management towards the ethnographer’s involvement in the conflict – her way of being neutral – revealed a massive lack of understanding of the multiple statuses of the ‘ethnologist as employee’ in the field (that is a manager, a bus driver and an academic). management gave more weight to the last two positions (bus driver and academic), combining them to create a new status, that of a radical intellectual in the tradition of the ‘établis’ movement. immersion and assignment the roles or assignments attributed to the ethnographer during her fieldwork study undeniably provide information about how informants objectify the relationship, but also about how ‘the ethnographer as a person tries to take on some of these assignments’ (fogel and rivoal, 2009: 5). this is particularly visible in the case of a strike. the stance taken by the ethnographer has allowed information and representations to be obtained, which informants were later able to ‘process’ by assigning either the role of ‘striker’ or that of ‘consultant and strike specialist’ to the ethnographer. the question of assignment has a particular resonance when the ethnographer is a stranger in the society she observes. however, immersion ‘at home’ – as previously seen in the bank and the transport company – reveals similar but specific issues. at home, the categories used by informants are more likely to be part of the ethnographer’s daily life. as jakob krause-jensen (2013b: 44) points out, ‘”anthropology at home” is a tricky venture’. the epistemological difficulties of ‘anthropology at home’, usually examined through their relationship to distance and otherness, find a new resonance here. roles were different in romania, where the ethnographer’s national representation was an additional factor. in the case of the ethnologist ready for marriage, i agree with katia boissevain when she wonders what happens when the role the ethnographer has been given does not suit him any longer, when ‘the costume does not fit anymore? when he is bursting at the seams or when, on the contrary, the suit starts feeling too big for him, even though he has committed neither a faux pas nor a blunder?’ (boissevain, 2009: 2). each ethnographer will attempt to answer these questions according to the various backgrounds and the possibilities at hand, in order to turn this bad role into a role that is better adjusted to his research purposes. the ethnographer will then try again to suggest another assignment to her informants. the situation in the bank led to an unbearable position for the ethnographer. isabelle rivoal analyses the ‘failure’ of her ethnographical relationship during fieldwork in lebanon ‘in political terms, but in a specific context: the family’ (rivoal 2009: 11). she attempts to make sense out of her experience of moving in with a young married couple by journal of business anthropology, 2(2), fall 2013 204 analysing it ‘in terms of domination and political division’. in the bank, the failure of the ethnographer’s position may have derived from an immersion that was ‘too successful’: the ethnographer was so well integrated that the informants temporarily ‘forgot’ about her ethnographer status – only to remember it when required by political purposes. this unbearable position is nevertheless heuristic. it has shed some light (in the instance of the excluded ethnographer) on the importance of power and authority struggles, as well as on the role of secrecy within a company. as antoinette molinié (2009: 1) notes: ‘these assignments have an experimental value. they allow the ethnographer to grasp the fundamental structures of the society he is studying’. contrary to pierre bourdieu’s views (1980) that the ethnologist is able to objectify the practices he observes thanks to his position as an outsider, in the instance of the excluded ethnographer, it was being caught in the strategies of the actors that made it possible for me to objectify the observed practices. conclusion in this article i have explored ‘the dual dimension of the ethnographic paradigm ‘i was there, i can talk about it’ by demonstrating that ‘being there’ is often not enough to be able to talk about it and, more importantly, that the way of ‘being there’ always influences the way of ‘talking about it’’ (fogel and rivoal, 2009: 3). i have thus ‘considered the ethnographic relationship both as a specific time in fieldwork experience and as a way of producing data from the process of relations’ (ibid.). ‘being there’ as a woman, and as a single woman, also influences the data collecting process. as diane bell and pat caplan have brilliantly demonstrated (1993), gender is never neutral in fieldwork; it is at least as significant as the chosen methodology. these three research projects demonstrate that when an ethnologist enters the informants’ world, he/she will be faced with a lack of understanding of his/her role. when analysed reflexively, they show that data production is closely linked to the choice of methodology. however, if occupying a working position allows a faster and less suspicious integration of the researcher when compared to being a mere observer, this method is nevertheless a best effort obligation rather than an obligation to produce a specific result. issues of power and interpersonal relationships take the question of immersion through a working position beyond that of the researcher’s integration. having a role in the company places the informant in a double-bind situation which can explain why, after co-existing for a while, the tension caused by the researcher’s duality leads to her eviction. it can be suggested that, even though occupying a job position makes the ethnographer’s integration a lot easier, it can undermine her recognition as a researcher. when the gallenga / elements of reflexive anthropology 205 ethnologist finds a position in the workplace, the actors focus on her status as an ‘employee’. this situation blurs the informants’ ideas of an ethnologist, even though her ethnologist status is still in the background and plays a role in interpersonal relations. the world of business has been shown to be a field of study like any other in that the underlying aspects of research do not differ from those found elsewhere. in fact, it is not the field which creates these issues but the methodology (immersion, 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fall 2013 208 nader, laura 1974. up the anthropologist. perspectives gained from studying up. in d. hymes (ed.), reinventing anthropology. new york and toronto: vintage books, 284-311. naepels, michel 1998. une étrange étrangeté. remarques sur la situation ethnographique d’enquête. l’homme 148: 185-200. neyland, daniel 2008. organizational ethnography. los angeles, london, new delhi, and singapore: sage publications. rivoal, isabelle 2009. un huis clos ethnographique ou l’impossible enquête chez un ancien milicien libanais. ateliers d’anthropologie 33. http://ateliers.revues.org/8204, page consultée le 16 juin 2013. wright, susan 1994. anthropology of organizations. london and new york: routledge. ybema, sierk, yanow, dvora, wels, harry, and frans kamsteeg (eds.) 2009. organizational ethnography. stydying the complexities of everyday life. london: sage publications. zonabend, françoise 1994. de l’objet et de sa restitution en anthropologie. gradhiva 16: 3-14. ghislaine gallenga is a social anthropologist whose research has focused both on the anthropology of firms (including comparative research in the field of public service) and on reflexive anthropology (working on epistemological issues arising from ethnographic relations, empathy, and ethics). she is currently associate professor in anthropology at aix marseille university (amu), and researcher at the institut d’ethnologie européenne méditerranéenne et comparative (idemec – cnrs 7307), in aix-en–provence, france. she may be reached at gallenga@orange.fr http://ateliers.revues.org/8204 mailto:gallenga@orange.fr the anthropology of chinese capitalism in southeast asia: from culture to institution? michiel verver and heidi dahles abstract this article outlines the contours of the scholarly debate on ‘chinese capitalism’ in southeast asia. this multidisciplinary domain is business and entrepreneurship-oriented, and concerns the ethnic chinese who have migrated from southern china to southeast asia and have come to play a dominant role in the region’s economies over the centuries. the debate revolves around the competing assumptions that ethnic chinese business success in southeast asia relies either on ethnic affiliation and shared cultural values, or on strategic deployment of resources, power relations and institutional co-optation. we distinguish four perspectives on ‘chinese capitalism’, and argue that the concept of culture holds the debate hostage in the divide between essentialism and anti-essentialism. the promise of an ‘anthropology of chinese capitalism’ resides in matters of perspective, therefore, rather than in the theoretical concept of culture itself. we advocate a liaison amoureuse between business anthropology and institutional theory. keywords: chinese capitalism, southeast asia, business anthropology, culture, institutions page 1 of 22 jba 2(1): 93-114 spring 2013 © the author(s) 2013 issn 2245-4217 www.cbs.dk/jba journal of business anthropology, 2(1), spring 2013 94 introduction business anthropology has been, and is being, developed primarily in europe and the united states, but what about in other parts of the world?1 let us be blunt about it. there is no such thing as a ‘business anthropology of southeast asia’; nor is there an economic, applied, or whatever other kind of anthropology of the region. worse, a number of prominent scholars have observed that there is not even an ‘anthropology of southeast asia’ (halib and huxley 1996; king and wilder 2003) in terms of a clearly delineated field of practice organized in a geographical area surrounded by unambiguous boundaries – physical, political, or cultural. the work of anthropologists in the region has been of a highly specialized nature – focusing on particular problems (‘ethnic conflict’), a particular subject area (‘rice agriculture’), single peoples (‘the peoples of borneo’) or states (‘the study of thailand’). conversely, anthropologists are prominently represented among those who identify themselves, and are identified by peers, as southeast asian scholars. historically, the field of southeast asian studies as a regional discipline accommodates a multitude of disciplines and subject areas that do engage the economic dimension, but rarely put business or entrepreneurship centre stage. as halib and huxley diagnose in their seminal introduction to southeast asian studies, this regional field of studies is dominated by western concepts and theories ‘grounded firmly in traditions that emphasize cultural interpretations of the region and processes of modernization’ (1996: 6). culture being a prominent concern, it does not come as a surprise that the boundaries of the region have been fiercely debated among southeast asian scholars. the area that may be defined in terms of southeast asia roughly covers the south-eastern region of the continent of asia, including the lands that lie to the south of china and to the east of india (hill and hitchcock 1996: 11). whereas southeast asia as a ‘geopolitical imagination’ is to a large extent a product of us cold war politics, in which southeast asia was played off against the ‘chinese threat’ (glassman 2005: 802), the region is in fact characterized by a pronounced religious, cultural and ethnic diversity that came into being long before european colonial powers encouraged and facilitated the settlement of (predominantly chinese and indian) migrants. for many * acknowledgements: the authors gratefully acknowledge the support of the netherlands organisation for scientific research (nwo) science for global development department (wotro) through the cambodia research group, as well as the constructive comments of two anonymous reviewers. verver and dahles / the anthropology of chinese capitalism 95 centuries, there was a considerable mobility of traders and merchants, religious travellers and scholars, and adventurers and explorers, within and across the region. colonialism enhanced these flows of human capital. a factor of great significance in these cross-regional movements are the ethnic chinese who came to populate coastal ports, the mining areas in southern burma, the malay peninsula, western borneo, and the large rice growing areas such as the mainland southeast asian plains and large cities (kuhn 2008). the study of the ethnic chinese constitutes a separate domain which partially but not completely converges with the field of southeast asian studies, but which is more businessand entrepreneurship-oriented than either anthropological or regional studies of the region (cf. king and wilder 2003: 11-12, 19-20). this domain shows a measure of coherence in that scholars seem to agree to disagree about the role of culture in ethnic chinese business and entrepreneurship. the ensuing debate accrues to what we will label as an ‘anthropology of chinese capitalism’, the contours of which this article makes an attempt at outlining here. such a discipline has to be understood in terms of a multidisciplinary approach to economic relations embedded in the ethnically and culturally diverse economies of the region. this article is structured as follows. first, we zoom in on the concept of culture which constitutes the very fundament on which anthropology as an academic discipline is built and which also fuels the debate about ethnic chinese business and entrepreneurship. second, we review academic literature on ethnic chinese business in southeast asia and abstract various perspectives of ‘chinese capitalism’ that differently perceive of the relationship between culture and business. third, in the discussion section, we revisit the chinese capitalism debate, in particular the deployment of the concept of culture, and advocate a liaison amoureuse between business anthropology and institutional theory. the predicament of culture between the 1960s and 1990s, the highly developed and – mostly – chinese-dominated economies of east and southeast asia accomplished exceptionally high growth rates by pursuing an export-oriented model of economic development. analysts outdid themselves in superlatives to capture the grandeur of this ‘asian miracle’ that changed the established international division of labour. the phrase asian century was coined to encapsulate the belief expressed by asian leaders that the 21st century would be ruled by chinese-dominated asian economics, politics and culture. indeed, the role of china in the region is remarkable. in terms of the sheer volume of investments, acquisitions and development aid, china has established itself as a powerful competitor and threat to western hegemony. the often prominent role of the ethnic chinese in economic development and, currently, as promoters of china’s economic interests journal of business anthropology, 2(1), spring 2013 96 in the countries that take them in as sojourners and immigrants, has fuelled an academic debate about the factors underlying their economic importance. as has previously been the case with social science literature on business and the economy in southeast asia, the debate about chinese business in southeast asia is multi-disciplinary – including historians, sociologists, management scholars, social geographers and anthropologists – and focuses primarily on the relationship between culture and the economic sphere. the debate revolves around the competing assumptions that ethnic chinese business success in southeast asia and beyond relies either on ethnic affiliation and shared cultural values, or on strategic deployment of resources, power relations and institutional co-optation. as such, the debate has to a large extent evolved into a pendulum swinging between the bashing of culture, on the one hand, and its celebration, on the other, as an explanatory factor for our understanding of chinese business strategy. the academic debate as a whole seems hard-pressed to go beyond the divide between essentialist and anti-essentialist understandings of culture and, more fundamentally, beyond ‘holistic’ thinking that perceives culture – often conflated with ‘a people’ – as a more or less stable, coherent and internalized set of values, norms and tacit knowledge that arrays or even determines people’s behaviour. as we will argue at length below, the debate is held hostage by this preoccupation with the concept of culture – anthropology’s major contribution to the debate – and hence does not progress towards a more in-depth understanding of ethnic chinese business in the region. we hold, however, that the promise of anthropology resides in matters of perspective rather than in the theoretical concept of culture itself. the concept of culture does not just ‘haunt’ anthropology’s engagement with the chinese capitalism debate; it is also to be found lurking in the discipline’s involvement in organization and business sciences. anthropology has had its fair share of constructing societies or cultures as integrated wholes, as holism – the stronghold of anthropological thinking – has often been understood in terms of describing social arrangements as closed systems (jordan 2003: 53, 87) or ‘primitive isolates’ – as critics of the functionalist school would say (redfield 1955: 25). since the 1980s however – perhaps as a reaction to the functionalist, structuralist and materialist schools whose truth-claims on the nature and form of culture were far from modest – anthropologists have largely refrained from ‘macroanthropologies’ on how cultural or social systems influence behaviour (ortner 1984; hannerz 1986). as moore and sanders (2006: 6) argue, ambiguity, fragmentation and conflict have become truisms in anthropology, while the idea of a structure or system – that is to say, a coherent model of social reality – is perceived as contradicting the ‘countless inconsistencies and the indeterminate nature of lived life’. verver and dahles / the anthropology of chinese capitalism 97 ironically, the very moment that anthropology attempted to move away from culture as an analytic category, other disciplines started adopting it (moore and sanders 2006: 17). within organization and business studies, the concept of culture has been extensively borrowed from anthropology (smircich 1983: 339). particularly popular has been the definition of ‘organizational culture’ as a system of shared symbols and meanings as developed by symbolic anthropologists (smircich 1983). this approach addresses the problem of social order and cohesion. it therefore appealed to both organizational scholars and practitioners, since they are equally concerned with how to ‘create and maintain a sense of organization, and how to achieve common interpretations of situations so that coordinated action is possible’ (smircich 1983: 351). accordingly, the static definition of an organization as a stable system or bounded whole with fixed boundaries which ‘has a culture’ (smircich 1983: 347) has dominated the early work of those scholars adopting the anthropological concept of culture (e.g. hofstede 1991). it is only when business anthropology emerged as a distinct perspective in the mid-1990s that the close relationship between managerial needs and analytical approach was disrupted. what may have been the ‘anthropology of businesses’ at first has now developed into a multidisciplinary approach, with anthropology as the lens through which businesses are viewed in terms of lifeworlds comprising everyday practices and processes of organising, sense making and meaning making ‘from below’ and ‘from within’. business anthropology distinguishes itself by an approach that acknowledges organizations in terms of processes of doing business and, thereby, contributes to an understanding of business culture as ambiguous and fragmented, changeable and entrenched with unequal power relations and conflicting interests (dahles 2004). anthropologists have had to learn to accept fragmentation, ambiguities and vagueness as the condition of their field of study and to exploit this experience for writing more adequate studies of what happens in the organizational or business arena (see bate 1997). in this sense, business anthropology has been a response to mainstream organization studies that oftentimes portrayed culture in an essentialist and static manner. considering the promise of ethnography in business and organization studies (ybema et al. 2009; locke 2011; czarniawska 2012), the anthropological approach seems increasingly appreciated. this, however, leaves open the question as to what anthropology’s promise is at a conceptual-theoretical level. in the remainder of this article, we argue in favour of engaging the concepts of culture and institution, and correspondingly plead for a cross-fertilization between anthropology and institutional theory within the organization and business sciences. perspectives on chinese capitalism inspired by max weber’s work on confucianism, efforts have been made journal of business anthropology, 2(1), spring 2013 98 to interpret ethnic chinese economic accomplishments in terms of ‘confucian capitalism’ or ‘chinese capitalism’ (redding 1990). chinese capitalism has often been described in terms of a communal and informal form of capitalism in contrast with the liberal capitalism based on individual achievements that emerged in the west. chinese capitalism is believed to be rooted in colonial times when – due to population pressure, political turmoil and poverty in china, on the one hand, and tales of burgeoning opportunities overseas, on the other – many chinese left their homes in the coastal provinces of southern china to make a living in other parts of southeast asia (kuhn 2008). this collective historical background generated discourses of the sojourner, middleman, and diasporic entrepreneur (barrett 2012: 3-5). however divergent these discourses may be, they imply that beyond migration lie experiences of displacement, host community hostility, racial discrimination, and limited opportunities for upward mobility. conversely, they also entail fresh prospects stemming from new economic niches and capital accumulation, by engaging in middlemen occupations and split loyalties stemming from ambivalence towards the country of residence (kuhn 2008). in diaspora, livelihoods are easily jeopardized, so that the reliance on family and shared ethnicity for labour, capital, information and transactions may be the only viable option for minority immigrants. from this it has been argued that chinese familism has facilitated the growth of their enterprises and the emergence of ethnic business networks – extending across the globe and providing the glue for what has come to be denoted as the transnational chinese community (redding 1990; weidenbaum and hughes 1996; tsui-auch 2005: 1191). although various studies stress the operational limits of this reliance on family and ethnic ties in business (e.g. kiong 2005), early academic accounts have been rather celebratory of the alleged economic success of the ethnic chinese. in addition to the idea of success, the concept of culture has played a significant role in the ways in which chinese economic activities have been viewed by scholars. it has, however, been questioned whether many ethnic chinese business people share bonds based on a common ethnic identity. contesting the existence of an ethnic chinese community based on a common culture, the institutional literature shifts focus away from community towards network-based benefits (yeung 2000: 187-189), claiming that ethnic chinese businessmen accumulate social capital by maintaining membership in a number of partly-overlapping networks which enables them to evade failing vertical linkages, such as uncooperative bureaucrats. this social capital based on personal trust provides the ‘institutional thickness’ that characterizes (ethnic) chinese business networks in a globalizing business environment (yeung and olds 2000: 15-16). in the burgeoning literature contributing to this debate, four perspectives can be discerned: the culturalist, instrumentalist, verver and dahles / the anthropology of chinese capitalism 99 institutional and transnational approach to chinese capitalism (dahles 2010). in each of these, two questions that are at the heart of the chinese capitalism debate are answered differently. first, ‘how do the ethnic chinese in southeast asia do business and why in this particular way?’ and second, ‘what is the role of ethnicity in all this?’ these two questions are highly intertwined and the analytic haze this entanglement causes forecloses a clear view of the relationship between business conduct and ethnicity. let us now take up each of these four perspectives. the culturalist perspective a culture-based approach to chinese capitalism arose in the fields of business studies and economics in the 1990s, when various explanations for the success of the ‘asian tiger economies’ were put forward. business gurus spoke of ‘bamboo networks’, ‘chinese commonwealth’, and ‘global tribes’ to describe chinese businesses. these businesses are supposedly rooted in a confucian tradition and are able to develop their business ventures by operating through the family firm and guanxi networks – that is, networks built on reciprocal social relationships and informal trust. this institutional embedding has enabled them to avoid state intervention. a similar argument has been put forward by fukuyama in his book titled trust, in which he argues that ‘confucian moral education’ places the family above all other social ties. fukuyama claims that in ‘low-trust societies’ such as the chinese, the internalization of such ethical principles replaces state-directed law as the basis for social order (fukuyama 1995: 56, 84). these kinship-based loyalties, moreover, supposedly accommodated the revitalization of the corridor between southern chinese provinces such as fujian and guangdong, the area from which most of the ethnic chinese in southeast asia have migrated throughout the centuries, and the settlement societies of east and southeast asia where they now reside (ibid., p. 92). redding’s provocatively entitled the spirit of chinese capitalism sets forth a similar culturalist argument, arguing that, driven by confucian values, overseas chinese exhibit a distinct form of capitalism of which the most salient features include paternalism (resulting in a strong vertical order and disciplined behaviour), personalism (resulting in horizontal cooperation based on reciprocity), and insecurity within the societal environment (resulting in defensiveness and mistrust, especially towards governments) (redding 1990: 184). it is not so much the content of such interpretations of chinese capitalism, but rather their culturalist reading which has evoked strong criticism. in stressing the importance of cultural factors in economic dealings, culturalist scholars agitate against economists who remove culture from their accounts (redding 1990: 12-13). however, critics rightly point out journal of business anthropology, 2(1), spring 2013 100 that they carry the argument too far and turn to an equally simplistic culturalist side, thereby essentializing ethnic culture as if it were shared by a community, stable through time and defining social behaviour (ooi and koning 2007: 108). ‘chineseness’ in the culturalist perspective is taken for granted as the de facto stimulus in economic conduct and, in so doing, an essentialist understanding of ethnic cultural identity is revealed. this shows affinity with talcott parsons’ (1960) understanding of the concept of culture, and his theory of action which builds on the idea of the internalization of cultural norms, values, symbols and roles as constitutive of a person’s orientation towards action. this view of culture is adopted by culturalist scholars, who thereby detach cultural values from a relational and hierarchical setting, as if the chinese have somehow packaged a value-system back in china and proceed to deploy it wherever they reside, however many generations down the line after migration, or in whatever socio-political context. this view still bears on the academic debate about chinese capitalism. the instrumentalist perspective scholars applying the instrumentalist perspective are at the opposite end of the spectrum when it comes to the different approaches to chinese capitalism. instrumentalists play down issues of culture and stress the rationally acting economic agent as driving capitalist endeavour, arguing that chinese do business the same way as westerners if conditions are comparable (chang and tam 2004: 33). consequently, all keycharacteristics of chinese capitalism – that is, the importance of cultural values, family business, guanxi networking and the footloose character of chinese enterprises – are trivialized. first, gomez and benton argue that culture is hardly relevant since people tend to go at it alone in the economic sphere (2004: 2). rather than creating the misconception that the ethnic chinese would facilitate business ties through common ethnic descent, they stress heterogeneity in chinese business; dividing lines exist on the basis of firm size, level of assimilation into southeast asian societies, generations, and different relationships with the state (gomez and hsiao 2001: 2). second, instrumentalist scholars oppose the notion of guanxi networking as the quintessential mode of organizing among chinese firms (gomez and benton 2004: 17). chang and tam argue that organizational imperatives rather stem from the need to survive within market conditions, not from some mythical chinese modus operandi based on confucianism (2004: 28). third, the family-centred make-up of the typical chinese firm has a ‘dark side’ (kiong 2005: 46). personalism, paternalism, centrality of decision-making and informality commonly result in disputes and disintegration. gomez and hsiao (2001) show that the family loses control over the enterprise due to issues of succession and inheritance, feuds between family members leading to division, and the desire of younger generations for more transparency and verver and dahles / the anthropology of chinese capitalism 101 bureaucratization. finally, the footloose character of chinese capitalism is questioned by observing that second and third generation migrants are rooted in their country of residence both politically and economically, and neglect ethnically based organization (gomez and benton 2004: 17). moving from business practice to ethnicity, instrumentalists imply that there is nothing chinese about chinese capitalism. they argue that culturalist academics and politicians alike create a false image of the ethnic chinese as ‘others’ opposed to the native communities of southeast asia and, in so doing, amplify ethnically-based nationalist discourse. kwok (1998: 125), for instance, states that such a ‘discourse on chineseness’ is not descriptive but ascriptive, and acquires ‘the status of conventional wisdom’ by means of what jamie mackie designates the ‘essentialist fallacy’ (2000: 238). as a reaction to culturalist ‘othering’, critical scholars such as suryadinata (1997: 5-6) claim that the ethnic chinese of southeast asia are in fact southeast asians rather than chinese, and that through ‘southeast asianization’ or ‘acculturation’ only a minority remains ‘overseas chinese’. he portrays the ex-colonial states of southeast asia as ‘state-nations rather than nation-states’ with an actual multi-ethnic character and an imagined nationality built on notions of indigenous culture which exclude immigrant minorities. based on a number of widely acknowledged work on ethnic identity – such as barth’s thesis on boundaries (1969), cohen’s work on the manipulation of symbols (1974), anderson’s notion of imagined communities (1983) and eriksen’s ‘us’ versus ‘them’ classifications (2002) – it is understood that ‘“actual” ways of conduct and identifications within an ethnic category, and (re)presentations of ethnic identity do not necessarily correspond’ (koning and verver 2012: 4). constructivist accounts have often portrayed ethnic identities as ‘manmade’ political instruments and ideological constructs, rather than as culturally embedded ‘entities’. scholars have agitated against essentialized notions of ethnic identity, deconstructing them and proving ethnic identity to be unstable, contingent and context-dependent. instrumentalist scholars take this argument to its extreme. in criticizing the essentializing tendency of the culturalist perspective, instrumentalists deconstruct the idea of an essential ‘chineseness’. the notion of ethnic identity is placed in the domain of the imaginary, whereas the actual conduct of people is claimed to have nothing to do with ethnicity. this separation of practice from discourse, however, contradicts the observation that reified presentations of ethnicity are ‘sticky’ and often resurface in social categorizations underlying behaviour (koning and verver 2012). the institutional perspective the culturalist scholars’ inclination towards explaining economic conduct by referring to internalized cultural values, and the instrumentalists’ journal of business anthropology, 2(1), spring 2013 102 tendency to prioritize economic rationality and label culture a farce, are brought together by institutional scholars who make use of granovetter’s notion of embeddedness. granovetter observed that ‘attempts at purposive action are instead embedded in concrete, ongoing systems of social relations’ (1985: 487). this embeddedness in social relations renders both culture and capitalism dynamic, and this is the central tenet of the institutional perspective. much in this vein, hamilton pleads for a perspective that acknowledges that the organization of economies flows primarily from people’s capitalist activities, and secondarily from the institutions framing these activities (2006: 9). people take things for granted in deciding their course of action because they participate in institutionally defined ‘lived-in spheres of life’, such as politics or the family (hamilton 2006: 10). these institutional environments, however, do not determine action but rather provide resources for economic activity. as such, hamilton views capitalism as a dynamic process characterized by competition and power struggles, as well as by continuous organizational change. chinese business practices implying patriarchy and personalism are adaptable features, changing shape in various politico-economic settings (hamilton 2006: 3). adhering to a similar view, yeung (2004) interprets ‘chinese capitalism’ as a form of organization which is rooted in cultural values of chinese society, but which has evolved and adapted in the southeast asian context. by analysing the impact of globalization on chinese economic institutions, yeung arrives at a ‘hybrid capitalism that is defined by its incomplete, partial and contingent transformations’ (2004: 9). although familism and guanxi relationships remain firmly in its foundations, therefore, transformations have changed their character. yeung describes how business networks have become international, while knowledge and experience are gained from education abroad (2004: 68). he holds that chinese firms engage more and more with non-chinese actors in order to acquire capital and exploit markets, transcend traditional guanxi networks, professionalize management, heighten transparency and credibility, and slacken family and paternalistic control (yeung 2004: 4682). in the institutionalist approach, ethnicity is treated neither as the internalization of pan-chinese cultural values, as the culturalists claim, nor merely as a tool in the hands of the state to create a false social divide, in the way that the instrumentalists hold. instead, ethnicity is depicted as a dynamic resource in the hands of both the state and the entrepreneur. dahles and ter horst (2006, 2012) temptingly illustrate this dynamic with respect to the cambodian silk-weaving industry, contending that, although the industry is historically dominated by the ethnic chinese through knowledge and networks, silk products embody a sense of khmer authenticity. paralleling such claims of authenticity, the silk producers are portrayed as khmer and the silk traders as chinese, irrespective of the observation that silk producers are often of chinese verver and dahles / the anthropology of chinese capitalism 103 descent as well. ethnicity, then, is a resource in the socio-historical organization of the industry and in legitimizing its ethnic outlook. ‘chineseness’, as a template, is institutionalized in the economic position of the middleman and wholesaler, rather than pointing towards some primordial affiliation. in any case, ethnicity should not be treated as an identity feature residing within individuals or groups, but rather as a resource at the disposal of individuals, groups, and ‘others’ within the social environment. the institutional perspective of chinese capitalism thus integrates aspects of the culturalist and instrumentalist perspectives in a somewhat nuanced manner, while at the same time leaning towards the practical and socially organized, and putting less emphasis on discursive and representational dimensions. these dimensions of chinese capitalism are fully acknowledged in the transnational perspective, as we will now see. the transnational perspective ong and nonini’s ungrounded empires (1997) and ong’s flexible citizenship (1999) propose the notion of a footloose chinese capitalism like that brought forward by the culturalist perspective, while simultaneously building on a combined marxian and foucauldian legacy (ong 1999: 19). it is marxist in the sense that capitalist motives are seen as ‘absolutely transcendental’ (ong 1999: 7) and the driving force in shaping meaning and practice in other spheres of life (ong 1999: 16). it is foucauldian in the focus on subject-making through ‘regimes of truth’ about ‘chinese capitalism’ and ‘chineseness’, which are seen as objectified and reified, rather than neutral, categories (ong 1999: 69). ong deploys the notion of ‘regime’, in which she distinguishes the nation-state, marketplace and family, as different ‘institutional contexts and webs of power’ that try to discipline subjects through regulation and normalization of attitudes and behaviour (ong 1999: 113). within ‘late capitalism’, characterised by interconnected and rapidly transforming sites of doing business, ‘diaspora chinese’ entrepreneurs flexibly accumulate wealth across borders, thereby challenging those ‘regimes’ that are more localized social orders. chinese business culture, with family business and guanxi networking as its crucial characteristics, has become increasingly useful since these ties make it possible to cut across national boundaries and link business people in different places (nonini and ong 1997: 21). these practices, however, should not be mistaken for authentic chinese cultural features as the culturalist scholars perceive them, but rather as discursive constructs used in the ‘celebratory narratives of chinese business success’ (nonini and ong 1997: 21). the theme of ethnic chinese as operating transnationally is a common thread in the debate on chinese capitalism. the culturalist and the transnational perspectives stress the abilities of business people to escape state disciplining (through ethnic cultural and social capital). journal of business anthropology, 2(1), spring 2013 104 conversely, instrumentalist scholars argue that chinese business is locally patronized. in between these extremes, institutional scholars point towards the local adaptability of an originally trans-local mode of social organization. ong (1997: 172-173) ascribes to the ethnic chinese a freedom of movement, and to nation-states (both in southeast asia and in china) a fear or rejection of such movement. however, one should be wary of celebratory accounts of the duality of the globe-trotting agent and the eroding grip of the nation-state. transnational practices are always embedded in local power mechanisms, cultural constructions and economic relations. ethnic expressions and acts respond to situated relationships and hierarchies; they are never free-floating but imply a degree of ‘social closure’ (guarnizo and smith 1998: 13). in stressing flexibility, inventiveness, and the politics of identification, the transnational perspective of chinese capitalism resonates with the instrumentalist appeal for ‘deconstructing essentialisms’ that trivialize the role of ethnicity in human conduct. as outlined earlier, these essentialisms take the form of objectified identity constructs. however, doing away with essentialisms misses out on understanding essentialising practices in ethnic identity politics. the transnational perspective to chinese capitalism, showing affinity with a foucauldian cultural studies approach, focuses on this reified ‘second nature’ of sociality. ‘chineseness’ is not taken as a primordial entity, in the way that culturalist scholars claim, but rather as a discursive entity in which truth and power intersect. the cultural characteristics of ethnic identity (confucianism, family values, guanxi, and so on), then, are treated as ‘discursive tropes’ that are used in both the state’s nationalist agenda and by chinese entrepreneurs to negotiate a path towards economic success and social well-being (nonini and ong 1997: 9). the major pitfall of this view of ethnicity as a postmodern grab bag of cultural characteristics is that it overemphasizes agency in selfpresentation while neglecting the critical role of social ‘others’. as yao cautions (2009: 255), identification is ‘also about collective demands, cultural obligations and communal acceptance’. this is especially relevant in southeast asia where ethnic relations and state policies attached to them have been tense from time to time. ethnic culture freed from racial connotation – such as the idea that ‘a black american or a white new york jew can become chinese by eating ‘chinese food’’ (yao 2009: 259) – is a utopia that the transnationalist perspective to chinese capitalism fails to acknowledge. culture and race are always conflated in notions of ethnic identity. therefore one may claim that ong and nonini reinforce an essentialist understanding of ethnicity, albeit in a discursive, rather than primordial, way. nevertheless, the transnationalist perspective to chinese capitalism does convincingly argue that one should not merely look at how ethnic culture and identification shape social action (as is overdone by the culturalists and rejected by the instrumentalists), but also at how representations of ethnic culture and identity are used to give meaning to verver and dahles / the anthropology of chinese capitalism 105 and legitimize actions and viewpoints. a summary of the diverse viewpoints is presented in table 1 below. table 1: perspectives of chinese capitalism. chinese capitalism perspectives culturalist instrumentalist institutional transnational business culture determines economic behaviour minor role in economic behaviour dynamic interplay between cultural institutions and capitalist opportunities discursively deployed in economic endeavour business– nation-state relationship culture ignores the nationstate nation-state controls business cultural institutions embedded in local powerstructures capitalist behaviour escapes state control market opportunities hardly mentioned determining economic behaviour reshaping cultural institutions inspiring discursive deployment of culture ethnicity ethnic cultural identity and practice as lasting and coherent culture being irrelevant ethnic culture as a dynamic resource in the interplay with social organization ethnic culture and identity as ‘politics’ to negotiate capitalist behaviour towards a liaison amoureuse between business anthropology and institutional theory the chinese capitalism debate is caught in a dichotomy of constructivist versus essentialist approaches to culture, moving in circles from primordial essentialism (culturalist perspective), to deconstructing essentialism (instrumentalist perspective), and back to essentialism through a discursive detour (transnational perspective). not unlike how brubaker and cooper argue for the concept of identity (2000: 10-11), culture as an analytic category runs the risk of meaning either too much, in the sense of a bounded and stable set of characteristics that ‘resides’ within an ethnic group, or too little, when seen as fluid, multiple, journal of business anthropology, 2(1), spring 2013 106 manipulated, etcetera. relatedly, the pendulum swinging between essentialism and anti-essentialism forces a false choice between ‘an acultural analysis of power and an apolitical analysis of culture’ (friedland and alford 1991: 254). in other words, culture is either presented as straightforwardly determining business practices without much regard for individual agency (culturalist perspective), or as only manipulated by agents in order to secure power and interests (instrumentalist and transnational perspectives). there is no progress towards an understanding of culture as dynamic and constantly changing; instead it is viewed as either explanans or explanandum. a truly dynamic conceptualization would acknowledge that culture sometimes arrays behaviour and is sometimes manipulated, that culture changes throughout time and space, and that culture stands in interrelation to other dimensions in business organizations. we believe that reconceptualising chinese capitalism as an institution – or better, as subject to processes of institutionalization – opens up this possibility of dynamism, and avoids versions of ‘holism’ and essentialism that cling to the concept of culture to rebound time and again. an institution, as a starting point, may broadly be defined as an informal or formalized organizing principle that is shared by a collective and is enacted through both action and thought (cf. durão and lopes 2011: 363). institutional templates manifest within a broader social setting – organizational field or society – and over time acquire a takenfor-granted status that arrays and disciplines the behaviour of organizational actors (greenwood et al. 2008). apart from avoiding the burdensome legacy of the concept of culture within the chinese capitalism debate, the concept of institution has the advantage of incorporating cultural, social and material dimensions of business organization within a single framework. scott (2008: 48), for example, notes that institutions are ‘made up of symbolic elements, social activities and material resources’. culture, then, is a resource in processes of institutionalization which stands in a dynamic interrelationship with social and material dimensions – sometimes converging and reinforcing each other, sometimes conflicting with each other. this interrelationship appears through analysing the ‘organizational framing of business-related activities’, as do ‘larger structures of power, as well as the limits and opportunities of individual agency’ (moeran and garsten 2012: 13). both anthropology and organizational institutionalism have been internally divided over the ontological status of culture. within institutional theory the definition of culture – as one of the pillars in processes of institutionalization – has shifted. whereas culture was long interpreted as a more or less coherent system of norms and values that human actors internalize, within what has been labelled the ‘new institutionalism’, culture came to be seen as a cognitive phenomenon that revolves around the production of scripts, rules, classifications and legitimizations (powell and dimaggio 1991). scholars came to explore verver and dahles / the anthropology of chinese capitalism 107 culture as external semiotic frameworks and shared knowledge, as opposed to internalized beliefs as in the ‘old institutionalism’. in anthropology, a comparable yet different shift has occurred in the ontology of culture. since postmodernism and poststructuralism took root in the 1980s and 90s, scholars moved from delineating ‘a culture’ as ‘a people’ to understanding it as ‘a political process of contestation over the power to define key concepts, including that of ‘culture’ itself’ (wright 1998: 14), rather than as a bounded and fixed ‘thing’. however, whereas organizational institutionalism remained a study of cultural systems – inferring the existence of culture from macro-organizational patterns – the shift from culture as internalized beliefs to external frameworks in anthropology implied a shift to agency as well. roughly, anthropology shifted focus from how culture ‘produces’ behaviour to how people’s behaviour ‘produces’ culture (moore and sanders 2006: 17). currently, in as much as institutional scholars hardly acknowledge the ‘politics of culture’, anthropologists have somewhat overblown the postmodernist argument. taken together, however, culture can be perceived as a resource in processes of institutionalization that are dynamic rather than fixed precisely because culture both arrays social behaviour and yet can be negotiated and manipulated in interaction. dynamism is a crucial notion in processes of institutionalization, which manifests itself in the relationship between cultural and social dimensions, but also in the dialectic between agency and structure, and in bridging micro and macro levels of sociality (mohr and white 2008). thus, framing ‘chinese capitalism’ as an institution must not be taken as an attempt to make truth-claims about a supposedly fixed nature and form of how those southeast asians with chinese roots organize business life – this would be little more than essentialism in another disguise. whereas the analytic focus should be on institutionalization rather than ‘the institution’ as such, the notion of chinese capitalism is useful as a ‘heuristic device’ (yeung 2004: 1) or, alternatively, as a ‘conceptmetaphor’ that aims to maintain rather than resolve ambiguity by preserving ‘a tension between pretentious universal claims and particular contexts and specifics’ (moore 2004: 74). anthropology is well-positioned to assure this sense of ambiguity and specificity. we believe that the merits of integrating anthropological and institutional approaches extend beyond the debate about chinese capitalism in southeast asia, and beyond conceptualizing culture. within the organization and business sciences – despite obvious parallels in perspective and interests – anthropology and institutionalism have hardly engaged in cross-fertilization. however, as much as the concept of institutionalization may advance the anthropology of business organization, so might an anthropological approach deal with some persistent lacunas which exist within organizational institutionalism, and which have been pinpointed by leading scholars in the field. institutionalists largely adhere to a quantitative methodology which, journal of business anthropology, 2(1), spring 2013 108 firstly, makes it hard to grasp meaning: it is much easier to count structures and organizational forms than it is to measure meaning systems. … if we are to take seriously the ideational aspects of institutions, we need to move, however slightly, away from strictly positivist research and incorporate interpretivist methods that pay serious attention to the subjective ways in which actors experience institutions.’ (suddaby 2010: 16). second, although institutionalists do acknowledge that institutions and actions are interlinked and that institutionalization is a dynamic process, they have in fact had persistent difficulty in capturing agency and, relatedly, the processual and ‘everyday’ character of organizational behaviour (powell and colyvas 2008: 277). this is largely due to the tendency of institutionalists to focus on the macro-structural outcomes rather than the actual process of institutionalization (zilber 2002: 235), as so omitting the relative power and interests of actors in the politics of maintaining order (clegg 2010). an anthropological perspective would certainly contribute to understanding institutionalization by emphasizing the situated practices and meaning-making by individual agents, without which any broader social order is by definition inexistent. as such, zilber – one of the few organizational institutionalists who explicitly deploys an ethnographic methodology – comes to the conclusion that ‘it is the continuous enactment of practices and meanings by organization members that constitutes and maintains institutions’ (2002: 251). conclusions to end on a positive note, scholars in the field of institutional analysis have recently answered the plea for an integrated perspective in organizational studies with regard to another one of anthropology’s hallmarks – the importance of historical context. the concept of ‘legacies of the past’ has been applied in order to address societal transformations as a function of the social, cultural, and institutional structures created under past regimes that persist in the present period. proponents of this approach argue that dominant social, cultural, and political forces at work in the larger society are rooted in power struggles that evolved throughout history and currently shape the identity of new institutions. turning to the field of international organizational and business studies, we believe that the concept of legacies helps capture the role of businesses, not in terms of passive recipients of institutional resources ‘but as actors involved in both the construction and reconstruction of such resources within and across national contexts’ (morgan and quack 2005: 1765). it is in this context that the analysis of ‘institutional legacies’ has been proposed. as firms internationalize they have to deal with increasing diversity in both their organizational practice and institutional verver and dahles / the anthropology of chinese capitalism 109 environment and may draw ‘on ‘sleeping’ nearly forgotten institutional legacies as a resource for their institutional change projects’ (morgan and quack 2005). a comparative perspective on chinese capitalism in southeast asia reveals the ways in which both long-standing and newly created institutional legacies are strategically employed, abandoned, even silenced, before being revitalized in cross-border ventures under rapidly changing and ambivalent institutional regimes. in the final analysis, the concept of chinese in southeast asia is not rooted in a homogeneous and static ‘community’ with ‘a culture’, but one which comprises multiple loyalties and at the same time is rapidly being transformed into a loosely connected patchwork of partly diverging, but nevertheless interrelated and internally heterogeneous, sub-communities. it is clear that community is identified, not as a shared ethnic culture, but in the situational and contextual terms of a common, though diverse, history that comprehends ancestral roots in china and a shared migratory past, as much as it is identified as a shared colonial experience that generated diverging legacies for the post-colonial nation states to build on (dahles 2010; dahles and koning 2013). this aspect has not been acknowledged by current institutional theorists, who position chinese capitalism in overlapping networks rooted in economic, social, and political relations. one dimension to be included in this framework – giving it historical depth – is the embeddedness in institutional legacies. this embeddedness may be strategically employed, abandoned, even silenced and again revitalized under rapidly changing conditions in the global economy. it is in a liaison amoureuse between 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yeung, h. w. c. 2004 chinese capitalism in a global era: towards a hybrid capitalism. london and new york: routledge. journal of business anthropology, 2(1), spring 2013 114 yeung, h. w. c. and k. olds 2000. ‘globalizing chinese business firms: where are they coming from, where are they heading?,’ pp. 1-30 in h. w. c. yeung and k. olds (eds.) globalization of chinese business firms. houndmills, basingstoke: macmillan press. zilber, t. b. 2002 ‘institutionalization as an interplay between actions, meanings, and actors: the case of a rape crisis center in israel.’ academy of management journal 45 (1): 234-254. michiel verver is a phd candidate in the department of organization sciences of vu university amsterdam (the netherlands). his research interests include entrepreneurship, family business and state-business relationships among the ethnic chinese in southeast asia (and in cambodia in particular). he has published in cross-currents: east asian history and culture review and in entrepreneurship & regional development: an international journal (co-authored with juliette koning). he may be reached at m.j.verver@vu.nl heidi dahles is professor in international business & asian studies at griffith business school, griffith university, brisbane (australia). her research interest is in the ethnic and cultural dimensions of asian business and the intricacies of cross-border business ventures. she has published in numerous peer-reviewed journals. among her recent books are capital and knowledge: changing power relations in asia (co-edited with otto van den muijzenberg, 2003) and multicultural organizations in asia (co-edited with loh wei leng, 2006). heidi is reviews editor for the journal of business anthropology and editor-in-chief (with ooi can seng and juliette koning) of the open access journal asia matters: business, culture and theory. she may be reached at h.dahles@griffith.edu.au mailto:m.j.verver@vu.nl mailto:h.dahles@griffith.edu.au ucsc close encounters: anthropologists in the corporate arena melissa cefkin abstract the corporate encounter invites casting an anthropological gaze on the objects and practices of corporate worlds. this article delineates three perspectives of the anthropologist on this encounter: (1) with the things corporations make (products and services), (2) with the way they make them (acts of production), and (3) with organizational imperatives (corporate forms). this examination draws specifically on the work of those who operate from within the corporate arena by referencing papers from ethnographic praxis in industry conference (epic). corporate actors, in turn, seek more nuanced views on human experience and aim to exploit the “people” and “practices” dimensions of their existence and have turned to anthropologists in the process. a brief exploration of the hopes and disjuncture that help shape the encounter from the point of view of anthropologists’ interlocutors inside the corporation rounds out this examination of the anthropologists’ corporate encounter. keywords design, epic, organizations, practicing anthropology, products and services page 1 of 27 jba 1 (1): 91-117 spring 2012 © the author(s) 2012 issn 2245-4217 www.cbs.dk/jba journal of business anthropology, 1(1), spring 2012 92 it's the key to knowing what's working and what isn't, how people are using technology and other tools in the course of the workday, how workers extract meaning (or don't) from their work, and so forth. we all make sweeping generalizations about these and many other topics, but we don't really know. corporate anthropology provides the possibility of actually knowing what's happening and why in organizations…. (davenport, 2007) …but their greater contribution may be in changing the conversation inside corporations, and providing voice for perspectives and people not often heard. (blomberg, 2009: 224) introduction upon entering the corporation-as-a-field site years ago, i began hearing talk of a training course for “customer obsession”. the site was the backoffice operations of a large corporation. the employees worked at billing, accounts receivables and collections, work that makes up some of the basic machinery of keeping a business operating. indeed i discovered that there were not one but two such courses: customer obsession 1, and customer obsession 2. flush in the throes of the first days of immersion in a new site, i imagined just how tricky this work of collecting money from people must be! just what special protection was required to avoid provoking threats when dealing with obsessed customers angry at their billing call? nothing in my familial, educational, or work background had armed me with more than a passing familiarity with business, let alone how corporations ran. who knew that they bought their pens from the local office supply store, just like me? or that many off-shored service workers were actually eager to participate in the team-building and cultural sensitivity training mocked in the us media (albeit, as i witnessed in skits performed by service workers in the philippines, with a healthy dose of irony and critique)? or, as i came to learn, that customer obsession courses did not prepare employees for dealing with angry customers, but instead trained them to be obsessively customer-centric? an “encounter” means an unplanned or unexpected meeting. it can also mean a confrontation or a clash. since at least the 1960s anthropology has been engaged in disciplinary reflections confronting cefkin / close encounters: anthropologists in the corporate arena 93 how anthropological forms of knowledge are both complicit with and responsive to powerful, hegemonic socio-political forms, from colonial empires to the military-industrial complex to reifications of power. this was the kind of encounter engaged by talal asad and his volume contributors in the 1973 anthropology and the colonial encounter (whose cadence i adopted for my own volume, ethnography and the corporate encounter [2009]) as well as work in the tradition of the writing culture (1986) focused on a critical rethinking of rhetorical strategies of authority in anthropology. perhaps more benignly, anthropologists have also been engaged with encounters with a variety of actors and institutions in the constantly evolving sites of modern-day society, from cutting edge science to high finance. this is an anthropology endeavoring to make sense of the contemporary. globalization, shifting labor and consumer markets, and everyday interactions with the products and services that businesses produce and which profoundly mediate our worlds all contribute to anthropological interest in corporations. notably, this interest is in some pockets, mutual. companies have for some time sought to explore and exploit the “people” and “practices”, dimensions of their existence and have turned to anthropology in the process. whereas a human relations tradition has long existed, often in competition with scientific management, the last several decades have witnessed tugs towards the cultural in the corporation. “…[v]alues, norms, collective ethos, authority in personal relations, and participatory structures of groups now seem to be a salient and very serious frame of thinking for corporate managers at all levels” (marcus 1998: 5). corporate actors seek alternative means of understanding and more nuanced views on human experience, not only for the aims of rethinking their own form and identity, but also to inform everyday decisions for business advantage. and many anthropologists have responded. indeed when i arrived at the back-office described above, i was not there by agreement to use the site as a setting for a study whose questions and goals were defined and formulated wholly elsewhere, (e.g., a grant funded thesis project). i was there in a consultative role, as part of a joint research-consulting engagement through the institute for research on learning (irl), a notfor-profit research organization affiliated with xerox parc and stanford university. this was 1993. following on work focused in and around educational settings, irl also took on projects in the workplace, extending the activities of its anthropological affiliates at parc such as jeanette blomberg, brigitte jordan, julian orr, and lucy suchman who had journal of business anthropology, 1(1), spring 2012 94 been engaged for more than a decade in investigating environments and practices of complex, technological production.1 the corporate encounter invites casting an anthropological gaze upon the objects and practices of corporate worlds. in this article i delineate three areas that have garnered this attention: (1) encounters with the things corporations make, that is, products and services; (2) encounters with the way they make them, with acts of production; and (3) encounters with the organization and with the corporate form. such encounters also call for an accounting of the conceptual frames and positional stances from which the anthropological gaze is rendered. accordingly i focus here in particular on the works of those who are directly engaged as mutual actors with others operating from within the corporate arena. i draw on work from the first eight years of the ethnographic praxis in industry conference (epic) for this inquiry. epic provides an occasion for practicing corporate anthropologists to engage each other in joint sense-making. i conclude by briefly considering what underlies the view from the side of the corporation, to ask anew why those in corporations seem to invite this encounter. but first i begin by situating this corporate encounter. anthropology as mutual actor there is a larger corpus of critical inquiry into the social and cultural impact of the corporate form, a corpus which is showing signs of coalescing into a sustained line of scholarship. this is evidenced by the inauguration of the journal for business anthropology itself, in its recognition that “the limited stock market company is one of the most pervasive forms of social organization throughout the world” and that “business corporations of various forms are significant drivers of globalization processes, which make them focal points in our ambition to spur discussions around business anthropology” (“why business anthropology?”). the 2011 current anthropology special issue on “corporate lives: new perspectives on the social life of the corporate form” (partridge et al.) is another case in point. for the purposes of this article, however, i leave aside this broader arena of scholarship on the impact of the corporate form and contain my comments to work conducted primarily from within corporate settings. 1 bits and pieces of the stories of both the institute for research on learning (irl) and palo alto research center (parc) are scattered throughout the literature. baba (2006), cefkin (2009) and wild (2012) address parts of this history. suchman (forthcoming, 2011) and syzmanski and whalen (2011) offer exemplar descriptions of the practices of anthropological work at parc, and jordan (2011) offers a review of the collaboration between irl and parc. cefkin / close encounters: anthropologists in the corporate arena 95 the anthropological form of concern in this article operates in the borderlands of practicing and scholarly purposes and is conducted by those engaged to address inquiries of direct interest to the corporation. a participant in corporate settings in such roles as researcher, consultant, manager, and designer, the anthropologist operates as a mutual corporate actor with other members of the corporation. anthropology is called out as an acceptable and often desired area of expertise in job descriptions for positions as diverse as product designer to learning consultant. work can be found in management consultancies, design and market research firms, advertising agencies, small think tanks and across numerous divisions of high tech, finance, manufacturing and consumer products and services companies. online forums – blogs, user groups and websites – have proliferated, hosting both commentary on the subjects under examination as well as to service the growing community of participants who use them to share tips, exchange resources, and invite perspective on questions and quandaries. publication venues for sharing case studies, as well as exploring methodological considerations, are expanding. and universities are taking note as well, with new concentrations of study oriented to applied organizational and corporate work. in the process, anthropologists are finding new ways of working and are exploring a multitude of opportunities to experiment with forms of representing anthropological knowledge. one of the key sites for such explorations is the ethnographic praxis in industry conference, or epic. held annually since 2005, the conference is organized around an innovative range of program elements with double-blind peer reviewed papers forming a large portion of the presentations. epic itself emerged out of anthropologists’ corporate encounter. the idea for this conference… has long been discussed among many of the people conducting ethnographic research in and for industry. over the years, “we” have met in workshops, paper sessions, over dinner, drinks and coffees at a number of other conferences to ask ‘where can we really talk openly about our work?’ (anderson and lovejoy, 2005: ii) to be clear, anthropologists make up a significant number of the roughly 300 international participants who attend the conference annually, and anthropological concerns and frames of thought continue to occupy a strong core. however, the larger epic community is by no means all anthropologists. by now a well established approach across many disciplines and practices, ethnography – not anthropology – acts as the organizing basis of the conference. indeed those whose primary area of journal of business anthropology, 1(1), spring 2012 96 expertise is business, computer science, sociology, and especially design are active participants. nonetheless the wistfulness of the question posed above – the desire for a safe place to ’really talk openly’ – directly indexes the anthropological questions at the heart of epic. it references a desire to claim a space to push on what anthropologists who are working in business and corporations are learning without being singularly held to account for participating in the corporate sector. it also speaks to the desire to have the space to explore the theoretical, methodological and representational issues raised by this work more deeply than most practitioners’ daily work contexts afford. the statement introducing the theme for the inaugural conference pushes on the kind of thinking promised by the event. the epic theme for 2005 was sociality. ethnographers working in industry are expected to pay attention to corporate priorities and current trends. one of the predominant corporate themes has been a focus on the individualization and personalization of products and services. although ethnography can address this issue, one that has received less attention is the social and collective nature of people’s lives. we hoped the theme “sociality” would spark debate and discussion around methods we use in our research, present our findings and conduct ourselves in industry settings. by having this common focus on the conference we collectively expand the boundaries of our knowledge and practice. (anderson and lovejoy, 2005: ii) the eight year corpus of work from epic suggests that encounters with products and services, with production processes, and with the organizational form of the corporation itself, give shape to the corporate encounter. sampling only from the epic archives admittedly leaves out other significant work by anthropologists positioned as actors in the corporate context. recent examples such as dourish and bell’s divining a digital future (2011), mccracken’s chief culture officer (2009), sunderland and denny’s doing anthropology in consumer research (2007), and articles appearing in the international journal of business anthropology point to the diversity of such work. indeed many epic presenters publish elsewhere as well. nonetheless epic provides a valuable site from which to examine the corporate encounter. the conference attracts those writing as practitioners and engaged in the very development of practicing corporate anthropology. while the conference has borrowed the genre of published proceedings from some participants’ cefkin / close encounters: anthropologists in the corporate arena 97 (particularly those in corporate research labs) scientific colleagues, and the proceedings are taken seriously as means to demand seriousness and care in the work, there is nonetheless an openness to an active working out of ideas and challenges. participants look forward to the conference as a place to present and sort through questions raised by their engagements, providing a pulse of the contemporary. encounters with products and services one of the most vibrant sites for the corporate encounter is in interactions with the things corporations produce; with the products and services they create and put into the world. this encounter concerns casting an anthropological gaze on the meanings these products and services have, the lives they live, and how they are transformed by and are transformative of people’s lives. here anthropologists grapple with understanding how the social and cultural lives of people embrace, avoid, or transform the product and service configurations presumed by the corporation. anthropologists are often in a position to undertake such examinations because they are being asked to in some way affect them or the markets they circulate in. while at times the work is intended to directly address the design of products and services or the marketing that will promote them, it does not necessarily entail a one-to-one correspondence between research and market or product development and can be oriented towards much broader and longer term research strategies. computing technologies, the internet and mobile phones show up repeatedly in the work presented at epic, a reflection, perhaps, of the fact that many participants are employed by the high-tech firms that fuel these industries. asokan (2008) analyzes how computers and cell phones both disrupt and are appropriated into cultural practices for managing and negotiating between the individual and community, public and private, in india. these technologies, she suggests, help support the ability of individuals to be in multiple states at once, to be in a shared space while engaged in a private exchange. asokan observed a range of ways that kids, for instance, manage their use of cell phones and computers by manipulating screen real estate so as to avoid a parent’s likelihood of looking over a shoulder when entering through a particular door or by putting cell phones on vibrate to control when to have a conversation. she suggests they do this in order to “carve out their own space in the heart of the social activity at home” (2008: 182) while avoiding alienating the family by appearing too secretive. similar themes are explored by rangaswamy and yamsami (2011), also in india but with attention to the ever dynamic mobile internet management, while others (ortlieb, 2011; journal of business anthropology, 1(1), spring 2012 98 ortlieb and jones, 2006; jones, 2005; nafus et al., 2007) have examined forms of collaboration and social management specifically mediated online and through websites. the technology enabled home is another example. roberts (2008) takes the reader on a journey through rural ireland, the social life of the elderly, and challenges and opportunities for technological reconfiguration. the objects framing robert’s investigation, and the focus of the product research and incubation division of intel’s digital health group, are “technological platforms that can support independent living for older people” (2008: 203). informed by an understanding of changing demographics and changes to rural infrastructures (e.g., closing of public centers such as post offices and the rise of ‘super’ hospitals), the researchers postulate a link between technological enabled independent living and minibus service. mobility is critical to the ability of the elderly to remain in the environments of their choice. bus journeys simultaneously reveal and construct community life for passengers. journeying makes tangible the links between the landscape, community, locality and sociality. the bus is a location where things come into alignment. the consequent conversation and reverie reveals not only the nature of place and sociality in such specific rural contexts but the importance of understanding that transport is about more than displacement. mobility services offer a means of escaping the home – they create joy, independence, access to healthcare and sociable lives. (roberts 2008: 209) ethnographic investigations revealed that “buses are as much events as they are functional ‘facilities’” (p. 211) and that “for ageing passengers travel had its own intrinsic benefits” (ibid.). these findings contradicted a dominant view of enabling independence within the home. our journeys forced us to critically revaluate the idea, and reality, of home for older people and, as such, allowed us to articulate a different vision of independent living and our potential role in enabling that. the idea of independent living is one in which a social life, and access to services, outside of the home is the sine qua non of independence for older people since it frees them from dependence and creates a strong sense of autonomy. in this sense the home is no longer the sole unit of analysis when understanding ageing and it might not be useful to think of the home as focus of our innovation efforts. a well cefkin / close encounters: anthropologists in the corporate arena 99 illustrated story about the importance of infrastructures and sociality beyond the home for older people produced a fresh narrative about independent living that supplemented the existing organizational narratives of technology enabled ageing-in-place. (roberts 2008: 214) money also shows up as an object of interest, for instance, in the realm of banking, finance, and investment (beers and whitney, 2006). peinado et al. (2011) describe a research and design project with a consortium of french banks and insurance companies. the altran “club innovation banque finance assurance” wished to develop a more service-centered approach to financial services. the sponsors presented the research problem as follows: to understand people’s “irrational as opposed to rational choices with respect to financial products and services” (2011: 261). they wanted the research to “investigate the changing relationship to money people supposedly were developing due to life’s lengthening – how this ultimately affected their choices in terms of life savings, insurance and so forth.” (ibid.) the researchers found that more general views of money – not a response to lengthening life-span – shaped people’s expectations. the mismatch between’s people’s broader sense of money as part of social relations and the very product-focused way in which the banks and insurance companies conceptualized it was evident. moreover they found that issues of trust – of bankers, let alone banking institutions – mattered enormously. “interviewees repeatedly brought back all representations with respect to bank and insurance companies to issues of trust, face-toface contact, and ethics. the role of bank and insurance companies within society as a whole was questioned.” (2011: 265). however these relational dimensions of financial services were not a part of employees’ assessments, which only measured their performance on the number of financial products sold. anthropological explorations of the lived existence of products and services in social and cultural worlds very often reveal something different than what the producers might have imagined. in this way anthropologists are led through the filter of the object back to the corporation. they encounter questions of how products and services are brought into existence and the assumptions that have informed them. encounters with production by working from within the corporate sector anthropologists enter into the processes of production. here the concern is with how the products journal of business anthropology, 1(1), spring 2012 100 and services that corporations introduce into the market are produced, and includes a focus on the processes of knowledge production engaged by the corporation, processes that anthropologists participate in and inform. reflections emerging from this work formed the core of ethnography and the corporate encounter (2009). examined from the perspective of anthropological researchers engaged to influence organizational decisions and actions, the volume explores how sites of research are construed and experienced as well as how practitionerresearchers confront questions of their own positioning. the authors reflect on their struggles to prompt different ways of thinking, knowing, and doing in these organizations. proceeding by way of descriptions of particular projects, practices, and subjects of the researchers’ work, the volume also broadens the aperture to consider how ethnographic work in industry is in dialogue with broader social and cultural discourses. (cefkin, 2009: 2) the reflective impulse attendant to participation in processes of production is notable as well in works presented at epic. in general the agreed to normative approaches for guiding action in corporations are those driven by quantitative, repeatable, and verifiable methods. numbers, scale, planning and efficiency matter. or as tunstall observes: “in the business universe of production, the two main representational strategies that business decision-makers use to enable the production and distribution of services and products are (1) the chart and (2) the spreadsheet.” (2006: 127). (tunstall argues for engagement with these by way of “yielding” to the productive forces of industry in the manner of the balance of yin and yang. she advocates engaging in “seductive play” with these productive forces via eight representational strategies available to and employed by ethnographers in business settings.) these norms and the practices they engender pervade key sites of anthropological interaction in business settings including strategy (built around trends, market analysis), business planning (where business cases play a core role), marketing (driven by surveys and segmentations) and product or service development (where cost-benefit analysis, segmentations, and engineering planning all play key roles). in the bank and insurance consortium project examined by peinado et al. (2011) described above, the sponsors (members of participating banks and insurance companies) remained closely involved. mostly trained as computer engineers, they tended to view qualitative research as soft and based on intuition. the work of the anthropologist required cefkin / close encounters: anthropologists in the corporate arena 101 engaging the sponsors in building an understanding of qualitative research. the sponsors also tended to view people’s choices about financial and insurance products as either rational or irrational. these world views influenced how products and services were developed and supported. “the clients demanded counsel, while the bank and insurance company hierarchy demanded sales.” (2011: 265) here the work of the anthropologist was to reframe the sponsors’ understanding from one of rationality to that of trust. granka and larvie (2008) offer sensitive reflections on the encounter between anthropologists and corporate processes of production by way of their experience working in the engineeringdominant context of google. this is an environment where technical know-how drives processes of production and authorized expertise trumps all other forms of knowledge. granka and larvie note that by getting close to users ethnographic approaches positioned them as a conduit to a kind of transformation. they would create opportunities for technologists to have a ‘real’ encounter with users, often for the first time. aware that this experience had a strong affective dimension for technologists, they paid a good deal of attention to how the experience was shaped. they would often identify extreme or “edge” contexts so as to create a degree of discomfort, enhancing technologists’ sense of defamiliarization and creating what they call a “conversion experience”, temporalizing technologists’ experience into a ‘before and after’. nonetheless, they identify a number of ways in which their thinking and approach clashes with reigning paradigms. whereas van marriwijk (2010) reports on the challenge anthropologists face in being expected to have ready-made answers, granka and larvie conversely suggest that their entree into processes of production denied them the status of expert. their focus on non-experts (i.e., end-users) as legitimate interlocutors clashed with the ethos of engineering, which “has philosophical roots in a modernizing ethos that juxtaposes the expert against the naïve, and reinforces the social division between creators and consumers of technology (e.g., holston 1989).” (p. 255) moreover, anthropologists were viewed as being at a disadvantage when it comes to making things. how can we talk about specifics if we don’t understand the capabilities and limitations of the tools for the creation of the technology? if we can’t code, are we really qualified to debate the specifics of a technological product? too often, we are thought of much as the people we introduce our teams to – as people who stand in as opportunities to journal of business anthropology, 1(1), spring 2012 102 rethinking some of the concepts related to technology, but not as legitimate creators of that technology. in this example, the “real” corresponds to the “naïve”, or the consumer of technology rather than the creators. the “real” we broker may end up rubbing off on us, effectively turning us into “naïve consumers” rather than creators of technology. (granka and larvie 2008: 256) these observations mirror others’ observations (cefkin, 2009; ross, 2003) that contestations over what counts as value and who produces it continue to play out in the daily life of corporate employees. for granka and larvie the corporate encounter is double-edged. …we find ourselves facing something of a conundrum. if it takes major shifts in thinking to produce the kinds of innovations for which we will be credited, are we then less likely to focus on the mundane, everyday failures of technology that also might show us opportunities for new and better stuff? (granka and larvie 2008: 258) they worry that in their emphasis on creating experiences of defamiliarization for their technology counterparts “we unwittingly overemphasize the spectacular at the detriment of the ordinary and mundane” (p. 255). it brings them full circle to feelings of displacement vis-à-vis the broader anthropological community.2 they continue: we may well suspect that the theatric of ethnography required to be effective in the workplace may locate us as ethnographers outside of the boundaries of “decent” anthropology. much like in goffman’s (1963) studies of people with “spoiled” identities, we find ourselves as outsiders to multiple groups to which we might once have belonged: team members, company business planners and even our own disciplinary colleagues. (granka and larvie 2008: 258) in yet other cases, anthropologists reflect on biases designed in to production processes. based on ethnographic examinations of 2 this kind of double-edged encounter is taken up directly as well by sunderland (forthcoming) in calling out the “monstrous” role of the anthropologist in navigating tensions on the theory-practice divide. it is also a theme that emerges repeatedly and powerfully by anthropologists working in and around the military and other defense and security organizations. see albro et al. (2011) for first hand accounts from anthropologists. cefkin / close encounters: anthropologists in the corporate arena 103 transitional spaces in brazil, anderson and de paula (2006) contend that there is a “we’ness” in transitional spaces, a sense of being familiar strangers, being a part of something outside the self and family. but this is something overlooked in the innovation practices of us companies. asboe (2008) raises the question of whether and how design anthropology can participate in the productive processes of the more resource constrained small and medium sized enterprises (smes). he suggests that the ability to dedicate focus singularly in looking at and understanding end-users is a luxury of larger firms. instead, participation in the production processes of smes requires that the anthropologist play multiple roles. it requires understanding the networks through which ideas emerge and decisions are made. this, he suggests, give this anthropologist the potential to impact and reframe innovation processes fundamentally throughout smes. in fact, each year at epic a number of contributions reflect explicitly on the impact of ethnographic work and how it lands in business (dalal and wall, 2005; dautcher and griffin, 2010; de paula et al., 2009; flynn and lovejoy, 2008; halse and clark, 2008; hanson and sariemento, 2008; mack and squires, 2011; schwartz, 2011; schwarz et al., 2009; thomas and lang, 2008; vinyets, 2009). here anthropologists directly face the ways in which assumptions shaping products and services are built into the process. in turn they also confront questions of their own role in shaping the processes and results of production. encounters with corporate forms a third set of encounters engaged by corporate anthropologists are those with the structures and formations of the corporation itself. this encounter concerns an inward focus on internal operations, on how companies organize to get things done and the practices and worldviews that inform them. here the focus is of work and the workplace, casting an eye on the socio-technical infrastructures through which organizations run. overall encounters with corporate structures and ways of working garner somewhat less attention at epic. overwhelmingly the work represented is that done to inform companies’ external facing products and services. the role of the anthropologist is often equated with that of a “guide” to the outside world (howard and mortenson, 2009). considerations of such things as corporate governance, organizational structures, and the everyday practices, tools and rituals of work have nonetheless dotted the proceedings. mack and kaplan (2009) take up the question of organizational policy. they explore what happens when a seemingly trivial corporate policy – that governing mail delivery journal of business anthropology, 1(1), spring 2012 104 to employees – is changed. employed as workplace anthropologists for pitney bowes, a us based fortune 500 company best known for its mail meters, their effort was commensurate with changes to mail policy due to environmental considerations, the search for efficiency, and potential do not mail legislation. within pitney bowes: the specific policy was to limit the delivery of standard mail (items such as catalogs, advertisements, and magazines) to fridays only, and to stop delivering “personal” mail altogether in the three largest pitney bowes offices where mail services were managed by pitney bowes management services (pbms, a business unit that provides mail delivery and associated services to hundreds of companies around the world). up to that point all mail regardless of postage class or intended usage was delivered to employees every day. the stated aim of the policy change was to reduce the environmental impact of mail and to increase efficiency. (mack and kaplan 2009: 62) their investigation included a focus on both mailroom employees and recipients of mail across multiple divisions. they found that the policy directive was communicated through the common hierarchical cascade model, where managers were informed (by memo) of the change with the idea that they would in turn inform the employees they managed. however many managers either failed to note the change themselves or failed to communicate it to employees, resulting in employees being unaware of the changes until they received mail stamped with a notice that such pieces of mail would not be delivered in the future. this left the employees in the dark as to the meaning and intent of the policy change. in addition, implementing the policy required interpretation and took shape differently in different locations. what mail counted as “personal”, for instance? were all catalogues and hand-written pieces of mail “personal”? moreover, it became clear that the policy was designed without clarity as to the ramifications on people’s work. for example, for some employees trade journals signaled a reminder to submit publications or investigate new tools for their work. for the marketing team, magazines and newspapers were tools for tracking advertisement placement opportunities and moves by their competitors. for a lawyer a notice from the bar association might have a bearing on the legal standing of his work. in the end not only did the policy change fail to achieve the stated goals, it ended up alienating employees, forcing a disruption in employees’ sense of engagement. cefkin / close encounters: anthropologists in the corporate arena 105 a seemingly banal internal policy can have serious implications on an organization’s external image; in the present case, the change triggered strong reactions among employees as to their perceptions of the company. it also impacted the way work got done inside the business. if employees had been engaged in the policy making and implementation process, employees might not only have become “engaged,” they could be directly involved in managing external perceptions of their company. policy can be a way of engaging employees in achieving corporate goals as opposed to just telling them this is what is being done. in order to ensure that policy is followed, understood, and bought into, management would need to involve employees in policy changes and the reasons behind them. (mack and kaplan 2009: 69) blomberg (2011) also focuses on the question of what happens when corporations attempt change and uses this lens to focus attention on the limits of standardization in the context of globalization. blomberg’s case concerns the delivery of outsourced it services such as server maintenance, application management, and help desk support. in this case manipulations to organizational structure together with process redesign were targeted as the route to change. the transformation, informed through the principles of lean manufacturing as applied to service contexts, involved four specific efforts: (1) work segmentation; (2) pooling resources; (3) using metrics to identify inefficiencies and defects; and (4) worker co-location. the change to how the work was being delivered was considerable. whereas previously service delivery personal would be dedicated to particular clients, sometimes even working at the client’s location, this change moved them out of client locations into regional service delivery centers. it also reassigned the personnel into pools servicing multiple clients; they were no longer dedicated to a single client. a fundamental goal of the transformation, blomberg notes, was to “make the way that services would be delivered “the same” no matter the location from which they were delivered” (p. 135). noting that this kind of standardization risked disempowering workers and resulting in ill-fitting practices, she focuses here on regional variances in the transformation. examining four regional centralized delivery centers – two in the united states, one in india and one in central europe – she shows how each center’s particular history and make-up strongly affected how the changes were received by employees and the unique challenges each journal of business anthropology, 1(1), spring 2012 106 center faced. one of the us centers was made of up seasoned employees with well established work practices, many of whom had worked from home. the move into the center where the workers were co-located caused personal disruption such as long commutes, challenged workers sense of autonomy and expertise, and disrupted relationships with “their” clients. in contrast, the other us center was newly established in a part of the country where the company had no prior presence. in this case a key challenge was the lack of experienced employees from whom to learn and adapt. the challenges in the india and europe centers were yet different again, with the former challenged by frequent job-hopping given the highly competitive corporate it labor market and the later faced with having to adapt their localized systems and practices into new global standards. blomberg uses these observations and analysis to consider more broadly the hierarchical regimes of control guiding organizational management. the priorities in many executive suites continue to stress centralized control, including monitoring performance and compliance with enterprise standards. while there is some acknowledgement of the emergent nature of change, the organizational impulse is to attempt to control change through mandates and compliance assessments. regimes of control make it difficult to resist change initiatives even when they are not creating the desired outcomes and can lead to behaviors where for example passing assessments becomes the goal rather than integrating the change into everyday practice. this can result in additional work with little value to the enterprise other than to demonstrate compliance. pressure to strictly adhere to a standard even when ill-suited to local contingencies can result in adjustments occurring only after “breakdowns” which negatively affects such things as client satisfaction, employee retention, and service quality. (blomberg 2011: 148) corporate events, practices and tools occasion other instances of the corporate encounter. in a prior study (cefkin, 2007) i challenged naturalized assumptions about data and information flows by examining their context of use. i used the vehicle of meetings held to review data entered into enterprise-wide information systems, specifically sales pipeline management systems (customer relationship management, or crm) for this investigation. regular meetings held to discuss existing sales opportunities (known as “cadences” in the fieldsite described in the paper) form an expected and familiar part of the life of sales cefkin / close encounters: anthropologists in the corporate arena 107 personnel in companies of all kinds. why do such meetings persist in an era where information systems ideally contain all the necessary information? what role do these forms of interaction play in the employee experience? drawing in particular on research within a global it firm, a striking observation was that despite the centrality of numbers as core to managerial control, the work of providing and reading numbers was profoundly interpretive. for example, what did the stated dollar amount of a forecasted (but not yet finalized) sale actually reference, an estimate of the client’s budget? or was it the actual cost of the solution or a best guess about competitors’ bids? one of the functions of the meetings was to engage this kind of sense-making. in the main fieldsite discussed, a globally distributed organization, meetings were held collectively at the sales team level. cadence calls (both due to geographical distribution and to allow people to call in from client sites or at home during off hours) almost always include participants joining by phone. some cadence meetings are held entirely as conference calls. participants often experience distraction and interference, timing their schedule to join the meeting, for example, by cell phone en route from one client call to another. others may be joining the meeting in the middle of the night from a distant time zone. multitasking is rampant and is made visible by the frequent pauses and requests to repeat questions or comments. (cefkin 2007: 191) the group element notwithstanding, the meeting operated as something of a call-and-response between the manager and each member of the team. exchanges between the sales manager and sales team member were imperative, interchange amongst peers was optional. recalling that information systems are designed towards an ideal of containing all the necessary data (explored and problematized by slobin and cherkasky [2010] in their look at the quest for the ’360 degree view of a customer’ by way of massive data analytics), it’s worth asking why this discussion persists. a key function of this practice and the form it takes, i argued, was to impact sellers’ actions and sensibilities: journal of business anthropology, 1(1), spring 2012 108 that the process repeats from week to week with a high likelihood of the same information being reviewed repeatedly suggests that the particular significance of any given adjustment to the content is negligible…the overall form and repetition of the meeting compels the meaning of the process. the form itself generates an expectation of movement and action. this imperative, reinforced as part of the rhythmscape of business workers, exceeds the function of articulating data and exchanging information. the form of the meeting, with its repeated series of oneon-one interactions of manager and sales rep held in front of an audience …produces an urgency, an imperative to act. (cefkin 2007: 197) encounters with corporate forms go hand-in-hand with anthropologists’ up-close examination of how things work within the corporation. other work presented at epic has considered such issues as employee engagement, loyalty, and change management (brondo et al., 2005; holmes, 2010; martin et al., 2007). by turning a lens on what happens and how it is seen and experienced from within, the corporate encounter extends consideration of the corporate form as a particular rendering of organizational, economic and social action. views from the corporation an encounter is engaged from a perspective. the question remains, what are the views of anthropologists’ corporate interlocutors on this encounter? at risk of oversimplification, i wish to close by suggesting something about what motivates and shapes the encounter from the point of view of anthropologists’ interlocutors inside the corporation3. management guru tom davenport echoes a straight-forward and commonly expressed interest in anthropology, focusing on the use of ethnography as a route to “actually knowing what’s happening and why” (2007). after jocularly serving up a litany of complaints about working with anthropologists…. anthropologists can be a pain in the butt. they will want to watch for a long time before coming to a conclusion – longer than you will deem reasonable. they will question your fundamental assumptions. they will insist on interpreting every little thing. they may even resist your 3 few empirical analyses of corporate members’ motivations and interests in engaging anthropological work have been performed. cayla and arnould (2012) provide a foray down this path. cefkin / close encounters: anthropologists in the corporate arena 109 desire to intervene in the work process they've studied, particularly if it means worse working conditions for the workers involved. (davenport 2007) … he nevertheless voices a bullish endorsement of its promise to achieve the kind of practical insight useful to the problem solving and innovation desires of business. this is an insight gained, according to davenport, from ethnography’s practices of observation. this view is uncomfortably embraced by anthropologists themselves who at the same time work to resist simple reductions of anthropological understanding to positivistic modes of observational enquiry (a challenge nicely explored at epic by nafus and anderson, 2006). beyond the immediate practical implications hinted at by davenport, a host of socio-economic dynamics also underlies corporate actors’ interest in anthropology. technological advances, global regulatory changes, labor migrations, and transnational flows of commerce are just some of the factors combining to transform the channels and dynamics of the socially embedded market. existing markets are being extended and new markets created, reshaping local structures. a fisherman in rural thailand or an agriculturalist in india, for example, can now use internet-enabled mobile devices to check up-tothe-minute market conditions before bringing their catch and produce to market. consumers are increasingly buying into on-going relationships with service providers such as cellular or isp providers and financial managers, and thus being enrolled as actors in production and supply chain processes (e.g., from computer assembly on a dell website to furniture assembly at home after a trip to ikea). trends in open source and collaborative consumption and the coupling of production and consumption in user-generated, peer-to-peer production are challenging existing models of reward and ownership structures. deeper understanding of how these dynamics are playing out on the ground and are transforming (and being transformed by) changing worldviews promises insight relevant to the efforts of corporations to respond to and create new opportunities. suchman notes: “writing against the tradition of classical economics, particularly in its separation of ‘the economy’ from ‘society’ or ‘culture’, recent scholarship has developed the argument that economic and cultural activities are inseparably interrelated. this is so insofar as identifications of products, markets, competitors, and the like fundamentally presuppose the mobilisation of cultural knowledge” (forthcoming). indeed corporations themselves participate in and help catalyze moves towards open innovation and production, tapping into and journal of business anthropology, 1(1), spring 2012 110 engaging partner and consumer networks and inventing the mechanisms and infrastructures that support these emerging forms of engagement. they have also endeavored to respond to a perceived consumer-driven imperative. how can a company stay relevant if consumers are no longer bound by the local and can instead access global markets? and as companies enroll consumers into their production processes they are asking, similarly, what they need to know about those with whom they are now in collaboration. hence “[f]igured as the expert on culture, it follows that the anthropologist would have an obvious currency in the making of markets” (suchman, forthcoming). the promise of anthropology in shaping the possibilities and futures for corporations is one way to understand the corporate encounter. another is to view it in light of a sense of disjuncture experienced from the felt inadequacy of the dominant assumptions guiding corporate existence. despite the rise of “the social” in the age of user-generated content, social media, and collaborative consumption, for instance, individual actors form the dominant rubric through which corporations frame their own practices, strategies, and goals. the hyperrationalized view that goals and actions can be counted on to operate together seamlessly persists. even where there is recognition of the social or the cultural, these tend to be viewed as variables, as discreet, if fuzzy, dimensions amenable to control and management. and yet participants in and observers of corporate practice are regularly confronted by the breakdown of such assumptions. this was evidenced, for instance, in reporting on the 2008 economic crises. stories circulated of how technocratic tools such as the formulas and models guiding risk management credit default swaps so mesmerized economic, political, and managerial actors that the partiality of the view embodied in these tools was ignored or forgotten. a common trope in such reports was to point to the limitations of algorithmic regimes and model-driven decision-making practices. they highlighted instead seemingly unforeseen human behaviors and practices. the perspective of new york times columnist paul krugman (e.g., “how could economists have gotten it so wrong?” 2009) resonated with that of financial times editor (and anthropologist), gillian tett (e.g., 2009), in providing an anthropologically-inflected understanding of how the economic downfall was brought on in large part due to the reified (partial) thinking of powerful actors. corporate managers, strategists, and even those on the front-lines continue to seek out alternate forms of understanding. anthropology’s emphasis on people and on emergent and dynamic processes of meaning construction and value formation together with anthropological cefkin / close encounters: anthropologists in the corporate arena 111 modalities of engagement – working with people on the ground, bringing together multiple points of view, and engaging members themselves to face challenges and formulate responses – are seen as routes to transcend these limitations. indeed a limited number of papers at epic have started to venture down the path of exploring broader, socio-economic dynamics as encountered through their practice within organizations. bezaitis and anderson (2011) outline a approach to informing strategy through ethnographic inquiry that is framed around uncertainty and “flux”. a question underlying my 2007 analysis of the cadence process used to manage the sales pipeline described above was to inquire into how corporate actors participate in the making of markets, and in particular how corporate forms add dimension to market forms as naturalized acts. i introduced the notion of a “rhythmscape” as an immersive, acoustic space which “suggests a way to identify and elaborate on performative dimensions of market production and consumption by opening up a different route into understand experience than the dominant visual and logo-centric means of interpretation.” (cefkin 2007: 198). acknowledging that “corporate ethnography finds it extremely difficult to connect such large-scale analysis of social change with day-to-day demands of internal or external clients for research” (wakeford 2011, 243), wakeford proposes a shift in the framing metaphor guiding corporate ethnographic praxis from “networked sociality” (in the vein of castells and wittel) to sloterdijk’s “sphereology” and “social foam” as a way out of individuated, information-dominant frames of understanding. the challenge explored by wakeford is the inadequacy of network models to attend to the shared affects which transcend the individual or assumptions of singular shared domain of action and meaning. echoing my 2007 suggestion to attend to the extra-informational elements of corporate practice and to make room for immersive, sensorial dimensions, wakeford argues for social foam as a conceptual resource for re-emphasizing the conditions, localness and liveness of social action. encounters, i intonated at the start, carry a sense of unexpectedness, even confrontation. the meetings described here are only “unexpected” and “confrontational”, however, in a particular discursive space. anthropologists’ encounters with the things corporations produce, with sites and acts of production, and with the organizational form inform a very intended meeting. this is especially true of those who engage these sites as mutual actors, as active and accountable participants in these sites. indeed this is a tale, perhaps above all else, of a motivated encounter, an encounter intended to bring about new realizations and the possibilities of change. journal of business anthropology, 1(1), spring 2012 112 acknowledgements i wish to thank jeanette blomberg and jill lawrence, as well as the anonymous reviewers, for their insightful comments on earlier versions of this work, and brigitte jordan and patricia sunderland for late stage reviewing. i especially want to thank the many presenters and participants of epic for the thought-provoking corpus they have created. references albro, r. g. marcus, l. mcnamara, and m. schoch-spana, (eds.) 2011 anthropologists in the securityscape. walnut creek: left coast press inc. anderson, k. and t. lovejoy 2005 ’sociality: are we getting enough?’ ethnographic praxis in industry 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anthropologists in the corporate arena 117 melissa cefkin is a member of ibm research almaden. she is a business and design anthropologist specializing in workplace ethnography, services research, product and service design, and organizational learning. melissa was previously a director of user experience and member of the advanced research group at sapient corporation and a senior research scientist at the institute for research on learning (irl). she is the editor of ethnography and the corporate encounter: reflections on research in and of corporations (berghahn books, 2009) and has served as the co-chair and on the board of the ethnographic praxis in industry conference (epic). a fulbright award grantee, she has a phd in anthropology from rice university. melissa may be reached at mcefkin@yahoo.com vi opdaterer systemet vi opdaterer systemet... rauli.cbs.dk opdateres og er snart tilgængeligt. inside the energy salon: installation and illusions of finality arthur mason abstract this article analyzes promotional images associated with energy events as ethnographic objects in their own right. i examine how the sensory experience of promotional imagery with its fantasy display contributes to the rational presentation of energy planning, with its emphasis on accountability through expert knowledge provisioning. promotional images fall under the rubric of impression management where an ideal of believability mediates between objects of manufacture and their desire. informed by the works of artists marcel duchamp and andy warhol, i frame these images as an illusion of finality, which i then connect to a broader argument about the rise of an energy salon―a shift that appears to involve an increased prominence of visual attention and management in how energy expertise is produced, performed, and circulated. keywords energy planning, expertise, impression management, restructured industries, promotional cultures page 1 of 18 jba 4(1): 36-53 spring 2015 © the author(s) 2015 issn 2245-4217 www.cbs.dk/jba mason / inside the energy salon 37 in april 2013 i attended the arctic summit energy roundtable event at the upscale hotel bristol in oslo, sponsored by an events group for the british weekly magazine the economist.1 the full title of the gathering was arctic summit: a new vista for trade, energy, and environment. its focus was the future of arctic oil and natural gas development. handouts for participants included glossy event pamphlets with elaborate graphic design imagery. take, for example, the arctic summit delegate booklet,2 whose subtitle poses the question: what will the arctic resemble in 2050? printed on the cover is an attention-grabbing visual: the background scene is a graphic-design illusion of a dark blue sky and sea that is cut horizontally across the middle by a strip of snow-covered mountains. this artificial backdrop intensifies the realism of a foregrounded photographic image depicting an ice-covered rocky island. at the island’s base, the viewer witnesses an illusion that logically corresponds to the island’s mirrored reflection upon the sea. yet through computer design wizardry, the reflection is not the mirrored image of the island, but instead, the details of an upside down industrial offshore oil rig (see figure 1). thus, in response to the question emblazoned on the book cover, what will the arctic resemble in 2050?, the visual responds with a fantasy illusion of a climate changed ice-free arctic ocean and an uninhabited island whose mirrored reflection is a multi-million dollar offshore installation. by placing the visual alongside the event slogan, this fantasy illusion is immediately recognizable as the projected possibility of the arctic future in the year 2050. it is not an illusion of the arctic in the year 2040, or even 2049 and three-months, but an illusion of a singular temporality by alignment with its slogan identity. importantly, the image does not carry the weight of accountability associated with an expert scenario projection. its fantasy proposition is evidenced by the absence of any credible authorship outside its ownership by the economist events group. 1 funding for this research comes from the norwegian-us fulbright foundation (2013) and the us national science foundation (2010-2017). i thank traci speed, brian moeran, and two anonymous reviewers for their instructive comments. 2 the booklet was also available online in downloadable pdf format. a second handout was an industry report titled arctic update from dnv to the maritime, oil and gas industries, and it, too, was available in pdf format. the latter report was published by one of norway’s largest strategic knowledge firms, det norske veritas (dnv), a sponsor of the event. finally, a third booklet, titled the british ambassador’s residence in oslo, was available for participants who attended the cocktail and networking reception scheduled to take place at the forenamed location. this booklet did not appear online as a downloadable document, but details were available in web format. journal of business anthropology, 4(1), spring 2015 38 figure 1: arctic summit image in this article, i present this promotional image as a key visual at an energy roundtable event. i describe its aesthetic treatment and placement next to people and things. my objective is to take promotional images associated with energy events as ethnographic objects in their own right. i want to know how the sensory experience of promotional imagery, centered on fantasy display, contributes to the rational presentation of energy planning, with its emphasis on accountability through expert knowledge provisioning. promotional images fall under the rubric of impression management (moeran 2005) or what lucien karpik (2010:44) calls “judgment devices”―suggesting that an ideal of trust or believability can mediate between objects of manufacture and their desire. in consumer packaging, for example, promotional imagery aims to generate values associated with the identity of objects, even while acknowledging the contingency of this aim (wernick 1994). in the context of energy planning, where foresight knowledge is characterized by uncertainty, promotional images may assist in the exercise of judgment. energy futures are detailed expectations that represent strategic resources for attracting attention from (financial) sponsors to stimulate agenda-setting processes. they are also commodities whose value is only indirectly based on their cost of purchase. as such, valuing the uniqueness of products such as energy forecasts requires forms of judgment that can assist in identifying quality beyond attention to economic price, or as karpik states, “when actors give more weight to qualities than to price…choice takes the form of judgment (ibid: 39, emphasis in text). i consider energy promotional images as a type of artefactual data, whose other types include expert reports, graphs, and scenario narratives. artefactual data are materialand digital-forms of knowledge representing “integrated packages” that capture an advisory firm or event group’s activity of transforming information into knowledge purporting to have strategic decision-making value (knox et al 2007:22). unlike with other types of artefactual data, however, i face a substantial challenge here since, despite their ubiquity, at no time during energy events are the mason / inside the energy salon 39 meanings of promotional images discussed. thus, i turn to an analysis informed by the works of artists marcel duchamp and andy warhol to frame these images as an illusion of finality, which i then connect to my broader argument about the rise of an energy salon―a shift that appears to involve an increased prominence of visual attention and management in how energy expertise is produced, performed, and circulated. energy roundtable meetings like the arctic summit are key networking events that attract the attention of government officials, company executives, academics, and journalists who seek consensus about the future of energy markets. they are ritualized learning environments, organized by event groups and advisory firms, which create interpretation around imagined energy futures. because of their emphasis on communication through display, energy events share similar features with a type of ritual eventing that anthropologists associate with “tournament” economies—book fairs, fashion weeks, or award ceremonies―in which participants compete for prestige through selfpresentation (moeran 2010: 133-140; appadurai 1986). the visibility of rank at such tournaments, for example, may be equated with the performance of consultants at energy events, in the sense that the linguistic repertoire of technical terms, acronyms, and nonverbal signs such as hand gestures (agha 2007; silverstein 2006) are consequential for the display of mastery over energy futures. also, tournaments enroll periodicity as an instrument for distancing the routines of everyday economic life. similarly, energy events rely on spatio-temporal features such as the division of the given time into, on the one hand, plenary sessions that everyone can attend and, on the other, parallel sessions that participants must choose among. such allocation of individual and collective discussion through conferencing can provide “exemplary instances and instruments of future-management” (wallace 2010: chapter 3). conceptually, tournaments of values place emphasis on the position-taking of competitors who act within a social field with the aim of accumulating prestige value. in what might be the earliest example of impression management documented by an anthropologist, bronislaw malinowski (1984: 62) notes the significance of quantifiable matter among trobriand islanders: “after they are harvested, yams are displayed for some time piled up in neat, conical heaps [exhibited for aesthetic polish, arrangement, criticism, admiration, comparison and praise]”. here, the appearance of quantification becomes a force for the extension and circulation of a person through his name, which reverberates in the minds and speech of others, what nancy munn (1986) calls “fame”. in the present context, i am less interested in what is performed at energy events than in what is shared through establishing a community of interpretation (mason 2007:374). by this, i refer to the way in which energy events associate new relationships among attendants, a process requiring social authority, intellectual technology, and practical activity, journal of business anthropology, 4(1), spring 2015 40 not unlike what timothy malefyt (2003) refers to as the work-shopping of consensus by advertising firms. for analytical purposes then, i consider energy events as analogous to a modern day aristocratic salon. norbert elias (2006) explains that in the eighteenth century salon participants increased their knowledge and refined their taste through conversation. in salon culture, etiquette, spatial relations, and modes of visualization are objects of representation which structure the image that aristocrats have of themselves (delacour and leca 2011:37). in a similar manner, the modern day energy roundtable is a type of elite experience that emphasizes luxury, etiquette, and security―producing a lifestyle that reinforces the veracity of strategic knowledge associated with energy planning. such events take place in four-star hotels in major cities across the globe. every detail is elaborately staged for each occasion, including personal name placards, menus, table settings, brochures, and the like. while the notion of tournament economy places emphasis on the consecration of individuality through the extension of one’s fame (munn 1986), energy salon culture aims toward glamorizing practices of interpretation with the aim of cultivating alignment through a celebrated aesthetic. that is, while the collective form of the tournament economy embraces a “carnivalistic logic” (bakhtin 1994, chapter 4) structured on the principle of contestation (moeran and pedersen 2011:5), energy salon culture leans toward religious ceremony in which ritualized meaning is subordinate to structure. to orient the reader to the stakes of my research, i first introduce the conditions that establish the possibility for an energy salon and then characterize promotional images, connecting their analysis with my broader assertion about an energy salon more explicitly. the key role that promotional images play in the rise of the energy salon is tightly wound around the idea that such images produce an illusion of finality. that is, promotional images are objects that aim toward the specific end of producing a finality that exists as part of an effort by an expertise regime to transcend its ideological conditions of origin. as such, promotional images produce a delicate ubiquitous image that is post-discursive and, in some sense, post-contextual (žižek 1991). in this sense, such images serve as a type of “judgment device” capable of contributing to the active weighing of knowledge from trusted sources (karpik 2010:44-45). rise of the energy salon energy events today are costly to attend, with heightened security to ensure that only those persons legitimately in attendance gain access to knowledge. both the types of locations where events take place and the actors who appear contribute to their sanctioning―as, for example, when secretary of state hillary clinton addressed cambridge energy week 2010 at the newly built hilton hotel in houston. elsewhere i attribute the mason / inside the energy salon 41 rise of these events to changes beginning in the 1970s in arenas associated with energy restructuring, environmental perception, and communication technology that provide opportunities for various types of advisory experts―mainly economists―to assemble, package, and perform knowledge about energy provisioning in new ways that can elevate the interests of industry and government into actionable views (mason 2006, 2007). such changes include the reorganization of information related to energy systems development: for example, coal, no longer intimately associated with labor politics, is now seen instead as a fuel, alongside oil and natural gas, in a context of electric power generation. such shifts coincide with what i call the disembedding of a culture of expertise during the 1980s and, specifically, with changes in preferences for representing knowledge visually from text to graphic design. what many refer to as the reagan era of “defunding the left”, for example, i see as a shift to the private sector of a first generation of government risk assessors, initially trained in response to a regulatory need for technical evaluation in the wake of the 1970s congressional environmental legislations. as this relates to imagery, juridical representation of knowledge through text begins to appear backwardlooking, especially when compared to the imagery employed by economists, whose graphic projections are forward-looking. also taking place at this time is the increasing relevance of economic knowledge in the service of government―as evidenced through the application of cost-benefit analysis in decision-making, particularly in environmental regulation, suggesting a shift from juridical evaluation to favoring economic efficiency through mathematical modelling. the introduction of this shift, what was to be called reform, was especially welcomed in the arenas of energy production where industry sought to leaven the “dead hand of regulation”, as the perceived cause of the 1970s energy supply crisis was already being referred to by policy analysts of the time (wilson 1971). thus disembedding, as i employ the term, refers to the (neoliberal) marketing of scientific evaluation among persons whose expertise remained indispensable to satisfying the requirements associated with regulation. during this same period, environmental activist organizations came to rely on scientific representations of truth to generate an empathy for the planet. as such, the authenticity of their message begins to rely less on the drama of personal risk-taking. this is especially so among organizations which acquire media enterprises, and which therefore no longer have to depend upon an independent news estate to stage the verification of their truths. as evidence, consider the shift in activist organizations that during the 1990s sought to alter the dynamics of collective life by fostering an ecological sensibility by reference to media stunts (wapner 1995). today, converting mass audiences toward journal of business anthropology, 4(1), spring 2015 42 planetary concern often requires employing images that stress an empathy for the graph, such as those prominently on display in the movie inconvenient truth. other efforts aimed at assembling knowledge include, for example, the establishment of government houses directed toward collecting reliable data from ever wider aspects of energy arenas―in part by imposing mandatory accounting on firms and creating a rationalized reporting system, as happened in the wake of the opec embargo. the institutionalization of energy knowledge provisioning through the us energy information agency provides a new opportunity for independent experts to repackage otherwise hard-to-find data. what i see in the above narrative is differentiation between, on the one hand, economic experts who transcend proprietary limitations and, on the other hand, legal expertise which remains tethered to attorneyclient privilege and which is thus incapable of advocating an industrywide horizon of expectation. the use of visuals (graphs) to frame the economic future as accessible in one glance intensifies this differentiation. as such, within the energy system, legal knowledge is increasingly backended, represented by “partial intellectuals” (bauman 1987:114) whom industry and government rely on to deliver historical precedent. by contrast, economic knowledge emerges as vanguard, that is, capable of making claims in the form of statements intended not for clients, but on behalf of impersonal forces (the market, the future). from this, epistemic interests appear distanced from proprietary claims, lending to knowledge a prestige value whose independent stance appears as a natural attribute. it is within this context that a newly established role for the executive round table event emerges. identifying knowledge with a neutral value creates the possibility for inviting competing parties to gather around individual announcements in a shared setting. where competing parties can stage their individual market condition without threat to their individual proprietary position, the experience is visual, independent, sequestered, and shared. nevertheless, the quality of this new type of expression, what i call the energy salon, represents reliability where the conditions of veracity are abstracted from any actually existing assembly of data, and as such, are dependent upon the eventing itself. inside the energy salon, aesthetic exposure is a prerequisite for ensuring reliability. within, the energy salon offers an opportunity to witness an expanded typology of delicate experiences that serve as a trademark for the veracity of expert knowledge, including attention to the spatial arrangement of security. at energy events, the proximity to knowledge aligns with a movement from ostentatious forms of enforcement toward more delicate forms of identification. at the street entrance to events, for example, the bodies of security guards are conspicuously robust, whereas the corporeality of attendants who deliver booklets to clients appears thin and feminine. this materiality of security mason / inside the energy salon 43 entails its own redundancy in the distancing of delicacy, where metal turnstiles located at the entrance of buildings give way to barcode scanning inside conference rooms. the cost for event attendance is stratospheric ($15,000 for three days at the oslo energy forum), suggesting that price, in combination with security and luxury, contributes to the delicacy of semantic provisioning. also, there is a commitment to an aesthetic of abstraction that displaces conspicuous recognition with artistic impression. at the hotel bristol, the meeting place for the arctic summit, an oil painting depicting naked boys frolicking at the seaside meets an ambivalent gaze from participants suggesting that inside the energy salon, erotic imagery is an abstract theme; in this case, the traffic in pedophilic desire could well be an image signifying an age of innocence.3 similarly, in what appears as a concerted appeal to cubism, oil paintings hanging on the mezzanine floor en route to an energy roundtable inside the corinthia hotel, st. petersburg, seemingly collude with the event’s power point images depicting petro-geologic futures. what presumably began as a way to ensure reliability of knowledge in energy decision-making is today inside the energy salon a way to ensure sociality through a lifestyle of semantic provisioning, whereby energy policy knowledge is established through an aesthetics whose reliability is a preference for delicacy. manufactuality: an object of manufacture and factuality an energy event key promotional image is an artfully designed computer graphic visual that appears on brochures, event booklets, and banners. it thematically channels the assembly of energy facts into one dramatic and immediately recognizable visual. it is replicated in various sizes and locations, appearing on event banners, wall-sized backdrops, internet pages, booklets, writing-pads, and powerpoint slides. the key image possesses strong qualitative aspects such as those images that typify realistic renderings, for example, classical art. as such, the shapes and colors that weight the key image with its dramaturgical form strike a marked contrast with the barely identifiable meanings of the linear and bar graphs used by the energy experts who are the key presenters at these events. finally, an event-date and slogan is typically printed directly onto the key image, conveying duration (one to three days) and central theme. examples of slogans include: the new face of risk, and what will the arctic resemble in 2050? while average exposure to a key promotional image results in sightings by participants that can be counted in the hundreds, i have 3 i thank norwegian anthropologist kari storaas for inspiring this observation and for alerting me to the cultural significance of the “moorish hall,” as the lobby of oslo’s bristol hotel is referred to, originally conceived as a gallery for artistic display before its high ceiling was lowered in order to create a mezzanine floor for conferencing space to host events such as the arctic summit. journal of business anthropology, 4(1), spring 2015 44 never overheard an event participant refer to a promotional image. i have accepted this absence of discussion as evidence that such images are perceived as superfluous and that the images affect a type of namebranding practice (logoization of pens, stationary, brochures) that is common among the upscale hotels in which these roundtable events take place. furthermore, the necessity of promotional imagery does not appear to me to be as critical as other auxiliary features: for example, the energy and security requirements of roundtable events where, in the case of the former, reliable electricity flow ensures internet capability, and in the latter, elaborate forms of security (guards, turnstiles, id badges) guide the etiquette of interpersonal interaction (mason 2012). security may also be seen as an ostentatious marking of boundaries between insiders and outsiders especially for highlighting one’s competence through lifestyle provisioning or extravagance (havens 2011:155). nevertheless, attention to these promotional images suggests that they do possess design and installation features that differentiate them from the other types of images on display. unlike, for example, the hotel logo used to indicate an enterprise identity, the event key image is almost always marked in ways that give its appearance a ritualistic function. the event date that is printed onto the promotional image stresses the eventness or unique time dimension of the gathering. furthermore, the datestamp attributes the key image with an obligatory obsolescence (once the event has passed), and in this way confers upon it a non-transferable identity. moreover, the presence of two contrasting types of visuals―promotional images that appear real (but are fabricated) and energy planning images that look abstract (yet are authentic to reality)―expresses a peculiar juxtaposition taking place within the same restricted time-space of social interaction. on the one hand, key promotional images, designed by artists, apply techniques of scale and aesthetics that do not associate the visuals with forms of accountability aimed at legitimizing an actual reality. on the other hand, expert energy graphics suggest forms of reliability whereby authenticity is scrutinized prior to circulation. that is, the kinds of assessments that experts make available through powerpoint images, while not subject to the strict controls of independent scientific knowledge (shapin 1994), do have their own particular forms of accountability (mckenna 2006). thus, while promotional imagery does not require the accountability employed in the graphs of advisory expertise, both types of visuals (along with decisions regarding how they are assembled and where they circulate) are aimed at the same target groups. these differences in aesthetic positioning―the presence versus absence of repetition; realism through fabrication versus authenticity through abstraction; the lack of discussion versus intense interpretation―suggest that what is being promoted through promotional mason / inside the energy salon 45 imagery is a mixture of both manufacture and factuality (what i refer to as manufuactuality) aimed at absorbing the complexity of energy expertise into an illusion of finality. that is, a key promotional image at energy events presents an illusion that assigns a finality of form to the content of any and all discussion, in spite of what individual meanings of accountability and authenticity remain. my inspiration for manufactuality derives from an article appearing in the new yorker magazine several years ago by art historian louis menand (2010), who offered a few reminders about the critical reception of mid-twentieth century modern art. in discussing pop artist andy warhol, menand first introduced art historian betran rouge’s comparison of warhol to the artist marcel duchamp. among duchamp’s innovations was placing everyday manufactured objects in an art gallery. by their very positioning within a gallery space, the identity of these everyday objects was transformed into an artwork. duchamp referred to this process as the ready-made. the ready-made, on the basis of installation, rejects the logic of a final identity that is assigned to consumer objects. that is, by the assignment of meaning through its installation in various settings, duchamp pointed out that the identity of an industrial object was flexible and that its function could be reassigned through performance. for example, inside the gallery-space the ready-made carries the identity of art, while inside the kitchen-space the ready-made is an appliance. thus, the ready-made draws attention to the identity conferred by installation. according to menand, rouge argued that warhol’s innovation was to create an imitation of the duchamp ready-made. through artistic recreation of an everyday object―for example, brillo boxes as artefacts of artistic production―warhol replicated what industry had already fabricated as a final object. in this way, warhol created an illusion of a consumer-object-of-finality (in abbreviated terms, an illusion of finality). set within the context of historical development, if you will, an object’s everyday finality, which duchamp transformed into flexibility by installation, was in the hands of warhol transformed back into finality by way of its replication through illusion. at this point in the discussion, i want to add two suggestions. first, as evidenced by the emphasis he placed on consumer packaging (that is, in contrast to menand and rouge’s argument), warhol was not that interested in the identity of manufactured objects as much as he was fascinated by their representation through the graphic design visual. second, menand reminds his readers that warhol’s work was usually sold piecemeal to collectors, and that it is easy to forget that virtually all of his art exhibitions were installations. that is, by creating replications of consumer packaging and then arranging them in an installation, warhol transformed the reality of the art gallery into a make-believe supermarket. and here is where menand ends his thesis―with the disappointing summary that “art is a commodity.” what menand does not journal of business anthropology, 4(1), spring 2015 46 grasp, however, is that by mimicking the reality of the supermarket inside an art-gallery, warhol demonstrated how the reality of the supermarket operates as a make-believe art-gallery. without embracing judgment on its ultimate purpose, as for example a kind of aesthetics regime for the molding of sensuality (haug 1986), the supermarket-gallery is indeed an art-display, populated by consumer packaging that is produced by real artistic-craft persons whose accomplishments can be measured through their graduate degrees in art design. when you consider all the artistic packaging encountered by a consumer while walking down a supermarket aisle, which is nothing if not an art display―one, moreover, available to consumers at a fraction of the cost of gallery prints―what warhol appears to have argued is that the supermarket-gallery was consciously being mistaken as mere advertisement, as if the content inside the packaging was of any real significance (žižek 1991). warhol’s emphasis on visual design packaging suggests that consumer objects derive a final identity not from their manufacture and subsequent installation, but from the illusion of finality conferred through visual design and the subsequent installation of visual design in an artistic display. on this same basis, in what follows i analyze a graphic design visual whose statement of purpose is to advertise the content of energy policy discussion. my argument is that the energy promotional visual is a key image whose redundancy of placement provides an illusion of finality that endorses the content of energy planning knowledge with its veracity. much like the consumer packaging reproduced by andy warhol, key event images are themselves an illusion of finality by their singularity of uniqueness (the artist’s creation) whose installation is in fact not superfluous, but instead assigns the content of any and all discussion through its finality of form. arctic summit: installation and illusion of finality returning to the delegate booklet titled arctic summit: what will the arctic resemble in 2050?, the visual for its cover was available in at least four unique formats at the arctic summit roundtable event. each format reflects a specific physical location, size, and symbolic function. first, the delegate booklet cover image appeared as a wall-sized banner hanging directly behind the central speaker stage. a row of ceiling floodlights shining onto the stage bathed the banner image with bright light. at 9-feet high and 20-feet wide, the banner backdrop image remained visible to participants throughout the day as a focal point of the event. its size, the largest visual at the event, enveloped keynote speakers standing at a podium and various roundtable discussants seated across the stage. the banner backdrop image was broadcast onto two large overhead screens hanging down in the middle of the assembly room in mason / inside the energy salon 47 order to project the stage activities to participants sitting in the back. when members of the audience rose from their seats to pose questions, a camera projected an image of participants directly onto the banner visual, so that the entire assembly’s attention was always directed toward the stage, and thus toward the banner image. in this way, the delegate book’s cover image became the event’s key image: that is, always associated, potentially or actually, with each public speaking participant. hence the key image formed a uniquely finalized visual space for containing public discussion. it divided all discourse into public and private. if participants did not appear projected onto the banner image, their speech was not part of public debate. sitting at the front of the stage and glancing across the room, i could identify a second format by the various ways participants interacted with the book cover image. for example, by the way participants placed the booklets on the white-clothed tables, just in front of them, near their drinks which stood nearby on coasters, i could see that the event key image had become integrated into a metaphorical structure of formal dining manners, appearing as a tablemat in a formal dining room experience. from its association with repeated displays of delicacy, such as the self-imposed demands of placing glasses on coasters and coffee cups on the doilies of saucers, the key image had become part of a delicate experience. by delicacy, i refer, for example, to the way participants held the booklet in their hands in such a manner that the event key image became integrated with associations related to hygiene, cleanliness, and proximity to shirt cuffs―that is, characteristics of personal touch familiar to such items as smartphones, keys, or wallets.4 in this way, the event’s key image entered the structured intimacy of formalized elite etiquette. its presence invited specific performances by participants who willingly conformed to the delicacies of its commands. a third format emerged during the evening, when event participants were shuttled by tour bus to a networking event and cocktail reception at the british ambassador’s residence, the villa frognæs. attendees had the opportunity to mingle with jane owen, british ambassador to norway, who also gave a welcoming speech to event participants. the villa frognæs is a mid-nineteenth century mansion whose interior rooms are adorned with paintings that typify scenes of delicately rendered landscapes in the style of romanticism. on the second floor, at the main hallway entrance, participants were ushered past a sixfoot high and two-foot wide promotional banner carrying the event key image with the words “networking reception” emblazoned at the top of the banner. another statement, “british ambassador’s residence on 19th march,” was printed at the bottom of the banner, just below the mirrored 4 the widespread sense of delicacy that the energy industry places on touch is evidenced in such far-removed locations ranging from energy roundtables to the schlumberger factory floor’s injury prevention program, where ubiquitous slogans on posters announce, “fingers are very precious.” journal of business anthropology, 4(1), spring 2015 48 image of the offshore installation in the area of the blue sea. beneath this statement, a string of letters provided the website address for the arctic summit. standing directly next to the banner image were two ornately decorated pieces of furniture, a delicate-looking dining chair and a dressing table. above the dresser, and in visual alignment with the key event image, hung a landscape painting featuring various domesticated birds. in a similar manner of design, the colors of both the banner image and the landscape painting were dark along the outer portions and bright in the middle, lending the impression of a diptych effect to the two landscape images (separated in time by two centuries). thus, the economist’s event key image and the ambassador’s residence furnishings entered into a visual ensemble, as an installation of the sensible, whose immediacy of recognition aligned the projected fantasy of the arctic in the year 2050 with a historic fantasy of artistic landscapes of romantic paintings during the 1850s. finally, the key image appeared on the event’s section page of the economist’s website. the event key image could thereby be reproduced by participants through screen shots, or revisited through bookmarks, for examination in greater detail. it was located alongside links to particular organizational aspects falling under the titles: overview, agenda, speakers, gala dinner, sponsors, supporters, venue, presentations. in this way, the event’s key image, by its proximity to various event categories, became linked to these details, not only electronically but also symbolically, as a discursive form. at no time were the meanings of the key image discussed. authorship of the image is not referred to inside the delegate booklet or on the website. the repeated image of an arctic island with a mirage of internal infrastructure is, therefore, left open to anyone’s interpretation. yet, from its fantastic quality―an island whose core is refashioned in technological form―one possible framing of the image is by reference to narratives that translate islands into inland-empires of technological wonder. an inland empire of technological wonder relies on the expertise of scientists and technocrats who do not seem to be affiliated with a university or any observable network of knowledge. everything appears to be operating along lines of innovation that are self-enclosed and selfsufficient. one of the more notable examples of this fiction is the depiction of crab key island in the james bond movie doctor no. in the midst of a tropical paradise, dr. julius no, adversary of british intelligence officer james bond, has installed an ultra-modern facility in the core of crab key. the internal island complex suggests many types of workers―architects at the design phase, engineers who ensure facility operation at maximum specification, and less skilled workers who carry out mundane functions requiring sober attitudes. recent fictional portrayals of madmen translating islands into inland empires include dr. topenkof in the jude mason / inside the energy salon 49 law and gwyneth paltrow movie sky captain and the world of tomorrow, and the video game skies of deception, in which commander diego navarro creates the archelon fortress inside terminus island, accessible via cobalt cave (see also mr. roarke of the television series fantasy island). eighteenth through twentieth-century novels such as robinson crusoe and the island of dr. moreau offer prototype forms that favor translating an island’s natural environment into a mask of superior techno-scientific operation (see also depictions of easter island and skull island). the characteristics common to each of these narratives include hidden techno-scientific infrastructure, secret charts, sequestered knowledge workers, unconstrained unreason, ocean-sized moats, and local inhabitants kept in the dark about their fate. taken together, these stories make up a category of translation that i refer to as “islands of inland-empire.” a typology of real and imagined arctic islands of inland empire include iceland, whose outer shell is seemingly just a backdrop for the appearance of different shaped pipes crisscrossing the surface as physical manifestation of hidden geothermic wonders internal to its core. my first glimpse of such an island of inland empire occurred while flying over kodiak island, alaska. there, beneath my plane, i saw terror lake, a dam built directly at the center of the island to provide hydropower to inhabitants of the fishing villages that dot the island’s shoreline. when i saw terror lake, i realized something was going on behind my back: a vast techno-scientific plot―an economic schema that afforded me the biocapacity for writing about the culture of my informants. in russia, a promotional installation at the st. petersburg economic forum displays the teriberka natural gas installation in miniature. it is a future technoscientific off-loading facility for developing the shtokman energy project. teriberka is located along the barents sea where today villagers live amidst modern day ruins. they also live in expectation that the shtokman project will bring a new modernity. during a norwegian research council-sponsored energy development event i had the opportunity to picnic in teriberka where, amidst welcoming comments by mayor valeri yarantsev, the town appeared tragic and poetic, like the hollywood movie set of shutter island with megastar leonardo dicaprio. back in st. petersburg, the promotional representation of teriberka provides a visual example of its future in miniature, equipped with tiny workers of an arctic island of inland empire. from an industry-sponsored perspective, the image of an oil and gas rig in the shadow of an island may indeed suggest that the arctic will soon be translated into an accessible and valuable hydrocarbon landscape. this is in fact the message of henrik madsen, ceo of the industrial concern dnv, and a keynote presenter and co-sponsor of the arctic summit event. standing at the podium, with the event key image draped behind him, madsen detailed a wide-ranging typology for requirements of arctic offshore oil and gas development. throughout journal of business anthropology, 4(1), spring 2015 50 madsen’s techno-scientific presentation, the event’s key image remained behind him as a stable, silent, and legible visual of the projected arctic future. madsen himself, though not having publicly stated his approval of the key image, expressed his alignment by his willingness to stand before it while outlining future development (imagine, for example, the unreality of the same ceo making these statements while standing in front of a nazi swastika banner). thus, in the same manner in which proximity associates the key image with fixed temporality, formal etiquette, discursive space, artistic appreciation, and individual inspection, the image―through its acceptability as a background representation for a cosponsoring organization―is enrolled as a suitable proxy for numerous details concerning a wide-ranging typology for arctic offshore oil and gas development. twenty-five speakers in all took to the stage, offering contrasting viewpoints in as much detail as offered by madsen. the event key image, therefore, whatever its meaning, was supportive of all perspectives of the speakers and roundtable discussants. in this way, the key event image was a silent public visual that was taken for granted by participants, instead of being openly debated for what it really was: an artificial vision whose finality of form absorbed representations of accountability and authenticity. conclusion the energy salon is an object that i created for producing academic knowledge in the form of ethnographic typologies associated with energy planning. in this, i follow standard practice in anthropology of requiring a stable subject to create purposeful data―culture being the most notable of these methodological fictions. by constructing the salon-space, i draw attention to a common structure surrounding expert performance in which incidental characters (security, promotional images, etiquette) allow energy knowledge to form a center so as to appear agentive, singular, and authoritative. returning to the work of malinowski (1986), such incidental features function to give structure to otherwise uncertain and unpredictable circumstances. malinowski’s observations, for instance, describe the role of magical activity in giving a meaningful structure to the uncertainties of dangerous outer-lagoon fishing, which he contrasts with the relative absence of ritual and magic in the safer innerlagoon fishing. this work served as the classical anthropological illustration that ritual-like incidentals function to give a sense of predictability to contexts of insecurity. in other words, given the absence of a pragmatic means/end relationship, what max weber (1946) defined as reason and rationality under conditions of modernity (p. 152), the magical system provides capacity for reconciling “gigantic variations on the theme of the principle of causality” (levi-strauss 1968: 11). in the present case, my focus on promotional imagery suggests two features. first, the energy event key image is the accretion of a new mason / inside the energy salon 51 material-epistemic investment, suggesting a historical development in the management and stabilization of interpretation in energy planning. that is, where qualitative knowledge of energy futures is highly unpredictable, the piling up of so-called judgment devices, in this case promotional imagery, works to shore up the legitimacy of expert predictions. promotional imagery therefore is an auxiliary instrument as part of this investment. at energy roundtable events, the promotional image suggests the unanimous embrace of a key visual whose individual meanings are displaced by its ritualized enrollment as a proxy for a fixed temporality, formalized etiquette, discursive space, artistic installation, and individual identification. its presence inside the energy salon contributes to the transformation of all things and experiences toward the economic accumulations and risks that surround energy planning. through installation and illusion, promotional images at roundtable events intensify the distribution across varied spatial and personal recesses of a shared judgment about the salon―an idea about the integrity of knowledge whose strengths might otherwise have to be weighted solely on dramaturgical centralized locations such as the speaking subject of expertise. second, the promotional image achieves its own singularity of visual form by its installation in the contrasting authenticity of expert images, and thus forms its own center. in this way, the key promotional image contributes toward an emerging epic structure of the energy salon itself, where the incidental character of the key image finds the particular pedestal of its unique form in the ubiquity, immediacy of recognition, and silence of distribution across varied spatial and personal recesses. film critic vlada petric (1999) considers a similar task in his discussion of epic structure in the film andrei rublev, andrei tarkovsky’s film depicting the life of a medieval religious painter. in one passage, petric points out that one of the essential features of epic structure in literature, movies, or painting is that each character forms a center: “if you concentrate on any one figure of [vittore] carpaccio’s paintings you begin to see with unmistakable clarity that everything else is mere context, background, built up as a kind of pedestal for this incidental character. likewise, in almost of every episode of andrei rublev there is an incidental character raised to the pedestal with the protagonist acting almost as an incidental character”. likewise, the event key image builds on existing practice of stabilizing uncertain energy futures through its self-enclosed ideological form which remains both an incidental characteristic and ubiquitous figure of the energy salon. journal of business anthropology, 4(1), spring 2015 52 references agha, a. 2007. language and social relations. new york: cambridge university press. appadurai, a. (ed.) 1986. the social life of things. cambridge: university of cambridge press. bakhtin, m. 1994. discourse in the novel. in m. holquist (ed.) the dialogical imagination. austin: university of texas press. bauman, z. 1987. legislators and interpreters. ithaca: cornell university press. delacour h. and b. leca. 2011. a salon’s life: field-configuring event, power and contestation in a creative field. in b. moeran and j. s. pedersen (eds.), negotiating values in the creative industries. cambridge: cambridge university press. elias, n. 2006. court society. dublin: university college dublin press. haug, w. 1986. ‪critique of commodity aesthetics‬: ‪appearance, sexuality, and advertising in capitalist society‬. university of minnesota press. ‪‪‪‪‪‪‪‪‪‪‪‪‪‪‪‪‪‪‪‪‪‪‪‪‪‪‪‪‪‪‪‪‪‪‪‪‪‪‪‪ havens, t. 2011. inventing universal television: restricted access, promotional extravagance, and the distribution of value at global television markets. in b. moeran and j. s. pedersen (eds.), negotiating values in the creative industries. cambridge: cambridge university press. karpik, l. 2010. valuing the unique: the economics of singularities. princeton: princeton university press. knox, h., o’doherty, d.,vurdubakis c. westrup 2007. transformative capacity, information technology, and the making of business experts. the sociological review, 55:1: 22-41. levi-strauss, claude. chicago: university of chicago press. the savage mind. 1968. mckenna, c. 2006. the world’s newest profession. cambridge: cambridge university press. malefyt, t. 2003. models, metaphors and client relations: the negotiated meanings of advertising . in t. malefyt and b. moeran (eds.), advertising cultures. oxford: berg. malinowski, b. 1984. argonauts of the western pacific. new york. waveland press. mason, a. 2012 (with m stoilkova). corporeality of consultant expertise. northern studies 6, 2: 85-98. mason, a. 2007. consultant forecasting in liberalized gas markets. public culture 19, 2: 367-379. mason, a. 2006. images of the energy future. environmental research letters 1, 1: 12-20. mason / inside the energy salon 53 menand l. 2010. top of the pops. the new yorker, 11 january 2010. moeran, b. 2010. the book fair as a tournament of values. journal of the royal anthropological institute 16, 138-154. moeran, b. 2005. tricks of the trade: the performance and interpretation of authenticity. journal of management studies 42, 5: 901-922. moeran, b. and j. s. pedersen, 2011. introduction. in b. moeran and j. s. pedersen (eds.), negotiating values in the creative industries. cambridge: cambridge university press. munn, n. 1986. fame of gawa. duke university press. petric, v. 1999. commentary to andrei rublev. criterion film collection. shapin, s. 1994. a social history of truth. chicago: university of chicago press. silverstein, m. 2006. old wine, new ethnographic lexicography. annual review of anthropology 35:481-96. wallace, d. 2010. governing the future. aukland: commons publishing. wapner p. 1995. politics beyond the state. world politics, 47, 3: 311-340. weber, m. 1946. from max weber. gerth h. h. & mills c. w. (eds.). new york: oxford university press. wernick, a. 1994. promotional culture. london: sage publications. wilson, j. 1971. the dead hand of regulation. the public interest, 25: 5478. žižek, s. 1991. the sublime object of ideology. london: verso. arthur mason is visiting faculty at rice university in the department of anthropology. he is an arctic anthropologist specializing in cultures of expertise, oil and gas development, and ritual and performativity. arthur was previously a ciriacy-wantrup fellow in the department of geography at the university of california berkeley, and is the co-editor of subterranean estates: lifeworlds of oil and gas (cornell university press, 2015). a three-time fulbright chair award grantee (norway, canada, russia), he has a phd in anthropology from uc berkeley. arthur may be reached at arthur.mason@rice.edu mailto:arthur.mason@rice.edu possessed by the zeitgeist: inspiration and prophecy in the business of fashion kasper tang vangkilde abstract the ability to foretell the future―and, as such, to conquer and determine it―is an essential preoccupation of contemporary business, which supposedly distinguishes the winners from the losers. the business of fashion is perhaps the case in point, being inherently concerned with continually staking out new paths into the future. in this article, i explore how fashion designers deal with this imperative through processes of seeking inspiration, constituting a distinctive “technology of prefiguration” by which the designers come to enter a prophetic condition. rooted in an animistic mode of being, this attests to a shamanic practice, which entails the designers becoming possessed by a zeitgeist and, hence, turning into prophetic agents with particular visions of the future. the world of fashion is, in this sense, populated by entities and processes not commonly associated with modern business, in that animistic tendencies, jumping things, spiritual beings and shamanic efforts enable the designers to attain otherwise unattainable prophetic viewpoints. underlying this argument is a more general ambition to open up our conception of business, as i suggest that business anthropologists may do well to uphold a profound naïveté in their methodology, which may essentially challenge and revise our assessment of modern capitalism. page 1 of 23 jba 4(2): 178-200 fall 2015 © the author(s) 2015 issn 2245-4217 www.cbs.dk/jba vangkilde / possessed by the zeitgeist 179 keywords the future, inspiration, prophecy, prefiguration, animism, shamanism, fashion “you always have to be in the zeitgeist. you know?” catherine pauses and looks at me, as if she wants to make sure that i am not completely lost. “yeah, in the time spirit,” i respond briefly, trying not to interrupt her flow of speech. we are engaged in a conversation about fashion and, in particular, what it is that makes a good fashion designer. and catherine, a fashion designer by training, has quite a few things on her mind. “so, you have to have this feeling for this time spirit in a way, because then you know basically what people are going to like in maybe one year.” now, i probably look more puzzled, thinking hard about what she is actually saying. catherine senses my puzzlement immediately. she elaborates: if you know a lot about what is happening in the world, you can also already imagine how things might be in one or two years’ time. there are a lot of trend reports and things like this, but it’s not only this. you have to kind of feel it or take it in. indeed, the ability or endeavour to anticipate the future and, in the same process, to bend it in a particular direction is an essential preoccupation of modern western business. this is nothing new, of course. about 20 years ago, business gurus gary hamel and c. k. prahalad emphasized in their bestseller competing for the future (1996), a book notoriously “not about catching up” but “about getting ahead” (ibid. x), that “[e]very company is in the process of becoming―of becoming an anachronism irrelevant to the future, or of becoming the harbinger of the future” (ibid. xi). for this reason, a number of sustained efforts to prefigure the future so as to “colonize” it strategically prevail in business organizations: big data analytics, user-driven innovation, design thinking workshops, prototyping, coolhunting and trendspotting are just a few examples of diverse kinds of “technologies of prefiguration” (see jiménez 2013), which seek to explore and capture, here and now, what is yet to come. the future, in a nutshell, is both a potentially valuable and highly contested space. as we all know, a defining characteristic of the future is precisely that it is so hard to foretell and, thus, inherently uncertain. the business of fashion is no exception. in fact, as the economist richard caves argues, creative industries are essentially characterized by a “nobody knows property,” which denotes the fact that no one can know with certainty how consumers will respond to new products. demand is, as such, highly uncertain and success unpredictable (2000:2-3; see also moeran 2005:172-173). in this respect, catherine, as well as other fashion designers, clearly believe that trend reports, market research and the like journal of business anthropology, 4(2), fall 2015 180 will only take you so far (see also entwistle 2009:138). instead, “you have to know the time spirit,” as rebecca, another fashion designer, contends. “you have to have a feeling for the time, or era in which we’re living.” her reason seems clear enough: “some people are doing foresight research to tell what is going to happen, and i think that a good designer should have just a feeling, so that when he sees something he knows that maybe it could become important. just a feeling about the time and what is going to happen.” referring to a zeitgeist is certainly not uncommon among fashion designers, and the notion has been much debated in fashion research as an explanation of fashion changes. in the most cited but also most clichéd interpretation, it has been suggested, for instance, that hemlines tend to drop during economic depressions and rise during economic booms (cf. entwistle 2000:63-64). apart from such a problematic, simplistic and reductionist theory, herbert blumer famously argued that fashion is a result of a process of collective selection in which designers, buyers and other agents make significant choices about which designs to create, buy and promote. although highly competitive and secretive, these agents make surprisingly similar choices, which, according to blumer, are due to their immersion in, and responsiveness to, “a remarkably common world of intense stimulation” (1969:279); that is, “a ‘spirit of the times’ or a zeitgeist” (ibid. 283). the key point remains, however, that the zeitgeist is exclusively discussed as an analytical concept rather than as an empirical reality which is considered serious business by a range of agents―not least by catherine, rebecca and other fashion designers. should we not then, as anthropologists, take descriptions of it just as seriously as anything else? in this article, i intend to do this by focusing attention on fashion designers’ persistent concern with becoming inspired. drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in hugo boss, a leading european fashion company,1 i shall argue the following: processes of inspiration constitute a distinctive technology of prefiguration by which fashion designers enter a prophetic condition. or, to put it differently, the sustained endeavour to become inspired is a particular way of dealing with the imperative of modern capitalist business to anticipate an inherently uncertain future. this entails two main processes. first, inspiration serves to impose a spatial distance on existing things and phenomena, allowing designers to envisage a fashion collection from a new perspective. second, inspiration serves to impose a temporal distance on the present, enabling designers 1 the fieldwork was conducted over eight months in 2007. puzzled by the fact that fashion designers face the challenge of being creative in highly specific time interval―for instance, in season―i gained access to hugo boss for the purpose of exploring how creativity, itself a “fashionable” phenomenon in the late modern world, unfolds in practice. vangkilde / possessed by the zeitgeist 181 to see―or see from―a future point in time. recalling the etymology of the term “in-spiration,” meaning the blowing of spirit into a subject or the possession of a subject by a superior power (cf. salamon 2005:48), i contend that these processes are deeply rooted in an animistic condition of being―that is, a tendency to perceive nonhuman entities as being alive―which forms the basis for a shamanic practice by which the designers become possessed by the zeitgeist―and, as such, turn into prophetic agents with particular visions of the future.2 now, if this sounds somewhat radical, it is indeed my point. following certain recent trends in anthropology, i subscribe to the view that we ought to be careful not to substitute surprising things and phenomena encountered in fieldwork with recourse to more familiar conceptions, thus explaining our surprises away (see e.g. henare et al. 2007a; latour 2005). while it is surely possible to analyse and, in a sense, deconstruct the zeitgeist as an obvious articulation of the romantic trope of “the creative person,” representing a sort of emissary of the divine (negus & pickering 2004:3-4), such an analysis would fail to take seriously what the designers themselves take seriously, relegating their experiences, perceptions and beliefs to mere romanticism; that is, they may think and say this, but i, as an anthropologist, know better (see also willerslev 2007:181-182). as the key objective of anthropology is, i believe, “to open up the world, rather than to seek closure” (ingold 2008:84, original emphasis)―that is, to continually explore “new possibilities for thinking about experience” (jackson 2013:88)―it is imperative that we uphold a profound naïveté and refrain from limiting in advance our understandings and conceptions.3 indeed, this may be particularly crucial in business anthropology, which tends to focus on contexts and activities that are “deceptively familiar” (krause-jensen 2013:43). in what follows, this methodological strategy shall lead us to see a world of business awash with entities and processes―animistic tendencies, jumping things, spiritual beings, shamanic practices, prophetic agents―which deeply challenge and revise our common assessment of what modern capitalist practices entail; and, as such, of what it, more generally, means to be modern. even hard-core business may be in-spired. 2 while a few studies have argued that “sources of inspiration are essential for continuing creativity” (eckert & stacey 1998; see also mete 2006), the processes of inspiration remain largely a black box in research on fashion. 3 as bruno latour emphasizes: “we have to resist the idea that there exists somewhere a dictionary where all the variegated words of the actors can be translated into the few words of the social vocabulary. will we have the courage not to substitute an unknown expression for a well-known one?” (2005:48, original emphasis). journal of business anthropology, 4(2), fall 2015 182 capacitating spaces―and relating to the world as continuous birth for fashion designers, just about anything can be a source of inspiration. or so, at least, it appears. we know, for instance, that giorgio armani was once inspired by the mountains of mongolia and china (davis 1992:128), john galliano by different images from the time of napoleon (mete 2006:284) and elsa schiaparelli by salvador dalí’s lobster telephone (ibid. 286). one could, therefore, easily be fooled into believing that the particular place to become inspired is not important. this is, however, far from the case. in fact, discussions about where to go on so-called “inspiration trips” can be fairly intense, as fashion designers tend to find it critical to be in the right place to become inspired―and the right place often differs not only from season to season but also from designer to designer. for the creative director of boss orange, a more casual brand in hugo boss, places with second-hand stores and street markets are particularly inspiring: “i don’t go to the chic places to see people who are dressed in gucci, prada or whatever. this doesn’t give me anything really. okay, people are well-dressed, but the new is not there. the new is always in the second-hand places.” i shall return to this rather intriguing and somewhat paradoxical statement about the new being in the second-hand places. for now, it should merely be noted that even if anything can potentially be inspiring, some places are believed to be significantly more inspiring than others. such places, i suggest, can be seen as a kind of “clusters of inspiration” in that they are perceived to constitute particularly dense agglomerations of sources of inspiration. the point is that when the designers are probing into such clusters of inspiration, these places come to function as capacitating spaces, to rephrase a pair of terms put together by alberto corzín jiménez (2003); that is, they come to capacitate or enable the designers to do things that would hardly be possible otherwise. or, to be more precise, they come to function in this way if the designers are open to it. in the following, i shall give this point ethnographic substance by turning to a group of five talented fashion designers, employed for half a year at hugo boss to work on a specific innovation project.4 early on a wednesday morning in february, i meet up with the fashion designers. in a presentation for the creative director a couple of days ago, the designers have received the discouraging message that their work is by no means progressing as expected. in fact, they are completely off track, having more or less misunderstood their task. left with no clear 4 i have described this project in much detail elsewhere, although for a different purpose (see vangkilde 2013). here, i therefore limit the description to a brief snapshot of one the inspiration trips in order to delve more deeply into inspiration in particular. vangkilde / possessed by the zeitgeist 183 idea on how to proceed with the project, the designers now find that they need to get away from the office in order to seek new inspiration. and since milan, one of the world’s most famous fashion cities, is nearby, we decide to spend the day here, visiting museums, bookstores, furniture shops, fashion stores, restaurants and bars. as such, we are all in a good mood, highly excited about what the day might bring. having visited the first museum, we discover a bookstore, as well as a store offering clothing, arts and crafts, right next to the museum. when we enter the stores, the designers walk around more or less separately, looking carefully at all the different things. not all of these are, of course, equally exciting, as some of them are almost ignored while others are seen as much more fascinating. among the latter are not merely shoes, bags, clothes and other fashion accessories but, just as often, or perhaps even more so, things of a quite different nature. katja, for instance, is very interested in a book which she finds really cool. she shows me a few pages of it, in which pictures of cd covers from hard rock and heavy metal bands are surrounded by pictures of entirely different things, such as a flower, a teddy bear, a puppet, or the like. she explains that she really likes this unusual and surprising combination, and louise adds that it is always so exciting when you see something that you have not seen or thought of before. after some time, we continue on to another museum, which is hosting an exhibition called “the new italian design.” this exhibition presents a wide range of designers in such areas as product design, food design, graphics and much more, and, again, the designers are highly enthusiastic. as in the stores, it is not merely things like handbags, jewellery and other accessories that attract the designers’ attention. rather, it is more often other kinds of design that they find truly fascinating. one creation, in particular, called un seconda vita―a second life―inspires rebecca. at first glance, the creation shows a broken bowl, but broken in a particular way so that each of the broken pieces becomes a small plate. rebecca says that she really likes this idea of something getting a second life, and she ponders over whether it could be applied to clothing as well. she tells me that she will indeed think more about this. in much the same way, various other creations become sources of possible new ideas, because they are found to be quite exceptional. after a few hours, we decide to turn our attention to milan’s famous shopping areas. since our plan is flexible, we spend the next hours going from shop to shop, looking at all sorts of things, including furniture, antiques, interior design, books, art, expensive designer clothes and mainstream fashion. we visit all those stores which, for one reason or another, attract our attention; for instance because of a great amount of weird stuff in the window, an unusual interior design, or something else. in these stores, the designers eagerly explore and discuss a large number of things, both the minor details and the overall construction of what they journal of business anthropology, 4(2), fall 2015 184 examine. in this respect, looking and touching are not always enough, as certain items of clothing must even be put on in order to see how they really look and feel. let this brief description suffice to emphasize that the designers demonstrate a quite extraordinary attention to everything and everyone around them; people, things, buildings, sounds, smells etc. according to the creative director, this kind of attention is apparently an inherent part of his personality: “as a person, i am very curious. i see how people are dressed, what they are doing, how they are, and what they want to communicate in the way that they are dressing. so, i am always looking left and right, and sometimes it is too much. i have to admit that it has happened more than once that people have come up to me and said: ‘do you have a problem?’ but the reason has always been that i was just attracted by a pair of jeans, a pair of shoes or whatever.” this heightened attention is precisely what we see turned on to its utmost level of intensity in milan. as the designers go from shop to shop, and street to street, they carefully observe and explore a range of people and things, activating all their senses in the process. things are touched, materials smelled, people observed, and so forth. in a sense, they appear much like a kind of “urban hunter,” tirelessly in pursuit of things, pictures, atmospheres and other constituents that could provide food for thought, as it were. as tim ingold stresses, people who hunt for subsistence generally have a very intimate knowledge of the landscape and its plant and animal inhabitants (2000:111). importantly, hunters are also often associated with an animistic way of being (see, for example, ingold 2000:111-131; viveiros de castro 1998; willerslev 2007). as one of the earliest notions in anthropology, animism is traditionally known to denote the human tendency to endow nonhuman entities with human characteristics (descola 1996:87; willerslev 2007:2). ingold points out, however, that the distinctive feature of the animist ontology is not so much the recognition that life is in things but rather that things are in life, caught up in a never-ending process of coming into being (2007:31). as he elaborates: this [animism as a condition of being] could be described as a condition of being alive to the world, characterised by a heightened sensitivity and responsiveness, in perception and action, to an environment that is always in flux, never the same from one moment to the next (ingold 2006:10). in this condition of being, in other words, the world is a nascent world, continuously about to disclose itself for what it is. and this condition, ingold goes on, is not just characteristic of animists in such regions as amazonia or siberia, but can also be seen among painters, as described by vangkilde / possessed by the zeitgeist 185 merleau-ponty. the painter, according to merleau-ponty, does not observe a pre-formed and complete world with the purpose of representing it. quite the contrary, he relates to it as though it were continuously being born; that is, “as though at every moment the painter opened his eyes to the world for the first time” (ibid. 12). i cannot conceive of a more accurate way of describing the heightened sensitivity and responsiveness of the designers in milan. creations in museums, clothing in fashion stores, people in the streets and so on are sensuously explored in every possible way, as if nothing like it has ever previously existed. while i was surely inclined to see entities―fixed and complete, however odd or remarkable they appeared―the designers always saw potentials, constantly exploring what things might become rather than what they were. crucially, this is not just a matter of being “attuned to an impressive degree to modern developments,” as blumer has it (1969:279), but of relating to the world in a very particular way. like many other hunters (ingold 2000:51), the designers are present at the continued birth of the world―that is, at the fact that things are alive―for which reason they are not turned in upon themselves, but open to the world around them (cf. ingold 2007:31-32). catherine explained this to me surprisingly clearly: “i think that it is very important to always look at things in a new way and never take things as they are. you have to be really openminded, and i think that you always have to, you know, look at everything that is happening around you, take everything inside in a way.” is catherine not a true animist? a designer has to be open-minded, never taking things as they are, always approaching life as a process of ongoing generation. as such, we get a first hint of why the creative director’s statement about the new being in second-hand places may not be so paradoxical after all; even used things, and perhaps used things in particular, are alive and undergoing continuous growth. now, two points should be clear. first, the designers’ sensuous immersion in clusters of inspiration bears testimony to the profound significance of space in processes of seeking inspiration. becoming inspired cannot just happen anywhere, but needs to be initiated in a particular somewhere. the designers clearly find it crucial to get away from their everyday surroundings and immerse themselves in settings marked off from the ordinary, meaning that clusters of inspiration occupy a liminal position which renders it possible to turn them into spaces of “undreamt-of opportunities” (see hastrup 2004:92). however, and this is the second point, such spaces emerge not as a simple effect of their liminal positions, but take form through the designers’ distinct mode of relating to them: that is, as continuous birth. the designers’ sensuous immersion in―and, not least, heightened responsiveness to―the ongoing generation of the world transform the clusters into a kind of magic space, journal of business anthropology, 4(2), fall 2015 186 a site “through which one can reappraise well-known spaces and imagine other textures of life’ (ibid. 111). it is in this sense that the clusters of inspiration come to serve as capacitating spaces, if one is open to it; that is to say, they capacitate the agents immersed in them and being open to the continued birth of the world to become truly inspired. what this entails more precisely is, however, yet to be clarified. jumping things―and the experience of being attracted in milan, it is clear that not everything is considered fascinating and inspiring. some things are more attractive than others, almost irresistibly drawing the designers’ attention to them. in one way or the other, these things are stimulating and extraordinary, somehow standing out from the mass of other things. as art historian james elkins notes, it is almost as if certain things possess such an irresistible effect that they tie us to them by little wires (1996:19). he puts forward the rather provoking idea that, instead of saying that humans are doing the looking, we might just as well argue that objects are trying to catch our eyes, their gleams and glints being a sort of hook that snares us. thus, to go on an inspiration trip and immerse oneself in museums, stores or similar contexts is to be “like fish who like to swim in waters full of hooks’ (ibid. 20). of course, the designers are the ones in pursuit of things but, to turn our customary assumption upside down, suggesting that things catch our eyes rather than, or just as much as, our eyes capturing things is, i believe, a thoughtprovoking yet apt invitation in the light of the above animistic condition of being. in the ethnographic studies, some of the most intriguing instances of animate things concern stones. nurit bird-david describes, for instance, how a man from the nayaka, a hunter-gatherer community of south india, relates that his sister-in-law was one day sitting under a tree when suddenly a stone jumped into her lap. the man then points at the stone because it was exactly this stone and not just any stone which had proved its ability to jump (1999:74; see also ingold 2000:97). indeed, to a western ear, such an experience may sound strange, really strange, but it is perhaps more common than we tend to think. is it merely a coincidence, for instance, that the creative director argued that he was attracted by a pair of jeans or shoes, thus ascribing the force of the attraction more to the jeans and shoes than to himself? moreover, the un seconda vita creation also appeared to approach rebecca as much as she was approaching it, since she was not looking specifically for this creation, but was rather drawn to it amongst the bulk of other creations. as such, the things perceived to be inspiring were always described as either wild, crazy, attractive, eye-catching, and so on, always causing a stir and thus capturing their attention. could it be, then, that the inspiring things were not simply in life, as described earlier, but even jumped onto the designers just as the stone had jumped onto the nayaka woman? vangkilde / possessed by the zeitgeist 187 on the face of it, such an idea may perhaps appear outlandish, evidently challenging basic modernist conceptions and certainties which carefully separate subjects from objects, humans from things (see, for example, latour 1993). as ingold argues, it is customary for people in the west to conceive of life as a distinct qualifying attribute; that is, a property which only some entities and not others are believed to possess (2000:96). it follows, then, that insofar as the properly modern way of dealing with things is to perceive them as not possessing the property of life, belonging to the sphere of “lifeless” things separated from “lively” humans, they are naturally incapable of jumping. clearly, the designers are not positioned outside but within such modernist conceptions, and, admittedly, none of them spoke explicitly about inspiring things “jumping onto” them. however, this was what the creative director did say at one point: “i really go through the things,” he said. “i let these things jump on me. i am absolutely open-minded. whatever is coming, is coming.” the famous british fashion designer, alexander mcqueen, similarly recalls how he once became inspired by a peter arnold orchid photograph when he stumbled upon the orchids in a one of his coffee-table books. or, perhaps more to the point, the orchids stumbled upon mcqueen. because, as he explained, these orchids “were so striking and strange that they leaped out at me” (quoted in armstrong 2007:361, emphasis added). while this indicates that the different structural positions between the designers on the floor and a creative director in charge significantly influence how they articulate what, the statement about jumping things is essentially a description of how inspiring things actively respond when one engages with them―a point which also the designers emphasize when they describe these things as wild, eye-catching, crazy, and so on, thus possessing a force of attraction. the question is, however, how are we to take such descriptions and experiences seriously, given our modernist inclinations?5 the nayaka (bird-david 1999), as well as the ojibwa (hallowell 2002[1960]) and the yukaghirs (willerslev 2007), may give us a clue. for them, life is not a property that entities may or may not possess a priori to their engagement in specific fields of relations. rather, it is the other way around: things are perceived to be alive, some of them even to be persons, as and when and because people engage in and maintain relationships with them (bird-david 1999:73). in other words, the quality of life is revealed not as an a priori property but after-the-fact; that is, life is a property of particular fields of relations and not of entities as such (ingold 2000:96-98; willerslev 2007:116-118). it is, therefore, mistaken to 5 by taking it seriously, i mean not to dismiss the description as pure nonsense or explain it away by claiming that the creative director and the designers must clearly be talking in metaphors or articulating a romantic trope of artistic creation, as also stressed earlier. journal of business anthropology, 4(2), fall 2015 188 assume that these people perceive nonhuman entities, in general, as animate any more than we, as moderns, do (hallowell 2002[1960]:24; willerslev 2007:116-117). rather, the important difference is that they see all entities, human and nonhuman, as potentially animate. when inspiring things jump onto, or actively respond to, the creative director and the designers then, we ought not to take it to mean that they perceive of particular things as belonging to a category of the animate in a general sense. rather, following their animistic tendencies, things are experienced to jump or respond, as, when and because they are involved in specific fields of relations and actual engagement. to put it differently, things are alive, jumping and responding, not as outward expressions of life as an innate property, but as the effects of being bound up together with the creative director and the designers in concrete contexts of practical engagement. animism, as rane willerslev argues, is not “an explicitly articulated doctrinal system for perceiving the world,” but rather “something that emerges in particular contexts of close practical involvement” (2007:8). this still leaves us, though, with two questions. why are some things more attractive or inspiring than others? and what, in fact, does it entail that things are alive, jumping and responding when engaging with them? engaging with things―and seeing from a new perspective if animate things emerge in and through their close practical engagement with the creative director and the designers, it follows that an answer to these questions must be sought in a thorough exploration of this engagement. in an interview with lisa, one of the designers from the trip to milan, this comes up rather suddenly as she looks at my recorder and says: “another area of knowledge which i think is important is to be able to make a connection; for instance, if i see a recorder, to be able to imagine it or to translate it into a shirt.” i have absolutely no clue as to what a shirt inspired by a recorder would look like. but it should be clear that the engagement between lisa and the recorder cannot be entirely understood as an act of bricolage (lévi-strauss 1966), as so many other discussions of creativity and design have it (see, for example, friedman 2001; louridas 1999). lisa does resemble a bricoleur in the sense that she engages “in a sort of dialogue with” the recorder in order “to discover what [it] could ‘signify’” (lévi-strauss 1966:18). she may also be claimed to interrogate an already existing “set of tools and materials” (ibid. 17). but, like the creative director always visiting second-hand stores, the point is not that she reorganizes these elements and thus creates an unprecedented combination between a recorder and a shirt. this should be even clearer when we listen to catherine, who does not zoom in on my recorder, but on a lamp: “i could also take that lamp over there and say, ‘okay, this is my inspiration.’ you can get something out of it. it is no problem. you vangkilde / possessed by the zeitgeist 189 can do a collection with this lamp as an inspiration. it just has to be your inspiration. i could see, for example, big white tops, and then really thin trousers. it is just an example, and that would run through. and then this round shape of it, you could try to have this as a topic going through as well. i would do big tops with thin trousers, and then i would find something else. i think that this round shape could be included as well.” this is hardly a bricoleur who speaks, not even if we recall the point that bricolage is not only a technical but also an intellectual activity (ibid.). the engagement between catherine and the lamp is not one of reorganization, producing transformation or newness through an act of combining the lamp with tops and trousers. rather more like the engineer who, as lévistrauss emphasizes, “is always trying to make his way out of and go beyond the constraints imposed” (ibid. 19), catherine seeks to envisage a fashion collection in a new way. at issue, then, are both elements of bricolage―that is, working with signs already established―and elements of engineering―that is, pointing towards concepts yet to come. so how are we to conceive of the engagement between catherine and the lamp? in his book on the nature of seeing, intriguingly entitled the object stares back (1996), elkins takes as his starting point the common assumption that seeing is “just looking;” that is, we open our eyes, light comes in, and we see the world. seeing is, in this way, a passive, unthinking act, which builds on the idea that the observer and the object are two separate entities; the observer looks at the object as if from a detached position (ibid. 17-19). elkins contends, however, that all of this is a lie. there is no fixed observer, no fixed object and no such thing as “just looking.” in fact, the reduction of seeing to a formula with a looking subject and a seen object is far too simple (ibid. 35). rather, the observer and the object are entangled in the sense that the former’s gaze shoots out towards the latter from which light travels back to the former, altering the one and the other in the process (ibid. 43). this may sound a bit knotty, but elkins emphasizes that seeing is essentially a reciprocal process. his argument goes something like this: when i look at someone, and this someone looks back at me, i watch how he or she responds to me so as to gain an updated sense of myself. as i see, i therefore also see myself being seen, which is to say that i see myself from the point of view of the person that i am seeing (ibid. 70-71). now, elkins’s thought-provoking point is that this process includes objects as well. in brief, objects grow eyes and stare back: each object has a presence―a being and a face of its own―and if we take that seriously (not as a vague intuition but as a fact of vision), then the world is full of eyes. seeing is being seen, and the world is so crowded with things that see and stare that we can stand to be aware of only a tiny fraction of them: more would overwhelm us (ibid. 12). journal of business anthropology, 4(2), fall 2015 190 elkins argues, in other words, that seeing is not just something that we do but something that happens to us (ibid. 35). when we look at an object, it looks back, as it were, and we come to understand something, not merely about the object but also about ourselves. for instance, looking at a book may give us information about the book but, at the same time, it may also remind us of the particular point in time when we were interested in that book (ibid. 74). to see is, in a nutshell, also to be seen. although elkins is solely concerned with the nature of seeing, his line of reasoning may provide us with an idea as to how we might construe the designers’ broader sensuous engagement with things around them. catherine tells us that she could easily take the lamp as her source of inspiration. in fact, it would cause her no problems, since she could see big white tops, thin trousers and something with a round shape. like the sensuous engagement with things in milan, she explores the lamp carefully―its colour, its materials, its construction, and so on―and, in this process, the lamp stares back, as it were, making a difference to how catherine envisages a fashion collection. the question seems to be: what is it that the lamp says? in a paper intriguingly entitled “can the thing speak?”, martin holbraad suggests that things may be said to have their own language―“thingese,” he calls it―which consists of their material characteristics. these, he emphasizes, “can dictate particular forms for their conceptualization” (2011:18), meaning that things may yield their own concepts and speak for themselves, if you will (ibid. 17-19). as catherine explores the lamp, it stares or speaks back in a way that calls into question our common (modern) distinction between concepts and things (see henare et al. 2007b). the design of the lamp and its material characteristics yield a concept of its own in the sense that the lamp provides a distinctive perspective on how a fashion collection may be envisaged. as a kind of effect of the lamp, catherine sees big white tops, thin trousers, and something with a round shape. in this way catherine enters into a practical engagement with the lamp, whereby she explores it with all her senses, and whereby she comes to see herself being seen, to follow elkins’s reasoning. in a sense, she comes to see herself from the point of view of the lamp; or, to be more precise, she comes to see a possible new fashion collection from this distinct perspective.6 the lamp, un seconda vita and other things are thus being both “looked at” and “looked from” in the same process, with the effect that they come to constitute distinct perspectives from which a fashion collection may be envisaged. as such, the engagement is not a one-way relatedness, as the designers are not approaching things as passive objects for their explorative gaze. quite the reverse, things are perceived as being alive, caught up in a continuous birth, for which reason 6 i thank morten axel pedersen for being the one who first suggested that catherine was looking from the point of view of the lamp. the way in which i have pursued this idea is, however, my responsibility alone. vangkilde / possessed by the zeitgeist 191 the engagement is a two-way responsive relatedness characteristic of an animistic condition of being. as bird-david describes what she calls an “animistic epistemology,” epitomized in the phrase that the nayaka are “talking with” things: “talking with” stands for attentiveness to variances and invariances in behavior and response of things in states of relatedness and for getting to know such things as they change through the vicissitudes over time of the engagement with them. to “talk with a tree”―rather than “cut it down” [the modernist epistemology]―is to perceive what it does as one acts towards it, being aware concurrently of changes in oneself and the tree. it is expecting response and responding, growing into mutual responsiveness and, furthermore, possibly into mutual responsibility (1999:77, original emphasis). this kind of animistic epistemology characterizes also the designers. their close practical engagement with a lamp, a recorder, un seconda vita, and so on is likewise one of “talking,” in that the designers are highly attentive to the ways in which these things respond as they come closer to them, look carefully at them, touch them, smell them, and so forth. in this sense, things are, to quote elkins, “no longer just things out there to be seen but also places where i can think about seeing and being seen” (1996:70). in brief, they constitute points of view which stare and talk back. all of this is momentous. when the designers pursue new inspiration, they enter into mutually responsive engagements with a range of things. this entails that, in the process of exploring these things, they come to see themselves from the perspective of those things; or, to be more precise, the things come to represent distinctive points of view from which they can envisage potentially new fashion collections. the key point is, thus, that the things afford (cf. gibson 1979) distinctive possibilities in the engagement with them; that is, they form part of a “circuit of affordances,” as moeran has aptly termed it (2014), in that they afford particular forms of conceptualization (holbraad 2011:18). although the designers engage with all things in this manner due to their animistic tendencies, only certain things stare or talk back in ways that firmly capture their attention. these things possess this force of attraction because the forms for their conceptualization―that is, their distinctive points of view―allow the designers to impose a spatial distance on current things and phenomena, enabling them to see a fashion collection in an unprecedented way. this suggests, finally, why the creative director is so excited about second-hand stores; for in these stores, things and signs established in the past are carefully interrogated (bricolage), and precisely because they constitute uncommon perspectives, they enable him to “cut” his existing points of view and thus move beyond present-day canons (engineering). the inspiring things are, journal of business anthropology, 4(2), fall 2015 192 therefore, always jumping or responding, being wild, crazy and extraordinary, as the two-way responsive engagement with them grants access to new perspectives. connecting with the zeitgeist―and entering a prophetic condition while the engagement between the things and the designers may perhaps appear somewhat fetishistic (see e.g. ellen 1988; hornborg 2006) as the former not only respond to but exert a significant effect on the latter, i shall now argue that the designers become possessed, not so much by particular things, as by a distinctive spirit: namely, the zeitgeist. there is, as such, a quite intricate relation between immersing oneself in concrete material surroundings and connecting with a spiritual realm. in what follows, i seek to clarify this relation. to get at this issue, we shall begin with the intriguing observation that the designers clearly find numerous things to be inspiring as we tour milan. so how can they determine, as sociologist patrik aspers asks, “among the things that they are inspired by, what actually to do” (2006:749)? faced with this question, it is typical to hear designers object that “this is so difficult to talk about” (see also ibid. 750). in addition, they often refer to a certain bodily feeling, which might be described as a kind of “gut feeling” or “fingerspitzengefühl” (cf. aspers 2001:45-46; entwistle 2009:131). listen, for instance, to lisa: “you have to have a certain feeling about trends. you have to have a sensibility to see which things exist right now, so that you can say that ‘now, it is enough about those things; now, we need to have something new.’ yeah, a special sense maybe.” this special sense or feeling may call to mind pierre bourdieu’s notion of practical sense or “feel for the game,” which denotes the “capacity for practical anticipation of the ‘upcoming’ future contained in the present” (1990:66). this capacity is produced by experiences of the game and its structures (ibid.), and one could presumably argue that good designers acquire such a capacity by being so engaged in the field of fashion that an anticipation of the future becomes possible. this is, in fact, what sociologist joanne entwistle argues in an analysis of fashion buyers at selfridges department store. these buyers rely not only on codified forms of knowledge and rational calculation, but also on what entwistle describes as tacit aesthetic knowledge: “an expressive and embodied knowledge derived out of a historical and collective disposition, or fashion habitus” (2009:139, original emphasis). in the present context, however, i think that there is more to it than that. recalling the statements at the beginning of this article, catherine explained, for instance, that “you always have to be in the zeitgeist,” since this enables you to “know basically what people are going to like in maybe one year.” rebecca said more or less the same thing, and vangkilde / possessed by the zeitgeist 193 they both argued that connecting with the zeitgeist is possible if one is highly attentive to the world, knowing much about what goes on in the present. now, does this amount to what bourdieu calls “a feel for the game” and what entwistle terms “tacit aesthetic knowledge”? although such concepts might prove illuminating in certain ways, the resulting analysis would essentially suffer from a crucial flaw: namely, that of too quickly substituting an unfamiliar expression―that is, the zeitgeist―for a familiar one―a feel for the game (latour 2005:47-49). hence, instead of explaining away the zeitgeist, i suggest that we hold our sense of wonder in suspension so as to seize on it as fertile analytical opportunity, thus adopting a strategy of “purposeful naïveté” (henare et al. 2007a:2). in this endeavour, we shall listen carefully to the creative director. in a presentation inside hugo boss, he addressed the issue of how he decides what to do: “it comes quite automatically for me. i don’t have a crystal ball. i just have a feeling that tells me what is right, or what i think is right, and what is not right. […] “in a way, it’s just to follow the wave, because, from my point of view, a designer is a kind of shaman. it is a person who has a possibility of catching something which is not really visible; something which is in the air, which everybody can breathe, but which only some people have the possibility, or the faculty, of translating into reality, into real and concrete things. […] “so, it is very esoteric, untouchable elements which we have to put inside and provide. and i know very well that this is difficult to understand but, believe me, it’s also very difficult to explain, because we’re talking about fresh air, or at least a feeling. it’s not mathematics or physics. i strongly believe that there are energies in nature which are moving things, which are not visible, and which few people have the chance to catch. that is the reason why i make the comparison between the designer and the shaman, because the shaman is also a person who moves from the regular level to another level in order to catch what is there and bring it back.” here, the creative director provides us with another, more detailed, account of the zeitgeist, although he does not use precisely this term.7 as untouchable and invisible yet in the air as something everybody can breathe, but only few people are able to capture and translate into tangible things, the zeitgeist is not embodied in particular material objects, as the notion of fetishism would suggest (ellen 1988:218). nor is it perceived as a person and manifested as a human, an animal or some 7 he used the term in various other statements, however, arguing, for instance, that “we follow the wave, the spirit of the time, which is, in the end, the same thing.” journal of business anthropology, 4(2), fall 2015 194 other concrete entity, as numerous anthropological studies of spirits have shown (morris 2006:15). rather, as a very distinct type of spirit, the zeitgeist is an omnipresent medium in which we are all essentially immersed as we continuously breathe it, not unlike the air, wind and weather which we likewise cannot touch but only touch in, as ingold describes it (2007:29). we simply are in the zeitgeist. but if this is so, what is it that makes certain people like the designers able to connect with it, and others not? with his analogy to shamans, the creative director gives us a clue worth pursuing. in the anthropology of religion, shamanism has been widely debated but is commonly known to denote a spirit-medium, with the ability to serve as a bridge between the spirit world and the human world (morris 2006:17-18). as defined by ioan lewis, a shaman thus represents “an inspired prophet or leader, a charismatic religious figure with the power to control the spirits, usually by incarnating them’ (quoted in ibid. 18). as spirits speak through a shaman, spirit possession is an intrinsic part of the shaman’s capacity to master the spirits (ibid. 24). importantly, eduardo viveiros de castro elaborates that this capacity rests on a particular mode of knowing: animism (2004:468-469). it is only by, first, perceiving an animate world and, second, exploring it through a relational stance―that is, by entering into a reciprocal engagement in order “to take on the point of view of that which must be known” (ibid. 468)―that shamans come to be possessed by the spirits and, thus, to know and control them by adopting their perspectives. shamanism presupposes, in other words, an animistic mode of knowing which essentially grows from the knower’s reciprocal relatedness with the known (bird-david 1999:78); that is, it entails “close and immediate relationships with the divinities or the spirits” (morris 2006:23). the designers’ acute attentiveness to, and two-way engagement with, everything and everyone around them constitutes an animistic mode of knowing, which, i contend, forms the basis for a shamanic practice by which they connect with the zeitgeist. since the zeitgeist is an omnipresent medium flowing through us all, humans and nonhumans, it follows that it can be known or mastered only by attending to and exploring everything carefully. in fact, catherine stated rather clearly that connecting with the zeitgeist comes about by being highly attentive to the present, just like the creative director argued that he is “always looking left and right.” in milan, the designers likewise displayed a heightened sensitivity to, and entered into mutually responsive engagements with, a multitude of things. as “something which is in the air, which everybody can breathe,” as the creative director explained, the zeitgeist is at once everywhere and nowhere but not, however, accessible to anyone. rather, connecting with it hinges on the designers’ animistic condition of being according to which things are not only alive and active but explored and known through a mutual responsive engagement with them; that is, through a particular mode of relating which not only the designers make vangkilde / possessed by the zeitgeist 195 happen but also happens to them. the zeitgeist, i argue, appears precisely in and through this reciprocal relatedness by which the designers, in their exploration of various things during inspiration trips, “open” themselves to the forces or perspectives of the world around them. their animistic inclinations thus underlie a shamanic practice which makes them inspired. the key point of this is not only that the designers gain a finetuned sense of what is happening, but of what is going to happen. “if you know a lot about what is happening in the world,” as catherine said, “you can also already imagine how things might be in one or two years’ time.” in this sense, the future is not detached from the present, but closely linked to it, so that the designers, when connecting with the zeitgeist, essentially become stretched out, as it were, between different points in time (cf. nielsen 2011:398). or, as kirsten hastrup describes the prophetic condition: “while situated in the ‘old’ world, prophets give voice to a ‘new’ one” (1989:224). the connection with the zeitgeist thus entails that the designers come to see, or see from, a future point in time. hence, they can determine what to do and, as a distinct yet not detached temporal moment, the future informs decisions and actions here and now; that is, the present is reimagined from the perspective of the future (see also miyazaki 2006; nielsen 2011). importantly, however, this reimagination ought not to be from a too distant future. as often stressed by the designers, they must be ahead of the market but not too much ahead, because this will lead to fashion collections that consumers are not ready for. they should, therefore, not to be one pace ahead but only half a pace, as the advertising professionals in moeran’s ethnography have it (1996:138). as such, their challenge consists of freeing themselves from the present while remaining anchored in it (hastrup 2004:194), imposing a temporal distance which allows them to see the present from the perspective of the future but also, in a sense, to see the future from the perspective of the present. to be possessed by the zeitgeist is, i contend, to occupy such a prophetic condition. foretelling the future―and upholding a profound naïveté a popular saying, famously stated by abraham lincoln, has it that “the best way to predict the future is to create it.” in a discussion of “the voice of prophecy,” edwin ardener likewise emphasizes that prophecies are not about predicting the future, but about foretelling it; that is, a prophet not merely discovers a new reality, but conceptualizes and defines it (1989). this is precisely what is considered an imperative in modern capitalist business, permeated as it is by a “create/innovate or die” mantra (jeanes 2006:127), impelling companies to continually stake out new paths into the future. in fact, the ability to foretell the future―and, as such, to conquer and colonize it―is apparently what distinguishes the winners journal of business anthropology, 4(2), fall 2015 196 from the losers. the business of fashion is perhaps the epitome of, or even model for, this conviction (see löfgren 2005), given that its very raison d’être is to establish a discontinuity with what exists. in this article, my argument has been that fashion designers approach this imperative by seeking inspiration, based on an animistic mode of being and involving a possession by a zeitgeist. while the inspiring things enable the designers to see a fashion collection from a new perspective, thus imposing a distance in a spatial sense, the possession by the zeitgeist makes them able to see, and see from, a point in the future, thus imposing a distance in a temporal sense. catherine, for instance, may envisage a collection from the point of view of a lamp, but, in order to know if this viewpoint is worth pursuing, she needs to engage with, and open herself to, the multitude of perspectives around her in order to connect with the zeitgeist and see from the future. in this way, processes of inspiration amount to a distinctive technology of prefiguration―a mode of delving into and foretelling what is yet to come―by which the designers become able to act under a condition of inherent uncertainty. in a nutshell, they come to obtain prophetic points of view. more generally, this attests to the ways in which humans tend to engage with certain nonhuman others, particularly spiritual beings, in contexts of high uncertainty. rather than representing “an idle metaphysical tenet,” animism denotes a distinctive mode of relating to nonhuman others, which “can be put to systematic and deliberate use” (viveiros de castro 2004:469). importantly, the analysis presented here explicitly challenges any modernist assumption which strictly separates inert objects from active subjects, lifeless things from lively humans―and, by implication, associates animistic inclinations with pre-moderns only. because “is it really true,” alf hornborg asks, “that we, modern “westerners”, do not animate the objects around us?’ (2006:22, original emphasis). the fashion designers, i believe, provide us with a clear answer, demonstrating how animism (together with shamanism) unfolds under certain circumstances of practical engagement (hallowell 2002[1960]:24; willerslev 2007:8). this, indeed, should caution us against undue exotization of those people portrayed as “animists.” even modern capitalist business thrives on animist and shamanic practices. underlying this argument is what i take to be an essential (business) anthropological ambition to learn how the involved agents themselves perceive their endeavours. if, to us, the designers’ account of a zeitgeist, or the creative director’s experience of jumping things appears somewhat odd, if not even nonsensical, the problem is ours and not theirs (see also henare et al. 2007a:6). the point is, then, to probe ever more deeply into our astonishment and seize on it as an analytical opportunity to challenge our common understandings. such a strategy of “purposeful naïveté” (ibid. 2) is not least significant in business anthropology where a vangkilde / possessed by the zeitgeist 197 core methodological task is, to quote jakob krause-jensen, “to maintain a constant awareness of the differences that underlie the surface similarity in the often-identical […] concepts used by the ethnographer and the informants” (2010:20). as a notion, the zeitgeist was of course familiar to me but, as a being in the world, it was entirely unfamiliar, let alone the animistic mode of relating by which to become possessed by it. business anthropology, i think, will do well to uphold a profound sense of naïveté which will open up, rather than close down, our conception of the world of modern business―of what it is composed and what it is like to be in it. this is, perhaps, the very purpose of a business anthropology. references ardener, edwin. 1989. the voice of prophecy. further problems in the analysis of events. in the voice of prophecy and other essays (pp. 134154). oxford: basil blackwell. armstrong, lisa. 2007. the diary of a dress: alexander mcqueen shares the saga of how one of his inspirations―a peter arnold orchid photograph―evolved from simple sketch to production nightmare to a stunning gown fit for supermodel naomi campbell. in the fashion reader, edited by l. welters and a. lillethun (pp. 361-363). oxford & new york: berg. aspers, patrik. 2001. markets in fashion. a phenomelogical approach. stockholm: city university press. ----------. 2006. contextual knowledge. current sociology 54 (5):745-763. bird-david, nurit. 1999. 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löfgren and r. willim (pp. 47-55). oxford: berg. vangkilde, kasper tang. 2013. in search of a creative concept in hugo boss. in exploring creativity. evaluative practices in innovation, design, and the arts, edited by b. moeran and b. t. christensen (pp. 69-95). cambridge: cambridge university press. viveiros de castro, eduardo. 1998. cosmological deixis and amerindian perspectivism. journal of the royal anthropological institute 4 (3):469488. ----------. 2004. exchanging perspectives. the transformation of objects into subjects in amerindian ontologies. common knowledge 10 (3):463484. willerslev, rane. 2007. soul hunters. hunting, animism, and personhood among the siberian yukaghirs. berkeley, los angeles & london: university of california press. kasper tang vangkilde is associate professor at department of anthropology, school of culture and society, aarhus university. his main research interests are within the fields of business, organizational and design anthropology, with particular emphasis on processes of creativity, branding, management and organization. he holds a ph.d. in anthropology (2012) from the university of copenhagen and is at present mainly responsible for the specialization in “innovation, organization and work” on the master’s degree programme in anthropology at aarhus university. as member of the steering committee of the research network for design anthropology, he is co-editor of the forthcoming design anthropological futures (bloomsbury academic, 2016). he can be reached at etnkvangkilde@cas.au.dk mailto:etnkvangkilde@cas.au.dk ethnography and co-creation in a portuguese consultancy: wine branding research as an example pedro oliveira abstract as ethnography branches into the fields of business, marketing research, innovation and design research, anthropologists working outside academic contexts are developing a set of practices that in many ways mirror the work of academic anthropology and in other ways diverge from it. drawing from the anthropologist viveiros de castro’s notion of controlled equivocation (castro, 2004), this paper explores the relation between academic anthropology and applied business anthropology, clients and anthropologist as a particular kind of ‘equivocation’. a wine branding research case is given as an example. keywords controlled equivocation, branding, ethnography, theory page 1 of 21 jba 1 (2): 197-217 autumn 2012 © the author(s) 2012 issn 2245-4217 www.cbs.dk/jba journal of business anthropology, 1(2), autumn 2012 198 the study of consumption has always been at the forefront of the relation between business and anthropology (baba, 2006). more than three decades ago, mary douglas and baron isherwood’s seminal essay on the anthropology of goods (douglas & isherwood, 1979) rendered consumption a social and cultural phenomenon amenable to anthropological thinking. anthropologists such as daniel miller have extended the arguments put forward by douglas and isherwood, making consumption a central piece in the study of material culture (e.g. 2008, 2010). rethinking consumption anthropologically has also gained a significant expression at the intersection of marketing and anthropology. from john sherry’s (1995) initial writings on marketing and anthropology, to qualitative forms of ethnographic marketing research such as netnography (kozinets, 2009), by way of the study of the relation between rituals and consumption (e.g. grant mccracken, 1990; 2005), and even recent developments in the field of consumer culture theory (arnould & thompson, 2005; sherry & fischer, 2009), the field is clearly in expansion. added to this, there is a current resurgence of business anthropology as a specialized field in which marketing research and consumer research form a substantial area of studies (baba, 2006; jordan, 2003; moeran, 2005; tian, 2010). like most forms of anthropological thinking, a divide is still observable between those who think of consumption predominantly in academic contexts and those who practise forms of applied consumer research in consultancy and corporate settings (e.g. malefyt & moeran 2003; morais & malefyt, 2010; sunderland & denny, 2007). another way of expressing this is to say that the exciting developments of the field are far from breaking the division between scholarly and applied practices. as patricia sunderland and rita denny (2007: 31) put it, regarding the time of consolidation of their professional identities as anthropologists and practising consumer researchers: ‘(…) applied work was deemed as less theoretical, less sophisticated, and ultimately less valuable. (…) the ingoing assumption about applied work was also that it was less “pure” and always a little compromised. moreover, if “applied” in general was “dirty”, consumer research or “marketing” was filthy – wickedly so, in fact. and, discursively, at least in terms of certain industries, it clearly still is’. working predominantly through a semiotic frame, as other anthropologists practising in the field of consumption have done (e.g. mccracken, 1990; 2005), sunderland and denny present us with a clear articulation between processes of immersion in the field and the oliveria / ethnography and co-creation in a portugese consultancy 199 particular sets of theories that organize the data throughout. their own work makes a fundamental contribution to establishing the similarities between corporate and academic anthropologies. paul rabinow once stated that anthropologists’ interests are both ethnographic and anthropological, insofar as they are united through the premise that description and interpretation are aspects of one another. this everpresent enmeshment of description and interpretation conveys a double-concern with cultural difference (‘the exotic’) as much as with broad theoretical questions (rabinow, 2008:34). practitioners of applied consumer research are therefore no different from their academic peers in intent and insight,1 similarities aside, there are substantial differences characterizing the field of consumer research in corporate settings, most often expressed in issues of language. anthropologists communicating with clients cannot afford to do so through the density, complexity, and unattended circularity of much anthropological theory, although this issue is not absent in consumer research literature (denny, 1995; malefyt, 2003). anthropologists working in the commercial world know that anthropological knowledge, and especially knowledge of a theoretical kind, must be communicated in a way that nonanthropological audiences can understand. here, in comparison with academic anthropology, intellectual compromises are brought to the fore. communication with clients must be clear in the usage of language and presented in a different form from an academic paper or article. choosing a different way of communicating may give the appearance of a lesser complexity or of an intellectual compromise. moreover, it remains to be clarified for whom things are a ‘compromise’ and what constitutes an ‘intellectual problem’ in a process of anthropologicallyguided business research conducted outside an academic setting. in this paper, i wish to challenge the notion that ‘applied’ consumer research in the consultancy context is less ‘theoretical’, ‘sophisticated’, or even ‘complex’ than forms of anthropology practised in other contexts. i suggest that a particular form of complexity crosses the entire spectrum of applied consumer research and is often conveyed, disguised or covered by language that seems less complex in 1 comparisons can be stretched beyond marketing anthropology and academic anthropology to similarities found between advertisers and anthropologists as professional groups. as pointed out by malefyt and moeran (2003: 12-17) advertisers must work − and often do − as ‘folk ethnographers’, in order to understand the target audiences they want to affect. both anthropologists and advertisers are fairly insular in how they prefer to communicate with members of their own professional categories. both are constantly involved in efforts of persuasion so as to get the financial resources that will allow them to carry their practices forward. and the similarities go on. the relation between the two groups, in more ways than one, is one of isomorphic similarity rather than of discontinuity. journal of business anthropology, 1(2), autumn 2012 200 form, while shaping the different dialects in which anthropology emerges in relation to clients of different professional affiliations. continuing the claim of previous writings on the subject (oliveira 2010, 2011) and drawing on the writings of other anthropological practitioners working in the field of consumer research (e.g. sunderland and denny, 2007; malefyt and moeran, 2003; morais and malefyt, 2010), i argue that anthropological research as practised at a consultancy level involves a rapid, ever-changing comparison of different anthropologies, or, in final analysis, a comparison of comparisons disclosed in different language forms at different stages of a process. in so doing, i take the claim expressed by viveiros de castro that ‘doing anthropology means comparing anthropologies, nothing more – but nothing less’ (viveiros de castro, 2004: 4). indeed, i take several claims made by viveiros de castro under the notion of controlled equivocation. in so doing i start the work of translation necessary to provide possible answers to the questions posed by this article. are anthropologists working in the business world doomed to provide mischievous, oversimplified proxies of concepts like ‘culture’ or ‘society’ that are deformed to suit the particular ends of corporations? is applied anthropology in a business context a broken mirror of the ‘real anthropology’ practised in academia? how can the notion of controlled equivocation account for some of the problems found in the relation between practice and academia? firstly, evoking the notion of controlled equivocation as a theoretical instrument for the practice of business anthropology is suffused with difficulties. not all of these are resolvable through the notion itself, and to suggest otherwise would imply reducing the notion to a tautological circularity. secondly, controlled equivocation is a concept forged to account for relations between our (western) epistemological worldviews and the worldviews of amerindian cosmologies (viveiros de castro, 1998). controlled equivocation designates the effort of capturing amerindian categories of meaningmaking through the eyes of our own (ethno-psychological) categories of meaning-making. in this sense, controlled equivocation is a notion originating in a radically different cultural context from western business research practice. it is born in amerindian perspectivism (viveiros de castro, 1998): that is, in the view of a world (animistically) populated with peoples and things that tend to see each other in similar ways. one of its main tokens is that, whereas westerners see bodies as expressions of different souls (or ‘minds’, as their modern equivalent), amerindians believe in the unity of a soul cutting across humans and non-humans, expressed in different bodies. in amerindian cosmologies the body is, therefore, a difference in point of view, a property of a soul that is not exclusively human and a manifestation of one of its differences. as viveiros de castro (2004: 9) himself puts it: oliveria / ethnography and co-creation in a portugese consultancy 201 the question for indians, therefore, is not one of knowing “how monkeys see the world” (…), but what world is expressed through monkeys, of what world they are the point of view. i believe this is a lesson from which our own anthropology can learn. if we try to radicalize the use of controlled equivocation (which means operating its migration from an analytical construct to an applied construct that is equally analytical), there are several lessons that can be extracted for the practice of business anthropology. every problem in applied business research contains problems of internal comparison (analogies between domains) and problems of external comparison (our investigations or the mental operations we trace to establish the analogies between domains). these two dimensions do not work separately: rather, they emerge in strict, ontological continuity. hence, working on a problem of innovation, more often than not, involves working through differences found between manufacturers, designers, sales people, marketing people, branding and communication agencies, and all kinds of other agents belonging in an extensive network. each agent in a given network is often the embodiment of a particular viewpoint. the anthropologist navigates around this network by mapping analogies between domains of meaning (for example, analogies between marketing language and design language), within and across different groups or different departments inside a company, while researching ‘consumers’ simultaneously (and therefore tracing analogies between consumers and corporations). bringing an anthropological insight to this world implies the double task of simultaneously comparing understandings of these different groups while setting them all up against anthropological understanding. one moves from internal comparisons (analogies between domains) to inter-cultural comparisons (comparisons between an anthropological understanding and the understanding produced in this kind of network). comparison, therefore, is not a product of translation, but a device that exists at the service of translation (viveiros de castro, 2004: 3). in applied work as well, comparison is king, operating between the different domains of meaning that form a stakeholders’ network or between this network and an anthropological viewpoint:2 to translate is to presume that an equivocation always exists; it is to communicate by differences, instead of silencing the other 2 although my use of ‘network’ is partially inspired by the work of bruno latour (e.g. 2005), the absence of an exhaustive clarification of the overlap between ant and viveiros de castro’s work is yet to be found in anthropology. to explore that overlap is way beyond the scope of this article, although it is a subject deserving further discussion and thought. journal of business anthropology, 1(2), autumn 2012 202 by presuming a univocality—the essential similarity—between what the other and we are saying. viveiros de castro (2004: 8) in applied work in business, this may assume the form of knowing that a distinct network of stakeholders may not be talking exactly about the same thing when, for instance, trying to rethink a new strategy, product or service. different points of equivocation are done and undone along the process. implementation does not necessarily stem from a full consensus at all times with all the agents involved in a network; rather moving from one point of equivocation to the next often comes after agreeing to disagree, in order to get to the next step. anthropologists in business may contribute to generating consensus insofar as they know (better than most) that things keep happening when conflict occurs. in short, consensus is suffused with equivocations that implementations more often mirror, than resolve: an equivocation is indissoluble, or rather, recursive: taking it as an object determines another equivocation ‘higher up’, and so on ad infinitum. viveiros de castro (2004: 9) here, perhaps, lies the most fundamental difference between how an equivocation is dealt with in applied work and academic work. aware of the endless recursiveness of an equivocation (for language itself is recursive), equivocations in applied business anthropology must come to a halt to give rise to a line of action or material implementation. this may be a new strategy, a redesign of a product or service, or a redesign of the ‘marketing mix’ of a new product or service (amongst other possible outcomes). any material outcome, however, has the potential to trigger new meanings in the network of which this outcome is part, therefore extending the equivocation until the next cycle of research. in short: one compares, so as to translate; one stops, only to know that other comparisons will follow; one implements (or contributes to implementation) at the point at which the endless recursiveness of an equivocation must be halted in order to give rise to material implementation. i will proceed with some examples drawn from anthropological literature, and one example of my own experience as a practitioner anthropologist in the field of business anthropology at couture (decode + disrupt), an anthropologically-oriented consultancy in lisbon, portugal, where i currently serve as a research coordinator (http://decodedisrupt.com), side by side with my teaching practice in ethnographic marketing research. compromising, mediating or working across equivocation? http://decodedisrupt.com/ oliveria / ethnography and co-creation in a portugese consultancy 203 an example of how equivocations work in the business context is found in the work of brian moeran (1996). in an ethnography of the daily life of a japanese advertising agency, moeran explores in great ethnographic detail agency negotiations with a client, across different departments and several organizations involved in the creation of an advertising campaign for a brand of contact lenses (ikon breath o2 lenses). broadly speaking, the challenge behind this campaign consisted of creating an overall campaign ranging across television commercial, newspapers, magazines, poster and pamphlet for display at retail outlets. in this frame, both advertising and point of purchase had to contain a single uniting theme. the particular demands made by the client and questions of labour division between the different agencies involved led to a creative team working on two separate projects over a six-month period: either printed matter or television commercial. yet the greatest source of disagreement (further leading to a greater source of ‘compromise’) came from the manufacturer’s views set against the creative views played alongside. while members of the nihon fibre corporation (nfc) manufacturing team wanted the stress to be placed on functional characteristics of the product, such as the amount of oxygen that lenses let pass onto users’ eyeballs, members of the marketing team wanted to focus on potential users and end benefits − for example, the possibility of continuous wear of the lenses. however, in order to gain credibility based on functional characteristics of the product, the communication of ikon breath o2 lenses had to reach doctors as a reliable and medically approved product. this was not as easy as expected, as there are individual differences in users making continuous wearing not recommendable for all cases. as the target in question consisted of young women aged 18 to 25, the creative team found itself trying to persuade three different audiences: the user, the medical profession, and the client. two ideas came to the fore as a result of differences in viewpoint. for the manufacturing team, an idea of ‘corneal physiology’ emerged as a desirable approximation to convey the functional characteristics of the product, although it was one that members of the creative team saw as hardly communicable to the target group. discussion proceeded around whether a celebrity could (and should) communicate the idea of ‘corneal physiology’ to a younger audience. at this point, the art director suggested merging together an image of the product as a combination of soft and hard characteristics, hence building a bridge between functional characteristics (the manufacturer’s viewpoint) and user experience. if the copywriter preferred the idea of ‘corneal physiology’, it still had to take into account individual users’ differences. through a series of complex negotiations between the different people involved, journal of business anthropology, 1(2), autumn 2012 204 described in great ethnographic detail, ‘soft hard’ ended up being chosen as a kind of nickname which salesman, retailers, doctors and lens wearers would all use to identify the nfc product. a form of consensus was reached so that implementation could take place. the author concludes, among other aspects, that working in brand definition and strategy equals the kind of functioning described by lévi-strauss in the savage mind (lévi-strauss, 1966); both the groups described by lévi-strauss and the network in question ‘insist on differentiation, and it is the existence per se of differences between things, rather than the content of such differences, which is of crucial importance to them both’ (moeran, 1996: 126). this example, although it does not stem from applied work in industry, illustrates the kind of movement involved in anthropological thinking in the corporate arena. different networks are mapped according to the meaning produced over one concept, as well as according to that which different groups inside the network are producing around one another. the question is not to find out who is wrong and who is right on the equation, but what is the particular problem of which each of the groups considered in the network stands as a particular viewpoint. analogies between domains (the different departments involved in the production of the campaign) are identified and set accordingly, while at the same time being set against intercultural comparison (our mental operations, themselves a part of culture) when a comparison with the savage mind is brought to the fore. the soft-hard approach selected in the network marks the temporary end of a process of recursiveness of the equivocation going on between materiality (the manufacturer’s view) and user experience (the marketer’s’s view). differences in positioning exist when the anthropologist is, from the very onset, an integral part of the network contributing to final implementations, and also involved in bringing consumers’ views and voices into the corporation. the kind of mental operations involved (inter-cultural comparison), however, are highly similar in nature and form. elsewhere, i have written about how consensus is achieved in the process of business anthropology research (oliveira, 2011). here i am stretching that point further by suggesting that generating consensus is not always about dissolving paradoxes in the terms of different agents, but about keeping in mind which paradoxes will be attending future processes of implementation stemming from the anthropological research at hand. viveiros de castro’s axiom, on the nature of equivocations in anthropology, gains new meaning when transported to the daily practice of anthropology and consumer research: oliveria / ethnography and co-creation in a portugese consultancy 205 the question is not discovering who is wrong, and still less who is deceiving whom. an equivocation is not an error, a mistake, or a deception. instead, it is the very foundation of the relation that it implicates, and that is always a relation with an exteriority. an error or deception can only be determined as such from within a given language game, while an equivocation is what unfolds in the interval between different language games. viveiros de castro (2004: 9) a lens manufacturer wanting to communicate the functional characteristics of a product is just as ‘right’ as a marketer wanting to convey its user experience. their ‘anthropologies’ are departing from a different axiom: the former from a world starting with the assumption that a similar experience will emanate from particular functional characteristics; the latter from a world where user experience will determine the appreciation of what the functional characteristics of the product are in the first place. to each other’s eyes, neither is right nor wrong, but equivocated in their premises. a similar paradox could be drawn between academic analysis in anthropology and the practise of anthropology in everyday life. a ‘soft-hard’ approach may give rise to a different product (as in a consultancy setting in applied business anthropology as a distinct product from academic anthropology). like a soft-hard approach to lenses, that product is capable of many things; yet resolving the contradictions between the two kinds of agents involved in its making is certainly not one of them. if an error or deception can only be determined as such from within a given language game, what distinguishes an equivocation from an ‘equivoque’ or a ‘mere’ error across languages? should the true equivocations of anthropology happen solely between realities as far apart as the west and amazonia? to start sketching an answer to this question, i will take up a narration of translational equivoque described by viveiros de castro himself (2004:14-16), but not before introducing a slightly different set of possibilities. the first possibility is that the difference between an equivoque and an equivocation can be analysed as a question of degree, rather than a qualitative rupture. in this regard, the work of kasper t. vangkilde is of particular relevance (2013, forthcoming). studying the creation of concepts amongst a group of hugo boss fashion designers, vangkilde provides an extensive description of how hugo boss as a brand is invested with animism by those who work with it. the brand is attributed a ‘personality’ that goes beyond the individual and collective agencies of the particular fashion designers engaged in forging new creative concepts. the exercise of creating new concepts at hugo boss involves a double effort of imagination. one relies on imagining the brand through the eyes of those who work with it; the other relies on journal of business anthropology, 1(2), autumn 2012 206 assessing new ideas through the eyes of the ‘personality’ the brand has been invested with. to recapture viveiros de castro’s language, the understanding going on between a brand invested with a ‘personality’ as a form of autonomous agency and those involved in its making is, first and foremost, ‘perspectival’ (viveiros de castro, 1998). the second possibility is that applied business anthropologists are often working on equivocations across different groups, professional affiliations, and respective language games, rather than participating in one predominant meta-game played between the anthropological analyst, on the one side, and a particular group, or ‘culture’ (= the ‘native’), on the other. the ‘culture’ of a product or service is here being rewritten in an extensive partnership, rather than the conventional partnership standing between a native and an analyst, of which culture is more often an analytical product (clifford & marcus, 1986). the third possibility is that, more than engaging in a compromise or a mediating role, the applied business anthropologist often ends up holding different and irreconcilable terms of analysis between different groups – terms that must, nevertheless, lead to implementation, even in the absence of full convergence between them. one is working through and around metaphors binding models and clients together (malefyt, 2003).3 lastly, there is the possibility that an internal translational process is happening all along inside the applied business anthropologist’s mind between the terms of theoretical analysis and the language(s) that must be conveyed to non-anthropological audiences in an appearance of lesser complexity. here lies a balance across analogies between domains, external comparison, and a need to communicate to audiences that are not trained in anthropology. that balance (needless to say) is different in academia and consultancy settings, and perhaps better captured in a story told by viveiros de castro himself. the narrative stems from one particular request that was asked of viveiros de castro. milton nascimento, a celebrated brazilian musician, had made a journey to amazonia, guided by people of a non 3 one excellent description of how metaphors are mapped, analysed and negotiated between advertisers and clients is to be found in malefyt (2003). taking a dual role as an anthropologist and advertising planner, the author describes in great detail the processes of staging metaphors through which an advertiser tries to persuade a client of its value proposition. the process through which metaphors are staged in client relations is a fundamental dimension of applied work in business and one amenable to a goffman-inspired analysis, like that put forward by malefyt. that my own article focuses on the analytical propositions contained in ‘controlled equivocation’ should not exclude the dramaturgical and performative dimension of encounters between agencies and clients as a mirroring surface of metaphor mapping. oliveria / ethnography and co-creation in a portugese consultancy 207 governmental organization. on this trip, milton spent time with the cashinahua of the jordão river. on his return, he decided to use the word ‘txai’ to name one of his albums. txai was a word used by the cashinahua to address milton and other members of the expedition during their stay. the artist took it as a synonym of friendship and brotherly affiliation. viveiros de castro was asked to write a sleeve note to the album, explaining that txai for the cashinahua meant ‘brother’ in the portuguese language. confronted with this request, the anthropologist explained that txai is a word that can be used to explain different things − including kinsfolk, cross-cousins, mother’s father, daughter’s children, any man whose daughter’s ego treats as an equivalent to his wife, something akin to brother-in-law, an outsider, or even an enemy. the end result was that the sleeve note ended up being written by somebody else. viveiros explains that the problem is not that members of the ngo and the brazilian artist were wrong about the meaning of the word txai; rather, that they were equivocated. it so happens that the cashinahua use terms where the closest approximation to a brazilian usage of language is, indeed, ‘brother’. it is precisely because of this that a cashinahua person would rarely address a (consanguinal) ‘brother’ through the term taxi, which indicates a connection of affinity, not consanguinity. in sum, ‘while the purposes may be similar, the premises are decidedly not so’ (viveiros de castro 2004: 16). neither the author nor the marketing team behind milton nascimento’s album could agree on the way analogies between domains and intercultural comparison work in the relation between the cashinahua and milton’s understanding of them. now imagine you are an anthropologist who is simultaneously working with the cashinahua, milton, and a marketing team. if you manage to do this, you will have imagined an anthropologist ‘making room for the social and cultural’ inside rather than outside a corporation (dourish & bell, 2011). in short, you will be facing an anthropologist in industry. (un)doing the work: ethnography and strategic planning in a wine branding research it is the beginning of january 2012 and i have just returned to my native country, portugal, after a six-month absence in barcelona, where i was working for another business anthropology consultancy. i came back to couture, the agency where i first started applying anthropology to marketing, design research, and innovation, two and a half years ago. at couture, i was informed of the latest briefing received by the agency . the client is manufacturer of a wine brand which once led the journal of business anthropology, 1(2), autumn 2012 208 portuguese market, but sales of which have now fallen for two years in a row. a particular brand, which for the sake of confidentiality i shall here call ‘old portugal’, is at stake. in a country where consumption rates are falling as a result of the current recession, old portugal is still, despite everything, our client’s bread and butter.. over time, however, our relation to old portugal and how we see it changes. we begin the project as we generally do: talking to each other as if the brand had a ‘personality’, an agency of its own, a set of cognitive and volitional qualities somehow imagined beyond our own particular agency: ‘i believe that old portugal’ wants this, or ‘old portugal needs this’, will become common ways of addressing the newly personified brand. at the time of my re-involvement with the consulting agency, i am told that the research project has been sold and its methodologies agreed with the client, as has the budget. i am offered a consultancy on a take-it or leave-it basis, and i decide to accept the challenge. from the outset, both couture and the client know that we are dealing with a product that marketers would describe as having reached its ‘maturation stage’. in marketing terms, this describes a well-known pattern by which a product or brand that has reached its peak in terms of sales and is now on a rapid descendant curve. there are many reasons why old portugal might be going this way. tackling them without evoking feelings of blame inside the company is going to be an incredibly hard task. moreover, it is clear from where we stand that, following a peak in sales starting in the early nineties, old portugal’s’ company decided to commercialize the product across different sales points aimed at target different groups. following the surplus of confidence that often comes with a strong period of high sales, old portugal became a standard item in a variety of retail outlets, including supermarkets, restaurants and petrol stations. the over-exposure of the brand led to saturation of its image, as well as to a lack of differentiation in its target audience. old portugal is now intended for everyone, old and young, and thus for no one in particular. facing this gloomy prospect, the client decides on an ethnographic, as opposed to a conventional marketing research, approach to its problem. the degree to which what we call ‘ethnographic research’ in consultancy of this kind actually corresponds to what academic anthropologists call ‘ethnography’ is a moot point. a first exercise of comparative translation involves determining the differences and similarities between the two kinds of ‘ethnography’ prior to going into the field. in each, a particular notion of anthropology is played out. for this project in particular, the team has agreed with the client to conduct in-depth interviews in peoples’ homes (which we call ‘ethnographic interviews’), applying thinking-aloud protocols to consumers making oliveria / ethnography and co-creation in a portugese consultancy 209 choices of wines, using projective techniques, and finally a new methodological product, brought by a brazilian member of our team, called ‘peer dinners’. peer dinners involve asking a research participant to select people within the same age group and organize a dinner where researchers will be observing and simultaneously partaking in the meal, while introducing cues in the conversation on matters they want to have answered. we agree with the client on as diverse a qualitative sample as possible, in terms of gender, age and generations. as usual, we do not focus solely on the brand in question, but start our interviews by enquiring about the lives of consumers (hereafter referred to as participants) and their overall habits regarding wine consumption. from the outset, we find ourselves dealing with at least three different ‘ideas’ of wine: one stemming from the client; another from the research team; and the third from the group of participants researched for this project. suffice it to say that the client is not to be understood as a single agent, but as a network of different departments inside the company – including marketing, sales, and the shareholders of its distributing company. we also know that variations across the three ‘ideas’ are often as strong as similarities between them. the question, as in all anthropology, is how to configure members of the three groups as theoretical agents rather than as passive subjects (viveiros de castro, 2004: 12). one does not start by assuming that anthropology holds a better theory for accounting for what wine is, as that would be jumping immediately into intercultural comparison, while disregarding the analogies between domains. rather, one works to sustain the exercise that different ‘anthropologies’ of wine will emerge from the different groups in question, enabling us to map where these anthropologies cross and where they hardly come together. lastly, one sustains the challenge of knowing that the thinking across these different anthropologies will ultimately have to be communicated to the ‘client’ in a language that is, at least in appearance, ‘non-theoretical’. in the process, different research techniques will evoke different theoretical models. for instance, in using thinking-aloud protocols, we ask people to go to supermarkets and pick a brand of wine that they have never tasted before, while asking them to voice aloud their thinking processes in their decision-making. by using this technique, we hope to gather insights that will open new ways for the communication of old portugal to audiences already familiar with it. here the world of jean lave (1988) and cognitive anthropology will help us organize the data gathering and analysis. as a result of thinking-aloud protocols, we find that there are visual elements in the bottles chosen by consumers that are not fully aligned with the visual elements of the old portugal label. the insights gathered feed the final strategy recommendations dealing with brand image and design. journal of business anthropology, 1(2), autumn 2012 210 through the interviews, we discover that consumers have some reservations about the provenance of the grapes that go into old portugal. questions of nationalism arise from the data, in that people express their distrust towards the provenance of grapes which originate in spain, their neighbouring country. this makes them perceive old portugal as lacking ‘purity’ – a perception that brings in issues of symbolic anthropology (douglas, 1966). at this point, the cognition that stems from the application of thinking-aloud protocols gradually shifts towards the symbolism of purity. a tension between cognition and symbolism will carry on throughout the process, emerging at different times with different people and through the use of different methodologies. with other colleagues trained in advertising, marketing, communication and design working at the agency, theory talk of an anthropological kind seldom comes to the fore. there are three networks of knowledge that must reach convergence for the final recommendations passed to the client. the first consists in a client divided in many departments; the second in the consumers researched; and the third in couture itself, expressed in our distinct disciplinary affiliations. the initial work of mapping must proceed by tracing the analogies between these different domains. as the research data gathered with participants comes in, we manage to broaden the questions and venture into a more radical examination of the problem. we are no longer merely asking ‘what is this brand?’ we are asking ‘what is wine?’ and what are we learning about wine as a social and cultural product. conducting the ethnographic interviews, we take a printed set of bottles of wine while asking consumers to order them according to what they think is their value and importance. we ask people permission to open their kitchen cabinets to see what wine they keep at home and how it is kept. we listen to endless stories about wine consumption, to find out that a significant number of participants had their initiation in drinking red wine with this brand, on a family occasion. two months of research have gone by and it is time to present our findings to the client. communication now becomes the major concern. how do we go back to a client and explain that wine has now become a set of social and cultural relations in a language that a client not trained in anthropology can actually understand? the presentation day arrives. my team is sitting in a room with the client − that is, old portugal’s ceo, together with his marketing representative and commercial director, plus the ceo of the distribution company and two other employees. today’s agenda involves delivery of the main research ‘insights’ and a co-creation session where, using oliveria / ethnography and co-creation in a portugese consultancy 211 design thinking techniques, we will invite people in the room to brainstorm solutions for old portugal. as the presentation unfolds, different viewpoints emerge between old portugal’s company members and members of our team. one of the slides of our powerpoint presentation turns out to be particularly problematic: on the left side of the powerpoint, we have some wines that are clearly winning market share over old portugal, in terms of brand image based on sensorial attributes of the product (flavour, smell, etc.) and traditional ways of wine making. on the right side of the slide, we have some wines that are clearly not going for sensorial attributes, but for a communication of ‘experience’ in and of itself: that is, the social experience of having a wine amongst friends or family, rather than focusing on sensorial attributes and traditional ways of wine making. we place old portugal among these wines. we explain that although old portugal has tried to communicate itself to the public in terms of sensorial attributes, tradition and origin, it is actually being perceived as a wine whose brand message is no longer clear and, if anything, closer to experience. unlike the manufacturing client’s perception, old portugal in the consumer’s view is much closer to a wine-experience than to a wine-attribute. and yet it is not fully situated in that territory, making it a hybrid: neither fish nor fowl. members of the company do not take this interpretation lightly. we argue that we are not talking of old portugal per se so much as the perception of the product (without either side clarifying what is here meant as ‘perception’). at this point, we are mediating between ourselves, old portugal, the ethnographic data gathered, and the different people present in the room. once the presentation is over we move to the co-creation session. for this we have selected a set of design-thinking techniques stemming from the problems identified through the ethnography. we invite those in the room to resolve them together. the peer dinners we have organized, with different age groups, have given us the insight that perhaps we can move beyond the dichotomy between sensorial attributes and experience, if we introduce a third term. we organize an ideation exercise where everyone must put themselves in the shoes of consumers of different generations. not only this, but they also have to embody the character of a particular generation trying to influence peers of the same age into drinking old portugal. the exercise creates something new in the room. up to this point, we have had a conflict stemming from our different ‘anthropologies’, one in which there was an ‘us’ on one side, and ‘ethnographic data’ gathered, on the other. from this point onwards, by enacting distinct positions regarding the brand, we invite members of the room to position themselves differently around the data presented journal of business anthropology, 1(2), autumn 2012 212 in the morning. at this point, we are doing an exercise that goes beyond cutting across the different wine domains found in the network. we are asking each person to position him or herself inside, rather than outside, the data gathered. we are making the network converge in a joined positionality: that is, trying to recreate an anthropological form of positionality that is shared by all. as we do this exercise, people in the room start dropping their generational characters to start talking about themselves, the people that they know, their habits of wine drinking and how these relate to some of the aspects they were shown in the ethnographic data presented in the morning. this process hardly stops there, however, as we must return in two weeks’ time and present the client with a strategy stemming both from the ethnographic data and the co-creation session. at this point, thinking of analogies between domains becomes insufficient. the data has provided all kinds of material amenable to anthropology in terms of rituals of wine consumption, wine initiation, kinship ties and gender difference, to name a few. but even if all of these subtleties could give rise to a myriad of interesting observations on well known anthropological categories and authors they cannot bind the network together and therefore making the equivocation move forward. to pull the threads together, we must move from analogies between domains to intercultural comparison. at this point, i have in mind lévi-strauss (1966) and mary douglas (1979). i know that in the myriad of people we have involved in building a joint positionality about wine, i am facing a set of categories reminiscent of structuralism. the brand is becoming a structural arrangement reminiscent of lévi-strauss’s the savage mind: one whose essence must be defined in relation to other brands which are themselves categories of differentiation (moeran, 1996). i also know that these categories are being constructed in the network of which i am part and that i must remember to think of myself as an agent of that construction. to put it differently: i have in mind that cognition is rooted in social life (douglas, 1979; lave, 1988) and that these categories are being constructed in a social life of which i am part. i must re-examine the nature of the social life in the process of which i have made myself part of. as in the ikon breath o2 lens campaign discussed above (moeran, 1996), there is a major equivocation that must be temporarily undone: to our client, the communication of this product must evolve from sensorial attributes to experience, while from our viewpoint it must communicate itself the other way around. here, the solution comes from examining the social encounters of the three branches of this network and how categories are being constructed within it. what binds together the ideas about wine emerging from couture, consisting of a team of oliveria / ethnography and co-creation in a portugese consultancy 213 people with different disciplinary affiliations, a client divided into many departments, and a sample of participants asked to talk to couture about their experience of wine and to hang around with our researchers? i realize that, exactly like the participants we have researched, our ways of making sense of wine emerge as just as divided when it comes to age difference, as they are through differences related to our positions and disciplinary affiliations. the network must learn with the teachings of the consumers researched: we cannot carry on communicating the same experience of wine along the different generations, while hoping that they will all take similarly to its sensorial attributes. it is the way that categories of meaning around wine have emerged in the social lives of our participants that will end up guiding the rethinking of the brand by the remaining network (couture + client). here, intercultural comparison − our investigations or mental operations, themselves a part of culture − slowly shifts into strategy: that cognition is rooted in social life must become a strategy for old portugal, disguised as it must be, in order to be efficiently communicated. we return two weeks later, having worked out and developed a strategy based on generational marketing, illustrated by ethnographic data gathered during the process and supported by what we had learned during the co-creation session. basically, we use this to argue that the product should be communicated differently to different generations, and to show how this might be done. at the third presentation session, we finally get it right, coming up with a strategy that involves explicitly dividing product communication to different generations in terms of the wine’s sensorial attributes, its origin, and experience. the client is finally happy with our work. so we start the brand guide for the communication agencies that will follow, while winning another account − this time on organic wine − with the same client. at the end of the process, unlike vangkilde’s (2013, forthcoming) ethnography of hugo boss designers, we no longer talk of the brand as a thing-in-itself, invested with personality or autonomous agency. we talk about what ‘people’ want for the brand, in a formulation where the word ‘people’ encompasses both the client and the consumers researched. but unlike the viveiros de castro music album story mentioned above (viveiros de castro, 2004), we do not refuse to hand in a strategy based on our ethnographic and co-creative work. as an agency specializing in ethnographic research and strategic planning, this is our work. not the kind of work that engages in intellectual contemplation of equivocations that extend themselves ad infinitum, but the kind of work that must identify the point where an equivocation can safely stop in order to give rise to implementation. journal of business anthropology, 1(2), autumn 2012 214 concluding remark: mapping equivocations and applied business anthropology in anthropology, the work of bruno latour has clearly shown that science is not immune to social, political and cultural contexts, but a direct reflexion of how different agents co-construct, at a given point in time, particular forms of science rooted in power, contingency, the social and the cultural (e.g. latour , 1993). applied work in business anthropology is often about recognizing how networks of meaning are formed between agencies, consumers and corporations while keeping the reflexivity necessary in order to identify the knowledge emerging from such networks − bearing in mind, as we must, that in applied corporate work the anthropologist is an active part of the network, rather than a detached participant-observer engaging with it through limited periods of time. if anthropology is often built upon misunderstanding (viveiros de castro, 2004), applied business anthropology is no different and translation is here, equally required. business anthropology at a consultancy level entails a dual process of translation: one that works with analogies between domains, and one that simultaneously sets the knowledge of different domains against anthropological knowledge (inter-cultural comparison). throughout the process, concepts that are good for anthropological thinking are presented in a form that only in appearance divests them of their theoretical background. powerpoint presentations to clients are not so much a form of obliterating anthropological theory as of presenting it under a disguise required for effective communication. anthropological theory is present all along, and more so during the several stages of the ethnographic process, insofar as different techniques will evoke distinct theoretical models in anthropology. for example, cognitive anthropology emerges in thinkingaloud protocols in the same way that symbolic anthropology comes out in the interpretation of meanings of the purity and origins of products. against this backdrop, one may claim (and many do) that the work of anthropologists in business is by no means anthropological work, as orthodox academia understands anthropology to be. in this article, i suggest that we could rather look at the question of the relation between academic anthropology and applied business anthropology in a consultancy setting as a matter of equivocation: not equivocation as a synonym of error, deception or mistake; but equivocation in the sense that between academic anthropology and applied business anthropology, there are zones of divergence that can be discussed, but will be difficult to resolve. to put it differently: between academic oliveria / ethnography and co-creation in a portugese consultancy 215 anthropology and its application in a business setting, exactly like a product or brand, there are divergences that will carry on being embodied in the daily lives of practitioners. in a sense, such practitioners are equivocated, while carrying a theory of equivocation that can account both for them and the discipline from which they originate. further research on the concept of controlled equivocation could benefit the relation between academic anthropology and applied business anthropology − not with a view to resolving it, but rather to identify the points where these two forms can safely stop, in order to give 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(1996). a japanese advertising agency: an anthropology of media and markets. richmond: curzon. moeran, b. (2005). the business of ethnography: strategic exchanges, people and organizations. oxford: berg. morais, r. and malefyt, t. de waal (2010). how anthropologists can succeed in business: mediating multiple worlds of enquiry. international journal of business anthropology, 1(1): 45-56. rabinow, p. (2008). marketing time: on the anthropology of the contemporary. princeton: princeton university press. sherry, f. j. and fischer, e. (eds.) (2009). explorations in consumer culture theory (routledge interpretative marketing research. london: routledge. sunderland, p. l. and denny, r. m. (2007). doing anthropology in consumer research. walnut creek, ca: left coast press. tian, r., lillis, m. and van marrewijk, a.h. (2010). general business anthropology. miami, fl: north american business press. oliveria / ethnography and co-creation in a portugese consultancy 217 vangkilde, k. t. (2013 forthcoming). in search of a creative concept in hugo boss. in brian moeran and bo t. christensen (eds.), exploring creativity: evaluative practices in innovation, design and the arts. cambridge: cambridge university press. viveiros de castro, e. (1998). cosmological deixis and amerindian perspectivism. the journal of the royal anthropological institute 4 (3): 469-488. viveiros de castro, e. (2004). perspectival anthropology and the method of controlled equivocation. tipiti journal of the society for the anthropology of lowland south america 2 (1): 3-22. initially trained in clinical psychology in university of coimbra (portugal), pedro oliveira moved onto the uk to complete a masters and phd in social anthropology at brunel university, funded by the portuguese foundation of science and technology (fct). pedro currently works as a research coordinator at couture (decode and disrupt), an ethnographic research and strategic planning agency (http://decodedisrupt.com). pedro may be reached at oliveiraatbrunel@yahoo.co.uk. http://decodedisrupt.com/ mailto:oliveiraatbrunel@yahoo.co.uk a few words from u no hoo… this issue marks the end of the fourth year of publication of the jba. to be honest, given my sense of impending doom a couple of years ago, i find it a little hard to believe. but, thanks to the hard work of colleagues who have rallied to the rescue and worked extremely hard to keep the journal alive, i think it’s now safe to say that the jba―unlike its competitor, the international journal of business anthropology―is here to stay. so do, please, submit your work and encourage your colleagues and students to do the same. a state of greater permanence doesn’t mean that everything in the garden (or, as an anthropologist, i should, perhaps, say “field”) is rosy. at one stage during last autumn it seemed that my own impending retirement from the copenhagen business school led me to understand that the jba had to be moved to a new website. so i entered into discussions―first with bloomsbury academic, and then with with vivian berghahn―to see if there was any way that a publishing house might be willing to take over the administration of the journal while still keeping it open access (the very mention of which makes most publishers utter a cry of dismay since it deprives them of an up-front cash flow through subscriptions). to her enormous credit, vivian―together with marion berghahn―worked out a plan whereby the jba would indeed remain oa and be administered by berghahn books for free, in exchange for a “jba book series.” i persuaded james carrier to join me as series editor and began to commission volumes accordingly. initial euphoria, alas, eventually had to yield to practicalities. two things have become clear during the past month. first, although vivian page 1 of 4 jba 4(2): 174-177 fall 2015 © the author(s) 2015 issn 2245-4217 www.cbs.dk/jba a few words from u no hoo … 175 and marion were prepared to give the arrangement a go, berghahn was going to have a very hard time trying to make ends meet financially under the new arrangement―something which impacted on the form and content of the proposed book series. second, it transpired that claus rosenkrantz hansen, at the copenhagen business school, was more than happy for us to remain under his care at our present website, and that my retirement from cbs was in fact irrelevant to the future of the journal. as a result, berghahn books, my co-editors and i have decided to keep the jba where it is for now, but, at the same time, to try to set up a proper submissions system―something that many of you know isn’t working properly right now. this isn’t going to be easy―the fact that we editors are located all around the world doesn’t help―but hopefully we’ll be able to do something constructive over the next few months. if any of you “out there” has any experience or knowledge at all in setting up a journal submission system, do please let us know. we need all the sensible and practical advice we can get. in the meantime, james and i are moving forward with the idea of a jba book series and will be discussing things further with vivian and marion berghahn at the aaa meeting in denver later this month. i am, however, looking for somebody who might be willing to act in my stead as one of the series editors. i cannot shoulder the editorial responsibility for both journal and book series at the same time. alternatively, we need a journal editor. will all volunteers please drop me a line, or stand in line in the convention center bar every evening during the forthcoming annual gathering of bearded weirdos and other a anthropologists? and now let us turn to the contents of this issue of the jba. the two first articles throw light on different corners of the creative industries―creativity and innovation being a strong theme in this issue―by drawing in different ways on anthropological theories of magic and animism. one deals with a “talent pool” of intern fashion designers at hugo boss; the other with snøhetta, a norwegian architect firm with a global range and reputation. kasper tang vangkilde draws on a range of anthropological theories of magic and prophecy to make sense of the work and experience of young fashion designers invited to create a collection for hugo boss orange. he shows that the fashion designer must have a fine-tuned sense, not only of what is happening, but of what is going to happen. to colonize that intermediate zone between being and becoming―half a pace ahead of the world―vangkilde argues that designers must enter a “prophetic condition” and be possessed by the zeitgeist. to analyse what is at stake in such creative processes, he uses theories of shamanism and animism to break with our common understandings of how we―or rather fashion journal of business anthropology, 4(2), fall 2015 176 designers―sense or perceive the world. to the average reader seeing is something we do, directing our attention towards essentially “passive” objects. but to a boss fashion designer that is not the way the world looks. quite the reverse: to the fashion designer certain objects and things become alive and active. they become in-spired, and in-spiration is the experience that some things make use of to draw the designers towards them, or, in an apt phrase, to “capture their attention.” as vangkilde notes, it is often, paradoxically, second-hand things that catch their eye and help them conceptualise the new. hagen’s article uses magical theory to understand the labour process in an elite architectural firm during a period of downsizing. she uses concepts of myth and magic to analyse the experiences of architects during a series of cutbacks in the wake of the financial crisis of 2008. magic, hagen argues, provides ways of thinking devised to cope with risk; they are thus pertinent and relevant when we want to understand how companies strive to get ahead in today’s turbulent global markets. like the fashion designers, architects struggle with the relationship between the new and the known, imitation and innovation. hagen suggests that magic, understood as “the repetition of difference,” thus offers helpful practices in which innovation and imitation fuse. generally the architects carry a deep affection for their firm, which even those who are fired hold in very high regard. the architects view themselves primarily as artists, and they talk contemptuously about “drawing for money” (thereby adhering unconsciously to richard caves’s distinction between “creative” and “humdrum” personnel and supporting bourdieu’s distinction between “art” and “commerce”). while celebrating creativity, however, they also―in line with howard becker―frown on ideas of “the lone genius.” the company is instead grounded in an egalitarian ethos, which is reproduced in the foundation myth of entrepreneurial employees who, through collective effort, were able to seize an opportunity and win a prestigious competition, which eventually got the company off ground. the organizational context here is that of the scandinavian welfare state, in the sense that the relatively generous economic support given to people temporarily out of work means that employees can afford to look at (temporary) unemployment as “just another mode of creative labour.” the issue then embarks on discussions of innovation and creativity. in a very helpful essay, benoît godin outlines the historical development and use of the word “innovation.” then the jba makes its own innovation by introducing a “speed movie” by simon westergaard lex and his students on―what else?―innovation. then come ten opinion pieces, with an introductory essay by brian moeran. the issue finishes with two articles by zoran slavnic and kimberly chong, together with an essay on emotion and the sense of the sacred in consumer rituals by tom maschio. the first article deals with another kind of creativity and precarious labour, this time from the margins of the a few words from u no hoo … 177 official economy. taking its methodological starting point in the life story of adem, a trained engineer who came to sweden in the 1990s as a refugee from bosnia, zoran slavnic describes the deregulation of the taxi industry over the last couple of decades. whereas in hagen’s case, the norwegian welfare state seemed to offer some protection for the architects in their condition of job insecurity, the reality for slavnic’s swedish taxi drivers is quite different. he describes a labour market characterized by increasing deregulation, ethnic segmentation, and harsh competition―a condition of precarity driving down incomes forcing taxidrivers to work still longer hours and to deploy informal economic strategies to survive. slavnic’s analysis links the processes of informalization, normally understood to be a salient characteristic of disadvantaged social groups, to larger structural and political deveopments of neoliberal transformations of contemporary capitalism. in the last article, kimberly chong deals with a different segment of the workforce in another part of the world. drawing on her fieldwork inside the chinese arm of a global management consultancy she describes the conditions of so-called “knowledge-workers” in post maoist china. more specifically, she analyses how practices of corporate social responsibility clash with post-maoist understandings. through the analysis of a corporate citizen initiative―a charity bike ride, where a corporate managers and white collar employees ride bikes through rural parts of china to collect money―she unpacks the assumptions and practices behind csr. the discourse of csr gets its appeal and legitimacy by claiming to fill in the gaps of development produced by the absence of the state. but, as chong argues, in china the state is seemingly omnipresent―a control which is enacted through paternalistic ties resembling those invoked by csr. chong points out how the charity event in particular, and csr discourse in general, are predicated on evolutionist assumptions and “othering.” the csr discourse reproduces the difference between givers and receivers of help and fetishizes cultural “others” as rural citizens, who are less “sophisticated” and “un-modern.” at another level, the discourse and experiences of the participants expressed and implied a particular view of china as still being trapped in a socialist legacy which is seen to be antithetical to global capitalist development. so there you have it. enjoy, and don’t forget to sign up as either book series or journal editor! jakob krause-jensen and brian moeran essay innovation: from the forbidden to a cliché benoît godin (institut national de la recherche scientifique (inrs), montreal, canada) there are words and concepts―many words and concepts―that we use with no knowledge of their past. such concepts are taken for granted and their meaning is rarely questioned. innovation is such an anonymous concept. today, the concept of innovation is wedded to an economic ideology, so much that we forget that it has mainly been a political―and contested―concept for most of history. before the twentieth century, innovation (and novation) was a vice, something explicitly forbidden by law and used as a linguistic weapon by the opponents of change. innovation had nothing to do with creativity, not yet. the concept has a “negative history”: a history of contestations, refutations, denigrations and denials. innovation is something that the opponent of change or the conservative calls innovation. in contrast, today innovation is a word of honor. everyone likes to be called an innovator; every firm innovates (or does it?); governments legislate to make whole nations innovative. but how could people of the previous centuries constantly innovate but at the same time deny they innovate? in what follows, the paradox is best explained linguistically. innovation is a bad word and page 1 of 9 jba 4(2): 219-227 fall 2015 © the author(s) 2015 issn 2245-4217 www.cbs.dk/jba journal of business anthropology, 4(2), fall 2015 220 people prefer to cast their innovative behavior using other words. “il fallait que l’innovation”, claimed the french historian and intellectual edgar quintet, “s’accomplît sans que le génie du passé eût le moindre soupçon qu’il entrât quelque chose de nouveau dans le monde” [innovation had to be carried out without the geniuses from previous times having the least suspicion that something new was being brought into the world] (quintet, 1865: 208). the concept of innovation changed meaning gradually over 200 years. innovation acquired a positive connotation because of its instrumental function to political, social and material progress of societies. from the early nineteenth century, a whole vocabulary developed that tells a story to “create, even sanctify” a progressive future, rehabilitating dirty words until then―revolution―and adding new ones―creativity―to talk of and about innovation. from that time on, innovation became a catchword that everyone understood spontaneously, or thought he understood; that every theorist talked about; that every government espoused. innovation and order from its very emergence in ancient greece, the concept of innovation (kainotomia) had a political connotation. as “introducing change into the established order”, innovation was subversive, or revolutionary, as we say today. this political and contested connotation was revived during the reformation (see below). in the meantime, the concept made its entry into latin vocabulary, with a positive meaning. from the fourth century, latin writers, first of all christian writers and poets, coined in-novo, which means renewing (return to the original or pure soul), in line with other christian terms of the time―rebirth, regeneration, reformation―and according to the message of the new testament (god sent his son jesus to save man from sin). innovo has no future connotation as such, although it brings a “new order.” innovo refers to the past: going back to purity or the original soul. the vulgate was influential here. in 382, pope damasus i commissioned saint jerome to produce a “standard” version of the vetus latina, which he did using original greek and hebrew texts. four books in the vulgate make use of innovo in a spiritual context (job, lamentations, psalms, wisdom). innovation thus began with both a positive and negative meaning, but subsequently lost this valence when it moved to the politico-religious sphere of the reformation. from the very beginning of the reformation, royal and ecclesiastical authorities started using innovation in discourse. in 1548, edward vi, king of england and successor to henry viii, issued a proclamation against those that doeth innouate. the proclamation places innovation in context, constitutes an admonition not to innovate and imposes punishments on offenders: godin / innovation: from the forbidden 221 considering nothing so muche, to tende to the disquieting of his realme, as diversitie of opinions, and varietie of rites and ceremonies, concerning religion and worshippyng of almightie god …; [considering] certain private curates, preachers, and other laye men, contrary to their bounden duties of obedience, both rashely attempte of their owne and singulet witte and mynde, in some parishe churches not onely to persuade the people, from the olde and customed rites and ceremonies, but also bryngeth in newe and strange orders … according to their fantasies … is an evident token of pride and arrogance, so it tendeth bothe to confusion and disorder …: wherefore his majestie straightly chargeth and commandeth, that no maner persone, of what estate, order, or degree soever he be, of his private mynde, will or phantasie, do omitte, leave doune, change, alter or innovate any order, rite or ceremonie, commonly used and frequented in the church of englande … whosoever shall offende, contrary to this proclamation, shall incure his highness indignation, and suffer imprisonment, and other grievous punishementes. the proclamation is followed by the book of common prayer, whose preface enjoins people not to meddle with the “folly” and “innovations and new-fangledness” of some men. a hundred years later, king charles prohibited innovation again, and the church produced lists of forbidden innovations, required bishops to visit parishes to enforce the ban, instructed bishops and archbishops as well as doctors (universities) and school-masters to take an oath against innovations and ordered trials to prosecute the “innovators.” advice books and treatises for princes and courtiers supported this understanding, and included instructions not to innovate. books of manners urged people not to meddle with innovation. speeches and sermons spoke against innovation, religious and political. every opponent to innovation―puritans, ecclesiasts, royalists and pamphleteers―regularly repeated the admonitions of monarchs in support of their own case against innovators―until the second half of the nineteenth century in the case of religion. the reformation was a key moment in the history of the concept of innovation. at a time when the reformation was incomplete and still in the making, the catholics accused the reformers of innovating. the puritans served the same argument to the protestant church, accused of bringing the church back to catholicism. the word served both sides of the debate: reformers and counter-reformers. it was precisely in the context of the reformation that the concept entered everyday discourse. this was only the beginning. soon the meaning of innovation was journal of business anthropology, 4(2), fall 2015 222 to be enlarged. first, to the political; the monarchists of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries accused the republicans of being “innovators”. innovation was revolutionary … and violent. no republican―no citizen in fact, not even the most famous protestant reformers or the french revolutionaries―thought of applying the concept to his own project. innovation was too bad a word for this. in contrast, and precisely because the word was morally connoted, the monarchists used and abused the word and labelled the republican as an innovator. this linguistic practice continued until the french revolution―and later―and cast the idea of innovation into general disrepute: “un préjugé général, produit par la haine de la révolution, a établi, avec des apparences assez favorables, que tout ce qui l’a immédiatement précédé, est excellent: c’est comme innovation qu’on la dénigre principalement; et par là même un discrédit général a dû s’attacher à toutes sortes d’innovations” [a general bias, arising from the hatred toward the revolution, established, with apparently considerable support, that everything immediately preceding it was excellent: it is as an innovation that is denigrated; and as a result every innovation has come to be discredited] (montlosier, 1814, tome trois: 137). frequency of the term innovation over time (google ngram) secondly, innovation widened its meaning to the social. the social reformer or socialist of the nineteenth century was called a “social innovator,” as william sargant puts it in social innovators and their scheme (1858). his aim was to overthrow the social order, namely private property. innovation was seen as a scheme or design in a pejorative sense, as it was a conspiracy in political literature (words used include project, plan, plot, or machination). this connotation remained in vocabulary until late in the nineteenth century, although some writers discussed social innovation using the positive idea of (social) reform. for example, in 1888, a popular edition of the encyclopedia britannica included a long article on communism which began as follows: “communism is the name godin / innovation: from the forbidden 223 given to the schemes of social innovation which have for their starting point the attempted overthrow of the institution of private property.” everyone shared this representation of innovation. natural philosophers, from francis bacon onward, never referred to innovation as what is certainly the most innovative project in science: the experimental method. equally, very few artisans and inventors talked of their invention in terms of innovation. innovation was political. innovation as an instrument of progress the concept of revolution and the concept of innovation changed meaning and started to be used in a positive sense at about the same time. the “spirit of innovation,” a pejorative phrase of the previous centuries, became one of praise. this occurred gradually over the nineteenth century, particularly in france ―“le centre de l’esprit philosophique et novateur” [the centre of philosophical and innovative spirit] (littré, 1873: 208)―and got full hearing in the twentieth century. two rehabilitations of the concept served this purpose. one was a semantic re-description: people start producing reflexive thoughts on what innovation was and concluded that the concept admitted of different interpretations. innovation was neutral. there were good and bad innovations. yet innovation was in fact a word of accusation, the “war cry of the fools”, as jean d’alembert puts it in his éloge de l’abbé françois régnier desmarais (1786). yet, innovation might also be a good thing, namely useful. here lay a second rehabilitation, an instrumental one. innovation was a means to political, social and material progress. writers narrated or rather rewrote the story of the past in terms of innovation, including the reformation and the revolution and talk of innovators in superlative terms. innovation was a source of national pride too: l’américain pris au hasard doit donc être un homme ardent dans ses désirs, entreprenant, aventureux, surtout novateur. cet esprit se retrouve, en effet, dans toutes ses œuvres ; il l’introduit dans ses lois politiques, dans ses doctrines religieuses, dans ses théories d’économie sociale, dans son industrie privée ; il le porte partout avec lui, au fond des bois comme au sein des villes [the american must be fervent in his desires, enterprising, adventurous, and above all, innovative. this spirit can be found in everything he does: he introduces it into his political laws, his religious doctrines, his theories of social economy, and his private industry; it remains with him wherever he goes; be it in the middle of the woods or in the heart of cities] (tocqueville, 1835 : 201). yet the transition from the negative to the positive was not sudden. one journal of business anthropology, 4(2), fall 2015 224 had to wait until the twentieth century for a complete reversal in the representation of innovation. this occurred after world war ii. those who contested innovation in the past―governments―started decontesting innovation and produced reflexive thoughts on innovation as a policy tool. one after the other, international organizations and governments began to embrace innovation as a solution to economic problems and international competitiveness, and then launched innovation policies. at that precise moment, the dominant representation of innovation shifted to that of the economy: technological innovation―a phrase that emerged after world war ii―as commercialized invention. technological innovation serves economic growth. a whole new set of arguments has developed: research and development (r&d) leads to innovation and innovation to prosperity. statistics are developed to support the idea: innovation surveys are administered to firms and the numbers collected into “innovation scoreboards” that serve as so-called evidence-based information for policy-makers. innovation becomes a basic concept of economic policy. in a matter of decades, science policy shifted to technology policy and thence to innovation policy, and indicators of science and technology like r&d have been relabeled indicators of innovation. in all these efforts, governments have been supported by academics as consultants, who produce models of innovation by the dozens, as a way to frame and guide policies. model itself becomes an integral concept in the literature on innovation. ironically, these developments led to the transformation of the concept from a means to an end to an end in itself. over the twentieth century, innovation has become quite a valuable buzzword, a magic word. innovation is the panacea for every socioeconomic problem. one need not inquire into a society’s problems. innovation is the a priori solution. theorizing innovation beginning in the 1940s, theoretical thoughts on innovation appeared and theories of innovation began to multiply afterwards. psychological, sociological and economically-oriented theories followed one after the other. two theoretical perspectives―the economic (technology) and policy perspectives―served a market ideology, and theorists rapidly got government hearing. here, innovation is no longer an individual affair but a collective process. to be sure, the twentieth century has its individual heroes: the entrepreneurs. yet, entrepreneurs are only one part of the process of innovation: a total process as some call it, or a socioeconomic process. as jack morton, engineer and research director at bell laboratories, who brought the transistor from invention to market and who is the author of numerous articles and a book on innovation, suggests (morton, 1968: 57): godin / innovation: from the forbidden 225 innovation is not a single action but a total [my italics] process of interrelated parts. it is not just the discovery of new knowledge, not just the development of a new product, manufacturing technique, or service, nor the creation of a new market. rather, it is all [my italics] these things: a process in which all of these creative acts, from research to service, are present, acting together in an integrated way toward a common goal. defining innovation as a process is a twentieth century “innovation.” herein lies a semantic “innovation,” an “innovation” that has had a major impact on the contemporary understanding of innovation. until then, innovation as a concept was either a substantive (something new) or a verb (introducing, adopting something new), an end or a means. sometimes it was also discussed in terms of a faculty (combination, creativity), an attitude (radicalism), aptitude (skill), or quality (originality, departure, difference):  substantive: novelties (new ideas, behaviours, objects)  action: introducing (or bringing in) something new  process: a sequence of activities from generating ideas to their use in practice from the mid-twentieth century, innovation has been studied as a “process,” a sequential process in time. innovation is not a thing or a single act, but a series of events or activities (called stages) with a purpose. the theorists have made themselves “innovative ideologists” here, to use historian quentin skinner’s phrase. they have brought in a new definition of innovation in reaction to a new context. innovation as a process has contributed to giving the concept of innovation a very large function: innovation encompasses every dimension of an invention, from generation (initiation) to diffusion. for sociologists, the process is one from (individual) adoption to (social) diffusion; for economists, from invention to commercialization; for management schools, from (product) development to manufacturing. everywhere, this process is framed in terms of a sequence (with stages) called models. conclusion as the nineteenth century ended, the word innovation had accumulated four characteristics that made of it a powerful (and pejorative) term. from the greeks, the representation of innovation had retained its subversive (revolutionary) character. the reformation added a heretical dimension (individual liberty), and the renaissance a violent overtone. together, these characteristics led to a fourth one: innovation as conspiracy (designs, schemes, plots). yet, in spite of these connotations that made a word (innovation) part of the vocabulary and discourses, innovation seems to have escaped the attention of intellectual or journal of business anthropology, 4(2), fall 2015 226 conceptual historians. many concepts of change (crisis, revolution, progress, modernity) have been studied in literature, but innovation has not. is innovation only a word―a mere word―in the vocabulary of adherents to the status quo―churches, kings and their supporters―and devoid of sociological meaning? in a certain sense, it is. before the twentieth century, no theory of innovation existed. innovation was a concept of limited theoretical content, a linguistic weapon used against one’s enemy. in another sense, innovation was not devoid of sociological meaning. the opponents of innovation in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries provided the first image of innovation and innovators, one that lasted for centuries. what constituted innovation and who was an innovator were defined by the enemies of innovation and innovators. it is against this pejorative image or representation that innovators had to struggle in the nineteenth century, when they started making use of the concept in a positive sense. the case of innovation is one more instance of the influence of religion on modern secular thought. before the twentieth century, the idea of innovation belonged to experience, but very rarely to thoughts and dreams. the innovator himself made no use of the word. as reinhart koselleck puts it on deeds, for centuries it was not innovation itself that shocked humanity but the word describing it (koselleck, 1972). the novelty (the “innovation”) of the twentieth century was to enrich the idea of innovation with thought, dreams and imagination. innovation took on a positive meaning that had been missing until then, and became an obsession. the changing fortune of innovation over the centuries sheds light on the values of a particular time period. in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the uses of the concept were essentially polemical. it served as a linguistic weapon, attaching a pejorative label to the innovators. in contrast, from the nineteenth century onward, innovation started to refer to a central value of modern times: progress and utility. as a consequence, many people started appropriating the concept for their own ends. yet, there is danger here that a word, as a “rallying-cry,” may become “semantically null.” “terms of abuse cease to be language” (lewis, 1960: 328). as pocock puts it with regard to the word revolution: “the term [innovation] may soon cease to be current, emptied of all meaning by constant overuse” (pocock, 1971: 3). references alembert, jean le rond d’ (1786), histoire des membres de l’académie française, morts depuis 1700 jusqu’en 1771, pour servir de suite aux éloges imprimés & lus dans les séances publiques de cette compagnie, tome 3, amsterdam: moutard. godin / innovation: from the forbidden 227 koselleck, reinhart (1972), “begriffsgeschichte and social history,” in r. koselleck (ed.), futures past: on the semantics of historical time, new york: columbia university press, 2004: 75-92. lewis, clive staples (1960), studies in words, cambridge: cambridge university press, 1967. littré, émile (1873), la science au point de vue philosophique, paris didier et cie. montlosier, françois dominique de reynaud de (1814), de la monarchie française, depuis son établissement jusqu’à nos jours; ou recherches sur les anciennes institutions françaises, leur progrès, leur décadence, et sur les causes qui ont amené la révolution et ses diverses phases jusqu’à la déclaration d’empire; avec un supplément sur le gouvernement de buonaparte, depuis ses comencemens jusqu’à sa chute; et sur le retour de la maison de bourbon, three volumes, paris: h. nicolle/a. édron/gide fils. morton, jack a. (1968), “the innovation of innovation,” ieee transactions on engineering management, em-15 (2): 57-65. pocock, john g. a. (1971), “languages and their implications: the transformation of the study of political thought,” in politics, languages and time: essays on political thoughts and history, chicago, university of chicago press (1989): 3-41. quinet, edgar (1865), la révolution, paris: félix alcan, 1891. tocqueville, alexis de (1835), de la démocratie en amérique i, paris: gallimard, 1992. benjoît godin is professor, inrs, montral (que), canada. for many years, he has worked on the history of statistics in science and, in 2005, published measurement of science and technology : 1920 to the present (routledge). at present, he is conducting research on the cultural and conceptual history of innovation. his latest book is innovation contested : the idea of innovation over the centuries (also routledge, 2015). he may be reached at benoit.godin@ucs.inrs.ca. https://mail.cbs.dk/owa/redir.aspx?surl=xcpcgpy-a4alnlzgemreov7e4t3fqx-avfwfhc4hunktvvaxdufscg0ayqbpagwadabvadoaygblag4abwbpahqalgbnag8azabpag4aqab1agmacwauagkabgbyahmalgbjagea&url=mailto%3abenoit.godin%40ucs.inrs.ca “calling it a crisis”: modes of creative labour and magic in an elite architect company aina landsverk hagen abstract in recent years we have seen a resurfacing of magic as an analytical category in anthropological literature, with particular emphasis on modern forms of occultism and witchcraft. magic has yet to prove itself a useful analytical tool within the anthropology of organizations, and this article aims at understanding everyday work processes through the concepts of myth and magic. the discussion is based on empirical data from an internationally acclaimed architect company based in norway, with a particular focus on a period of downsizing in the aftermath of the global financial crisis in 2008. the architects try to uphold an egalitarian, social-democratic ideology of creativity within a capitalist system and make use of a range of magical practices in order to succeed. the article shows how narrative flexibility transforms the brutality of downsizing into a mode of creative labour, and concludes that the internal dynamic between risk taking and risk reducing is inherent in both magical practices and capitalist systems. keywords organizations, creativity, architects, magic, downsizing, flexibility page 1 of 18 jba 4(2): 201-218 fall 2015 © the author(s) 2015 issn 2245-4217 www.cbs.dk/jba journal of business anthropology, 4(2), fall 2015 202 introduction “no human beings, at whatever stage of culture, completely eliminate spiritual preoccupations from their economic concerns.” malinowski (1935:vi) in the aftermath of the global financial crisis in 2008, companies all over the world struggled to survive. even though scandinavia was not hit the hardest, the crisis also had repercussions for the everyday life of employees in the social-democratic welfare states. in norway, the office space of an elite architect company went from bustling frenzy to subdued silence when 140 employees were reduced to half the number in a little over a year. it happened in two major bulks during my fieldwork, affecting the ongoing creative processes in which the architects were involved. the company has had a turbulent history from its genesis in 1989 when a loose group of unknown, newly educated architects won their first world famous commission. this was not the first time the company had to downsize. still something was different this time around. coinciding with the repercussions of the financial crisis in 2010 was the process of reorganizing the company structure into several entities. this was presented to the employees in all-hands meetings as a move to secure the company brand, its legal rights and intellectual properties and systems: in short, to reduce risk in what was framed by the management as a time of “crisis.” project groups would be transferred from the mother company to other entities one at a time during the winter months. there was a slight, whispering unease among the employees at this news: what would happen to groups that lost a competition or failed to get a contract signed during that period? what would be the criteria for receiving notice of dismissal that year? “it’s like paradise” junior architect katherine1 was one of those receiving notice of temporary dismissal in february 2010. when she didn’t seem all that disenchanted, i asked her whether she still felt lucky to have been employed in this particular company? she replied, “yes, it’s really different than most offices i think. it’s like paradise.” this puzzled me. the architects seemed to be systematically overworked, in addition to being hired and fired depending on financial fluctuations, but they nonetheless expressed their love for the company. why? to understand this paradox, i see downsizing as being a mode of creative labour generally accepted by the employees, but only if it is accompanied by a narrative flexibility that upholds the autonomous character of their everyday creative practices. i employ the notion of magic as a general aspect of such work practices, 1 all names are pseudonyms. hagen / “calling it a crisis” 203 using the internationally acclaimed architect company based in norway as an empirical location for my discussion. the ethnographic study presented here is based on extended fieldwork in the company’s two open office landscapes―a warehouse in the inner oslo-fjord, and a renovated office space on lower manhattan―during the period 2008-2012. it consists of more than 50 indepth interviews in oslo and new york, the filming of about 100 hours of group work, participation in several sessions of communal reflecting on internal work processes and methodology, and a number of action research workshops facilitated by my research team in a larger project on everyday creativity in the workplace.2 as part of my phd, i followed five different competition teams in the two locations, and also observed several videoconferencing meetings of a cross-branch team. during the winter of 2010, the period relevant to this article, i occupied a designated desk in the open office space of the company, observing the collaborative work of a competition group consisting of four architects and one interior architect. i took part in a number of all-hands meetings addressing both the downsizing and structural changes of the company, as well as everyday conversations among its employees, at lunch or at coffee breaks, and in several off-hour activities. after the fieldwork period i kept contact with the company employees, and visited both offices on several occasions during the following years. during the winter of 2010 katherine became what the employees called a “50 percent-er.” by not cutting full positions, the management wanted to ensure that all employees would still be coming to work every day, and hopefully get the chance to return to a full-time job if things picked up in the near future: a form of numerical flexibility (wood 1989) made possible by the many temporally employed workers. ”yes, i am part of the club,” katherine stated when i asked for her status during the downsizing rounds. she deliberately made a sad face, before lighting up. “but actually it will not be too bad. i only get a few thousand (norwegian kroner)3 reduction (in salary) and working 50 percent less will be good for me.” i had often seen her late at night, along with many of her team partners, struggling to meet the deadline of the latest commission. origin myths have laid the foundation for the company’s organizational practices. one of the founders explained how “we felt that no one took us seriously. so we decided to risk everything on one big project (…). we drew it in los angeles. in six weeks” (hagen 2014:69). “we had an unusual beginning,” another founder stated. “you just kind of win it almost by luck.” origin myths are in general reproduced through 2 the idea work project was funded by the research council of norway and five norwegian partnering companies (see carlsen et al. 2012). as contract researchers, we provided the partner firms with relevant research-based activities throughout the period 2008-2011. 3 this is equivalent to about €250, as of july 2015. journal of business anthropology, 4(2), fall 2015 204 such intraand extra-organizational storytelling (czarniawska 1997, gabriel 2000, boje 2014), and here the myth of creative work as requiring little (although genius-like) effort, and the myth of creative flexibility and limitless hours, are induced by phrases like ”we drew it in six weeks.” by designing the entry within an “unreal” timeframe and in an “unreal” space, winning a major competition without any prior experience suddenly seems plausible. the serendipity, chance and hardship following the initial competition win are repeated in the media stories, but more importantly the origin myths are transmitted through the active storytelling of seniors to newcomers, to the extent that these narratives came to define the company ideology decades later. while myths are basic ingredients in practices of magic, they also provide organizations with great opportunity for expansion (meyer and rowan 1977) and can be good tools for reducing risk during times of necessity. this i call narrative flexibility. the stories told and retold to new employees in the architect company emphasize exactly the connection between creativity, success, bravery and comradeship. the genesis myths tell of how the group of young architects took only weeks to complete a winning competition concept. the myths thus form the basis for the ideal creative process that, according to the employees, leads to sensory “eureka-moments” where the architectural concepts are produced collectively―the idea not coming from any single individual but from the group as a whole. this ideal process is presented to new employees as the recipe for winning competitions and acquiring commissions. these local myths are strongly linked to more general myths of creativity dominant in western society, particularly addressing the relation between the artist, artwork, the public and the mundane. according to one of the employees at the oslo headquarters, “architecture is the slowest of all art forms.” architects seem to struggle with the myths surrounding artistic and architectural practices, and particularly with the assumed clear-cut opposition between imitation and innovation. the myths of creativity are as powerful as the building structures to which the architects relentlessly try to give a “liquid” form through their enchanted 3d software technology and advanced machinery. in contrast, the 2d software autocad is a more mundane working tool mastered by all, regarded in general as old-fashioned as it only enables one to make straight lines. more advanced technology is the domain of the younger, newly educated architects who enchant their colleagues with their 3d software skills, and challenge the position of senior architects as the sought after crafters of physical models and drawings (gell 1998). the seniors instead perform as experts on the collaborative creative process itself. the genesis myth of this particular company, as it is presented to the external audience, contains no references to, or detailed accounts of, the actual work process of drawing the successful competition entry. the hagen / “calling it a crisis” 205 exception is one account of the origin myth where the creative process was explained in some detail by one of the founders: “in an apartment downtown los angeles they slept under the tables, drew and discussed. they egged each other on. in architecture, one seldom experiences this moment of eureka (…) strictly speaking, it’s just an uncontrollable movement in the cerebral cortex―the moment you think of something you weren’t able to discover before. it’s an addictive feeling you want again and again.” (hagen 2014:79). he retold one of the most solid myths of creativity: the embodied eureka moment, where the idea for the solution arrived seemingly without effort. “it is like a game where we together conjure the ideas. something lies smoldering―and is drawn out through lengthy conversations.” this moment of sensible intuition, so characteristic of artistic creation (lévistrauss 1962/1972), was achieved only after strenuous periods of conversations and sketching. the sheer workload necessary to undertake such an intense collaborative effort was not accounted for in any of the versions of the myth circulating in the media, and so contributed to the spell-like qualities of the phrase “in six weeks,” hinting at a supernatural creative outburst requiring little effort. architects could be described as bricoleurs (lévi-strauss 1962/1972:17), continuously collecting ideas, elements and inspiration from outside sources and from past design projects that never materialized. they are part of the process of constructing buildings, landscapes and interiors, and in this they are more often selling lines and “drawing for money” than making art. one of the more mundane solutions the architects in this particular firm offer to this artistic dilemma of closure and fluidity is to transform their work into everyday rituals: for example, by mounting wheels on furniture to spur mobility and flexibility; by mixing administrative and architect staff in the open office landscape; and by celebrating each employee’s birthday by singing in norwegian during lunch hour. they are also vocal in addressing issues of creativity in every project and design project groups in order to secure functional flexibility (wood 1989). as one senior architect in the oslo office said, “there is a tradition for not having a tradition here.” in an organizational climate that disapproves of all forms of codification of work methods, the system of heightened sensory-perceptive, technologically skilled, or vocal performance acts needs to be founded on myths allowing for exactly these “moments of eureka.” i identify three modes of magical practices present among these creative labourers: sensory magic, crafting magic and vocal magic. the heroism involved in accounts of creativity hides the fact that most creative acts are acts of collaboration involving a multiplicity of actors (john-steiner 2000; kelley 2001; osborne 2003; hargadon 2003). each mode of magical practice is connected to a particular group of journal of business anthropology, 4(2), fall 2015 206 company magicians: spiritual leaders, like the founders quoted above, who instigate internal motivation through speech acts; ritual experts, who have extensive knowledge of organizational practices; and digital gurus, who are masters of the advanced software. what i call sensory magic plays a vital role in the company philosophy, as the “eureka moment” is highly intertwined with myths forming local ideals of everyday creative practices. in the words of the founder “it’s an addictive feeling you want again and again.” this feeling is one of bodily sensation and intellectual stimulation and in naming this sensory magic i define it as a practice on its own, interrelated with vocal and crafting magic (which will have to be discussed in length elsewhere). sensory magic is key to understanding what fuels labour in companies within the creative industry. the lines that are drawn after the process of a collective eureka moment are not the same kind of lines that are drawn “for money,” even though they may look the same to the naked eye. sensory magic has transformed and infused these lines with a combination of anarchic solidarity (gibson and sillander 2011) and collective will. this confirms malinowski’s (1935) argument about how spiritual preoccupations are interrelated with economic concerns―and with tangible results. magic in anthropology malinowski was part of a generation of anthropologists who revived and reconfigured the primitive notion of magic by comparing the practices of the “other” to those of the enlightened people of western countries. the crown jewels of britain were likened to the kula shells of the trobrianders, with symbolic power far outreaching their “objective” value. advertising practices in the post-world war ii era were interpreted as similar to the workings of local shamans in asian or african communities, who use repeated words and formulas to enchant people into thinking anything is possible―whether becoming a beauty queen, falling madly in love, or procuring wealth―but also to gain control over whatever we do not want to happen. how did the concept of magical practices come to influence anthropology? edward b. tyler (1871), james g. frazer (1890) and marcel mauss (2002 [1950]) each in their own way discussed the symbolic meaning of magic acts, magic as a social fact, “a complex of ideas, beliefs and rites handed down from one generation to another” (greenwood 2009:9). building on these early thoughts on magic, malinowski (1922/1932, 1935, 1948/1992), raymond firth (1939/1972) and evans-pritchard (1937/1976) argued that magic is also a rational way of ordering society, an essential feature of the productive process in primitive economy. when the trobrianders artistically carve dazzling canoe prow-boards for the kula trade, the magic patterns are integral to instilling optimism that these canoes will be safe in rough and hagen / “calling it a crisis” 207 dangerous seas and simultaneously work to demoralize their adversaries (gell 1992:44). the myth of the flying canoe is thus regarded as fundamental for the work practices of trobriand carvers. the rites and spells that accompany the acts of carving also contribute to a team spirit among the voyagers (malinowski 1935:116). in focusing on the functional aspects of magic, anthropologists such as malinowski outlined its systemic character: how magic acts through rites and formulas aimed at the emotional element of everyday production tasks (malinowski 1935:60). with his confidence theory of magic, malinowski claimed that magic has “the function of giving confidence to the worker, of acting as a supplementary sanction for the performance of the task” (1935:184). magic does not replace technique and knowledge, but instead contributes towards economic efficiency and the integration of effective teams, becoming “also an empirical force” (malinowski 1935:240). in this way magic has both a psychological and a sociological effect. for his part, evans-pritchard (1937/1976) discarded the idea of magic as a fixed total system of knowledge, arguing that it was contextually relative, dynamic, and adaptive to situations. lévy-bruhl (1928), on the other hand, building on mauss (1950/2002), emphasized the cognitive and sensory aspects of magic, seeing magic as “a process of mind that goes beyond either sociological or psychological reduction” (greenwood 2009:10). to lévy-bruhl the metamorphosis of bodily awareness was a part of the sensory and psychic connection with both material and non-material reality, an embodied experience referred to as “mystical mentality.” in the past decades anthropologists have used these theoretical contributions on magic in primitive societies to enlighten their interpretation of similar practices in modern culture. alfred gell (1992, 1998) makes extensive use of malinowski’s work on the trobriands in his discussion on the production and reception of modern art. although not explicitly mentioned, lévy-bruhl’s “mystical mentality” resonates with the concept of the “distributed mind” portrayed by gell (1998), where “the creative products of a person or people become their ‘distributed mind’ which turns their agency into their effects, as influences upon the minds of others” (miller 2005:13). with new volumes on magic and modernity (meyer and pels 2003, moore and sanders 2001), witchcraft (bond and ciekawy 2001, kapferer 2002, stein and stein 2005) and magic and fashion (moeran 2015), contemporary anthropology sees a resurfacing of magic as an analytical category and a fruitful venue for research (masquelier 2004). however, magic has yet to prove itself as a useful analytical tool within the anthropology of organizations and in the following discussion i will attempt to bring magic and organizations together. architecture has a long history of being viewed as a form of art (rannells 1949)―an idea that brings with it certain some moral journal of business anthropology, 4(2), fall 2015 208 implications. as alfred gell (1992:59) has written, “if artists are paid at all (…) it is a tribute to their moral ascendancy over the lay public,” and he goes on to argue that artists’ magical production is the reverse of productive technology. when divine inspiration and ancestral spirits fill the artist, she is not working “for us,” and thus, in the contexts of artistic production, the trivial world of contract formulations and cost assessment seems to be disenchanting, or even morally wrong. art is thus “a black box,” of which we, the audience, are in awe when we see the result. like most professions within the creative and knowledge industries, architects are also dependent on their ideas being acknowledged as exciting and inspiring by others. but what happens if this strategy of enchanting the audience does not succeed in securing enough revenue? walking the lay off line thursday, february 17, 2010, the oslo office the snow is no longer falling. the sky is dense grey―only hints of blue streaks break the surface. inside. quiet. still air. a petite, smartly dressed, brownhaired woman is walking the aisles of architects pretending to be at work. the atmosphere is thick with the absence of the sounds of normality. the woman bears a compassionate, but strict expression of determination. nobody wants to pay her attention, yet everyone’s senses are fully tuned in to her movements. is she slowing down? does her body aim towards this column? are her eyes fixed on someone in that row? her concentrated movements yell out the answer to what is wondered in silence: is it my turn? your turn? his or her turn to go? the task she has been assigned affects everyone’s activity these dreaded days. people avoid each other to avoid her. their looks are empty, revealing nothing, asking nothing. their voices anxiously mellow. she is bringing the word on who’s in and who’s out. the one thing you don’t want in your hand today is a sheet of white paper bearing the black inked notification of your temporary dismissal. the company champions a kind of creativity that its managers and employees identify as “egalitarian and social-democratic.” both work hard to avoid traditional practices of artistic mentors telling others what to define as “creative” and how to draw. new employees are expected to speak out, to contribute with ideas on the same level as any senior, and to take full responsibility for the work that has to be done. the managers hagen / “calling it a crisis” 209 deny any hint of “archistar” status (lo rocco & micheli 2003 in la cecla 2012), as “everyone has an equal voice” in the company lingo. the organization promotes a highly collaborative approach to creative practices and a philosophy of “self-structuring chaos.” but these are all practices that come with a cost, something that became poignant in the aftermath of the global financial crisis of 2008. the question of who would be laid off created a lot of unease and muffled discussions during the winter months of 2010. the only vocal outburst of anger i witnessed came from a senior architect. she voiced her frustration loudly one day, sitting at her desk in the open office landscape: “it is inhumane! people are walking around waiting to know if it concerns them.” no one answered her exclamation and muffled voices once again took over the office soundscape, in ingold’s (2011) term. the architects explained how the sharing of space―for example, by means of voices and the constant movement of bodies―automatically effectuated the sharing of ideas. they linked the bustling, loud office atmosphere directly to their ability to work creatively and collaboratively. it was the typical creative organization (witz et al. 2003, schwarz 2003), appearing to any approving observer as something of an ideal community of workers collaborating amiably with a common mission of making a difference in the world. during the first round of lay-offs in 2009, a young architect remarked, nodding towards the desk area of the office landscape: “it’s like a funeral here. people are losing their jobs tomorrow, but still they work like they’re obsessed with meeting a deadline.” the initial strategy of a temporary reduction in work hours had led to many employees working extra, as they would just stop registering the hours they worked instead of going home midday, not eager to leave their colleagues with a double workload. so they stayed at their desks, drawing steadily on the computers―without registering the labour and consequently not getting paid for it. silence had been a rare phenomenon in this particular soundscape of elite architects, but now it was reigning in the rebuilt warehouse building. at one point i asked one of the many young german architects in the office: why was no one kicking and screaming or, at least, showing some emotion during these layoff days? why was it so nerve-rackingly silent in an office landscape that was usually so pulsating? david did have an answer ready (and it was one that at the time surprised me): “i think it is because everyone likes the company so much, despite what’s happening.” he continued, “my friends in europe, they lost their jobs and just hate their company now. nobody [here] talks about it the downsizing; only those who are close friends.” he considered his last statement and added, “and often not even then. people don’t even know who is on temporary contracts, they don’t want to ask.” this avoidance can be seen to reflect the scandinavian idea of equality as meaning “equal worth” [likeverd in norwegian] (gullestad 1989), where every person’s voice is equally important, regardless of their employment status. the journal of business anthropology, 4(2), fall 2015 210 local cultural phenomenon of refraining from posing differences as general themes in social interaction (vike 2001) adds generalizability to david’s claim that they refrained from interrogating their colleagues’ employee status. another line of explanation is connected to the magic of the origin myths. in a research-facilitated workshop session in april 2009, landscape architect magnus elaborated on the uniqueness of the company, contrasting it with much more “random” tasks or marketoriented companies. “there is a greater will to discuss issues here―even now, when times are tougher, and discussions must be held with people that unfortunately have to leave. the discussion between us employees and the management group on whether we would decrease our salary or let people go. what is always the argument is that we will certainly not lower the quality of our architecture. we are not selling ourselves out or taking on assignments we don’t believe in. this implies that what i call ‘the mission of the company’ will not be compromised.” he went on to argue that this “mission” was triggered by an integral aspect of architectural practice. “in a way, it all comes down to a form on a personal level, from the big mission, that if this mission doesn’t feel right to me, then i won’t be able to contribute. i feel that the company is really good at this―that one feels this mission. it feels logical: ‘this is how it is supposed to work.’” this employee’s reflections implied that downsizing as a strategy in times of hardship was viewed as a legitimate practice by the staff, and that it was preferable to “selling out.” the discussion that he referred to, between employees and the management group, about whether they should decrease salaries or let people go, took place during several allhands meetings in the winter months of 2009 and 2010. the financial situation was strained and the management introduced several options for the staff to discuss in the obligatory meetings that took place in the lunch area at irregular intervals. these gatherings had the important function of disseminating information about the financial and organizational situation directly to the employees, but also of enabling them to voice their opinions and concerns to each other and the managers. the all-hands meetings are a requirement of the norwegian work environment act, but they were also an organizational ritual that curbed the feeling of risk, just as acts of crafting are accompanied by rites and spells that lead to enhanced team spirit (malinowski 1935:116). in the allhands meetings conducted during the winter of 2010, the messages from hagen / “calling it a crisis” 211 the management were increasingly sombre. just before christmas a reduction in bonuses and salaries was discussed; in the following february, it eventually became necessary to hand out temporary dismissals. despite the sombre messages, these all-hands meetings underlined the compassionate nature of the company (and the welfare state), the message being that no one was alone in these times of hardship, that compensation for loss of pay would be given by the state, and that the management was working creatively to figure out ways to get out of the situation without permanent dismissals―a practice called “flexicurity” (wilthagen and tros 2004). the higher the risk, the greater the need for rituals like anniversaries and all-hands meetings, and it is in this territory of dealing with danger that magic in the malinowskian (1932) sense belongs. the financial state of architectural offices in general depends first and foremost on signing contracts after winning competitions or securing commissions, contracts that not always reflect the amount of work that will be put into the design process.4 in europe, open competition is the most usual form, where anyone, even inexperienced architects, may enter a proposal―this is how the company won its first contract in 1989: in the words of one of the founders, “you just kind of win it almost by luck.” juries decide on anonymous entries of more or less finished concept models. this contributes to the magical character of genesis myths, since success can come from “nowhere,” as it did in this case. this also affects the value of creativity within the industry, in that the competition phase itself (four-five months) is generally seen as the most creative phase of any architectural process. this is when collaborative creativity can arise from “nothing” in a most magical way, just as related in the company’s the genesis myth. after winning a competition, the next step is approval of cost estimates. getting the client or contractor to sign the agreement is therefore of crucial value to a company’s finances, and thus has consequences for the fluctuating number of employees. to get the contract to cover most of the actual costs is an issue of substantial concern, as entering competitions is an expense in itself for the architectural firms involved. even if the company is invited and receives a fee, the latter is seldom enough to cover the hours of work invested in such a process. in this economy of fame the architects are highly dependent on winning esteemed prizes and media coverage through prestigious projects that can bring “cultural capital” (bourdieu 1984/2010:124) to the company and only in some cases large commissions become profitable. to compensate for this risk, a lot of companies instead “draw for money” by designing traditional office buildings and hotels. the dependence on competition success contributes 4 the manner of competing diverges in the european and american system of architecture commissions. this is discussed in more detail in hagen (2014). journal of business anthropology, 4(2), fall 2015 212 to making the logic of “numerical flexibility” (wood 1989) seem legitimate, as a permanent full-time workforce is complemented after winning a competition by employees hired on short-term contracts. if a contract fails or is stalled, these temporary employees have to go. kathrine, who views the company as “paradise,” regardless of being downsized herself, seemed to accept this view. downsizing, magic and creativity according to mauss (2002/1950), magic is by definition believed. it is also felt as a sensory experience (lévy-bruhl 1928). it is handed down through generations by means of myth telling and thus becomes a social fact, an emotional element of everyday work. what the architect above described as “the mission” is something the company had never written down, documented or codified. it can rather be described as a philosophy of work that was being handed down by “ritual experts”―informal leaders who are often (but not always) senior in position, and who both guide and sanction new employees in their social and work-related conduct by means of their narratives. maja, one of these ritual experts, shared her personal experience of such a collective “eureka moment” with her younger colleagues in the following manner: “it was like this big vision when we got the idea of this tilted plane. everybody was so excited, it was like a spiritual experience and everybody had this like―wow, what a fantastic idea! it's like everybody went home and dreamt about this, sloping planes, and then we were fighting like crazy for five weeks, because we could never agree exactly how to do it. but i think it really didn't matter, because we all believed in the main idea, and we could do it many ways. in the end it was the logic of the idea itself that was the driving force and the main guide.” the embodied experience of “mystical mentality” (lévy-bruhl 1928) is reflected in the ideal practices that the architects repeatedly discuss during project meetings and reflection seminars as the key to their success. these in-house stories of creative collaborative labour celebrate the sensory connections to collective ideas as the preferred method of working. at the same time, sensory magic is seen as an uncontrollable force only possible to release through ongoing sessions of collective vocal magic, never by prescription or systematization. at this point, a swedish architect, magnus, interrupted: “you also say that the experience was a physical sensation in the body.” maja: “yeah.” magnus added: “you can almost feel your spine burning.” hagen / “calling it a crisis” 213 luke, a young american, broke into the conversation. “this is important. we know it's important, because the results are fantastic. they are there forever.” when the younger architects ask maja whether such eureka moments can be planned for or facilitated, she refused to answer. instead she insisted on how “you know it when it happens.” company myths like this, then, function as the only “recipe” for these architects’ everyday work practices. they disclose the procedures and essential elements of an “ideal” execution of entries to architectural competitions. the storytelling practices in the company are extensive and a part of celebratory rituals, reflection sessions, and everyday work life. “for societies without writing and without archiving the aim of mythology is to ensure that (…) the future will remain fateful to the present and the past,” lévi-strauss (1978/1995) writes. the trobriand myth of the flying canoe (malinowski 1922/1932) discloses how the “full knowledge of magic” enabled a canoe to fly through the air from an inland village, arriving safely on all the islands in the kula exchange chain. the narrative functions as an introduction to the extensive use of magical rites, formulas and spells in the natives’ main labour activities: yam cultivation and canoe building. in addition, the elements presented throughout the tale give a full rendition of the techniques and procedures for carving the canoes that are so important to the native’s economy of fame, the kula trade (malinowski 1922/1932). risk-taking is what many of the architects identify as a characteristic of their organization. in response to a presentation of the new company structure at an all-hands meeting, senior architect håkon exclaimed: “minimize risk? the company takes risks. (…) we have to do both at the same time: make brilliant architecture and earn money.” the difference that makes a difference (bateson, 1972/2000) in the history of the company is that, according to håkon, “this time we’re calling it a crisis.” crisis in paradise technique is supposed to be dull and mechanical, opposed to true creativity and such authentic values that art represents. this is a distorted view, according to gell (1992:56), who argues that the technical activity is also the source of the efficacy of our social relations. in periods of financial stability, the few young “digital gurus,” who had mastered 3d software like rhino and grasshopper, gained respect and status for their enchanting abilities. during the downsizing periods i noticed how the monotonous, and thus silent, work suddenly surfaced with meaning and purpose, in contrast to the celebration of “creative buzz” and the enchanted 3d models and renderings. the vocal magic of the spiritual leaders was subdued during this period. rather, it was the traditional, journal of business anthropology, 4(2), fall 2015 214 mundane crafting magic that kept them afloat through the treacherous waters of the financial crisis. and, when i dared to ask, the architects fiercely refused to describe the labour of these months as less creative. the 2d software autocad, a democratic tool enabling everybody to perform, became a sacred object (durkheim 1912/1974:44) during the downsizing, securing momentary inclusion and belonging. thus, when the employees no longer controlled who was included in or excluded from creative work, they compensated by performing egalitarian ideals through the tools they all knew how to use. when the architects artistically “carve” dazzling 3d designs and print miniature models that enchant their audience, they also work to demoralize their adversaries (gell 1992:44). the optimism that these design concepts would somehow provide safety in rough and dangerous seas was dependent upon managers doing a good job handling the economic side of the business. the employees’ strong emphasis on an egalitarian, social-democratic ideology seemed never to subside during, or after, this period of downsizing, despite the sudden introduction of what the architects deemed to be “inhumane” practices of temporary and permanent dismissal. when i repeated my question to a norwegian senior architect with more than 15 years’ experience in the company―why was no one rebelling during the lay-off periods?―she said quietly: “it is horrible to say, but we have nowhere to go. we are like an abused child. this is what we believe in.” the social fact of the magic inherent in the creative processes seemed to make them captive to their own talents and aspirations. in becoming true believers in these particular practices of creativity, it was difficult to transform yourself into becoming an architect “drawing for money,” or accepting orders and strict regulations. the repercussions of the financial crisis and the capitalist system highlight how the architects are inextricably interwoven as employees, consumers, and salesmen of lines. this might explain why they like the company this much, why they claim that they cannot find a (truly creative) job elsewhere―despite the brutal acts of exclusion in times of hardship. regardless of the management’s efforts to avoid layoffs, the oslo branch lost half its staff within little over a year. with hindsight, it became clear that few of the digital gurus and the ritual experts were given permanent notes of dismissal. the magicians stayed in the realm. despite the company’s past history of taking chances and jumping on opportunities often way beyond their control, and thus winning prestigious competitions, reducing risk became the mantra of the third decade of the company’s existence. conclusion the principles of a magical system are inherent in every important human activity involving danger, uncertainty and chance (firth 1939/1972; hagen / “calling it a crisis” 215 malinowski 1935, mauss 1950/2002). a diverse set of moralities and values affect both employees and management’s decisions, reactions and sentiments during the unstable times that followed the global financial crisis in 2008. to deal with the dilemmas and ambivalences surfacing from the paradoxical state of being “equally genius” in a capitalist economy, these architects made use of a range of “magical practices” in their everyday work―practices inherent in modern organizations to set things or people in motion. faced with the harsh reality of market exploitation, they were not the only profession in the knowledge domain to struggle in actualizing their ideas into “any existence whatever” (colebrook 2008:80). a narrative flexibility enabled collaborative creativity through the ideals promulgated to new employees, but it also transformed the brutality of downsizing into a mode of creative labour. the origin stories of success in the company have never been documented in writing, but are retold and reshaped depending on the situation. in this way, stories are used as a way of being able to downsize (and upsize) with compassion and empathy through the narrative flexibility of the origin myths recaptured at the beginning of this article. this form of flexibility hides the brutality of risk-taking and risk-reducing practices. the vocal magic of the directors and the original staff is essential to install confidence in the employees, and the buildings that they design are tangible proof that success is within reach. the implications of defining architecture as an art form within a strictly capitalist system necessitates the building of “impossible” organizational structures, where revenues do not readily appear in the shape of money, but rather as a continuous stream of acknowledgements spurred by their risk-taking design practices. both magical practices and capitalist systems thus feed from the internal dynamic between risk taking and risk 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(ed.) 1989. the transformation of work? skill, flexibility and the labour process. boston, ma: unwin hyman. aina landsverk hagen holds a phd in social anthropology from the university of oslo, norway. she is currently employed as a senior researcher at the work research institute at oslo and akershus university college of applied sciences, norway. her research interests include gender, social and power relations, freedom of speech, anthropology of magic and creativity within organizations. she may be reached at aina.hagen@afi.hioa.no vi opdaterer systemet vi opdaterer systemet... rauli.cbs.dk opdateres og er snart tilgængeligt. opinions: all about creativity and innovation andy c. pratt, doris ruth eikhof, keith sawyer, robert d. austin, peter johnson, martyn straw, patrik wikstrom, jie ren, filip lau and mikkel brok-kristensen, with an introductory essay by brian moeran a prolegomenon brian moeran (copenhagen business school, denmark, and the university of hong kong) several months ago, when jakob, timothy and i were planning this spring’s issue of the jba, we realised that we would probably have two articles ready for publication on professional people―architects and fashion designers―regarded as “creative.” so, in an attempt to overcome the randomness of journal submissions and to create a thematic flow for our readers, we decided to seek opinions on creativity and innovation from people in the business world and from academics who make it their business to conduct research on them. the results are here before you. approach more than half a dozen people from different occupational and cultural backgrounds and request them to write about creativity and innovation, and a journal editor looking for textual coherence is asking for trouble! what follows is an eclectic mixture of opinions about the nature of creativity and innovation in virtually all forms of business life: from organizational management to crowdsourcing, from branding to stardom, from workforce neurodiversity to page 1 of 70 jba 4(2): 228-297 fall 2015 © the author(s) 2015 issn 2245-4217 www.cbs.dk/jba opinions: all about creativity 229 the various treatments for toy story. written in a variety of styles―some “business-speak,” others conversational, yet others academic―these essays offer different people’s takes on ideas of creativity and innovation, and support the assertion that, like culture (williams 1985), creativity is one of the most widely used and misused words in the english language (negus and pickering 2004: vi). neither it nor innovation may be regarded as “a coherent, controlled, well-rounded and clean-edged affair.” rather, both are “dislocated” (latour 2005: 46)―a dislocation that is most apparent, perhaps, in the intellectual silos in which we all wallow and which, it seems to me, occasionally pushes one or two of us to try to reinvent the wheel. but that, maybe, is what creativity and innovation are all about! nevertheless, precisely because of these disciplinary and workplace dislocations, i should admit that i myself learned a lot from these opinion pieces, and that they added to my own understandings of the business of creativity and innovation (moeran 2014). like doris eikhof, in the past i have on occasion been exasperated by the ways in which people talk about this “mantra.” to paraphrase jana costas and gideon kunda’s opinion piece title in the last issue of the jba: “when i hear the words ‘creativity’ and ‘innovation,’ i reach for my gun.” clearly, there’s no “proper” use of creativity or innovation, or of any other word that is, in andy pratt’s formulation, as deceptive, simple and self-evident, but also elusive (the whole point of “keywords [parkin 1979, moeran 1984]). still, as he then goes on to say, we should be reflexive about our production of knowledge and try to pin things down a bit if we’re going to talk about them―something benoît godin does superbly in his essay on the shift over time of the word innovation from being forbidden to becoming a cliché, and that pratt himself does with how 20th century history has affected our understandings and use of both innovation and creativity. both essays underline the argument that “knowledge is always and necessarily formed in context.” pratt argues that creativity and innovation are relational activities and that their interaction generates more than the sum of their components. in this respect, a number of scholars (myself included) like to think of creativity and innovation in terms of collaborative engagements, and it is in fact such engagements which underpin the essays that follow here―whether between script writers and film producers, hr managers and autistic employees, or musical stardom and new technologies. they take place on four interlocking levels. we encounter them, first, among the different agents assigned to a particular project―a gallery director and her employees, curators, artists, and funding bodies (eikhof); or fashion designers, photographers, models, hair stylists, make-up artists, bookers, advertising clients, and so on and so forth, all involved in putting on a fashion show or shooting an advertising campaign (mears 2011). journal of business anthropology, 4(2), fall 2015 230 engagements also take place between these agents and the institutions by which they are employed (between the “talent pool” and hugo boss, for example [kasper vangkilde]; or the architects and the firm that is obliged to lay them off in a recession [aina landsværk hagen])―together with their associated hierarchies of power that include both internal positions (creative director, supervisor, trainees, and so on) and external status rankings (armani, dolce & gabbana, hugo boss, burberry, and so forth). this is exemplified nicely by sawyer’s account of the zigs and zags involving individual scriptwriters, actors, and organizations such as pixar, disney, hasbro and mattel (sawyer). but we also find institutional engagements with individuals (and vice versa) in the enactment of hr and recruitment policies (rob austin). thirdly, they occur between agents, institutions, and the materials, tools and technologies, together with their associated ideals and budgets, with which they all in their different ways engage and negotiate among themselves―witness patrik wikstrom’s discussion of the shift from a product-based to access-based music economy; or jie ren’s account of the development and practices of crowd-sourcing. and finally, engagements are initiated between all of the above and cultural genres (like the brands discussed by martyn straw), in the sense that such engagements “employ conventionalised and specialised occupational practices and practical knowledge, work within an institutional context with its own inherent cultural logic and produce a tangible text, product, or performance” (dornfeld 1998: 16). my own take on creativity is that we need to focus on all these different kinds of collaborative engagement, enacted by different participants as they go about conceptualizing, designing, performing or producing, and assessing different organizational forms and cultural goods: on what both sawyer and straw refer to as zigging and zagging towards the final goal―whether it be a film treatment or an exercise in branding. these “zigs” and “zags” involve frequent shifts in direction, which themselves drive the creative process forward and lead to one small innovation after another (sawyer). in this respect, creativity and innovation do not involve thinking “out of the box,” as so many people like to think. rather, as austin points out, both take place very much “on the edge” of the box (see also moeran 2014: 3-4). it is on the edge that you encounter neuro-, social, organizational, disciplinary, and product diversity. as a creative director in a japanese advertising agency once said to me: “with creative ideas you should never be one step ahead of society. if you are, society can’t keep up with you. so you should aim to be just a half step ahead.” this raises the question of the extent to which creativity is to be sought in “incremental steps,” or in “radical ideas.” sawyer argues for the former; ren, in the context of entrepreneurial profit and domain-related expertise, for the latter. different creative activities, it seems, demand opinions: all about creativity 231 different approaches; different ways of doing things with different skills engender different levels of results. in the music industry, technological innovations have been disruptive and led to “creative destruction,” as online piracy inspired new competitive business models which began to sell music as a service, rather than as products as previously (wikström). “positioning,” then, is crucial to what straw refers to as “the win/win” point of differentiation. creativity, innovation and improvisation now, it may be that using anthropology by businessmen as a problemsolving tool is “creative and innovative in its own right,” as filip lau and mikkel brok-kristensen aver, but over the years―perhaps most famously, by claude lévi-strauss (1966)―anthropologists have themselves wrestled with creativity and innovation, and how best to understand and analyse them. john liep (2001: 2), for example, equates creativity with innovation. this is the way many people think (certainly, the distinction is not entirely clear in some of the essays that follow). but what exactly is “innovation”? is an innovation necessarily “creative”? and who is going to come up with one: in the case of crowd-sourcing discussed by ren, are they more likely to be entrepreneurs, people with high expertise, or those with low? ultimately, we are led to ask: should we equate creativity with innovation, and vice versa? two other anthropologists, timothy ingold and elizabeth hallam (2007: 2-3), would answer in the negative. contra liep, they say that creativity and innovation are not the same thing. creativity, they argue, is forward-looking, whereas one can only gauge when an innovation has taken place by looking backwards at past products (or structures, or social processes). in other words, as eikhof points out, innovation is utilitarian; it is little other than a means of measurement―something that may appeal to policy advisors, as well as to those writing about innovation management, but of which anthropologists are almost certainly wary. this raises the question: can creativity be measured? governments like to think so and cite endless statistical data relating to turnover and employment figures in different forms of cultural production to justify their (often little more than lip service) support for creative industries. but, as eikhof points out, this support veers towards economic production and “draws attention away from the creative activity itself to the use of its product.” ingold and hallam find a way out of this measurement fixation by suggesting that we need to focus on processes of “in-the-making,” rather than on the products made―a focus that is at the heart of sawyer’s essay, which seems to suggest that creativity is to be found in process and innovation in the product. at the heart of such forward-looking processes journal of business anthropology, 4(2), fall 2015 232 is improvisation, which, through small and occasionally surprising changes, may invoke larger implications (see also sennett 2012: 214). improvisation is a word that creeps into, and on occasion takes over, some of the opinions that follow―notably sawyer’s account of the development of the treatment for toy story. lau and brok-kristensen, for their part, tell the tale of a product brief provided by a gym shoe manufacturer which was quite unable to improvise by thinking beyond its own industry-specific language. peter johnson, too, makes a strong call for organizational improvisation as a means towards achieving results in business. this certainly begins to answer the question, in my own view, of how best to think about and analyse creativity (and innovation). improvisation is spur of the moment extemporizing. it consists of people “fabricating and inventing novel responses without a pre-scripted plan and without certainty of outcomes; discovering the future that… action creates as it unfolds” (barrett 1998: 605). in this respect, improvisation is exciting, but also perilous. as austin notes, it questions the sort of “fitting in” organizations expect. in different forms of cultural production, it obliges people (like vangkilde’s “talent pool” designers) to come up with something whose outcome they cannot necessarily envisage, but which has to be novel and coherent―usually in front of a client or other audience (in the case of these young designers, a hugo boss creative director). precisely because improvisation takes people away from the security of habitual practice and leads them to “the edge” of the unknown, there is a tendency for them to rely on stock tricks of the trade which have proven effective in the past, rather than to risk failure, even though they know deep down that not to fail is in itself a failure (barrett 1998: 606-8). improvisation, then, often comes to be learned, as johnson argues for organizational improvisation―something that in itself brings to the fore the paradoxical extent to which seemingly unconstrained improvisation is in fact structured. in this respect, ingold and hallam’s distinction between backwardlooking innovation and forward-looking improvisation seems at first glance neat. alas! it doesn’t quite work in practice. it is often hard for those working together in collaborative situations to detach improvisation from innovation, process from product. perhaps this is a characteristic particular to cultural production in the “creative” industries, which are always conceptualising and manufacturing new products on the basis of past products and experiences. for them, primarily because they are working for the most part with defined genres and brands, the present is the past (something that straw, for example, in his discussion of branding, would probably like to get away from). as a result, we end up saying that creativity is product-as-process, neither one, nor the other, but both together. as sawyer (2006: 157) has pointed out elsewhere, “improvisation couldn’t take place at all without some shared conventions, because otherwise communication would be impossible.” opinions: all about creativity 233 this suggests that creativity is rarely a great leap forward, but rather consists of a series of small steps akin to the pigeon-toed shuffle of a geisha. thinking aside so what more do we need to explain creativity? creative products in themselves are characterised by what howard becker (2006: 24) has called a “fundamental indeterminacy.” films, fashion shows, studio shoots, and music gigs vary enormously, even though they may be realised by the same personnel in, to all intents and purposes, the same environments using the same materials and techniques. yet they are all marked by a series of choices by participants: those zigs and zags so nicely described in sawyer’s account of the conceptualization of toy story. it is the “combination of routine and unusual choices among available possibilities” (becker 2006: 25-6) that gives every creative product its character. what affords such choices, therefore―materials and available technologies, aesthetic ideals, genre and cultural style, personal networks, power relations, money―should be our main concern (moeran 2014: 3559). we see this combination of affordances at work in wikström’s essay on how technological changes in the music business are accelerating access-based music services, which themselves are beginning to reduce “the value and significance of artist-based music brands.” similarly, crowdsourcing has only become possible through the development of online platforms (ren). the concept of affordance would, i think, also help firms and other organizations when they decide to innovate. it is certainly what has enabled the jba to publish the “speed video” by simon lex westergaard and his students. it has already been suggested that creativity involves moving to the edge of the box. let me take this suggestion a little further. to be able to move to the edge, you have, necessarily, to be able to “think aside” (koestler 1970: 144-77)―something argued strongly for in straw’s discussion of brands. this is no easy task. as any zen novice will aver, the harder you try to find the answer to what the sound of one hand clapping might be, the less likely you are to find it. and yet you have to try and try again, because it is when you are beating your head against the wall of the box in frustration that, quite suddenly, a totally unexpected answer is likely to come to mind. creativity, then, involves thinking aside, and thinking aside demands discipline, skill, hard work and patience. creativity is based on graft, and not on an inexplicable gift from the gods. thinking aside is characteristic, as koestler argues, of humour, science, and art. each sees analogies which nobody has seen before―whether in a pithy saying (“statistics are like a bikini. what they reveal is suggestive. what they conceal is vital”), discovery (kepler’s journal of business anthropology, 4(2), fall 2015 234 linking of the physical and metaphysical in gravity and the holy ghost), or visual image (meret oppenheim’s cup, saucer and spoon in fur). while people working in different forms of cultural production may not aspire to such eureka acts, they do, nevertheless, attempt to uncover things that have always been there but “hidden from the eye by the blinkers of habit” (koestler 1970: 108). they bring together hitherto separate planes of experience in order to afford “originality,” which often―like metaphor―consists of no more than a displacement of attention to something that was irrelevant before, but is now made relevant (ibid. p. 119). the aim, then, is to free the mind of those constraints which are necessary for it to maintain a disciplined routine in everyday life, but which at the same time prevent the “blindingly obvious” from emerging. in koestler’s words again: ordered, disciplined thought is a skill governed by set rules of the game, some of which are explicitly stated, others implied and hidden in the code. the creative act, in so far as it depends on unconscious resources, presupposes a relaxing of the controls and a regression to the rules of verbal logic, unperturbed by contradiction, untouched by the dogmas and taboos of so-called common sense. at the decisive stage of discovery the codes of disciplined reasoning are suspended―as they are in the dream, the reverie, the manic flight of thought, when the stream of ideation is free to drift, by its own emotional gravity, as it were, in an apparently “lawless” fashion (ibid. p. 178). references barrett, f. 1998 “coda: creativity and improvisation in jazz and organizations: implications for organizational learning.” organization science 9 (5): 605-22. becker, h.s. “the work itself.” in h. s. becker, r. r. faulkner and b. kirshenblatt-gimblett (eds.) art from start to finish. chicago and london: university of chicago press. dornfeld, b. 1998 producing public television, producing public culture. princeton, nj: princeton university press. ingold, t. and e. hallam 2007 “creativity and cultural improvisation.” in their edited creativity and cultural improvisation. oxford: berg. koestler, a. 1970 the act of creation. london: pan. lévi-strauss, c. 1966 the savage mind. london: weidenfeld & nicolson. liep, j. 2001 “introduction.” in his edited locating cultural creativity. london: pluto. mears, a. 2011 pricing beauty: the making of a fashion model. berkeley & opinions: all about creativity 235 los angeles: university of california press. moeran, b. 1984 “individual, group and seishin: japan’s internal cultural debate.” man 19 (2): 252-66. moeran, b. 2014 the business of ©reativity: toward an anthropology of worth. walnut creek: left coast press. negus, k. and m. pickering 2004 creativity, communication and cultural value. london: sage. parkin, d. 1979 the cultural definition of political response. london: academic press. sawyer, r. k. 2006 “group creativity: musical performance and collaboration.” psychology of music 34 (2): 148-65. sennett, r. 2012 together. london: allen lane. williams, r. 1985 keywords. (revised edition.) oxford: oxford university press. * * * do economists make innovation; do artists make creativity? the case for an alternative perspective on innovation and creativity andy c pratt (city university, london) the contemporary imperative is to use knowledge, and to apply it to innovation, and in turn to boost the scale and scope of economic production. we are bombarded with “knowledge,” the need to gain it, or deploy it effectively. however, we seldom pause to differentiate between good and bad knowledge; all knowledge seems to be equal and positive. thus, this is not knowledge (or even information) overload (implying the need to sift and filter it), but knowledge as universal object: knowledge management, knowledge exchange, knowledge transfer, and the knowledge economy. such use of language simultaneously points to, but then obscures, its object. it is a process that sociologists of knowledge refer to as “black boxing,” a rhetoric that reduces the “knowledge problem” to one of logistics and organisation: the nature of knowledge is “bracketed out” (pratt 1998, pratt 1997). it is striking that neo-classical economic discourse characterises knowledge as an externality; that is, it is something not an intrinsic part to the economic problem. this essay seeks to place the knowledge question at the centre of our analyses, and subsequently suggests a radical re-interpretation of innovation and journal of business anthropology, 4(2), fall 2015 236 creativity. i will argue that there is, furthermore, an important specificity to knowledge “in action,” which i illustrate by reference to the cultural economy. my aim is to provoke, and to provide a different lens―one that challenges the view that regulation and organisations simply “get in the way” of the free circulation of knowledge. in short, i wish to confront the formulation of the problem, normally stated, characterised as guaranteeing the supply and distribution of knowledge: as the multiplication of management paper and textbooks on the topic will testify. a parallel trend has been to recognise that the field of arts and culture does not seem to face the same problem. in the field of arts and culture―the creative industries―all the latter do is produce “newness”: creativity and innovation are in abundance (pratt and jeffcutt 2009). moreover, the “creative turn” in management has acknowledged that artists and cultural activities are quite good at both producing and managing knowledge under complex and risky situations; suggesting that what they do with knowledge might be important. it is a commonly held view that “new” knowledge, manifest in novel goods and processes, is what drives the economy and society. simply having knowledge is not sufficient; it has to be used, or applied to a specific problem. this is why we have the “problem” of knowledge transfer and exchange. it is commonly stated that the contemporary economy is/will be a knowledge economy, and thus the imperative to produce more knowledge. it is not the economy of knowledge, as economic norms might express it (and how to fix market imperfections); rather it is knowledge itself that is constitutive of the economy and its dynamics. accordingly, in this essay i will reverse the normative argumentative order, and consider the challenge of “knowing” knowledge. i will reject the universal and atomised view of knowledge: what counts as knowledge in one time/place is different to another. this organisational twist to economic action is an anathema to normative economists, who see organisations and institutions, as well as knowledge, as external factors, which can be assigned a residual value in an equation. more shocking still, for those economists who have wandered outside the iron cage of their normative discipline, have been relational or post-structural critiques of economics. in a series of intriguing and provocative studies economics has been deconstructed, and the disciplinary logic exposed. a particularly challenging text argues what is a heresy for economists: that economists make markets (in other words, the latter are not “natural,” but a construct; moreover that they encourage us to act as if the market existed: people and markets are wrong, not economic theory)(mackenzie, muniesa, and siu 2007). in this essay i follow this lead and pose the questions: do economists make innovation; and do artists make creativity? i will argue that the discursive formation of innovation and creativity effectively blinds us to the social opinions: all about creativity 237 actions of knowledge creation (that is, humans acting, not humans {economists} writing about doing). moreover, that it would be productive to take a new look at the process of what we term “innovation and creativity” without bracketing out knowledge. instead of treating them as exceptional and rare, i argue that we should see non-creativity and noninnovation as exceptional, and an achievement; just as much as maintaining creativity and innovation are an achievement. innovation and creativity innovation and creativity are deceptive terms: simple and self-evident, but also elusive. it is this dualistic and functionalist character that makes them such tricky topics for social scientists and policy makers. debates about innovation and creativity have generally generated more heat than light concerning our understanding of the phenomena in question. this black boxing hides three topes: the first is idealism and universalism: these terms are deployed as if they were universal in time and space. second, innovation and creativity are presented as a “missing link” that needs fixing, disclosing a functionalist conception. third, creativity and innovation are presented as normative for economic production: they are considered to apply to all sectors of the economy equally. the “economy” in question is one based on manufacturing techniques and the addition of science. my line of argument will challenge normative perspectives. however, i am not assuming that i can simply suspend all preconceptions, rather that we should be reflexive about our own production of knowledge. specifically, to understand how it is embedded in role and norms, and disciplinary structures. this speaks to the role of science and the legitimation of knowledge and truth as a reflexive act. this is a rather over-ambitious agenda, but it is indicative of the ground clearing that we need to do before attending to an analysis of innovation, particularly that in the cultural economy (see below). in terms of economic history the significance and form of innovation and creativity is variable. it is notable that in developed economies creativity and innovation are perceived to be in crisis now, and for the last century. arguably, this is not due to a lack of knowledge, but rather the function that innovation has been required to perform in relation to the dominant forms of economic activity: mass production. the fordist form of mass production and consumption, and its regulation, stabilised on the basis of the scale of production. innovation, in terms of quantity was needed; but less attention was paid to economics of scope beyond pressing the margins of market share. science and technological knowledge was institutionalised and regulated in a similar fashion, from schooling to the laboratory. emblematic was the battle of us car manufacturers with extreme styling of cars (such as tailfins and streamlining) which promoted the continual deployment of fashion and journal of business anthropology, 4(2), fall 2015 238 design elements to drive product turnover and serial and multiple purchases. the crisis came with under-consumption triggered by the oil crisis of the 1970s. process innovation was important in the development of post-fordism and flexible specialisation, which was a way of reconfiguring markets to economies of scope and once again generated a demand for new products, especially those that differentiated by design characteristics. arguably, the “need” for product innovation to satisfy the scope economies that were driving markets generated “a crisis of innovation.” the post-fordist model was based on hollowing out the large production unit, outsourcing activities and risks: research and development were one such area in many companies. rather than being inside the corporation, innovation was outsourced to the network. indeed academic knowledge “discovered” this in the notion of “open innovation.” in the same way, the development of science parks was promoted to enable technology transfer between universities and companies. these were different ways of filling an innovation “hole” generated both by the hollowing out of companies, and the need for scope economies. what about creativity? on one hand, it can be appreciated that the increasingly fast fashion cycle of products, and the demand for more “new” products provide one dimension of the demand for creative output. this is an argument for the increasingly industrialisation of cultural production that has been intensified from the early 20th century onward. on the other hand, we can see the internal problem of art, which is the value system that does not correspond to the economic value system. the artistic value system is complex, but has commonly been reduced, as with science, to the genius who generates unique and distinctive discovery which as a result of its unique qualities transforms the world (pratt 2008). this tension has constituted the conditions of the birth and consequent form of the cultural economy in the 20th century. the following section points out the particularity of the cultural economy, and why the atomised and universal “genius” offers a poor understanding for the interaction. cultural economy the labels used capture the twists and turns of the debate from the original usage of “culture industry” as an opposite to culture in the frankfurt school usage; to the cultural industries notions of french communications theorists; to the nominalist creative industries of the british government, and the associated “creative class” and “creative city” deployed by richard florida to denote a current modality of place marketing and consumption politics. finally to the “creative economy” of un agencies, which has morphed into the “cultural economy’(pratt 2009, in press, pratt 2011). opinions: all about creativity 239 this is not the place to deconstruct the labels and the conceptualisations that are deployed in the “cultural economy.” suffice to say that it is a contested area: there are three strands. first, one that has progressed from a focus on the interrogation of the symbolic value of culture and cultural consumption, then cultural production (as opposed to cultural consumption), and finally to a wider conceptual field of a cultural eco-system. second, analyses that have used the relationship to markets as differentiator: state versus market, for-profit versus not-forprofit, formal activities versus informal activities. third, those that have used predefined categories to legislate “creative” from “non-creative” activities, or “cultural” from “non-cultural” ones. these debates are serious and complex; however, my purpose here is to highlight the problematic use of the modifier “creative” as if it were a simple matter to identify a “creative” act or product, outside of its context. moreover, i want to highlight the tension between the words “culture” and “economy.” thus my point here is to point out that the cultural economy signifies a contested field, critically one that draws upon non-normative disciplinary assumptions. an illustration of this point is that the “cultural turn” in the social sciences has re-discovered the “cultural dimensions” of everything, and that they may be susceptible to cultural analysis. thus we have had many interesting accounts of the “cultural economy.” despite the apparent unorthodox position, such accounts have failed us. first, they have sought to look at the cultural dimensions of the economy, yet empirically they failed to examine the cultural industries (which one might have expected to be the genuine “hard case”). second, the work is normative. normative in the sense that it re-produces the parsonian divide between economics and sociology that informed the realm of economic sociology, and economics from the second half of the twentieth century onwards (pratt 2004). framing all attempts to challenge the formulation as dualistic, such a division is essential for the disciplinary constitution of contemporary economics; basically economic sociology is an “externality,” or a “residual.” thus, any rigorous analysis of the cultural economy faces a number of challenges based, first, in various ways, on taxonomy: that is on what or which is the object of analysis; and second, on the mode and logic of analysis. the two are of course related: ontology and epistemology. here a meta-anthropology of academic analyses is necessary: why do these different tribes decide on particular taxonomies of the world? nominalist-empiricist and positivist economics simply groups “similar things” together (however, this breaks down in such a nominalist world view: all red things, or flat things, etc.?). in this case the “similar” is a natural order of manufacture and with it a material’s physical transformation. when we begin to consider the “service industries” or “knowledge economy,” let alone the “virtual economy,” journal of business anthropology, 4(2), fall 2015 240 such a classification breaks down. interestingly, this does expose the epistemological flank of the debate: how do things happen? empirical tracking of correlations can offer implied causation; a process that can appear reliable manipulating physical objects. however, attributing causes of particular effects in a virtual or symbolic sense consists at best of guesses. causal analysis requires a more materialist argumentative strategy, and in so doing draws in a wider, or different, set of objects which processes relate together to generate cause. thus the philosophically materialist line of argument constructs the cultural economy using the set of activities and materials that are necessary to make a “cultural product” exist. that is, for contemporary popular music to exist, as patrik wikström shows in his essay here, we have to pre-suppose recording, distribution and playback technologies and platforms, as well as regulatory structures such as intellectual property rights, a meaning system associated with music and its symbolic value, and its dissemination. we also need to consider the formation of music performance and composition skills, and their formation. “culturalised” knowledge the line of argumentation in this essay has been to decentre knowledge, and to situate it, or embed it, in social and spatial processes: to propose a relational definition of knowledge. as i argued at this beginning of this essay, a central problem has been the “bracketing” of knowledge in debates about innovation and creativity―a point of view that resists a relational perspective. we have noted how such a perspective might be relevant in accounts of economic change, and in explaining the particularity of the cultural economy. in this section i want to draw upon some threads of philosophical and sociological rationales for such an argument. the philosophy of science has concerned itself with the logical arguments for causation (epistemology), and with the nature of things (ontology). contemporary science, and debates about the nature of innovation, are founded on logical positivism: a nominalist and atomistic argumentative framework. as cause cannot be directly sensed, it must be inferred; it can only be verified under particular conditions, typically those of the laboratory. the normal account of science is based upon removing interference in the reaction under investigation. critics of logical positivism have argued that the notions of ontology (nominalism), and the assumption of radical randomness of events are incorrect premises. in essence, this is a philosophical stand-off, as both accounts can be logically sustained (bhaskar 1989, 1975). sociologists of scientific knowledge have been able to offer a radical “test” by taking essentially an anthropological approach to opinions: all about creativity 241 scientific practice. they have begun by observing scientists and forming a conception of the world that their actions assume (woolgar 1988, latour and woolgar 1986). in simple terms, the messy laboratory is rendered into neat science when it is written up. logical positivism is retroactively “proven.” sociologists of scientific knowledge have sought to understand what scientists actually do, as practices. their conclusions are that these practices are not accounted for by logical positivism, but by a relational understanding―where a correspondence, not absolute, truth is the norm. moreover, in order for laboratory experiments to “succeed” in the outside world, the world itself has to be changed (latour 1988, 1987). this does not undermine the fact that new practices and reactions are achieved, but it questions both the reason for them, and the (non-) independence of knowledge. knowledge is always and necessarily formed in context. this conclusion has a radical impact on the models and conceptions of innovation and creativity that lie at the core of economic and management science. the associated epistemological debates are anti-foundational ones, and can be followed via the contemporary critique of economic sociology, and sotto voce, a critique of economic anthropology. the pivot point in this literature is the exploration of a relational social science: of how meanings are co-constructed in debate and practice. david stark’s (2009) inspiring account of some of the boundaries of social analyses of economic action and of value offer a provocative way forward. this work shares a common foundation of a relational social science: actornetwork-theory. ant develops a radical ethnographic approach to meaning making, objects, and their relationships; it positions itself as a non-human-centric account of the world (in that it seeks “non-humans” as potential actants embroiled in a network). the pioneering work by callon (callon, millo, and muniesa 2007, callon 1998) and colleagues, in particular, has turned attention to the interrogation of economic action: exemplars being ethnographic studies of markets and pricing. a radical extension of work―notably by mackenzie (mackenzie 2009) and knor-certina (knorr-cetina and preda 2006)―exploring that most obscure field of financial modelling in hedge funds. allied to this is the thesis that economic theories make markets, rather than theories accounting for, and explicating markets. inspiring though this is, it is notable that few attempts have been made to turn such an analytical lens onto the cultural economy. this is the subject of the final section. discussion this essay has sought to interrogate and re-configure the question of innovation and creativity. i have taken the reader through a number of ways in which knowledge has been obscured by, and excluded from, an analysis for which it is allegedly the subject. analyses of knowledge have journal of business anthropology, 4(2), fall 2015 242 assumed that it is a “thing” that is amenable to transaction and exchange, independent of its value, or its constitution. this view, i have argued, is but a construct of economic theory. i have shown that there is a body of work that would challenge such a normative view, offering a relational and social constructivist alternative. this is an argument that is rooted in the philosophy of science and the study of technology, and has been extended (controversially) to the field of economics and sociology. this argument is disruptive of notions of innovation, cause and effect; and of the (lack of) social dimension of scientific and economic processes. finally, we can point to the fact that the cultural economy is ripe for the application of these insights. the false dualisms of economic and cultural value (that is, the values imposed upon the field) disintegrate in complex forms in the light of closely and attentively observed cultural practices. the normative view of the cultural economy is that it is in some way a deficient, or poorly disciplined version of the economy. the suggestion from this paper is that we might instead consider the cultural economy as a more “normal” state of affairs, and the abstracted “economy” the exception (if at all). the socially and culturally embedded forms of social action that constitute “markets” are important, and constitutive: they are not residuals. innovation and creativity are relational activities; they are based upon social interaction and ideas. they have a generative relation, thus the interaction can be more than the sum of its components. in fact, it would be a fair characterisation that this interaction in situ is generative of ideas; but such ideas and practices have to be recognised for what they are (so the same ideas might not be understood by others, with different histories and imaginations). moreover, further interactions, under different conditions are required before a potential “application” (anticipated or unanticipated) is found. even then, the application may not be acknowledged or accepted by a social group or organisation, and it may be forgotten. there is no necessity for ideas and inventions simply to become apparent. in what may seem like a rather dilated argument, i have argued that many normative notions of innovation and creativity could be usefully “turned on their heads,” or have their logical order reversed. moreover, the dominant characterisation of innovation, invention and creation is atomistic, and should be cast aside in favour of a relational understanding. in so doing we might perhaps approach an understanding of the cultural economy―not as a failed, inefficient, or ineffective economy, but as a more useful “model” of action. perhaps, then, we will avoid the conceit that economists make markets, and artists make creativity. the application of a humble anthropological perspective might help us to take more seriously what actually happens, as opposed to what we’d like to, or what should, happen. the study of innovation and creativity is, i would argue, at the very beginning of a new journey. a good opinions: all about creativity 243 place to begin is with the cultural economy. references bhaskar, roy. 1975. a realist theory of science. leeds: books. bhaskar, roy. 1989. the possibility of naturalism : a philosophical critique of the contemporary human sciences. 2nd ed. ed. new york ; london: harvester wheatsheaf. callon, michel, ed. 1998. the laws of the markets, sociological review monograph series. oxford ; malden, ma: blackwell publishers/sociological review. callon, michel, yuval millo, and fabian muniesa. 2007. market devices, sociological review monograph. malden, ma ; oxford: blackwell. knorr-cetina, k., and alex preda. 2006. the sociology of financial markets. oxford ; new york: oxford university press. latour, bruno. 1987. science in action : how to follow scientists and engineers through society. milton keynes: open university press. latour, bruno. 1988. the pasteurization of france. harvard: harvard university press. latour, bruno, and steve woolgar. 1986. laboratory life : the construction of scientific facts. princeton, n.j: princeton university press. mackenzie, donald a. 2009. material markets : how economic agents are constructed. oxford: oxford university press. mackenzie, donald a., fabian muniesa, and lucia siu. 2007. do economists make markets? : on the performativity of economics. princeton, n.j.: princeton university press. pratt, a. c. 1997. "the emerging shape and form of innovation networks and institutions." in innovation, networks and learning regions, edited by j. simmie, 124-136. london: jessica kingsley. pratt, a. c. 2004. "retail therapy." geoforum 35 (5):519-521. pratt, a. c. 2008. "innovation and creativity." in the sage companion to the city, edited by john r. short, phil hubbard and tim hall, 266-297. london: sage. pratt, a. c. 2011. "an economic geography of the cultural industries." in the sage handbook of economic geography, edited by a. leyshon, l. mcdowell and r lee, 323-338. london: sage. pratt, a.c. 1998. "science, technologie, innovation: ouvrir la boite noire." in recherche et développement: travaux franco-brittaniques. , edited by j cohen, d hart and j simmie. paris: publications de la sorbonne. journal of business anthropology, 4(2), fall 2015 244 pratt, a.c. 2009. "cultural economy." in international encyclopedia of human geography, volume 2, edited by r kitchen and n. thrift, 407-410. oxford: elsevier. pratt, a.c. in press. cultural economy. in the international encyclopedia of geography: people, the earth, environment, and technology, edited by d richardson. new york: wiley. pratt, a.c., and p. jeffcutt, eds. 2009. creativity, innovation and the cultural economy. london: routledge. stark, david. 2009. the sense of dissonance : accounts of worth in economic life. princeton, n.j. ; woodstock: princeton university press. woolgar, steve. 1988. science : the very idea, key ideas. london ; new york: routledge. * * * creativity and innovation: or, what have the arts ever done for us? doris ruth eikhof (university of leicester, school of management) my typical reaction to the words “creativity” and “innovation” in close proximity is exasperation mixed with pessimism. like probably no other phrase, creativity and innovation stand for a “creative industries-turn” in cultural policy that occurred from the late 1990s onwards (menger 2013, oakley 2009, oakley et al. 2014). in the uk, the complementing visual of this creative industries-turn was the image of oasis guitarist noel gallagher attending the then newly elected prime minister tony blair’s media party at 10 downing street in 1997: a new era with arts and culture at the heart of policy. nearly two decades and much critical discussion later, the “creativity and innovation” mantra seems to have lost none of its power and promise. as a researcher of cultural work i “naturally” get asked to write about creativity and innovation, or to apply for research money from innovation-focused funding schemes. i say arts and culture; you say creativity and innovation. my heart sinks every single time. and here is why. just before the millennium, tony blair’s new labour government in the uk set up a creative industries task force, whose seminal mapping document defined the creative industries as a key target of public policy (hesmondhalgh and pratt 2005, see menger 2013 for european cultural/creative industries policy more broadly). at the heart of this policy shift was the belief that those industries that “have their origin in individual creativity, skill and talent” (dcms, 2001: 5) make two socio opinions: all about creativity 245 economic contributions. firstly, they turn creativity into marketable innovations, thereby generating economic growth and high skill/high wage employment (e.g. clifton et al. 2009, chapain et al. 2010). secondly, they attract the so-called creative class (read: educated, high spending, tolerant and community-oriented people) which helps transform tired urbanities into diverse, multi-cultural breeding grounds for sustainable livelihoods and makes them attractive for investors (florida 2004). consequently, money was made available to develop creative clusters, business incubators and re-branding initiatives (landry 2000). berlin’s “poor but sexy” campaign is a poignant example of a whole metropolis successfully trading on the image of the authentically impoverished creative to attract global investment (neate 2014). in britain, pretty much every small town now has its share of creativity-branded small business spaces flanked by independent coffee shops. what at first glance might have looked like welcome attention for the arts and culture soon turned out to be a take-over of cultural policy by economic policy in search of a palatable―even hip or cool―attempt at economic and social engineering (oakley 2004, peck 2005). the visually most notable consequence of creative industries policy has been accelerated gentrification. the less well-off have been priced out of facelifted neighbourhoods in which the creative class now sips fair-trade flat whites and craft beers, “burnt-out beautiful people” (rainnie 2005: 9) recovering from their daily slog of advancing the knowledge economy. the creative class’ urbanities do not house a new society with “full opportunity and unfettered social mobility for all” (florida 2004: 321), but merely provide an anti-bourgeois, anti-corporatist ambience that helps educated workers reconcile their humanist career ambitions with the realities of a capitalist system that remains money-focused, under contemporary austerity more than ever. there is also considerable debate over whether the creative industries have delivered and can ever deliver on the first set of expectations, those concerning their more direct contributions to the economy: that is to say, gdp growth or high skill/high wage employment (e.g. comunian 2009, warhurst 2010). reviewing pre-financial crisis data, comunian (2009) shows ambiguous evidence of which of the newly labelled creative industries deliver employment and gdp growth. new jobs mainly seem to be opening up in it-related industries, rather than in traditional arts and culture organisations or in sme craft production. it giants such as google or facebook may look like creative new worlds of work (walker 2013), but whether their informal working cultures are the source of their product market success, or a perk they can afford because of it, remains open to debate. once the internet economy’s supporting infrastructure is factored in, the picture certainly turns much darker, with market leaders such as amazon providing innovation based on exploitative working cultures and low wage/low skill jobs (kantor and streitfeld 2015). journal of business anthropology, 4(2), fall 2015 246 this ambiguous evidence of the benefits of creative industries policy is why the “creativity and innovation” mantra exasperates me, especially in its glossy policy report guise. for the umpteenth time: it does not work that easily; the creative industries do not immediately deliver a stylish, diverse brave new world for all, and no number of new creative clusters is going to change that. fortunately, my exasperation may well have a short(ish) shelf life. after nearly two decades, the next policy paradigm du jour can’t be far away (hipsters and the sharing economy, anyone?). surely the band waggons will move on and leave the arts and culture to breathe freely once again. i say arts and culture, you say you’re busy elsewhere. unfortunately, it is at this point that pessimism creeps in. creative industries policy looks to me to have changed arts and culture substantively and in ways that may well undermine their vitality and sustainability long after the policy band waggons will have disappeared over the next silver lined horizon. my concerns arise from observations of practices of cultural production over the last decade. i will briefly sketch the underlying concepts before turning to two illustrative cases from my research in the uk . in his 1983 article, “the field of cultural production,” pierre bourdieu outlines how cultural production essentially comprises three main practices: artistic practice, position-taking, and economic engagement. as artistic practice bourdieu understands instances of original creation that are driven by artistic or creative motivations―for example, the production of a play, or the curating of an exhibition. practices of position-taking aim to place individuals or organisations within the cultural sector―by establishing reputation in a particular genre, for instance, or by collaborating with certain artist or organisations. economic engagement comprises practices focused on markets within and outside the cultural sector: for example, selling/exhibiting cultural outputs, securing financial capital, or recruiting artists. the field’s raison d’etre lies in its artistic practice, in which individuals follow an intrinsic drive to create and express and find themselves in a flow-like state where “ordinary human capacities are transcended to produce excellence beyond convention” (banks 2014: 242). position-taking and economic engagement are undeniably essential for cultural production: position-taking makes artistic practice recognisable as such, and positions it for assessment―by its artistic genre, for instance, or by its quality; economic engagement secures financial, and coordinates human, resources. in themselves, however, neither positiontaking nor economic engagement produces art, culture or creative activity. they do not constitute, in the language of economic production, the core business of the sector. it is artistic or creative practice in its various guises, especially when experienced as a “perfect synthesis between the opinions: all about creativity 247 worker and the work” (banks 2014: 242), that marks cultural production as a field and attracts and retains cultural workers (eikhof and york 2016). however, a marked disjuncture is becoming apparent between, on the one hand, the importance that cultural workers attribute to artistic practice and, on the other hand, the space given to artistic practice in cultural production; cultural workers’ ability to present and advocate for it; and the influence it is allowed on other practice, in particular economic engagement. i recently analysed documents with which cultural organisations had applied for funding. in those documents, the applying organisations competently outlined their contribution to the economy and local communities: in other words, the wider benefits of their cultural production. when questioned about their artistic practice, answers were markedly more general, hollower and much shorter. asked to list their strengths, the majority of organisations forgot to mention anything relating to art or culture at all, typically listing the efficient use of resources or community contributions instead. indicatively, only a very small share of the funder’s questions actually required the organisations to talk about their artistic practice, or their core business, itself. the vast majority of the documents concerned either the organisation’s position within its respective field or, overwhelmingly, practices of economic engagement―typically an organization’s contributions to communities, or what role it saw itself playing within the cultural economy. in short: artistic practice was barely part of the conversation and, where it was, the cultural organisations themselves were remarkably poor at talking about and making a case for it. the gist of these sector-level conversations i saw mirrored at the micro-level of cultural production. an indicative example was that of a gallery, small in numbers of staff but a medium to large player in its field in terms of reputation and positioning, which had contacted me to help it develop new ways of attracting income. reviewing the gallery’s activities, it emerged that a preoccupation with practices of economic engagement, in particular funding applications and developing new business opportunities, had to a substantial extent crowded out artistic practice. gallery staff were still motivated by artistic practice as such, and described discussions about art works, artists, techniques and curating as their reason for getting out of bed in the morning. however, many of these discussions were no longer taking place in the gallery itself. in the most illustrative case they had physically relocated to the kitchen table of a flat shared by two key staff. one of the two flatmates described how they would while time away in meetings with gallery colleagues, while discussing art at home for hours on end without giving the clock so much as a glance. similarly, the gallery’s director had gone part-time to engage in freelance curating and artistic work―the same type of work she was contracted to do for the gallery but could not make enough time and creative headspace for, given the position-taking and economic journal of business anthropology, 4(2), fall 2015 248 engagement practices her director’s position increasingly required. once in the gallery, most conversations and activities focused on where money might come from, which income streams could best be developed and how existing activities could be organised more efficiently. similar to the funding applications described earlier, the conversations within the gallery were replete with eloquent articulations of its contributions to communities, the city and the cultural sector more broadly. but, while staff recognised these discussions as necessary, they also described them as wearying, soul destroying or, at best, simply boring. the increasing prevalence of economic engagement zapped staff motivation to work in and for the gallery―in particular, to work overtime or put in additional effort. the artistic practices undertaken offsite, on the contrary, were what fed their desires and energy for working in cultural production. it became clear that reclaiming a more prominent and protected position for artistic practice in the gallery was even more important for the gallery’s sustainability than developing new funding and business opportunities. these two examples are illustrative of how artistic practice can be “crowded out” (eikhof and haunschild 2007) of its central position in cultural production while position-taking, and especially economic engagement, take up an increasing amount of space, or even start to dominate. in particular, the problematic situation the gallery found itself in evidenced how dangerous such crowding out of artistic practice can be. when economic engagement grows, cultural production loses its raison d’etre; it loses that which constitutes it as a field in itself and for itself. crucially, it also loses its vital distinction from the economic field, the essence that allows bourdieu (1983) to describe arts and culture as an “economic world reversed.” in short, imbalances between artistic practice, position-taking, and economic engagement endanger the vitality and sustainability of cultural production. from my observations, creative industries policy―with its buzzwords, “creativity” and “innovation”―facilitates such dangerous imbalances. firstly, by focusing on creativity rather than on art or culture, creative industries policy broadens the scope from that of traditional cultural policy to include economic production, which is in a broad sense cultural and/or draws on individual talent and imagination, but which does not position itself predominantly as art―as web design, architecture, or video games, for instance. visual and performing arts, music and literature suddenly find themselves amongst a much more heterogenic range of activities―a range for which, as researchers have repeatedly emphasised, it is difficult to pinpoint commonalities and shared identities (e.g. garnham 2005, hesmondhalgh 2007). because engagement with any policy, cultural or otherwise, implies advocacy and because successful advocacy relies on a strong sense of identity and shared purpose, such diluting of identities is unlikely to be helpful for making the case for arts opinions: all about creativity 249 and culture, whatever the context or occasion. as illustrated by the above case of the gallery, a strong sense of shared purpose is essential for protecting or reclaiming the position of artistic practice in cultural production. secondly, the term innovation emphasises notions of usefulness, marketability and progress. its omnipresence has helped embed a utilitarian perspective on the “wider” (read: socio-economic or just economic) contribution of creative, and therefore artistic or cultural, practice. it has normalised the view that such production leads to tangible and marketable progress (for instance, to innovation) and can therefore be presented and assessed in terms of how valuable a (contribution to) progress it delivers. the point here is not that the arts and culture are or should not be innovative―they can be and frequently are; but, as oakley (2009) points out, it would be misleading to expect innovation to feature in every bit of cultural production. similarly, artists and creative workers are of course able to propose social and political innovation. artmoney.org, for instance, is an illustrative example of artists’ “creative “problem-solving […] with a more systematic and globally-oriented political agenda” (banks 2013: 38). indeed, an autonomist reading sees cultural work as the potential source of radical societal change and progress (banks 2014). the problem of linking artistic and creative practice to innovation, progress and marketability lies in the refocusing on, and over-emphasis of, use value. creative industries policy, with its utilitarian perspective on cultural production, draws attention away from the creative activity itself to the use of its product and, importantly, to the competent (read: versed in the policy language du jour) articulation of that use. it has claimed space―in public dialogue, on funding application forms and in the organisation of cultural production itself―for practices of economic engagement, and it has done so to the detriment of artistic practice itself. it is because of these developments that the words “creativity and innovation” not only exasperate, but also bring out the pessimist in me. creative industries policy, with its “creativity and innovation” mantra, has normalised the requirement of arts and culture to make a case for their useful/marketable/progressive contribution to society, and has forced them to do so in economic policy language and from a position of diluted identity. for sure, this requirement has been identified as problematic; it has been met with protest and discussion (e.g. comunian 2009, o’connor 2005), and some cultural leaders seem to find viable ways of responding to it (webb 2014). however, this requirement has also resulted in subtle and less subtle, conscious and unconscious, changes to the balance of artistic practice, position-taking, and economic engagement in cultural production. banks (2015) points out that because cultural value is a defining structural feature of cultural production, the commodification of art and culture depends on it as much as artistic practice itself does. while, as he concedes (ibid.: 43), “the economic order appears eminently journal of business anthropology, 4(2), fall 2015 250 capable of overriding cultural concerns’, analyses should not accept such a hostile take-over as inevitable but explore how culture is ‘counterposed, managed and arrayed in relation to the economic” (ibid.: 41, emphasis in the original). understanding cultural production not as a juxta-positioning of the artistic and the economic, but as a ménage à trois of artistic practice, position-taking and economic practice can provide such a more nuanced analysis (eikhof 2010). it reveals structural homologies between position-taking and economic logic that allow a hollowing out of artistic practice even against good intentions, even by regimes of commodification that recognise the economic value of cultural value. neither the funder nor the art gallery in the above examples set out to destroy cultural value―most likely they genuinely attempted to preserve it. but embedded in and part of a discourse focused on creativity and innovation rather than arts and culture, their actions affected how artistic practice, position-taking and economic engagement relate to each other, and to the detriment of the first. the empirical examples cited above give little reason to join oakley (2009: 410) in her hope that “for arts organisations […] it may simply be a case of re-stating their value in another context.” even her assessment that “the danger is less to individual arts organisations and more to the ecology as a whole” appears optimistic. the long-term consequences of the creative industries-turn in cultural policy look to be severely problematic in terms of the vitality and sustainability of the arts and culture. whether a rebalancing of the three main components of cultural production―artistic practice, position-taking and economic engagement―is possible or even likely, especially given contemporary austerity politics and funding cuts, is difficult to predict. my observations of cultural production, combined with boltanski and chiapello’s (2006) demonstration of how capitalist, economic or business logics have annihilated other raisons d’être through integration, make me pessimistic. for art’s sake, i hope i’m wrong.1 references banks, m. 2013, “creative cities, counter-finance and the aesthetics of exchange: copenhagen’s artmoney project.” cities, 33: 36-42. banks, m. 2014, “‘being in the zone’ of cultural work.” culture unbound, 6: 241–262. banks, m. 2015, “valuing cultural industries.” in k. oakley and j. o'connor (eds), the routledge companion to the cultural industries, london: routledge, 35-44. bourdieu, p. 1983 “the field of cultural production, or: the economic world revised.” poetics, 12: 311-356. 1 the author would like to thank kate oakley and mark banks for their constructive comments and feedback. opinions: all about creativity 251 carey, j. 2006, what good are the arts? london: faber & faber. boltanski, l. and chiapello, e. 2006, the new spirit of capitalism, london: verso. chapain, c., cooke, p., de propris, l., macneill, s. and mateos-garcia, j. 2010 creative clusters and innovation. putting creativity on the map, london: nesta. comunian, r. 2009, “questioning creative work as driver of economic development: the case of newcastle-gateshead.” creative industries journal 2(1): 57–71. department for culture, media and sport (dcms) 2001, creative industries mapping document, london: dcms. eikhof, d.r. and haunschild, a. 2007 “for art's sake! artistic and economic logics in creative production.” journal of organizational behavior, 28(5): 523-38. eikhof, d.r. and warhurst, c. 2013, “the promised land? why social inequalities are systemic in the creative industries.” employee relations, 35(5): 495 508. eikhof, d.r. and york, c. 2016 “’it’s a tough drug to kick’: a woman’s career in broadcasting.” work, employment and society, forthcoming. florida, r. 2004, the rise of the creative class, new york: basic books. garnham, n. 2005, “from cultural to creative industries: an analysis of the implications of the ‘creative industries’ approach to arts and media policy making in the united kingdom.” international journal of cultural policy, 11(1): 15-29. hesmondhalgh, d. 2007, the cultural industries, 2nd ed. london: sage. hesmondhalgh, d. and pratt, a.c. 2005 “cultural industries and cultural policy.” international journal of cultural policy, 11(1): 1-14. kantor, j. and streitfeld, d. 2015 “inside amazon: wrestling big ideas in a bruising workplace.” the new york times online, http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/16/technology/inside-amazonwrestling-big-ideas-in-a-bruising-workplace.html?smid=fb-share&_r=0 [accessed 20/08/2015] landry, c. 2000, the creative city, london: earthscan. menger, p.-m. 2013 “european cultural policies and the “creative industries” turn.” in j. chan and k. thomas, handbook of research on creativity, london: edward elgar. neate, r. 2014, “berlin's “poor but sexy’ appeal turning city into european silicon valley.” the guardian online, http://www.theguardian.com/business/2014/jan/03/berlin-poor-sexysilicon-valley-microsoft-google [accessed 20/08/2015] http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/16/technology/inside-amazon-wrestling-big-ideas-in-a-bruising-workplace.html?smid=fb-share&_r=0 http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/16/technology/inside-amazon-wrestling-big-ideas-in-a-bruising-workplace.html?smid=fb-share&_r=0 http://www.theguardian.com/business/2014/jan/03/berlin-poor-sexy-silicon-valley-microsoft-google http://www.theguardian.com/business/2014/jan/03/berlin-poor-sexy-silicon-valley-microsoft-google journal of business anthropology, 4(2), fall 2015 252 oakley, k. 2004, “not so cool britannia: the role of the creative industries in economic development.” international journal of cultural studies, 7(1): 67-77. oakley, k. 2009, “the disappearing arts: creativity and innovation after the creative industries.” international journal of cultural policy, 15(4): 403-413. oakley, k., hesmondhalgh, d., lee, d. and nisbett, m. 2014, “the national trust for talent?: nesta and new labour's cultural policy.” british politics, 9(3): 297-317. o’connor 2005, “creative exports: taking cultural industries to st petersburg.” international journal of cultural policy, 11(1): 45-60. peck, j. 2005, “struggling with the creative class.” international journal of urban and regional research, 29(4): 740-770. rainnie, a. 2005, “hurricane florida: the false allure of the creative class.” sustaining regions, 4(3): 4-9. walker, t. 2013, “perks for employees and how google changed the way we work (while waiting in line).” the independent online, http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/perks-foremployees-and-how-google-changed-the-way-we-work-while-waiting-inline-8830243.html warhurst, c. 2010, “the missing middle: management in the creative industries.” in townley, b. and beech, n. (eds), managing creativity, cambridge: cambridge university press, 217-236. webb, a. 2014, “’we need arts as much as we need food. our responsibility is for that to be possible’: insights from scottish cultural leaders on the changing landscape of their work.” doctoral thesis, stirling. * * * the zig zag path to toy story keith sawyer (university of north carolina at chapel hill) in creativity research, the predominant theories of how creativity occurs, and of how new ideas are generated, have been linear stage models, as summarized in (sawyer, 2012, p. 89). influential stage models include (isaksen, dorval & treffinger, 2000; scott et al., 2004; wallas, 1926). perhaps the most widely cited linear models of creativity are versions of wallas (1926) and include the following stages: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/perks-for-employees-and-how-google-changed-the-way-we-work-while-waiting-in-line-8830243.html http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/perks-for-employees-and-how-google-changed-the-way-we-work-while-waiting-in-line-8830243.html http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/perks-for-employees-and-how-google-changed-the-way-we-work-while-waiting-in-line-8830243.html opinions: all about creativity 253  preparation: the creator studies the history of prior works, concepts, and ideas related to his or her field.  incubation: the creator takes time off from the work, allowing ideas to potentially emerge from the subconscious mind.  ideation: one of more of these subconsciously formed ideas emerges into consciousness, often resulting in a subjective sensation of insight.  selection: typically, the creator has many insights and as a result, many possible ideas to pursue. in the selection stage, the creator consciously analyzes each of the many insights that have emerged from the prior steps and chooses which one will be most promising to pursue.  execution: the selected idea is developed, using the established practices and methodologies of the creator’s field, to a point where a work can be publicly shared. (wallas, 1926, combines selection and execution in a “verification” stage.) linear theories of creativity and innovation tend to reinforce two common beliefs about creativity. the first is that creativity is based in a surprising, sudden moment of insight. in the ideation stage, an idea is thought to emerge from the subconscious mind, and in the selection stage, the creator realizes its importance. the second is the belief that creativity is driven by solitary, lone individuals. after all, it’s people that pass through this process while working, it’s people who have creative ideas, and they’re more likely to have these insights when they’re alone. if innovation is based in creative people having great ideas, then the implication for organizations is to make sure that recruiting and hiring practices identify creative individuals; and to make sure that staff development programs are designed to enhance each employee’s creativity. another implication is that employees should be rewarded for good ideas—for example, by implementing profit sharing programs, or bonuses for ideas that come to fruition and generate revenue. but most companies have found that these techniques do surprisingly little to enhance organizational innovation. the reason is that linear theories of creativity are wrong. instead, research has shown that the creative process unfolds unpredictably (sawyer, 2007, 2012). it emerges from a wandering, exploratory process, and unexpected ideas slowly advance the process. this meandering path leads down many dead ends; this is why successful innovators so often talk about the importance of frequent failure. i use the term zig zag to characterize the creative process. the term “zig zag” is meant to invoke the image of a zig-zagging line, which takes sudden turns and often shifts direction (sawyer, 2013). in a related set of findings, research has shown that successful journal of business anthropology, 4(2), fall 2015 254 innovation is not based in moments of sudden insight, and it is not the result of individuals having great ideas. instead, innovation emerges from collaborations among individuals―from small sparks, tiny ideas, that come together in effective teams and social networks. innovation is not about individuals; it is an organization-level phenomenon (sawyer, 2007). the most innovative companies are the ones that have been able to overcome these all-too-common, stereotypical beliefs about creativity, and have come to understand its slow, incremental, and collaborative nature. they’ve designed their culture, structure, and incentives to align with this creativity research. such companies include legendary innovation powerhouses like w. l. gore, google, and 3m. in this paper, i’ll describe how this works at pixar. i’ll start with a case study, the successful innovation that put pixar on the map. in november 1995, disney released pixar’s toy story, the first-ever movie that was 100 percent generated with computer animation. it was a huge risk; in fall of 1994, even pixar’s owner, steve jobs, was about to give up and sell the company to microsoft. but the risk paid off big-time: the movie’s reviews were astonishingly good. the washington post compared it to 1939’s the wizard of oz. the movie grossed $28 million on its opening weekend, the most successful thanksgiving weekend movie opening ever. it went on to become the highest-grossing movie of 1995, with $192 million u.s. box office and $357 million globally. the plot, you’d think, must have come from a burst of inspiration. a little boy named andy plays in his bedroom with his toys, especially his favorite wooden cowboy doll named “woody.” at andy’s next birthday, his favorite present is a new action figure of a spaceman, buzz lightyear. buzz quickly becomes andy’s favorite toy, and woody gets really jealous. while on a family trip to a pizza restaurant, the two toys get into a fight and fall out of the family car, getting left behind. they go through a series of adventures and challenges to find their way back to andy’s house, and have to face off against andy’s mean neighbor sid phillips and his evil dog scud. at the end of the movie, they are finally reunited with andy and his other toys. but the plot did not come from a burst of inspiration. instead, it emerged from a long creative process that resembled a zig-zagging path. the original treatment for toy story, written by john lasseter, andrew stanton, and pete doctor, had almost nothing in common with the movie that we know and love. let’s follow the zigs and zags of the creative journey that led to toy story (price, 2008, pp. 121-132). zig: the first draft was ready in march 1991. it had two main characters: a one-man band named tinny and a ventriloquist’s dummy. the movie starts with tinny waking up in his factory, and then he is given as a birthday gift to a young boy. the boy’s family goes on a road trip to the southwest, and they take tinny along. but early in the trip, he gets opinions: all about creativity 255 forgotten and left behind at a gas station. there, he meets the ventriloquist’s dummy, and they work together to find their way back to tinny’s home. in a series of adventures, the two travel from the back of a truck to an auction, to a garbage truck, a yard sale, a couple’s house, and finally to a kindergarten playground―the happy ending in which the toys are reunited with the children. pretty much the only plot element that made it into the final movie was a toy getting left behind at a gas station. other bits and pieces zigged and zagged into the final movie: a slinky caterpillar in the treatment gradually evolved into a slinky dog in the final film, and in both treatment and film, there’s a threatening pet dog that the toys have to escape from, and one of the main toys is given as a birthday present. zag: after the initial treatment, jeffrey katzenberg of disney told pixar to rewrite toy story as more of an odd-couple buddy movie―like the older movie the defiant ones, about two men thrown together by circumstance and forced to cooperate even though they hated each other. so in september 1991, the pixar team came back with a second treatment. tinny and the dummy were still the main characters, but there’d been lots of changes. tinny was no longer born in the factory; he was born as he was unwrapped. the ventriloquist’s dummy was already in the house, and it was the children’s favorite toy. the dummy became jealous of the shiny new tinny, and they started to argue with each other. instead of a vacation to the southwest, the family was moving to a new town, and after a hard day of packing, they went out for pizza. the favorite toys went along for the ride, but they fell out of the car at the gas station and got left behind. eventually they made it back home, but the moving van was just leaving for their new town. tinny and the dummy were deterred by a vicious dog, but then all of the toys helped rescue tinny from the dog, and tinny and the dummy were happily reunited with the family. zig: the next zig came when lasseter decided that tinny was too old-fashioned. he replaced tinny with a g.i. joe type action figure. zag: lasseter changed the action figure character into a space hero named lunar larry. zig: his name was changed again, to tempus from morph, and his outfit was changed to a bright red space suit. zag: the dummy was transformed into a cowboy character, exaggerating the contrast between the new space hero and the boy’s old favorite toy. zig: disney nixed the ventriloquist dummy character. they were worried that parents (and children) would find it creepy and scary; a lot of horror movies use the ventriloquist dummy as an evil and dangerous character. woody was changed into a stuffed toy with a pull string. journal of business anthropology, 4(2), fall 2015 256 zag: tempus was renamed buzz lightyear. zig: pixar wanted g.i. joe as one of the toys in the movie, but hasbro refused to license the rights, instead granting permission only for mr. potato head. zag: the writers decided that woody and buzz would be rescued from sid’s house by barbie in a commando style raid, patterned after sarah connor in terminator 2. zig: this idea was dropped when mattel refused to license the rights to barbie. zag: pixar wanted billy crystal to play buzz, but he turned down the part. the next choice was tim allen, star of the tv show home improvement. the directors had wanted buzz to be a self-important, almost arrogant character, and billy crystal could have done this voice brilliantly. but at the first script reading, allen’s voice made buzz sound like a friendly, ordinary guy―and the directors decided they liked that version of buzz even better. zig: in november 1993, this back-and-forth journey culminated in yet another rejection by disney. the biggest problem was that woody was too unlikable: an early scene had him abusing slinky dog, and another had him pushing buzz out the window. pixar rewrote the script to make woody more sympathetic. instead of pushing buzz out the window, buzz fell by accident. finally in february 1994―three years after the original treatment―disney gave the green light. production would start that april. toy story offers several lessons about creativity: 1. the first idea won’t be great. it’s likely to be substantially modified, or to be removed altogether. but the first idea is necessary to get the journey started. 2. creators never know exactly where they are in the process; they don’t know how close they are to the final goal. but they trust that the process will eventually lead to successful creativity. 3. each zig leads to the next zag, and these changes in direction drive the creative process forward. even after many subsequent successful movies, and with bigger and bigger budgets from disney (and correspondingly bigger risks), pixar has stayed true to its grounding in this improvisation, wandering process. this includes more recent hits such as frozen and inside out (catmull and wallace, 2014; barnes, 2015). in business and entrepreneurship today, shifts in direction are often called a “pivot” (e.g., ries, 2011). but this term makes it sound like all you need is one major transition, when in reality, successful innovation opinions: all about creativity 257 involves constant, frequent shifts in direction. so i prefer to call each turn a “zig zag” and my image of the process is a zig-zagging line, with frequent changes along the way. i am often asked to provide advice on innovation to business organizations. many of these organizations have senior managers who’ve figured out the truth about innovation. their challenge is to convince the rest of the senior leadership, and then the staff of the organization. it’s a major transformation, because it requires a new culture, new incentives, and a new leadership style. my role is to support these efforts by showing that the transformation is grounded in solid scientific research. unfortunately, most organizations that need innovation consulting are far from finding innovation. in these, i’m asked to present a “business process model” or a scientifically-based linear pathway that has been demonstrated to increase the odds that revenue-generating products will emerge. the senior leadership team is looking for certainty and predictability. i do my best, but all too often, these organizations never change. they never become innovative, because they’re not ready for the necessary transformations. traditional management techniques can work well for incremental innovation―when you make minor modifications to existing successful products, or you take an existing product and attempt to sell it to a new demographic, or in a new country. but for radical innovation―new products or services that result in market-leading breakthroughs, and large profit margins, and strong brand identity, organizations need a transformation that aligns with the natural process of innovation. it’s difficult to succeed at this sort of innovation, because it requires that six organizational characteristics be in alignment: 1. culture: innovative organizations have a culture that supports risk taking, that acknowledges the importance of failure, and that fosters collaboration and broad-ranging social networks 2. process: innovative organizations support the wandering, zig-zagging process of creativity. although the process is unpredictable and non-linear, there are roughly eight phases of creativity that occur at various points in the process (see sawyer, 2013). successful innovative organizations provide support for all eight of these phases. 3. incentives: one common mistake is for organizations to reward success; but creativity often involves failure, and the failures can be essential to the eventual success. a second mistake is for organizations to reward the individuals thought to be responsible for the innovation, when in fact, successful innovations emerge from many contributions from many individuals, and for some of them it’s hard to explicitly journal of business anthropology, 4(2), fall 2015 258 identify exactly what their contribution was. rewarding specific individuals blocks the collaboration and openness that drive innovation. 4. composition: creativity research has found that when teams and organizations are composed of people with different backgrounds, they are more innovative. the type of diversity that works best is cognitive diversity: people who come with different intellectual backgrounds, and who have mastered different bodies of facts and conceptual material. having a diversity of skin color or nationality or ethnic background won’t work as well, if everyone has the same degree from the same university. 5. leadership: in innovative organizations, leaders understand that innovation emerges from the bottom up: from diffuse networks of collaborating individuals. leaders understand that innovations are unpredictable and that the process is non-linear. leaders realize that they are not the ones who can develop, alone, a successful innovation. in addition, research shows that decisions about which innovations to pursue are more effective if they’re made by a distributed team, rather than by a single executive. in innovative organizations, leadership is distributed rather than concentrated in a powerful executive. 6. structure: innovative organizations have complex structures. individuals often participate in multiple projects, sometimes in very different market segments and functional units. in the most innovative organizations, individuals change units and assignments frequently. this drives innovation because it helps to distribute knowledge across cognitive frameworks and organizational lines. for successful innovation, an organization needs to have all six of these characteristics. getting any one of the six wrong can derail the natural process of successful innovation―the wandering, improvisational process that i call a zigzag. research shows that organizations can make the transformation, and we know a lot about how to help organizations along the path from traditional organizational structures and cultures, to new forms that drive innovation. references barnes, b. 2015. the brain behind pixar's new film. the new york times, pp. ar1, ar10. sunday, may 24. catmull, e., & wallace, a. 2014. creativity inc.: overcoming the unseen forces that stand in the way of true inspiration. new york: random house. opinions: all about creativity 259 isaksen, s. g., dorval, k. b., & treffinger, d. j. 2000. creative approaches to problem solving: a framework for change (second edition). buffalo, ny: creative problem solving group. price, d. a. 2008. the pixar touch: the making of a company. new york: knopf. ries, e. 2011. the lean startup: how today's entrepreneurs use continuous innovation to create radically successful businesses. new york: crown business. sawyer, r. k. 2007. group genius: the creative power of collaboration. new york: basicbooks. sawyer, r. k. 2012. explaining creativity: the science of human innovation (2nd edition). new york: oxford. sawyer, r. k. 2013. zig zag: the surprising path to greater creativity. san francisco, ca: jossey-bass. scott, g., leritz, l. e., & mumford, m. d. 2004. the effectiveness of creativity training: a quantitative review. creativity research journal, 16(4), 361-388. wallas, g. 1926. the art of thought. new york: harcourt, brace and company. * * * “here's to the crazy ones”: why we need to rethink “fitting in” as a virtue in innovation-based business and society robert d. austin (copenhagen business school, denmark) recently, i gave a talk about what i think organizations need to do be become more innovative to a group of human resource management (hrm) executives, at a conference designed specifically for people who occupy such positions. the reaction was interesting. they were polite. a handful of people were clearly excited by what i was saying, nodding, some almost cheering, though quietly. but the overall reaction was silence, distrust, apprehension. alas, what i had to say was not very much like what they were hearing in the other conference sessions. more specifically, i was talking about a project i've grown increasingly engaged in in recent years, about neurodiversity in the work force, how it benefits innovation, and how more and more companies and other organizations are giving it a try. but it was not neurodiversity per se that these hr execs had a problem with. it was something broader, an journal of business anthropology, 4(2), fall 2015 260 apparent implication of my more specific points. allow me to explain by working up to that broader implication. my involvement in the neurodiversity movement―for it has become, now, a movement―started back in 2007, when i co-wrote a harvard business school case about a danish company called specialisterne (austin, et al, 2008). thorkil sonne, the founder of specialisterne―which means “the specialists” in danish―had the audacious idea that some people with autism might have special abilities useful in the it industry. motivated by events in his own life, notably his son's autism diagnosis, thorkil refinanced his home and used the cash he freed up to start a company that would sell software testing services. he had the idea, which turned out to be right, that some people on the autism spectrum would be really good at the exacting but often extremely repetitive tasks involved in software testing, quality assurance, and similar kinds of work. the movement he started has grown by leaps and bounds, achieving a major milestone in april of 2015 with a united nations event called “employment: the autism advantage.” thorkil has now branched out and not only offers software testing services, but has also begun helping large companies start their own neurodiversity programs. sap has been a pioneer, as has hewlett-packard. early on, sonne adopted the dandelion as the symbol of specialisterne. the dandelion is, of course, that self-propagating yellow flower with ugly jagged leaves that many keepers of beautiful lawns have learned to detest. as a child, i remember my father's vehement efforts to eradicate these yellow interruptions in the uniformly green natural carpet he was trying to cultivate in front of our house. it's difficult, because they reproduce and replant themselves quickly, and they are hardy―you have to get the root out, or they'll come back. what thorkil points out, in a truly poetic metaphor, is that the dandelion, viewed on its own, is a very valuable plant. it can be used to make wine, tea, and coffee and its leaves are a nutritious addition to a salad (it's a source of vitamin a, calcium, potassium, iron, manganese). it contains an inflammation reducer that some scientists in canada are investigating as a possible cancer cure (see references). so what makes the plant a much hated weed? what makes it a weed is the context, the fact that it ends up in the wrong place―in what is intended to be a uniformly green lawn. the analogy, of course, is to thorkil's staff with autism―they are very valuable people, but get labelled as the societal equivalents of weeds when we try to force-fit them into the narrow, predefined roles of standard organization charts. if we can locate them in a better place, in a context that accommodates their individual needs and activates their talents fully, then they need not be weeds at all. this is what thorkil has proven, with specialsterne, and what other companies like sap and hp are piling up evidence to support. this idea extends, both conceptually and in practice, into a opinions: all about creativity 261 broader idea, which thorkil and i have called “the dandelion principle” (austin and sonne, 2014). the dandelion principle asserts that it will often be, on the whole, beneficial to an organization to adjust the contexts of work to activate the talents of workers more fully, and to abandon the expectation that we should choose people to fit pre-defined standard roles. as managers in our study of “dandelion programs” have told us repeatedly, the approach that they must bring to their employees with autism―providing individual accommodations and adjusted contexts that activate their talents―teaches managers to achieve better results with their other, more neurotypical employees. working within standard organizational roles prompts employees to do good work, but individual accommodations make them more likely to do great work. here we begin to come close to the implication that made the hr managers squirm. the dandelion principle says we should not start in hiring with checklists derived from a top down strategy process, as is called for in “strategic hrm” textbooks. instead, hire people with special abilities, and put them into an individually designed context that maximally activates their talents. what's threatening to conventional hr thinking about this line of logic, is that it calls on us, at least to some extent, to reconsider long cherished ideas about the virtues of fitting in. as the moderator after my talk noted, hr execs are always trying to fit people “into the grid” and those who don't fit don't get hired. for a long time, people with autism have suffered exactly this fate. you might have dual masters degrees in electrical engineering and computer science, but if your interviewer can't check the box that says “makes good eye contact,” you're toast.2 this problem afflicts not just people with autism, but many others with “differences.” as a manager in my pre-academic career, i once had a brilliant contract employee who had a very obvious social anxiety issue; as brilliant as he was, he would fall to pieces in interview situations, or situations in which he had to talk to more than about three people. the company i worked for really needed to hire him, because his knowledge of our computer systems was encyclopedic and his software development talent immense. repeatedly, i tried to get him hired. but he could never successfully run the hr checklist gauntlet. what i was saying, then, to a group of hr managers, is that the way we do hr in companies means we're losing out on a lot of talent. of course, this is what made them uncomfortable. much of what they were talking about in other conference sessions, their “grids” and such, were obstacles―or so i was saying―to their companies” long term success. but i haven't yet tied this problem back to innovation. the 2 autism spectrum disorder is often characterized by social interaction difficulties. so it is exactly things like “making eye contact,” or awkward or blunt verbal interaction, that cause problems for people “on the spectrum.” journal of business anthropology, 4(2), fall 2015 262 motivation that sap stated at the launch of their “autism@work” program in may of 2013, makes the connection explicit: “we share a common belief that innovation comes from the “edges.” only by employing people who think differently and spark innovation will sap be prepared to handle the challenges of the 21st century.” (sap press release) they did not say “we want to show that we're good corporate citizens,” or “we hope to score great csr points” (although they have certainly done some of that―other than specialisterne, no company got more favorable mentions at the un event than sap). they said, in essence, “we need neurodiversity to innovate and survive competitively.” the company thinks similarly about other kinds of diversity. with more than 70,000 employees from more than 90 countries, they are in the diversity game in a big way. visit an sap cafeteria, which i did this summer in palo alto, california, and you'll encounter a marvelous array of talents from all around the world. the logic behind the claim that diversity leads to innovation is straightforward. innovation requires―i'm borrowing from don campbell, 1960 here―that we: 1. create variants different from what we have created in the past, and 2. “selectively retain” valuable variants, sorting variants we think might be valuable apart from those we don't think promise value, pursuing the former and setting aside the latter. campbell's framework is darwin-inspired: variation + selective retention. people and organizations have problems in both parts of this equation. at stage one, we have a tendency to create new things that much resemble the old things we've created before. at stage two, we have a tendency to see value in new things that much resemble what we've seen and experienced value in before. it's probably not accidental that, of all the wondrous things xerox researchers invented at their palo alto research center (parc) in the early 1970s, the one thing they most successfully commercialized was the laser printer―the device that's arguably most like a xerox machine. diversity, then, or so the argument goes, is likely the help with the problems of both stages. different backgrounds, disciplinary training, neural wiring, and so make it more likely that you'll come up with a variant different from what has come up in the past. and the different points of view that derive from differences make it more likely that you'll see value coming from new directions. innovation is about producing valuable inconsistency. but it can be difficult to be inconsistent within organizations that have, for years, worked to shrink variation, using techniques like six sigma. valuable opinions: all about creativity 263 inconsistency arises, not at the center of the probability distribution, where industrial approaches have often focused, to align means and shrink variances, but at the edges. in an innovation economy, we need variance. we need the outlier ideas, and to get those, we might just need more outlier people―more oddballs, more misfits. this is not an entirely new notion in the tech industry. on a panel i facilitated a few years ago, a venture capitalist had this to say: “i worked at [a major tech company] for thirteen years and had a chance to work on many of the great businesses there…at the core of every great product...you’d often find a very capable individual…and these guys―no offense to them―but they’re all a little odd….they have their own…let’s call them “inspired peculiarities’...they all extract a tax from the organization in the way that they work…they’re different from other people, in a way that doesn’t fit very well sometimes…but if you’re at the core of product, you can extract a pretty high tax, and that’s okay, it’s good for the company...” an iconic apple television advertisement makes a similar point: here’s to the crazy ones. the misfits. the rebels. the troublemakers. the round pegs in the square holes. the ones who see things differently. they’re not fond of rules. and they have no respect for the status quo...they change things. they push the human race forward. and while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do. indeed, the odd ball nerd who achieves seemingly unexpected success is now an enduring motif within the tech industry. is there empirical research to support this notion? some. this is the point of research we're currently engaged in with sap and hp; and although we are not there yet, i believe based on what we've seen already, that we will be able verify the dandelion principle―we will show the net benefit, in terms of innovation and other payoffs, of neurodiversity, at least in these companies. one revelation at this point has been that participants in the program have proven suitable for a much wider range of jobs than anticipated; at sap, the mathematical inclinations that some people on the spectrum exhibit have been useful in data analytics and digital security work that the company has trouble finding people qualified to do. other recent research is suggestively supportive also. for example, in a study of crowdsourcing, jeppesen and lakhani (2010) have shown that “marginality” is statistically related to success in solving scientific problems. they analyzed “solvers” on the innocentive crowdsourcing platform and found that successful solvers are typically distant from the “focal field of the problem.” they noted that you could journal of business anthropology, 4(2), fall 2015 264 extrapolate this finding to suggest that “the best way to solve problems is to have experts from vastly different fields attempt solutions” (although they also urged caution with extrapolation of their findings to extremes). this is disciplinary diversity, not neurodiversity, but the principle might be quite general. work by lakhani and some others suggests that, while traditional workers in traditional organizations can be very reliable in producing pretty good new ideas, marginal people are more likely to come up with really great new ideas. and you could argue, further, that in an increasingly “winner take all” oriented economy (frank and cook, 1996), an organization's ability to come up with great ideas might be of increasing importance. but this is bound to cause heartburn for traditional hr (and other) managers. my favorite expression of just what might be implied by a society that reveres outliers to a much greater extent is a rant by cyberpunk writer bruce sterling, an exhortation to fellow “nerds”: “forget trying to pass for normal. follow your geekdom. embrace nerditude... don't aim to be civilized. don’t hope that straight people will keep you on as some sort of pet. to hell with them....take a terrible revenge. get weird. get way weird. get dangerously weird. get sophisticatedly, thoroughly weird, and don't do it halfway...don't become a well-rounded person. wellrounded people are smooth and dull. become a thoroughly spiky person. grow spikes from every angle. stick in their throats like a pufferfish.” imagine managing employees with this attitude. some people, especially in the tech industry, don't have to imagine it. they have been there. my contention: more people need to go there. but the way we do hr today is pretty much completely opposed to going where we need to go and the future innovation economy. the “tax” that someone like this might extract from an organization, as the vc i mentioned earlier put it, could be quite high, and traditional hr aims to avoid such taxes, often by choosing people who “fit in.” the fundamental difficulty with human resource management as often practiced is, as thorkil and i have expressed it, this: the phrase “human resources” suggests that there’s valuable “human stuff” that companies just happen to keep stored in containers called “people.” this is kind of like referring to the contents of a famous art museum as “paint resources” (austin and sonne, 2014). people are not fungible resources. jose velasco, the u.s. lead of sap's autism@work program, likes to say that people are like puzzle pieces. each one has a different shape. and with a lot of hard work, we can piece them together into an effective whole. but in organizations we have often opinions: all about creativity 265 taken a short cut. we've designed roles that, in essence, cut off people's odd shaped edges so that each puzzle piece has a regular, rectangular shape, one that fits easily together. but, as anka wittenberg, sap's chief diversity and inclusion officer notes, there's a big drawback to this: “our vision is to create an inclusive environment where people can bring their uniqueness to the table. the corporate world has mostly missed out on this. historically, we've asked people to tailor themselves to fit. but when you do that, people have to leave part of their authentic selves behind, which is too bad because those parts are potentially valuable to us.” to put it simply: in an innovation economy, fitting in is over-rated. and we need to re-examine our practices in business to take this into account, especially our hr practices. there has never been a time when we more needed to solve this problem, or when we were better positioned to do it. here's to the crazy ones. let's bring more of them on board. references “cancer-killing dandelion tea gets $157k research grant,” cbc, april 20, 2012, http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/windsor/cancer-killingdandelion-tea-gets-157k-research-grant-1.1248382 austin, r. d. and t. sonne. 2014. “the dandelion principle: redesigning work for the innovation economy,” mit sloan management review. austin, r. d., wareham, j. and j. busquets. 2008. “specialisterne: sense and details,” harvard business school case number 608-109, february, 2008. campbell d.t. 1960. “blind variation and selective retention in creative thought,” psychological review 67: 380-400. frank, r. h. and p. j. cook. 1996 the winner-take-all society: why the few at the top get so much more than the rest of us. new york: penguin. jeppesen, l. b., and k. r. lakhani. 2010. “marginality and problem-solving effectiveness in broadcast search.” organization science 21 (5): 1016– 1033. * * * http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/windsor/cancer-killing-dandelion-tea-gets-157k-research-grant-1.1248382 http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/windsor/cancer-killing-dandelion-tea-gets-157k-research-grant-1.1248382 journal of business anthropology, 4(2), fall 2015 266 creativity in a real-time world: improvisation and the culture of creativity peter johnson (fordham university, new york) as technology accelerates and competition intensifies, innovation has become a priority in almost every business strategy. “the fear of getting netflix-ed or uber-ized is spurring big companies to dial up their investment in innovation.” accelerators, incubators and innovation teams are being formed everywhere and one of the newest top job titles is chief innovation officer (kirsner 2015). yet, one of the great ironies of a formally structured innovation process is that creativity often is highly unstructured, nonlinear, serendipitous and “more closely associated with art than it is with science” (edwards 2008). with this paradox of structure versus creativity, perhaps it is no surprise that many resourceful businesses are using a process derived from performing arts which has been found to accelerate innovation, foster creativity, and improve communications. and, interestingly, this process already occurs organically in almost every organization (moorman and miner 1998a 1998b, cuna, et al. 2012) organizational improvisation: a catalyst for creativity and innovation when we think about “improvisation” the concept most often evokes images of standup comedy or a jazz combo. but before you start booking an offsite workshop at the upright citizens brigade or second city, it is helpful to take a look at what “organizational improvisation” actually entails and how it is winning applause for business innovation. although is a relatively new concept in managerial science, organizational improvisation has a long-standing and valued role in music and performing arts (crossan 1998; hatch 1998; randall 1993; vera and crossan 2004; weick 1993, 1998). the word improvisation comes from the latin and is a combination of proviso and the prefix im. proviso means to provide for something in advance or do something that is premeditated. when the prefix “im” is added, the word becomes definitional opposite, as in the word “immobile.” thus improvisation (improvisus) is used to describe “that which is unforeseen and the unexpected” (weick 1998)―an apt description of business situations that managers face every day. as evidenced in its latin roots, improvisation has been around for a long time. it has been taught and performed in theater and music as far back as the 18th century (randall 1993). beethoven and mozart were known as accomplished improvisers and many of their improvisational creations were later written down and used as the basis for classic opinions: all about creativity 267 symphonic themes. (berkowitz 2009; gibson 2006; hatch 1998). in business literature, the jazz metaphor has been frequently used to conceptualize organizational improvisation. a jazz combo has instrumentation (skill sets), an audience (customers), a venue, a time frame and predetermined themes. but within these confines the participants are encouraged and expected to create, experiment, and build on each other. at times they rely on standard patterns; at other times solos, duets and other combinations take off and discover new and unexpected directions (crossan 1998; hatch 1998). the process of improvisation also is accepted and routinely employed in non-artistic fields that include athletics (mirvis 1998) and the military (brady 2011; senor and singer 2009). in athletics, the managers (coaches) and workers (athletes) go through extensive physical and mental training and endure long hours of repetitive practice. then, in actual competition, teams start with set plays and then are expected to improvise to gain advantage over an opponent (gilmore and gilson 2007). as many football coaches will attest, the structure of a set play lasts for no more than a few seconds and, after that, success depends on how players react to unanticipated moves from the opposing team and improvise solutions to each unique situation. modern military doctrine also values improvisation. along with extensive training, deep enculturation and a formal hierarchical structure, today’s military places a high value on initiative and real-time response in actual combat (brady 2011; warfighting 1994). improvisation covers a wide range of activities and can be conducted by individuals, groups, and organizations. examples of individual improvisation would include soliloquies, musical solos, or modern dance. (crossan 2004, hatch 1998). group improvisation might include a theatrical cast, crisis managers (weick 1988, 1993), athletic teams (mirvis 1998), emergency rooms (batista and cunha. 2009) and service recovery (cunha and kamoche 2009). in everyday business situations “organizational improvisation” occurs frequently in small units of existing behavior which can include work groups, cross functional teams―and even spontaneous hallway conversations (crossan and apaydin 2010; moorman and miner 1998a, 1998b). to more clearly identify organizational improvisation in a business context, a number of definitions may be helpful. one of the simplest ones (kamoche and cunha 2001) defines improvisation as “the art of composing and performing contemporaneously.” (note the use of the word “art.”) another definition adds the use of experience and resources: “the conception of action as it unfolds… drawing on available material, cognitive, affective, and social resources.” the definition of improvisation perhaps most often used in business applications adds the dimension of time to define improvisation as “the degree to which composition and execution converge in time” (moorman and miner journal of business anthropology, 4(2), fall 2015 268 1998a). improvisation can also be proactive or reactive. in reactive situations, participants are forced by events to act quickly without the benefit of time or fixed strategy. in other cases, such as theatrical performance or even a new product initiative, groups agree ahead of time to improvise and follow its guidelines of improvisational behavior (akgun et al. 2007). as performers know, improvisation is a skill that can be practiced and learned (halpern et al. 1994; mirvis 1998) and, when used properly in business, it gives managers a set of tools to respond quickly to unexpected situations, to improve responsiveness, and to minimize the use of resources (vera and crossan 2005). expect the unexpected in practice, virtually all managers will have to use improvisation, whether they are trained in it or not. drastic changes in deadlines, demanding clients and out-of-the-blue dot com competition (like uber) are all examples of business situations where improvisational actions may be the most readily available alternative (moorman and miner 2001; weick 1998, 1993; weick et al. 2005). improvisational situations can be recognized when managers say things like: “we’re going to have to wing it,” “doing it on the fly,” “shooting from the hip,” or other phrases that describe a process that demands innovation in real time (crossan et al 2005). two high-profile events are examples of organizational improvisation being used to deal with fast-moving business situations. in 2008, when facing the near collapse of the us banking system, secretary of the treasury, henry paulson, and chairman of the federal reserve bank, ben bernanke, acting in less than three days, developed a threepage proposal to demand an immediate $700 billion from congress to purchase toxic assets. mr. paulson, a highly experienced business executive and the former chairman of goldman sachs, apologized for the brief length of the document given the staggering amount of money requested. although he had over 35 years of high-level business experience, mr. paulson told congress: “there is no playbook for responding to turmoil we have never faced. we adjusted our strategy to reflect the facts of a severe market crisis, always keeping focused on our goal to stabilize the financial system” (new york times 2008). what paulson and bernanke did was to improvise a creative solution, although it is likely neither one of them, even with all their experience, had ever been trained in improvisation. another example occurred in 2010, when bp was struggling to control the disastrous oil spill in the gulf of mexico. richard sears, the head of offshore oil exploration for shell and an mit professor who was working day and night to create a solution said: “there is no standard operating procedure for these kinds of incidents. that would be because they don’t happen very often. . . . [it’s] all custom solutions” (popular opinions: all about creativity 269 mechanics, may 24, 2010). then, after the spill was controlled, bp calculated billions of dollars in compensation to businesses and individuals in “real time” without benefit of a formal corporate strategy (aldy 2011). use of improvisation to innovate and find solutions need not be of the magnitude of these two crises. in research conducted by the author, when managers were in situations where they had to improvise, they cited circumstances like: a sudden, large new business opportunity; drastic actions by competitors; new product launches arbitrarily accelerated by management; or new technology adaptation, such as migration to mobile devices. these examples, along with the body of organizational literature, indicate that, while improvisation may not be an explicit part of most business strategy preparation, it almost inevitably will be needed (weick 1998). good news: improvisation seems to produce better results just as not all theatrical or musical improvisations produce enduring art, organizational improvisation does not always guarantee success. however, there is significant evidence that organizations that encourage and support improvisation, on balance, get productive results. moorman and miner (1998a) found that in a new product development situation, even among organizations with highly formal procedures, improvisation occurs frequently. and in times of high economic turbulence, higher levels of organizational improvisation had a significantly positive effect on new product performance. organizational improvisation also can be enhanced with training. vera crossan (2005) found that the application of improvisational techniques like, “agree, except, and add” and “readymades” in an organizational setting produced behavioral changes that enhanced performance. but can improvisation develop creativity and innovation that lead to better overall business performance? journal of business anthropology, 4(2), fall 2015 270 organizational improvisation has a positive relationship to business performance, as quantified by market orientation for over 20 years the concept of “market orientation” has been associated with positive organizational performance (jaworski and kohli 1993; kirca, jayachandran, and bearden 2005; kohli and jawarski 1990; narver and slater 1990). over 200 academic studies have quantified that companies that have higher market orientation produce better marketing, financial and customer results. but, to achieve and sustain market orientation requires businesses to be highly sensitive to customers, responsive to competition, and have efficient internal communications. not all businesses are market oriented―and to maintain it requires continuous innovation and dedication of resources (ketchen et al. 2007; kumar et al. 2011). as innovation is an important part of building and sustaining market orientation, a theory has been developed that the spontaneity and creativity of organizational improvisation might be interconnected with market orientation (baker sinkula 1999; dennis and macaulay 2007). the author found that this idea resonated with a number of senior business executives who, although highly experienced, often found themselves facing situations where they needed to innovate and create solutions with little time and no set structure. this motivated an empirical study to examine if there were a measurable relationship between top management work groups, that exhibited higher levels of organizational improvisation, and the market orientation of their firms. the results of this research were both expected―and surprising. the expected part was that, confirming similar studies, organizational improvisation has a positive impact on market orientation. in a study of 234 top managers, it was found that 24.3% of market orientation could be explained by the variable of organizational improvisation (johnson 2015). the more surprising finding of this research was that this positive relationship was not moderated to any significant degree by job title, seniority, size of company, type of industry, or gender. while we expected to see a positive relationship between improvisation and market orientation in small businesses and technology companies, the same positive relationship was present in large financial service companies, manufacturers, and among senior executives. these findings set up some interesting implications for business creativity and innovation. opinions: all about creativity 271 there’s a commonly held belief that creativity and innovation are ingrained in corporate culture and that certain organizations, such as ad agencies and technology startups, are simply more innovative―and perhaps more improvisational―than large, established firms. however, examination of organizational improvisation and the body of research indicates that this may not be the case. it seems that innovation comes on the workgroup level and, perhaps more importantly, the opportunities to improvise are frequent and have the potential to be productive. it’s not a matter of if you need to improvise; it’s a matter of when as managers continue to be pressured to innovate, perhaps they do not have to reinvent their culture or invest in elaborate structures. improvisation already occurs organically in all organizations, so why not anticipate it, train managers in its use and welcome it as part of the innovation process? an important side benefit to this is that there is comparatively little cost in recognizing and supporting improvisation. businesses can simply take advantages of situations that inevitably will occur to encourage group coordination and creativity. the research indicates that improvisation is not just “winging it” and hoping for the best. improvisation is a proven and respected practice in the arts and it is inevitable in a fast-moving business world. in addition to structured investments in innovation, 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the academy of management review 23 (4): 698–723. narver, john c., and stanley f. slater. 1990. “the effect of a market orientation on business profitability.” journal of marketing 54 (4): 20– 39x. randall, mayumi ogura. 1993. the history of piano improvisation in western concert music. dma diss., university of cincinnati. senor, dan, and saul singer. 2009. startup nation: the story of israel’s economic miracle. new york: hachette. us marine corps. 1994. warfighting manual. washington, dc: us marine corps. vera, dusya, and mary crossan. 2004. “strategic leadership and organizational learning.” academy of management. the academy of management review 29 (2): 222–40. vera, dusya, and mary crossan. 2005. “improvisation and innovative performance in teams.” organization science 16 (3): 203–24. journal of business anthropology, 4(2), fall 2015 274 weick, karl e. 1988. “enacted sensemaking in crisis situations.” the journal of management studies 25 (4): 305–17. weick, karl e. 1993. “the collapse of sensemaking in organizations: the mann gulch disaster.” administrative science quarterly 38 (4): 628–52. weick, karl e. 1998. “improvisation as a mindset for organizational analysis.” organization science 9, no. 5: 543–55. weick, karl e., kathleen m. sutcliffe, and david obstfeld. 2005. “organizing and the process of sensemaking.” organization science 16 (4): 409–21. * * * the branding imagination martyn straw (the purposeworks, new york) the value of brands is well known, not only in common marketing terms such as power drivers of share, preference, trust, loyalty, etc., but in dollar terms. they add billions of dollars to market caps because strong brands are annuities. they withstand storms such as bad product, press. they command premium prices. the extent of their value is recorded in the interbrand 2014 best global brands report, which estimates the #1 brand, apple, to be worth $118,863m, a +21% increase over 2013. by comparison samsung comes in at #7 with an estimated value of +15% $45,462m, a little over a third that of apple. so what’s wrong with samsung? that 15% growth number suggests not a lot. but it’s not just apple’s numbers: do samsung customers form endless lines to get the new new thing? it’s also important to keep in mind these are brand dollar values, not physical sales. something is happening to create incredible value around mystical magical, intangible assets worth billions of dollars. accordingly, as marketers we need direction on how to create magic! we cannot stumble around hoping for inspiration that is not relevant, or dull, unoriginal work that nobody cares about. we want a perfect blend of art and science: it’s not enough to capture consumers’ brains if you don't get their hearts. the average consumer has access to all the knowledge in the world―how much the dealer actually paid for that car, what people think opinions: all about creativity 275 of cornflakes, what everyone is saying about their product and customer service experiences. good behavior is not enough. your customers must want you to win! the win/win here’s the headline for all that follows: ensure that at all times consumers get their money’s worth. we will go on to talk about the “win.” it’s not always a tangible offer, but one of the rules of magical branding is a head/heart proposition that emanates value. as an example, consider supermarket owned brands, which have often been considered low cost commodities. but they have always been brands―friends of the consumer looking to save money. it was always clear whose side the brands were on. this aspect of the relationship was arguably more important than price alone. that friendship is now further cemented by significant product (and packaging) improvements that say even louder that the buyer is smart, and any stigma of penny saving has totally evaporated. it’s not just about price. it’s about win/win in a cycle of mutual loyalty. there are different ways into the win/win brand relationship. here are some: immersion branding this is not just about events and sponsorship, although they play a part. by definition we can look at any prospect as just not yet a consumer. the magic is to understand and communicate the brand experience. here is where on-line can play a key role in the arc of brand communications by adding a new dimension to the brand construct. a good example is the “pepsi pass” world offering the third dimension of brand immersion with the pepsi pass, “coolest music, sports and live events,” and not just deep discounts on the product (although these do exist). it is not just a beverage but also part of a rich, satisfying lifestyle that communicates the values of the brand. design = immersion: the very minimalist and clean lines of apple products are an earned look and feel that passes along a sense of what using and feeling the devices is like. we don’t need to be told how well they devices work together and apart―we just feel it. starbucks has taken this to the street. globally, the brand is identically the “third place” between office and home, where customers can take out coffee or just go online. it has introduced japan to the venti. every starbucks globally has the same set-up―although there are a few stores with no seats―penny wise, brand foolish. journal of business anthropology, 4(2), fall 2015 276 mirroring fundamental to consumers’ needs both practical and emotional. as discussed above the branding imagination captures the hearts and minds by demonstrating complete empathy and understanding of the consumer. mirroring completely closes the gap between brand owner and brand buyer in a seamless dialogue. it may be the propensity of many brands to create a gap in communications in a brand monologue. this is the opportunity. the response to be sought is high scores for such measures as “brand for people like me.” this is not trickery. the challenge―and the gamble―is to build the proposition honestly on a caring and true insight. things will turn horribly wrong if communications misjudge this. and mirroring should operate all along the value chain, starting with the product: you cannot sell a bad one twice and any relationship between buyer and seller is cratered irreparably. before you are brand owner you must walk in the shoes of your customer. brand provenance we can often play out in our minds where we imagine successful brands come from, invoking a sense of time and place. despite current reality, in its brand world coors comes to us from west of the mississippi, smirnoff from russia, jaguar from the bloodlines of the british racing tradition, toyota land cruisers from the serengeti, the privileged classes who inhabit the world of ralph lauren (but, interestingly, not tommy hilfiger). at the heart of the brand’s story there should always be a sense of time and place that the consumer wants to be part of and believes is authentic. sometimes brand provenance is not a world but an overall idea or proposition. for instance, we might consider ge’s long-standing “imagination” idea a value we can all get behind. it’s a salute to engineering integrity, innovation and grit, not just jet engines. once the brand provenance is fine-tuned and agreed, it must never be wandered from or become blurred―certainly never contradict itself by not behaving on-brand or consistent with brand values. brand schizophrenia gets consumers confused and typically to lose trust. brand disobedience in every category there is a standard set of verbal and visual language that obeys a norm. every bank, for instance, speaks broadly in the same voice of hospitality, friendliness, care, and the wonderful retirement life you can expect if you simply bank with them. simply put, there is no opinions: all about creativity 277 differentiation in the category, and there seems to be no attempt to create win/win brands or to apply any of the principles discussed here that could create a stand-out bank brand. we like brands that take a contrarian stance in their respective categories―brands that shake things up a bit―“zigging” to the category “zag.” an example is subaru which―in a category that is obsessed with features and performance data―has simply aligned the brand with “love,” and by extension, with memories, and a powerful way to express durability in the background. there is a danger―anyone can go rogue, but it must be in a relevant way in honest pursuit of the win/win. the response goal from the target should be “how did they know that about me?” not in a creepy way, but in the sense of a caring and listening brand. advocacy branding this is an evolution of the service brand. service brands are typically not differentiating because they are all expected to serve―service is table stakes by definition. service brands cannot be let down by the brand experience. cable companies, for example, need to take heed here. everyone needs to step up into the next level we call advocacy branding. the advocate brand transcends what the target wants to what the target will want. this is a dangerous play, but with high rewards. one old example of this is the atm. no one could imagine such a thing, let alone demand one. more currently, apple products are masters at bringing to market products and services we did not know we wanted. the ipad? who knew? advocacy branding is a component of marketing imagination. for too long brand owners have relied too much on spinning product sameness instead of insight, which invariably devolves to price wars. this is not win/win. furthermore, since it is impossible to sell a poor product twice, shortsighted. nevertheless we encourage the use of “advocacy positioning” to spotlight thoughtful benefits in an engaging, pleasing way that touches the heart and soul. advocacy branding is hard work. it means digging deep into the heart and soul to understand their dream products and services. this is not necessarily a call for billion-dollar investments into npd, but a wakeup call to the brand strategist who should know, at the very least, the unmet craving of the target. this is a piece on creating brands, not just communications, although they are obviously interwoven. accordingly, the best construct is to understand the most differentiating, relevant and future proof benefit of the offering, and to align it seamlessly with an integrated journal of business anthropology, 4(2), fall 2015 278 product/experience/communications brand whole, ideally being out ahead of consumers, surprising them with brand “gifts” they were not expecting. this is the win/win. b2b the challenge here is to not forget the win/win. that you are a good company and do what you do well in your space does not make you different―it just allows you to contend. for some reason there is an invisible line between consumer marketing and corporate marketing. it’s a false distinction. coming to the client’s service with, say, a “disobedience” or “advocacy” proposition, for instance, is likely to put more of a spark into the view and competitive spirit of the brand. this is owed, not just to the customer, but to the employees. * * * will algorithmic playlist curation be the end of music stardom? patrik wikström (queensland university of technology, australia) it is 2015 and there are no indications that the relentless digital transformation of the music economy is about to slow down. rather, the music economy continues to rapidly reinvent itself and industry powers, positions and practices that were redefined only a few years ago are being questioned once again. this paper examines the most recent changes of the music economy as it moves from a product-based towards an accessbased logic. this essay starts out by recognising the essential role of technology in the evolution of the music economy. it then moves on to a discussion about the rise of so-called access-based music business models and points out some of the controversies and debates that are associated with these models and online services. with this as a background the paper explores how access-based music services, and the algorithmically curated playlists developed by these services, transform the relationship between artists, music and fans and challenge the music industrial power relationships and established industry practices once again. the technology-driven music economy the business, as well as the musical evolution, of the music economy is heavily shaped by technological change. recording technologies such as multi-track recording and non-linear editing; distribution technologies such as the music cassette and the compact disc; promotional media such as broadcast radio or video-sharing websites; performance technologies opinions: all about creativity 279 such as the electrical microphone, the amplifier, or the sequencer, and a whole range of other music technology innovations, have shaped the sounds, aesthetics, and music business models during the past century and continue to shape the economy into this century. many of these innovations have been truly disruptive, in the sense that they have ruthlessly made existing practices and competences obsolete. artists, composers, and businesses that relied on the superseded technology have been forced out of business, while new artists, sounds, genres and business practices, able to benefit from the new innovations, have taken their place. during the past two decades, there has been ample opportunity to observe the processes of creative destruction in the music economy. more or less all aspects of the music industrial value chain have been affected, but primarily the technologies for music promotion and distribution have been at the centre stage of digital disruption. accounts of this process usually take 1999 as its point of departure. 1999 was the year when the global recorded music industry had experienced two decades of continuous growth, largely driven by the rapid transition from analogue vinyl records to digital compact discs. the transition encouraged avid music listeners to purchase much of their music collections all over again in order to listen to their favourite music with “digital sound.” as a consequence of this successful product innovation, recorded music unit sales more than doubled between the early 1980s and the end of the 1990s. it was with this backdrop that napster, the first peer-to-peer filesharing service was developed and released to the mainstream music market. napster was an illegal file-sharing service and, together with a range of similar services that followed in its path, it reduced physical unit sales in the music industry to levels that had not been seen since the 1970s. the recorded music industry struggled during much of the 2000s with how to cope with the overwhelming online piracy. the legal and technical attempts to thwart these illegal practices eventually proved to be unsuccessful, and the impact on the music economy was transformative, irreversible and, for many music industry professionals, also devastating. thousands of people lost their livelihood; large and small music companies folded, or were forced into mergers or acquisitions. the rise of access-based music services slowly the realisation dawned that online piracy could not be stamped out and, in order for the industry to survive, new business models had to be developed that were able to compete with piracy. these business models had to offer music in a format that made it appear like it was free to the consumer, but somehow nevertheless were able to generate revenues for creators and rights holders. journal of business anthropology, 4(2), fall 2015 280 after a lengthy period of entrepreneurial business model experiments, the surviving model was a radical shift from established practices. it required the industry to abandon the fundamental music industrial logic, where music was packaged as products and sold at a strictly regulated unit price, in favour of a new model where music was sold as a service for a monthly fee. these so-called access-based music services offer a music subscription service that does not charge their consumers for downloading individual songs or albums. rather, for a monthly subscription fee, these services offer unlimited access to a large music library which the subscribers have access to, only as long as they pay a monthly fee.3 the market has quickly accepted access-based music services. the model has captured more than 80 per cent of a number of recorded music markets in europe and asia, and it is about to take over permanent downloads as the dominating business model in the global economy for recorded music. a controversial shift the transformation from a product-based to an access-based music economy has not been entirely uncontroversial. during the early days of access-based music services, there was wide-ranging scepticism in the music industry about the fundamental viability of the model. as time moved on however, and revenue―as well as the number of service providers on the market―continued to increase, these sceptics slowly but surely accepted the viability of the new business model. however, a number of questions related to these services remain unresolved. the most urgent one concerns the fairness and transparency of the repatriation of revenues generated by access-based music services from consumers, via aggregators and record labels, to composers and musicians. the access-based service providers report billions of dollars in royalty payouts to record labels and other rights holders, but at the same time, there is anecdotal evidence from musicians, artists and composers of seemingly very popular songs indicating that the revenues from these services are not appropriately shared with them. these are legitimate grievances that have to be resolved in order for record labels and other digital music aggregators to hold on to some level of legitimacy in the new music economy. the role of brands in the music economy while the question of fair and transparent repatriation of royalties from 3 some access-based services also offer an advertising-funded, free version of their service which allows users access to the music library, but with limited functionality. opinions: all about creativity 281 access-based music services is indeed a major concern, this essay focuses on a question that is not yet as heavily discussed, but which may have an even more radical impact on the functioning of the emergent music economy. a useful starting point for this discussion is the role of brands in the music economy. music brands in a product-based music industry logic are primarily associated with an artist (e.g. taylor swift) or a band (e.g. one direction), who during a period of time builds significant value into the brands that are associated with their craft and practice. to be fair, there are other types of brands in the recorded music economy―for instance, compilation albums (e.g. now that’s what i call music) and record label imprints (e.g. ministry of sound)―but an overwhelming number of brands are nevertheless associated with an individual artist or band. such music brands often serve as platforms for long, loyal and profitable relationships between fans and artists. the brands are also increasingly used to organise equally profitable relationships with other brands, via multimillion sponsorships and endorsements (for example, taylor swift endorsing diet coke, or one direction endorsing pepsi). the investment in, and development of, such brands are normally considered as a music company’s most essential activity and the one that constitutes a considerable, if not the largest, part of the company’s cost base. music is an experience good, meaning that it is difficult to estimate the value of a music product before it has been listened to. in a productbased music economy, a recognisable music brand is one of a number of mechanisms (expert and user reviews are other such mechanisms) that assist consumers in their purchasing decisions, and reduce the risk of the latter’s spending their limited music budgets on music that does not match their musical preferences. while music brands are necessary filtering mechanisms for consumers in a product-based music economy, consumers in an accessbased music economy make their music listening decisions in a very different way. rather than carefully selecting a number of products to add to a limited but slowly expanding music collection, consumers pay a monthly fee to get access to a very large music library. as the market for access-based music services continues to evolve, competing services strive to expand their libraries to include an increasing number of songs and ultimately to make them as comprehensive as possible. today, there are still minute differences between the libraries offered by competing access-based music services, but looking into a not too distant future it is clear that the service providers’ libraries will become increasingly comprehensive and increasingly indistinguishable. the services will no longer be able to use their music libraries as a point of differentiation. journal of business anthropology, 4(2), fall 2015 282 algorithmically curated musical experiences to some extent the market has already reached this state, as service providers more or less have ceased promoting the size of their libraries. the point of differentiation has rather moved on to the services’ “contextual features” that assist users in navigating the enormous music libraries and making decisions about what song to listen to next. the access-based music service providers’ development of such contextual features is still in its infancy, and at this stage, a seemingly trivial, but still fundamental, structure in this differentiation strategy is the curated playlist. a basic playlists consist of a set of songs curated by either a human or an algorithm, focused on a specific theme, mood, or activity. some playlists may be fairly static and consist of songs appropriate for a dinner party or for focused studying. other more dynamic playlists are algorithmically curated, based on an analysis of data from sensors in users’ mobile devices, the users’ previous music listening behaviour, their relationships with other humans via social media, and acoustic characteristics of the millions of songs available in the service’s music library. this analysis make it possible to curate a personalised musical experience that gives the user the “right music for every moment,” to quote the leading access-based music service spotify. most access-based music services invest heavily in playlist curation capabilities, and there is high demand for music data analytics expertise, which also is reflected in an intense acquisition frenzy led by service providers with available capital. for instance, spotify acquired the music data analytics company, the echo nest, in 2014; the internet radio provider pandora acquired another music data analytics company called next big sound in 2015; and a few months later the world’s largest company, apple, acquired the ukbased music data analytics company musicmetric. it is vital to realise that this kind of algorithmic playlist curation reduces the music listener’s cognitive load by essentially removing the need to develop relationships with the creators of the songs that match their musical preferences. the algorithms efficiently supplant the function of the artist-based brands that were necessary components in the now fading product-based music economy. in the access-based music economy, there is no need for consumers to remember or recognise artist-based brands in order to get a satisfying musical experience. the only relationship the music listeners need to manage is the one with their access-based music service provider. if we follow this reasoning to its logical conclusion, it leads to a condition where artists are no longer a cultural phenomenon, with loyal fans and strong brand recognition. rather, they are anonymous producers of sound components that are ready to be combined by automatic algorithms into a comprehensive musical experience personalised to individual users’ preference, mood or activity. this change constitutes a significant redistribution of power, from the artists and the music opinions: all about creativity 283 companies that previously controlled the relationship with the music listeners, to the access-based music service providers and the algorithmic curators of ever-evolving individualised playlists. consequences for established music industrial structures while it is unlikely that the hypothetical condition laid out above will ever be completely attained, it is nevertheless very likely that a gradual shift towards an access-based music economy significantly reduces the value and significance of artist-based music brands. as the brands’ roles as repositories of economic value and signposts for consumers’ music listening decisions diminish, the role and purpose of the music company, and primarily the record label, need to be redefined once again. the music industry is traditionally structured into three major sectors. two of these sectors are consumer-oriented, and focus on live music and recorded music respectively. the third sector is focused on the licensing of musical rights for various purposes: for instance, for use of a song as a component in an audio-visual production for film or television; or for playing music in a public venue. organisations in the recorded music sector have already been forced to radically redefine their roles during the ongoing digital transformation of the music economy. digital technologies for music recording, as well as for music distribution, have led many organisations in this sector to abandon their operations for physical music distribution, as well as their facilities for high-quality studio recording. the value-creating activities that up until this point have sustained and even increased its significance are the record labels’ marketing and brand building activities. the reason behind the heightened significance of marketing in the recorded music economy is relatively well established: digital technologies have lowered the entry barriers to the recorded music industry―a fact which has dramatically increased the number of titles released onto the market, and increased the marketing resources required to break through the noise. conclusions the ongoing move from a product-based to an access-based music economy, where algorithms take over the role of music brands and marketing professionals alike, will potentially lead to a radical shift of power from the production and recording of music to the curation of musical experiences. such a shift would constitute a fundamental challenge to the recorded music company’s final bastion. it remains to be seen how far-reaching this impact eventually will be, but one possible future scenario is that the recorded music industry sector in practical terms will cease to exist and be folded into the music licensing industry sector. such a change would be a natural extension of an already ongoing process, where a plethora of new media outlets have multiplied the journal of business anthropology, 4(2), fall 2015 284 revenues from music licensing and moved the music licensing sector closer to the music industrial epicentre. the one thing that is certain is that technological development will continue to shape the evolution of the music economy, and that the music industry of the future will be very different than the music industry of today. * * * exploring creativity in crowdsourcing jie ren (fordham university, new york) where can we get good ideas with low cost? recent researchers (e.g., brabham 2008; cardoso and ramos 2009; chanal and caron-fasan 2008; kleemann and günter 2008; leimeister et al. 2009; ramos et al. 2009; schenk and de strasbourg 2009) probably would suggest “the crowd.” indeed, crowdsourcing (derived from the chinese proverb: “two heads are better than one” [yu and nickerson 2011]) has increasingly been the easiest and most inexpensive method to gain creative/innovative ideas. with the current or potential shortage of r&d resources, firms are encouraged to rely on the collective and distributed intelligence disseminated in the crowd for future competitiveness. numerous innovation requesters have either hired a third-party information system vendor and/or designed their own websites to connect with the crowd in order to earn un(der)paid ideas (kleemann and günter voß 2008). however, are the ideas snatched from the crowd radically innovative and entrepreneurial enough that they can bring surplus values to firms and/or markets? in order to answer this question, this paper blends the literatures of entrepreneurship and innovation management to explain crowdsourcing (e.g., oswick et al. 2011). first, entrepreneurship literature suggests that the crowd does not have the motivation of an entrepreneur (the consistent pursuit of profit) (schumpeter 1961a). therefore, the crowd is not “alert” (kirzner 1997) enough to create radical ideas and to make substantial opportunities. second, innovation management literature suggests that creativity needs prior domain knowledge (for example, market expertise) (shane 2000). in many cases, domain knowledge is something largely missing from the crowd. hence, ideas from the crowd may neither be motivated, nor have sufficient domain knowledge, to create radical ideas. opinions: all about creativity 285 crowdsourcing crowdsourcing, first used by howe (2006), is the act of outsourcing tasks traditionally performed by an employee or contractor, to an undefined, large group of people or community (that is, a crowd), through an “open call.” individuals in the crowd, in most cases, are slightly rewarded (e.g. mechanical turk) or unpaid (e.g. citizenscience). many innovation requesters―individuals or organizations―are using the crowd online for creative ideas or even for real innovations (like formally written programming scripts). with the advantages of low cost and easy access, crowdsourcing has quickly spread worldwide. due to the large capacity of the crowd, innovation requesters (firms or individuals) have been utilizing the crowd’s wisdom via online platforms. for example, mechanical turk, 99designs, and crowdspring are online platforms designed by a third party for requesters to outsource tasks to the crowd. alternatively, companies including half bakery, threadless, microsoft (imaginecup), and dell (ideastorm) have conducted crowdsourcing campaigns through their own websites. in china, thousands of innovation requesters have been posting their requests for creative ideas from the crowdsourcing website: task.cn. it is so popular that a new word 威客 (weike) has even been created: to refer specifically to those who take on tasks from crowdsourcing websites. furthermore, the encouragement from academia with regard to crowdsourcing has accelerated the practice’s pervasion in the practitioners’ arena. for example, chanal and caron-fasan (2008) suggest that, due to the common lack of resources for innovation in small and medium sized enterprises (smes), a service capable of involving the crowd in large networks (filled with useful and reachable knowledge) is crucial to the future competitiveness of crowdsourcing. specifically, many researchers have started to draw attention to the motivations of crowd members. for example, hars and ou (2002) have examined the motivations of programmers contributing their effort to an open call for open-source software. their motivations can be identified as forming two general categories: internal (for instance, intrinsic motivation, to have fun, and so on) and external (direct or indirect monetary compensation, and recognition by others, and so forth). others (xu et al. 2009) have empirically supported the idea that the reputation gained, and skills learned, from open-source software project participation may help programmers with future work opportunities. in addition, in two case studies, ren (2011a) has identified four stages of crowdsourcing: identifying, requesting, evaluating, and retaining the crowd. she also confirmed the motivations just mentioned and eliminated possible new motivations of the crowd. that is, the crowd in her case studies is neither interested in monetary rewards, nor cares about intellectual property rights for ideas it has submitted to innovation journal of business anthropology, 4(2), fall 2015 286 requesters. in summary, the rationale behind the pervading phenomenon of crowdsourcing can be explained as “two heads are better than one.” the more ideas that are submitted from the crowd, the more creativity is expected from the submitted ideas. however, the question remains: in order to add new values and disrupt the current market layout, can these ideas be radical and entrepreneurial enough? entrepreneurship literature entrepreneurship literature can answer this question, since ideas generated by entrepreneurs are actually radical. as the pioneers who economically advance the society (schumpeter 1961a), entrepreneurs create unique ideas. these ideas can be a novel combination of five possible innovations (that is to say, a new good, a new market, a new method, a new source of supply, and a new organization) (schumpeter 1961a). the combination is so radical that it can trigger market resistance in the short term and then bring new values to new ventures (and their markets) in the long term. even for the minds of the ever-motivated entrepreneurs, radical ideas are difficult to create and need concentrated alertness (kirzner 1957). they pursue entrepreneurial profit. “entrepreneurial profit… a (significant) surplus over costs” (schumpeter 1961a: pp.128), drives entrepreneurs to create values destructive of the existing economic equilibrium (schumpeter 1961b): “new businesses are continually arising under the impulse of the alluring profit” (pp.131). the new value, to be destructive, cannot be incrementally new. it has to be radical: at least, radical enough to earn entrepreneurial (significant surplus) profit. “without (creative) development (upsetting the norm) there is no (significant surplus) profit, without profit no development” (schumpeter 1961a, pp.154). simply put, the motivation of pursuing entrepreneurial profit is elementary and crucial to creating radical ideas. however, the crowd, in sharp contrast to entrepreneurs, rarely desires monetary rewards. mostly, those concerned want to either show their values in helping others, or kill time via online activities, or continue their hobbies, and so on. for example, a participant in the crowdsourcing setting once told ren (2011a) during their interview: “i still want to do it (participating in the crowdsourcing project) without any monetary reward.” even if the crowd were to desire to get rich, crowdsourcing is definitely not a good way to go about it―the reason being that crowdsourcing websites always underpay the crowd or exploit their intelligence for free. revised from schumpeter’s phrase, the above arguments can be summarized as: without the motivation of earning entrepreneurial profit, radical ideas can rarely be expected from the crowd. opinions: all about creativity 287 in the setting of crowdsourcing, some ideas involve the implementation of existing technical invention, such as advertising electronic cars. prior knowledge, for example related to electronic cars, whether developed from work experience, education or other means, will influence people’s abilities (roberts 1991) to comprehend, interpret and exploit opportunities in a way lacking that prior knowledge cannot replicate. in short, if a person doesn’t understand the structure and strength of electronic cars, how can s/he possibly come up with a radical slogan, and accordingly change potential buyers’ perception of electronic cars? the crowd mostly consists of individuals who don’t have domainrelated expertise. therefore, they cannot discover entrepreneurial opportunities and create radical ideas. even for open source software communities (the crowd with a certain level of expertise), their voluntary collaboration can probably advance the software incrementally, but not radically, since they don’t have the motivation to pursue entrepreneurial profit. therefore, in order to earn significantly beyond average profit, entrepreneurs by definition need to generate new ideas/innovations themselves and accordingly create opportunities destructive of the existing economic equilibrium (schumpeter 1961b). any lack of prior knowledge would let these money-earning opportunities slip away. “each person’s idiosyncratic prior knowledge creates a knowledge corridor that allows him/her” (shane 2000, pp. 452), not others, to discover entrepreneurial opportunities. therefore, the crowd may not be programmed to create radical and entrepreneurial ideas. innovation management literature innovation management literature can also help explain the original question, in that it suggests that radically innovative ideas (as opposed to incrementally innovative ideas) require significant resources, capabilities and knowledge, and consequently incur high uncertainty and disagreement. however, crowd members in general don’t acquire those resources, capabilities or knowledge. therefore, their ideas tend not to be radical. as in entrepreneurship literature, radical ideas need domainrelevant skills. similarly, innovation management literature suggests that these skills are one of the three components leading to creativity (amabile 1983, 1996), and that these skills represent “the ability to learn and apply certain types of domain-specific knowledge” (taggar 2002, p.316). in order to gain these skills, an individual can accumulate familiarity with the domain in question through “memory of factual knowledge, or technical proficiency” (taggar 2002, p.316). diverse as the crowd can be, it’s hard to locate a few individuals in it who have acquired journal of business anthropology, 4(2), fall 2015 288 domain-relevant skills. complementary to the entrepreneurship literature’s argument that lack of knowledge impedes the crowd from creating ideas based on existing technical inventions, innovation management literature suggests more. that is, prior knowledge can not only inspire new thinking about existing technical invention, but it is also the pathway to new inventions, and further to radical innovations. imagine: if mark zuckerberg (the founder of facebook) hadn’t acquired superior programming skills and understood the mechanisms of other networking tools (e.g. msn), he wouldn’t have created facebook (which was an extremely radical/creative idea that revolutionized people’s living styles). in contrast, although there are a few crowds (for instance, communities of open source software enthusiasts) with prior knowledge of their domain of interest, the general crowd does not possess this attribute. therefore, normally, the general crowd (unlike knowledgeable individuals) can only advance the existing innovation incrementally (for example, by combining two existing technologies or products). therefore, without prior domain knowledge, creative innovations or radical relevant ideas can rarely be created from the crowd. blending the two literatures by blending the two literatures (e.g., oswick et al. 2011), this paper aims to explain why ideas created from the crowd may not be radical/creative enough to create a substantial surplus profit. entrepreneurship literature indicates that in order to create radical ideas, the idea providers need to have prior knowledge (shane 2000) to acquire keen insight into the idea domain and also to be motivated for entrepreneurial profit (schumpeter 1961a), so that entrepreneurs can be alert to the creation of radical ideas. moreover, innovation management literature echoes the importance of domain-relevant skills (amabile 1983, 1996) for generating radical ideas (rogers, 2000). in sum, the two literatures suggest that radical ideas can be generated only if idea generators, firstly, are motivated for entrepreneurial profit and, secondly, have domain knowledge. comparison: idea creativity from entrepreneurs versus that from the crowd according to the monetary desires and expertise levels as discussed, idea providers can be categorized as, firstly, entrepreneurs; secondly, highexpertise crowds (very few in number); and, thirdly, low-expertise crowds (see figure 1). entrepreneurs, who consistently pursue entrepreneurial profit (schumpeter 1961a) and are usually experts (shane 2000) in some domains, are motivated and able to create radical ideas. since the number of entrepreneurs is usually small compared to the crowd size, radical ideas are unlikely to be many. open source software communities, which can be labeled high-expertise crowds, on the other opinions: all about creativity 289 hand, are able to provide radical ideas. nevertheless, aiming to develop and continue their hobbies (e.g., ren 2011a) and to get involved in related online activities, these software developers are generally not motivated enough to stay alert and to create radical ideas. instead, the ideas they make public tend to advance the existing software and are for the most part incrementally innovative, rather than radical. in contrast, due to the lack of prior knowledge and desire for entrepreneurial profit, the low-expertise crowd is rarely able to provide radical ideas. nonetheless, for some low information asymmetry products (brush and artz 1999; nelson 1970), such as chairs, desks, and lamps, the crowd can gain relevant knowledge through daily consumption. in such cases, it is possible for members to provide incrementally innovative ideas based on their increasing demands of these products (ren 2011b). however, like software enthusiasts, the low-expertise crowd (for instance, “turkers,” or participants from mechanical turk) is not motivated to stay alert and create radical ideas. figure 1: comparison of idea creativity from entrepreneurs versus that from the crowd conclusion this paper doesn’t deny the obvious benefits of crowdsourcing. instead, it suggests that researchers and practitioners, who use the crowd for innovative outputs, should leverage the crowd more strategically. first, due to the shortage of r&d resources, smes can acquire inspiration from the crowd’s distributed and collective intelligence for incrementally improving their current products and services. because of the large capacity in the crowd, a huge number of ideas can be expected from the crowd. for example, through the crowdsourcing web portal, “my journal of business anthropology, 4(2), fall 2015 290 starbucks ideas,” starbucks has been using its current and potential customers to gain thousands of ideas for improving its existing products and services. although the black box of how entrepreneurs create radical ideas hasn’t been illuminated, innovation requesters, especially researchers, can design human/computer interactive systems that would leverage inexpensive and collective human intelligence for radical ideas. however, the algorithms of such systems must leverage the diverse backgrounds of crowd members. for example, with specified instructions to combine, change and/or criticize existing ideas, crowd members can be trained to acquire some domain knowledge (ren et al. 2014). then the capacity of the crowd may be increased for more creative ideas. as long as innovation requesters are motivated for entrepreneurial profit, they may stay alert and select radical ideas from this large pool of ideas submitted from the crowd. references amabile, t. m. 1983. “the social psychology of creativity: a componential conceptualization.” journal of personality and social psychology, 45: 357376. amabile, t. m. 1996. creativity in context. boulder, co: westview press. brabham, d. 2008. “crowdsourcing as a model for problem solving: an introduction and cases,” the international journal of research into new media technologies, 14(1): 75-90 brush, t. h. and artz, k. w. 1999. “toward a contingent resource-based theory: the impact of information asymmetry on the value of capabilities in veterinary medicine.” strategic management journal, (20)3: 223–250. cardoso, m. and ramos, i. 2009. open innovation and the solver community, acm chanal, v. and caron-fasan, m. 2008. “how to invent a new business model based on crowdsourcing: the crowdspirit ® case.” paper presented at conférence de l'association internationale de management stratégique, sophia-antipolis hars, a. and ou, s. 2002. “working for free? motivations for participating in open-source projects.” international journal of electronic commerce, 6(3): 25–39. howe, j. 2006. “the rise of crowdsourcing.” wired magazine, 14: 1-5 kirzner, i.m. 1997. “entrepreneurial discovery and the competitive market process: an austrian approach.” journal of economic literature. 35 (march): 60-85. kittur, a. chi, e. and suh, b.. 2008. “crowdsourcing user studies with opinions: all about creativity 291 mechanical turk.” proceeding of the sigchi conference on human factors in computing systems, 4/5: 453-456. kleemann, f. and günter voß, g, 2008. “un(der)paid innovators: the commercial utilization of consumer work through crowdsourcing.” science, technology & innovation studies, 4(1): 5-26. leimeister, j., huber, m., bretschneider, u. and krcmar, h. 2009. “leveraging crowdsourcing: activation-supporting components for itbased ideas competition.” journal of management information systems, 26(1): 197–224. nelson, p. 1970. “information and consumer behavior.” journal of political economy, 78(2): 311–329. oswick, c., fleming, p. and hanlon, g. 2011. “from borrowing to blending: rethinking the processes of organizational theory bilding.” academy of management review, 36(2): 318–33. ramos, i., cardoso, m., carvalho, j. and graça, j. 2009. “an action research on open knowledge and technology transfer.” ifip international federation for information processing, 301: 211-223. ren, j. 2011, “who is more creative, experts or the crowd?.” the proceeding of the 17th americas conference on information systems, 1: 771-783. ren, j. 2011. “exploring the process of web-based crowdsourcing innovation.” proceedings of the 17th americas conference on information systems. 3: 1804-1818. ren, j., nickerson, j. v., mason, w., sakamoto, y. and graber, b. 2014. “increasing the crowd’s capacity to create: how alternative generation affects the diversity, relevance and effectiveness of generated ads.” decision support systems, 65: 28-39. roberts, e. 1991. entrepreneurs in high technology: lessons from mit and beyond. oxford university press, new york. rogers, e. m., 2000. diffusion of innovations. (5th edition.) new york: free press. schenk, e. and de strasbourg, i. 2009. “crowdsourcing: what can be outsourced to the crowd, and why?’ workshop on open source innovation, strasbourg, france. schumpeter, j. a. 1961a. “theory of economic development: an inquiry into profits, capital, credit, interest, and business cycle.” in s. shane (ed.), the foundations of entrepreneurship, volume 1, pp. 120-178. cheltenham: edward elgar publishing. schumpeter, j. a. 1961b. “the process of creative destruction, in capitalism, socialism and democracy.” in scott shane (ed.), the foundations of entrepreneurship, volume 1, pp. 178-184. cheltenham: journal of business anthropology, 4(2), fall 2015 292 edward elgar publishing. shane, s., 2000. “prior knowledge and the discovery of entrepreneurial opportunities.” organization science, 11(4): 448-469. taggar, s., 2002. “individual creativity and group ability to utilize individual creative resources: a multilevel model.” academy of management journal, 45(2): 315-330. xu, b., jones, d. and shao, b. 2009. “volunteers’ involvement in online community based software development.” information & management, 46: 151-158. yu, l., and nickerson, j. v. 2011. “cooks or cobblers?: crowd creativity through combination.” proceedings of the sigchi conference on human factors in computing systems, 1393-1402. * * * anthropology: moving beyond companies’ “creative” and “innovative” toolkit filip lau and mikkel brok-kristensen (red associates, copenhagen, denmark) 2014 was a big year in sports. the two biggest events with a global audience were probably the winter olympics in russian sochi and the soccer world cup in brazil. preparing for such events starts years in advance for an athletic gear company. in one of these companies, management decided to use 2014 as a platform to launch a whole new generation of “creative” and “innovative” offerings to capitalize on the increased worldwide attention. having such a focus on your product category is simply an opportunity that cannot be missed. in early 2012, this particular company started to brief designers and marketers on how to make 2014 a record year. their mission was to show the world the best the company could offer and to discover new dimensions of what an athletic gear company could provide sports fans. during this time period, management produced a flurry of socalled “product briefs” that were distributed throughout the company. these 2-page long briefs described the problem to be solved, the likely solution, the intended target audience, and so on. there were briefs on team jerseys, on football shoes, on gym shoes, on footballs and more. let’s take a look at a typical example―a brief for a gym shoe. it reads like this: “the shoe should exhibit the idea of breathability in the upper combined with midfoot support during dynamic strength opinions: all about creativity 293 movements.” the brief goes on with similar industry-specific language about feet, cushioning, laces, and heels. what does this tell us? for us, it shows that the company in question is first and foremost a shoemaker at heart. so, even when it challenges itself and intends to build innovative offerings, it begins with a technical brief for a shoe. the brief illustrates to all of us not working in the shoemaking industry that the people in that business operate with a pretty narrow definition of where it is allowed to be creative and innovative. the gym shoe brief is a telling example of how companies think when they intend to build something new and revolutionary: from the very first step―the product brief―designers and developers are asked to create something that is close to the core of what the company already does, that is built on past experiences and existing capabilities. which is all fine―if what you want is a state-of-the-art shoe. but what is innovative and creative about that? hard to tell. the company in question knows what it does. it is one of the biggest and most successful companies within sports equipment and athletic gear. what strikes us as odd is that when it decided to make 2014 a year of innovation and creativity, management started out by looking inside its organization, returning to the company’s roots in shoemaking to find new solutions (admittedly combined with a strong and decades-old collaboration with the world’s top professional athletes for specialized product development). it did not look to the softer social sciences or humanities for a new take on what “creative” and “innovative” could look like in the eyes of the users and consumers of the world (beyond product testing on focus groups). the gym shoe was a fairly representative example of how the company in question developed a suite of new products to be launched in 2014. but this is not the whole story. the sports company actually did something that would make a sociologist or ethnographer smile. a team of anthropologists was hired in preparation for the 2014 soccer world cup. they were asked to help the company form a clearer perspective on the future of football and its role as a nation-building tool. the team asked the following questions. what role does soccer have in the lives of younger generations for the participating nations, especially the ones that were rising on the world stage at the time, like russia and mexico? what does it mean to be a young, aspiring mexican, and how could the national soccer team be part of the nation-building of an edgy, up-and-coming country? such questions are gefundenes fressen for ethnographers, sociologists, anthropologists and the like. the intention with such a study was to inform, direct and inspire designers and product developers in the sporting goods company. hiring the group of social scientists was seen as innovative and creative inside the company. and here we arrive at the main point of this opinion piece. seen from the chair of many executives whom we meet in journal of business anthropology, 4(2), fall 2015 294 our daily work as external consultants, the social sciences and humanities bring something new to the table―an alternative approach to problemsolving, a school of thought that can provide perspective and direction to questions about where the world is going that management science and business science cannot to the same degree. bringing in anthropology as a problem-solving tool is seen as creative and innovative in its own right (squires and byrne, 2002). that’s good―the door has been opened to the big companies―but is it good enough? every day it becomes clearer and clearer to us that, as social scientists, we are only at the beginning of a journey (campaign for social science, 2015). there’s still some way to go before we are as established as trusted advisors to executives in the same way that engineers are. right now most softer social scientists are positioned in executives’ minds within the “creative and innovative” box (moeran, 2013). while we as social scientists can pride ourselves on standing on the shoulders of 150 years of theory and methodology development, many are still seen as “new” and “different” by the management of companies out there. the number of executives seeking advice from social scientists is dwarfed by the number of, say, engineers or legal experts who shape the perspective of executives on a daily basis. while engineering or medicine is broadly accepted as “applied natural science,” there is still some way to go before anthropology or ethnography gets the same recognition. the industry we want to be part of building is still very much under development. it lacks many of the symbols and institutions that constitute an industry in its own right, such as broadly recognized academic journals and conferences, awards, educational programs, associations and unions, and so on (jordan, 2010). in its effort to be taken seriously by executives as a true, standalone alternative to managementand business science, our industry must build more opinion pieces such as madsbjerg’s and rasmussen’s the moment of clarity (2014) if it is not to end up married to design thinking and other up-and-coming disciplines that borrow elements from the social sciences. the big question is how to position the discipline of anthropology and other soft social sciences in the minds of executives. how can the discipline become indispensable to them in their decision-making on their bigger problems? how do we make our insights, recommendations and advice sound in the eyes (and ears) of executives? key “innovative” and “creative” tools from the heart of the social sciences at the company we work in, we have spent the past ten years experimenting with getting the ears and attention of executives. we have found that the most interesting and juicy problems are found on cor svp-level in many of the organizations we work in, so that’s where we opinions: all about creativity 295 want to work. and that is, frankly speaking, the level in a client organization where many social scientists have something truly valuable to offer. problems needing abductive reasoning, problems with many types of potential outcomes— that’s where social sciences can offer answers where management and business science have a harder time providing direction and clarity. once we realized this, we have been on a journey to get into real conversations with the executives in the companies we work for. here, the challenges that arise speak to the core strategy of the business. these challenges center on what business a company is in―which has implications for the customers they are trying to reach, with what products, and through what channels and methods. what anthropology offers, a deep understanding of the customers, has little impact unless it’s placed at the core the business (skarzynski and gibson, 2013). at red we realized that, in order to have the impact we wanted, we needed to stop seeing ourselves as researchers and social scientists and more like management consultants utilizing the engine of social sciences. with this realization also came a formalization of something we’d always intuitively done as a part of every project: understand our clients and their industries, in the same depth as we did their customers. it’s now a set part of our problem-solving tool, where this is one of the so-called five lenses we use to explore and understand our clients and their issues. how are key employees working with running shoes in a sporting goods company actually thinking about the world of running? what kind of ideas and assumptions do they have about the people they serve? how is their world-view shaped by the fundamental beliefs of the company? figure 2: overview of the five “lenses.” (from internal red associates training material) journal of business anthropology, 4(2), fall 2015 296 when attempting to understand how companies think about the world in general―and a specific phenomenon in particular―it has proven indispensable for us to understand the fundamental beliefs, mental models and orthodoxies that drive the behavior, policies, strategy development and decision-making processes in the company we serve (bansi and walters, 2011). without this insight we cannot provide enough guidance to our clients, and we cannot tell what is old news or new news, what will likely work and what will not, and so on (see figure 2). and we won’t be able to speak their language―business, it’s called―if we do not know how they see the world and internalize the key phrases and industry terms they use. we look for many things in the data we collect. a key concept is the mapping of asymmetries between the client’s orthodoxies and how the world (for instance, of running) is lived and perceived from other perspectives, for instance by users. here, utilizing the social sciences as a method provides a unique way of doing this. instead of staying within the language used to frame the problem within the company, we translate what companies talk about into real-world phenomena. in the case of a sporting goods company a business problem might be how to sell more running shoes. our job is to translate this into clear human experience, behind the problem that we can try to understand―why do people run? this seemingly simple trick―not studying running shoes, but studying running in its own right―is at the core of our practice and one of the most delicate analytical, yet highly creative, elements in any project we do. and this very flip also makes it possible for our clients, to take a step back and look at what’s happening within their own business. by reframing the problem, we’re also removing discussions of blame, of internal politics, of past discussions, and allowing everyone to look at their problems in a new light; boosting the creative and innovative thinking of the company as a whole, simply by providing a new perspective on their business. conclusion ‘innovation” and “creativity” are context-dependent terms. as external consultants, we have learned that, in many companies, bringing in sociologists and anthropologists for advice is seen as an innovative and creative act in its own right. for social scientists, to move from a position as alternative advisor to become as central and trusted as, say, the engineer, it is necessary to focus on the challenges at the cand svp-levels in companies. these challenges center on what business a company is in―which has implications for what customers they are trying to reach, with what products, and through what channels and methods. opinions: all about creativity 297 what anthropology offers, a deep understanding of the customers, has little impact unless it’s placed at the core the business. references campaign for social science 2015. the business of people: the significance of social science over the next decade. london: sage publications. jordan, ann t. 2009. napa bulletin, practicing anthropology in corporate america: consulting on organizational culture. hoboken, nj: john wiley & sons. jordan, ann t. 2010. “the importance of business anthropology: its unique contributions.” international journal of business anthropology 1 (1): 15-25. madsbjerg, christian and mikkel b. rasmussen 2014. the moment of clarity. boston: harvard business review press moeran, brian 2013. the business of creativity: toward an anthropology of worth. walnut creek, ca: left coast press.. nagji, bansi and helen walters 2011. “flipping orthodoxies: overcoming insidious obstacles to innovation: case study.” boston: harvard business review press. skarzynski, peter, and rowan gibson 2013. innovation to the core: a blueprint for transforming the way your company innovates. cambridge, ma: harvard business press. squires, susan, and bryan byrne, eds. 2002. creating breakthrough ideas: the collaboration of anthropologists and designers in the product development industry. westport, ct: praeger pub text. * * * vi opdaterer systemet vi opdaterer systemet... rauli.cbs.dk opdateres og er snart tilgængeligt. essay everyday things: an anthropologist’s take on emotion and the sense of the sacred in consumer rituals tom maschio i was originally trained in the anthropology of religion and did my first fieldwork in papua new guinea, studying a melanesian people’s ritual and religious life and trying to understand their sense of the sacred. the work i’ve carried out the last eighteen years as a business consultant studying consumer culture has turned out to be not so very different from my previous work. this may give people in both anthropology and advertising pause, but to me, and to other commentators, consumer culture is often a search for meaning, not merely a search for material comfort or fun or pleasure or status or an attempt to satisfy basic necessity. the next thought may also give pause: that the search for meaning is often a search for the sense of the sacred in the everyday―the everyday product, the everyday activity. in categories as varied as pet food, bicycles, credit card use, food, and electronics, the successful product or brand often gives people a sense of what can only be described as the sacred in the everyday. this sense is a strong emotional benefit for consumers, the creation and evocation of which is an important objective of the rituals and routines that surround product usage. this emotional page 1 of 10 jba 4(2): 342-351 fall 2015 © the author(s) 2015 issn 2245-4217 www.cbs.dk/jba maschio / everyday things 343 benefit provides certain brands and products with what malcolm gladwell would term “stickiness,” or memorability. likewise, anthropologists who write about the workings and objectives of religious ritual tell us that ritual is one way cultures highlight and make memorable for participants certain values, meanings and feelings. the anthropologist gilbert lewis writes that “the idea of the deeper significance of ordinary things is familiar to those who take part in the study of ritual” (lewis 1988:30). ritual places ordinary things within a special field of meaning so that participants will pay attention to them. as lewis puts it, during a ritual: “instead of seeing an object or action in a conventional way we un-gate our vision and search out its special qualities, which have no relevance in the ordinary economy of our perceptual and practical dealings with it, but which by close attention, by some sort of short circuit of thought, may provide an intimation of a mystery” (lewis 1988:31). in this way ritual creates the sense that the object attended to is something memorable, complex and symbolic of deeper values, and something of the sacred attaches to it. i’ve often used anthropological theories about religious ritual to help me understand consumer thoughts and feelings about their preferred products and brands. i’ve tended to view the rituals and routines that consumers create around products and brands as affirmations that these objects are special and deserving of sometimes quite intense attention. when i first wrote a version of this essay these thoughts intersected with what was one of the most central questions of the past economic recession for businesses: what can we learn from products and brands that were performing respectably, if not profitably, in the midst of a severe economic downturn? why do consumers remain attached to some products and brands and categories and not others in rough economic times? in many cases it has to do with this feeling of meaning in the everyday and with the concept of ritual. put another way, certain brands stand out from others in the same category because they have been particularly successful in allowing consumers to tap into the sense of the sacred in the everyday. and, i believe, more products would be successful if advertisers understood the meanings of the rituals that attach to specific product categories. my overriding objective in writing this piece is, hopefully, to suggest a promising approach to the study of consumer culture. i wish to argue that one of the ways that advertising can better understand the emotional benefits of specific product categories and then more crisply articulate these benefits in communications strategies about specific brands is to leverage a particular anthropological approach to ritual. journal of business anthropology, 4(2), fall 2015 344 anthropological definitions of ritual are varied and complex, as are the definitions and approaches that anthropologists have used when considering consumer rituals, and i will consider a few of these here. revelations about the everyday: performance and emotion in consumer rituals the subject of the ritual aspect of everyday occasions was most famously discussed by goffman (1955) through his analysis of “facework.” facework is the seemingly choreographed, standardized interactions between people striving to create, maintain or preserve “face” or self and social image. facework is a ritual of social interaction. mauss would have called this maintaining the persona―the person’s reputation, social role, social position; the view he carries of himself into the social arena and displays to the world. in consumer research rook (1985) considered the symbolic and ritual elements of personal grooming, after having criticized consumer and marketing studies for failing to consider adequately the symbolic dimensions and meanings of consumer actions (1985:251). for both authors the element of sacredness in everyday occasions and activities is implicit. for instance, for goffman the person is the seemingly sacred object of the interaction ritual, whose face, honor, reputation and selfimage must be maintained through performance. the telos or goal of the ritual is face maintenance, almost at all costs. in an interesting parallel from consumer studies, rook points out how people often work toward realizing a more ideal self-image through their grooming patterns and use of consumer items and brands. there is something charged in the selfimage people are trying to attain or continually recreate in their stereotypical and patterned grooming activities, as i have seen in projects i’ve carried out on hair care brands and products, and as malefyt’s analysis of men’s shaving rituals reveals (2015:704-21). when reading these scholarly accounts, and my own business reports, i remember how a sense of enthrallment often animated and colored peoples grooming activities, the techniques they used to carry out these activities and the objects, substances and brands that they used. in another example, sherry (1983), drawing on mauss’s seminal work the gift, outlines the stereotypical stages and interactions of holiday gift giving. he does not directly broach the idea of sacredness in his piece. it appears however that people engage in these interactions to achieve an ideal of sociality, even social harmony, almost as if they are working toward realizing a sacred ideal. in a related vein wallendorf and arnould (1991) draw on durkheim’s ideas as they outline the social functions and meanings of the ritualistic thanksgiving day meal. the feast draws family together and celebrates family history and lore. this is a rite of intensification centered on consumption and food, often represented by “down home” or everyday commercial brands and foods. these brands maschio / everyday things 345 resonate with the informal “communitas” of the feast while also celebrating the culturally important correlation of abundance with family. family is abundance on a number of actual and symbolic levels during thanksgiving―abundance of sentiment and feeling, abundance of concern symbolized by food abundance, by the abundance of the feast. yet, i believe that some of these treatments do not make explicit enough the idea of enchantment in relationship to consumer and other everyday rituals. enchantment entails a type of thralldom; it entails seeing the everyday thing or activity in a heightened fashion, thus seeing or perceiving some deeper meaning and even mystery in them. malefyt’s argument about the sensory elements of shaving for one class of shavers―we would perhaps call them ritual adepts―certainly brings this idea of enchantment to the fore. but malefyt’s main brief is to outline a way of marketing the senses, introducing the anthropology of the senses to corporate anthropology (malefyt 2015: 710-716). he references anthropological work that shows how “culture specific concepts and practices of a people’s sensory experience generate day-to-day social interaction and mark what is meaningful in life” (2015:707). but the idea of “sacredness” remains implicit, and the word sacred unspoken. to build on malefyt’s argument, the sensory qualities of ritual alert participants to the fact that they have left the realm of the prosaic; that some special meaning attaches to the activities they are witnessing or carrying out; that they are entering a special arena. being a new guineaist i am well acquainted with ritual activities that are meant to reveal the true or deeper meaning of everyday things and activities to, for instance, initiates. in one initiation rite i observed and studied in new guinea, common place objects were presented to initiates, sung about, had the names of their different sections revealed and generally were shown to have cosmological and sacred significance, as were the everyday activities in which they were used. this significance had to be absorbed in manifold ways if the initiates were to progress as persons, and move to a different and enhanced social status (maschio 1994:104-139). to make the connection, i do believe consumer rituals often reveal people to be engaged in performances that enable them to see or perceive or create the deeper meanings of their everyday activities and of the objects they interact with. further, these rituals have an emotional payoff and objective. they are often emotionally satisfying to perform, and their performance is meant to evoke certain emotional states. during these performative sequences people reflectively add depth and meaning to their everyday lives and thereby, as perhaps geertz would say, establish pervasive moods, motivations, feelings and emotions in themselves (1973:119-120) so, i am thinking about the performative, the theatrical, and the aesthetic and emotional elements of ritual. in general i am framing consumer rituals as performances carried out according to the directions journal of business anthropology, 4(2), fall 2015 346 of almost theatrical scripts that are meant to move an audience emotionally (whether an audience of one―oneself―or of many) through symbolic language, with the aim of heightening the meanings of objects, activities or aspects of life. after all, the early anthropological definitions of ritual discussed its concern with the realm of the sacred, and with the consecration of objects, as in the work of durkheim. i do not feel that we should shy away from these insights simply because we are dealing with consumer culture, a realm not as profane as critics often portray it to be. if we are going to use the concept of ritual, let’s use the concept of the sacred as well. let me illustrate how these ideas apply to the study of consumer culture by discussing the rituals that consumers weave around some common product categories: pet care and bicycles. nothing is seemingly more every day than feeding your cat or riding your bike. cat food and cat mana: a bit of category history u.s. cat food sales increased 12.3 percent in the six months ending november 2008, with sales increases holding steady toward the end of that recession year, just when the us economy was cratering. sales of catcare related paraphernalia (kitty condos and the like) had also increased dramatically over the course of the recession. what to make of this when many people were worried about having enough money to keep their homes and buy food for their human families? a series of ethnographic projects i carried out on pet care, and peoples’ attitudes toward their pets and pet food brands, was revealing. we all understand that the intimate physical interactions between cats and their owners―during petting, playing and grooming―produce feelings of connectedness, peace and security for owners and their cats. many people feel that cats put them in touch with their own animal nature, enabling them to experience simple animal contentment, such as when their cats sit on their laps purring. but beyond this, cats fascinate their owners because they seemed to possess some uncanny, exotic, magical quality. though my respondents were not familiar with the idea, i would say that they perceived that their cats possessed mana. in the anthropological record of diverse cultures, mana is a religious concept that represents the principles of efficacy and power. and people often describe their cats as extraordinary, efficacious animals, possessed of capabilities that provide a window into the natural world. for instance, cats appear preternaturally athletic to cat lovers. they also seem to possess amazing and mysterious sensory abilities and even aesthetic qualities. their beauty somehow indicates their discerning nature. one of the pet owner’s most important concerns is nurturing cat mana through the choice of the right pet food. some want their cats to really act like cats―which means exhibiting mana. this is one of the ways that owners experienced a sense of wonderment, or sacredness, in the everyday. driving cat food sales is a powerful consumer need to cultivate cat mana maschio / everyday things 347 and to see it exhibited in cat play and other behaviors. owners often feel a real species distance between cats and themselves. unlike dogs, whose internal states are thought to be much more easily read, cat behavior provides only teasing indications and ambiguous signs of a mysterious nature that owners struggle to interpret. it is this desire to make contact and to divine cat nature that drives human/cat interaction, and in some very interesting ways. owners value the presence of this enigmatic creature within their homes, especially noting cats’ behavioral interactions with domestic spaces. a sense of the sacred in the home many cat loving owners also speak of the symbolic link between the nature of cats and the nature of home. cats introduce a world of physicality, play, amusement, spectacle and sentiment into the home. paradoxically, having a pet cat is one of a number of ways that people seek to humanize the home. cats make a house feel lived in. they do this by investing something of themselves in it when they take possession of our domestic spaces. a favorite sleeping place in a bookcase, a particular nook or cranny of the house, a preferred room or bed or chair, and the cat’s daily visiting of these special places enhance the owner’s sense of hominess. often the cat owner will embellish these spots with toys, scratching posts, personalized pillows or little beds. as an anthropologist of religion, i view these commercial embellishments as shrines to essential cat nature. in this way owners are symbolically expressing the idea that their cats are sanctifying their homes, weaving a sacred hominess into everyday experience, enabling them to experience domesticity more vibrantly and richly. the shrines that cat owners build to their cats become the stage on which cats then perform, and cat owners interpret cat behavior as if it were a ritual performance. a cat’s daily rounds through the house, its feeding and play behavior, have a repetitive and ritualistic quality that owners find highly satisfying. it is as if by engaging in its daily routines the cat renews the sense of domesticity and sacredness in the everyday. owners feel they are participating in this ritual by furthering its performance. as one respondent put it: “i want to provide a sense of security and contentment to our cat. cats like to be in control of their environments. i feel amusement in their cat places and i feel pride that they i have cared for them enough so that they have taken ownership.” when cats came to possess the domestic realm in these ways, owners feel themselves to be closer to their cats and to have made a real connection with them. journal of business anthropology, 4(2), fall 2015 348 high-end bicycle brands i have done this sort of exercise in ferreting out the sacred meaning of the everyday product or service in many projects that i have worked on. as i have done so i have continually made use of the concept of ritual. it is a truism at this point to note that consumers create rituals and routines around products and brands. from an anthropologist’s perspective, the brand ritual is a type of cultural performance (as a play is a performance) through which consumers express meanings and sentiments, not only about the brand itself but about larger cultural issues. in the study of cats and cat food brands, as consumers talked about cat food brands and other cat care products, they expressed ideas about domesticity, the nature of a sacred animal, and their understanding of mana (all well-established topics in anthropology). this brings us to another point about consumer and other sorts of ritual performance: that they can reveal whole worlds of meaning, mapping back to many culture domains. let me turn to another example in another category: high-end bicycle brands. in one commercial project i found that riders were expressing ideas about competitiveness, energy, play, discipline, freedom and beauty, as they purchased, raced, trained on, customized and repaired their bicycles. these ideas often weren’t expressed directly but were encoded in symbols. thus, design elements of a bicycle came to symbolize energy, lightness, and strength. on a deeper level, the frame of the preferred bicycle brand served as a metaphor for how riders wish to think of their own, actual physical bodies―strong, light but fit, and trained to a fine edge. like a dramatic play a brand ritual usually has an overall theme or message. in the bicycle ethnography i arrived at the theme of “alignment”―riders attempting to align bicycle design into a close fit with their own physical bodies. riders are continually customizing their bicycles to fit their own particular body types, to suit the type of race they were preparing for, and to be concordant with the sort of training routine they were practicing. as they do this they are also remaking their bodies, making their bodies more concordant with the shapes and contours of their bicycles. i took this process of embodiment to be the cyclist’s brand ritual (as he usually felt he could carry it off with his preferred bicycle brand) and went about decoding it as i would any other ritual performance. one other aspect of ritual is its formality, especially when compared to routines, as lewis points out (1988:19-22, 25). in actual religious ritual there is often a certain rigidity or formality of gesture, as well as formal decorations, singing, the use of special costumes, masks, and special smells like incense, all of which alert participants that they have entered a special performance arena. these involve some of the dimensions that malefyt discusses in his work on the sensory elements of maschio / everyday things 349 brand rituals. certainly the elaborate costumes of the cyclist and all his specialized, repetitive training rituals have a formality and ceremonialism to them. the ultimate purpose of the cyclist’s brand ritual is to hallow the activity that he is engaging in (bicycle riding and racing) through the means of his bicycle brand. this is how he creates and elaborates a sense of the sacred in his everyday and seemingly completely secular, banal training activity. i do mean everyday, as the training regimes of competitive riders are nothing if not regular and disciplined. the brand ritual, like a religious ritual, has an ultimate emotional objective for the participant that he, or she, wishes to experience again and again. for the cyclist this is a sense of transcendence and freedom that riding and racing delivers, once one is trained up and ready to compete. for the cat owner it is the sense of wonder at sharing one’s home with a sacred, mana-filled animal, and the enhanced sense of domesticity that their cats allow them to experience. discussion my take on why consumer products and brands can become “sticky,” memorable, in a recession and at other times, then involves unraveling an apparent paradox. this is that a sense of the sacred, more than simply a sense of meaning, can be derived from the most ordinary things―that product category or brand rituals are often about the hallowing of some life arena and activity. can it be that consumer culture is sometimes a façade for what can only be called religious impulses, or a screen upon which those impulses are projected? thinking of the swath of profane consumer categories that i have subjected to anthropological analysis―cat foods and bicycles, cars, credit cards, toothpaste, underarm deodorant, skin moisturizers, feminine hygiene products, car parts (one could go on and on)―such a thought gives pause or brings to mind the old topic of commodity fetishism. of course an atheist might call a particular religious object a fetish; certainly he would feel that believers feel inappropriately or mistakenly enthusiastic about, say, images of the virgin mary. the bookend and response to the idea of fetishism, however, is the religious intuition about the deeper significance of everyday things. and indeed “the deeper significance of ordinary things is familiar to those who take part in the study of ritual” (lewis 1988:30). certainly it is familiar to me. as i have said, many of the religious objects i studied in new guinea seemed at first glance no more promising candidates for ritual treatment. in one ritual i’ve written on, a female initiation rite, the ritual objects were areca nut, lime, small clam shells, common plants of various sorts, pig tusk ornaments, dogs’ teeth, cassowary quill necklaces, and grass skirts (maschio 1994:105-139; 1995:131-161). it’s what people do with these common things, both here and elsewhere, that give them their particular meanings, regardless of what journal of business anthropology, 4(2), fall 2015 350 the things are in and of themselves. more often then not people are weaving them into ritual performances. of course i’ve never used the word “sacred,” or the phrase “religious ritual” in any of my business reports and presentations. but these phrases and ideas have often informed my thinking. this has been my secret. the account planner for the the bicycle project leveraged the idea of the competitive cyclist’s ritual, which included the notion that cyclists are in a constant state of physical refinement and personal transformation, to see biking as a way to access new experiences. like me, the planner eschewed over-the-top references to “sacred experience.” rather, the planner and his agency stressed the thoughtful, purposeful elements of the cyclist’s behavior and attitude―the fact that the cyclist perceived his ritual of alignment to be the cultivation of an intellectual skill. they then sought to portray brand attributes in intellectual terms, portraying the brand as a thoughtful brand that innovates on its own time frame, just as riders develop a thoughtful training program through their ritual of alignment. their presentation secured the account. the innovation company i worked with on cat foods and cat care assimilated the idea of mana to the idea of super foods, stressing the nutritional power and efficacy of new cat food product offerings. the idea of manafilled cat nature was given a nod in communication strategies with the phrase “super cats”―super foods for super cats. this was all tied in to the sacred domestic symbolism of cats via a notion of parallel play―the idea that owners perceive cat nature to reveal itself as they watch cat play and cat routines go forward in domestic settings. the brand thus was portrayed as nurturing true cat nature. years later some of these same ideas were used again in an advertising campaign for a specific cat food brand in the client’s portfolio. references durkheim, emile. 1961. the elementary forms of the religious life. new york: collier books. geertz, clifford. 1973 the interpretation of cultures. new york: basic books. gladwell, malcolm, 2000. the tipping point: how little things can make a big difference. new york: back bay books/ little brown and company. goffman, erving, 1967. interaction ritual: essays on face-to-face behavior. new york: pantheon books. lewis, gilbert, 1988. day of shining red: an essay about understanding ritual. cambridge: cambridge university press. maschio / everyday things 351 malefyt, timothy, 2015. “an anthropology of the senses: tracing the future of sensory marketing in brand rituals.” in handbook of anthropology in business. rita denny and patricia sunderland eds., pp 704-721. walnut creek, ca: left coast press. maschio, thomas, 1994. to remember the faces of the dead: the plenitude of memory in south western new britain. new directions in anthropological writing. madison wi: university of wisconsin press. maschio, thomas, 1995. “mythic images and objects of myth in rauto female puberty ritual.” in gender rituals: female initiation in melanesia. nancy lutkehaus and paul roscoe eds., pp 131-161. new jersey: routledge. rook, dennis, 1985. “the ritual dimension of consumer behavior.” in the journal of consumer research 12: 251-264. sherry, john 1983. “gift giving in anthropological perspective.” in the journal of consumer research 10: 157-169. wallendorf, melanie and arnould, eric j. 1991. “we gather together: consumption rituals of thanksgiving day.” journal of consumer research 18: 13-31. tom maschio has been a business anthropologist for the past sixteen years and head of his own consultancy (maschio consulting) since 2004. his consulting work has run the gamut of product and service categories and has been carried out mostly for fortune 500 companies. his original training in symbolic and humanistic anthropology continues to undergird his approach to business anthropology. he originally carried out ethnographic research in papua new guinea and his experience there serves as an ongoing source of inspiration for his life and work. he can be reached at tom@maschioconsulting.com mailto:tom@maschioconsulting.com taxi drivers: ethnic segmentation, precarious work, and informal economic strategies in the swedish taxi industry zoran slavnic abstract this article invesitgates the processes of ethnic segmentation, precarious labour, and informalization in the swedish taxi industry during a period of rapid deregulation during the 1990s. it does so by focussing on the life story of a single individual―adem, a taxi driver in the swedish city of malmö. despite his education, long working experience, and all efforts to make use of these advantages, all doors to an appropriate career in sweden have remained closed to him. as a result, he has been pushed into working in the taxi sector, which is increasingly characterized by ethnic segmentation, hard working conditins, and harsh competition, forcing people to deploy informal economic strategies in order to survive. adem’s fate becomes strongly determined by these socio-economical processes. at the same time, the article shows that these processes are not separate, but are closely interrelated and reinforce each other. on the broader level these processes are a general consequence of the neoliberal reconstruction of western economies, and structural economic, political and social changes related to it. page 1 of 22 jba 4(2): 298-319 fall 2015 © the author(s) 2015 issn 2245-4217 www.cbs.dk/jba slavnic / taxi drivers 299 keywords taxi industry, ethnic segmentation, informal economy, precarization, deregulation, sweden. introduction during my fieldwork in malmö, i used a taxi more often than usual. i needed to meet several informants who lived or worked in different parts of the city. taxis were the most efficient means of transport to get the job done. but perhaps the most important reason was the cost. an increasing number of taxi companies at the time charged only 45 kronor (us$5.50) for all destinations within the city, which was actually a price my employers were prepared to pay. but this extremely low price was also something that i thought about every time while being driven. three thoughts usually circulated in my mind. first, this situation reminded me of portes’ story (1994:426) about the informalization of local transport in miami. local regular bus lines, employing union organized, mostly white, drivers were competing with the so-called jitneys, which were small and overcrowded, had no airconditioning, and were driven almost exclusively by immigrants. the service of the regular lines was indeed better: the buses were more comfortable, with air conditioners; but they were also more expensive, more infrequent, and stopped only at stations. the jitneys were cheaper, the service was more frequent and they used to stop wherever the customer wanted. portes concluded that the competition between the controlled and irregular economy had never been as apparent as in this case. the same can therefore be said for the malmö taxi situation. cheap taxis are almost exclusively operated by immigrants, and they have multiplied so much that it is almost impossible to charge higher prices. the quality of service is perhaps somewhat lower―drivers may not have mastered the language and the cars are somewhat older and dirtier―but the client does not have to wait more than three minutes and the service is inexpensive. but, as we shall see later in this article, it is impossible for these firms to get bigger and better paid jobs, such as a contract with the bigger, luxurious hotels in the city, or fixed agreements with the municipality or county for transporting patients, the elderly and so on. such contracts are almost exclusively reserved for larger and more established taxi companies. secondly, each time during the ride i tried to calculate how many fares taxi drivers have to take during the day to make it all worthwhile. responding to my phone call, picking me up, taking me to the destination―an average ride can hardly be shorter than half an hour. this meant that they could not earn more than 100 kronor (us$12) per hour. if they worked twelve hours a day, six days a week―about 26 working journal of business anthropology, 4(2), fall 2015 300 days a month―then the overall revenue per month might come to a maximum of 31,400 kronor (us$3,750). once they had paid for leasing the car, daily fuel, the dispatch centre service, plus car maintenance and washing, and payroll tax, what remained was far below the guaranteed lowest wages for employees in sweden. and all this despite working a twelve-hour day, six days a week. and finally, a third thing i started thinking about was the informal economy, or “black economy” (svart ekonomi), as this phenomenon is usually called in the political and media vocabulary in sweden. when it comes to taxi fraud, according to the swedish taxi association (taxiförbundet 2014), more than 30 billion kronor in taxes have been lost since the taxi market was deregulated in 1990. these figures should, however, be taken with some caution. for instance, during the 1990s and early 2000s both authorities (sou 2004-102; skatteverket 2005) and media estimated that annual tax evasion came to four billion kronor in the taxi sector. the current estimate is one billion kronor (taxiförbundet 2011). despite the variations, there is a sort of general consensus that tax fraud is widespread within this sector, which is also often associated with other serious types of crime such as rape and robbery. through these short reflections i actually arrived at three keywords related to three socio-economic processes with which this article is going to deal. these are first the process of ethnification or ethnic segmentation of the taxi industry; secondly, the process of precarization, or progressive worsening of working conditions and reduction of (welfare) protection for employees; and thirdly the process of informalization within the sector: that is, increasing the volume of work done outside society’s existing regulatory framework. in other words, by using the life story of a single taxi driver in malmö as an empirical base, the article aims to show how the radical worsening of working conditions within the sector was accompanied by two additional processes―ethnic segmentation and informalization―and how these three processes are not separate but closely interrelated and reinforce each other. deregulation deregulation of the swedish taxi sector (implemented on 1 july, 1990) was in fact the beginning of an extensive deregulatory wave in sweden during the 1990s, when a number of strictly regulated economic sectors (electricity, domestic air traffic, postal services, rail and taxi services and telecommunications) were opened to the “free market.” being considered a test case to prepare for later deregulations (laitila et al. 1995:9), taxi deregulation was planned and organized very carefully. among other things, all parts of the project were implemented on the same day (marell & westin 2000, 2002). slavnic / taxi drivers 301 the main political argument behind deregulation was the low efficiency and high prices that had previously characterised the taxi market. deregulation was expected to provide the necessary conditions for achieving a better balance between supply and demand, resulting in lower fares and a higher quality of service. furthermore, competition was expected to improve efficiency, which in the longer run would decrease the number of smaller actors in the market, and at the same time increase the number of larger operators, who could than take advantage of economies of scale (nutek 1996). however, in reality the market was liberalized: that is to say, formal measures of state regulations were removed, but better efficiency was not achieved. what really happened was a lowering of effectiveness in terms of the decreasing number of rides per vehicle and per working day and even time-productivity (the relationship between paid time and total working time) decreased (laitila et.al. 1995). the resulting lower profitability forced people to work longer hours to earn the same wage. simultaneously a new wage system for taxi drivers, a so-called “payment by result” (nutek 1996) was introduced, which meant that, especially within the larger taxi companies, the higher costs caused by the low effectiveness tended to be transferred to the employees, that is to say, the taxi drivers. all this created conditions for the three inter-dependent processes with which this article is concerned: ethnic segmentation, precarious labour, and informalization. these matters will be discussed within the geographically limited area of malmö/lund, and through the life story of a single immigrant taxi driver. the biographical method provides a useful tool for studying structure-agency dynamics, especially in the interdisciplinary studies of migration, ethnic business, and labour markets. when people choose to tell researchers their life stories it becomes possible to reconstruct those structural institutional and cultural patterns that constitute their biographies (rosenthal 1993). a biographical-narrative interview that this article is based on was made as a part of my field work on ethnic business in malmö, in the end of the first decade of 2000s. ethnic segmentation relying on the classic theory of a dual labour market (reich, gordon and edwards 1973), michael piore (1979) argued in his concept of ethnic segmentation that international migration is caused in the first place by the demand for cheap and disposable labour in advanced capitalist economies rather than by social and economic processes in the countries that export labour. secondly, he linked migration to the segmentation of labour markets. indeed, immigrants most often become part of a secondary labour market, thereby providing more jobs and job security journal of business anthropology, 4(2), fall 2015 302 for the local population which mostly occupies the primary labour market. there is a vast literature showing that piore’s segmentation theory is still relevant. it shows that changes in immigration policy towards tighter control are linked to the wider political and economic processes of the withdrawal of the welfare state, erosion of social rights, and labour re-commodification (slavnic 2010; munck et al. 2011). these policy changes have not prevented or even reduced immigration, but criminalized it instead (jordan & düvell 2002; anderson 2010), placing immigrants in a vulnerable, “precarious legal status” (bernhard et al. 2007). the increased insecurity and legal uncertainty during the immigration process determines their position in the labor market even after they have resolved their legal status and become “full citizens” (anderson 2010; goldring & landolt 2011). their precarious citizenship status continues to overshadow chances in the labor market (munck et al. 2011), by providing opportunities to their employers to continue to exploit them (jordan & düvell 2002; wright & mckay 2007). the life story that is the empirical foundation of this article is in many aspects quite illustrative of these processes. adem is 52 years old and a trained electrical engineer. he came to sweden at the beginning of the 1990s as a war refugee from bosnia.1 in his homeland he had over many years built his career in a large company that competed internationally, operating within the same market as sweden’s assea (today abb). once in sweden, he applied for more than 200 jobs, but without success. he was not even called for a single interview. his disappointment was at its peak after an event that he describes as follows: in the municipality of arbåga there is an abb factory producing high-voltage equipment. they announced a job vacancy for an electrical engineer. the ad matched so well to me and my qualifications that i myself could not have written a better prescription. it was exactly what i had previously dealt with, i.e. high voltage devices and their installation… and i applied immediately. i thought to myself that if i could get this job it would be brilliant. as i said, the job was as if it was tailored just for me. besides, the abb companies are very similar to energoinvest. they were formerly assea, which merged with a swiss company that was named abb. and coincidently it was abb that i worked with during my time in libya. for example, while we built a substation, assea built an identical one, but with a different voltage level, about thirty yards from us. they 1 above mentioned tighter immigration control in sweden relates just to refugees from the war in former yugoslavia in the beginning of the 1990s (see slavnic 2000). slavnic / taxi drivers 303 transformed for instance 220,000 to 110,000 volts, which we later took over, transformed it to 33000 volts before distributing it to the places where it was needed. and then a few days after i sent in my application, i received a letter in which they “thanked me for my interest.” they had already hired someone else. okay, i thought, there is nothing to do about it. such things happen. just three days later, however, i saw exactly the same ad in a newspaper. and then i wondered what this was all about. at that time i was in fact still unaware of swedish discrimination, racism and so on. i thought instead that they might have needed a second engineer for the same post. so i phoned up the firm's personnel manager. i noticed immediately in his response that he tried to wriggle. throughout the conversation it became increasingly clear that the ad was about the same job vacancy that i had already applied for. finally, i asked a direct question: “have you employed anyone following the previous ad?” he said, “no.” “and you are now looking for an engineer for the same place?” his answer was, “yes.” i asked if it was worthwhile for me to once again submit an application for the post. the answer was, “no.” i said, “ok, thank you” and hung up. ... this event hit me really hard. we can only speculate about the reasons why the employer did not show interest in adem, or even invite him for an interview, in spite of the fact that both his formal qualifications and his professional experiences were at least compatible and comparable with corresponding swedish ones. it might have been his age, or assumed lack of language and cultural competence, or both. it might have been intended discrimination, based on ethnical stereotypes and prejudices, or what has been described by some scholars as statistical discrimination. it might have been a combination of all of these. anyway, the result was blocked entrance to the primary labour market, which would have led to stable employment, good working conditions, relatively high wages, and chances of advancement. in this respect, adem’s story is just another case supporting the findings on ethnic segmentation portrayed by academic literature in sweden. immigrants obviously encounter difficulties―both in the process of entering the labour market, and within it. when it comes to recruitment, despite their equal education, immigrants have a higher percentage of unemployment, are employed in unskilled occupations (höglund 2002), or within atypical forms of employment compared with the swedes (jonsson & wallette 2001; håkansson 2001). they are also more often excluded from the further recruitment process in the early stages (hertzberg 2003; neergaard & mulinari 2004). it is often sufficient to have a strange or unusual name to be excluded (helgesson 2000). journal of business anthropology, 4(2), fall 2015 304 furthermore, immigrants have significantly fewer chances to get jobs that are relevant to their qualifications than do swedes (martinsson 1998; helgesson 2000). at the same time, such practices of exclusion lead to a systematic concentration of immigrants in simple industrial and service jobs, with a focus on physically demanding, stressful, or dirty jobs (alund and schierup 1991; schierup et al. 2006; slavnic 2012). adem’s story is quite illustrative of these processes. soon after the incident mentioned above, he was persuaded by his friends to seek a new occupation, to become a taxi driver. ... a friend of mine said to me, “adem, damn, why do you complicate things with all these applications? you have, of course, already noticed that it doesn’t lead anybody anywhere. instead, take a job as a taxi driver. just look at me, i have already worked for five or six months. it is possible to cope with the job.” so he tried to persuade me. and then he said that there were no problems with the job, the managers are mainly immigrants. there are also many bosnians employed there who you can work with, which makes it all easier. finally i decided to give it a try. my idea was that, during my employment as a taxi driver, i would continue to apply for the job i was meant for, electrical engineer. it’s true, as my friend said. a few weeks later, after i attended a short training course in order to get my taxi license, i was employed as a taxi driver. there are two things that we learn from this quotation. first, the more difficult it is to get a job in the primary labor market, the greater the push is to start working in the taxi sector, either as an employee, or as selfemployed. secondly and related, it gives us some idea of how the process of ethnic segmentation works. slavnic and urban’s (2008) geographical study covering the period 1990-2004 supports this trend by showing that the proportion of swedish-born people working in the taxi industry had been constant during the period studied, while participation of the foreign-born population in the taxi sector has increased by around 20 per cent. adem’s experience fits this trend well. in spite of higher education and many years of work experience, for him doors to employment in accordance with his qualifications and merits were obviously closed. at the same time, after deregulation, entrance-obstacles were removed, which enabled relatively easy access to jobs in the taxi industry. but at the same time, the sector was increasingly characterized by drastically worse working conditions, long workdays, and general uncertainty about the future. testimony to this is offered by adem’s continued story. slavnic / taxi drivers 305 precarious work adem’s first employer was a man who had also come from former yugoslavia, although thirty years earlier. adem worked for him for about a year, six days a week, ten to twelve hours a day. wednesdays were his days off. during the working shifts, time used to pass really quickly. there were more than enough calls and he almost never waited for one at the taxi depot. about a year later, however, his employer ran into financial difficulties. the tax authorities conducted an audit of his firm and decided he owed more than 100,000 kronor.2 he was forced to close down his business, and adem found himself back at square one, facing the question: "what happens now?" at that time he still used to send job applications to companies in the engineering sector, but to no avail. the only solution he found reasonable at that point was to start his own taxi firm. he managed to get financial support from the state and credit from the bank to buy a new car. in order to be legitimate he also needed to complete some sort of taxi-specific education: luckily, a short course. once it was completed, he was quickly able to start his business. the period he describes like this: i worked as before, approximately ten to twelve hours per day, but working for myself i didn’t even have wednesdays off now. i worked every single day. my private affairs i performed on the road. for example, if i had to meet with the auditor, i waited until a time when i had to go to malmö, where he was located. before i went off i called him to see if he possibly had time to meet. the papers that would be needed during the meeting i had with me in the car. this was the way things were during the two years i was self-employed. the majority of taxi drivers work under the same conditions … the quote indicates that working conditions within the swedish taxi sector increasingly deteriorated. there are several possible explanations for this. the first is an attempt to compensate for lower profitability by working longer days and nights―a frequent ploy in the taxi sector (laitila et al. 1995). unemployment statistics in sweden since the early 1990s show significantly higher unemployment compared with the previous period. this means that a large number of individual actors were effectively forced to work in the sector despite deteriorating working conditions, by accepting longer hours and a lower income, because they had nowhere else to go. another contributing factor in this context is that the taxi industry, as mentioned earlier, moved towards becoming ethnically segmented during the same period. to drive a taxi was for these people often the only form of paid work that was available. 2 between 2006 and 2008 the swedish tax authorities had conducted a so-called taxi project, which resulted in additional taxation of about 280 million kronor, affecting about 2,000 companies and 1,400 drivers (skatteverket 2009). journal of business anthropology, 4(2), fall 2015 306 these economic and social processes, however, are not particular to the taxi sector alone. if we remain focused on sweden, we find similar trends (to keep the list short) in the household and cleaning sector (gavanas 2010, 2013), the pizza trade (hultman 2013), seasonal berry picking (woolfson et al. 2012), and construction (likic-brboric et al. 2013). at the same time, the interconnection between migration, ethnic segmentation and precarization is related to wider global (neoliberal) changes (hardt and negri 2000; harvey 2005; anderson 2010). precarization includes not only weaker basic socio-economic security (standing 2005 2008), but allows for increased economic exploitation. to paraphrase foti (2005), an increasing number of people who are exposed to precarization become “hireable on demand, available on call, exploitable at will, and fireable on a whim.” moreover, this kind of exploitation flows over into free time and disrupts “the continuum of everyday life” (tsianos and papadopoulos 2006). the fact that adem was self-employed does not make any difference. during the past three decades, the dominant political, media and academic discourses have glorified small firms and their owners as major creators of new jobs and growth. self-employment is, however, often less glorious and represents the opposite of standard employment, because it provides weak socio-economic security and self-exploitation (edgel 2005; schierup et al. 2006). this is especially true when immigrants start their own small businesses (slavnic 2004, 2013; alund 2003; abbsian 2003). research shows that these kinds of owners find themselves in a much worse economic situation than immigrants who have regular employment (hjerm 2001, 2004). regarding the taxi sector, slavnic and urban (2008) provide some empirical evidence for the growing income gap between swedish-born and foreign-born taxi drivers. the foreign-born had an annual income that was only 80.3 per cent of the annual income of swedish-born in 1991. this difference increased by 2004, when they earned only 68.6 per cent of the income of swedish-born drivers. at the same time, the average disposable income in the taxi-sector (regardless of region of birth) has been lower than the average for all sectors in sweden (ibid.:85). however, it was still more economically viable for foreign-born people to work in the taxi-sector than not to work at all. this explains, at least partly, their inclination keep working in the taxi-sector, despite increasingly worsening working conditions, and decreasing incomes. at the same time, the only competitive strategy that many of these operators were able to deploy in order to remain in the market was to keep down charges. in malmö all this started with so-called mini-taxis. i asked adem how the phenomenon of the "mini-taxi" in malmö began, and he said: ... it all started in 1994, i think. at that time they used those little renault clio cars. almost all the first-established mini slavnic / taxi drivers 307 taxi operators had them. the price for a ride was about 2830 kronor. when i started in this business, the price was only 35 kronor, then 39, and finally around 45 kronor. what was it that made this profitable? well, it meant that people began to travel more by taxi, it was simply cheaper. the business idea was thus to keep the car constantly running. since the cars were not expensive, either in terms of pricing or service, they were also relatively durable. later this basic business idea got watered down. suddenly larger cars showed up―first opel astra and then different kinds of mini-buses. finally, the advantages of low costs were lost altogether. at the same time, prices remained low as more and more taxi operators began to operate in the same market. the majority of these new players competed, however, for private customers, because they had no chance to compete for business or government customers. adem explains it like this: ... in this sector you are supposed to profile yourself according to the customer you want to attract. in malmö/lund, you have not more than two major taxi companies covering perhaps 90 per cent of all business customers. taxi skåne has over 300 cars. taxi kurir is another such firm. they are established all over the country, and over here they have as many cars as needed. if there is a need for as many as 100 cars, they will make sure to have that many on the spot. so there is no chance to compete with them... since they as a rule get all the big contracts… all mini-taxi companies are therefore compelled to find their way to retail customers, those who do not travel by taxi on a regular basis. there is a difference between private customers and business customers. the latter do not care―if for example the cost of the trip is 100 or 200 kronor, never mind. comfort and punctuality are more important. if a private customer, on the other hand, needs to take a taxi from the pub to home, and pays out of his own pocket, then it pretty much matters if the price is 50 or 100 kronor, you know? according to data from the swedish taxi association (taxiförbundet 1998), at the end of the 1990s 55 per cent of the total number of trips were so-called “publically funded,” 21 per cent were business trips, and only about 24 per cent were private trips. the structure of the market has not changed significantly since that time (see taxiförbundet 2014). at the same time, the total number of taxi companies in sweden is approximately 8,000, operating 14,000 vehicles. of these, some 6,000 were companies with only one vehicle and about 1,200 with just two vehicles. so more than 8,000 vehicles, that is 60 per cent of all taxi vehicles in sweden, belong to these small firms. journal of business anthropology, 4(2), fall 2015 308 here we need to consider who the main actors in sweden’s taxi industry are. first, there are the drivers (förare)―people employed in one of these 8,000 taxi companies. even firms with only one car employ at least one extra driver, in order to improve a car’s efficiency. second are the private taxi companies, just described. the majority of these have only one or two cars, while the number of larger companies is actually very small. in 2008, there were 69 companies with 10-20 cars and only 41 companies with more than 20 cars (taxiförbundet 2008). in fact, the largest taxi company in sweden in 2008 owned not more than 150 cars (ibid.). third, there are the dispatch centres. these normally do not have cars, but provide services to taxi companies that are registered under their logo. at the time of my research there were about 300 such dispatch centres, which included some 80 per cent of all taxi companies in the country (skatteverket, 2009). dispatch centres are usually registered as limited companies, and rarely as economic associations, where the owners of taxi companies are also the owners of the centre (although some of sweden's largest dispatch centres―for example, taxi stockholm and taxi göteborg―are registered in this way). all companies registered in one dispatch centre have identical logos and telephone numbers on their cars, which then gives the impression that these dispatch centres (like taxi kurir) are large taxi companies owning all these smaller companies that operate under their logo. but in fact they are not, even if their power and influence of those are quite great, bearing in mind the fact that they may often include (and control) several thousand vehicles. companies that do not operate under the umbrella of a centre are the so-called free-wheelers (friåkare). the exact number of these is not known, but according to data cited in the introduction to this article (bengtsson et al. 2000), in the late 1990s in malmö about 40 per cent of all taxis were run by freewheelers. since nobody had a monopoly in the local market, all companies had to compete for all market niches (ibid.). the preceding quote suggests, however, that freewheelers and smaller taxi centres were increasingly excluded from the business market. at the same time, it seems that competition in this market became additionally hard when large established taxi companies from other regions, such as taxi kurir, started establishing themselves in the malmö region. this intensified competition led to further precarization of the taxi sector and increased the risk of raising the number of actors within this sector who were ready to employ informal economic methods in conducting their work. the next section will address these processes and strategies. informal economic strategies the basic circumstances that forced adem to run his business in the way he did consisted of blocked access to three-quarters of the market, on the one hand, and sharp competition for private customers, on the other. coincidentally, his dispatch centre ran into trouble and the owners were slavnic / taxi drivers 309 forced to sell the business. before i present and discuss the strategy deployed by the new owners in order to pull the company out of the crisis, it is necessary to explain the notion of “an informal economy.” an informal economy is traditionally understood as one operated primarily by marginal and disadvantaged social groups: in the first place, by unemployed poor and immigrants. this is not “the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth” although it is certainly true that precarization is related to informalization. according to tsianos and papadopoulos (2006) the embodied experience of precarity is not only characterized by vulnerability (flexibility without protection), hyperactivity (constant availability), simultaneity (simultaneous dealing with multiple activities), and unsettledness (mobility through different space and time lines). it is also characterized by the need to become calculating, deceitful, and to cheat. it is perhaps also true that members of disadvantaged social groups are over-represented in the informal economy, but they are certainly not those who make the biggest profit out of it. for example, williams (2014) has shown that unemployed people in the uk earn only about one per cent of the total national earnings from informal work, while at the same time 97 per cent of total informal earnings is being taken by those with formal jobs. participation in the informal economy in fact increases the marginalization of already marginalized social groups (ibid.:14). in conceptualizing the economic system as either formal or informal―where the informal economy is a sort of an anomaly, preventing the formal economy from functioning normally― the unity of the economic system is overlooked (leonard 1998; williams 2014), and in turn this tends to over-emphasize the formal nature of our societies (harding and jenkins 1989). today there is a growing awareness, at least within the academic community, that the informal economy is not generated by marginal social groups nor by increased immigration. indeed, it is not an anomaly, but an integral part of the formal economy (sassen 1998; likic-brboric et al. 2013; standing 2011). informalization is related to the capitalist mode of production. it is in general the result of a structural conflict between old (welfare) modes of regulation and new (neoliberal) regimes of accumulation. essentially, the old regulatory frameworks have become too tight for new forms of capital accumulation to be able to expand without disruption. consequently, all economic actors are more likely to try to achieve their economic aims outside existing regulatory frameworks, in other words, by using informal economic strategies (slavnic 2010). the informal economic strategies deployed by powerful social actors, such as big businesses and state institutions, have been identified as “informalization from above.” at the same time there are informal journal of business anthropology, 4(2), fall 2015 310 strategies developed partly as survival strategies, and partly as resistance to informalization from above, by small and less powerful actors (small business owners and marginalized immigrant entrepreneurs), which have been called “informalization from below”(ibid.). if we return to the swedish taxi-sector, the dominant political and media discourses define the informal economy as the property of those marginal social groups, who are viewed as a major part of that economy (slavnic 2011). at the same time, the media make a clear distinction between so-called seriös3 taxi companies (and dispatch centres) and companies that are prone to illegal activities. this tendency to criminalize small taxi companies and freewheelers is extensively used by large companies as part of their business strategy, in order to run the small operators out of the market. they usually present themselves (and most media and political actors accept this new discourse as the truth) as a priori decent economic actors who have in fact been most severely harmed by irregularities within the taxi sector. their actual motives, however, are not a desire for justice and order, but rather their strong interest in out-competing their competitors and thereby capturing monopolistic positions in the market (ibid.). this kind of strategy is nothing other than “informalization from above.”4 smaller companies (and dispatch centres) in turn seek to get rid of being labeled as oseriös,5 partly by (over)investing in external features that they perceived characterize a seriös company. they understand that this is characterized by significantly higher prices and better service, which is often reflected in the fact that drivers have uniforms. but, as adem’s story shows, it is not always enough just to have the intention to become a seriös taxi firm. he describes how the new owners, making an effort to pull the dispatch centre out of its crisis, actually pushed it even further into the mire. they tried to bring order into the company. …the first change they introduced was to raise prices. then they raised the price for being connected to their dispatch centre. they also introduced a rule on uniforms, inspired by taxi skåne. to me the uniform issue was less important, but they thought it was the most important change and it was almost only this issue that used to be discussed during our regular monthly meetings. has the driver worn a tie, was the tie neat and tidy, and so on. at the same time, the real problems were growing. one was that we certainly lost up to 60 per cent of all the customers we had ever had. 3 swedish idiom, meaning serious, describing decent, law-obiding companies; 4 for more detailed discussion of the concept “informalization from above” see slavnic, 2010 and slavnic, forthcomoing 2016; 5 swedish idiom, meaning un-serious, describing, fraudulent, deceitful companies; slavnic / taxi drivers 311 why? simply because this clientele was made up of retirees and students, meaning people with tight finances. prior to the changes, our low prices at about 39 kronor per ride, with the longer journeys being slightly more expensive, were acceptable. the price would only be slightly more expensive than travelling by bus, and so of course they would call a taxi. even pensioners thought the prices were affordable. with higher prices, however, one could see clearly how this customer base started disappearing. this and similar situations led to a number of cases of illegitimate competition, even among colleagues from the same dispatch centre. adem describes a few such cases: what was the result of this? well, when enough work is no longer available for all, some drivers manage to retain part of their daily income, while others earn less and less money. who are those who keep their incomes? well, they are those who cheat, who steal others' customers, they are such people. zs: what do you mean by stealing customers? adem: yes, they simply steal customers. in this business, there are many thieves. we all had a rule about how strong the radio transmitters in the cars could be, but some drivers tuned theirs to a very strong broadcasting signal, so strong that only their signal was visible on the taxi centre's computer screen. or another such typical case was when the taxi centre sent me to take a run from gunnesbo, while another driver was there in the vicinity. for me it would perhaps take about 6-7 minutes to get to the site, while for him it would only take half a minute. under our current rules the cars that are in motion do not have the right to take these trips, only the cars waiting at the centre. but it often happened that they did pick up customers anyway, as in my case. and then a few minutes later i showed up over there like a fool. zs: but you never know who's picked up your client? adem: you can find out if you have time to do it, but it is not always easy―especially if the customer was already waiting for a taxi when he shows up. he picks up the customer directly and disappears. this was an obvious example of unfair and cruel competition, based on informal strategies which are part of the struggle for survival among most marginalized groups and individuals in the labour market and are part of informalization from below. they were used as a last resort in the struggle for survival, in a situation where all other opportunities to journal of business anthropology, 4(2), fall 2015 312 survive in the "formal" economy were closed. a similar conclusion from their study of the informal strategies of taxi drivers in a small english town, moonhaven, is drawn by jordan and travers (1998). they write that these are rational economic actions performed in response to structural constraints that arise as a consequence of changes that occur within the so-called formal economy. at the same time, since this strategy is actually the only way to survive, it cannot be seen as immoral by those who carry it out. moralizing in this context could be perceived as hypocrisy, and not as legitimate criticism (ibid.: 298). in any case, when it comes to adem, he eventually decided to close down his company. when i asked him about the real causes behind this decision, he answered: the key reasons were several. the first was the poor profitability in the third year, which was the result of the bad business policy and working conditions in the taxi association. and the second reason was that i really got tired. i got tired of both exhausting work and working conditions, but also of the taxi profession as such. it's incredibly tough to drive taxis for a long time, especially mini-taxis… in my case it worked out that during one run i’d get a second booking, and then during the second run, i’d book a third, and that was the way it was going all day. you had to constantly keep in mind all these things, and i was constantly under stress. taxi business really kills one, wears out one... this quotation in a way sums up the message that adam wanted to give me, but also summarizes academic points that this article wishes to communicate. the gospel of flexibilization, as standing (2011:24) puts it, tells people that they have to obey market forces and always be available and endlessly adaptable. adem tells us nevertheless that nobody can do it indefinitely. in other words, there is a fundamental contradiction between neoliberal (unlimited) demand for flexibility and human beings limited capability to fulfill this demand. unless they employ informal economic strategies that in this case become a rational response to structural downward pressure towards greater flexibility, which these individuals are not able to resist. the other alternative, which adem chose, was to give up. my last question to adem was what he thought about the current situation in the taxi industry in general and in particular about the situation in malmö/lund: listen, what happens in this industry is not a coincidence... there are many people, especially down here in southern sweden, who cannot find a job… almost all are highly educated … but they could not obtain employment commensurate with their level of competence and were slavnic / taxi drivers 313 therefore forced to take up employment in the taxi industry. for society, it was some sort of safety valve. it was better that these people took employment as taxi drivers than to stroll through the employment agencies, or in the streets or even end up in newspapers articles about crime or abuse. the state is looking through its fingers; all sorts of problematic business strategies within the sector are tolerated to keep these people in some sort of employment. this brings us to the role of the state in this context. adem is quite confident―even categorical―in his assessment of the situation, asserting that the state tolerates informal economic strategies in the taxi sector, as a sort of “labour market policy measure.” moreover, he is not the only one who thinks so. several of my informants, involved in or related to the taxi industry, have given me similar assessments. during the past fifteen years, for instance, several commissions have been appointed by the government6 or different state agencies/departments7 charged with investigating irregularities in the taxi sector. but, despite these investigations clearly pointing out the problems within the taxi industry as well as proposals for how to deal with them, the government has actually done nothing concrete. an example of this is the proposal for special de-tanking centres (or reporting centres for taxis, as they are called in most recent documents), where the data from all taximeters were to be registered and saved. the proposal was first presented in 1997, but in sou 1999:60 it was officially offered as a strategy for dealing with tax evasion in the taxi sector. this particular story has been going on for the past seventeen years, covering two mandates of social democratic government and additionally two mandates of centre-right coalition government. throughout this period basically all relevant actors―media, various state agencies (among others the competition board and the national tax agency), trade unions and branch associations―repeatedly pressed the state to implement effective legislation in order to do something about these problems. politicians have nevertheless ignored all these claims. eventually, after continuous political demand, underpinned by a 6 sou 1997:111, branschsanneringsutredningen; sou 1999:60, taxiutredning ”kundvänligare taxi”; sou 2004:102 ekonomisk brottslighet inom taxibranschen; sou 2010:76 transportstyrelsens databaser på vägtrafikområdet―integritet och effektivitet. 7 redovisningscentraler för taxi―ds 2013:66, departementsserien (ds) 5 november 2013; näringsdepartementet; skatteverket (2008); skattefelskarta för sverige, (2008:1); skatteverket (2014) skattefelets utveckling i sverige 2007– 2012. note that these two reports, made by the swedish tax agency, deal with tax evasion in all economic sectors, including the taxi sector. journal of business anthropology, 4(2), fall 2015 314 number of reports issued by various organisations, agencies and institutions, on 25 july,, 2012 the government appointed yet another commission to investigate the possibility of establishing reporting centres for taxis. the findings were presented in february 2013 and led to a new law on reporting centres. the parliamentary decision was made on 10 july, 2014, and the law should come into force on 1 january, 2016. this looks like the end of this story. from 2016, the state is expected to collect at least one billion kronor more each year in income tax, and taxi customers may expect to have better and safer services. but there are rumours within the taxi sector about the newest technical solutions making it possible both to order the nearest taxi cab and to pay for the service via a smart phone app (taxiförbundet 2014b). certain groups within the sector are said to believe that this new technology makes taxi meters useless and unnecessary. this seems to confirm the view that the state is purposefully ignoring the problems within the taxi sector. the law on reporting centres has been approved only now, when it is practically impossible for it to be implemented. but this article has actually presented the opposite example (taxi project 2006-2008), showing how tax authorities deployed decisive measures in order to clean up the taxi sector. therefore, the only safe conclusion may be that state policy in this context has been quite ambivalent, inconsistent, and sometimes contradictory. in fact, there is nothing peculiar in this, because the story of the swedish taxi sector’s deregulation is, in this way, also a story about the neoliberal reconstruction of the swedish welfare state. such large structural changes are always accompanied by internal conflicts between old and new ideologies, old and new moralities, old and new policies. in the course of time new (neoliberal) ideology, morality and policies have become dominant, creating a new social order (dumenil and levi 2002) in which adem’s life story is embedded. concluding discussion this article has dealt with the socio-economic consequences of the rapid deregulation of the swedish taxi-sector during the 1990s through the experience of a single immigrant taxi driver, as these effects were manifested in the geographical region of malmö-lund. as we have seen, the fate of adem is strongly determined by structural changes in the economy and new (neoliberal) economic trends. although highly educated and with long working experience behind him, all doors to an appropriate career in sweden remain closed to adem. at the same time, thanks to deregulation and the removal of most entry barriers, it was relatively easy for him to establish a taxi business. this sector, however, became increasingly run by “pure” market forces, characterized by harsh competition, extreme deterioration of working slavnic / taxi drivers 315 conditions, and growing uncertainty. consequently, the sector became less attractive for all those who were able to find a job in any more lucrative industry, while at the same time it has also become the last refuge for the most vulnerable individuals and groups in society, who do not have that chance. on a broader level, the present processes of growing ethnic segmentation and precarization are intimately related to the rise of neoliberal capitalism, for which migration serves as an important vehicle by making the labour markets more flexible and reducing the cost of labour (munck et al. 2011, 254–255; see also schierup & alund 2014). mass migration still appears to be a necessary condition for capital accumulation (hardt & negri 2000; bauder 2006). or, to put it more accurately, it is not immigration and immigrants as such that contribute to capital accumulation, but their precarious position in the labour market, which makes them attractive to a capitalist economy. “[t]hey are valuable just because they are vulnerable” (bauder 2006:22). by being systematically pushed into the secondary sectors of the labour market, migrants help stabilize it for non-migrants (ibid.:23). at the same time, and in the long run, they also help the neoliberal reconstruction of the labour market, which means worse working conditions and poorer work protection for all (standing 2011). this article also questions a common taken-for-granted “truth” about the informal economy: its causes and carriers. normally informalization is regarded as a salient feature for marginalized and disadvantaged social groups. in sharp contrast to these views, this article offers an alternative explanation: informalization in western economies is a general consequence of the deep economic, political and social changes that characterize such societies, generally described as “postfordist transformation.” informalization is a result of a structural conflict between new, neoliberal economic trends and old (welfare) regulatory frameworks. however, the resulting processes of welfare state retrenchment, economic deregulation, labour 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(eds.) workers and the global informal economy: interdisciplinary perspectives. london and new york: routledge. slavnic, z. and urban, s. 2008 “socio-economic trends in the swedish taxi sector: deregulation, recommodification, ethnification.” international journal on multicultural societies (ijms) 10 (1): 76-94. sou 1997:111, branschsaneringsutredningen, stockholm. sou 1999:60, kundvänligare taxi, stockholm sou 2004:102, ekonomisk brottslighet inom taxibranschen, stockholm. sou 2010:76, transportstyrelsens databaser på vägtrafikområdet integritet och effektivitet, stockholm. standing, g. 2005 “why basic income is needed for a right to work.” rutgers journal of law & urban policy 2 (1): 91-103. standing, g. 2008 “labour recommodification in the global transformation: how to achieve economic security.” social indicators research 81 (1): 15-30. standing, g. 2011 the precariat: the new dangerous class. london: bloomsbury academic. slavnic / taxi drivers 319 svenska taxiförbundet 1998 detta är svensk taxinäring och svenska taxiförbundet, pressinformation, 1998-05-27, stockholm. svenska taxiförbundet 2011 branschleget 2011. stockholm: svenska taxiförbundet. svenska taxiförbundet 2014 branschläget 2014, stockholm: svenska taxiförbundet tsianos, v. and papadopoulos d. 2006 “precarity: a savage journey to the heart of embodied capitalism.” transversal―eipcp multilingual web journal 11 http://eipcp.net/transversal/1106/tsianospapadopoulos/en, (access date 10.10.2015). williams, c. c. 2014 "the informal economy and poverty: evidence and policy review." http://works.bepress.com/colin_williams/34 from the selected works of colin c williams. wright, t. and mckay s. 2007 undocumented worker transitions: united kingdom country report. eu sixth framework programme: contract number: 044272. woolfson, c., et al. 2012 “forced labour and migrant berry pickers in sweden.” international journal of comparative labour law and industrial relations 28 (2): 147-176. ålund, a. and schierup, c.-u. 1991 paradoxes of multiculturalism. aldershot: avebury. ålund, a. 2003 “self-employment of non-privileged groups as integration strategy: ethnic entrepreneurs and other migrants in the wake of globalization.” international review of sociology 13 (1): 77-87. zoran slavnic is a sociologist and researcher in the field of work, migration and citizenship at the remeso (institute for research on migration, ethnicity and society), linköping university (sweden). his research concerns informalization, re-commodification of labour, migration, the swedish taxi sector and working conditions, opportunity structures and welfare of immigrant entrepreneurs (see http://www.isv.liu.se/medarbetare-vid-isv/slavnic-zoran?l=en). his broader academic interests also include methodology and sociological theory. he may be reached at zoran.slavnic@liu.se. http://eipcp.net/transversal/1106/tsianospapadopoulos/en http://www.isv.liu.se/medarbetare-vid-isv/slavnic-zoran?l=en mailto:zoran.slavnic@liu.se in memory of connie perin (1930-2012), who was my guide into the world of contemporary anthropology, and the world of begonias. organization theory meets anthropology: a story of an encounter barbara czarniawska abstract this text briefly depicts the history of an encounter between anthropology and organization theory in the anglo-saxon literature in the period 1990-2010 as seen by an organization scholar. in focus are some stable characteristics and some changes in this relationship, against the background of wider developments in societies and in social sciences. the article ends with suggestions concerning future possibilities of combining the insights of the two fields in a fruitful and interesting way. keywords anthropology, organization theory, social science page 1 of 23 jba 1(1): 118-140 spring 2012 © the author(s) 2012 issn 2245-4217 www.cbs.dk/jba czarniawska / organization theory meets anthropology 119 introduction this is a story of two decades of interaction between organization studies and anthropology, told by an organization scholar. like all stories, it is one-sided. much as this interaction has enriched organization theory, it would be incorrect to claim that organization scholars have become fullfledged anthropologists, the recent fashion for "organizational ethnography" notwithstanding. organization researchers have looked into the field of anthropology and borrowed devices that seemed useful; translated concepts for their own use; changed and adapted, not always faithfully. it can be said that we organization scholars have poached within anthropology’s terrain. in our defence stands michel de certeau, who said that “readers are travellers; they move across lands belonging to someone else, like nomads poaching their way across fields they did not write, despoiling the wealth of egypt to enjoy it themselves” (de certeau, 1984: 174). thus the following account, no doubt faulty and partial itself, tries to render the process and the results of an encounter between two academic disciplines from the perspective of one of them. a corresponding account from the other side would be a valuable complement to this picture.1 the story starts with a short excursion back into the 1970s, to create a background for its actual beginning: the 1990s. it was in the early 1990s that organization scholars "discovered" anthropology. it was not for the first time (see, for example, jaques, 1951; rice, 1958; turner, 1971), but it was then that the geopolitical climate made the encounter truly noticeable. under an umbrella of "organizational culture", at least two distinct schools of thought began to form: one that saw a new management tool in organizational culture, and an opportunity for organization studies to turn to humanities and symbolic analysis. both have accomplished their goals, although the gap between them has grown bigger and bigger. the first group based its work on traditional anthropology; the second joined forces with anthropology's internal revolution. twenty years later, organization culture as a tool of management has given way to storytelling, while organizational symbolists have been taken to task by supporters of studies of science and technology (sst) for neglecting objects, bodies and machines. it can be somewhat surprising, therefore, that ethnography as a method of field study has now spread within both groups. marketing and information technology people use ethnographies for practical purposes; researchers write ethnographies of 1 editors’ footnote: a corresponding account by an anthropologist has been commissioned for publication in the next issue of the jba. barbara czarniawska will be given the opportunity to comment on this account and, thereby, to open up a debate. journal of business anthropology, 1(1), spring 2012 120 hospitals, cities, and virtual worlds. will it be yet another research fashion? or will this relationship become stabilized, permitting organization studies to fulfil its old but forever thwarted ambition: to show how organizing happens? the beginnings, as illustrated in the following section, were not promising; the ending is much more so. the times that were: a tale of three dissertations my personal encounter with anthropology dates back to my stay as a visiting acls fellow at mit during the academic year 1981/1982. doctoral students at the time learned regression analysis – and field methods from john van maanen. my mentor, lotte bailyn, advised me to read rosalie wax's doing fieldwork: warning and advice (1971/1986). i finished reading it at three o’clock in the morning, marvelling that a scientific book could keep me as fascinated as a detective story. i became curious about the issue of fieldwork in organization studies, and was shown the original of henry mintzberg's doctoral thesis from 1968: “the manager at work – determining his activities, roles and programs by structured observation". his advisor was edward h. (ned) bowman, professor of operations management. i could recognize in it his study of the work of five chief executives, reported in the nature of managerial work (1973), but the book was quite different from the thesis: broader in scope, but also ... more structured. the original thesis was much closer to ethnography, although the study method was far from traditional anthropological observation. mintzberg's starting point was not anthropology, but his disappointment with earlier diary studies of work: not one of these studies provides substantial insight into the actual content of managerial activities. (...) the reader is told where managers spend their time, with whom they spend their time, how they interact (telephone, face-to-face, etc.) and so on. but the reader is never told what is transacted. (mintzberg, 1970: 88; italics in the original) mintzberg suggested another method: i use the label "structured observation" to refer to a methodology which couples the flexibility of open-ended observation with the discipline of seeking certain types of structured data. the researcher observes the manager as he [mintzberg shadowed five men] performs his work. each observed event (a verbal contact or a piece of incoming or outgoing mail) is categorized by the researcher in a number of ways (e.g., duration, participants, purpose) as in the diary method but with one vital difference. the categories are developed as the czarniawska / organization theory meets anthropology 121 observation takes place. (1970: 90, italics in the original) readers in the 2000s may wonder about this seeming obsession with structure and categories, but at the time mintzberg wrote these words even direct observation was supposed to be strictly structured. the form for recording observed interaction created by us social psychologist robert bales (1950) was being widely used. indeed, in the same journal article, mintzberg apologized to the reader who "may feel that some of the categories are not sufficiently 'neat'" (p. 94). between listing the categories, mintzberg gave examples of his field notes, revealing that he had, in fact, shadowed "mr. m". he had sat in m's office and walked with m to the plant; they had returned to the office and then gone to a meeting with consultants (in some later descriptions of his work, the term "tracked" has been used, but it was later appropriated by mintzberg for other purposes; see mintzberg, 2007). it took at least twenty years for mintzberg's methodological approach to be taken for granted in organization studies; it took thirty years before a work of an anthropologist, harry wolcott, became a methodological hit in social sciences, including organization studies. harry f. wolcott was an anthropologist who had studied the kwakiutl for his doctoral dissertation, before turning his attention to the field of education, and it is this later dissertation that is of interest here. like henry mintzberg, he noticed that diary-type studies suffered from many shortcomings, and would not allow him to answer his central question: "what do school principals actually do"? he did not seem to be aware of mintzberg's study, not only because the two studies were done practically in parallel, but probably also because management was not yet perceived as a general profession in the 1970s; nor was its knowledge base seen as applicable to all domains of life, as it is now. wolcott decided to put his anthropological skills to work, but realized from the beginning that his study, focusing as it did on one school principal, would differ markedly from studies of tribes or kinship (wolcott, 1973/2003). in a letter to jay gubrium, wolcott explained how his approach acquired the name "shadowing": if the idea of "shadow studies" developed as a consequence of the publication of man in the principal's office: an ethnography (hrw 1973), it evolved in a rather indirect and unintentional way. i was well-enough aware that i was already stretching the boundaries of ethnography with a study of an elementary school principal across town. the whole idea of doing ethnography locally, and in school, of all places, seemed new and novel. so novel that the first chapter of the book dealt with how i went about the study. one of the journal of business anthropology, 1(1), spring 2012 122 nicknames i acquired during those two years (1966-1968) was the shadow, based on the radio show of years ago, and as i report in the sixth paragraph of the book (1973: 2), that was a nickname that stuck. it also provided a successful explanation of my role, an observer who might turn up anywhere that the principal himself turned up. what the shadow did was shadowing, and in explaining my research approach, that is a term that i used casually (e.g. p. 3). personally i found something sinister in the idea that i was "shadowing" someone else, acting like a detective, but i think others used the expression more light-heartedly, and it lent itself to a good-natured banter. (wolcott, 2000: reprinted with permission in czarniawska, 2007) although wolcott's shadowing consisted primarily of unstructured observation, the spirit of the times left its trace, in that he undertook structured observation as well, noting the activities and interactions of the principal at 60-second intervals for two hours at a time. thus in the 1970s, henry mintzberg had to hide his anthropologyinspired approach under a "structural" disguise; harry wolcott did not have to hide his approach, but then his study was not perceived as an "organization study". this spirit of the times was fading away when i visited mit in 1981, and it had apparently vanished by 1987, when gideon kunda defended his doctoral thesis there. his advisers were anthropologist john van maanen and edgar schein, a social psychologist who had been strongly influenced by anthropology. kunda studied an intentional attempt to construct an "organizational culture" in a high-tech company (thus the ironic title engineering culture). his approach was anthropological through and through; an israeli citizen, he felt like he was studying an exotic culture. he went to tech (a pseudonym) three to five days a week for six months to observe the activities of a group of staff members at corporate headquarters. he spent another six months observing a group of line workers, while continuing to maintain contact with the staff people. he interviewed and held informal conversations; frequented all types of pubic activities; and joined all the open events, like workshops and sports. in contrast to many later ethnographies, professional work was not his focus; as he was studying the "construction of culture", he observed managerial activities and their results. when the thesis was published as a book in 1992, its ethnographic character was emphasized rather than hidden: this study belongs to the genre known as "ethnographic realism." this identification says much about presentational style, little about the actual research process. the descriptive style of this genre presents an author functioning more or less as a fly on the wall in the course of his sojourn in the field – an objective, unseen czarniawska / organization theory meets anthropology 123 observer following well defined procedures for data collection and verification. it requires no great insights, however, to recognize that ethnographic realism is a distortion of convenience. fieldwork, as all who engaged in it will testify, is an intensely personal and subjective process, and there are probably at last as many "methods" as there are fieldworkers. (kunda, 1992: 229) and so on and so forth, in a similar tone. the book has become a bestseller and has been recently (2006) reissued in the second edition. something pivotal had happened, and as its observer and participant, i tried to capture it on my own work. a move toward an anthropology of complex organizations: the 1990s in 1989, i edited a special issue of international studies of management & organization (ismo, 19/3), which i prefaced with an excerpt from a book manuscript i had been working on at that time, called anthropology of complex organizations. sage published the book in 1992, changing its title to exploring complex organizations: a cultural perspective. my publisher explained to me that because i was (and am) not an anthropologist, i should not use the word "anthropology" in the title; and furthermore, it would be placed on the wrong shelf in bookstores (those were the days when books were sold in bookstores, and not on the web). my reasoning, in the special issue, as in the book, went as follows. large and complex organizations are among the most characteristic signs of our times. yet there are few traditional methods that would allow the study of this phenomenon, so central to contemporary cultures. neither macroeconomics, with this bird's eye perspective, nor the theory of the firm, which reduces organization to a super-person, a "decision-maker", has much to offer. social psychology requires groups; it is not certain that group behaviour covers everything that occurs in complex organizations. if the phenomenon of a large and complex organization is seen as a central tenet of contemporary cultures, however, then anthropology is a discipline to turn to for help. and turn i did. the definition of organization the definition of organization i presented in ismo differed slightly from that in the book. the earlier one went as follows: organization is a system of collective action, undertaken in the effort to influence the world (...) the contents of the action are meanings and things (artefacts). one system of collective action is distinguishable from another by the kind of meanings and products socially attributed to a journal of business anthropology, 1(1), spring 2012 124 given organization. (czarniawska, 1989: 3) in the book, the word "system" was replaced by the word "net": "organizations are nets of collective action..." (1992: 32). when analysing the reasons for which organization theory had earlier parted ways with anthropology.2 i concluded that it was systems theory, among other things, that contributed to the rift. after all, anthropologists had always studied "the organization", but they did not mean entities separated by boundaries from the "environment". even eric trist, trained as an anthropologist, found the traditional methods wanting and opted for the systemic approach. participant observation, yes; action research, yes; but not traditional anthropological analysis (fox, 1990). indeed, for at least 20 years, cybernetics and systems theory held practically all social scientists in thrall (including anthropologists; see bateson, 1979), so that "system" crept into my text almost automatically, and only a keen anthropologist reviewer pointed it out to me. in my opinion, however, and in the opinion of many of my colleagues, the time was ripe for another encounter.3 anthropology evoked i had chosen edmund leach (1982) as my main guide to anthropology, because i liked his definition of the field as "a study of the unity of humankind through a study of its diversity". each study of humankind has as its basis the difference between humans and non-humans, i reasoned. as complex organizations undoubtedly contain both, studying these differences and the ways of cooperation between the two would be useful. thus i was trying to introduce the studies of science and technology through the back door. leach was a social anthropologist, and his study objects were doubly human: as "anthropos" and as "social". it was only when my manuscript was almost ready that i learned from us anthropologist constance perin4 about the revolution within anthropology over things that were said and written by clifford and marcus (1986), marcus and fischer (1986) and rosaldo (1989), for example. but even today i can see what i liked about leach's approach. he suggested that anthropological studies should be historical, but not historicist: firmly situated in time and space, but without any kind of determinism in analysis. leaning more toward ethnology than toward 2 according to dwight waldo (1961: 217-8, fn. 7) when organization theory was still called administration theory, "some of the students of organization are more anthropological than anthropologists". 3 in the 1980s, scholars interested in symbolism formed a network called standing conference on organizational symbolism (http://www.scos.org/) 4 http://constanceperin.net/ http://constanceperin.net/ czarniawska / organization theory meets anthropology 125 anthropology, he suggested studying the way of life of selected people (which i then remade into "way of work"), and, in a goffmanian style, to see it as enactment of a social drama. and then he made the most enchanting admission: social anthropologists are bad novelists rather than bad scientists. but i hold that the insights of the social anthropologist have a special quality because of the arena in which he [sic] characteristically exercises his artistic imagination. that arena is the living space of some quite small community of people who live together in circumstances where most of their day-to-day communications depend upon face-to-face interaction. this does not embrace the whole of human social life, still less does it embrace the whole of human history. but all human beings spend a great deal of their lives in contexts of this kind. (leach, 1982: 53-54) this admission apologetically assumes a narrative approach, and a conviction that life takes place "locally". but leach's take neglects the connectedness between localities (see e.g. sassen, 2001), and his statement was formulated long before more and more people started to spend a good part of their lives in a form of "response presence" (knorr cetina and bruegger, 2000) – in front of their computers. my other anthropological references survived the passage of time better, however. geertz's the interpretation of cultures (1973) became fashionable in the early 1990s, but it is significant that geertz listened to the young revolutionaries and, although keeping a somewhat ironic distance, contributed much to the wave of reflexivity in anthropology (see e.g. geertz, 1988). i have also included mary douglas' book how institutions think (1986) because constance perin took me along when she went to listen to douglas lecturing at uppsala university. the idea that classifications are at least as important in modern societies as they were in "primitive" societies (durkheim and mauss, 1903/1963) circulates impressively, not the least through such works as bowker and star (1999) and bowker (2006). i have also included castaneda (1968/1986), still fashionable at that time, and thomas p. rohlen (1974), whose work is a standard example of an anthropologist studying an exotic (japanese) company. yet another example was latour and woolgar's laboratory life (1979/1986), as latour was still presenting himself as an anthropologist in the late 1970s. tracing anthropology in organization studies journal of business anthropology, 1(1), spring 2012 126 having listed classical examples of organization studies that were close to ethnographies (dalton, 1959; crozier, 1964; kanter, 1977), i turned to other fields and other authors, whether or not they declared themselves "organization scholars". an excursion into ethnomethodology revealed bittner (1965), whose advice on how to study organizations is still valid, and silverman and jones’s (1976) study of organizational careers. a similar excursion into political anthropology threw light on the work of abner cohen (1974, 1981), michael burawoy (1979), and tony spybey (1989). finally, i concentrated on the growing branch of organization studies: organizational culture. there, i started with historical antecedents – elliot jaques' the changing culture of a factory (1951) and barry a. turner's exploring the industrial subculture (1971) –before moving to more recent developments. among them were deal and kennedy's corporate cultures (1982), edgar schein's organizational culture and leadership (1985), and frost et al.'s organizational culture (1985). the latter had another edition in 1991, which by then was entitled reframing organizational culture. already, the subdivisions seem to be clear enough (see e.g. smircich, 1983): "corporate culture" as a managerial tool, a conceptualization favoured by consultants; "organizational culture" as a metaphor for organization, where the organization is seen as a village or a tribe, or a site of organizational symbolism. thus the 1990s saw "organizational culture" in all its variations as a full-fledged member of organization studies. organization studies embraced anthropology, and the encounter had a dynamic character. what happened in time leach, "at the risk of being old-fashioned" (1985), was against anthropologists studying their own cultures: [f]ieldwork in a cultural context of which you already have intimate first-hand experience seems to be much more difficult than fieldwork which is approached from the naive viewpoint of a total stranger. when anthropologists study facets of their own society their vision seems to become distorted by prejudices which derive from private rather than public experience. (leach, 1982: 124) leach saw himself as old-fashioned because, by 1980, britan and cohen (quoted also by heyman) had already claimed that anthropology had to move into modern societies, as more and more societies are modern: today, the context of human social life has changed drastically. as local communities have become incorporated into large systems, lineages, clans, age-sets, chiefs and big men have all declined in importance. czarniawska / organization theory meets anthropology 127 simultaneously, classes, ethnic group, and formal organizations have emerged with increasing significance throughout the world. (britan and cohen, 1980: 9) organizations in foreign contexts became more and more closely connected to local contexts, aid organizations being a good example (david mosse, 2004/2007). furthermore, certain organizations within a local context – hospitals, for example – can be more exotic than organizations in a foreign context previously studied. what is more, projecting an alien perspective – that of organization theory, for example – onto a well-known phenomenon like the university (marilyn strathern, 2000/2007) could produce the desired estrangement. sharon macdonald (1995/2007) announced a rapprochement not only with science studies, but also with marketing and consumer studies, soon to be developed even more. thus there is continuity, but also change. there are things and topics that are new, but with clear connections to the past. the times we live now: the triumph of ethnography by the 2000s, certain developments were clearly visible. "corporate cultures" became the domain of consultants. organizational symbolism was absorbed by two separate trends. one was the narrative turn, which also reached organization theory, itself split into two parts: one inspired primarily by narratology (e.g. czarniawska, 2004b) and one close to folklore studies ("storytelling", see e.g. gabriel, 2000). the other was cultural studies – sociology inspired by anthropology – which focused mostly on popular culture (see e.g. rhodes and westwood, 2009). one thing is sure, however: ethnography is the dominant method in organization studies at present (see e.g. nyland, 2007, and ybema et al., 2009), although the term has acquired a wide variety of meanings. the influence of anthropology on organization studies further weakened the impact of systems theory. in my chapter reprinted by jiménez (czarniawska 2004a/2007), i was already convinced that "organizations" are epiphenomena: they are one of the products of an action net that may spread wider and further than any organization. on the other hand, this encounter also caused certain criticisms of traditional anthropological methods: "the cardinal rule of ethnography – the necessity for a prolonged period of participant observation – encounters four problems in research on organizing: of participation, of time, of space, and of invisibility" (czarniawska, 2004a/2007: 536-7). to counteract these problems, i suggested a "mobile, symmetrical ethnology". instead of describing it in hypothetical terms, however, i illustrate it in the next section with concrete examples. journal of business anthropology, 1(1), spring 2012 128 the stories for our times i have chosen three examples of organization studies by a philosopher, an anthropologist, and a sociologist. this choice is meant to illustrate the growing transdisciplinarity of organization studies. such studies are no longer "cross-disciplinary" in the sense prevalent in the 1970s, when representatives of different disciplines would agree to study the same object, primarily to discover that "the object" was not the same after all (czarniawska, 2003). it is researchers who have become transdisciplinary, not research projects. further, i have chosen just these three because they practice a symmetrical approach (humans and non-humans, western and nonwestern cultures treated alike), and because of the novelty of their writing style (mol, rottenburg) or the novelty of the field under study (mackenzie). for these reasons, these three works, especially when contrasted with dissertations described earlier in this text, are good illustrations of the present promises for anthropology-inspired organization studies. in the body multiple: ontology in medical practice (2002), dutch philosopher annemarie mol describes the diagnosis and treatment of atherosclerosis, drawing on her fieldwork in a dutch university hospital. at first glance, mol does what many other researchers currently try to do: she depicts a local practice in the health sector, and draws some abstract conclusions from her study. but her book is far from ordinary. she separates her text into two parts on each page. the upper part relates to her ethnography of the diagnosis and treatment of atherosclerosis in the hospital under study. the innovative aspect of her study method is that she followed, or "shadowed" the patient's body, thus being able to show how, moving from one hospital department to another, the body, the patient, and the disease transform into different ontological entities. the lower part of the page contains a developing theoretical reasoning on various stances in medicine, philosophy, and social sciences. like the upper part, it is divided into chapters, and each theoretical part is relevant for the ethnography part it underpins. the reader can choose to read the theory first and the ethnography afterwards, or the other way around. one could also say that the ethnography part contains the plot of the story being told, whereas the theory part contains a metaplot; it is, in fact, a theory about changes and developments in theories. mol's would be a hard act to follow, but it is an example of a most ingenious way of combining theoretical reflection with an attention-getting rendition of the field material. two other of annemarie mol's innovations are noteworthy. apart from observation, she also uses "ethnographic interviews", but not in the sense given to the term by us anthropologist james spradley (1979), who czarniawska / organization theory meets anthropology 129 coined the expression. for him, the purpose of such interviews was "to describe a culture". in contrast, mol suggests that the term “ethnographic interviews” should mean that the interviewees themselves become ethnographers (2002: 15). furthermore, she replaces the well-known concept of "tacit knowledge" with "embedded knowledge" in her analysis – to denote knowledge accumulated in various parts of an action net created by the actions of the producers, their suppliers, and their clients, which is activated by each of them for the purpose at hand without the need for anybody to master the whole of it. richard rottenburg's far-fetched facts. a parable of development aid (2009) is a book by an anthropologist, which shows, dispassionately and convincingly, why development projects are doomed to fail in their present form. based upon first-hand knowledge of such projects, rottenburg claims that the main problem resides in the differing communication styles of the various actors involved in the project: the western financiers, the consultants hired to run the project, the local authorities, and the local practitioners. they communicate in different codes, resulting in a veritable tower of babel, in which all the participants believe that they are speaking the same language, yet no understanding occurs. when two parties share the code, they are even more prone to neglect the fact that the others do not share it. technical aids – lists, calculations, tables, computer programs – merely contribute to the confusion rather than rectifying it. rottenburg tells the story through several voices, each of which presents its own version of a development project in ruritania (all names are fictive). the narrators are all acute observers, able to point out the shortcomings of their partners; among them, they represent objectivism, relativism, and constructivism. but these three perspectives cannot merge, and the project is on the verge of collapse. following the project over time, rottenburg arrives at a description of a common pattern that applies not only to development projects, but to projects in general. in the beginning, one leaves as much as possible open; in the end, one concludes as much as necessary for accounting purposes. about midway through the project, plans and contracts must be adapted to developments, so it is possible to conclude what needs to be concluded. projects routinely suffer from a midlife crisis at this point, because the uncertainty that is desired at the start prevents a simple comparison of the actual state achieved with the contractually agreed-upon target state. it then becomes inevitable that all parameters must be redefined: the given situation, the targeted solution, the contract conditions, and the procedure for assessing the achieved state. this redefinition must be denied, however, or it would give the impression that the project is unpredictable and, consequently, financially incalculable. that would result in the loss of an indispensable prerequisite for conducting future projects. this aporia can be resolved journal of business anthropology, 1(1), spring 2012 130 by appealing rhetorically to contractual stipulations and facts on the official level, and secretly redefining the entire situation as an unofficial one (rottenburg, 2009: 167). in the project in question, one of the parties – the strongest – refused to admit the necessary redefinition of the situation, and the weakest party was therefore forced to file for bankruptcy. the error committed by the losing party was to believe too strongly in ‘‘facts and figures’’ as accurate representations of a reality that would finally prevail. yet written documents were among the villains of the story, because they cannot change when the context and its definition have changed. yet the book is not pessimistic in its conclusions, which can be applied to all projects undertaken in the contemporary multicultural world. rottenburg suggests a pragmatist solution for this type of impasse. by maintaining, consciously and temporarily, an illusion of the enlightenment – of a language that signifies the actual world and is accessible to all who want to speak it – it is possible to reach an understanding that can be translated into local vocabularies. donald mackenzie's material markets: how economic agents are constructed (2009) is only one among several ethnographies of financial institutions, blooming now in the wake of the creation of a new branch of social sciences: social studies of finance (see e.g. knorr cetina and preda, 2005). i have chosen mackenzie’s work rather than, for example, karen ho's liquidated. the ethnography of the wall street (2009) (discussed by batteau and psenka in this issue of the jba), precisely because mackenzie is a sociologist of science and technology who uses anthropology for his purposes rather than submitting to the conventional requirements of the genre. this is how he explains the particulars of this approach: those who have worked in the social studies of science and technology tend to acquire sensitivities, interests, and intellectual resources that differ at least to a degree from those of the wider disciplines to which we belong (...) what is perhaps most characteristic of a perspective rooted in the social studies of science and technology is its concern with the materiality of markets: their physicality, corporeality, technicality. (mackenzie, 2009: 2) thus his approach bridges the gap between the traditional topics of archaeology (material culture) and anthropology (nonmaterial culture), situating both firmly in the modern era. the fieldwork on which the book is based was conducted by the author, but also by other scholars; it uses observation (including participant observation by one of mackenzie's coauthors) as well as 189 interviews. thus a reader, who does not know or understand the workings of finance, can actually grasp what people working in finance do, rather than how they think (which is ho's focus). the results can, hopefully, reach beyond academia, as mackenzie (2009: czarniawska / organization theory meets anthropology 131 185) explains: markets are of course central to modern life, and are here to stay: a comprehensive move away from market forms of economic provision is close to inconceivable. yet most people's direct experience of the markets is limited. (…) financial markets are littered with what the social studies of science and technology tends to call "black boxes" of this kind (…) devices, practices, regulations, organizations, models, and so on, the internal structure of which can be disregarded or which are opaque to outsiders, often because their contents are regarded as "technical" (...) research that opens the black boxes of finance can thus contribute to public as well as academic life. methodological lessons and gains studying black boxes renders especially acute one of the four problems of studying organizing (problems of time, of space, of participation, and of invisibility) – invisibility resulting from virtualization of many practices. it so happens that most social studies of finance use the "halfies" (abulughod, 1991) for the purpose of penetrating beyond the opaque service: observers who were themselves finance traders or at least undertook the appropriate schooling (knorr cetina and bruegger, 2000; beunza and stark, 2003; mackenzie and hardie, 2009; and ho, 2009). what to do, however, if such an option is not available? to answer this question, i quote my own study – not because it is excellent, like the other three quoted in this section, but because it happens to resolve this problem. at the beginning of my study of news agencies (czarniawska, 2012), i was not quite sure how to shadow people who work primarily at and through their computers. in the past, i had frequently shadowed managers who used computers only sporadically (czarniawska, 2007). true, my colleagues are now developing sets of techniques to be used in creating "virtual ethnographies" (hine, 2000) – research done on the internet. apart from computer studies, which have a different purpose, ways of studying people working with computers are not yet well developed. yet some forays into this domain can be found in jemielniak and kociatkiewicz (2009). much to my relief, my hosts at the italian news agency, ansa, easily solved my problems. they simply gave me a place at a computer with two screens, such as they were using themselves, and although i could not intervene in their work, i could see "the desk" and "the wire" and shadow the news through the production process. when a discussion started in the newsroom concerning a specific news item, i could trace it in the database, and therefore always (well, almost always) knew what they were talking about. journal of business anthropology, 1(1), spring 2012 132 not even my shadowing seemed to be a problem. after all, shadowing consists of watching over people’s shoulders as they work and receiving explanations, and, i quickly learned, they were certainly used to that in the newsroom. thus i could physically follow people in managerial positions when they went to meetings or even to the cafeteria (lots of fascinating conversations took place there); could observe face-to-face interactions in the newsroom; was allowed to look over the shoulders of people performing specific tasks (desk editors); and could follow production on the screen. anthropological methods require but a slight adjustment in order to fit modernity. as to "participation", in the case of organization research, participant observation means that the researcher assumes the role of a member of the organization or, alternatively, an employee becomes a researcher. this was the method adopted by melville dalton, who worked as a manager; michael burawoy, who worked as a machine-tool operator; john van maanen, who was a police trainee; and robin leidner (1993) who was a mcdonald’s worker and a combined insurance trainee. these examples indicate that such studies – no doubt superior to all other types – are possible to conduct only with exceptional luck in obtaining access, or because the workplace does not require specific qualifications. i could probably try to act the role of personnel manager, but it would require such an effort that it would effectively prevent me from observing. participation in a dance differs from participation in an emergency meeting of top management. although prasad and prasad (2002) have claimed that top levels of the hierarchy are hidden from the ethnographic gaze, they overlook the fact that these levels may simply be difficult to access in participative mode. it is necessary to emphasize at this juncture that i have been using the term "participant observation" literally, excluding situations in which the researcher is present as an observer rather than as a participant, as in the cases of gideon kunda (1992) and mitchel abolafia (1998). such nonparticipant observation is an obvious possibility for organization scholars, and it is enhanced if the observation time is prolonged. still, this is not to say the longer, the better. the issue of time is especially problematic in organization studies. consider, for example, the advice that science anthropologist sharon traweek has given to her colleagues in her article on fieldwork strategies in science studies: our first field work should last a minimum of one year, preferably two; subsequent field trips can last as little as three months as long as they occur at least every three or four years. the questions and theories change, but we study the same people if they survive as a community, and maybe later on we also study some of their neighbours. (traweek, 1992: 438) czarniawska / organization theory meets anthropology 133 my study of the management of the city of warsaw (czarniawska, 2002) took me about fourteen months. during that time, a new city council was elected, which meant that i lost half of my interlocutors. moreover, the "neighbours" also changed as a result of an administrative reform. the point is that i was not studying a community of city managers but an action net of city management: interconnected acts of organizing (czarniawska, 2004a). traweek had studied the japanese physicists for something like 20 years before she began to feel that she was getting the gist of their lives and activities. suppose i studied warsaw management for twenty more years. it would no doubt be a fascinating study, but i am not sure that there will be much in the management of warsaw in 2015 that was of crucial importance for understanding the management of that city in 1995. there is no "essence" that i could have revealed, given time. specific persons may retire or become exchanged as the result of the next political coup, but the actions that constitute management will remain. on the other hand, the form and content of the actions may change drastically, even if the same people remain as a result of, say, a new information technology or a new fashion in big city management. "japanese physicists" may produce an impression of stability, quite incidentally, by remaining in the same space. but do they, actually? time and space are inextricably intertwined in practice, although they become separated in theory. this separation facilitates particular theoretical biases. german anthropologist johannes fabian (1983) said that traditional anthropology counted the time of the other in a different way than it counted "our time". i will simplify fabian’s complex argument by mentioning two such differences: the first is that the other’s time goes more slowly than does ours; and the second is that it is not considered coeval (the other is perceived as living in another era). now, time in contemporary, complex organizations is condensed, and it is counted at many places concurrently. it is not only coeval, but also multiple. and it runs fast. the journalists i studied could not understand why i needed so much time to write my report. they believed as well that it would become obsolete in a year (czarniawska, 2012). hanns-georg brose (2004) developed this line of thought in a helpful way. he suggested that contemporary western societies are characterized by three connected phenomena. the first is acceleration, the speeding up of social processes, shorter life-cycle of products, higher pace of innovation, accompanied by such acts of resistance as the slow food movement. according to brose, acceleration and the resistance to acceleration must be studied together. the second phenomenon, related to the first and commented upon frequently by zygmunt bauman (e.g. 1995), is the shortened time horizon of expectations and orientations, resulting in a shorter duration of social structures and personal commitments. both are causes and effects of the third phenomenon: an journal of business anthropology, 1(1), spring 2012 134 increasing simultaneity of events, in what schütz and luckmann (1983) called "the world at reach". in this context, brose formulated a question that is very apt as a rationale for this text, especially if the "we" in his utterance is understood as "we social scientists": more and more rapidly varying events seem to appear on our different screens, overlapping and blurring the rhythms of our everyday life (e.g. work and leisure) and life-courses, breaking the gendered coupling of work and education. as the functioning of the ordering principles (first things first) and synchronizing mechanisms (calendars and clocks) cannot be taken for granted any more, are we deemed – like with television – to zap around? (brose, 2004: 7) as our world at reach has widened, there is a problem in trying to record and interpret it. zapping is one solution; a bird's-eye view another; but they hardly solve the difficulty of contemporary fieldwork: how to study the same object in different places at the same time? here another difficulty resulting from an attempt to follow the anthropological tradition is revealed: dealing with space. an observer is usually situated in one room, one corridor, or one branch, although some excursions may occur, especially when a shadowing technique is used. modern organizing, on the other hand, takes place in a net of fragmented, multiple contexts, through multitudes of kaleidoscopic movements. organizing happens in many places at once, and organizers move around quickly and frequently. as lars strannegård aptly noted in the title of his fascinating study of an it company (complemented by the artwork of maria friberg), the people he studied were constantly "already elsewhere" (strannegård and friberg, 2001). additionally, not all interactions require a physical presence. knorr cetina and bruegger (2000) have spoken about embodied presence and response presence, the latter not necessarily visible to an observer, as when people "talk" to somebody via e-mail. as barley and kunda (2001:85) have pointed out, traditional observation is usually inadequate to capture any type of computer work, so they recommend a more sophisticated use of technical aids in observation. brose (2004) concluded that the increasing simultaneity also causes an increase in non-simultaneity of the number of people who, while living at the same time, do not live in the same time. the phenomenon seen by fabian as produced by anthropologists becomes global, as the distinction between the modern and the non-modern collapses. therefore brose postulates, and i cannot help but agree with him, that there is a need to study the emergence of new practices and structures that are supposed to show a way to live and work with different temporalities; a way that no longer relies on a hierarchical or sequential ordering of activities. czarniawska / organization theory meets anthropology 135 the present triumph of ethnography in organization studies can be explained by scientific fashion (strengthened by the non-scientific uses of ethnography, see e.g. greenwood, 2008), but also by a general enthusiasm for opening black boxes. additionally, at least three decades after it was postulated (weick, 1969/1979), the processual approach seems to be finally winning over the structural one, although not in the sense that this term is used in literature theory. now that anthropologists have returned from exotic countries and organization theorists have acquired greater experience in wielding anthropological tools, perhaps the time is ripe for a fruitful exchange. together, we can figure out the best ways of studying what people in contemporary societies do when they organize. references abolafia, mitchell y. 1998 ‘markets as cultures: an ethnographic approach.’ in michel callon (ed.) the laws of the markets. oxford: blackwell, 69-85. abu-lughod, lila 1991 ’writing against culture.’ in w: fox, richard g. 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tyranny of transparency.’ in: jiménez, alberto corsín (ed.) the anthropology of organisations. aldershot: ashgate, 485-497. traweek, sharon 1992 ‘border crossings: narrative strategies in science studies and among physicists in tsukuba science city, japan.’ in: andrew pickering, (ed.) science as practice and culture. university of chicago press, 429-466. turner, barry a. 1971 exploring the industrial subculture. london: macmillan. waldo, dwight 1961 ‘organization theory: an elephantine problem.’ public administration review, 21: 210-225. weick, karl 1969/1979 the social psychology of organizing. reading, ma: addison-wesley. wolcott, harry f. 1973/2003 the man in the principal's office. an ethnography. walnut creek, ca: altamira press. journal of business anthropology, 1(1), spring 2012 140 ybema, sierk; yanow, dvora; wels, harry, and kamsteeg, frans (eds.) 2009 organizational ethnography: studying the complexity of everyday life. london: sage. barbara czarniawska is a professor of management studies at the university of gothenburg, sweden. she studies connections between popular culture and practice of management, and techniques of managing overflow in affluent societies; exploring techniques of fieldwork and the applications of narratology in social sciences. most recent book in english: cyberfactories: how news agencies produce news (2011). barbara may be reached at barbara.czarniawska@gri.gu.se producing “global” corporate subjects in post-mao china: management consultancy, culture and corporate social responsibility kimberly chong abstract china’s rampant economic modernization―much discussed, vaunted, and criticised―has led to an influx of foreign corporations. along with substantial investment they usher in new problems of modernity. most pressing, at least from the perspective of western managers, is how to “reengineer” the chinese knowledge worker to think and behave in accordance with global business norms. drawing on 16 months fieldwork inside the china arm of global management consultancy, this article examines the ways in which the internal practice of corporate social responsibility (csr) is used to ”civilize” chinese employees in a global ethics. through ethnographic analysis of various ”corporate citizenship” initiatives, i track the ways in which these performances of morality feed into an ”imaginary of a moral self.” i also point out the discursive limits to these processes and argue that csr, which has been criticized as a modern re-incarnation of western paternalism and corporate imperialism, is a discursive formation which is incompatible with the post-mao context where economic development and morality is mainly controlled by the state. furthermore, i show that corporate ethicizing, although often characterised as an extra-financial disposition, is page 1 of 22 jba 4(2): 320-341 fall 2015 © the author(s) 2015 issn 2245-4217 www.cbs.dk/jba chong / producing “global” corporate subjects 321 subsumed into the work of making “engaged employees”―defined as those who are productive of shareholder return. keywords corporate social responsibility, morality and ethics, culture, china, shareholder return. in the mid-eighteenth century, several thousand chinese laborers travelled to california with the hope of finding gold. in recent years we have seen another “gold rush.” this time it is the western business elite who have travelled across the world to make their fortune. encouraged by a host of government incentives, they have flocked to the metropolises of shanghai, beijing and guangzhou to mine the lucrative “china market.” spearheading the nascent operations of large multinationals, western executives often struggle to cope with the pace of expansion. in particular, they complain that they cannot find the right kind of employees. as aihwa ong has pointed out, this is not conceived as a problem of technical expertise. rather there exists a widespread perception amongst western managers that chinese workers, whilst well educated for their jobs, do not display the requisite social knowledge and dispositions befitting employees of global entities (ong 2006).1 under mao zedong china ran an autarkic regime in which workers enjoyed lifelong employment in state run “work units” (danwei), shielded from the pressures of market competition in a socialist command economy. during this time, almost all aspects of public and private life were subject to state control. the chinese communist party even sought to influence people’s thoughts (lynch 1999).2 in the four decades since mao’s death, china has embraced market capitalism and become firmly integrated into the global economy. it has captured the lion’s share of manufacturing work, to become the second largest economy in the world. this dramatic contrast between china’s present and recent past is often invoked in narratives which problematize the chinese corporate subject. for example, dimitri kessler and andrew ross find that western managers in china’s software industry attribute the “deficiencies” of chinese workers to their socialization in a context which 1 according to ong, western managers in shanghai consider “the reengineering of chinese knowledge workers and the production of new business ethics the most challenging part of their work” (ong 2006: 167). 2 state intervention in private and public life endures in the post-mao period of market socialism. in some senses, though, it has diminished. for example, people now have far greater choice and control in decisions regarding work and where they live. but in other ways intervention has become more invasive. one obvious example is the imposition of the draconian family planning rules, otherwise known as the “one-child policy.” journal of business anthropology, 4(2), fall 2015 322 is portrayed as the antithesis of global capitalism. ridding them of their “socialist” ways or “irrational” chinese culture is posed as a managerial conundrum (ross 2006, kessler 2006), a hurdle to economic development which must be overcome if china is to move higher up “the value chain.” in this paper i follow ong’s injunction to pay attention to the managerial technologies which define corporate subjectivities, and i consider the new forms of sociality which are accompanying china’s economic modernization. whilst ong’s research focuses on how the conduct of chinese employees is problematized by western managers and discourses in mainstream business literature, i am interested in the actual practices which are deployed to transform the problematized chinese worker into an idealized corporate subject “who will think and behave in accordance with global business norms” (ong 2006: 171). i draw on sixteen months fieldwork inside the china arm of a western global management consultancy which i will call systeo.3 my analysis focuses on corporate social responsibility, or csr, as a managerial tool of acculturation; specifically, i examine the ways in which the internal practice of csr is used to “civilise” chinese employees in the ways of global capitalism. notions such as “the triple bottom line” (people, planet and profit) and “fair competitiveness” suggest that csr operates by expanding economic value to subsume value social and ethical values (see rajak 2011: 10; 2008). as geert de neve and his co-authors put it, csr can be read “as an attempt by corporations to underscore [the claim] that a ‘humane capitalism’ is possible” (de neve et al. 2008: 17). elsewhere anthropologists, including elana shever, marina welker and peter benson, have focused on how csr is deployed as a means of manipulating the external perceptions of corporate practice: that is, on how it feeds into corporate reputation, particularly in contexts like the extractive industries where the destructive aspects of capitalism are especially visible. by contrast, the argument i present here concerns how csr is deployed internally to create social meaning for employees. although i am looking at the implementation of csr in china, it is important to stress that the story i present here is not, however, one of overcoming “cultural difference.” rather, i suggest that the moulding of corporate subjectivity provides a useful forum to examine the connections between ostensibly de-politicized forms of morality and the economic interests of global business. i am interested in how morality is woven into the production of new forms of corporate personhood (kirsch 2014), taking my lead from dinah rajak’s insights about how corporations, through forms of story-telling, create an “imaginary of a moral self” which intensifies, rather than ameliorates, the most 3 systeo is a pseudonym. all informants’ names have been anonymized, and potentially revealing details such as gender and ethnicity have been augmented where such details do not impair the argumentation. chong / producing “global” corporate subjects 323 destructive elements of global capitalism. writing about the mining company anglo-american, rajak argues that “narratives of philanthropy play a key role neither as the antithesis to the logic of capitalism, nor as the company’s conscience, but as the warm-blooded twin to the violence of corporate imperialism” (2014: 266). however, i extend rajak’s argument by showing that embodied performances of morality also feed into an imaginary of a good corporate citizen. for management consultants the making of moral legitimacy is particularly important; they rely on processes of conspicuous ethicizing to underwrite their otherwise hollow professional standing (kipping 2011). invested with extraordinary power to restructure organizations, management consultants are known for failing to deliver. behind the headlines which highlight the millions (of public money) spent on failed it management projects is a lingering doubt over consultants’ expertise.4 what do consultants actually do and why do we entrust them to refashion our economy? the scope of their impact cannot be underestimated; almost all large public and private sector organizations will hire a management consultancy at some point. changes to workplaces―such as the growth in outsourcing, the implementation of comprehensive it systems, and the ubiquitous redefining of the organization as being primarily motivated by performance objectives―can all be traced to management consultants. they do more than advise: consultants produce forms of knowledge―business concepts, ideas and models. these are epistemological tools which create the legitimacy for them to carry out organizational interventions, and which may or may not have their intended effects. indeed, it is in the event of failure that performing morality―being a good corporate citizen―becomes paramount. in this article, i explore the projects of corporate citizenship through which employees are encouraged to embody a moral ethos: in particular, the annual charity bike ride―the most visible of systeo china’s corporate citizenship initiatives. experiences of suffering, hardship and dislocation are part of an enactment of morality where employees are asked to relate to a “safe” other to which they can direct their goodwill. in this way, the production of meaning and affect is carefully managed. however, as we will see, chinese employees’ interrogate the morality they are being invited to perform, suggesting that there are limits to which csr can be depoliticized as a device of “shared global values” (rajak 2011). i argue that csr, which rajak has criticized as a modern reincarnation of western paternalism and corporate imperialism (ibid.), is a discursive formation which is incompatible with the post-mao context where economic development and morality are mainly controlled by the state (kipnis 2007). second, i demonstrate that corporate ethicizing, 4 for example, “nhs has no idea what £300m of management consultancy buys,” the guardian, 4 june 2009. journal of business anthropology, 4(2), fall 2015 324 although often characterized as an extra-financial disposition,5 is subsumed into the work of making “engaged employees”―defined as those who are productive of shareholder return. hence, my analysis substantiates rajak’s observation that csr is not conceived as a “moral bolt-on” to capitalism as usual, but rather the integration of ethical principles and praxis into corporations’ core business (rajak 2008). fieldwork inside reflexive management production one of the first questions people ask when i tell them i carried out fieldwork inside a global management consultancy is: “how did you get access?” many assume that consultants would be paranoid about having an anthropologist embedded amongst their ranks, not least because what i am interested in―the forms of knowledge and processes of valuation which underpin contemporary managerial techniques―is also what consultants sell. management consultancies are the central institution in what nigel thrift terms the “cultural circuit of capital... [which is] responsible for the production and distribution of managerial knowledge” (thrift 2005: 61). consultants trade in reflexive business management: they sell knowledge of the “practicalities of business,” which is, in turn, fed back into business practices. more than once i was accused, only halfjokingly, of being a corporate spy. but the fact that i was interested in the production of managerial knowledge could also be a selling point. according to greg downey and melissa fischer, business anthropologists have become the exemplary reflexive managerial subject (downey and fischer 2006), a depiction which lends itself to corporate collaboration―especially in industries built on a foundation of reflexive knowledge such as advertising (moeran 2006, mazzarella 2003) and information technology (cefkin 2010, nafus and anderson 2006). an anthropologist “for free” could be an attractive proposition if articulated in the right context. my access was brokered with senior executives convinced of the efficacy of systeo’s corporate culture to produce exemplary corporate subjects. “systeo culture” was frequently invoked as a social totality that would swallow anything in its path. even the in situ anthropologist would not be able to escape its effects, a view espoused by one expatriate manager who told me: “by the time you leave here you will be systeofied!” perplexed by chinese employees who did not display the desired subjectivity, expatriate management was open to the potential of anthropology to shed light on the situation. many assumed that the problem lay with”chinese culture:” the intractability of chinese 5 in simple terms csr consists of practices and discourses in which business is portrayed as being concerned with more than just profit. they are good “corporate citizens” who stress the “triple bottom line” (accounting for “people” and “planet,” as well as profit). chong / producing “global” corporate subjects 325 employees, because of “their culture,” to yield to systeo acculturation. but others feared that the ineffective operation of corporate culture, a concept which was originally devised by management consultants, would threaten their status as knowledge experts and thus had potentially negative implications for the project of selling management knowledge externally. after a stint as an english trainer to systeo’s back-office employees (who carry-out the routinized work of processing timesheets, expense claims, and arranging business travel of consultants), i was invited to participate in an internal management project concerning systeo’s corporate culture―the “human capital strategy programme.” the ostensibly overlapping content of anthropological and consulting expertise―that of culture―surely facilitated, if not informed, the invitation. in any case, with this new position came a new means of producing anthropological knowledge―through collaboration with my research subjects (holmes and marcus 2006). effectively, i was treated as an external consultant to systeo’s corporate culture―a position which conferred access to systeo’s hr department, internal corporate training, csr initiatives, and entry to the various consulting offices in its china practice. however, after a year of access my motivations for carrying out work unpaid started to be questioned. thus, for the last few months of fieldwork i took on a contractor role in the csr division, helping to coordinate local csr initiatives in the china practice. by participating in initiatives of “corporate citizenship”―the vehicle through which csr is implemented―it was hoped that employees would learn to perform the “core values” which formed the foundation of the firm’s “corporate culture.” due to my commitment to anonymize systeo to the best of my abilities, i am unable here to disclose the company’s core values. however, it should be noted that companies in the professional services industry have strikingly similar core values, in spite of the explicit, or at least implicit, claims made on their websites that their core values form the basis of their distinct culture or “way of doing business.” for example, boston consulting group, pricewaterhouse coopers, and kkr―a consultancy, an accounting firm and consultancy, and private equity firm, respectively―all espouse core values of “integrity,” “diversity/respect for the individual,” and “innovation.” notably, however, boston consulting group does not use the term innovation, preferring instead “expanding the art of the possible.” historian christopher mckenna observes that the two books which are widely cited as initiating the corporate culture movement in the 1980s, corporate culture: rites and rituals and in search of excellence, have strong links to mckinsey management consultancy’s “brand” of professionalism (2006). the former was based on mckinsey’s definition of corporate culture, whilst the latter was written by two mckinsey partners, tom peters and robert waterman, as part of a strategic decision journal of business anthropology, 4(2), fall 2015 326 to commodify the firm’s professional practice (ibid.).6 the now ubiquitous idea that a company’s culture is defined by a set of “core values” derives from the codification of mckinsey’s internal notion of what constituted professionalism. rather than expertise being a source of professional status, for consultants, performances of professionalism provides a resource for claiming expertise (kipping 2011). moreover, professionalism can be standardized and developed into a full-scale model of organization―mckinsey’s famous”7s” model―which places “shared values” at the centre of organizational coordination. in short, corporate culture hi-jacked cultural analysis for a management product.7 it is of relevance to ask, why do consultants espouse this notion of culture? the idea that organizational culture is a totalizing force which can be engineered at will, whilst clearly rejected by anthropologists (marcus 1998, wright 1994), is also a very particular view in organization studies and the field of management. in a paper on risk culture in the finance industry since the 2007-8 financial crisis, mike power, tomasso palmermo and simon ashby make the observation that regulators, risk committees, and consultants have a tendency to selectively appropriate from the organizational culture literature in their problematization of risk culture (2014). in particular, literature from the 1980s, such as the work of organizational theorist edward schein, is favored. schein, who espouses a deterministic notion of culture which can, vitally, be controlled, appeals to experts whose legitimacy rests on assertions of being able to change or at least strongly influence social reality. by contrast, more recent literature, that which emphasizes a more open, less deterministic conceptualization of culture (for example, alvesson 2013), is sidelined. schein’s formulation of organizational culture closely resembles mckinsey’s formulation of corporate culture; indeed schein was a favorite intellectual source for systeo consultants in their powerpoint “deliverables.” but it was always the specter of failure, that despite all the exhortations of management consultants such a notion of culture could not produce the desired subjectivities, which animated my investigation. hence, the aim of this article is to draw attention to the various subjectivities inside the consultancy, rather than an analytical focus on subjectivation in the foucauldian sense, which assumes the smooth production of subjectivities. furthermore, i suggest that it is by comparing desired subjectivities, as delineated by management practices and discourses, with those that employees actually evidence that we can shed light on the character of knowledge that consultants sell. according to nigel thrift, managerial knowledge, which is at its 6 mckenna states that “the managing partners at mckinsey & company created “corporate culture” as a strategic response to the declining demand for the firm’s central “product” – the organizational study” (mckenna 2006: 193). 7 http://www.mckinsey.com/insights/strategy/enduring_ideas_the_7s_framework (accessed 16 april 2015). http://www.mckinsey.com/insights/strategy/enduring_ideas_the_7-s_framework http://www.mckinsey.com/insights/strategy/enduring_ideas_the_7-s_framework chong / producing “global” corporate subjects 327 most basic concerned with the minutiae of interaction and human behavior, is performative in the sense that embodied performances of this knowledge are required for its authentication. (thrift 2005: 96). in addition, he suggests that the prescriptive character of reflexive managerial knowledge is such that it “has the power to make its theories and descriptions of the world come alive in new built form, new machines and new bodies” (thrift 2005: 11). this second notion of performativity bears close resemblance to michel callon’s thesis of performation. writing specifically about economic models, callon (1982: 2) argues that economics “performs, shapes and formats the economy, rather than observing how it functions.” this thesis has been taken up with gusto in the social studies of finance where scholars have demonstrated how financial equations and trading algorithms work not to represent but to intervene in the social reality of financial markets (mackenzie 2006; mackenzie et al. 2007). management consultants also produce practical models―those that are actually used in business―which do not necessarily correspond to economic or management theory as taught in universities (thrift 2005). in so doing, they play an important role in shaping every day business realities. however, it should be noted that the ways in which these models affect social forms is not necessarily isomorphic with the claims embedded in their theories. hence, rather than focusing on whether or not models of corporate culture can be considered culture proper, i look at how practices and discourses of acculturation such as corporate citizenship, create the legitimacy for managerial interventions in the most basic forms of corporate life. corporate citizenship and the performance of morality writing about the “de-radicalization of csr,” sociologist ronen shamir observes that “the community” of csr discourse can often refer not to local “stakeholders” but the employees of large corporations. he argues that: “by focusing on employee participation in csr projects, by enlisting them to contribute time, money and knowledge, and by sharing with them the company’s reputation as socially responsible, the normative control is deployed by transforming employees into a ‘community’ and by turning labour relations into a question of employees’ satisfaction and loyalty” (shamir 2004: 683). csr initiatives provide myriad possibilities for employees to perform the company’s core values. inducting employees into being “good corporate citizens” constituted a pathway for them to become “systeofied.” as peter grantham, a consultant from the london office, put it: “csr seeks to inspire our employees and reinforce cultural values about ‘who we are’ and ‘how we operate.’” in china, this injunction takes on a rather literal meaning. according to stephanie smith, head of global giving, systeo was only allowed to open offices in china on condition they provided educational and community investment. journal of business anthropology, 4(2), fall 2015 328 in autumn 2008 i participated in systeo china’s “flagship” corporate citizenship event―a charity bike ride across sichuan province to raise money for victims of the devastating earthquake which had hit the region on may 12 of that year. to be considered for participation i had to donate at least one item to an online auction. other employees would then bid for these gifts, the money going to the sichuan relief effort. the fifteen employees with the highest bids, and thus who had raised the most money, would be selected automatically. the remaining twenty slots would be decided by putting all the other “sellers” into a lucky draw. just a couple of months after the auction i boarded a flight to chengdu, the capital of sichuan province, with all the other beijing-based employees. once there we boarded a coach which took us on a tour of the city before arriving at the hotel. along with our flights and meals systeo had paid for us to stay in a 4 star hotel in the downtown area. after 30 minutes to check-in and freshen up, we met outside the hotel for the bike fitting. gleaming new mountain bikes were unloaded into the car park. british senior executive, mark mcdougall, had brought his own well-used racing bike. the bike mechanics enjoyed teasing him in broken english, saying that it was a great bike “maybe ten years ago.” conversations were stilted but jovial, as the participants―consultants drawn from the different china offices―started to get to know one another. we continued chatting over dinner. one consultant, xing feng, a native of chengdu, was in hospital when the earthquake began. “i was lying in the hospital bed when the walls started to move; i had no idea what was happening,” he recalled. the other participants listened with unwavering attention, some of them visibly moved. “this is my home and i know people who have lost their homes, friends or family members,” he went on to say. his personal narrative contrasted with that of james tsang, from hong kong but brought up in the us, who spoke in abstract terms about how “in these times, what with the financial crisis, it’s good to give something back to society.” we cycled between fifty and seventy kilometres each day, covering one hundred and fifty kilometres altogether. mark, the british senior executive, was my “chaperone.” one of the best riders, he was usually at the front of the pack, but periodically he would hang back to check on those behind him. he would often cycle next to me, giving me advice on how to make better use of my gears and encouraging me with comments such as, “just imagine how amazing you’re going to feel when you cross the finishing line―it’s gonna be worth all the pain!” saddle sores were the least of my worries. with a route that included motorways and dirt tracks through industrial processing zones, as well as the expected climbs up emei shan and le shan, the famous mountains of sichuan, we found ourselves cycling in harsh conditions. our clothes were splattered with mud and a thick layer of dirt covered our faces. the participants―middle-class, white-collar workers―could be forgiven for thinking they had signed up for a survival course, not a bike ride. the chong / producing “global” corporate subjects 329 message that we needed to suffer to do good, that this was an exercise in being “outside your comfort zone,” was deeply apparent. blocked roads, collapsed buildings, and piles of rubble became familiar sights on our journey. the “finishing line” was a construction site. a primary school that had been destroyed in the earthquake would be rebuilt, funded by systeo. led by the senior executives, we formed a procession of cyclists, greeted by cheers from local government officials, pupils and their parents. the pupils performed a song and dance routine. the consultants presented them with rucksacks stuffed with treats. then the day’s climax―a “ground-breaking” ceremony in which senior executives were photographed posing with shovels alongside government officials. the next day, we visited two more schools. consultants dished out blankets and laptops. they asked the children if they had heard of systeo and if they wanted to be management consultants when they grew up. later we filed into the makeshift canteen and had lunch with the pupils, some of whom were dressed in the traditional costumes of the yi minority. one little girl notable for her green eyes, so uncommon amongst han chinese, drew the most attention. out came the digital cameras. groups of consultants and children held their hands up, fingers adopting the “v” for victory symbol, and smiled to the beat of the flash. by fetishizing the people they helped it would appear that systeo employees considered them to be wholly different. the children were rural citizens, less sophisticated, and un-modern in comparison. deciding who deserves help requires a process of differentiation. workers considered the children to be of lower suzhi (quality)―a concept which has become central to processes of governance in post-mao china, and is typically invoked as form of social classification which justifies inequalities of power, status and wealth between those with “high” suzhi and those “lacking quality” (kipnis 2007). yet, in some ways the children were not so different. only the top fifty students (by test scores) were allowed to attend. like the consultants, who were typically recruited from elite universities, they were high academic achievers―perhaps one day they would become consultants? the consultants were helping people they could both distance themselves from and identify with. depicted as less fortunate versions of themselves, the precocious pupils of the destroyed sichuan schools were the “safe” other to which they could direct their good intentions. employees had signed up to a strange mix of endurance, selfdeprivation, and indulgence. given that they spend at least five days a week inside an office, cycling one hundred and fifty kilometres across sichuan was physically, as well as mentally, challenging. but these were isolated, contained challenges. unlike the children they visited, the recipients did not stay in makeshift housing, but rather in a four star hotel. similarly, eating simple dishes of plain vegetables and rice was a one-off experience of “the local,” and not a mundane activity of everyday journal of business anthropology, 4(2), fall 2015 330 existence. these were also meticulously planned challenges; by contrast the children were faced with the ongoing instability, uncertainty and precarity of living in the aftermath of the earthquake. i point out these differences because it is precisely by drawing parallels with recipients―the creation of an “empathic zone”―that employees can be said to be experiencing “the other” and thus testing themselves. it is this carefully calibrated testing of the self that is so covetable and definitive of the internal practice of csr. the bike ride was designed to be experienced as a series of revelatory moments―about participants’ own capabilities, their responses to adversity, their position in social hierarchies, and even the utility of their expertise. these revelatory moments were crucial to transforming the self: that is, to promoting the creation of new subjectivities. one might expect that employees returned to work with an improved ethic of graft. perhaps, also they became more content in their everyday work, which might translate into a state of heightened passivity so making them easier to manage. or most obvious, one might expect that they found meaning, a sense of purpose, in jobs which are defined by their inscrutability. performing a”global” morality in post-mao china although long established in systeo’s older geographies (of north america and western europe), corporate citizenship was still in its infancy in china. “it’s been hard to get traction―it’s been difficult to build corporate citizenship in china,” remarked stephanie smith, head of global giving. tentatively she suggested that that there was “not a strong heritage of charitable giving due to cultural norms.” stephanie implied that chinese employees constrained by “their culture” did not grasp the idea of charity―giving without the expectation of return―a problem that suggested, in her words, “a need to increase employee awareness.” this was especially important because “corporate citizenship is something that develops organically in each region,” being comprised of “employee driven initiatives [and hence] often takes on a ‘local flavor.’” as carolyn hsu has pointed out, voluntary giving is not a foreign concept to chinese who have long seen it a moral obligation to provide for kin in need (2008: 84). however, giving to strangers―a central principle in western charitable giving―is not valorized and has only been recently introduced (ibid.; also see rolandsen 2008). hsu examines the historical development of project hope―one of the first, and most successful, charities in the post-mao era―which was set up to raise funds for rural schools. it elicits donations from individual and corporate donors; the latter includes, notably, systeo. according to hsu, the main problem facing charitable organizations in china is that chinese people find it difficult to trust strangers unless they are engaged in reciprocal relations built up through gift exchanges. as well as noting that charity is a culturally conditioned perception based on a western conception of universal love, chong / producing “global” corporate subjects 331 which can thus be applied to those near and distant to us, hsu observes that such cultural hurdles can be overcome by drawing on existing schemas of moral legitimacy. for example, by recasting hitherto anonymous donations as personalized, and hence trust generative, relations between donor and recipient. stephanie’s assertion, shared by many expatriates, that chinese employees are held back by a set of norms or cultural values, fails to grasp how notions of charity are predicated on configurations of social relations which are not necessarily shared across contexts. as we will see, this failure to consider social relations would not be the only threat to the realization of the desired corporate subjectivity. during the bike ride there were nightly team briefings, in which consultants were invited to give their thoughts on the day. one consultant commented that one of the children, of the schools we had visited, had the same mobile phone as him. “do they really need our help?” he intoned. a few of us went to a bar afterwards where the discussion continued. “it’s different for us,” said chen jin, a consultant from beijing, referring to mainland chinese employees as opposed to expatriates. “obviously we have very different lives from these children, but you know thirty, forty years ago…we weren’t so different.” since market reforms were introduced income inequality has skyrocketed and chinese society has become increasingly stratified. that said, the suggestion that urbanites and rural citizens were equal under mao is at best nostalgic. various scholars have pointed out that rural china, although privileged in (chinese communist) party discourse (bach 2010), was continuously decimated and devalued for the sake of creating urban china as the vision of socialist modernity (siu 2007). nevertheless, chen jin’s comments do show how memories of china’s socialist past continue to inform how people experience and make sense of present-day social differentiation. chen jin had questioned whether these communities were truly deserving of corporate aid on the basis that the recipients appeared to be too similar to them. i should stress that chen jin and other chinese employees were not disengaged from the plight of china’s rural poor. they would often forward emails to each other asking for donations to charities dedicated to improving the living standards for rural children. containing harrowing images of teary-eyed children eating scraps of food, carrying sacks of sticks on their back, hands and faces raw from the cold, these emails stated emphatically who was the deserving subject of charity. systeo’s csr initiatives had disrupted the overdrawn, if not patronizing, image of the rural child as the uncivilized, inferior other to the modern, middle-class urbanite that employees propagated. yet, this was precisely the opposite of what was intended. csr initiatives are predicated on, and serve to magnify, the inequality between recipients and donors. whether represented as integral to their business model, or simply old-fashioned corporate giving, csr has innovated little on the imperialistic trope of western folk helping to civilize the journal of business anthropology, 4(2), fall 2015 332 developing world. it is by highlighting inequalities that csr initiatives gain their moral legitimacy: who can truck with measures to help those who are worse-off? it is apparent that certain representations of communities are necessary to legitimate csr as a way of “giving back” to society. if chinese employees do not see themselves as superior to the recipients of their goodwill, then the moral imperative that drives the initiative is lost. they might begin to wonder why they have made personal sacrifices―not just with the objects they put up for bidding, but also four days of annual leave, four days that could have been spent with their families―to cycle across western china. they have suffered, but for what and for whom? at the end of the event, we were put into groups of three and asked to write an article together based on our experience. the best articles would be published in the company csr magazine. i was put with chen jin and yu na, two consultants from beijing. we sat together on the bus back to chengdu to discuss what we might write. yu na asked a rhetorical question: “the government would provide help if systeo didn’t, right?” to which chen jin agreed. from conversations on the road i sensed that many employees had chosen to participate in the bike ride in order to see with their own eyes the destruction wrought by the earthquake. a distrust of chinese media representations which had saturated primetime tv, night after night, served as one motivation. buying into the wave of chinese nationalism that was fuelled by this media explosion was another. as we passed a refuge of temporary shelters, metal cabins with uniform blue roofs, lisa teng, a consultant based in shanghai, pointed out the grand, grey brick government offices in close proximity. “buildings for officials get rebuilt before homes for ordinary people―that’s china for you,” she lamented. even though employees thought that the relief effort would be marred by corruption, they took it for granted that the state would be leading the operations. as catherine dolan has argued, the practice of csr typically claims its legitimacy, or at least rhetorical traction, by claiming to plug gaps in development produced by the absence of the state (dolan 2010). the lack of formal standards or regulation―whether concerning labor practices or factory emissions, for example―is used to justify the growth of csr practice in these areas. in the united states, where state intervention is often treated with suspicion, the idea that corporations will intervene in everyday life―indeed that they should because they provide better, more efficient solutions―is widely accepted. in china, however, the state is seemingly omnipresent. basic choices concerning human reproduction, media consumption, one’s place of residency, are all subject to state intervention. this control is enacted through paternalistic ties, not dissimilar to the kind invoked by the practice of csr. this point is exemplified by the media construction of “grandpa wen,” wen jia bao, then premier of the prc, the 66 year-old poster “boy” of the relief effort. tv crews and journalists document him in the trenches, consoling chong / producing “global” corporate subjects 333 homeless, maybe even orphaned, children―the victims of the earthquake. such media narratives drive home the message that the patron of the relief effort was the chinese communist party, not systeo or any other western donor. stephanie smith and other employees, expatriate and chinese, involved in building systeo china’s csr programme, had not thought through how a strong, paternalistic, state would impact the effectiveness of csr to engage employees. in this context, the value that systeo brought to the relief effort was not apparent. and thus the key csr message, to both external stakeholders and systeo employees, that systeo is there to “make a difference,” failed to materialize. months after the bike ride i had lunch with a few consultants. the conversation turned to the topic of corporate citizenship. one consultant, joanna li, told me that they do not yet have the culture (wenhua) for such initiatives. she said that “not long ago the government took care of everything―your work, where you lived, people in need.” she was referring to mao’s “iron bowl”―the set of cradle to grave benefits, including life-long employment, which prevailed under socialism. “people don’t really consider giving to others; it’s just not in the culture right now,” she explained. joanna’s comments seemed to imply that culture, a bit like older ideas of development, was based on a linear teleology. one day chinese culture would “catch-up” with the west, and then giving to charity would be normalized. expected even. until then chinese “culture” would hold back the implementation of csr. joanna’s thinking seems remarkably close to that of stephanie smith, the head of global giving―recall her remark that “the norms” of giving were not yet established in china. the idea that there exists a teleology of development which is matched, or evidenced, by a teleology of mentalities may not be anything new. what is interesting is how, in this context, culture is seen as the driver of these teleologies, in contrast to standard modernist notions of development in which culture is posed as a hindrance to producing rational, liberal citizens. it may be the case that this reversal simply reflects the fact that culture is a dominant discourse of management consultancy and is seen as a model for controlling social reality. as i have already pointed out, consultants, despite being hired to create efficiency through the implementation of standardized, rational and technocratic forms of management, in fact base much of their expertise on culture. but the recourse to culture, and in particular the invocation of cultural difference for explaining the failure to conform could also be read as an unprovocative way of side-stepping managerial control. that is to say, chinese employees are also adept at apprehending culture for their own self-interest. journal of business anthropology, 4(2), fall 2015 334 providing a “high level experience” the money raised from the bike ride bolstered the already considerable amount raised through a donation drive launched in the immediate aftermath of the earthquake, in which the company matched every renminbi donated by an employee. in just one week systeo china and its employees had donated over 2 million renminbi (u$s180,000) to the relief effort. employees’ generosity called into question stephanie’s assertion that “the norms” of giving were not yet established in china. given that a sizeable donation had been made, and with ease, why was it necessary to organize a fund-raising bike ride? some insight can be found by looking at who was eligible to participate. any employee could donate money, but only permanent employees received the email explaining how they could join in.8 as we will see, corporate citizenship is seen as a form of human investment, which is reserved only for those the company seek to retain. just six months after the bike ride i was hired as systeo china’s very first “corporate citizenship coordinator.” in fact the job was created with me in mind. the experience i gained working in the human capital strategy programme was seen as especially relevant, a point i will return to later. also, having participated in the bike ride, i was well informed to help organize the following year’s bike ride, the main task of this position. so i joined a bike ride committee comprised of consultants who had volunteered their project management and logistics skills, as well as time, to the csr programme. over a series of conference calls we hammered out a rough sketch of the event; it was my job to translate these ideas into fluent, exciting communications which would be sent directly to employees and uploaded onto the company intranet. very quickly i realized that we were planning a much more ambitious event than in previous years. there would be more participants―up to sixty employees and, for the first time, the bike ride would be open to employees outside of china, as well as those based in the china offices. this was the idea of emma jiang, senior executive and bike ride lead. the participation of employees from north america and europe would, according to her, show that systeo china was a truly global entity. another reason for pursuing this arrangement was that it might encourage chinese employees to take part. most were between their mid20s and 30s and, unlike their parents, had only ever been employed by foreign companies. they saw themselves as part of a generation of asian cosmopolitans who wanted to work in “global” environments (hoffman 2010, hsu 2005). csr initiatives such as the bike ride were almost unheard of in chinese enterprises. their existence signalled immediately 8 because i was not a permanent employee i should have been disqualified. however, other colleagues lobbied the senior executive who was overseeing the event, telling her about the unpaid work i had done for systeo’s corporate citizenship initiatives. thus, she decided to make an exception. chong / producing “global” corporate subjects 335 that these were not “local” entities. moreover, such events allowed employees to actually meet and interact with europeans, americans, and australians. emma also expected “foreign” employees to jump at the chance of cycling in china. but getting access to them would not be a straightforward matter. we needed to “reach out” to the csr leads of the different systeo geographies. their western names indicated what the employee directory confirmed―only systeo offices in the global north employed specialist csr professionals. china did not have a csr lead. as contracted csr coordinator, i was the next best alternative. hence, i was asked to present powerpoint detailing our plans for the coming bike ride and background information on the previous year’s event. david kraus, the german lead, was to first to comment: “i know what the [german] senior executives will say: ‘that’s nice but what does a bike ride have to do with systeo?’” the connection between corporate citizenship activities and systeo’s core business was not apparent. amelia, the us lead, had different objections. she said she would only want the us geography to be involved if we could “deliver a high level experience that rivals the everest event.” the year before employees, notably only those from the global north, had been invited to “challenge themselves” by trekking to the mount everest base camp, an event of great complexity to organize, which was collectively judged a “resounding success.” i was struck immediately by amelia’s emphasis on the individual employee’s experience, rather than on the charities for which the employees would be raising money. cathleen doyle, the ireland csr lead, seemed to share her concern interjecting with, “does anyone on the global corporate citizenship team know you’re organizing this?” the tone in which cathleen asked her question seemed to suggest that we, the chinese corporate citizenship team, were errant children going behind the backs of our “global” parents. the implication was that if global was not involved then they―the western csr leads―could not ascertain the quality of the event, the experience we would deliver, which made them wary of letting “their” employees participate. in fact global were the ones who suggested we contact the csr leads. sitting at my desk, staring at my phone as if it could talk back to me, i felt extremely uneasy. there was something untoward in their questioning, something that suggested we were not just talking about logistics or csr. our competency, our skill at performing corporate ethics, was under attack. amelia stated in no uncertain terms that she would not be sending out our communications to all us employees. in effect she was refusing access. only those who had signed up to corporate citizenship interest lists, and asian american employees, would be made available to us. i was floored. there was a mailing list comprising only asian american employees? in a “global” company? and why would only americans of asian ethnicity be interested in participating? amelia’s comments seemed to rehearse my own observation that csr “works” when employees can journal of business anthropology, 4(2), fall 2015 336 identify with the recipients of their goodwill. except she seemed to suggest that a common ground could only be found on the basis of ethnicity. there were also controversies over who would be a deserving recipient: “where do you draw the line? there are lots of charities which need our support in ireland so why should we help raise funds in china?” remarked cathleen. emma trotted out the global narrative, that as a global company systeo should encourage its employees to participate in charity events in different geographies. met with awkward silence, emma added: “the foreigners, i mean the expatriates who participate in the bike rides...you should see the children’s faces―they have never seen a foreigner before.” i got her point that having expatriates involved gives chinese recipients a much greater sense of systeo, that it is a global entity with employees drawn from around the world. at the same time i could not shake the feeling that we―the china corporate citizenship team―were selling ethnic voyeurism to white employees. the gap between recipient and donor had suddenly been amplified. such comments did not necessarily suggest a paucity of professionalism or inaccuracy of observation―i had seen for myself the enchanted faces that she spoke of. rather it appeared that emma was unprepared for the csr leads’ spiky questions and negative feedback. we had not anticipated the csr leads would act as gatekeepers to employees. if doing good was integral to corporate citizenship activities in all geographies, as is suggested by stephanie smith, the head of global giving, in systeo’s leadership videos and the company magazine, then why was employee participation so tightly policed? the finances of corporate citizenship were instructive here. overall, the bike ride committee hoped to raise at least two hundred and fifty thousand renminbi (us$38,000) through the event. however when going through the project budget i found out that less than ten per cent of this money would go to charity. most of it would go into covering the event’s costs: the hotels, the flights, the meals, the bike rental, bike mechanics and third parties (for instance, agencies specializing in local logistics). the injunction from amelia, the us lead, to “deliver a high-level experience” belied an overarching objective, not to raise money for charity, but to create what were termed “engaged employees.” as i would later find out by reading the business case for my role of china corporate citizenship coordinator, corporate citizenship activities are seen as an input to human capital. systeo sell and practice internally the idea that csr is a way of making “engaged employees,” those who actively contribute to the creation of shareholder value. every csr lead is under pressure to demonstrate how they have improved employee engagement―this is how their performance is evaluated―which explains why they are wary of letting “their” employees participate in initiatives organized by other geographies. chong / producing “global” corporate subjects 337 as an internal consultant to the “human capital strategy programme” i was privy to the range of activities―intra firm dating events, sports clubs, flexible work arrangements―which were considered deserving of company investment. csr was yet another example. the naïve theory is that by participating in such activities employees develop a more positive relationship with the company so enhancing productivity, and, in turn, shareholder value. although i found that the connection with shareholder value was rarely mentioned (it was only made apparent in diagrams which measured the improvement in “employee engagement” in terms of total shareholder return), on occasion it was explicitly referred to. for example, in an interview with systeo’s head of global giving, stephanie smith stated baldly that corporate citizenship initiatives “need to prove return of investment will come” in order to be implemented. writing about the partnerships between big business and ngos robert foster (2014) argues that contemporary global capitalism uses consensus as a way of diffusing potentially conflictual relationships and agendas, and in doing so weds ethical praxis with the creation of shareholder value. this kind of bridging between ethics and profit through strategic collaborations is termed “connected capitalism.” the use of csr as a tool of acculturation is but another example of how external associations or partnerships, such as investing in local schools destroyed by natural disasters, can be apprehended for the moral aestheticizing of business as usual. conclusion in this article i have examined the work of “re-engineering” chinese employees in a global ethics through the internal practice of csr. i have shown how activities of “doing good,” by inducing employees to perform a decontextualized form of morality, aim to create a discursive moral self. the content of this morality, however, lacks a subterranean ethics. instead, employees are invited to perform the company’s “core values,” which are more codifications and commodifications of professionalism (mckenna 2006: 193) than ethical coordinates for social action. hence morality is defined in negative terms―as what it is not. through revelation corporate citizenship activities are designed to create affective ties which would appear to be defined by the absence of financial concerns. the actual amount raised by the bike ride for the charity is never disclosed, somewhat strange given that this is the explicitly narrated objective of the event. hence employees, apart from the bike ride committee, are not aware of the slim margins of charitable giving. at the same time, employees do not question the comparative luxury in which they are “challenged.” it would seem that employees are encouraged to see such changes to the self as not driven by profit. in this way they can be said to have been “engaged.” journal of business anthropology, 4(2), fall 2015 338 yet sentiments which derive their meaning from the elision of finance are generated with the view to making subjects who maximize the creation of financial value. one of the central contradictions of csr is that moral legitimacy is drawn through the performance of extra-financial concerns, yet moral authority is generated for the purposes of finance. how this contradiction is effaced is of particular interest. we find that the failure to display the correct ethical dispositions is, in the first place, denigrated as a problem of culture. chinese employees are seen as somehow less developed, culturally speaking, than their western colleagues. their “failure” is that they do not display the right norms of giving and benevolence befitting global professionals―they are exoticized to explain their lack of “professionalism.” we find that, to be deemed worthy, recipients of corporate aid are also exoticized. there is a common theme of ethical action being legitimated through processes of making strange what might otherwise be familiar. however, in the analysis presented above, we see that such attempts at othering are not always successful in the post-mao context. the problem is not only that chinese employees see the targets of their goodwill as too similar to themselves. they also question the legitimacy of corporate intervention. in post-mao china, where state power is still hegemonic, the rhetorical traction of csr is somewhat decimated. this would suggest that the efficacy of csr to produce the “right” performances of morality is not, as the discourse suggests, universal. rather the desired moral self is imagined in continuation with older structures of paternalism and corporate philanthropy. although there is nothing intrinsically “western” about the marriage of ethics to 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(1994). anthropology of organizations. london: routledge. kimberly chong is a teaching fellow in social anthropology at university college london. trained in economics, sociology and anthropology, kimberly has carried out research which examines forms of expertise in connection with china’s economic development. recent publications include an article on how fund managers utilize conviction narratives to make decisions under conditions of radical uncertainty, published in socio-economic review. she is currently working on a book manuscript about management consulting in china and the practices of financialization, provisionally titled the work of financialization, which will be published by duke university press. she may be reached at kimberly.chong@ucl.ac.uk mailto:kimberly.chong@ucl.ac.uk liminality in advertising from the mad men era barbara olsen abstract this article reflects an evolving anthropologist’s marketing career during the 1970s, before anthropology was truly welcomed as contributor to business strategy. i worked on several accounts mentored by a brilliant but conflicted creative director-guru-boss, an experience resulting in this reflexive advertising narrative punctuated by periods of liminality. i used my agency archives from the 1970s and field notes (or advertising log) as my data set to reflect this period. my field journey traversed the mad men era, immortalized in the amc tv series about the 1960s and beyond, where creative directors freely crossed boundaries of sex, class and gender stereotypes. i discuss several advertising campaigns in which i was involved. the broader narrative reveals an uncomfortable divide between cultural empathy and advertising practice. while creatively stimulating, i describe the conflict in a marketing career that challenged ethical sensitivities. keywords advertising history, anthropology, liminality, reflexivity page 1 of 28 jba special issue 2: 77-104, spring 2016 © the author(s) 2016 issn 2245-4217 www.cbs.dk/jba journal of business anthropology, special issue 2, spring 2016 78 prologue it was fall 1972; i was back in new york after a divorce wondering what my next career move would be. a friend suggested i give adam wilson a call. we had known him since the 1960s when i was a freelance illustrator attending hunter college in their graduate anthropology program. i decided to visit his ad agency on madison avenue since i heard it was hiring. on the day of my appointment, i sat down and waited an hour. finally, i was called into the office and adam wilson, the creative director and owner of the small advertising and promotion firm, rose from his desk and shook my hand. he said, “what brings you here?” i responded, “i’m looking for a job. no more freelance. i want to work full time.” he sat down, folded his hands over the vest of his dark blue three-piece suit. the chain of his gold watch fob dangled to its pocket. i held my breath. after a long pause he said, “i can’t hire you. i’d only want to make you my girlfriend.” no, this is not a clip from the contemporary tv show mad men, which i honestly find too painful to watch because of the similarity with my ad career. this conversation actually happened. i countered with a lecture on the unfairness of his response. wilson backed down and said, “it was a joke.” but, it was not. the adam wilson & friends agency was located in the penthouse suite of a building on madison avenue and 54th street in manhattan. the elevator opened into a gray-carpeted waiting room. the design of the entire office was classic bauhaus modern, simple yet elegant. two receptionists sat at desks along the wall leading to the back offices of account executives, copywriters and art director. the “bull pen”―a room where concepts were rendered into finished mechanicals (ad layouts ready for engraving)―was at the end of the corridor. nearby, wilson’s office featured a black desk similar to the long black table in the conference room next door. degrees from cooper union and yale hung on the white wall next to a painting, a grey “homage to the square” by richard anuszkiewicz. as i studied the painting, he explained that at yale they were both students of josef albers, well known for his nested squares of color. albers himself studied at the bauhaus school in europe, where design was predicated on utilitarian elegance. adam reminded me of napoleon―short and stocky, confident and commanding. we said we would talk in the next week and i left feeling dejected. the song, “watching and waiting for a friend to play with” by the moody blues, from their album to our children’s children, played on my emotional jukebox as i entertained the possibilities during my return trip home. yes, i took the job and the opportunity to be mentored by a creative director who became my new friend. it was the beginning of a mutually beneficial relationship that transformed into a platonic friendship and a long-term business partnership. for the next sixteen years i worked with him and went to school learning both advertising and olsen / liminality in advertising 79 anthropology, enriched by both. adam’s offer was the answer to my dilemma. he championed my need for economic independence and introduced me to the city’s museums that became our weekend outings. i took classes at the art students’ league and enrolled in the school of visual arts to perfect my skills at work. in spring 1973, i decided to finish my degrees in anthropology at the new school of social research in new york. by 1977, the personal relationship became too complicated and we resolved to be friends and business partners. my next significant other occasionally made a contribution to wilson’s team. on the surface we appeared to make “& friends” a reality. my reflexive narrative of liminality, that is being “betwixt and between” as described by turner (1979:236-237), covers my sense of ambiguity with advertising in the 1970s. toward this end, i here review my collection of adam wilson & friends’ advertising archives, focusing on three marketing campaigns i worked on in various capacities between 1972 and 1980. at first, i loved the excitement and creativity of advertising, eventually advancing from artist to account assistant and executive responsible for several clients. however, it was also a time when anthropological reasoning was struggling to find its voice in the chatter of advertising; i often found that anthropological insight was unappreciated. by 1979, because of internal strife and an unbalanced client roster heavy with competing companies, the agency split accounts and solved my protracted state of liminality. i founded imc marketing group, ltd. to accommodate half of our clients and to have greater autonomy while completing my degree. i continued working with adam as imc’s creative director through 1988 and leveraged my corporate position for time to finish fieldwork and complete my phd. that was the end of the mad men era for me. this phrase has become a cliché for midtwentieth century advertising, but it defies time and instead describes actual personalities and brilliant minds caught up in hubris and greed clinging to a memory of what could have been. i tried to change adam, to add some happiness to his manic life. by the mid-1970s he confessed to having a mote around his heart. ironically, he passed away in 2007 from an infection in fluid that had collected around his heart. this article has relevance for practicing anthropologists as they often encounter similar work environments and emotional tension satisfying client requests. i focus on how advertising values conflicted with my anthropologically informed consciousness. i repeatedly experienced multiple phases of cognitive dissonance with varying degrees of intensity over the decade, each time cast into a liminal zone of separation, transition and incorporation (schouten 1991; turner 1979) with new understanding to cope with conflict, determined to survive a dysfunctional environment. the anthropological lens on culture helped me understand my liminality. i clashed with superiors over corporate journal of business anthropology, special issue 2, spring 2016 80 direction, personnel issues, ad strategy, and the recollection of client discussions, which i noted in my log to preserve sanity. as described later, rifts over gender and cultural issues created cognitive dissonance with adam’s creative direction for clients in the 1970s: warner’s bra from 1972-1975 (positioning bras in the context of women’s sexual liberation); franklin society federal savings and loan association bank from 19751977 (teaching women financial security); and abc pictures international 1979-1980 (integrating cross-cultural acculturation). each is presented as a case below, with interpretation reserved for the discussion section. in the following sections, i contextualize the concept of liminality, before proceeding to the methodology, three campaign cases, discussion-lessons for practice, and conclusion. understanding liminality turner provides analysis for those in the pre-modern process of formal transition between social roles and status changes as they experience “the liminal period” of “betwixt and between” (1979:236-237). he follows van gennep’s original treatise (1960) demarking the rites of passage primarily aiding tribal passage from youth to adulthood in stages from “separation, [to] margin (or limen) and [to] aggregation” sequentially managing detachment, disruption and social reconnection with new requisite roles and responsibilities (turner 1979:235). more recently, scholars investigating contemporary liminality reveal similarities with pre-modern cousins. for instance, based on van gennep’s rites of passage (1960) and turner’s concept of liminality (1969), schouten (1991) offers clarity for contemporary liminal status change that often incorporates rituals using consumer goods for identity reconstruction to enhance the process of formally passing from one role to another (youth to adult, married to divorced, employed to retired). he notes the familiar process: “1) separation, in which a person disengages from a social role or status, 2) transition, in which the person adapts and changes to fit new roles, and 3) incorporation, in which the person integrates the new role or status into the self.” in the process, schouten claims we engage in “identity play” with props to practice new roles (pp.49-50). his work on liminality presaged a new line of “identity project” inquiry that now informs consumer culture theory (arnould and thompson 2005). liminality research in corporations, however, suggests that modern rites of passage (between states of being) are more complicated and prolonged than those in pre-modern societies. tempest and starkey (2004) analyze the liminal dilemma of temporary contract work. beech (2011) focuses on liminality concerning anticipated, but unfulfilled promotion and part-time status within firms. this type of liminality is familiar for practicing anthropologists between project contracts and for artists working freelance. because i experienced liminality as cognitive dissonance while working in advertising, i will use olsen / liminality in advertising 81 the two terms interchangeably throughout the article. to appreciate the effects of liminality, malefyt and morais (2012) mention that it is experienced subjectively―often with regard to a place. i experienced my liminality in an advertising agency dealing with creative direction and positioning logic for three campaigns that conflicted with the history of ideas and progressive values i was learning at the time in graduate school. “thus, acute awareness over thoughts and feelings, ideas and realities due to interaction of place with our existing thoughts from somewhere else can result in states of confusion or indeterminacy in our thinking” (p.79). to ameliorate recurring cognitive dissonance dealing with the campaigns’ positioning concepts and managerial intimidation, each time i disengaged by entering a liminal zone. each passage began with separation (consciously aware of myself as other with different opinions), through transition (learning various survival strategies to preserve my integrity against ridicule) and finally, to incorporation with a new sense of a stronger self (each incorporation renewed my resolve to complete the ph.d. in preparation for the next chapter in my life). with each passage i learned new tactics to manage conflict elaborated later in lessons from the log. i recorded these moments of introspection for reflexive strategic analysis. writing and drawing introspectively in a log while experiencing the passage significantly enhances the liminal process. using this creative process reframes one’s perception of events from incomprehensible and depressing to be able to see opportunity and new possibilities. in liminality, by perceiving one’s self as other, we gain a heightened awareness of our social relationships and surroundings to interpret the cognitive dissonance. i became aware how the creative director appropriated cultural trends for campaign themes. hackley (2002:214) claims that, “the advertising industry with its skill in gathering and interpreting consumer cultural knowledge [uses it] in order to fashion culturally resonant advertising.” i understood that this appropriation has ideological consequences for a consumer culture where advertising exists in a feedback loop influencing social values. this echoed in my concern with our agency’s campaign themes that co-opted social movements and popular culture to sell products pairing the sexual revolution and feminist beliefs in women’s lib with paternalism, while also negating cross-cultural experiences with parochial norms. the level of creativity is how an agency earns its reputation. as a campaign theme evolves into ads and sales promotions, the creative concept is fueled by many voices along the way: agency director, account executive, account supervisor, creative director, copy writer, art director, and even the client. each contributes his/her part to the cultural resonance that frames the big idea. as i became increasingly “entangled” in interacting with these “things” that connected us together (hodder 2012), introspection with a log became the most valuable tool for reflection. journal of business anthropology, special issue 2, spring 2016 82 methodology: agency archive analysis and ethnographic journaling when adam wilson & friends split accounts in late 1979, i founded imc marketing group. to create my portfolio, i took copies of the campaigns on which i had worked. for my reflection, i use these archives to deconstruct the mores of historical contexts reflected by the creative direction in three clients’ advertising and sales promotion campaigns. with each campaign, i struggled to reconcile my evolving feminist values with sexist, classist, and cultural stereotyping prevalent in the industry. one way of analyzing this dissonance is through the lens of liminality parsed in the discussion. i also maintained journals (1972–1988) in an advertising log that became my participant-observation field notes with personal reflections used to track client projects, agency meetings, and my state of mind. between crises and chaos, these logs kept me centered. using selfreflexivity, the log primarily informs my narrative ethnography. there are fourteen journals from 1972 to 1980. the 1972 journal covers transitioning back to new york. subsequent log entries in the 1970s decade included work to-do lists, class assignments, poems, essays and drawings to understand power relationships. there are many drawings depicting anxiety, cityscapes and self-portraits. the log with advertising practices and agency observations provides insight coinciding with the mad men era on madison avenue. by the 1980s, my notes are more complex with client-focused verbatims revealing provocative observations of agency power dynamics. over time, the log became a valuable tool used to record client meetings, and reflected managerial mores that were historically contextualized and often antithetical to an anthropological way of thinking. the journals reveal liminal insight on the profound divide between adam’s managerial style and my anthropological appeal for humanity. many times i was caught “betwixt and between” in a liminal zone (turner 1979) of confusion wanting to quit, yet needing to work and not let my friend down. in kaminsky’s introduction to remembered lives, he notes that myerhoff’s recollection of the anthropological journal as a genre for “text production is described as a potential healing process, a quest for wholeness of being, for recuperating parts of the personality that are suppressed or damaged in social relations that subordinate women and induce alienation generally” (kaminsky [in myerhoff] 1992:84). marcus and fischer (1986:113) suggest ethnographers follow a “trend that we call repatriation” to turn our focus back home. my advertising narrative using journal notes reflexively thus falls within their “experimental moment” (ibid. pp. 165, 166). following their lead, i explore “historical and cultural conditions for the articulation and implementation of different values” (ibid. p. 167) embedded in advertising during a particular point in time. the 1960s represented a olsen / liminality in advertising 83 socio-cultural crossroads where class, gender and ethnic stereotypes were questioned. women were encouraged to gain an education and find employment. sexuality was liberated by the birth control pill and promoted by media, including cosmopolitan magazine. the civil rights movement celebrated cultural and racial diversity. all were reflected in advertising’s “creative revolution” during the 1960s (cracknell 2011:21314). creative directors began sourcing cultural trends to position the “big idea” (maas 2012:136). these sentiments trickled through our agency, too, but with greater emphasis on pushing sexuality to the edge of decorum, while also honoring traditional gender roles. the result for me was embarrassment and confusion. contestation was met with hostility. in the following section, i present the three advertising and promotion campaigns for warner’s bra, franklin society federal savings and loan association, and touch of home™ from abc’s video sales division, while reserving my critique and introspective analysis for the discussion section. liminality in advertising: campaign cases from the mad men era 1972: consumer choice: warner’s bra before i joined adam wilson & friends, warner’s came to the agency for trade ads and sales promotion to raise its market share. in the late 1960s, warner’s share of the market lingered at eight in the bra category, well behind playtex, maidenform and other frontrunners. it had a serious image problem among younger females not interested in wellconstructed foundation garments targeted to their mothers’ generation. the traditional warner’s customer was the older, full-figured woman whose numbers were being eclipsed by the baby boomer generation preferring a more natural look. as creative director, adam’s first solution was to brand a new bra with the name love touch. it was a sexy lacy bra made from softer double-knit fibers also used in the body crème and comfort curve (c. 1971) bras specifically designed for younger women. regardless of this targeting effort, warner’s share stayed the same. we sensed we had a sales rather than a product problem. early on, during a discussion with the client in our office, i suggested using participant observation in stores to study “the underwear clan of the fashion tribe.” my jargon was not well received. with a severe glance and eyes rolling, adam kicked me under the table and told me later to keep my anthropology to myself. a few months later adam asked a couple of us to watch how bras were sold in macy’s and gimbels (upscale department stores). as far as i knew, we did not have store permission for the visit. today, we call such observers “mystery shoppers.” i was satisfied that we were conducting in-store participant observation. we encountered overwhelming frustration finding clerks for help. in upscale department stores in the early 1970s, bras were too sexy to be seen in public and were kept hidden behind the counters in drawers. a clerk produced the journal of business anthropology, special issue 2, spring 2016 84 bra size and her own favorite brand or, if specified, the customer’s requested brand. after the account executives reported to adam, converting the clerks to warner’s brands became the goal to increase sales. with adam in the lead, during 1971, the agency created sales promotions directed at ambivalent clerks to convince them to retrieve a warner’s bra for customers to buy. some promotions were designed so that clerks could engage a customer’s attention while highlighting warner’s concern for their love life. other promotions were presents to clerks to make their lives more cheerful. for consumers, the new year’s promotion featured astrology charts, so clerks could read a customer’s horoscope. for valentine’s day, we created a palm reading kit, “warner’s love is in the palm of your hand,” so that clerks could focus customers’ attention on warner’s brand while reading their love lines. this was accomplished using a transparent acetate diagram, with copy implying that warner’s love touch helped predict the future, placed over a customer’s palm. during february, the clerk also gave each customer a booklet offering advice on “50 ways to please your lover.” the booklet offered tips on how to properly compliment your lover, how to massage and pamper him. adam said it targeted the younger “cosmo girl” who read cosmopolitan magazine for advice to keep her man happy. warner’s also sent store clerks birthday greetings and easter flowers in the top markets where warner’s was sold. for december, we created a booklet of warner’s recipes―“guide to holiday shortcuts for tired salesgirls”―that would help clerks (“girls!”) make better holiday dishes for parties. “girls” was the typical term for female store clerks and product buyers. the guide noted, “it’s all from love touch™ the great new doublelknit bra from warner’s. happy holiday.” unfortunately, none of these efforts increased sales at the six “upstairs” stores across the country where warner’s was sold. ultimately, warner’s increased the advertising budget and the agency produced two print ads for sunday newspapers and national magazines. the most sensuous ad said: “indulge yourself in warner’s. no matter what goes on outside, you feel like more of a woman with warner’s underneath.” adam was repositioning warner’s image from old fashioned to youthful, sexy and erotic while challenging maidenform’s ads that depicted bras worn as outer garments. finally, our staff visited warner’s showroom and saw how store buyers chose product for the following season from rows of bras hung on hangers. it was insightful. adam conceived a counter stand that he coined the “money tree” and designed it with arms to hold bras on hangers. it became a revolutionary solution that moved bras out of the drawers into public view; the same way bras were sold to the trade (wholesalers and retailers) in warner’s showroom. while warner’s vice-president thought it was a good counteract to playtex’s packaging appeal, most male management at warner’s thought it was in poor taste. we conducted a test with the stand and the bras sold out quickly. the money tree was olsen / liminality in advertising 85 redesigned as a floor stand. adam’s point-of-purchase innovation was the first retail self-service device for the bra lingerie category. warner’s eventually moved from eight to number two share of the bra market (olsen 2003). after introducing warner’s money tree to retailers, we discovered competitors using it, too. our next trade ad said, “take it from warner’s, everyone else is.” adam wilson & friends became the go-to agency for creative solutions. the print ad campaign and bra stand dramatically boosted sales. by 1973, working with a production company, adam created four tv commercials that ran in the largest cities where warner’s was sold. this case represents the potential of marketing as a force for cultural change (olsen 2003). adam wilson & friends helped revolutionize how bras were sold on public display ultimately facilitating competition while enhancing consumer choice. figure 1: changes in author's cognitive dissonance during warner's bra campaign at the same time, i had problems with the promotions (see figure 1). the warner’s graph describes their year-round sales promotion campaign that, to my mind, objectified women and sexualized the product in an unseemly way. store clerks received a different promotion each holiday to engage with potential customers while they decided which bra to buy. the colored bars represent my escalating discomfort (cognitive dissonance) every time i discussed this campaign. with recognition and buzz on madison avenue, our agency was journal of business anthropology, special issue 2, spring 2016 86 ready to grow. marketing was exciting, i thought adam was brilliant and i was hooked! at night i took classes at parsons in copywriting, and at the art students league and school of visual arts in illustration, while continuing anthropology at the graduate faculty of the new school for social research (1973-1988). 1975: paternalism: franklin society federal savings & loan association in a conversation i had with adam before his death, he confessed that i was the model for his franklin bank campaign. i was part of a growing cohort of young feminists redefining marriage and motherhood, clueless about investing and in need of financial advice. when the agency acquired the account for franklin society federal savings and loan association in 1975 their main competition was irving bank. irving promoted a personal banker in their ads that concluded with “call irving.” however, our research found no one named irving, or any personal banker to speak with, in their branches. to counter their campaign, adam’s creative solution was “the answer man” for each franklin branch. franklin’s target was retirees and women. the strategy included sales promotions and an ad campaign. the in-bank promotion included a series of educational booklets placed in a stand on bank counters to prompt discussion and initiate savings accounts. each title helped women toward financial independence: a woman’s guide to money; a woman’s guide to home repairs; how to shop more wisely; how sewing can save you money; how to make your husband rich; how a single girl can save a little money. all advised talking to the answer man about opening a savings account. adam did not realize how objectionable this paternalistic approach was to progressive minded women of the 1970s like me. as a fledgling account assistant, i counseled against this approach (see figure 2). the graph describes our agency’s solution to attract new depositors for franklin’s savings accounts by offering relationship-building self-help booklets and an ad campaign. the graph demonstrates my heightened dissonance with the creative concept that positioned women in need of a man or needing the bank’s (answer man) to help them save money. the client loved the campaign and the male staff in our agency all supported the creative direction. it only made me anxious. olsen / liminality in advertising 87 figure 2: changes in author's cognitive dissonance during franklin society federal savings and loan association campaign the ad campaign poignantly reflects a single woman’s dilemma in a stagnant economy―the mid-1970s. it ran in the daily news, the new york post, the new york times and newsday. targeted to working class planning for the future, the first ad displayed a large social security card with a headline suggesting: “if this is your retirement fund, you better read this ad.” the second ad with a photograph of a smiling woman hugging her new fur coat close to her chest ran with the headline: “if you didn't marry a rich man, it's not too late” (see photo a). it was a time when tellers were female and officers were male, the ad prompts women needing guidance to talk to an answer man. both ads end with branch addresses and the name of each answer man. the tag line double entendre “our interest doesn't stop with your money” reinforced an early example of relationship marketing. while other banks advertised the interest earned, franklin's solution solved real problems with a customer-focused approach (olsen 2009). the campaign was a success and raised the bank’s value so that within two years it merged journal of business anthropology, special issue 2, spring 2016 88 with a larger bank. photo a: franklin society federal savings and loan association print ad 1979 – parochialism: abc’s touch of home™ in the late 1970s our agency worked with abc pictures international to promote their movies abroad. in 1978, they approached adam with a proposal to market a new venture. touch of home would be sold by their video sales division. the idea was to provide abc network programming packaged on cassettes to u.s. multinational employees and their families living overseas. they found that repositioned families yearned for reconnection to stateside lives. with the product’s international intent, adam finally suggested i contribute anthropological input. as abc created their own acculturation program and a monthly magazine, (similar to tv guide) called “touch of home guide,” there was little to add. however, i worked on the account as account executive. the agency produced an advertising campaign, the leave-behind (an abbreviated sales brochure given to prospective buyers) and a larger sales brochure. the campaign olsen / liminality in advertising 89 targeting corporate executives supported a practical idea to help employees (male) with wives and children stay happy for the duration of their overseas contract. the media plan included advertising in time, fortune, forbes, u.s. news & world report, newsweek, business week, the wall street journal, and the new york times. as a double-duty tactic, we used the ads as visuals in the brochures. the first ad featured a happy family―mom, dad, son and daughter. it addressed the cost factor to send a family overseas with the headline: “it costs you over $200,000 to send a family overseas. now abc helps make sure they stay.” the copy followed: you transferred four of your top people to four widely scattered locations around the world. and each brought a family who’s been homesick since the day they arrived. it will take more than the usual bonuses, perks, allotments and allowances to make them happy. what they want is home. … the same programming that’s made abc america’s #1 network.… the second ad, with visual reproduction of the “touch of home weekly program guide,” addressed the fact that an unhappy, bored family affects the productivity of the employee. this fear was relieved by the headline: “now your overseas productivity problems can be solved in 48 hours.” the copy concluded that, ”a man who goes home to an unhappy family every night comes to work unhappy in the morning. and that can mean major productivity problems for you….” journal of business anthropology, special issue 2, spring 2016 90 photo b: abc’s touch of home print ad the third ad (see photo b) solves the problem by visually showing how the family can take their home with them on the sojourn abroad. the visual metaphor suggests that the resolution of homesickness is plugging in a cassette of abc tv programming. the retouched photograph in the visual shows a businessman’s hand clutching an attaché handle attached to the roof of his house as he lifts it off its suburban street. the headline saying “now they can take it with them wherever they go,” was followed by copy that touch of home was mother’s helper, too: american mothers know how important television can be in raising children. it’s entertainment, it’s education, it’s a friend, it’s a pacifier and it’s a playmate for a child who’s sick in bed. but most important, it gives the mother the time to take care of other things. and if she has a harder job to do, you know that he will, too. a good night’s television means a good day’s work… the effective and sadly true theme that families cannot live without tv as an entertainment pacifier critical for employee productivity continued through both brochures where we reproduced the ads for repetitive effect. our touch of home sales brochure (1979:14) promoted “abc’s olsen / liminality in advertising 91 family orientation service” that abc produced in-house. it read: your employees and their families can begin adjusting to their new country overseas even before they leave the united states. using both recorded and printed material in a total information package, they’ll become acquainted with the people, the customs, traditions and the cuisine and learn the important words and phrases that they need to get started in their new country. it’s the kind of orientation program that eases their transition through this difficult period of adjustment to life overseas and continues as long as they’re there. the end result was a brilliant campaign that addressed many complications faced by american employees and their families during overseas assignments. as will be elaborated on in the discussion section, i often discussed how the contradiction that american television programming delivered on video cassettes watched inside the home, perhaps all day, conflicted with the promise of easy acculturation initiated by abc’s orientation program. again, i was told to keep my concerns to myself, creating cognitive dissonance for me (see figure 3). as can be seen on the graph, my cognitive dissonance scale was highest for this campaign because, as an anthropologist in graduate school, i was asked to contribute an opinion that was ignored. this campaign defied my anthropological belief that travel involves immersion in another culture. as part of my portfolio (along with the previous two campaigns) that i used to attract new clients, i wrestled with the touch of home concept during every sales pitch. journal of business anthropology, special issue 2, spring 2016 92 figure 3: changes in author's cognitive dissonance during abc’s touch of home campaign lessons from the log reflecting on work performed is a chance to reexamine our own doubts, insecurities and troubled relationships. i found that corporate culture was historically contoured by socioeconomic dynamics which permeated positioning strategies and campaign themes. i was similar to many young women at the time reevaluating their own sexual mores and life ambitions experiencing various degrees of liminality. from the beginning in 1972, i felt great ambivalence toward advertising as a career where anxiety ruled initiated by what i observed as a cult of the boss. in both adam wilson & friends and imc, adam as boss, was sole creative director and guru―hailed as invincible by all clients. “many companies depend on a guru” (mccracken 2009:6) and all our clients considered adam their guru to dispel the fear of uncertainty. in advertising, uncertainty exists everywhere: getting new business, executing campaigns, getting client approval, reaching deadlines, selling a product, and getting paid on time. olsen / liminality in advertising 93 brownlie (1998:121) observes that, “uncertainty itself does not confer power, but rather coping with this uncertainty does…” and adam was a master at manipulating uncertainty. to adam, money was the salve to uncertainty. his primary policy above all was to make money, often using a heavy hand that came with human cost and great employee churn. my log reflects frustration with creative solutions and cruel management tactics coupled with survival strategies. as early as 1973, my log states: instinctively we know the good from the bad. there are two ways to reinforce behavior: positively through setting an example and providing a reward [nurturing] healthy egos and strong relationships and negatively, through authoritarian coercion and punishment producing intimidation and low self-esteem. knowing why we do what we do is freedom (nd). the agency culture i encountered was similar to briody’s discovery in gm manufacturing plants―it was a “blame” culture (2013:135-36). at adam wilson & friends, nobody―from the creative director-boss-guru to account executives, art directors, copywriters and traffic personnel (project tracker)―ever took responsibility for errors simply to avoid adam’s wrath. most problems stemmed from inadequate communication between adam and account executives and from them to copywriters and bullpen artists who took the brunt of the blame because doing the ad mechanicals twice pushed the limit of media deadlines. friendly suggestions to remedy procedure only solicited further tirades. my log repeatedly cites passages of frustration and remorse, as well as gaining incredible strength and fortitude. one cannot remain in a liminal state for too long without negative consequences. i came to realize that the contestation of wills was played out in part through eye control of the other’s stare, so i learned to look at intimidators with my strong eye. “between two people one of them will have a stronger eye muscle. that is the person who dominates the relationship” (log, 5/2/74). i discovered that if i returned the look with my strong eye, my attitude changed to confidence and i could not be bullied. a later passage notes, “the politics of intimidation is thought control” (log 6/29/76). across the industry, adam was known for having a tyrannical personality and for being hard to work for, which accounted for the employee churn. by 1979, in total frustration, i wrote, “for years i couldn’t find the words and now i cannot find the voice. at least my pen still flows. [my] drawings are diagrams of the heart” (log 1/23/79). while i found release in drawing and philosophizing in my log, some events were harder to process with a participant-observer distance. an account executive stole $200,000 from the adam wilson & friends agency. in addition, the log continued that we had another crisis when our production manager (steve) created a shadow company to siphon funds away from the agency. i wrote in my log, journal of business anthropology, special issue 2, spring 2016 94 unbeknownst to adam or me, steve formed a separate company called scanagraphics from which he billed the clients for jobs done by other companies … he bragged [to a secretary] at having stolen $75,000 through obtaining our commissions from media and from kickbacks. he took the money to the bahamas… what can come from swimming with this tide? (november 1979 nd) it was a time for survival, not only for the agency, but also, i saw an opportunity to find greater autonomy by starting a sister agency, imc marketing group with adam as creative director. i did not hire thieves. however, i soon observed: this is a journal of frustration. i’m writing because i can no longer continue working in advertising without a critical perspective, without some kind of divorce from reality. if i can survive as a participant-observer of my daily experience, perhaps then i may maintain both my sanity and my job (log, 10/20/80). a week later the reflection continues with my understanding that the most used phrase in the business is “cover your ass.” i wanted to leave, but felt a personal responsibility to the agency and to adam. this is when my log becomes a purposeful tool for protection against lies and broken promises. “uncertainty and confusion encourage us to make insightful connections in apparent disunity and see what we might not normally see” (malefyt and morais 2012:84). my detour now had a clear purpose to use my time to work on advertising accounts with clear focus to earn the ph.d. in anthropology. discussion: critical introspection with implications and lessons for practitioners this critical analysis of the three campaign cases juxtaposed against survival strategies in a dysfunctional corporate culture has relevance for practicing anthropologists when negotiating their own emotional labor. survival strategies as lessons learned during the field experience include the application of anthropological methods: participant observation, maintaining detailed introspective field notes, and a longitudinal approach which, years later, allows a reflexive critical examination of the campaign archives. many insights emerged from this process. they align with recent research in consumer behavior and marketing literature advocating introspection and a critical perspective. gould (2008:311-312) notes that “while researchers sometimes recognize the personal subjectivity present in their own critical practices, they nonetheless do not fully reflect about it introspectively or integrate it in a way that demonstrates how it informs their work.” he writes extensively on introspection with olsen / liminality in advertising 95 practical advice to perfect this methodology. he continues, “i argue that introspection concerning one’s subjectivity is a key, if not the key to the construction and comprehension of critical thought (i.e., authors write and readers read in ways that are both self-and culturally embedded)” (p.313). while analyzing the cases presented, i realize that i never viewed marketing products through the lens of the marketer, but instead focused on product meaning for consumers buying the products. following the critical marketing paradigm (saren et al. 2007; tadajewski and brownlie 2008), o’shaughnessy advocates that researchers use “ethnospsychology as the study of folk psychology” to understand “consumer actions from the consumer’s point of view (2008:158). considering the neophyte role mentored by a guru, one reviewer noted that mentoring is similar to the shamanic quest with incorporation of a new identity at journey’s end. however, my guru, while ahead of the marketing curve, often proselytized antiquated social values. since i was part of the team that used our clients’ campaigns to get new business, each case was problematic: warner’s bra objectified women; franklin society federal savings and loan association’s promulgated women’s financial independence while deferring a paternalistic authority to men; and the abc touch of home video package containing american ethnocentric focused entertainment for multinational employees’ families, violated my anthropological imperative for cultural immersion. during the execution of the campaigns, my intuition told me that many parts of our creative direction were in poor taste and socially incorrect. in this reflective narrative, i have used the trope of cognitive dissonance with graphs to visually explain this intuitive logic. in the following section where i critically dissect client ads and sales promotions, figures 1-3 visually demonstrate the level of cognitive dissonance i experienced with each project. the warner’s bra campaign the warner’s bra sales promotion and advertising campaign was my introduction to advertising. as a freelance artist, i became familiar with the campaign that led to the brilliant strategy that changed the entire industry. i was smitten by the excitement and limitless expense accounts that allowed us to entertain clients at the finest midtown restaurants. adam even had his favorite table at the laurent restaurant where he and i usually had dinner, opposite salvador dali and his wife, gala’s table, when they came to new york and stayed at the lombardy hotel upstairs. it was a schizophrenic life between day and night, work and weekend. a neophyte in training at the agency, i worked primarily in the art department. adam promoted favored employees quickly to new positions and welcomed all opinions for creative inspiration. i was filled with good ideas and rarely held my tongue even when advised not to speak. as figure 1 shows, my participant observation came with journal of business anthropology, special issue 2, spring 2016 96 escalating liminality or cognitive dissonance. i was new to the industry and warner’s bra was my first exposure to the licentious logic that sex sells more than bland reason-why positioning. while enjoying the freedom of the 1960’s-inspired sexual revolution, i was socially conditioned to be a prude (olsen 2006:175). i was shocked by the warner’s campaign. the sales promotions registered on my cognitive dissonance barometer between 30 and 80 percent. adam’s condemnation of my anthropological contribution that continued throughout my tenure topped the scale. the horoscope readings, birthday cards and easter flowers were the most benign. at the time, those dabbling in astrology often wrote horoscope charts for friends. ”love is in the palm of your hand” included a rendering of palm lines on clear acetate predicted a customer’s future. the acetate said, “your future is a present from “love touch’ by warner’s.” it seems contrived and trivial. the consumer booklet “50 ways to please your lover” was more difficult for me to connect with because it cast women as sex objects needing instruction to compliment, pleasure, and keep their lovers satisfied. most women at the agency were embarrassed by it. it was the only promotion that was lost to posterity due to its popularity with men. all samples vanished by the 1980s. the christmas recipe book “guide to holiday shortcuts for tired sales girls” stereotyped female clerks as “girls” rather than acknowledging them as women performing a critical job. it would be a long time before service workers became respected “sales associates.” the booklet has a cover photograph showing an exhausted, middle-aged woman at home sinking into her easy chair. she is incredibly disheveled. her mouth is turned into a frown and a message is pinned to her blouse saying, “may i help you”? yes, this woman clearly needed a reward for being overworked in the lingerie department. it was a time of staff cut backs in all retail stores. the message demonstrated that warner’s sympathized with her situation. however, it seems ingenuous to assume she was ready to cook, bake, and make intricate drinks to entertain guests at a christmas party. she needed a rest! every time i produced these promotions to tell the campaign story, i gagged on the presentation while also remembering adam’s protestation to keep my opinions to myself. early on, i realized this career would not be an easy fit. but i loved the creativity and looked forward to new accounts with creative challenges. franklin society federal savings and loan association the franklin bank campaign targeted the vulnerable working class and women experiencing liminal economic insecurity. it resonated a high level of cognitive dissonance. at the time i was in my own liminal zone after divorce and particularly sensitive to the advertising and promotional booklet copy. during a conversation with him in 2002, he olsen / liminality in advertising 97 admitted using my experience to target financially insecure women. as the assistant on the account, i realized i could benefit from advice in the first three booklets (see figure 2). the sixth, “how to make your husband rich,” was particularly irksome because my ex had left me for a wealthier woman and never had to work again. i resisted the notion that franklin could help me “save money” by sewing! ironically, it was adam who benefitted from my sewing and my being between work and school; i had little time to sew. i resented the fifth booklet “how a single girl can save a little money,” because i was in graduate school and well educated, yet was paid less than my less educated male peers. most workers in entry-level positions had too little income to save. the first ad featured a social security card, paired with advice not to rely on it for retirement. the visual and headline captured attention with a call to the obvious and stigmatized the truly impoverished unable to save. the second ad with a woman in fur coat, said “if you didn’t marry a rich man, it’s not too late.” it played on a common theme that women marry for money. all we needed was a bank account as surrogate for a man’s support and an answer man for help. i hated the creative direction. my advice suggesting a more progressive campaign positioning a stronger female using her savings to fulfill her potential fell on deaf ears. adam convinced the client his ideas would produce results and they did. in conclusion, the strategy raised franklin’s market share enough so that it merged with a larger bank. i used the franklin campaign to solicit banking clients in the 1980s. abc’s touch of home for abc’s touch of home, an anthropological perspective was appreciated and voiced in their in-house orientation program. the intent was to keep the family happy and the employee productive. it was a rare opportunity for a marketing anthropologist in the role of account executive. unfortunately, the results isolated families from experiencing local culture (see figure 3). the brochures we produced were intended to convince multinational corporate executives why overseas employees needed daily american television that satellite transmission at the time was incapable of delivering. the touch of home sales brochure (1979) suggests that everyone’s happiness depends on familiar tv viewing because “television has become a cornerstone of the american lifestyle” (p.9). the campaign direction empathized with the expatriate condition of “disorientation and boredom,” to which an anthropologist might suggest taking a walk to experience local culture and make new friends. upon reflection, i think the account was perfect for an anthropology student immersed in the language of liminality from van gennep (1960) and turner (1969), who was studying liminal people in transition. our campaign eased the problem for dislocated families who journal of business anthropology, special issue 2, spring 2016 98 played a critical role in employee productivity. expatriate spouses and families experience their own liminality accompanying husbands and fathers overseas. briody and chrisman conducted in-depth research on the acculturation experiences of general motors’ expatriate employees and their families adapting to new locations when posted abroad. similar to the problem that abc was trying to solve, they found that the employees (all were male) could integrate more easily because work absorbed most of their time. briody and chrisman (1991) found that adjustment was more problematic for the spouses (all were female), because filling time “related to their relatively unstructured daily schedule and their lack of social networks, particularly at the outset of overseas assignment” (p.268). in one interview, an employee sympathized with his wife and children, because they “’had hours and hours in which they had to face the unknown’” (p.267). abc’s touch of home campaign addressed this “unknown” by turning attention to the importance of keeping the family entertained. my conflict with touch of home reached a new level of cognitive dissonance. cultural exposure and acculturation should have meant a joyful immersion in another life experience during their assignment. tv programs from home seemingly aborted a perfect opportunity to establish cross-cultural friendships and memories. again, i acquiesced my cultural sensitivity to a client’s product needs. with satellite transmission of programming on the horizon, american television syndicators soon supplied the global marketplace. adam wilson & friends joined this process, producing sales brochures and ads for our syndicators selling abroad. refuge came with my intensified focus on anthropology and on illustrating the way of the shaman for michael harner (1980), who became my thesis advisor, with shirley lindenbaum and william roseberry joining my committee. conclusion absorbed by the advertising world in a state of liminality, my perspective was incongruent with agency mores. moeran (2014:4) suggests that scholars should continue to critique and “problematize the taken-forgranted, …[and be] not afraid to criticize, on the basis of their extended research, business forms and practices they deem to be unethical or morally reprehensible.” in retrospect, it was a dysfunctional workplace because of the “conflation of boss and company” (carrier 2013:122). i didn’t realize how dysfunctional the agency had become until rereading my log, which has more to say about personnel chaos than account management. many problems, unfortunately, stemmed from the arrogance of the boss-creative director’s personality. employees feared his intimidation and tantrums. however, i shared our clients’ admiration for his marketing knowledge and creative solutions. indeed, few knew the quiet side of adam. he was kind and considerate and loyal to the few olsen / liminality in advertising 99 friends he had. as a single father, he was devoted to his sons. most of his down time was spent at museums with his sons or home painting at his easel, reading, studying military history, and painting toy soldiers he bought to add to his vast collection. adam was the creative guru of the agency and the mastermind of each campaign theme that empowered target markets. even on weekends, adam never stopped working. he used every opportunity to observe people in his quest for cultural knowledge that could be converted into campaign solutions that satisfied customers. the warner’s and franklin bank campaigns were a testament to his perception that the 1970s were a time when many women were experiencing their own liminal passage to sexual and financial independence. marketers assist in such transitions by providing products for identity play. our sexualized campaign theme to sell bras paralleled the sexual revolution of the 1960s and 1970s. warner’s bra empowered women by providing consumer choice in retail stores using the “open merchandising concept” (olsen 2003:127). this change in practice stimulated competition in the category that continues unabated today. our agency’s effort was a revolution for lingerie that precipitated a cultural turn in the marketplace. with the love touch sales promotion and advertising campaign, our agency participated in the feedback loop by which social mores and cultural attitudes were transformed. similarly, the franklin society federal savings and loan campaign reflects socioeconomic dynamics that drew young women to college and into the work force during the 1960s and 1970s. by providing the fatherly figure of an answer man with emotionally charged ads and condescending self-help booklets, the campaign took a paternal interest in the single woman’s need for practical advice to save money. touch of home solved a productivity problem for american corporations expanding abroad by shipping favorite television shows on cassettes to their employees and their families overseas. as previously noted, the acculturation problem for spouses and children was more problematic than for the male employees. the unhappy family was a window of opportunity for our client abc pictures international and an inspiration for our agency’s campaign theme. the metaphorical home was their tv set; abc’s network programming became the home companion for nostalgic families not comfortable in their foreign environment. from my perspective, the product isolated families from the host culture while the campaign pandered to a parochial niche dependent on american television shows. however, by adopting the program, each family had more control over their daily circumstances. the campaign themes followed the academic marketing dictum to satisfy the wants and needs of target markets. this does not suggest that all creative solutions were executed with optimal consideration for sociopolitical correctness. these three campaigns, as demonstrated by journal of business anthropology, special issue 2, spring 2016 100 the three figures, prompted a series of liminal dilemmas for me. the cognitive dissonance began when i worked freelance in the agency on warner’s campaign before joining full time in 1972. at a meeting sometime in 1971, i offered a suggestion to use anthropological participant observation with bra customers that was rebuffed by adam. it was the first time i felt like i did not belong. every subsequent suggestion using anthropological insight prompted adam to respond with variations on the theme, “leave your anthropology at school.” his antipathy to my anthropology was numbing. i persisted with opinionated judgment calls whenever i thought his creative direction warranted oversight. while my freelance role with the agency was with the art department, during 1971 i sporadically observed the evolution of the love touch bra campaign that continued after i joined full time. my initial reaction to the trade ads was benign. the liminal point of separation started when i began to distance myself from the love and sex creative direction while working on art renderings in the bullpen. by the end of 1972, i realized that sex was a prevailing advertising solution to break through the clutter to get noticed. during my transition phase, i developed a thicker skin and relaxed my prudishness. the media, magazines, television, movies and even fashion, promoting the mini skirt, were exuding sexuality as they percolated through a changing culture. with incorporation, i recognized that the campaign was characteristic of the era in which it evolved by symbolizing women in their lingerie as sex objects. i professionalized my feelings and swallowed my pride, determined to continue working toward my ph.d. during the franklin bank campaign, i was more actively involved as assistant account executive engaging in bank observations and client meetings as well as interacting with the art department. figure 2 reveals a slower emergence of cognitive dissonance that escalated dramatically. the liminal process began when the booklets became personal. i liked to sew, i needed to save my money, but i definitely did not want to make a husband rich. separation was immediate and visceral. the campaign made me sick. the advertisements made me realize i needed a career i could contribute to for a lifetime and not marry again for a very long time. i was strengthened through the transition by drawing in my log. there are pictures of powerful, earth mother females pregnant with the earth (as seen from outer space) floating in their wombs. i used my dominant eye to focus on other eyes in conversations with adam, clients and employees. this helped strengthen my resolve not to capitulate. i felt personally empowered as i came through this passage. by 1977, incorporation was complete with a different sense of my self. i was strong enough to say goodbye to my personal relationship with adam and empowered by my conviction i would earn my ph.d. while still working with him. this was the most powerful personal experience of liminality during my career because it was so personal. olsen / liminality in advertising 101 touch of home, on the other hand, represented a professional contestation of wills. the client had a product that it believed solved an all-too-real corporate dilemma. adam had a creative solution that satisfied the problem while i had my own anthropological agenda. because i was now fully committed to my anthropology curriculum, the touch of home program made no sense to me. the separation phase began. as a marketing account executive, it solved family homesickness and raised employee productivity to a degree. as soon as i got the account, i began to pull away, cognitively separating marketing from anthropology. i was truly “betwixt and between.” as we executed the campaign, my protestation was ignored, but i was in transition with a plan. my role on the account was keeping records, getting client approval and making sure that the copy and art proceeded in a timely manner to meet due dates. ultimately, it led to my incorporation phase. i incorporated a new professional identity that coincided with a major disruption in the agency mandating a timely separation of accounts. i also incorporated imc with the hope that the future agency would be more manageable under the rubric that adam, theoretically, would be working for me. in my experience, these three campaigns suggest that the liminal zone and passage can be a learning experience. when consciously applied for personal empowerment, the process can be life changing. this article has implications for anthropological training and practice because it demonstrates how different methodologies can be used for insight and reflection. it critically probes marketing practice using traditional anthropological methods; participant-observation, field site journal notes and longitudinal analysis. by presenting the campaign cases from the perspective of the participant in the marketing practice, i connect introspection of cognitive dissonance in a reflexive retrospection and suggested these strategies for surviving liminal conflict (zones). thus, this article presents a multi-technique methodology for the practicing anthropologist’s toolbox. sunderland and denny (2003:192) suggest that as investigative anthropologists “we are generally listening and looking for the “invisible’ cultural meanings and categories that organize people’s perceptions and actions.” from the mad men era of the 1970s with warner’s bra, franklin society federal savings and loan association to abc picture’s touch of home, clients offered products as cultural solutions that solved real problems initiated by historical circumstances. their campaigns and my field notes helped pry open “the invisible” to understand how liminality appeared within this time frame and how i learned to cope with and overcome the imbalances of gender, class and moral issues. acknowledgments the author thanks the reviewers for their wise suggestions, maryann mccabe for inspirational advice, antonella fabri for her close reading of journal of business anthropology, special issue 2, spring 2016 102 an earlier draft, and costas hadjicharalambous for his part in preparing the figures. my deepest gratitude extends to elizabeth briody for her patient diligence editing this paper. references arnould, e.j. and c. thompson. 2005. consumer culture theory (cct): twenty years of research. journal of consumer research 31: 868-882. beech, n. 2011. liminality and the practices of identity reconstruction. human relations 64(2): 285-302. briody, e.k. and j.b. chrisman. 1991. cultural adaption on overseas assignments. human organization 50(3): 264-280. briody, e.k. 2013. collaboration and anthropology in corporate work. journal of business anthropology 2(2): 133-167. brownlie, d. 1998. high minds and low deeds: on being blind to creativity in strategic marketing. journal of strategic marketing 6: 117130. carrier, j.g. 2013. business literature and understandings of business. journal of business anthropology 2(2): 120-132. cracknell, a. 2011. the real mad men: the renegades of madison avenue and the golden age of advertising. philadelphia, pa: running press. gould, s.j. 2008. introspection as critical marketing thought, critical marketing thought as introspection. in critical marketing: issues in contemporary marketing. m. tadajewski and d. brownlie, eds. chichester, west sussex, uk: john wiley & sons, 311-328. hackley, c. 2002. the panoptic role of advertising agencies in the production of consumer culture. consumption, markets and culture 5(3): 211-229. harner, m. 1980. the way of the shaman. new 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elliott, a. shankar and m. catterall, eds. 2007. critical marketing: defining the field. oxford, uk: butterworth-heinemann. schouten, j.w. 1991. personal rites of passage and reconstruction of self. na advances in consumer research. 18, r.h. holman and m.r. solomon, eds. provo, ut: assoc. for consumer research: 49-51. sunderland, p.l. and r.m. denny. 2003. psychology vs. anthropology: where is culture in marketplace ethnography? in advertising cultures. t. de waal malefyt and r.j. morais, eds. new york, ny: berg: 187-202. tadajewski, m. and d. brownlie, eds. 2008. critical marketing: issues in contemporary marketing. chichester, west sussex, uk: john wiley & sons. tempest, s. and k. starkey. 2004. the effects of liminality on individual and organizational learning. organization studies 25(4): 507-527. touch of home™. 1979. sales brochure. abc pictures international; abc video sales division. turner, v. 1969. the ritual process: structure and anti-structure. new york, ny: aldine. journal of business anthropology, special issue 2, spring 2016 104 turner, v. 1979. betwixt and between: the liminal period in rites de passage. in reader in comparative religion: an anthropological approach. w.a. lessa and e.z. vogt, eds. new york, ny: harper and row publishers, 234-243. van gennep, a. 1960. the rites of passage. translated by m.b. vizedom and g.l. caffee. chicago, il: university of chicago press. barbara olsen, ph.d. is professor of marketing in the state university of new york at old westbury where she has taught consumer behavior, branding and marketing courses for 27 years. she obtained her ph.d. in anthropology from the new school for social research while building a career in advertising. her current research interests explore the sociocultural dimension of consumption and consumer engagement with art, music and lifestyle choices. her articles have appeared in the journal of business research, consumption markets and culture, and human organization, and as chapters in numerous books. she may be contacted at olsenb@oldwestbury.edu mailto:olsenb@oldwestbury.edu working in liminal states: fluidity and transformation in organizations maryann mccabe and elizabeth k. briody this special issue of the journal of business anthropology grew out of a panel, “liminality and crossing boundaries in applied anthropology,” held at the 2013 american anthropological association annual meeting in chicago, il. the authors presented papers seeking to explore how business anthropologists continually operate in and across boundaries and work in liminal states and spaces. they called on the fruitful concept of liminality to make sense of their work because business anthropologists are enmeshed in complex material assemblages with diverse actors, products, and markets, discourses, and ideologies. the session led to a renewed consideration of liminality and of how embracing liminal space and time affords anthropologists opportunity to collaborate with others, act within multiple realities, and be change agents in organizations where they are working and/or consulting. this issue pursues the “betwixt and between” idea of liminality (turner 1967:93), a transitory stage associated with life stage rituals, and examines it from a perspective of enduring fluidity and movement. whether applying their skills to consumer research or organizational culture, business anthropologists are constantly engaging with people in different disciplines, professions and functional areas of organizations. as members of teams conducting collaborative ethnography, business anthropologists are continually translating different worlds of meaning to page 1 of 12 jba special issue 2: 1-12, spring 2016 © the author(s) 2016 issn 2245-4217 www.cbs.dk/jba journal of business anthropology, special issue 2, spring 2016 2 reach consensus and bring their projects to fruition. the papers in this issue describe liminal experiences of anthropologists working with corporations and other organizations. they show how creative and productive an expanded notion of the liminal state has become in practicing business anthropology. taken as a whole, the papers offer a view of liminality that is oriented to understanding the global economy, its increasingly diverse and mobile work force, and the recurring need for innovation in competitive marketplaces. expanding the notion of liminality the idea of liminality has occupied a central place in anthropological thought since its earliest conception by arnold van gennep (1960) and key works by victor turner (1957, 1967, 2007). for both of these scholars, liminality was a transitory stage through which the social person or community passes. from their perspective, liminality was confined in time and space, specifically in rituals, so that there was a beginning and an end to liminal time and space. van gennep defined three phases in life stage rituals such as birth and marriage: separation from society; a period of transition or liminality; and reincorporation into society. passing through the liminal phase is a transformational experience, according to van gennep, because the social person assumes new rights and obligations as a member of society. turner, concerned with the social order, also considered the liminal phase transformational because rituals resolve and restore contradictory principles of social structure such as the paradox between matriliny and virilocality in ndembu life. his analysis of the symbolism involved in ndembu rituals provides deep understanding of the sensory experience in rituals and the semantic structure of contradictions in ndembu society. following van gennep and turner, the authors in this issue take up the idea of liminality as a transformational process, to explain the roles of the anthropologist working in the business world and, in some cases, the changes experienced by those collaborating with anthropologists. in contrast to the idea of liminality as a transitory stage that one passes through and completes once and for all (for example, puberty), we can conceive of liminality as a fluid state, or situation, where one is constantly moving between different worlds. anthropologists engage in collaborative ethnography and planned change, where projects with clients require translation of at least some aspects of the worldviews of other project participants. they are well suited to this task. moving across boundaries and translating meaning from one context to another is an essential part of the anthropological endeavor. in business settings, anthropologists assume the role of trying to make different points of view mutually intelligible to people working on client projects. liminality becomes a part of everyday work life as business anthropologists become involved in project after project. even if some projects include the same mccabe and briody / working in liminal states 3 people or people from the same disciplines, professions, and functional areas of an organization, translation is ongoing. the practices of project participants reflect different ontologies, which, in the latourian sense, imply that the process of translation goes on forever because we cannot speak in the ontology of others, but only try to represent it (latour 2013). based on latour’s view of the translation of knowledge and practices, business anthropologists are always working in a fluid and never-ending state of liminality. their experience differs from traditional fieldwork where anthropologists enter and leave a site after an extended stay. doing collaborative ethnographic fieldwork is the everyday working experience of business anthropologists. the liminal state in which they work allows them to act as organizational change agents based on the research, analysis and teamwork they perform. liminal movement is central to business anthropology. given the participatory nature of collaborative ethnography and its potential for change, the anthropologist is engaged in planning and negotiating the design and use of client projects with other team members, while also being involved in observing the latter’s practices. this observation of other team members, what luhmann (2012) calls “second-order observation,” is purposeful. as luhmann notes, it “entails active intervention in a situated manner” (2012:59). that is, the anthropologist takes on the role of team facilitator in the collaborative process. while coming to grips with his/her own perceptions of situations, the anthropologist is trying to understand and translate the perceptions of fellow team members (who may include other ethnographers, organizational members and/or consumers). continual interaction creates a paradox in which the anthropologist is always detached, yet connected. that is, the anthropologist repeatedly detaches himself or herself from one reality in order to connect with another over the life of the project. the movement is continuous. thus, liminality is a more active and lasting state in business anthropology than the transitional stage envisioned in earlier theoretical conceptions. liminality in business anthropology one way to describe the work that anthropologists do in the business world is to say that they are involved in making something new related to the design, marketing and delivery of products and services, or to an assessment of the organizational culture and its potential for change. they conduct collaborative ethnography and engage in innovation and change to: (1) design products that will be useful to consumers, beneficial to society and sustainable in relation to the environment; (2) develop marketing and advertising communications to foster resonance between consumers and brands; and (3) help re-structure organizations to improve performance and/or create seamless customer experiences of the brand. so the work of business anthropologists entails everything journal of business anthropology, special issue 2, spring 2016 4 from developing new goals, and the processes required to achieve them, to designing new products and services, to fashioning communications, and above all, creating consensus around them. collaborative ethnography stems from organizations identifying opportunities in the marketplace and leads to providing solutions and improvements for a complex and shifting world. in this sense, the liminal state of business anthropologists is oriented to innovation and change. companies, whether for profit or nonprofit, are ever-altering in response to customers and markets. as trentmann (2009) suggests, routine and rupture are never far apart in the everyday life practices of consumers and organizations. the authors in this issue point out that liminality is marked both by flux and ambiguity, as well as by degrees of flexibility and adaptability. a liminal state evokes innovation and creativity, although, as some of the articles demonstrate, innovation and change can generate liminality. a liminal state is characterized by a loosening of moorings, expected disruption, and openness to new ideas and behavior. when business anthropologists engage in collaborative ethnography and consulting, the implicit if not explicit purpose is to cause change: such as revising objectives and work practices, designing new products, or re-positioning brands. interacting with others on the research team, business anthropologists play multiple roles: not only the traditional role of insight purveyor, but also the roles of knowledge broker and change agent (beers 2016). as knowledge brokers, business anthropologists translate across professional and organizational boundaries to set up an environment for exchanges of ideas among team members and for imagining and immersing themselves in “what-if” scenarios. beers (2016) notes that this does not happen spontaneously without formal or informal workshops and promptings―such as use of facilitation techniques that encourage team members to be open, exploratory and disruptive. the fluidity and movement of the liminal state sets the stage for business anthropologists to cross boundaries and act as change agents. the liminal state and transformation the liminal state has the potential to become transformative for organizations and individuals. following ingold (2013), we can think about transformation backwards and forwards. with a backward gaze, we see outcomes. for example, we can point to re-structured organizations, new brand communications, and fresh product designs. these outcomes reflect changes in organizations and the way those organizations relate to consumers, employees, and other stakeholders. from a forward look, we see emergent processes. working on client projects is a transformative experience for anthropologists, as they grapple with issues facing clients and learn about business and consumer practices concerning products and brands, as well as broader economic, political and social contexts of mccabe and briody / working in liminal states 5 production and consumption. insights gained from collaborative ethnographic research open vistas on possible ways to maneuver in the context within which team members are enmeshed. research oriented to business implications is related to the traditional role of the anthropologist as insight purveyor applying new knowledge to solve client problems. working on client projects is also transformative in terms of second-order observations and translating perspectives of other team members, which is part of the anthropologist’s role as knowledge broker. the self-discovery that comes from grasping aspects of different worldviews affects all project participants. some participants will be able to articulate integrated understandings to address client issues. as those team members collaborate, they will be in a position to shape, revise and bring projects to completion. in some circumstances, participants will not reach agreement on their goals or on the ways to achieve them. under both scenarios, the anthropologist is involved as change agent in the organization. the anthropologist’s skill in moving in liminal space is a key element – a necessary but not sufficient condition – in the transformation of individuals and organizations. taking a forward look at transformative processes in formation, authors in this issue talk about their experiences working in a liminal state. the transformations that occur are what ingold (2013) calls a correspondence, or bringing things “into a relation with one another” (2013:70). correspondence requires being “able to recognize subtle cues in one’s environment and to respond to them with judgment and precision” (2013:109-110). anthropologists are carving space in the business world to do just that: recognize consumer cues for products; respond to other team members; and spur joint action within organizations and in the marketplace. liminality provides grease and glue for the work at hand. it supplies the grease by encouraging people to understand how other team members are defining projects, interpreting ethnographic data, and using research results―all in different ways. it also can furnish the glue for reaching consensus and bringing projects to fruition. the business anthropologist working in a fluid and enduring liminal state can exert a strong and positive influence on the course and outcome of the work, the future of the organization’s decisions, and the organizational communications and learning that result. at the same time, liminality has the potential to flow into a less productive, effective, or desirable end state, both for organizational stakeholders and for the anthropologist. the broader cultural context―whether internal or external―affects the ways in which all participants respond to transition and to its potential. sometimes participants are too wedded to their worldviews and are unable or unwilling to change or innovate. it may be too threatening for them to examine their hidden assumptions and beliefs, or too painful to consider journal of business anthropology, special issue 2, spring 2016 6 the impact of the potential change on their role and authority in the organization. they may believe that the timing is not “right”: that is, that change or innovation is too disruptive at this point in time and that other priorities deserve the organization’s attention. if any or all of these factors are in play, a skillful anthropologist may be unable to assist the organization successfully through a transition, or may be unable to apply his/her knowledge and perspective to help the organization thrive. thus, managing liminality in context can be quite challenging and not always successful. articles in this issue the anthropologist/ethnographer authors exhibit a range of roles in the articles in this special issue. two are professors (gluesing and miller) who describe actual or potential situations associated with liminality that arose when they were working with students on their student research projects. gluesing focuses her attention on global virtual teams in which anthropologists are involved. anthropologists working with such complex entities can use liminality to unleash creative solutions by breaking free from organizational constraints, developing new skills and knowledge, and initiating and maintaining new connections. through training and coaching, they may be able to suggest that organizational members gather and review field notes, step into another person’s shoes, and otherwise understand a situation from alternative perspectives. like all organizational participants, they can use the fluidity of global teams to take action and experiment with possible solutions. anthropologists, gluesing argues, are well equipped for working in liminal spaces like global virtual teams because their work entails continuous transitioning between divergent perspectives. miller’s article discusses the liminality affecting the transitions in performance of multiple-disciplinary teams. she refers to the “liminal territory” characterized by confusion and conflict, as individuals on teams engage first in articulating their disciplinary perspective, then attempt to synthesize multiple disciplinary viewpoints into a coherent whole, and finally create a holistic, transcendent approach that captures the system dynamics. these attempts are “messy” and often fail. like gluesing, miller suggests that anthropologists can serve as team “guides” because of their methodological training, rapport-building experience, and competence in translating different perspectives. wall and englert work in industry as ethnographers on xerox teams at the palo alto research center (parc). they “move” and “translate” between “practitioners” (study participants/users), researchers or technology designers, and other stakeholders. they find that the movement and translation process is iterative, with multiple transitions involving customers and relevant internal organizational members. a key goal for wall and englert is to help the teams arrive at an mccabe and briody / working in liminal states 7 integrated or “co-constructed” perspective―a closer alignment―on new designs, products, and services. they point out that team members may not realize that they are entering into a liminal space―say, when developers realize “practitioners” do not use the technology in the way it was intended. an opportunity then emerges for the team to discuss and reflect upon the evidence; typically, further design changes result, enabling the team to move out and beyond the liminal space. olsen describes the roles she played in a new york-based advertising agency during the 1970s, ranging from bullpen artist to executive. she focuses on three particular advertising campaigns that resulted in her direct involvement with liminality. she discovered that as the three ad campaigns progressed, her cognitive dissonance heightened. with each campaign, she describes her own experience with the phases of separation, transition, and incorporation. while olsen generally found the work exciting and creative, her feminist sensibilities and anthropological coursework stood in sharp contrast to the campaign messaging and her agency’s values. she used a variety of strategies to cope with the liminality―including participant observation in the field, keeping a log (field notes and reflections) of client-agency-customer interactions, and taking a long-haul view of her advertising career. ultimately, she made the decision to earn her ph.d. in anthropology, leaving the day-to-day practicalities of advertising behind. briody held a series of volunteer positions on the board of trustees of an assisted living and nursing care community. at the time, she had been working for years as an anthropologist in industry and had recently completed a pro bono cultural study of this community. like olsen and wall and englert, she encountered liminality while preparing for and serving in the board president role. a small but powerful minority of board members and the executive director resisted the initiation of a capital campaign to renovate the facility. her term was marked by ambiguity, inaction, clique formation, and overt conflict. briody differentiates among three types of liminality, examining them in relationship to turner’s concept of social drama. she developed the countering resistance model based on the lessons she learned. chief among them were the cultivation and maintenance of key relationships to mitigate liminality. outcomes of liminal processes rites of passage in cultures studied by turner (1967) and others (e.g., middleton and kershaw [1965]; radcliffe-brown [1922]) were integrated into community life and occurred repeatedly in a patterned way. even though the rituals were new to the initiates, many members of the community had experienced them at some point in the past, and others possessed local knowledge about the processes involved and the expected end results. indeed, these rituals linked directly to the community’s journal of business anthropology, special issue 2, spring 2016 8 shared beliefs, norms, and practices and served to reinforce them. liminal states and spaces in contemporary organizations are emergent processes and do not always follow a predictable pattern or have predictable outcomes. liminality can be unexpected, taking individuals and organizations by surprise. organizational leaders may not be able to cope with the confusion and ambiguity. even anthropologists who are “of” a particular organization, and/or have experienced liminality in organizational settings, do not generally know a priori the processes and outcomes associated with a liminal period or space. it is difficult to anticipate what is likely to happen, in what sequence, and with what end result. timing, interactions, strategies, and a host of other factors can affect the outcome. liminality can be purposeful and intentional (wall and englert, gluesing). it can be used to help make sense of a liminal state or time (olsen, gluesing, miller). it can encourage people to become reflexive, identify their cultural assumptions, be open to alternative points of view, and face complexity (wall and englert, miller, gluesing). however, knowing that an individual, group, or organization is experiencing liminality does not necessarily imply that it can always be used to advantage. it can affect the quality of interactions and behaviors that occur (briody, olsen, miller). transitions can be ripe with conflict for individuals (olsen) and groups (briody, miller). organizational stakeholders can resist change and innovation and hold on to their worldview such that the length and pace of the transition, as well as organizational outcomes, are at risk (briody, olsen, miller). when that happens, the innovation or change can result in a partial or complete failure (briody). to leverage liminality productively, other aspects of the context (such as cultural rules, beliefs, expectations, sanctions) are required to support the transition. the two professors (miller and gluesing) were able to provide advice and counsel to their students and to the global team members with whom they worked; students appreciated the value of their newly acquired skills in preparation for their professional careers. the in-house ethnographers at xerox participated as full team members, ensuring that customer usage aligned with design intent (wall and englert); otherwise, a poorly designed technology would have cost, time, and reputation implications. olsen’s article represents a mix of outcomes. by her account, the three ad campaigns were successful. they satisfied the client and added to the growing reputation of the ad agency. however, as a budding anthropologist, she found the thematic content of two of the campaigns distasteful. moreover, she indicated that her boss dismissed the relevance and usefulness of her anthropological skills (olsen). the openness to new possibilities was not realized. she found herself launched into a liminal morass, rising with each successive campaign. mccabe and briody / working in liminal states 9 moreover, agency culture did not tolerate a collegial exchange of ideas; only her boss’ inspiration and approach mattered. briody’s article describes an organization’s path through an eighteen-month liminal period during which philanthropy was widely contested. board members found themselves in one of two opposing cliques whose firmed-up positions could not be bridged. there was no organizational consensus to seek a common solution to keep the doors of the long-term-care community open. the minority clique led by powerful insiders was able to derail philanthropic efforts, without offering a promising alternative approach, and despite the pending and immutable renovation deadline imposed by state authorities. communitas as “an intense comradeship or egalitarianism” (turner 2007:95) or “a generalized social bond” (96) never formed across the board―a condition that could have led to the creation of trust and collaboration, and ultimately to a shared vision of the future. thus, the hoped-for transition or transformation was not realized. what’s new? this examination of liminal spaces, times, and people working in contemporary organizations has expanded our understanding of transitions. by their very nature, transitions entail movement and flow. both are core to organizational culture and change. nothing stands still as creativity, innovation, resourcefulness, imagination, and initiative gear up and take hold. the “storehouse of possibilities” of which turner wrote (1990:12) emerges. but what do those transitions that have been characterized by liminality look like? what are the key attributes of those transitions? how much commonality is evident in the “betwixt and between” state in its appearance, tempo, and activities? what factors contribute to the beginning and end of these transitions? all of the articles suggest, and some (wall and englert, briody, olsen) stress, the iterative nature of the behaviors that occur within transitions. their findings indicate that transitions are often composed of multiple repetitive processes―often a back-and forth, or even a twosteps-forward-one step-back, trajectory. discussions and debates appear as routine and critical dimensions of work-based activity. input is gathered, sorted, understood, and used in preparation for each “round” of interactions. a single, linear path to some end point does not represent liminality accurately. a second attribute of transitions is the variation tied to the liminality experience. those in transition do not experience it consistently or uniformly. miller and gluesing’s students, for example, found it necessary to switch back and forth between roles of project researcher/consultant, team member, and student. olsen indicates that her advertising experience was “punctuated by periods of liminality” and journal of business anthropology, special issue 2, spring 2016 10 that her cognitive dissonance increased during the ad campaigns. for her part, briody reports that the liminality tied to the board of trustees was interspersed with numerous interventions as members attempted to resolve opposing views and achieve consensus. she also points to the fluctuating pattern of board resignations as an indication that members reacted differently to liminality―some with lower tolerances than others. liminality fluctuates during transitions. wall and englert report that their design teams experienced an ebb and flow in liminality as they shifted toward a closer alignment in perspectives. briody’s findings offer further insight into the fluidity of liminality. she identifies three distinct types, one of which (disrupting liminality) decreased over time, a second type (prophetic liminality) increased over time, and a third type (recurring liminality) emerged with cyclic regularity. liminality is heterogeneous, then, in terms of transition time frames. olsen’s and briody’s articles report extended time frames in which liminality was in play, in contrast to the liminality experienced by gluesing and miller’s students and wall and englert’s design teams. indeed, we hypothesize that the longer an individual, group, or organization remains mired in liminality, the less likely it is for that liminal space or place to result in a productive outcome. a third feature entails anthropological preparation to help individuals and organizations under liminal conditions. anthropologists have the training and are often positioned to help individuals and organizations during “betwixt and between” states and spaces. first, they typically have exposure to the concept―both through the literature and experiential learning. their movement back and forth between their fieldwork, field notes, and literature (emic to etic) requires an understanding and appreciation of multiple perspectives (gluesing). in addition, anthropologists can and do play important roles in facilitating understanding of and action in complex projects. they are able to dissect the multiplicity of viewpoints found on multiple-disciplinary, developercustomer, and/or global projects where ambiguity reigns and a shared approach has not yet been articulated (miller, wall and englert, gluesing). descriptions in three of the articles indicate anthropology’s value in real time (miller, wall and englert, gluesing). also of relevance and usefulness are liminal experiences explored retrospectively as historical narratives (olsen, briody). olsen emphasizes the importance of anthropological techniques that helped her cope with liminality. briody summarizes the lessons she learned about liminal circumstances―specifically, those related to agreement on strategy and collaboration. by applying the combination of method, theory, and practice to liminality―whether in current or past projects―anthropologists are positioned to help organizations of the present and future understand their culture and work effectively within it. mccabe and briody / working in liminal states 11 finally, the articles reveal the extent of the anthropologist’s effect on organizational issues. that effect can range from ephemeral to longlasting when we consider the roles of business anthropologists (insight purveyor, knowledge broker, and change agent, as discussed above) within the framework of social life as mobility, flow and movement (cresswell 2006; lefebvre 2013). across the five articles, the anthropologists were successful as insight purveyors, but varied in their impact as knowledge brokers and change agents. in three of the articles, the anthropologists moved the organizational change process forward by acting like a coach or teacher (miller, wall and englert, gluesing). they encouraged the development of mutual understanding and innovative solutions and reported instances of sustained high performance. in other words, the coaching or teaching proved effective, was adapted for use by organizational members, and had a long-term effect on organizational outcomes. in the olsen and briody articles, their organizational effect was not durable. the change process became stymied because key people who needed to buy into the process refrained from doing so. both organizations were tightly-controlled hierarchies with little room for deviation from what the key leader(s) wanted or what tradition deemed appropriate. indeed, organizational innovation was not routinely tolerated. persuasion and logic were insufficient in changing leadership perspectives. under such circumstances, any knowledge broker or change agent would likely face similar disappointing outcomes. we hope that you enjoy these articles! references beers, r. 2016. humanizing organizations: researchers as knowledge brokers and change agents. in collaborative ethnography in a business environment. m. mccabe, ed., walnut creek, ca: left coast press, in press. cresswell, t. 2006. on the move: mobility in the modern western world. new york, ny: routledge. ingold, t. 2013. making: anthropology, archeology, art and architecture. london, uk: routledge. latour, b. 2013. an inquiry into modes of existence: an anthropology of the moderns. c. porter, trans. cambridge, ma: harvard university press. lefebvre, h. 2013. rhythmanalysis: space, time and everyday life. london, uk: bloomsbury. luhmann, n. 2012. introduction to systems theory. cambridge, uk: polity. middleton, j. and g. kershaw. 1965. the kikuyu and kamba of kenya. london, uk: international african institute. journal of business anthropology, special issue 2, spring 2016 12 radcliffe-brown, a.r. 1922. the andaman islanders: a study in social anthropology. cambridge, uk: cambridge university press. trentmann, f. 2009. disruption in normal: blackouts, breakdowns and the elasticity of everyday life. in time, consumption and everyday life: practice, materiality and culture. e. shove, f. trentmann, and r. wilk, eds. oxford, uk: berg, 67-84. turner, v.w. 1957. schism and continuity in an african society: a study of ndembu village life. manchester, uk: university of manchester press. turner, v.w. 1967. the forest of symbols: aspects of ndembu ritual. ithaca, ny: cornell university press. turner, v.w. 2007. the ritual process: structure and anti-structure. new brunswick, nj: aldine transaction. turner, v. 1990. are there universals of performance in myth, ritual, and drama? in by means of performance: intercultural studies of theatre and ritual. r. schechner and w. appel, eds. cambridge, uk: cambridge university press, 8-18. van gennep, a. 1960. the rites of passage. m. vizedom and g. caffee, trans. chicago, il: university of chicago press. maryann mccabe, ph.d., is founder and principal of cultural connections llc, a consumer research consultancy. she works for fortune 500 companies and advertising agencies in the u.s., europe and japan. her specialization is branding, positioning and marketing strategy in the automotive, banking, beauty, food, health care, pharmaceutical and technology industries. she is also senior lecturer at the university of rochester, department of anthropology, where she teaches courses on market research, entrepreneurship and sustainability, and works with students who earn an entrepreneurial study year. her ethnographic research has been published in academic books and journals including consumption markets & culture, journal of consumer culture, human organization, and journal of business anthropology. she is currently chair of the public policy committee, society for applied anthropology. she may be reached at mm@cultureconnex.com. elizabeth k. briody, ph.d., is a cultural anthropologist who has been engaged in organizational-culture change for over 25 years. she is founder and principal of cultural keys llc, a consultancy that helps organizations transform their culture, reach their potential, and attract and retain new customers. she has worked in health care, manufacturing, consumer products, service industries, research institutions, and other industries in the u.s. and abroad. her most recent books include transforming culture: creating and sustaining effective organizations (co-authored with robert t. trotter, ii and tracy l. meerwarth, palgrave, 2014) and the cultural dimension of global business (co-authored with gary ferraro, 7th ed., pearson, 2013). elizabeth is currently a board member of the american anthropological association. she may be reached at elizabeth@culturalkeys.us. mailto:mm@cultureconnex.com mailto:elizabeth@culturalkeys.us vi opdaterer systemet vi opdaterer systemet... rauli.cbs.dk opdateres og er snart tilgængeligt. business ethics: a double bind ghislaine gallenga, steven sampson and jérôme soldani issues of morality have penetrated all sub-fields of anthropology (howell 1997; fassin and stoczkowski 2008; faubion 2011). the same is true for the field of business studies, where new forms of applied ethics have emerged (moussé 1990; naudet 2001). these contemporary challenges pose new anthropological questions and thus offer new frameworks with which to approach ethics within the disciplines of both anthropology and business studies. in the world of business, moral concerns can take the form of a managerial strategy or personnel management tool (both 2007; portella et al. 2010), causing some researchers to see them mainly as an “economization” or “commodification” of ethics rather than as an “ethicization” of capitalism or of the business world (naudet 1997; salmon 2004 and 2007). a company’s pursuit of good conduct, whatever form it takes, can be viewed cynically: as an investment intended to increase profitability, as well as a technique of deflecting external moral and political pressures (boyer 2002; marzano 2008). such interpretations run the risk of becoming moral evaluations or value judgments. as anthropologists, our task is not to make such judgements, but to study how members of a business organization deal with the moral atmosphere in which they must work. the rising focus on the ethics of business is connected to recent technological developments in production and communication, as well as to the relations of production between classes and between countries. key trends include the transformation of companies into globalised page 1 of 6 jba special issue 3: 1-6, spring 2016 © the author(s) 2016 issn 2245-4217 www.cbs.dk/jba journal of business anthropology, special issue 3, spring 2016 2 production networks, automation and digitalisation of tasks, new approaches to the role of the company as a socially responsible, ethical and political actor, and the possibility of corporations to obtain positive publicity through charitable social projects or the risk of negative publicity due to social media exposing corporate scandals (gallenga 2014:130-131). whereas the topics of the ethics of anthropological practice (now audited by academic research ethics committees) (edel and edel 1959, 1968; bonte 1991; caplan 2003) and business ethics (particularly in management sciences) (anquetil 2010; ballet 2011) have been extensively discussed, there are few anthropological studies that seek to combine both dimensions simultaneously. notable examples of such combinations are those discussing entrepreneurship and islam in malaysia (sloane 1999) and indonesia (rudnyckyj 2010) or, on a larger scale, the contributions on business ethics in southeast asia (gallenga and soldani 2013). in the international public sphere, corporate social responsibility (csr) has stimulated a debate on the transition from ethics within an organisation to the ethics of the company in society, whereby certain collective work principles are promoted as expressions of the company’s norms and values (laget 2009; capron and quairel-lanoizelée 2010). while there has been an increasing trend for companies to develop codes of ethics and charters of good conduct, this phenomenon is not new, having originated in the early 20th century. yet the trend toward making ethics more prominent is a response to the societal demand for inserting ethics into the life of the workplace and into the economic sphere of business generally (sen 1993; naudet 1999; arnsperger and van parijs 2003). the “ethical turn” (fassin 2014) also reflects a change in the way companies represent themselves in society, as manifested through their involvement in civic campaigns for greenwashing, fair trade, sustainable development, and so on (salmon 2009). as anthropologists, we have always oscillated between universal and particular forms of ethics in the societies we study, and this has led us to try and avoid the pitfalls of essentialism and normative discourse (eberhard 2009). contemporary research in the field of management or applied ethics considers the moral aspect of business in its normative sense: is the purpose of business “really” moral? are certain management or business practices more morally acceptable than others? how can production be moralised? however, research seldom focuses on business ethics as an object of research in itself. these papers attempt to rectify this shortcoming by focusing explicitly on the anthropology of the business ethics imaginary. today, the discourse and practices of business ethics can be found everywhere. but what exactly does this concept include? how can we define it in explicitly anthropological terms? for the manager as well as gallenga, sampson and soldani / business ethics 3 the anthropologist, business ethics―in terms of its ideas and practices―involves dealing with opposing notions, often constructed in terms of the opposition between market efficiency versus the “costs” of ethics. as a matter of fact, an ethical approach can only grow out of a situation of double bind (bateson 1972) comprising injunctions that are technically contradictory: being “good” according to one actor means being “bad” according to another (kant 1997; wittgenstein 2008; badiou 2011). the actor―person, manager, organization―is constantly seeking to stay in line with a notion of ethics, seen as the only condition of success, and favours one injunction to the detriment of another. the result is that any given moral action deemed acceptable by one party may lead to moral disapproval by others. ethics would thus mean reconciling the irreconcilable (morin 2004). because the manager is torn between objectives of accumulating and harnessing resources within the marketplace and dealing with moral judgements of economic activity (working time increasing, using pollutants, and so on, versus employees’ well-being, preservation of natural resources, and so forth), the manager both initiates and suffers from this double bind. the same can also be said of the anthropologist, for whom there is the ethical question of the thin line between the descriptive task and the critical dimension of our discipline. ethics can be seen as the search for an optimal balance. defining such balance inevitably creates conflicts between diverging interests. in the anthropology of business ethics, this tension is twofold: the manager is torn between two imperatives―ethics versus efficiency―while the researcher is caught up between scientific neutrality and social engagement. this dilemma is highlighted in this collection of papers. is “business ethics” a set of philosophical principles―a kind of code―or is it simply a tool in the production process? this issue is explored by ghislaine gallenga, who underscores the need to “anthropologize” business ethics, to see how it operates in the workplace. following this, arnaud kaba describes how the owner of an indian tea plantation, in all his patrimonial glory, can manipulate the discourse of “fair trade” in running his enterprise. old fashioned patronage somehow meshes with―but also contradicts―corporate social responsibility. researching a taiwanese baseball club, jérôme soldani shows how the club’s official corporate values of “health, honor, harmony, honesty, humility” are articulated as a microcosm of the company, and of society. yet the club remains racked by continuing scandal, and the players display alternative, even resistant values. anyone who has followed the tv drama mad men would be surprised to find business ethics at the core of an advertising agency. yet in her analysis of a paris ad agency, léa porée demonstrates how ethics becomes the very product of the ad firm. the firm’s morality is its capital. mad men’s don draper would certainly revel in porée’s article. finally, the issue of “moral capitalism” is confronted directly in steven journal of business anthropology, special issue 3, spring 2016 4 sampson’s paper, which describes the ethics and compliance industry in american firms. ethics and compliance operates at the intersection of avoiding prosecution and acting ethically―“doing things right” versus “doing the right thing.” despite their widely diverse settings and data, the case studies here reveal some key insights and some future tasks of an anthropology of business ethics. first, is the role of ethics as a lived practice by actors rather than a simple code to be respected, ignored or breached? the articles here show the veritable production of ethics by the actors. ethics is thus more a tool than a code. a second insight from these case studies is the inseparability of moral and economic life: the economic activities in these organizations are intimately bound by moral projects, justifications, and objectives. this means that distinguishing a research field of “the economic” from “the moral” is not only misleading, but methodologically unproductive. the anthropological task is not to locate or distinguish the moral and ethical dimensions of business life, but to show the intermingling of business and ethics. these articles show how organizations and firms are attempting to become moral communities; in fact, establishing such moral communities seems to be one of the major tasks of management, whether it be in its more participatory form or as patrimonial. finally, there is the research challenge of entering the often closed world of business and organizations in the search for the ethical. the research task is not to flesh out the code, nor simply to demonstrate ethics as some kind of façade. rather, our task is to describe and understand how actors experience morality and ethics, including moral dilemmas. this indeed is the double bind described in these articles. exploring the double bind of business ethics in the anthropology of the workplace and business anthropology highlights the constraints that must be taken into account in the production of anthropological discourse. we hope that this special issue elucidates the role of ethical practice as an object of business anthropology and of anthropology generally. references anquetil, a. et al. 2010. éthique de l’entreprise. réalité ou illusion? paris: l’harmattan. arnsperger, c. and p. van parijs. 2003. éthique économique et sociale. paris: la découverte. badiou, a. 2011 [2003]. l’éthique. essai sur la conscience du mal. caen: nous. ballet, j. et al. 2011. l’entreprise et l’éthique. paris: seuil. bateson, g. 1972. steps to an ecology of mind. chicago: university of gallenga, sampson and soldani / business ethics 5 chicago press. bonte, p. 1991. questions d’éthique en anthropologie. sociétés contemporaines 7: 73-85. both, a. 2007. les managers et leurs discours. anthropologie de la rhétorique managériale. pessac: presses universitaires de bordeaux. boyer, a. 2002. l’impossible éthique des entreprises. réflexions sur une utopie moderne. paris: éditions d’organisation. caplan, p. ed. 2003. the ethics of anthropology: debates and dilemmas. london and new york: routledge. capron, m. and f. qarirel-lanoizelée, 2010. la responsabilité sociale d’entreprise. paris: la découverte. eberhard, c. 2009. au-delà de l’universalisme et du relativisme : l’horizon d’un pluralisme responsable. anthropologie et sociétés 33(3): 79-100. edel, m. and a. edel. 1959. anthropology and ethics. springfield, il: thomas. edel, m. and a. edel. 1968. anthropology and ethics: the quest for moral understanding. cleveland: case western reserve university press. fassin, d. 2014. the ethical turn in anthropology: promises and uncertainties. hau: journal of ethnographic theory 4 (1): 429-435. fassin, d. and w. stoczkowski. 2008. should anthropology be moral? a debate. anthropological theory 8: 331-332. faubion, j. 2011. an anthropology of ethics. cambridge: cambridge university press. gallenga, g. 2014. penser au miroir de lʼéthique (interview by émir mahieddin). journal des anthropologues 136-137: 123-136. gallenga, g. and j. soldani. 2013. lectures anthropologiques de l’éthique entrepreneuriale. moussons 21, 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(ed.) 1997. the ethnography of moralities. londres and new york: routledge. kant, e. 1997 [1785]. leçons d’éthique. paris: le livre de poche. laget, p. 2009. responsibilité d’entreprise et éthique sont-elles solubles dans la mondialisation ? paris: éditions de l’aube. marzano, m. 2008. lʼéthique appliquée. paris: puf, que sais-je ?. morin, e. 2004. la méthode 6. éthique. paris: seuil. moussé, j. 1990. éthique et entreprises. paris: vuibert. naudet, j.-y. 1997. éthique des affaires. de l’éthique de l’entrepreneur au droit des affaires. actes du colloque d’aix-en-provence, 4 et 5 juillet 1996. aix-en-provence: librairie de l’université. journal of business anthropology, special issue 3, spring 2016 6 naudet, j.-y. 1999. morale économique. des fondements religieux à l’éthique en entreprise. actes du colloque d’aix-en-provence, 2 et 3 juillet 1998. aix-en-provence: librairie de l’université. naudet, j.-y. 2001. éthique en entreprise. actes du colloque d’aix-enprovence, 6 et 7 juillet 2000. aix-en-provence: librairie de l’université. portella, a. et al. 2010. l’éthique en entreprise. manuel à l’usage des responsables rh et des managers. paris: studyrama. rudnyckyj, d. 2010. spiritual economies: islam, globalization, and the afterlife of development. ithaca: cornell university press. salmon, a. 2004. l’offre éthique des entreprises. cahiers internationaux de sociologie 1(116): 77-96. salmon, a. 2007. la tentation éthique du capitalisme. paris: la découverte. salmon, a. 2009. moraliser le capitalisme ? paris: cnrs éditions. sen, a. 1989. on ethics and economics. oxford: wiley-blackwell. sloane, p. 1999. islam, modernity and entrepreneurship among the malays. londres: palgrave macmillan. thévenet, m. 1994. la culture d’entreprise. paris: puf. wittgenstein, l. 2008 [1967]. conférence sur l’éthique. paris: folio. towards transdisciplinarity: liminality and the transitions inherent in pluridisciplinary collaborative work christine z. miller abstract although the value of cross-disciplinary teams is widely accepted, relatively little attention has been given to the work that precedes addressing a team’s objective or stated problem, that is, the work required to negotiate their various disciplinary perspectives. this article considers how the notion of liminality, a cultural and social state of “betweenness,” might be used to conceptualize transitory stages in the development of pluridisciplinary groups and teams that are comprised of individuals from many diverse disciplines. it suggests how anthropologists can play a role in guiding and facilitating this particular domain of invisible work. keywords liminality, invisible work, pluridisciplinary, interdisciplinary, multidisciplinary, transdisciplinary teamwork page 1 of 23 jba special issue 2: 35-57, spring 2016 © the author(s) 2016 issn 2245-4217 www.cbs.dk/jba journal of business anthropology, special issue 2, spring 2016 36 “life is multiple disciplinary. disciplines are the result of the artificial fragmentation of knowledge.” (choi and pak 2006:357) introduction the increasing use of cross-disciplinary teams in business and academic settings reflects a growing awareness of the limitations of singular forms of inquiry to address the complex problems in societies and organizations (conklin 2005, johnson 2009). all too often, the dominant approach to problem solving has involved parsing out bits and pieces to individuals or homogeneous teams and then attempting to bundle the results together. however, a paradigm shift is currently underway that acknowledges different classes of problems, some of which require a multilevel approach and the integrated perspective of multiple disciplines. the atomistic or reductionist approach to problem solving that is characteristic of single disciplinary problem solving approaches typically favors one perspective over others and often generates unintended consequences that create more problems than are solved. for example, urban renewal projects that vaporize existing “blighted” neighborhoods and relocate residences to multistory mega housing blocks have failed to produce the desired results. many now stand vacant, haunting testaments to single-source solutions to complex multidimensional problems involving social, cultural, economic, technological, and environmental components. an emerging sense of the complexity of many of the problems faced by contemporary societies has engendered a search for alternatives that incorporate multiple points of view and disciplinary perspectives. choi and pak (2006:351) suggest that the phrase “multiple disciplinary” be used as a general term “for when the nature of involvement of multiple disciplines is unknown or unspecified.” in this article, the term pluridisciplinary is substituted for multiple disciplinary to avoid confusing multiple disciplinary and multidisciplinary, which represent two distinct forms of team members’ engagement and interaction. pluridisciplinary serves not only as a general term, but also as a rubric under which three forms or stages of teaming―multi-, interand transdisciplinary―are encompassed. as the deployment of pluridisciplinary teams is increasing, the unique challenges of this work have begun to surface. if these teams are to deliver innovation and framechanging solutions that can be achieved through requisite variety and heterogeneity, then they must overcome the barriers embedded in singular disciplinary perspectives. this work is inherently uncomfortable as it requires openness to accepting diverse knowledge domains and ways of working that may conflict with one’s own assumptions, disciplinary orientation and work practices. miller / towards transdisciplinarity 37 if team members are unable or unwilling to embark on what can be a significant learning curve, then barriers to effective teaming within cross-disciplinary groups can derail projects and goals. because people bring their cultural (here in the sense of disciplinary) differences in language, tools, work practices, epistemologies, paradigms, and goals relative to the project, there is a need to better understand the processes involved in team formation and establishing a shared understanding of the mission and objectives. there is work to be done before, during, and after the teaming experience to assist the team in navigating the transitions from a group representing single disciplines to a unified team that transcends individual disciplinary boundaries and perspectives. the purpose of this article is to consider how liminality as a cultural and social state of in-between-ness and a phase in the ritual process might be used to conceptualize transitory stages in the development of pluridisciplinary groups and teams. the role of the ritual guide is suggested as an analogy for individuals who play a key role in assisting teams to navigate the stages of cross-disciplinary teamwork. the literature on group and team formation supports the claim that groups and teams go through various stages in their development. tuckman’s classic article on small group development has become the basis for much subsequent research on phases of group and team development. he identified four stages in group development that could be distinguished by those that describe the social or interpersonal activities among group members and those that describe the task work of the group. “in the social realm, these stages in the developmental sequence are testing-dependence, conflict, cohesion, and functional roles. in the task realm, they are orientation, emotionality, relevant opinion exchange, and the emergence of solutions (tuckman 1965:384). the four stages were later abbreviated to “forming,” “storming,” “norming,” and “‘performing” (tuckman and jensen 1977). early studies of the stages of group development could hardly have anticipated twenty-first century conditions, particularly the impact of advances in technology, and the deployment of pluridisciplinary teams facing the unique challenges of cross-disciplinary collaboration. differences in language, socialization, tools, and work processes can pose formidable barriers and often limit―if not completely derail―the work of teams composed of members from multiple disciplines. by applying the lens of liminality as a “mediating period" (barfield 1977) that defines a transition in a rite of passage, this article considers the interactions that occur in the transitions between the stages of interpersonal group development. it also suggests how forsythe’s (1999) concept of “invisible work” might be applied to the processes entailed in moving from one stage to another. further, the article discusses how anthropologists in particular can guide and facilitate the transitions between multi-, inter-, and transdisciplinarity. journal of business anthropology, special issue 2, spring 2016 38 differentiating between multidisciplinarity, interdisciplinarity, and transdisciplinarity applying the concept of liminality to explore the differences between multidisciplinary (additive), interdisciplinary (integrative), and transdisciplinary (holistic) teams allows for examining these types of teams as varying points on a continuum of cross-disciplinary work (choi and pak 2006). although it is common to see the terms used interchangeably, there are important qualitative differences among these modes of interaction in pluridisciplinary work (margolin 2002, conklin 2006, choi and pak 2006, strathern 2007, lawrence 2010, mcgregor 2014) differentiating between the terms allows for important distinctions between the stages through which teams might progress. progression through multidisciplinarity, interdisciplinarity, and transdisciplinarity is neither guaranteed nor compulsory. not all situations require the attention of a pluridisciplinary team. as choi and pak note “while multiple disciplinary [i.e., pluridisciplinary] teamwork is appropriate for complex problems, it is not always necessary in every single project.” recognizing that multi-, inter-, and transdisciplinary tend to be used interchangeably, choi and pak (2006:351) conducted a study of how the three terms were applied in academic literature, ultimately consolidating their findings to provide these definitions: multidisciplinarity draws on knowledge from different disciplines but stays within their boundaries. interdisciplinarity analyzes, synthesizes and harmonizes links between disciplines into a coordinated and coherent whole. transdisciplinarity integrates the natural, social and health sciences in a humanities context, and transcends their traditional boundaries. strathern (2007) echoes choi and pak in acknowledging the crucial distinction among the three terms. referring to nowotny’s contribution to discussions regarding “the potential of transdisciplinarity” (gibbons et al. 1994, nowotny, scott, and gibbons 2001), strathern (2007:124) notes: interdisciplinarity, in the strict sense, points to a framework shared across disciplines to which each contributes a bit. (multidisciplinarity, the simple alignment of skills from different disciplines, is already left behind.) transdisciplinarity implies even more: it brings disciplines together in contexts where new approaches arise out of the interaction between them, but to a heightened degree, in a kind of super compound. these distinctions suggest a qualitative difference between each type of work group and imply a change resulting from either or both internal and external conditions. my own lengthy experience in working with miller / towards transdisciplinarity 39 pluridisciplinary teams suggests that the liminal phase marking the transitions between forms of teaming is not the same as the routine kinds of dysfunction that plague many groups and teams. liminal phases may be characterized by increased communication, heightened stress levels, misunderstanding, conflict and, possibly, renegotiation of the team’s goals and objectives. multidisciplinarity, interdisciplinarity, and transdisciplinarity as qualitatively different states exhibit distinct differences in levels of collaboration and engagement, and in the nature of the missions, goals, and objectives that are established. the qualitative difference between one type of work group and another involves a shift in values and attitudes that allows for a reframing of the problem space, a willingness to accept diverse epistemologies, and an openness to considering multiple solutions. each transition requires a change in the level of investment by each member. multidisciplinarity requires the least investment: each member brings his/her individual knowledge base; negotiation is primarily in the area of operations and there is little expectation that members will invest time and energy in changing their perspectives. interdisciplinarity requires a more significant investment of time and energy due to the need for more extensive negotiation in reaching shared understandings, which enables analysis and synthesis to occur across disciplinary boundaries. in the case of transdisciplinarity, the requirement for negotiation is very high: all members must be willing to subordinate their individual disciplinary perspectives to achieve a common vision that encompasses the dimensions and dynamics of an entire system. figure 1 illustrates these differences. figure 1: types of pluridisciplinary teams: additive, integrative, and holistic (choi and pak 2006) visualization created by the author. journal of business anthropology, special issue 2, spring 2016 40 as previously noted, choi and pak acknowledged that not every challenge requires a pluridisciplinary approach. however, they suggest several situations where pluridisciplinarity is desirable: situations in which it is necessary to resolve ‘real world’ or complex problems, when developing consensus in terms of definitions or guidelines is required, when there is a need to create a comprehensive prospective theorybased hypothesis for research, or when it is necessary to provide comprehensive services such as in health care or education (2006:357-358). climate change is a classic example of a complex problem, or what rittel and webber (1973) referred to as a “wicked problem,” due to how it encompasses global and local environments that interact with each other in a myriad of ways. such problems are ill-defined, uniquely configured, and involve multiple constituencies and interdependencies. because of their multidimensional nature, the problems engendered by climate change cannot be solved by a single disciplinary approach―for example, by technologists―but must also incorporate social, cultural, environmental, economic, legal and political dimensions. the promise and problems of pluridisciplinarity the value of teams involving participants from diverse disciplines working together to solve complex problems is widely recognized (marquardt and horvath 2001, benkler 2006, choi and pak 2006, gloor 2006, sawyer 2007, miller, aqeel-alzrooni, and campbell 2009, sigelman 2009, brown, harris, and russell 2010). however, less attention has been devoted to the work that precedes addressing the stated problem or team’s objective, that is, the work required to integrate pluridisciplinary perspectives and enable collaboration. the social processes involved in reaching a state where participants not only cooperate, but also collaborate, can be described as “invisible work” (forsythe 1999). forsythe conceptualizes invisible work as the aspects that tend to be overlooked or invisible to those not trained in ethnographic research, which includes “detecting tacit knowledge” and assumptions (1999:130). there is often a tacit expectation that members of pluridisciplinary teams will work out whatever issues impede progress toward a solution to the stated problem. sometimes the prior experience of one or more individuals is adequate to achieve the transition from an assemblage of participants to a working team. more often the obstacles to achieve highly integrated pluridisciplinary teams are insurmountable, resulting in achievements that are less than optimal and in the worst case, failure to achieve even moderate success (contractor 2013). these problems appear to be endemic for pluridisciplinary, multicultural teams. marquardt and horvath (2001:19) noted that: miller / towards transdisciplinarity 41 on most global teams, frustrations outnumber successes. global executives, all too frequently, recount stories of setbacks caused by global teams, strategic plans that have suffered, careers that got derailed, projects that have taken so long that the competition took the market. tacit expectations that team members will “just work things out” overlook the root causes of the difficulties that participants are likely to encounter. failure to recognize the formidable disciplinary and cultural differences that manifest in epistemologies, tools, languages, and work practices puts the teams and their projects at risk. without the benefit of a seasoned guide, the prospect of arriving at a shared understanding of the mission and objectives, norms of communication, and agreements about how work will be done greatly diminish the chances of achieving an optimal outcome. conklin (2006:15) refers to shared understanding about the problem and shared commitment around possible solutions as the “holy grail” of collaboration: shared understanding does not necessarily mean that we agree on the problem, although that is a good thing when it happens. shared understanding means that the stakeholders understand each other’s position well enough to have an intelligent dialog about the different interpretations of the problem, and to exercise collective intelligence about how to solve it. pluridisciplinary teams: the ritual of collective work liminality, described as a phase in the ritual process that is characterized as a state of “betwixt and between” (turner 1995:95), provides a lens through which we might explore the stages of pluridisciplinary teamwork. the scope of this article limits the discussion of ritual to broad generalizations, specifically, that ritual is a fundamental component of social life in all societies, that it is exhibited in various types of rites, and that it is characterized by elements of performance, tradition, symbolism, prescribed rules, and formalization (turner 1969, geertz 1973, douglas 1996, 2002). the concept of ritual has also been explored in the context of organizational culture (gluesing 1995, martin and frost 1996, cefkin 2010, erwin 2015). the process of ritualization―that is, how activities and practices become ritualized―has been discussed indirectly and less frequently. bell (1992:74) suggests that “ritualization is a way of acting that is designed and orchestrated to distinguish and privilege what is being done in comparison to other, usually more quotidian, activities.” bell’s definition provides a useful distinction for comparing “regular” work groups and multidisciplinary collaborative teams. the ritualization of collective work, specifically in groups comprised of members from diverse disciplinary backgrounds, initially occurs in the act of bringing together a heterogeneous group of individuals for the purpose of journal of business anthropology, special issue 2, spring 2016 42 engaging in a joint enterprise. membership can be either voluntary or assigned. in an academic setting this might be a group of faculty from diverse disciplines; in an organization, it could be a cross-functional team. in either case, members of these groups are selected and in some fashion removed from their routine environments to become participants in a venture that requires the focused attention and input of diverse perspectives, training, and skillsets. wenger (1998:183) proposed that the role of ritual can be “understood in terms of community formation” and that rituals connect local practices and identities to other locations across time and space. they are a form of engagement that can bolster imagination―by cultivating the sense of others doing or having done the same thing―and alignment―by channeling an investment of the self into standardized activities, discourses, and styles. wenger’s concept, tying ritual and community formation together, anticipates the social processes involved in preparing for collaboration. how a group self-organizes, how it negotiates the rules that will govern members’ interactions, the ways in which activities are ordered, and the meanings that are ascribed to particular language, symbols, and artifacts, exemplify the process of ritualization of collective work practice. extending the concept of ritual to collective work implies that processes and practices be “formalized” in some way, meerwarth et al. (2005) discuss the difference between formal codified rules and the “unwritten partnership rules” that emerge during partnership formation. they note that “emergent partnership rules are individually-based, independently-generated, voluntary perceptions and assessments of partnership” (p. 288). since they are not formalized, they can be accepted or rejected and are enforceable only through the consensus of the group. because they are unwritten, partnership members might not even be aware of them. if we think of the process of collective work done by individuals from multiple disciplines as a form of ritualized practice, then the space created by the qualitative shifts that occur in transitioning from one phase of team interaction to another might be construed as liminal space. the team is neither what it was, nor what it might become―an active state rather than one in which activity is suspended. what occurs in the process of transitioning is a “black box” of social interaction in which team members must engage in three critical tasks (miller 2012) to perform beyond their singular disciplinary perspectives: 1. articulate the value of their disciplinary perspective in relation to the goals and objectives of the project; 2. demonstrate the use and value of the disciplinary practices and tools they contribute; and miller / towards transdisciplinarity 43 3. engage in negotiating, integrating, and managing diversity in environments where the team’s multiple knowledge domains are in play. accomplishing these tasks requires that participants be willing to engage in an intense social learning process. in pluridisciplinary collective work the process of formalizing rules occurs as a result of participation and through the reification of the operational aspects of collective work and the products that are generated by the joint enterprise (wenger 1998). if organization occurs, structure and formalization emerge from what is initially organic and informal (stinchcombe 2001). the liminal phase as threshold figure 2: the rite of passage (source: illustration provided by wearenotconnected.wordpress.com) conceiving of the transitory stages in the process of collective work through the lens of liminality provides a framework in which to study why and how such transitions occur. the term liminality is derived from the latin limen meaning “threshold.” the liminal state is described as a phase during a rite of passage in which individuals engaged in a rite of passage move from the separation phase and enter the margin (or threshold) (turner 1995). in the first of three phases (separation, margin, and aggregation) identified by van gennep, individuals or “initiates” are removed from the structure and norms of their customary journal of business anthropology, special issue 2, spring 2016 44 lives and identities. once separated from the normal routines and structure of their lives, they enter a realm in which they may experience certain elements of “anti-structure” (turner 1995:96) including role reversal, confusion, humiliation, and, sometimes, abuse. removed from former social roles and norms, participants are bound to each other through what turner (1995:96) refers to as “communitas,” a shared experience in which they all partake equally. as depicted in figure 2, the rite of passage concludes with the re-entry of the initiates into the structure and norms of the community, but with a new identity with commensurate changes to their social position, responsibilities, rights and privileges. innovation 101: heterogeneity versus homogeneity a growing awareness of the limitations of singular forms of inquiry to address the complex problems that societies and organizations are currently facing (wilson and pirie 2000, marquardt and horvath 2001, davies 2006) is fueling the interest in pluridisciplinary teams. comprehension of the scope and depth of these problems requires a holistic or systems perspective, one that allows problems to be viewed simultaneously from multiple diverse perspectives. this might be conceptualized by applying the metaphor of a diamond: viewing the “stone” through its various facets reveals different aspects of the problem. brown et al. (2010) posit that “the task is…to draw on all our intellectual resources, valuing the contribution of all the academic disciplines as well as other ways in which we construct our knowledge.” in discussing the nature of communication flows through interpersonal networks, rogers introduces the concepts of “homophily” and “heterophily.” rogers notes that the labels were first introduced by tarde (1903) who argued that “social relations i repeat, are much closer between individuals who resemble each other in occupation and education.” rogers (2003:305) defines homophily as “the degree to which a pair of individuals who communicate is similar.” weighing the benefits of homophily and heterophily, he notes that “heterophilous networks, those that are composed of individuals who are different in certain attributes, have special informational potential, even though it may occur only rarely” (rogers 2003:306). while heterophilous groups are likely to experience more difficulty in communication due to cognitive dissonance resulting from differences in technical competence, language, and tools, these networks have the greater potential when it comes to diffusing innovation. rogers concludes that the “bridges” or interpersonal links that they create in a communication system are able to span multiple networks to convey information about innovations, as granovetter’s (1973) theory of the strength of weak ties suggests. the growing awareness that multiple, rather than singular, viewpoints are best suited to address “wicked problems” has engendered miller / towards transdisciplinarity 45 the practice of deploying teams comprised of participants from multiple disciplines. wicked problems constitute a unique class of problems that require an approach that transcends traditional disciplinary perspectives, but this is easier said than done. unfortunately, we assume more than we know: ignoring the work required to integrate pluridisciplinary perspectives in a way that allows teams to creatively overcome compartmentalized epistemologies and singular modes of inquiry puts teams at risk of not only achieving marginal success, but also of failing completely. new realities, new requirements according to castells (2000), 21st century organizations face challenges that are unique to this era―including discontinuous rather than incremental change, emergent over prescribed order, simultaneous attention to both local and global concerns, and the growing dominance of networks over bounded silos. advances in information and communication technologies are accelerating the rate of change that impacts competitive market and global conditions and dictates new organizational capabilities. these include team-based collective work, cultural competence, new forms of leadership, accountability, a high tolerance for ambiguity and uncertainty, sensitivity to social processes, continuous learning, and the ability to communicate “the new” in multiple modes, including verbal, visual, text and multimedia formats (erwin 2014). organizational norms, processes, structures and values can be designed either to support or inhibit these practices and competencies. relating this to pluridisciplinary group work: an openness to recognizing and accepting the validity of different knowledge cultures is essential for these teams to be productive. many of the required skills and competences are considered “soft skills”―such as humor, empathy, emotional intelligence and optimism―which are assumed to be personal attributes that are difficult to test or assess in a job candidate. although more organizations are recognizing their importance (caudron 1999), soft skills continue to be nice-to-have rather than got-to-have qualities in screening individuals for employment. however, there is a strong relationship between so called soft skills and the characteristics common to effective members of pluridisciplinary teams because they tend to be indicators of aptitudes for leadership, teamwork, negotiation, communication, and sociability. these kinds of skills are useful when navigating the rough waters caused by “shared misunderstandings” (batteau 1979) arising from disciplinary differences related to language, epistemology, meaning, tools, and work practices. organizations that provide opportunities to learn and practice soft skills may be better positioned to foster organizational cultures that value and reward people who develop the interpersonal skills. such an journal of business anthropology, special issue 2, spring 2016 46 organizational culture can aid in the transitioning process through the stages of multidisciplinary teamwork. in practice the work is messy working late one night, conklin encountered a janitor who commented that the vacuum cleaner he was using was not working as it should: it was not actually picking up the dirt. later conklin (2006:3) made the analogy that “when we are working on wicked problems in a socially complex environment [e.g., pluridisciplinary teams], it is much harder to notice that our tools are simply not ‘picking up the dirt.’” the advantage that the janitor had was that he could clearly see the dirt the vacuum was missing. gluesing (1995) described the relationships between members of pluridisciplinary cross-functional teams as “fragile alliances.” her study of a global virtual team (gvt) in a multinational high tech firm explored how gvt members made sense of the cultural complexity of their work and how they operated within that complexity. in addition to coming from diverse disciplinary backgrounds, these teams were separated by physical and psychological distance, corporate boundaries, and cultural differences. gluesing’s study suggests that preparing team members to deal with these conditions and factors prior to their experience might have resulted in a positive outcome. collaborative innovation networks (coins) seminar: a multi-year study of pluridisciplinarity the coins graduate seminar1 provided an opportunity to study pluridisciplinary teams in a global virtual partnership. the seminar is taught annually in partnership with mit sloan school of management and the center for collective intelligence, the university of cologne, the university of bamberg, the stuart school of business as the illinois institute of technology, and aalto university in helsinki. the seminar has been conducted annually since 2005 and has sometimes involved other academic partners and clients. personal experience from 2008 through 2014 as a faculty partner in the collaborative innovation networks (coins) graduate seminar has led to insights that indicate a need for explicit learning opportunities that prepare participants to collaborate effectively in pluridisciplinary teams. guiding teams through the challenges inherent in multicultural, pluridisciplinary teaming made clear the need to train participants in the skillsets required to reach agreement on mission, goals, and objectives, to negotiate shared meaning, and to build the operational structure needed for the team to function. for example, in the 2013 coins seminar, an american female design management student was teamed with a group of four male german 1 https://sites.google.com/site/coincourse2015/home https://sites.google.com/site/coincourse2015/home miller / towards transdisciplinarity 47 engineering students. despite repeated attempts by the female student to contribute to the project, her ideas were given cursory consideration and rarely if ever implemented. the german teammates continued to use german as their primary language even when the female student was involved. the female student declined an intervention by the faculty coaches. rather than participating fully, she opted instead to provide whatever contributions she could and left important decisions about implementation to her german counterparts. insights gained through years of participating in the partnership suggest that the seminar itself created a context that allowed for engaging in both theory and practice. four years after the partnership began, i concluded in a narrative case study that: significant opportunities for learning are rooted in the multidisciplinary and multicultural context of the seminar and the interactions that occur between gvt [global virtual team] members. lessons learned underscore the importance of social learning as a means of identifying and understanding the mechanisms that facilitate or inhibit collaboration at the team level. insights from the seminar have led us to think about how the linkage between social learning, collaboration, and the knowledge sharing challenges encountered by multidisciplinary global virtual teams might be integrated to form a theoretical framework to guide the development of explicit learning objectives (miller 2012:132). how might we make sense of the “messiness” that most multidisciplinary teams experience? one possible way is to equate this “messiness” to the notion of “anti-structure,” a characteristic of the liminal state in traditional rites of passage during which initiates experience role reversal, ego deflation, and other forms of disorientation. referring again to the illustration in figure 2, we might imagine team members leaving work groups in which their roles and identities are established to join a new group whose members are socialized and educated in disciplines different from their own. for example, graduate students participating in the coins seminar come from design, business, programming, and computer science departments. the newly formed teams take on a project. however, before the “real work” can begin, team members must sort out what exactly what their mission is, what objectives will need to be met, and how they will organize to achieve success. as can be seen in figure 2, the journey begins through liminal territory where confusion and conflict (anti-structure) reign. no longer among others who share the same language, tools, and work practices, team members face the tasks of articulating, demonstrating, negotiating, and integrating. during the process of reaching consensus the team sets itself on a path to reach a level of engagement and collaboration, either multidisciplinary (additive), journal of business anthropology, special issue 2, spring 2016 48 interdisciplinary (integrative), or transdisciplinary (transcendent or holistic). we might think of the initial phase of the work of social learning that pluridisciplinary teams confront as being “the mess,” described by erwin (2014) as what is deemed “the problem,” but is not yet understood or clearly articulated. the mess is unfamiliar, “still fuzzy,” unpredictable, and complex. it is a liminal space through which team members must pass to transition from one phase to another, depending on the level of engagement and collaboration that they collectively aspire to reach. according to erwin (2014:2), “the mess” is what precedes “the new”: that which is recognized as vitally important, has stature, and receives respect and attention. erwin notes: “there is a lot less glory and guidance in the mess.” the mess is familiar to most pluridisciplinary teams. it is unlike the rituals we are familiar with from studies of traditional societies because in contemporary rituals, like pluridisciplinary teaming, guidance is relatively rare. glory is even rarer. managing complexity and turbulence in pluridisciplinary teams a growing number of firms have accepted that pluridisciplinary teams provide an alternative means of tackling the complex problems and challenges facing organizations today. practitioners and scholars have called for new forms of leadership that allow organizations to adapt to rapidly changing conditions (southern, gaffney, and moore 2012). in pluridisciplinary teams, for example, this might take the form of rotating leadership among team members based on the particular skillsets that are required at certain times during the project. in addition to internal leadership, there is growing recognition of the importance of external guidance and mentoring for, as marquardt and horvath (2001:157-158) point out: often we point to the team leader for guidance. team leaders, however, have their hands full with managing and administering the activities and tasks of the group. more important, a leader is usually right in the middle of the action―a position that doesn’t usually offer a holistic perspective. it’s difficult to understand conflict or communication issues when you’re part of the process (and indeed may be part of the problem). imagining the skills and qualities of the individuals who serve as ritual guides and facilitators in traditional societies can help to identify the requirements for guiding and mentoring pluridisciplinary teams. unfortunately, job descriptions for ritual guides are rare. what we do know is that a ritual guide would be an individual who has been through the ritual process and, consequently, is sensitive to what an initiate is likely to experience. if we consider multidisciplinary collective work as a form of ritual, we might assume that guiding and mentoring these teams miller / towards transdisciplinarity 49 requires similar qualifications, including the ability to observe and interpret social processes and interact with team members in ways that help them to build consensus, resolve conflicts and achieve clarity when goals and objectives become clouded. the ideal guide or mentor is able to serve as a resource and sounding board for the team and facilitate group processes when required. to serve as an unbiased observer the guide also must be aware of his or her own personal assumptions. finally, the guide must be able to achieve analytical distance: to stand apart without standing above (in the hierarchical sense). such individuals do exist and their numbers are growing. there is also an increasing number of examples of teams that have successfully negotiated the transitions from multidisciplinary to interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary, as illustrated in figure 1. a number of firms―particularly design consultancies like ideo, gravity tank, conifer, and iota―have formed with the intention to deploy pluridisciplinary research teams. the research network for design anthropology2 centered in denmark was founded on a commitment to exploring pluridisciplinary teaming practices, specifically between designers and anthropologists, but also incorporating a diverse range of disciplinary perspectives in project-based work. some organizations have been deploying pluridisciplinary teams for many years and the success rate for these teams has improved dramatically over time as more of their employees and members have become seasoned and experienced, and as organizational environments and structures have adapted to the requirements and practice of pluridisciplinarity. examples of successful pluridisciplinary/multifunctional teams are featured in a forthcoming volume on collaboration. it includes a collection of works that “address roles that business anthropologists assume as choreographers or participants in collaborative ethnography when they work in and with corporations and other organizations” (mccabe 2016). from a variety of perspectives and contexts, the articles describe situations that illustrate how working with pluridisciplinary and multifunctional teams “is a dynamic process of social interaction” involving knowledge, power and emotion. in the introduction, mccabe explains how anthropologists live in “liminal space” in situations that require “cognitive convergence,” requiring that they read and translate other perspectives, “shifting back and forth between participation and observation.” mccabe introduces the concept of “cognitive convergence”, which is a state of shared understanding that must be reached for team members to communicate effectively across disciplinary and functional boundaries. the purpose of this article is to explore the process by which cognitive convergence is achieved. applying liminality as a framework to 2 https://kadk.dk/co-design/research-network-design-anthropology https://kadk.dk/co-design/research-network-design-anthropology journal of business anthropology, special issue 2, spring 2016 50 conceptualize a state of “betweenness” opens a space within which we might explore how shared understanding and “shared misunderstandings” (batteau 1979) are processed by individuals and the team. the emergence of practitioner and academic organizations, training programs, and movements provide evidence of the increasing interest in pluridisciplinarity. one of the best known academic organizations is the science of team science (scits), described as “a rapidly growing cross-disciplinary field of study that aims to build an evidence-base and to develop translational applications to help maximize the efficiency and effectiveness of team based research.”3 the balanced team movement is described as a “self-organizing group” and “a global movement of people who value multidisciplinary collaboration and iterative delivery focused on customer value as a source for innovation.”4 its primary areas of interest include lean startup, agile, lean, agile ux, lean ux, devops (development operations), and customer development. the challenge for applied anthropologists pluridisciplinarity is emerging as a field for which anthropologists are particularly suited. describing the challenges of collaboration within multinational firms to meet customer needs, peinado (2014) argues that “given their understanding of complex cultural systems, anthropologists have much to contribute to how organisations can transform themselves in order to adapt to these new challenges.” the holistic perspective that is fundamental to anthropologists’ training equips them to identify, process, and communicate the complexity inherent in multidisciplinary and multifunctional teams. being both an active participant as well as an observer can result in key insights regarding group processes that either facilitate or inhibit progress through the interdisciplinary, multidisciplinary, and transdisciplinary stages of team development. as the demand for applied anthropology has increased, anthropologists have moved into ever more active roles. this shift has moved anthropologists from external observers and traditional participant observation into the domain of active engagement as organizational members. even more active participation―such as in the emerging field of design anthropology―moves anthropologists from observers to interventionists engaging in transformative practices (gunn, otto, and smith 2013). many anthropologists have served as members of pluridisciplinary teams. the guide might be a peer or core group member, or may be external in the manner of a traditional ritual guide―a member of the community that has been through the ritual experience and is able to assist others in navigating the process. the goal is to reach a shared 3 http://www.scienceofteamscience.org/, accessed on august 20, 2015. 4 http://www.balancedteam.org/, accessed on august 20, 2015. http://www.scienceofteamscience.org/ http://www.balancedteam.org/ miller / towards transdisciplinarity 51 understanding of the reasoning and rationale behind divergent ideas and practices. as mccabe (2016: in press) explains “such roles are challenging because they involve the intersection of different sources of knowledge, power and emotion. since knowledge, power and emotion are social constructions, they require reading and translation when people work together.” an anthropologist, or a researcher from any discipline, who has experience in successfully negotiating the process of pluridisciplinary collaboration, can serve in the role of guide. after all, ritual guides in traditional societies were not anthropologists. the question is how can the skills, sensitivities, and theoretical perspectives and frameworks particular to educating and training anthropologists―and others―be applied to guide groups through the stages of multidisciplinary, interdisciplinary, and transdisciplinary teamwork as illustrated in figure 1. nevertheless, anthropologists are uniquely qualified to serve as guides in helping teams navigate the liminal states that mark the transitions between multidisciplinary, interdisciplinary, and transdisciplinary teaming. they are experienced as observers of the dynamic and fluid states of social interaction and sensitive to cultural nuances. much anthropological research is conducted with the aim of describing and interpreting “the other”; traditionally, this has meant describing non-western societies to the west. with the emergence of subdisciplines, such as business and design anthropology, the anthropological gaze has turned increasingly to contemporary societies, cultures, and subcultures. for example, in describing the role of culture in the process of innovation and adaptation in the automotive industry, briody et al. (2010) specify the importance of anthropological fieldwork in examining cultural change and transformation. serving in the role of ritual guide, anthropologists can assist team members to process and make sense of their experiences and provide help in articulating the nature of engagement, establishing shared routines and practices, dealing with conflicts, developing strategy, negotiating shared meaning and models, and navigating the transitions between multidisciplinarity, interdisciplinarity, and transdisciplinarity. with access to the vast archive of anthropological knowledge―ethnographies, theories, methodologies, and concepts―developed through intimate in situ engagement with social groups across time and space, anthropologists can draw on a wealth of resources. over the course of their studies, student anthropologists are exposed to these archives, which constitute the rich legacy and history of the field. acting as ritual guides requires some reimagining of anthropology. however, this shift is already well under way as anthropologists move from roles as observer-participants to journal of business anthropology, special issue 2, spring 2016 52 incorporating intervention and transformative practices in collaboration with other disciplines (kilbourn 2013). there is general agreement that pluridisciplinary teams composed of diverse disciplinary members can be effective in tackling so called “wicked” problems (conklin 2005). bringing individuals from diverse disciplines together in pluridisciplinary teams creates the potential for innovation (rogers 2003, strathern 2004). while this trend is increasingly important, it is also problematic. as gunn and clausen (2013) argue, “we question the idea that if you just bring different knowledge traditions together this will lead to innovation―it is not that easy.” the challenges confronting pluridisciplinary teams continue to hinder team members from successfully navigating the transitions from multidisciplinary to interdisciplinary, and to achieving the final leap to transdisciplinary teaming. conclusion the point has been made that not all situations require the attention of a multidisciplinary team. although the progression through multidisciplinarity, interdisciplinarity, and transdisciplinarity as illustrated in figure 1 is neither guaranteed nor compulsory, we are nonetheless left with the sense that the type and scale of the problems that human societies are confronting require a holistic approach that transcends disciplinary biases, assumptions, and barriers. ever more pressing systems-level problems of the social and environmental variety have immense implications for business organizations and society at large. the need to generate and apply actionable knowledge that transcends disciplinary boundaries―to evolve beyond the current model of singular forms of inquiry―has become an imperative. there is no set formula or algorithm for achieving this goal. everything depends on the particular context and experience of the individuals who happen to be involved. however, there are many examples of how this imperative is being addressed through formal organizations such as the scits, and practitioner-focused groups like the balanced team movement. approaches such as transdisciplinary team-based research, which aims “to integrate and ultimately extend beyond discipline-specific concepts, approaches, and methods to accelerate innovations and progress toward solving complex real-world problems,” are being embraced in medical and other research fields (hall et al. 2012). organizations can access resources and guidance from these and other sources. a simple checklist provides initial practical direction for organizations that intend to utilize pluridisciplinary teams or to improve the effectiveness of existing cross-disciplinary teamwork. first, assess the nature of the projects under consideration: do they require the involvement of pluridisciplinary perspectives and skill sets? analyze the dimensions―for example, social, technological or cultural―and the file:///c:/users/crh.lib/appdata/local/microsoft/windows/temporary%20internet%20files/content.outlook/3tz22rvo/002.miller%20-%20liminality.docx%23_enref_26 miller / towards transdisciplinarity 53 research areas that are involved. next, discuss who might be qualified for the team. of those potential participants, who has previous experience with the research topic? who has either prior experience working in pluridisciplinary collaborations or a willingness to engage in such work? identify the person who will take the role of facilitator/guide or coach for the team. will it be a member of the team or someone external? a prelaunch meeting of potential teammates with the facilitator/guide to discuss the project and the contributions that each would bring is essential. the return on the initial investment of time in following through on these suggested steps is borne out in literature on the outcomes of successful pluridisciplinary teams. much depends on the compatibility of the individuals, which remains an unknown until people actually come together. even though a candidate might have expertise in a particular research area, if he or she is not willing or able to engage with others in a way that allows each member’s contribution to be respected and considered, that candidate is not likely to be a productive addition to the team. we can apply the phases involved in rites of passage (turner 1995) to understand teamwork effectiveness. confirming the selection of team members can be considered the beginning of the separation or detachment phase. individuals enter the liminal phase once the project is underway. this state is characterized by blurring or confusion of disciplinary distinctions. turner (1995:94) notes that during the liminal period “the characteristics of the ritual subject (the ‘passenger’) are ambiguous; he passes through a cultural realm that has few or none of the attributes of the past or coming state.” the third phase―re-aggregation or reincorporation―completes the process: passage is consummated. a pluridisciplinary team, like any team, will encounter problems in both teamwork―the social interactions among team members; and task work―the set of tasks that must be accomplished to reach a desirable output. the role of the facilitator/guide or coach is to assist team members in negotiating the teaming process, in resolving conflicts and overcoming barriers to achieve a cohesive final product that represents the best thinking and skills of the individual participants. how the participants are able to achieve the levels of teaming depends upon: (1) the nature of the project; (2) the level of skills and the commitment of individual team members to an integrated outcome; and (3) the ability of the facilitator/guide to help the team make the transitions from multidisciplinary to interdisciplinary, and from interdisciplinary to transdisciplinary. we might look to the past for inspiration and guidance. if we imagine collective work as a form of ritual, we might study the role of the ritual guides who shepherded initiates through the confusion and conflicts inherent in navigating transitional stages and liminal spaces. by balancing the need to break established identities, structures, and journal of business anthropology, special issue 2, spring 2016 54 routines, that is, to create anti-structure, we allow for the emergence of new forms of working, new types of identity, and new perspectives on the world. can we learn or imagine how they were able to achieve balance at the edge of chaos? 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"are two (or three or four … or nine) heads better than one? collaboration, multidisciplinarity, and publishability." political science and politics 42 (3):507-512. southern, nancy, sylvia gaffney, and bernice moore. 2012. "leaning into complexity: supporting leaders through transformative learning." integral leadership review 11 (11):9. stinchcombe, arthur l. 2001. when formality works: authority and abstraction in law and organizations. chicago: university of chicago press. strathern, marilyn. 2004. commons and borderlands: working papers on interdisciplinarity, accountability and the flow of knowledge: sean kingston publishing. strathern, marilyn. 2007. "interdisciplinarity: some models from the human sciences." interdisciplinary science review 32 (2):123-134. tarde, gabriel. 1903. the laws of immitation. translated by elsie clews parson. rahway, n.j.: the mershon company press. tuckman, bruce w., and mary ann c. jensen. 1977. "stages of small-group development revisited." group & organization studies (pre-1986) 2 (4):419-427. turner, victor. 1969. the ritual process: structure and anti-structure. chicago: aldine publishing company. wenger, etienne. 1998. communities of practice: learning, meaning and identity. edited by john seely brown, learning in doing: social, cognitive and computational perspectives. cambridge, uk: cambridge university press. wilson, valerie, and anne pirie. 2000. multidisciplinary teamworking indicators of good practice: scottish council for research in education. christine z. miller, ph.d., is clinical associate professor of innovation at iit stuart school of business. previously, chris served on the faculty in the graduate program in design management at the savannah college of art and design (scad). her interdisciplinary doctoral research (anthropology and management) explored process formalization and the relationship between innovation and formalization at a tier one automotive supplier. her research interests incorporate how sociality and culture influence the design and diffusion of new products, processes, and technologies. she studies technology-mediated communication and knowledge workflows within pluridisciplinary groups, teams, and networks and the emergence of collaborative innovation networks (coins). miller is a founding member of the coins conference. she can be reached at cmille31@iit.edu. vi opdaterer systemet vi opdaterer systemet... rauli.cbs.dk opdateres og er snart tilgængeligt. liminality, anthropology, and the global organization julia c. gluesing abstract turner described liminality as a “realm of pure possibility” that can give rise to novel configurations of ideas within a ritual framework, while bourdieu referred to liminality as a “space of possibles.” one of the greatest challenges managers and their employees face in multinational enterprises that cross multiple boundaries is the increased complexity brought about by ambiguity, multiplicity, interdependence, and constant, rapid change. working in global organizations means operating simultaneously in multiple contexts. anthropologists can make a contribution to an understanding of global work by managing ambiguity and crossing boundaries; by living and working liminally―something acquired in both anthropological training and through experience; and by bringing creativity to the forefront to foster global understanding. keywords global organization, complexity, ambiguity, change, multinationals, boundary-crossing, liminality page 1 of 22 jba special issue 2: 13-34, spring 2016 © the author(s) 2016 issn 2245-4217 www.cbs.dk/jba journal of business anthropology, special issue 2, spring 2016 14 introduction in a 2010 ibm study involving face-to-face interviews with more than 1,500 ceos around the globe, a consistent theme emerged: the challenge posed by a rapid escalation in complexity. in a world with an unprecedented level of interconnection and interdependence, issues like global warming and climate change, access to clean water, the potential for disease to rapidly spread, and the vulnerability of our infrastructures to breakdown, keep leaders awake at night. in his introduction to the study report, then chairman, president, and chief executive officer of ibm samuel j. palmisano wrote (2010:4): what we heard through the course of these in-depth discussions … is that events, threats and opportunities aren’t just coming at us faster or with less predictability; they are converging and influencing each other to create entirely unique situations. these firsts-of-their-kind developments require unprecedented degrees of creativity – which has become a more important leadership quality than attributes like management discipline, rigor or operational acumen. scholarly work supports this conclusion and points to the multidimensionality that arises from the many diverse socio-political, cross-cultural, and geographical boundaries that must be traversed to operate simultaneously in multiple contexts (lane, maznevski, and mendenhall 2003). this complexity means that anthropologists who want to make a contribution in multinational corporations must move fluidly in an environment characterized by conditions of multiplicity, interdependence, ambiguity, and flux. turner’s concept of liminality, which was rooted in the rituals of small-scale societies, but which he also applied to modern societies, was of a “midpoint of transition... between two positions” (1974:261). anthropologists learn about and practice the concept of liminality. they can be well suited to the work of managing complexity because they are trained to embrace liminality, either through living and working in a continual liminal state, or temporarily as part of a transition from one way of seeing or doing things to another. they routinely alternate between both emic and etic perspectives, working as both participants and observers of daily life. yet anthropologists are best equipped for this work because their professional identity is often multiple, open to possibility, and flexibly responsive to the multidimensionality that surrounds them. this article discusses how anthropological training provides competencies that embrace liminality and resemble those that business practitioners and international business scholars are now cataloging as essential for success in multinational corporations. in particular, emphasis is on the ability to open pathways to seeing and doing things in new ways, unleashing creative potential. the article continues with a brief gluesing / liminality, anthropology, and the global organization 15 definition and review of the concept of liminality, as it will be applied here. the discussion then turns to what it means to lead in complexity and offers some of the current managerial thinking about how best to cope with complexity. next follows a description of the implications for anthropological training and how it can equip anthropologists to work well with complexity by helping them to accept and use ambiguity, fuzzy boundaries, and multiple perspectives to their advantage. in other words, anthropologists can learn to apply the concept of liminality in their everyday work with organizations. finally, the article presents some of the ways anthropologists and other organizational scholars are employing the liminality concept in business. they are using this concept to develop strategies for working across boundaries, promoting learning, and opening up new possibilities for understanding and managing the rapid change, frequent transitions, and novel situations that are characteristic of today’s complex global business environment. the liminality concept liminality is a classical anthropological concept that focuses our attention on “inbetweenness,” on the experience of being open to possibility that has the potential to uncover and to challenge deeply-rooted assumptions about how a community or a society works (cook-sather and alter 2011). the concept can refer to the state of inbetweenness, or to the phase in a change process where one has given up old ways of seeing and behaving but has not yet replaced them with new ones. it is a time of possibility. when we invoke this concept and apply it to ourselves, or encourage others to apply it, we can assume a position that is “ambiguous, neither here nor there, betwixt and between all fixed points of classification” (turner 1974:232). the position of inbetweenness is at the threshold between roles: for example, between anthropologist and business consultant, or between groups, such as an anthropology community of practice and a professional group of engineers. it thereby affords us the opportunity to gain insights into how people perceive and act in the world; into what is similar or different in people’s perceptions and ways of acting; and into how to learn from these insights, creating alternatives to work in traditional, organized bureaucratic forms. in applying the concept of liminality, we open up possibilities for the new forms of organizing and ways of working described in this article, challenging our assumptions and changing our expectations. it becomes possible to build new structures better suited to our interconnected, interdependent lives that cross boundaries and contexts frequently. garston has suggested that liminality can help us practically embrace ambiguity and use it to explore the limits of existing structures. she uses the example of temporary employees who experience working for an organization, but not being a permanent part of the organization, to illustrate how this type of work can be a space that opens up possibilities. journal of business anthropology, special issue 2, spring 2016 16 the risks and opportunities of temporary work “challenge the old boundaries of industrial organization” and suggest “new ways of organizing and experiencing work, as well as new ways of constructing organizational subjectivity” (garston 1999:606). yet these liminal spaces also hold the risk of undermining organizations by disrupting established routines with nothing yet to replace them and individuals’ positions within the organization, leaving them in a transitional state with no established identities or roles to perform. turner (1995:97) described liminality as “a realm of pure possibility whence novel configurations of ideas and relations may arise”―a realm that bourdieu (1996:236; 1991:10) discussed in terms of a “space of possibles.” this idea of liminality is the focus of this article. the sections that follow provide an overview of the managerial viewpoint on complexity and what it means for leading, and working in complex global organizations, and suggests how anthropologists, through their unique training, can apply the concept of liminality to help people in their daily work as they face the challenges of complexity. leading, managing and working in complexity definitions, descriptions, and predictions about globalization and the rapid pace at which it is occurring are numerous; there are many points of view about the globalizing process and its meaning or implications for businesses and for ordinary citizens (appadurai 1996; friedman 2000; stiglitz 2002). globalization is about international economic integration and income inequality, the creation of global consumer cultures, and the crossing of many borders. the globalizing efforts of companies meet with varying successes and unintended consequences. however, in spite of the many different ways of understanding globalization, there are some emerging patterns that are important to how we think about and live in a globalized world. lane, maznevski, and mendenhall (2004:8) present an accessible and comprehensive characterization of globalization by emphasizing three basic globalizing conditions that “together function as the foundation for the increasing complexity of globalization: multiplicity, interdependence, and ambiguity.” they argue that the complicated mix of global competition, the many geographies and contexts involved, with numerous cultures and languages that are all tightly linked, make things more complicated and less predictable than in the past to manage. unpacking the three conditions of complexity is the first step to “linking complexity with the processes to manage it” (2004:9). the first condition is multiplicity, which simply means that multinational corporations deal with many different voices, viewpoints, and constraints. people’s ideas about work and how it fits in with their lives vary greatly. from the perspective of global business, multiplicity is primarily about the multiplicity of competitors, customers, suppliers gluesing / liminality, anthropology, and the global organization 17 along the value chain, multiple governments and their regulations and requirements, and the many stakeholders who monitor, or have an interest in, what businesses do and the impact they have in local communities. for example, a local grocery and variety store in the san francisco bay area may find that it now has large competitors that originate not just in the u.s., but―like tesco and ikea―come from the uk and sweden. mcdonalds changes its food and drink offerings to suit the demands of many different customers in local markets around the world. ford motor company, to create an automobile for the u.s. market, must work with and integrate the products of suppliers in thailand, mexico, china, malaysia, and brazil. visteon corporation, a large automotive parts supplier, in its turn, must comply not only with u.s. regulations regarding the chemical content of its manufactured products, but also with those of the eu. high tech giants like google have found themselves embroiled in controversy when their policies about open access to information on the internet collided with the chinese government’s policies of information control, nicknamed “the firewall of china.” companies can also find themselves constrained by powerful non-governmental organizations like human rights watch or amnesty international, who can be powerful enough to push companies to alter their employment practices. managing all this multiplicity is part of globalizing, but it is also a very real challenge because there are no established “how tos.” moreover, the previously successful practices of examining balance sheets and making strategic plans that are executed with discipline no longer work very well because there is so much unpredictability. business circumstances in global markets can change over night. the second condition of complexity caused by globalization is interdependence. all one has to do to understand this condition is to look back at the global financial collapse in 2008, or even further back to the attacks on the world trade center on september 11, 2001, when the stock market dove and many businesses were interrupted―especially those whose headquarters were housed in the trade center itself. while companies can take advantage of interdependence to drive down costs and expand into global markets, there is a downside to the extended web of relationships in which they function. a delay in shipping parts from china to the u.s. can have an enormous cost when plant production has to be shut down in the u.s. as a result. alliances can be more complicated than imagined: take, for example, the daimlerchrysler merger which ultimately failed, partly due to imperfect understanding of each other’s operating expectations, competencies, and cultures. ambiguity is the third condition of complexity. no one doubts that there is an abundance of information available on the internet and flowing through corporate infrastructures around the world. yet the clarity of information is difficult to achieve when there are so many different meanings for the same information depending upon context and cultural perspectives; misattributions or interpretations can abound, journal of business anthropology, special issue 2, spring 2016 18 especially when so much communication takes place using virtual technologies. for example, even in global finances and accounting it is difficult to know “the facts” of a situation when there are different reporting systems and norms for inputting or disclosing financial information in different locations around the world. even global accounting firms like pricewaterhousecoopers cannot ensure that what one country reports on a balance sheet will be equivalent to another’s. equivocality is another aspect of ambiguity that occurs when different interpretations of the same information are possible. at ford motor company, when the company was first attempting to design a global car, a global team of product managers in different countries looked at a basic blueprint for the design of a chassis and each member came away with a different interpretation of the blueprint, one focusing on cost, one on safety, one on supplier relations, and one on manufacturability with different implications for design. it is also nearly impossible when the numbers on the spreadsheet change to know what caused the change. cause and effect relationships in global business are particularly difficult to unpack when an abundance of related factors can be involved. for example, correlating a sales team’s new global strategy to an upturn in product demand in a local market is nearly impossible because that increase could be due to many local factors, including bank policies, tariffs, or even the disappearance of a competitor. the complexity created by multiplicity, interdependence, and ambiguity is dynamic, too. indeed, the whole global system seems to be changing at an ever-increasing rate. environmental conditions such as climate change and the potential scarcity of water resources, energy fluctuations due to political conflicts, and jostling for power on the global stage, are just some of the factors that influence daily fluctuations, making it difficult to decide how to act. so, how are leaders and managers responding to dynamic complexity? scholars (sachs 2000; lane, maznevski, and mendenhall 2004) and ceos (ibm 2010) point to the importance of requisite variety (ashby 1973) and talented people with a global mindset and the ability to think systemically as critical to organizations’ structures and policies. organizations must “complexify” themselves, introducing a variety of perspectives and skills into their workforces. the complex and ambiguous inputs coming from the environment must be matched by an equal cognitive complexity in the people who respond. in addition, the processes must be flexible enough to allow change to occur. as weick and van orden have remarked: “globalization requires people to make sense of turbulence in order to create processes that keep resources moving to locations of competitive advantage” (1990:1). the ibm report (2010) echoes the need for systems thinking, and variety by highlighting the competencies that successful global companies foster: creativity and systems thinking with enough flexibility to change gluesing / liminality, anthropology, and the global organization 19 with speed. systems thinking means that the parts of a system can be understood best in the context of relationships with one another and with other systems, rather than in isolation (senge 1990). in previous ibm reports, change was cited as the most difficult challenge for ceos to overcome. now it is the complexity of global systems, with creativity named as the most important attribute leaders and managers can have to capitalize on complexity (2010:11): “the effects of rising complexity call for ceos and their teams to lead with bold creativity, connect with customers in imaginative ways and design their operations for speed and flexibility to position their organizations for twenty-first century success.” anthropology and learning to embrace liminality the concept of liminality as a process, as a transitional state, and as an ambiguous space that frees the self or a group from the imposition of traditional structures, opening up the possibility for new ways of thinking and being, is central to the lives and work of anthropologists, no matter the context of their work or with whom they are working. the very nature of the u.s. four-field anthropological education and training demands that students embrace the study of humankind from the perspectives of physical evolution, archeology, linguistics, and culture, holding all perspectives simultaneously even if they specialize in one of the fields. it is a holistic and integrative frame that involves crossing boundaries and taking on multiple perspectives from the start. anthropology in many ways accomplishes deep education in a discipline while also downplaying ideological structures as determinant of interpretation, allowing structures to emerge from experience and at the boundaries of societal and organizational life. for example, students are encouraged to immerse themselves in anthropological theory to establish a solid grounding in preparation for fieldwork. yet, while in the fieldwork experience, students also are encouraged to open up to alternative meanings and interpretations of events, relationships, and objects, from the point of view of the people they are studying. anthropology thus moves back and forth between documented disciplinary knowledge and local knowledge, between etic and the emic perspectives, between observer and participant roles. in this sense, doing anthropology is a liminal experience of oscillating perspectives. field notes themselves are symbolic of the liminality that is central to anthropology, representing being in the field but not of the field. the liminality in field notes comes from three sources: (1) the anthropologist’s position “betwixt and between” worlds, their own and that of the people they study; (2) the ways field notes mediate between the different roles an anthropologist might take on while in the field, and his or her own personal relationship to field notes; and (3) how field notes are a form or genre of writing and how they relate to other forms of writing (jackson 1990). for a student, field notes are a form of ritual that https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/system journal of business anthropology, special issue 2, spring 2016 20 is a necessary part of the transition from student of anthropology to professional anthropologist, especially for a student who is working towards a graduate degree. field notes are part of ritual because they are a tangible representation of the student’s role as an “outsider” in the group or society s/he is studying. they also connect the student while in the field to home and to the anthropological profession, and then, on the student’s return to home base, they connect back to the field and the experience of fieldwork. boundaries in fieldwork can be fuzzy, and a student can experience ambiguity when cultural norms and meanings are not yet known and when their own are not applicable. roles as a participant observer can also be ambiguous: for instance, when a student is asked to participate in the work of a business team he or she is observing, even if it is just copying documents. the student assumes the role of team member for a while and is no longer in the role of researcher or observer. however, the team will not fully allow the student to be one of them, or to “go native,” and will put the student back into the researcher role eventually. field notes are a record of the continual movement between the roles of anthropologist and native and mediate this experience. as documents, field notes also represent an emotional detachment from the field and are a central part of the science of anthropology. yet, at the same time, they are an emotionally-laden diary of the anthropological experience, as well as a record of native confidences and expressions of their life experiences. field notes are a detached description of the situation experienced by a student anthropologist and provide data to address an intellectual problem―the reason for the fieldwork in the first place. at the same time, field notes are also a representation of the student’s experience and can provoke a flood of memories and emotion in which the field notes are a reflection of self and no longer of the field. as documents, the field notes are “raw data” that can be translated into a finished piece of writing, midway between the anthropologists and the reader of a journal article, a book, or even a fictional narrative. they are also betwixt and between a private document and one that is public. fieldwork, and the field notes that are intimately a part of it, can prepare and test a student’s ability to live with ambiguity, with an identity that is unclear to the anthropologist or to the natives’ identity, and with all the uncomfortable feelings that result from this state of neither here nor there and neither this nor that (jackson 1990). an anthropologist’s training is socialization into a life of ambiguity and inbetweenness, a liminal life, that is central to the discipline of anthropology and which continues throughout an anthropologist’s career. it is excellent preparation for work as a business anthropologist in a multinational enterprise, where people are working in spaces with continually shifting boundaries, multiple cultural arenas, and diverse contexts. anthropologists can develop a level of cultural intelligence that gluesing / liminality, anthropology, and the global organization 21 means they know and can readily transcend their own cultural background to interact with and understand people from other cultural backgrounds more readily than most. experienced professional anthropologists who accept liminality as a way of life develop a unique ability to seek out and work with difference, and the capacity to produce new knowledge from this difference, by moving back and forth between the known and unknown. in fact, they actively seek out information about difference. as bateson (1972:459) reminded us, “information is the difference which makes a difference.” anthropological training that emphasizes a tolerance for ambiguity is an advantage if the goal is to think in new ways and open up possibilities for new ways of working―or, simply put, for being creative. we can do even more to train anthropology students to embrace liminality in a business setting. in educational experience, liminality can serve as “a threshold between and among clearly established roles at which one can linger, from which one can depart, and to which one can return” (cook-sather and alter 2011). specifically, students can take up a liminal position between student and professional―not with the goal of immediately transitioning from the former to the latter, but rather with the goal of accessing and acting on the insights that such an indeterminate state brings. there is also the potential for the crossing and re-crossing of boundaries to transform the ongoing relationship between anthropologist and business professional. as more anthropologists turn to the private sector for employment in global organizations, work for consulting companies that serve them, or become free-lance consultants, additional training experiences while they are being socialized into the discipline through their education would prepare them to transition from anthropology student to professional business and organizational anthropologist in the private sector. we can structure opportunities for immersion in interdisciplinary project work and offer opportunities for anthropological practice in settings that simulate, or actually are, global work settings that entail multiplicity, interdependence, ambiguity, and flux: in other words, complexity. two examples from my own teaching experience illustrate how this additional preparation might be accomplished and the learning that the opportunity affords. interdisciplinary project work as an illustration of interdisciplinary project work, i am going to describe an example from an educational collaboration at wayne state university (wsu) where i have taught and conducted research in both the department of anthropology and the department of industrial and systems engineering (ise). the particular educational program is called the engineering management master’s program (emmp), which is taught on campus in ise and also in industry, particularly at ford motor company, where the program is delivered to working engineers and paid journal of business anthropology, special issue 2, spring 2016 22 for by the company as part of its leadership development (gluesing et al. 2008). the degree is a wsu degree, no matter where it is taught. there are two years of coursework that includes a mix of engineering, business, and anthropology. in the third year of the three-year program, students work in teams on year-long leadership projects. each team, along with its corporate sponsors, chooses a project for its global, strategic importance and because the project generally involves a knotty problem that has not yet been solved within the established organizational structure. faculty advisors and graduate students work with the industry project teams and their company sponsors throughout the year. at the end of the year, the teams present the results of their work to top-level managers, as well as a thesis to their faculty, so there is a very important “deliverable” that the teams must produce. graduate students specializing in business anthropology have been fortunate to be assigned to these teams. the opportunity to interact with working engineers to solve a real-world problem, with high stakes in a setting that crosses multiple boundaries within and outside the company, is excellent preparation for what they might face after they graduate. the students move outside the discipline of anthropology and learn to “see” the world through the eyes of the engineers. they learn about the demands of the corporate environment in projects that can cross multiple locations as dispersed and diverse as japan, brazil, germany, the u.s. and china, and india and the middle east. they have to learn about “car culture” and corporate culture, and about the differences among the engineering disciplines. in their turn, anthropology students apply their skill set to conduct research for the teams and to help them as “consultants,” opening possibilities to the team members through their “outsider” point of view, and illuminating cultural factors that may be hindering the resolution of the problem. the anthropologist’s work is often a part of the final deliverable. it is an eye-opening experience for the anthropology students and is often quite uncomfortable as many of their assumptions are challenged, but it invariably teaches the students to examine problems from different perspectives, to suspend judgment before making interpretations and attributing meaning, and to open up to new ways of seeing and doing things. one student, who had come to work with a project team, noted at the start of her work that she was skeptical about working with a corporation and leery of corporate exploitation: of both people and the environment. she and her fellow students in anthropology had a negative opinion of business in general, and certainly of a company like ford which “enslaves” its engineers and makes products that “pollute.” at the conclusion of her project experience, her ideas had changed. through her participant observation in the corporate environment, she began to realize the difficulties faced by the engineers and the ambiguity inherent in their work (what she had previously gluesing / liminality, anthropology, and the global organization 23 thought was “just calculations”), and began to see the engineers as human beings faced with nearly impossible complexity in which they had to function and make decisions. she also saw that many of the engineers really had safety and environmental preservation as strongly held personal goals, and that they loved their work. they were concerned with the safety of their families and friends who would be driving these vehicles, as well as that of the general public. for this student, the project work was liminal work and a positive, though uncomfortable, part of her transition from academe to the business world. the project work also introduced the idea of crossing cultures, and all that this process entails, as something not limited to societal boundaries. the educational structures in cultural anthropology generally do not include “the other” as another occupational, functional, professional, or unit-based culture, whereas in the multinational corporation, occupational cultural groups are often just as salient as national or societal cultures. a liminal role highlighting ambiguity the second example is a classroom experience. one semester i taught a graduate seminar in identity and globalization for the department of anthropology at wsu. i collaborated with a colleague who was teaching a course on global perspectives for the business school (miller et al. 2008). we arranged to have our classrooms located next to each other on one of the university’s satellite campuses that was equipped with state-of-the art video conferencing capability. my colleague had established a relationship with a technical university in germany. she and a couple of the professors there had devised an eight-week simulation to teach about, and give the students on both sides of the atlantic some experience in, global virtual teaming. my anthropology graduate students studied the business students as they worked together using email, web chat, video and audio conferences, assuming roles on negotiation teams for a merger and/or acquisition involving a fictitious german and american company. the anthropology students did participant face-to-face participant observation, just as they would have been required to do in the “real world.” they had to assume all the confidentiality and the fieldwork requirements a business anthropology project would entail, including obtaining official university institutional review board (irb) approval. the business students asked the anthropology students for reports, which the students had to provide without violating any of the rules for confidentiality, yet still provide value to the business teams to maintain their credibility. the anthropology students experienced considerable ambiguity about assuming multiple roles as students, and team members and consultants. this type of academic-practitioner, outsider-insider role is often one that is assumed by corporate anthropologists, so it was an excellent training experience for the students in straddling boundaries journal of business anthropology, special issue 2, spring 2016 24 and working in a liminal space. the students were required to prepare a final report for me based on their field notes, so they also experienced the transition from their notes to a finished write-up. the relationship to their field notes and to their report contained ambiguity about what was and was not appropriate to include in the report. the process of reflection about their liminal situation made the students aware of both the pitfalls and advantages of ambiguity as a necessary part of liminality. the students felt the stress it can produce but also experienced the understanding and insights they gained about negotiation from the business students. it was a perspective on negotiating boundaries that was not part of the anthropological perspective on identity, negotiated identity or cross-cultural negotiation they were learning about in my class. liminality, as a classical concept in anthropology, can be incorporated in the educational setting in many ways: through knowledge imparted by the instructor; through reading and studying; and most importantly, through experience in various settings. cook-sather and alter (2011:8) remind us that a theory of liminality, that can help support and analyze transitions within formal educational contexts but also in relation to education more generally, is particularly necessary in the contemporary world, when life is constituted by multiple and overlapping liminal phases, places, and states as members of a society move from one culture, context, and role to another, often repeatedly throughout a single lifetime. this conceptualization of liminality suits multicultural theories and approaches and invites us to analyze the common educational rite of passage in new terms that can create new lenses for seeing the world and encourage questioning of dominant relations of power and dominant forms of knowledge, as well as open spaces for creativity and the generation of new knowledge. for business anthropologists in training, the two examples described here offer concrete suggestions for preparing them to assume roles in global organizations where liminality abounds and where the concept can be useful in managing complexity if employed strategically. the strategic use of liminality to manage complexity for anthropologists who study and who work with and within business enterprises, their education and training, especially in the field, equip them to navigate and take advantage of liminality strategically. they can leverage liminality in their own work and in creating opportunities for people in organizations, both individually and collectively, to become more flexible, to learn, to change, and to build new structures and new knowledge. people can become adaptable to an environment in continual flux if they take advantage of and foster the conditions of liminality creatively. anthropologists are uniquely equipped to make use of liminality in their own work as employees in multinational organizations gluesing / liminality, anthropology, and the global organization 25 or as external consultants. below i describe four aspects of organizational life that are open to liminality, and which can create opportunities for anthropologists working with and within global organizations. liminality is a useful concept to enable organizations to manage complexity strategically through: (1) interdisciplinary, cross-boundary, multicultural project teams; (2) multi-skilling and mobility that enables flexibility; (3) creating change; and (4) engaging in identity work to make the most of workforce skills. 1. interdisciplinary, cross-boundary, multicultural project teams as more multinational corporations adopt project teams as the basis for organizing work, the concept of organization as an enduring social artifact is being challenged (weick and van orden 1990; tempest and starkey 2004). with the temporary nature of many project teams, especially those that cross multiple cultural, organizational, and geographic boundaries, the question is raised of how learning and knowledge development takes place (tempest and starkey 2004). liminal episodes can become a context for learning as new ways of organizing are being developed in multinational, globally-networked corporations. new institutional spaces that are transient, as well often as virtual spaces, can provide contexts for learning. learning occurs across organizational boundaries in network environments constructed of linked project teams. these spaces release employees from organizational structures that bind too tightly. they can promote creativity and innovation because they challenge traditional hierarchies and create liminal situations that are “conducive to transcendence and play” (tempest and starkey 2004:509). global project teams provide the opportunity to disrupt taken-forgranted routines and to try out new ones without having to establish a long-term commitment to a new process. networks of project teams in new product development in the automotive industry, for example, are often given a “passport” to move freely across traditional organizational boundaries and hierarchies to seek new technologies and specialized expertise, and to create new processes for developing products. there is considerable ambiguity at the start of the product development process. while employees who are part of the project teams can still carry traditional titles such as powertrain calibration engineer, they may often work in new ways that do not fit the standard job description that goes with this title. these same engineers could be working on new manufacturing processes, or experimenting with others on the opposite side of the world to develop new calibration techniques or develop new engine materials. in global product development, engineers often confront new engineering challenges posed by a very different environment, such as having to design for dessert temperatures, high altitudes, or very rough road conditions. the situation is fluid and malleable, enabling new ways of journal of business anthropology, special issue 2, spring 2016 26 working and new knowledge creation. inhabiting a liminal space is their way to be creative in devising solutions to problems they may never have encountered before. wenger (1998) states that a community of practice is a necessary condition for knowledge generation because it provides the interpretative context for making sense of the world of work and, thus, the possibilities for learning. new forms of organizing, such as temporary project teams or new product development teams, also provide groupings of individuals that can be activated as the basis for knowledge production in recurring projects. periodically, they can be drawn together and activated by managers who serve as network brokers. business and organizational anthropologists and design anthropologists are often members of such teams, whether as insiders or outsiders to the formal organization. the teams present anthropologists with the opportunity to make use of liminality and transition spaces to open organizational members’ thinking. they may introduce new lenses, perhaps through collaboration with another discipline, or by an employee from another part of the world with another cultural perspective or practice. anthropologists can help build both systems thinking and creativity by introducing into the conversation a holistic view of organizing, and by making visible interdependencies that may be taken for granted.by organizational members. they can work with organizational members to use liminal opportunities as a way to break free of organizational constraints and make new connections, “complexifying themselves” by taking on diverse, alternative perspectives and “rearranging resources” to learn as individuals and to contribute to organizational learning at the same time. 2. multi-skilling, mobility and flexibility for high-performing project teams that are the basis of global networked organizations, connections and cooperation are essential, especially if organizations want to develop and benefit from new knowledge for strategic renewal and innovation. cohen and prusak (2001) have stated that social capital connects organizational members together and encourages cooperation. social capital is characterized by trust and shared norms that can encourage a climate of reciprocity. yet it is a difficult challenge to establish social capital which resides within organizations that are constantly in a state of recomposition. instead, what is occurring more often is social capital that is work-based and in which a sense of belonging build on the project as the focus of commitment. organizational work centering around project teams creates new forms of social capital that themselves create network connections which transcend formal organizational boundaries and operate “within and between organizations” (knoke 1999:18). the project becomes the focus of commitment, while people’s sense of belonging builds from this gluesing / liminality, anthropology, and the global organization 27 commitment. for individual workers, this commitment can mean developing social capital that lasts beyond the project and beyond their tenure in any one organization. if they maintain connections as part of a community of practice (of engineers for example), or because of personal bonds formed during project work―especially if that work revolves around solving tough problems―they can create more fluid career paths for themselves. they also can avoid the rigidity of the career tracks imposed by formal organizational human resource systems. in the ambiguous, liminal spaces created by project work, individuals can leverage the scope of learning opportunities and develop a breadth of skills and knowledge to perform in a broader range of organizational roles. individuals now expect to work for more firms in their career, and even for several companies simultaneously, on a broad range of projects. in this sense, liminal transitions are a new reality in organizational life. enabling employees to become multi-skilled with a rich portfolio of experiences increases the flexibility of the organization as a whole. the organization develops the “requisite variety” of employees to innovate and to tackle unexpected or new situations that arise in an environment that is continually in flux. having people on board who embrace job mobility also means that project teams can be assembled quickly in different locations around the world to work on a variety of products and on problem-solving projects, both short-term and long-term. 3. creating change if we embrace the concept of liminality as a part of modern organizational life, then it is possible to see opportunities for creating organizational change―not just as a result of major environmental jolt, but also as a part of normal organizational life (horvath 2009; howard-grenville et al. 2011). organizational change programs are often intentional, but change need not be formalized. it can occur in everyday practices such as meetings or workshops that are constructed symbolically as “liminal phenomena.” these events can be “bracketed,” but not removed from the everyday action of organizations. “when brought into being in the hands of able actors, liminality as a cultural apparatus provides great possibility and material for endogenously creating intentional cultural change” (howard-grenville et al. 2011:18). liminality can be a kind of cultural tool to enable change. the work of howard-grenville and her colleagues introduces a new model of organizational change in which organizational insiders, who are not necessarily part of any managerial hierarchy, can achieve change by taking action, experimenting, and working with the symbolic richness that is present in organizational life. the model is based on three central processes: (1) resourcing the everyday as liminal; (2) engaging the liminal; and (3) translating liminal experience and seeding change. the model assumes that people actively construct together the journal of business anthropology, special issue 2, spring 2016 28 meaning of the symbols that surround them, including events and behaviors. the model assumes that organizational actors are actively engaged in constructing symbols that include multiple voices, and which are polymorphic, with different meanings for different people. for example, in a french-american team, symbols for food facilitated cooperative interaction across cultural boundaries. however, the french understood the symbols to reference careful preparation of food, while the americans interpreted the symbols in reference to eating good food. the americans and the french team members were able to joke about their different interpretations and to see them as complementary. they used the symbols to take a broad view of each other’s potential contributions to project success. team members could see how both ideas and their implementation were important to a positive project outcome. symbols have the potential for malleability, though translation or recombination, opening up the possibility for cultural change. spaces can be opened up that “bracket” a topic for attention, but that leave room for “what-if” scenarios and new meanings that have the potential for changing ways of working. applying such a model of organizational change means that any organizational member can become a change agent. at nike headquarters in oregon, for example, a group of colleagues and i were invited to participate in a regularly scheduled workshop. we were outsiders brought in to attend and participate in the event, with some of us making presentations. the nike staff, all across the headquarters location, were invited―but not compelled―to attend. the interaction was informal and included nike symbols of sustainability, collaborative work, and sports, especially of achievement and sports icons. the workshop was about sustainability. at one point the topic of water came up in one of the presentations, which led to a discussion of water use in the manufacture of t-shirts and shoes. one of the people in the workshop began talking about the meaning of water in relation to sustainability, especially in the context of sports. ideas came up about recycling water, and the topic changed to recycling shoes, with the focus on shoes as fluid, and so on. the workshop became a liminal space where people could draw on existing cultural resources in the form of tangible objects placed on the walls and on the tables that had multiple meanings. the objects helped people create new meanings that might lead to new thinking about how to manufacture products that use less water. the meaning for sustainability was extended to not just natural resources, but to the products themselves. our outsider group (all “cultural experts”) introduced additional resources into the workshop and juxtaposed them with existing resources in the community to foster new perspectives. participants were encouraged to tap into others in the nike community, as well to take the ideas from the workshop further, but without the imposition of any formal organizational mechanisms. this process preserved liminality to keep possibilities open and allow people to take gluesing / liminality, anthropology, and the global organization 29 action or experiment in their everyday work. this nike example illustrates how opportunities for significant culture change can be initiated through ordinary conditions, and not major crises, and as part of everyday organizational life rather than separated from it. liminality enables culture change because it temporarily suspends normal interactions and removes them from the existing cultural repertoire, giving rise to creative improvisation through the redefinition of common symbols. 4. engaging in identity work an intriguing area of work in identity is in the area of bicultural and multicultural identity (brannen and thomas 2010; fitzsimmons 2013; fitzsimmons et al. 2011). new scholarship is arising in the study of people who have bicultural or multicultural identities as a new organizational demographic. having a bicultural identity means that a person identifies with two or more cultures and has internalized associated cultural schemas (fitzsimmons 2013). as the world becomes more connected and interdependent, and as immigration and migration are on the rise, demographics are changing. in the u.s., thirteen percent of the population is made up of first-generation immigrants, and twenty percent of the population speaks a language other than english at home (united nations statistics division 2011). bicultural marriages are more commonplace. for example, it is no longer unusual for an employee in a multinational corporation to be born, vfor instance, to a senegalesegerman woman married to a german man, but who was raised in spain and is now working in the u.s. people who are bicultural could be considered liminal characters. they typically are not easily defined because they do not enact a persistent identity (sturdy, schwarz and spicer 2006). bicultural or multicultural individuals have access to multiple cultural knowledge systems that they have learned as a result of significant exposure to the multiple cultures shaping their identity (hong et al. 2000). they have the potential to facilitate boundary crossing, and thus organizational creativity and innovation, by bringing diverse people with differing perspectives together. they also can help transfer knowledge in global networked organizations. biculturals develop more complex cultural representations and are more likely to be able to deal with cognitive complexity across domains, giving them both the empathy and flexibility “to integrate ideas in potentially novel and more creative ways” (brannen and thomas 2010:11). it is possible that if organizations can locate bicultural individuals already in their workforce, they can engage them in searching for ways to remain competitive in an increasingly challenging and complex environment. there is a strategic role for anthropologists in helping to find and to put the bicultural or multicultural skillset to work in global work. journal of business anthropology, special issue 2, spring 2016 30 conclusion liminality is part of a world of contingency, where the complex array of events, people, structures, and ideas can take on multiple meanings and move in many different directions. as a key concept in anthropology, it has the potential to push forward our practice in and theorizing about global organizations. first, as practitioners, many anthropologists work in consulting roles, whether they are fully employed by an organization or contracted, and whether they are working inside or outside the organization, or both. consulting itself can be seen as a liminal activity. czarniawska and mazza (2003) used the concept of liminality to examine the positions of both clients and consultants, concluding that they both occupy a liminal space, neither wholly inside nor outside the client organization or the consulting firm. there are often tensions about objectives and there is uncertainty about identity, position and routines. anthropologists are good at working with this type of liminal process. consulting anthropologists have the opportunity to create rituals in their work that will turn “a regular organization into a liminal one” (2003:279). they can move back and forth across project (or organizational) boundaries, sharing documents between team members, and often pulling the clients into fieldwork, then moving back inside the organization again to present a final project report. the entire process is transitional, uncertain, and open to possibility. anthropologists are already complex people adept at managing complexity and ambiguity to create new knowledge and innovate using this liminal oscillation as a source of strength. they are in an excellent position to tap into their toolkit and pull out the liminality concept, putting it to good use in global organizations that need their help. for example, anthropologists could use the concept of liminality as part of delivering corporate training or leadership coaching. teaching leaders to engage in the practice of taking field notes from time to time, especially when they are faced with a knotty problem, could help them apply more extensive complexity to their own thinking (denison et al. 1995). field notes can serve as a mechanism of detachment that could help leaders examine a problem from multiple perspectives and enhance their problem solving ability. incorporating liminality as part of corporate training also can help build leader capacity to examine problems from multiple perspectives, introducing more creativity and innovation into day-to-day work. this skill has a tendency to get lost as organizational forms have become specialized and leaders have narrowed views of their environment as a result. thinking liminally is a creative act in and of itself. when applied in the context of solving business problems or making an organization more innovative, liminality can be powerful. a liminal lens could enable a broader line of sight into the different parts of gluesing / liminality, anthropology, and the global organization 31 the organizational network. second, as researchers who wish to expand theory in the era of global networked organizing, liminality offers the opportunity to link this concept and theory from anthropology with others in organization science, information science, or leadership and management theory. one idea might be to couple the concept of liminality with metacognition (thomas et. al. 2008) as an indicator of complex thinking and the ability to hold multiple perspectives simultaneously. one could experiment with leadership development that is designed to build liminal thinking skills 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eds. lanham, md: rowman & littlefield publishers, inc., 159-176. sachs, j. 2000. international economics: unlocking the mysteries of globalization. in globalization and the challenges of a new century: a reader. p. o’meara, h. d. mehlinger, and m. krain, eds. bloomington and indianapolis, in: indiana university press, 217-226. senge, p.m. 1990. the fifth discipline: the art & practice of the learning organization. new york: doubleday. stiglitz, j. e. 2002. globalization and its discontents. new york, ny: w. w. norton. sturdy, a., m. schwarz, and a. spicer. 2006. guess who's coming to dinner? structures and uses of liminality in strategic management consultancy. human relations 59(7): 929-960. tempest, s. and k. starkey. 2004. the effects of liminality on individual and organizational learning. organization studies 25(4): 507-527. thomas, d.c., e. elron, g. stahl, b.a. ekelund, e.c. ravlin, j.-l. cerdin, s. poelmans, r. brislin, a. pekerti, z. aycan, m. maznevski, k. au, and m.b. lazarova. 2008. cultural intelligence: domain and assessment. international journal of cross cultural management 8:123-143. turner, v. 1974. dramas, fields, and metaphors: symbolic action in human society. ithaca, ny: cornell university press. turner, v. 1995. ritual process: structure and antistructure. new york, ny: walter de gruyter. united nations statistics division. 2011. unsd demographic statistics. http://data.un.org; accessed april 11, 2012. weick, k.e. and p.w. van orden. 1990. organizing on a global scale: a research and teaching agenda. human resource management 29(1): 4961. wenger, e. 1998. communities of practice. new york, ny: cambridge university press. journal of business anthropology, special issue 2, spring 2016 34 julia c. gluesing, ph.d. is president of cultural connections, inc., a research, consulting, and education firm supporting global networked organizations. she is also a business and organizational anthropologist and research professor in industrial and systems engineering at wayne state university where she teaches global perspectives in engineering management, global leadership, and qualitative research methods courses in the global executive track ph.d. from 2005-2010, dr. gluesing was the principal investigator on a national science foundation grant, the “digital diffusion dashboard,” studying the diffusion of innovation across the global enterprise by tapping into an organization’s information technology infrastructure. she may be reached at gluesing@teamcci.com. mailto:gluesing@teamcci.com opinions: ethnographic methods in the study of business elizabeth k. briody, gary alan fine, katarina graffman, stephanie a. krawinkler, maryann mccabe, patricia sunderland and rita denny for this issue of the journal of business anthropology, i approached a number of people who have conducted research in, with, on, or for business organizations of one sort or another and asked them to reflect upon their ethnographic experiences. what follows is a series of essays by scholars and practitioners ‒ many of them extremely experienced, but one at the beginning of her career ‒ who between them have provided us with a collation of exemplary practices and insights. it isn’t just restaurant kitchens and home cooking that provide ‘food for thought’, but cruise ships, art museums, general motors, and an austrian electrical company. bon appetit! bm page 1 of 35 jba 2(2): 133-167 fall 2013 © the author(s) 2013 issn 2245-4217 www.cbs.dk/jba journal of business anthropology, 2(2), fall 2013 134 collaboration and anthropology in corporate work elizabeth k. briody, cultural keys, llc as an anthropologist working at general motors (gm) r&d (1985-2009), i was used to questions from employees, friends, academics, and the media about my role and methods. yet, when brian moeran asked me to write about ethnographic methods in the study of business, i felt challenged. my basic toolkit was common to most cultural anthropologists – content analysis of ethnographic field data – although my role as an applied researcher was also to develop recommendations, and sometimes interventions, to improve organizational effectiveness. upon reflection, i decided that those interested in business anthropology might find the evolution of how i worked (my approach), and how i analyzed my project data (thematically), relevant to their own research. in this opinion piece, i discuss a convergence over time between my research approach and the analysis of my research data at gm. this convergence represents an important transition from independence to collaboration as i changed from being an academically-trained anthropologist to an applied anthropologist in a business setting. it also reflects the construction of a body of cultural knowledge about the corporation in the form of cultural themes. simultaneously, i show that this same transition to a collaborative partnership paradigm was occurring within gm. i end by arguing that collaboration is generally a more productive work practice than independent efforts by individuals, that collaboration has a greater potential to improve organizational effectiveness, and that anthropologists are well suited to leading and facilitating collaborative projects. the transition from sole researcher to team researcher anthropologists often work alone in the field and alone during analysis and writing, though they may consult with others (their study participants, colleagues, and/or professors, for example). i, too, was a lone field researcher when i began working at gm. it was up to me to develop a proposal, review it with my supervisor as well as with the management of the particular unit that might approve the work, establish rapport with study participants, gather and make sense of studyparticipant data, write up my findings and recommendations, and handoff the final report. my communication with the management of the sponsoring unit was limited and occurred mostly when the project was ending. while it was the case that i was the only anthropologist at gm r&d, gm colleagues from other disciplines also worked independently. thus, the pattern of working largely alone at gm r&d was common at that time. opinions: ethnographic methods in the study of business 135 however, i soon began a multi-year collaboration with an academic anthropologist and her students at a nearby university. our relationship with our gm management sponsors became regular and direct; there was keen interest in what we were learning and recommending. i built on this approach in subsequent projects and began developing deeper relationships with sponsoring-unit leaders. for example, i became more visible as i set out to explore the operations of two different product programs and served as both researcher and consultant to them. i offered workshops to help them explore interventions to deal with their cross-cultural problems. my new role was a reflection, in part, of the changing view of research at gm. researchers were charged to become increasingly applied in their focus, to identify committed sponsors for each new research project, and to work with those sponsors closely to address key issues. at this time, i also expanded my relationships with anthropologists at other universities and in my professional associations. in the early 2000s, my work pattern changed again. i supervised a graduate student intern who ultimately became a gm contract employee. together we began building a team of researchers by leveraging our contacts. our team had regular interactions – both informal updates and formal presentations – with our management sponsors. gm’s external partners also sought us out. aside from the obvious benefits of having a wider variety of experts on our team, and more of them, this kind of teamwork also reinforced the value of developing strong relationships with the leadership of the sponsoring units. when those linkages were robust, it was possible to work directly with them to frame and conduct the research. these projects were more relevant and our recommendations were frequently implemented. in one of our last projects, the sponsoring leaders engaged in what anthropologists call community-based participatory research. their questions and insights led to collaboration on ten tools or interventions. in contrast to my earlier hand-off approach, working directly with the sponsoring leadership allowed our research team to become an effective part of a far bigger team effort within the corporation. compiling a thematic understanding of gm culture in the mid-1980s, much of the popular business press focused on corporate culture, describing it in ways that made little sense to me (for instance, strong or weak cultures). in one of my first projects, i identified a pattern of blame and blame avoidance. i was able to operationalize the theme of blaming and found that it helped me make sense of seeminglydisparate perspectives and behaviors. blaming was expressed in statements made by manufacturing workers who were frustrated by poor product quality. employees blamed those upstream from them in the assembly process and those on the previous shift, not their own shift. the journal of business anthropology, 2(2), fall 2013 136 content of the blaming statements reflected gm’s rocky transition from production quotas at any cost, to improvements in quality while maintaining efficiency. this thematic approach both resonated within gm and was easy to explain. it became an important analytical component in future projects. historically, gm’s culture has been characterized by autonomy (defined as acting and developing independently of the whole) and its allied theme of individualism. autonomy was evident in gm’s distinctive, differentiated, and decentralized operations. indeed, gm was formed in 1908 from the consolidation of several different car companies that were linked together through committees and financial controls. each gm unit or division had its own assumptions, expectations, and values. work practices and processes were ‘home grown’ by these individual units, rather than centrally developed and disseminated. terms and phrases such as ‘silos,’ ‘functional chimneys,’ ‘turf,’ ‘not invented here,’ and ‘my way or the highway!’ reflect the themes of independence, self-reliance, and ethnocentrism and continue to be part of the firm’s vernacular today. in all of the projects i worked on while at gm, autonomy always had an effect on the ways in which employees understood their roles, how work was conducted, and the overall course of organizational events. however, other cultural themes emerged from my project data as well. data collection year(s) project cultural themes focus 1986 truck assembly plant blaming quality 1986-88 expatriates parochialism adaptation and repatriation 1988-89 reorganization autonomy organizational status 1990-91 downsizing career advancement job mobility 1993-94 vehicle development process ambiguity commonality and differences 1996-98 global product program differentiation cross-unit integration 1998-2000 strategic alliances authority decision making 2001-03 r&d partnerships reciprocity effectiveness 2002-07 researcher workspace productivity workspace requirements 2002-07 new vehicle assembly plant collaboration ideal plant culture 2007-08 integrated health health care fragmentation customer views table: key cultural themes and focus of selected gm projects by data collection year(s) opinions: ethnographic methods in the study of business 137 morris e. opler has argued that a longitudinal examination of cultural themes often reveals changes in culture. until i completed an analysis of my research projects by theme and year, i was unaware of the transformation playing out in my own data. cultural conflict and ethnocentric behavior emerged during the first fifteen years of my gm career. for example, cultural conflict appeared in the parochialism of gm’s domestic units in accepting, and later promoting, returning gm expatriates. in another project, a global vehicle program had insufficient authority to be successful. ethnocentric behavior combined with little cohesion among the participating gm units resulted in decision-making ambiguity, program delays, cost overruns, and ultimately failure. in the most recent projects, conflict and ethnocentrism lessened and were overshadowed by an increasingly-cooperative spirit. we found a desire for building and maintaining strong, healthy working relationships both within gm and beyond. themes of reciprocity and collaboration featured prominently. for example, when gm r&d provided funding to professors at several universities, it never anticipated that reciprocity would play a key role in maintaining those long-term relationships so that the projects would be successful. similarly, in the ideal plant culture project, we discovered a consensus view of a desired future culture among hourly, salaried, and executive employees. they repeatedly expressed a unified vision and a cooperative orientation to manufacturing work. validating a cultural shift in gm’s cultural evolution w. lloyd warner emphasized cultural explanation within a broader societal context. in particular, he examined the relationship between external forces and community and organizational activity. in that same spirit, i asked myself: to what extent has gm’s autonomous culture been tempered over its 105-year history? with my own career as a case in point, i saw that my work evolved from the sole researcher model to one that was inclusive of other researchers and employees at all levels – including senior leaders. in addition, i discovered that there had been a transformation in the cultural themes from my research projects toward an emphasis on partnership, cooperation, and unity. however, i then questioned my initial query. could it be that this former corporate giant was actually moving away from its infamous, directive, top-down management style to work practices that valued joint efforts, improved coordination and collaboration, knowledge sharing, and cohesive working relationships? i decided to try to validate the shift toward collaboration and collaborative research in my own projects by canvassing gm’s history. for over a century, gm has engaged in various types of ventures to improve its competitiveness. these ventures have been global in orientation; all continue to be active today. what i found in response to my question pleased and surprised me. journal of business anthropology, 2(2), fall 2013 138 export export was gm’s earliest venture strategy. the gm export co. was created in 1911 to sell product outside the u.s. vehicles were ‘completely knocked down’ and then shipped to wholesale distributors in places such as europe and the middle east. overseas assembly a second strategy involved overseas assembly. gm began opening plants in various countries beginning in 1923. within five years, plants were opened in 12 other countries; still more plants were added during the 1930s and 1940s. these assembly plants produced product for markets with the capacity for at least 10,000 vehicle sales while the gm export co. ended up serving smaller markets. acquisition acquisition of manufacturing operations represented a third strategy. gm purchased operations such as vauxhall motors ltd. in the uk and adam opel a.g. located in germany during the 1920s. this strategy was a way for gm to cope with emerging issues overseas (e.g., higher tariffs, preference for european styling). little was collaborative about how these three early strategies worked. for example, the gm export co. often disregarded customer requests for service and did not stock spare parts routinely. the overseas assembly strategy was established primarily to compete with ford motor co., not to design products with particular customers in mind. finally, the acquisition strategy was consistent with gm’s autonomous tradition of independently-minded unit management. gm’s overseas operations continued to expand through the mid1960s. soon after, automotive manufacturers in europe and japan began challenging gm’s dominance. gm faced increasing government regulation, particularly with respect to vehicle safety, and found its relationship with the united auto workers union (uaw) acrimonious and costly. outside the u.s., many governments required automotive manufacturers to hire more local employees and abide by local content laws in which a higher proportion of the raw materials had to be local. joint venture the 1970s represented a turning point in the way gm functioned. gm entered the arena of the joint venture in which a separate organizational and legal entity is created from the resources of at least two companies. opinions: ethnographic methods in the study of business 139 this new unit operates independently of the parent firms and relies on the principles of partnering – including a desire to achieve common goals, a willingness to negotiate and reach consensus, and an ability to work together. new united motor manufacturing inc. (nummi) was one of gm’s most notable joint ventures because it involved a key competitor – toyota motor corporation. the nummi plant was managed by the japanese with a uaw workforce and some participation by gm salaried employees and executives. although this joint venture was terminated as part of gm’s bankruptcy, it was an important and highly-visible precursor to many other future partnering arrangements. global product program gm gained experience in internal partnering with the establishment of global product programs in the mid-1990s. i had the opportunity to study the delta small car program as it was getting underway in 1996. this program consisted of employees from three globally-distributed gm units who were assigned to work together and produce vehicles that would be sold in different markets. unfortunately, the matrix structure designed to organize the participants was not successful due to insufficient authority of the program manager and strong employee allegiance to their home units. however, other global programs learned from this experience – specifically in terms of how employees were organized and the work carried out – so that global programs have operated increasingly effectively over time. strategic alliance gm participated in a series of strategic alliances, often with companies in which it had equity. i had an opportunity to study gm’s strategic alliance with isuzu motors ltd. beginning in 1998. its purpose was to share costs, gain economies of scale, and produce a truck that could be sold globally. gm’s partnership with isuzu lasted about 35 years – a tribute, at least in part, to the strong relationship formed between the most senior leaders of both firms. collaborative research laboratories one other strategy was developed during my gm tenure. gm r&d created collaborative research labs (crls) with twelve universities located around the world. these relationships were different from gm’s joint ventures, global product programs, and strategic alliances because gm, not its university partners, provided the funding. the purpose of these crls was to bring researchers from gm r&d and the particular universities together to work on applied problems of interest to both parties. each side placed a high value on the relationships created among journal of business anthropology, 2(2), fall 2013 140 small groups of researchers, as well as on their research outcomes. for example, gm benefitted from the universities’ cutting-edge knowledge and techniques, while professors and their students had opportunities to work on important automotive issues. explaining gm’s cultural evolution toward partnering these historical data on gm’s venture strategies corroborate the collaborative patterns associated with my own research career. they show that gm evolved from a corporate entity with unilateral management control to a firm that experimented with, and then adopted, a partnership orientation in its most recent ventures. many factors contributed to this cultural shift. first, gm faced rising competition globally, particularly from japanese automakers. second, customers expected higher quality, better reliability, and improved durability from gm products. third, gm’s own financial resources were shrinking and, at the same time, the corporation faced new government regulations both at home and abroad. all these conditions created a willingness at gm to improve its options by working in innovative partnering arrangements. finally, gm’s products and processes are now largely global. consequently, collaboration within the firm and with long-term partners is much easier than in the past. all of gm’s various partnerships since the 1970s have had their own unique character. collaborations that are vitally important today involve china. gm was eager to enter the chinese market given its vast potential. it pulled together a team of senior gm leaders of chinese origin to explore ways of penetrating it. the chinese government requires a joint venture arrangement for any firm wishing to do business in china. therefore, the structural aspect of any relationship gm would have there was predetermined. fortunately, this team recognized the importance of relationships in chinese culture. it used its own contacts in china, and due diligence, to identify a joint venture partner. discussions began with shanghai automotive industry corporation (saic) group, resulting in the creation of sgm (saic – gm) in 1997. a decision was made that the joint venture would produce buicks because of the positive image that the chinese held of this brand. the time that the gm team spent in cultivating relationships with saic and other key chinese stakeholders paid off quickly. the first buick rolled off the line in china in 1998. by 2012, gm had sold 2.8 million vehicles in china, making it gm’s largest market. gm’s recorded revenue in china that year was $33.4 billion. opinions: ethnographic methods in the study of business 141 conclusion several lessons for anthropologists can be drawn from this longitudinal examination of research approaches, research project themes, and corporate venture strategies. first, it is possible to document cultural change by analyzing anthropological research within organizational settings – both how it is done and what it has found – as is typical in studies of ethnic groups and communities generally. moreover, other sources of data can be used to validate the results from such analyses. second, knowledge of core cultural themes can be useful in describing and explaining the worldview and behavior observed within an organizational culture. a more detailed understanding of the key cultural obstacles and enablers of organizational-culture change can be revealed through an analysis of these themes. indeed, themes can be critical heuristic devices in encouraging organizational transformation and learning. third, collaboration requires an ability to work with people who have different viewpoints, competencies, and roles. anthropologists are equipped to understand, assess, and translate across organizational, occupational, and national-culture boundaries, as well as the designeruser and producer-customer interfaces. applied anthropology programs that emphasize collaborative approaches in their training, especially as part of project work, are likely to be valued by clients and positioned for success. indeed, collaboration with colleagues, study participants, and sponsors is a necessary characteristic of anthropological work in the corporate sector today. * * * if you can’t stand the heat: the business of observing restaurant kitchens gary alan fine, northwestern university it takes a feat of memory to recall that it was over thirty years ago that i began my ethnographic research on restaurants and their cultures. at the time i had conducted research on little league baseball teams and fantasy role-play gamers, but i hoped to expand from the world of voluntary and casual leisure to the examination of institutions that were concerned with the production of aesthetic and sensory objects. ultimately i observed in the kitchens of four restaurants in the minneapolis-st. paul area: a gourmet restaurant, a restaurant that catered to business clients, a downtown hotel, and a neighborhood steakhouse. in journal of business anthropology, 2(2), fall 2013 142 examining restaurants i recognized that i was concerned with locations that were simultaneously small groups with their own local cultures, and also economic organizations in which profit was required for survival. these were sites in which individuals had different amounts and forms of power, and in which there existed several competing models that characterized the work (fine 1996, 2009). of course these were not just any work organizations, but specifically organizations that were tight and loud and hot, filled with sensory challenges. every field site has its own peculiarities, details that become part of the ethnographic story. i have long treasured a quotation from paul stoller describing his research among the songhay in niger in his taste of ethnographic things. stoller (1989: 4) writes elegantly, ‘africa assailed my senses. i smelled and tasted ethnographic things and was both repelled by and attracted to a new spectrum of odors, flavors, sights, and sounds.’ in a small way minnesota restaurants have similar effects, creating a buzzing, booming, smelly confusion, but also hopefully for the managers an efficient and profitable confusion. observers of any work scene soon realize that workers, no matter if they treasure their work, do not show up by their choice alone. there are schedules and demands that are placed upon them. bosses need workers at particular times and on a regular timetable. employees are controlled through a hierarchical organization that has the power – a power that i have seen used – to terminate the relationship if those with decisional power are unsatisfied with the performance or the profit. because these spaces are not public arenas, access is provided through the generosity of management, often through some delicate negotiation of what can be seen and when. one depends on the kindness of management. gaining the blessing of bosses, i had a burden of trust to overcome, as do many other observers of business sites. workers needed to know, in the pungent words of howard becker (1967), ‘whose side was i on?’ of course, the true answer was that i was on the side of the academy, of social science, of my own bosses, but i had to persuade both management and workers that i was on their side as well. the question for whom the observer observes is a salient issue, but often it becomes muted as it is clear that no bad outcomes result, at least in the short run. the clearest expression of this sentiment was found in the hotel kitchen that i studied, part of a hotel chain that operated under explicit, external corporate control. one day early in my time in the hotel kitchen, one of the kitchen workers, noting my notepad, asked me, quite reasonably, if i was conducting a time-management study. more often this tension between being a friend and being a spy or ‘fink’ emerged in the context of joking. ostensibly this was friendly banter, but there was an underlying sense of concern. for instance, at the high-end, creative restaurant at which i observed, davis, a server, jokes to me, asking, ‘who do you really work for? what hotel chain do you really work for?’ diane, a opinions: ethnographic methods in the study of business 143 cook, suggests that i was a reporter for the national enquirer, hoping to dig up dirt on the restaurant industry. on another occasion at the continental restaurant, the head chef, paul, raises the same anxiety in suggesting that i am a spy, adding that ‘he’s watching to make sure we work.’ similar remarks were made in my presence during my study of three meteorological offices of the national weather service, where it was suggested that my presence was related to the work of the office of inspector general (fine 2007). this suspicion became salient in those cases in which minor deviance occurred in my presence. this was particularly evident with lower-status employees, who feared my power over their careers. for instance, one pantry worker noticed that i was watching when she ate a piece of roast beef that had been trimmed. she giggles and asks nervously, ‘are you going to put this in your book?’ later a dishwasher eats some of the beef and jokes, ‘which part will we steal today?’ the workers hope that i will legitimate their deviance, or even participate in it, which, of course, i do. these employees wish that i will place myself on their side as a true, if limited, member of their group, embracing its underside. at the steakhouse cooks received beers from the bar, and i did on occasion as well. once a waitress informed the cooks that i was watching them drink and one of the cooks responded, ‘he’s on our side. he’s exposing the scandals of cooking.’ i was touched by the remark. of course, the reality was that there were moments in which forces of control ensnared me. twice i was asked not to observe, both times during the first days of my research. in one case the restaurant was scheduled to be featured on a local television show, and viewers were informed that they would receive a reduced price on steak that weekend. the manager thought that the restaurant would be too crowded and i might be in the way. after i had been present for a few weeks, i observed on equally busy nights. at the continental restaurant, i was asked to skip a day when a server was being trained by watching the kitchen. again, later in the research, i was present when another server was given the same training. at first, organizations, particularly those with power hierarchies, may be sceptical of outsiders, but with enough goodwill, outsiders can turn into honorary insiders. a final point to consider in observing organizations is that those who are in control and those who hope to have the organization succeed may wish to have the observer’s perspective, often for good causes, even if the consequences can upset the order of things. throughout my research i was careful not to provide information to chefs or managers about my observations of particular workers and was careful about not being too specific about conclusions that might improve the kitchen. i would never mention food that fell on the floor was quickly washed, reheated, and then served to customers. still less would i mention the food that was thrown around the kitchen or knives tossed in momentary journal of business anthropology, 2(2), fall 2013 144 anger. still, these gatekeepers had my ear when they wished and would learn my general reactions. even though i have no reason to believe that my comments had any doleful consequences, it is reasonable that workers would worry about what i knew and what i might report. the reality that businesses are organized with power imbalances makes them tricky sites for those who wish to observe their operation without being forced to take sides. in a previous discussion (fine 2003), i have argued that observers should strive for what i termed ‘peopled’ ethnography. by this i mean that while producing theory and not merely descriptive accounts, ethnographers should never lose sight that it is the local, empirical particulars of the group being observed that constitute the research. theory alone does not make ethnography persuasive. even if one examines a large organization (and restaurants typically are microscopic organizations), one is examining a set of small groups that negotiate shared problems and constitute a bounded network of these groups. businesses with their structured hierarchies and their organizational charts exemplify how social systems are constituted by networks of tightknit social relations. the ethnographer who wanders into this field must quickly recognize how that network operates and must recognize, as i did in my smaller organizations, that each relationship one makes and each group with which one has contact is viewed carefully and cautiously by other workers and other groups that see their own position as potentially vulnerable. i titled this essay by using a phrase that links both to cuisine and to politics, and perhaps that is a properly bifurcated metaphor. ethnographers must be brave in their observations. they must recognize that while informants are often friendly, it is not only their hearts and arms that are open, but their eyes and ears as well. ethnographers may face cold informants or hot environs, and both matter in the kitchen, on the shop floor, and within an office. references howard s. becker. 1967. ‘whose side are we on?’ social problems 14: 239-47. gary alan fine. 1996. ‘justifying work: occupational rhetorics as resources in restaurant kitchens.’ administrative science quarterly 41: 90-115. gary alan fine. 2003. ‘toward a peopled ethnography: developing theory from group life.’ ethnography 4:4 1-60. gary alan fine. 2007. authors of the storm: meteorology and the culture of prediction. chicago: university of chicago press. gary alan fine. 2009. kitchens: the culture of restaurant work. revised opinions: ethnographic methods in the study of business 145 edition. berkeley: university of california press. paul stoller. 1989. the taste of ethnographic things. philadelphia: university of pennsylvania press. * * * doing ‘business anthropology’ katarina graffman, inculture when faced with the task of writing a piece about business anthropology methods, i immediately recognized the challenge in giving a short but fair picture of what it means to be a ‘business anthropologist’. what follows is my best response to that challenge. seven years ago i founded my company inculture, enthusiastic but still in doubt about being able to make a living as an anthropologist outside academia ‒ especially without compromising anthropological theory and method ‒ and so enter into ordinary market research, even if a little bit disguised as such! a professor advised me that i had better not mention that i was an anthropologist: ‘it will most likely be easier for you to thrive in business by labelling your work as expertise in media and consumer studies’. when i asked why, i learned that ‘out there’ ‒ meaning the world outside academia ‒ the notion of culture was poorly defined and thus regarded as fuzzy: ‘they want facts and figures’. this advice made me defiant: would the notion of anthropology, my choice of priority subject area, really be more repelling than inviting ‘out there’? consequently, instead of being deterred, i became more determined than ever to emphasis the fact that i am a cultural anthropologist and that the company inculture is an anthropological consultancy firm, which would always pursue anthropological skills and expertise and defend the importance of these, regardless of client or project. after having read ‘opinions: what business anthropology is, what it might become… and what, perhaps, it should not be’ in the journal of business anthropology, my confusion increased rather than the opposite. i should perhaps be slightly apologetic about being blunt, but i prefer honest criticism. the opinions presented in this issue of the jba are formulated in a very academic way, and ‘business anthropology’ itself is defined more as an open question than a proper suggestion. the result is confusion. it does not have to be more complicated than: anthropology, journal of business anthropology, 2(2), fall 2013 146 both as a theory and as a method, offers a holistic understanding of human action in a society increasingly dominated by marketing and branding. or, as ulf hannerz (2012:254) writes in one of the opinions: ‘i see anthropology as a study of all human life in which business these days plays a very central role.’ as i see it, the most challenging tasks of business anthropology are the following: 1. convincing the client about the aim and importance of anthropology: what can be achieved? 2. customizing the method for the actual project; 3. presenting the result in a way which is relevant to business and makes sense to the client. convincing the client about the aim and importance of anthropology: what can be achieved? one of the most difficult tasks for inculture has actually been to market anthropological knowledge and its benefits. in this sense, i could agree with the professor mentioned above, ‘culture’ has become a buzz-word which has a variety of connotations and the conception of anthropology itself is limited. it thus comes as no surprise that these notions pose a problem for most clients, and that the ability to explain why anthropology would make a difference from a business point of view has to be improved. anthropologists must develop this competence further, as well as how to better communicate their theoretical and methodological professionalism and explain its relevance for business development. moreover, ethnographic methods and anthropological analyses must be customized to clients’ demands and from the start account for commercial relevance. anthropologists have to extend their area of knowledge to include cognitive science and business administration with emphasis on product development, marketing strategy, consumer theory and communication. this is, of course, two-edged: to understand and apply knowledge from other disciplines, while also embedding oneself in different business environments without losing the anthropological focus. i have for some years been heading a course in cultural analysis for students learning copywriting and art direction at the most reputable school for communication studies in sweden. anthropological knowledge is slowly making its way into advertising and will in the long term both change the way culture is understood in that business and lead to an increased demand for anthropologists. when anthropological theory develops to include knowledge which is clearly relevant for the client’s business, it makes real sense and may result in the company manifestly improving its competence to include strategic cultural judgments in their activities (see further graffman & börjesson 2011). opinions: ethnographic methods in the study of business 147 customize the method for the actual project. if we succeed in convincing a client to use anthropology to enhance knowledge and understanding, and thus enable the formulation of a successful business strategy, the next phase is to decide how this should actually be done. i have so far been trusted to design projects fairly independently, probably due to my recognized experience as an anthropologists, but also as a result of the subject area still being a ‘white space’ for most clients. all projects are different and each individual project demands full attention to the choice of methods: participant observation, long interviews, ethnography, mapping, and so on. as a business anthropologist you need to be creative when it comes to methods and analysis. every new assignment is a true challenge and contributes to the ongoing development of methods. all projects have to be anchored in reality rather than in theory, and driven forward by intelligently interpreted facts derived from observations and hearings: what is said and what is actually done. as anthropologists we do not deliver the answers the client presupposes or, even worse, takes for granted. our professionalism is about being able to create an allencompassing picture of humans’ ways of acting ‒ a picture which distinguishes between short lived trends, or ways of living, and long lived human needs, or ways of being. the applied method does not always have to include ethnography, even if inculture, more often than not, realizes its importance and makes it part of the project plan. however, it is important to emphasize that fieldwork and participant observation is not always required. sometimes it is the ‘anthropological eye’ that is needed: to be a cultural advisor and also to apply one’s expertise to already existing facts. new knowledge is gained by combining existing knowledge. present the result in a way which is relevant to business and makes sense to the client. most of us are aware that we cannot formulate a consultant recommendation as a traditional academic report; no one will understand and/or have the time to interpret the text. for those of us brought up in an academic tradition, it is very difficult to change the way we present our research and findings. this became very clear when i was working with an english client and entrusted to understand and define mauritian culture. the client explained clearly that it was not helped by my academic theorizations and formulations and that the quality of my work was brought down by the fact that i did not trust myself to make clear recommendations and come up with concrete suggestions. as an academic, of course, you are never supposed to do this but to leave the field open for alternative interpretations. the client insisted: ‘we wanted journal of business anthropology, 2(2), fall 2013 148 your competence as an anthropologist and need to know what you think as such. you are the expert; we are not’. when working in business, you must learn to make the most plausible conclusion whilst taking into account the facts that are present. not even doctors are always sure when making diagnoses: they use their expertise to make intelligent guesses about the illness you are most likely to have and how best it should be treated. leaving the patient with the possibility of having a number of potential illnesses, and consequently the choice of a range of different treatments, would quickly undermine the doctor’s reputation as a professional. grant mccracken (2009) suggests that every company in the future will need a chief culture officer, someone who carries the anthropological way of thinking into the heart of the company and makes it part of its strategic thinking. maybe this is not imminent, but hopefully anthropological knowledge and theories will in the future be regarded as of strategic importance for business rather than merely as another tool for market research. anthropology matters as it can make a difference when judging how matters matter to human beings. references graffman, katarina & kristina börjesson 2011. ‘‘we are looking forward to some cool quotes!’ perspectives on applied ethnography’. ethnologia europaea 41(1): 96-103. hannerz, ulf 2012. ‘opinions: what business anthropology is, what it might become… and what, perhaps, it should not be’. journal of business anthropology 1(2): 254-256. mccracken, grant 2009. chief culture officer. how to create a living breathing corporation. new york: basic books. * * * business ethnography stephanie a. krawinkler, university of vienna as a young researcher who only recently finished her doctoral dissertation, i feel both honoured and hesitant about sharing my encounter with business ethnography with colleagues and readers who opinions: ethnographic methods in the study of business 149 have had far more experience than i. however, i will go ahead and write about my research on trust at a company that i will call wire inc. – focusing in particular on insights attained through trying to gain access to and information about this company, as well as the mix of methods that i then used there. in addition, i will give a short outline of some of the particularities of engaging in business (as opposed to some other kind of) ethnography. born in austria, i studied international business management at the university of applied sciences in eisenstadt, and later also received a master in social and cultural anthropology, from the university of vienna. in addition, i was trained in group dynamics and organizational development at the alpen-adria-universität klagenfurt, and have worked as a business consultant and an in-house consultant. since 2006, i have been engaged in organizational focused anthropology, a subdivision of business anthropology. as i see it, an ethnographic approach can in general help the anthropologist work out who has what kinds of tacit knowledge in an organization ‒ tacit knowledge that, once uncovered, can be of help in the process of reengineering, mergers, and conflict solving. it provides a snapshot of an organizational culture and allows us to develop measures that really fit the company and so, potentially, have a higher rate of being successful. in the following case, however, i did not have a change mandate of this kind, since i was conducting academic research. wire inc. as part of my doctoral research i focused on understanding emic perspective(s) in the matter of trust. to accomplish this research, i spent five months over a period of one and a half years as a participant observer in a medium-sized austrian company called wire inc.1 wire inc. is a family-owned company with a long tradition in offering electrician services. in 2011, one in four employees in the industrial sector in austria was working for a medium-sized company like wire inc. so that it is rather typical of such companies. located 200 km from vienna, it had many out-of-office processes. my choice of this company was partly based on the fact that it was easier to approach an owner in my home country, while its regional distance from vienna meant it was easier to shift roles and provide time frames for the research, which contributed to efficiency. wire inc. mainly operates in the business-to-business (b-2-b) sector. it went through financially difficult times at the beginning of this millennium and has been undergoing a range of restructuring processes since. at the time i entered as a researcher, the company employed 139 1 this research was partially funded by the university of vienna. journal of business anthropology, 2(2), fall 2013 150 people and was strongly male dominated (only ten women were employed at that time). the official structure was a rather flat one and work was organized in projects with varied time-frames from a few days to several months. because it has had trust issues in the past, wire inc. was open to this − at least in austria − new way of interacting with longtime social research. my ethnographic approach consisted of applying a combination of methods, which included participant observation, person-centered interviews, group discussions, ego-centered social network analysis, informal talks, experiments, analyses of written material produced by the field, video and photo documentation, and writing a field diary. gaining access to wire inc. there was no prior relation between the company and myself before the research project started. as we know from other accounts, gaining access to a company for research is an often difficult process, but it is one of the crucial points affecting the success or failure of any organizationalfocused business anthropology. in this particular case, a work colleague opened the doors to wire inc: she recommended me to them and established an initial connection. since the practice of conducting longterm business ethnography is almost completely absent in austria, the recommendation was helpful in my getting a foot in at the door. i had two phone calls with the owner: in the first i described the research outline (including the research design and its possible benefit to the company), and in the second, we agreed on a date to meet. during the meeting i received a detailed company description and tour; the owner, the ceo and i clarified the research design, including optout possibilities for both the company and myself, access arrangement, informing the employees, and publishing rights. the meeting closed with a shared lunch, which was a further opportunity to familiarize with my future informants. we took a few days to think about the proposal and finally all involved agreed on the research, which should conduct ethnography of, and not for, an organization. this implied that i could – from a research point of view – define my own research questions, and that i was not going to be financed by the company, which enabled me to avoid having to deliver 'wanted' results. connecting with informants… obtaining access to the company on an official level is only a first step towards success. even though seldom discussed in the business anthropology literature, it is absolutely necessary to build rapport with informants: managers, employees, workers and apprentices, and whoever else is part of your field. in my case this also included temporary opinions: ethnographic methods in the study of business 151 employees, cooperation partners, customers, and suppliers. in the end it is their willingness to share their knowledge and insights that allows us to gain a holistic multi-perspective view of a company. in my own case, this involved views from all levels of the company’s hierarchy, as well as the standpoints of its departments, the perspectives of its partners, clients and suppliers, and other contextual information. during all of this, i had to adapt to different people in different ways to create empathic connections: by adopting different forms of communication, modes of behavior, and dress codes. even when doing organization-focused research, the ethnographer has to take all these into account since there are subgroups in every company. right from the start, i was very transparent about my role and aims. i was quickly referred to as ‘our phd-candidate’ by people in wire inc. in this respect, we can say that ethnography isn’t just a method, for it is shaped by the ethnographer’s own character. my informants perceived me as a member of a university who conducted research in a different city from the one i lived in; who was willing to spend weeks and months away from my family and friends; and last, but not least, who was a woman. in order to be able to carry out this kind of research, my roles shifted during the course of the project: from social anthropologist setting up a project, asking and discussing things; to apprentice, who learned how to lay cables and install distribution boxes; to team-member at sport events; and facilitator in workshops. these varying roles helped me to understand the everyday working lives of the people i was studying, to establish relationships of trust with them, and to elicit information from them. in this respect, one should never underestimate the value of attention: usually people perform their tasks and only receive attention and feedback when things go wrong or very well. hardly ever does anyone take an interest in their everyday practices, beliefs and values, in the way that i did as an ethnographer. these everyday practices on a person's working environment often remain hidden and, in general, people are so busy carrying out their tasks that they do not have the time to find out about and get to know other peoples’ perspectives ‒ something that is true of workers, as well as of managers. as long as the anthropologist manages not to be regarded as a spy and reliably shows that she isn’t going to rat on someone, this opens up an interesting field of information. this is where being an anthropologist comes into play. i was a free element in the company, and experiencing some of the work tasks and the work environment (cold winters, hot summers, heights, and so on) gave me a multi-layer level of understanding. hanging out in public spaces within the organization, spending time with people at all levels of the hierarchy and in all departments, and collecting information on similar topics from various different perspectives, gave me a holistic view of the company. this material could be aggregated at a meta-level as it described journal of business anthropology, 2(2), fall 2013 152 small particularities. part of the result was the explication of implicit knowledge ‒ something that can be especially problematic if someone leaves the company and the knowledge gets lost. methods applied so what exactly did i do at wire inc.? participant observation was a vital part of my path of understanding wire inc. there are four quadrants of information in this (jordan & dalal, 2006: 366): saying, doing, thinking and feeling. the first quadrant is accessible through interviews, focus groups and group discussions, as well as through informal talks. but the more ‘subtle, tacit, implicit, and context dependent’ (ibid.) information of the other three quadrants lies beyond spoken information, so that ethnographic approaches are a means to elicit these by ‘digging deeper under the surface’. in this case my participant observation ranged from periods of full observation to full participation. the latter was one of the keys to my finally being invited to the company’s informal events that were valuable sources for me to comprehend communication and trust structures at wire inc. all this needed time and a willingness to engage with people, hence carefully sharing precious time. especially in the beginning, i shadowed a sample of people through a day, or a project team over a couple of days. generally, we finished with a person-centered interview towards the end to clarify observations allowing space and time for informants to share their perceptions of what was going on. another means of data collection was through group discussions, which provided the space to discuss topics like trust (and confront different opinions people had), that are usually implicit in daily actions but generally left outside the topics of ordinary business meetings, unless there happens to be a particular issue to be resolved. after being in the field for a couple of months, i started conducting ego-centered network analysis interviews on the theme of trust: collecting sensitive data on trust relationships between employees in the company. obtaining this information only succeeded because the people concerned thought my way of handling data was trustworthy. informal talks went along with participant observation: whenever i wasn’t disturbing the workflow, i used to engage with informants. notably, car rides as well as company events, proved to be valuable moments of informal interaction to enhance my understanding of what was going on at wire inc. the company also provided me with broad access to its data and documentation, and i was also allowed to take photos and make my own video recordings. these audiovisuals were helpful when it came to my analysis of fieldwork data (transcribing and reanalyzing earlier events), opinions: ethnographic methods in the study of business 153 as well as when making presentations and discussions of results both within the company and in academia. last but not least, i kept a research diary. all in all, the methods applied focused on seeing: ‘seeing, as opposed to looking, embraces the whole body, neither vision alone nor disparate senses. the whole body is the means to understand and resonate with the world. the body becomes the memory and is not so easily separated from the mind, as in the descartian tradition.’ (okely, 2001: 104) the method-mix that i adopted was chosen to answer the research questions of this particular project. however, i suspect that different research aims and environments would require a different set of methods. particularities of business ethnography being asked to write about ethnographic methods, i feel the need to emphasize that to me ethnography is more than just a technique. as van mannen (2006) notes, ethnography is a process as well as a product. hence, it is as much in the process of data collection as it is in the time spent analyzing the material (and the two often run in parallel). it is also the written product that appears as a monograph ‒ like my own thesis (krawinkler, 2013) ‒ or as articles. i would like to add that ethnography is a process and a product characterized by a particular type of attitude, so that, so far as i am concerned, ‘anthropology is a way of thinking’ (eriksen, 2004: 169) and ethnography is shaped by it. ‘ethnography often runs counter to common knowledge because it requires tapping into what people often take for granted about their work, and thus, do not ordinarily discuss.’ (jordan & dalal, 2006: 368) the anthropologist, who is trying to figure out how things work, why things are done in a specific way, and what is the meaning of certain artifacts, can act as a refreshing influence in a business organization and, as a result, people employed there often start reflecting on their general surroundings and habits. in other words, she stimulates informants’ awareness of their own environment. the anthropologist goes after tacit knowledge, the ideas submerged in underlying structures that can be likened to an iceberg hidden under the surface of the sea. ethnographic approaches allow us to discover the differences between saying and doing that usually hint at interesting discrepancies. what, if any, are the particularities of business ethnography? as i mentioned earlier, i believe that ethnography is shaped by an journal of business anthropology, 2(2), fall 2013 154 anthropological attitude. as thomas hylland eriksen (2001: 4) says: ‘a few important defining features of anthropology are nevertheless common to all practitioners of the subject: it is comparative and empirical; its most important method is fieldwork; and it has a truly global focus in that it does not single out one region, or one kind of society, as being more important than others.’ in many aspects, therefore, business ethnography is comparable to any other anthropological subfield research. however, my own experience suggests that the following points also need some consideration: access, language and cultural codes, time, responsibilities of the anthropologist, ethics and data presentation. of these, responsibility and data presentation are, to my mind, particularly important.  responsibility: there are societies with organizational boundaries that encourage a generally high rate of inter-dependence among their members. as a result, even if you are solely observing, you already have an impact on the field. we need to be aware of this effect and handle this responsibility with care. everything we do or do not do, say or do not say, is interpreted by our informants, and it has the power to change processes. this can be a wanted effect, if we have been given a change assignment. but, in contrast to more classical fields of anthropology, the power relationship between anthropologist and her field of research is different. some of the corporations commissioning anthropologists act globally. anthropologists are indeed ‘studying up’.  data presentation: lengthy, detailed ethnographies might be an interesting read for some people, but they usually do not fit well with the fast pace of the business world ‒neither in terms of the time it takes to produce them, nor of the time needed to read them. on the contrary, the likelihood of reports being looked at, and their contents incorporated into ongoing practice, increases if we use a language and a way of presentation that is familiar to the people addressed. in the research elaborated on above, i provided a powerpoint-presentation and discussion for the owner and the ceo, and an exhibition of the same results throughout the company for everyone else interested. i also wrote an article for the company's magazine and wire inc. received a copy of my scientific ethnography (in other words, my ph.d. thesis). the management decided to frame the posters from the exhibition and these are still on display in the entry hall of the main building of the company. although there is a lot more that could be said (in particular about commissioned research and consulting, on the one hand, and about the uses to which ‘ethnography’ are put by people who aren’t anthropologists, on the other), i have tried here to show why business ethnography is a opinions: ethnographic methods in the study of business 155 valuable approach to the study of organizations. making use of the example of wire inc., i illustrated some of the difficulties involved in doing such research – in particular, the issues of access and connecting with informants, as well as the mixed methods that i adopted. hopefully, you have got a taste of what business ethnography conducted by a young graduate student in an out-of-the-way country can be like. and since i appreciate exchange, collaboration, and sharing my experiences, as well as opportunities to gain further new experiences, i look forward to hearing from you at email@stephaniekrawinkler.com references eriksen, thomas h., 2001. small places, large issues: an introduction to social and cultural anthropology. london: pluto press. eriksen, thomas h., 2004. what is anthropology? london: pluto press. jordan, brigitte and brinda dalal, 2006. persuasive encounters: ethnography in the corporation. field methods 18(4): 359–381. krawinkler, stephanie a., 2013. trust is a choice. prolegomena of anthropology of trust(s). heidelberg: carl-auer-verlag. okely, judith, 2001. visualism and landscape: looking and seeing in normandy. retn 66(1): 99–120. van maanen, john, 2006. tales of the field: on writing ethnography. chicago: univ. of chicago press. * * * 360 on method maryann mccabe, university of rochester since the time of our founding participant observer malinowski, there has been a radical change in approach to anthropological research, with increasing focus on the social production of knowledge. compared to earlier days of participant observation when the anthropologist was considered an objective observer or authority, today the ethnographic fieldworker is thought of as engaged in a project of co-construction or cocreation (oliveira 2012). two streams of thought have influenced this shift in perspective on the anthropological self, the other, and the process that transpires between them. one is the postcolonial moment (clifford mailto:email@stephaniekrawinkler.com journal of business anthropology, 2(2), fall 2013 156 1986); the other is the more recent collaborative turn (thrift 2002). while anthropologists across the discipline have been active in building both streams of thought, business anthropologists stand in the forefront because of the need for collaboration in praxis. this essay explores the shift in methodological approach from objectivity to subjectivity and epistemological issues of producing knowledge. it argues that, as a result of the postcolonial moment and the collaborative turn, anthropologists live and work in fluid liminal space where they negotiate different worlds of meaning. business anthropologists find themselves continually moving across boundaries as they conduct research in and with companies. these boundaries include business units within a corporation, functional departments at advertising agencies, segments of the consumer population, and so forth. working with engineers, psychologists, and designers, for example, involves an ongoing dialogue across boundaries that keep the anthropologist in a more constant liminal state than previously theorized. from its earliest conception by arnold van gennep (1960), through key works by victor turner (1967, 1969), liminality has been conceived as a ‘betwixt and between’ transitory stage through which the social person or community passes. business anthropologists move in such liminal space, regularly carrying out projects and communicating with people inhabiting different worlds of meaning. in this essay, i rely on case situations from my consulting practice to examine liminality from a perspective of fluidity and movement in the postcolonial and collaborative environment of conducting participant observation. participant observation as performance in his penultimate book, geertz (2000) pens a fieldwork biography and muses about his experiences as participant observer in java, bali and morocco. writing about his first experience studying javanese religion, he refers to participant observation as ‘learning how to live with the natives’ in a bemused way which foregrounds the performative nature of the method. as he writes, ‘what had begun as a survey of (this has to be in quotes) “the role of ritual and belief in society,” a sort of comparative mechanics, changed as the plot thickened and i was caught up in it, into a study of a particular instance of meaning-making and the complexities that attended it (2000:15). participant observation is performative insofar as the anthropologist is an instrument of experience, perception and interpretation. thus, compared to the conception of the participant observer in the earlier malinowskian time as objective authority, geertz points to reflexivity in gaining partial truths about cultural beliefs and practices. similarly, as the notion of participant observer changed, the idea of the native’s role in the research process has shifted from passive to active. this is expressed, for instance, in the approach to interviewing where the opinions: ethnographic methods in the study of business 157 person is no longer considered a vessel of answers, a repository of knowledge, but a participant in the interaction (holstein and gubrium 1995). the native becomes a producer of meaning who develops a narrative in concert with the ethnographer. a marketing research project in the cruise industry highlights this interactive relationship between anthropologist and native in the field setting. for a cruise company, i conducted participant observation on two cruises, each on a different competitor line, in an effort to understand the meaning of a cruise for people who enjoy taking cruises. the company owned several lines and wanted to develop brand architecture and delineate a positioning for each line in its portfolio. a colleague, anthropologist john f. sherry, jr., took cruises on the company’s own lines. as participant observers, we took note of our own reactions to the built environment and to observations of and encounters with other passengers. one of my experiences involved participating in the formation of an onboard group of eight people seated at the same dining table, including sisters who were amateur singers in their hometowns. they cajoled the rest of us into singing songs together when exiting the dining room. as a group, we engaged other people in song. the group of eight formed a relationship and gathered to share activities on the ship at other times of the day. after the cruise ended, the relationship continued for a while through email contact. creating a sense of belonging is a common onboard experience, one of the many meanings of taking a cruise. people who develop bonds onboard may pursue friendship and even become cruise mates in the future. by participating in the group of eight, i coconstructed the meaning of community and learned about this perhaps ephemeral but important kind of social relationship occurring on cruises. the postcolonial moment and power post-colonial thinking about participant observation and writing cultural accounts emphasizes historical context and relations of power between the native and the anthropologist. as clifford (1986:9) says, ‘ethnographic work has indeed been enmeshed in a world of enduring and changing power inequalities, and it continues to be implicated. it enacts power relations’. as a result, recognizing the positionality of researcher and other persons in the ethnographic encounter becomes part of the analytic grist. this aspect of reflexivity, making clear how the power in the relationship affects knowledge gained, is a tool in elucidating the worlds of meaning inhabited by the anthropologist and the research participants. reflexive introspection about relations of power continues to be an important part of cultural analysis long after the encounter has ended (olsen 2012). a study of champagne practices for a u.s. wine importer shows how journal of business anthropology, 2(2), fall 2013 158 awareness of power relations enters marketing research analysis. for this project, i conducted participant observation in wine stores and at wine tasting events, and interviewed champagne aficionados in their homes and accompanied them on shopping trips. during the interviews, it became apparent that the research participants expected me to be knowledgeable about champagne. they assumed i would have answers to their questions about the complex industry of champagne. frustration was evident when i did not have answers either because in fact i did not know the answer or was feigning ignorance as a tool to explore their practices. the expectation that i would be an expert, and therefore in a position of power, and the disappointment when i did not give evidence of this power, revealed the importance to aficionados of gaining greater competence as champagne connoisseurs. by analyzing emotional aspects of the interactions, i learned that champagne signifies not only celebration but also enjoyment of one’s knowledge of champagne production and consumption. the collaborative turn and social process nigel thrift (2002) describes the current state of western capitalism as a rule of emergency because of the time horizon on short-term financial performance and speed-up in the conduct of business, including the need to react quickly to competitors, suppliers and customers. keys to success in this faster-paced environment are creativity, innovation, collaboration and knowledge exchange. business anthropology partakes of this environment by collaborating with various partners to affect organizational change, product design and marketing strategy. working in and with companies, business anthropologists adapt and develop research methods to gain insight as quickly as possible. we usually employ multiple methods, famously called a triangulation of methods, to reach deep cultural understanding of business issues at hand. in a research project on creativity and cooking for a food company (mccabe and malefyt 2013), anthropologist timothy de waal malefyt and i were concerned with understanding how us women think about meal preparation and construct dinner on a daily basis for their families. we conducted in-home interviews, which involved conversations using a loosely structured interview guide, tours of the kitchen, and observation of mothers cooking a meal for the family. in addition, we went on brief food shopping excursions with each respondent. prior to the in-home interviews, we had asked our research participants to keep in-depth journals of their daily thoughts and feelings around meal planning over the course of a week and to make a collage of their favorite meals. combining these methods provided a fuller picture of dinner issues than each single method alone, but the participant observation of cooking a meal produced a key insight. the observation uncovered how women improvise in the kitchen. opinions: ethnographic methods in the study of business 159 when asked about what they cook for dinner, mothers responded that they had a repertoire of meals their families enjoyed and occasionally tried new dishes. what became apparent as mothers cooked and talked with us about their actions was how they altered ingredients, less of this, more of that, substituting one thing for another, based on knowing the likes and dislikes of each person in the household. these slight changes, such as substituting cinnamon for cumin, were creative adaptions to recipes that were not articulated during the more formal part of the inhome interviews. only during the cooking process did improvisation come to light. of course anthropologists are aware that cultural assumptions underlying people’s practices often lie hidden. as mccracken (1988:23) writes, ‘most respondents have difficulty giving a full account of what they believe and what they do. long ago, their beliefs became assumptions and their actions became habits. both are now almost completely submerged beneath the surface of consciousness’. in this case, what provided insight was the social process of observing and conversing with women while they cooked. letting them articulate how they improvise to satisfy the tastes of everyone in the family revealed that preparing dinners the whole family will enjoy together was ‒ and is ‒ a way of creating family life. we learned that creativity in everyday life begins with the familiar and makes small adjustments rather than being a novel and complete departure from something existent. ethnography co-created with client participation for business anthropologists, another aspect of co-creation in fieldwork is having clients join encounters with research participants. it has become commonplace in marketing research to invite people from the sponsoring company and advertising agency to accompany us for in-home interviews and group discussions. clients appreciate this because it gives them an opportunity to speak with consumers and see the context of their everyday lives. as business anthropologists, we are happy when members of the client team come to the field, because interaction with them usually gives us a larger grasp of the business issues and often produces ethnographic insight. i remember, for example, a breakthrough moment conducting research for a pet food brand. one morning i was having breakfast with the client and as we discussed the in-home interviews under way, a bolt of lightning struck us both. we realized that research participants were talking about pets as social connectors in the family and that this would provide a new and unique positioning idea for the brand. the conversation stimulated analytic thinking about the meaning of pets and corporate strategy and communications (mccabe 2014). having clients participate in the ethnographic process, however, introduces a layer of complexity for business anthropologists. it puts the anthropologist in liminal space and time when he or she is conducting an interview, trying to gain the respondent’s perspective and attempting to journal of business anthropology, 2(2), fall 2013 160 complete the interview in an allotted time frame, while at the same time, entertaining the client view and allowing the client to ask questions and pursue lines of corporate interest. at times respondents recognize the expert authority of the client and engage in extended conversation with the client about the company’s products and their use of them. this may require the anthropologist to manage the interview in order to retain rapport with the respondent and facilitate the social production of knowledge. in these situations, business anthropologists work in tripartite liminality as they move between the spaces of anthropological thought, consumer practices and client objectives. conclusion anthropological research has taken a 360 degree turn in approach from objectivity to subjectivity since the beginning of fieldwork in the discipline. shifting from the participant observer as objective authority, ethnography has changed to consider reflexivity and positionality between anthropologist and research participant in crafting a representation of people. business anthropology reflects a current view of participant observation as co-constructed or co-created experience. this raises a postmodern question about the validity of different cultural accounts or, as clifford (1986) phrases it, whether one cultural account is as good as another. the issue surfaces for business anthropologists, for example, when marketing research results differ from market segmentations held by clients, or when collaborators in design and organization change studies have different professional backgrounds. in these situations, blueprints for corporate action typically emerge as negotiated solutions among participants (malefyt 2003, denny 2013). the 360 degree change in approach to anthropological research shows how elastic and powerful a method participant observation remains. elasticity has enhanced the power of the method through incorporation of concepts of reflexivity, positionality, representation and negotiation. this reconfiguration of participant observation enriches our ability to understand cultural practices in the world. as business anthropologists embark on projects and go from one project to another, they move in liminal space and time, intermittently working with clients, research participants, and other colleagues who have different concepts, languages, and worldviews. in this fluid space, they listen to multiple voices, gain insider views, and communicate across boundaries. business anthropologists live in a perennial space of liminality where meanings are grasped and often negotiated. references clifford, james. 1986. introduction: partial truths. in writing culture: the poetics and politics of ethnography. james clifford and george e. marcus, opinions: ethnographic methods in the study of business 161 eds. berkeley: university of california press, 1-26. denny, rita. 2013. the cry for practicality. in advancing ethnography in corporate environments: challenges and opportunities. brigitte. jordan, ed. walnut creek: left coast press, 136-150. geertz, clifford. 2000. available light: anthropological reflections on philosophical topics. princeton: princeton university press. holstein, james a. and jaber f. gubrium. 1995. the active interview. thousand oaks: sage. malefyt, timothy dewaal. 2003. models, metaphors and client relations: the negotiated meanings of advertising. in advertising cultures. timothy dewaal malefyt and brian moeran, eds. oxford: berg, 139-164. mccabe,maryann. 2014 (forthcoming). pets and configuring family, kinship and natural cosmology. in sourcebook in business anthropology, rita m. denny and patricia l. sunderland, eds. walnut creek: left coast press. mccabe, maryann and timothy dewaal malefyt. 2013. creativity and cooking: motherhood, agency and social change in everyday life. journal of consumer culture. online first, june 25, 2013. doi:10.1177/1469540513493202. mccracken, grant. 1988. the long interview. thousand oaks: sage. oliveira, pedro. 2012. ethnography and co-creation in a portuguese consultancy: wine branding research as an example. journal of business anthropology 1(2): 197-217. olsen, barbara. 2012. reflexive introspection on sharing gifts and shaping stories. journal of business research 65: 467-474. thrift, nigel. 2002. performing cultures in the new economy. in cultural economy: cultural analysis and commercial life. paul du gay and michael pryke, eds. london: sage, 201-233. turner, victor w. 1967. the forest of symbols: aspects of ndembu ritual. ithaca: cornell university press. turner, victor 1969. the ritual process: structure and anti-structure. chicago: aldine. van gennep, arnold. 1960. the rites of passage. monika b. vizedom and gavrielle l. caffee, trans. chicago: university of california press. * * * journal of business anthropology, 2(2), fall 2013 162 for opinions: ethnographic methods in the study of business patricia sunderland and rita denny, practica group, llc when brian asked us for an opinion piece about ethnographic methods in the study of business, he asked for one ‘especially relating to your work with consumers’ and added that he thought it would be best ‘if it were based on personal experiences and included reflections on what might have been improved, how business ethnographers compare with ‘ordinary’ ethnographers in the field, and so on and so forth.’ as anthropologists who work in the consumer research space of anthropology in, on, and for businesses it would be easy, indeed it would be predictable, to lament the thinness of ethnographic work that takes place within corporate consumer research. we could, in fact, speak of the utter predictability and commodification of ethnography within this realm. in commercial consumer research ‘an ethnography’ has been rendered to a three to four hour at-home encounter with a pre-recruited (individual) respondent, an encounter that almost always includes a sit down interview component, a home tour including some sort of demonstration, a shop-along portion if conceivably relevant, and invariably something like collage homework completed before the researchers arrive. almost all consumer research firms that offer ethnographic research – at least in the united states – offer some version of this, including ours. design firms also routinely offer ethnographic research. it would also be somewhat easy and predictable to lament the relative demise of queries for ethnographic work within corporate consumer research circles in the wake of big data. there is no question – again, in the united states at least – that big data have operated not just as a surging wave, but rather as what feels like the destructive recurrent tidal power of quantitative frameworks to be constituted as the way of knowing, the way of predicting, and thus for corporations, embraced as the way to assure future commercial success. many anthropologists who work in consumer research in the united states do so as freelancers and/or as part of small boutique firms. we all have felt the impact of the incursion of digital and digitallycollected big data, along with the commodification and ubiquity of the ethnographic offer outlined above. together with the economic downturn in 2009, in which corporations made severe cuts and process changes in their ways of commissioning consumer research, it has been – dare we say it – a tsunami. many small firms have gone out of business, freelancers have not found enough work to sustain themselves, and many anthropologists have joined large firms, the numbers game, or re-joined academia. without question we have also pondered and been pulled by opinions: ethnographic methods in the study of business 163 these possibilities. and we could have written about this, given brian’s cue that personal experience should be the muse. but what we decided to write about here was actually inspired by a fieldwork experience that occurred shortly after we received brian’s request. at that time, we2 were involved in on-site (but not in-home) fieldwork for a brand that offered experiential entertainment. our client, as is often the case, was in the field with us, and he wanted to take part in at least the first phase of the research – to see what was going on and, in this case, also to broker our entrée. he was a client with whom our past projects had been a success; nonetheless he was nervous, there was a lot riding on the outcome of this particular research. as a result, he seemed not able to keep himself from offering tips. he told us to please attend to language, to really listen and pay attention to how people said things. he wanted to be sure that we would attend to the kinds of language people actually used in that setting, as well as the language they spontaneously used to describe that setting. as he said, he wanted to be sure we found out ‘the lexicon.’ he also told us at the same time to attend to small details, to really look at what people were doing, not just to listen to what they said. when we related some of our early analytic thoughts and observations on the morning following the first day of research, he exhorted us to please ‘ladder up and down,’ to be sure to ‘push up and down.’ he wanted us to be sure to note how these observations and points and any others we would make were instantiated in the smallest ways or actions, as well as ladder up to the larger implications and ramifications, specifically the ways this issue tied in with larger sociocultural meanings, phenomena, and the implications thereof. he reminded us throughout to be very context-oriented and specific in our observations and analysis. for example, what time of day and where exactly in the environment was x, y, or z happening? what kind of person or persons were involved, a younger or older male or female, and were they alone, or with others and if so how many???? in addition, he told us on a few occasions that if, in the course of the more formal interview encounters we had planned, the conversation veered into what seemed more promising directions, to just jettison the guide and follow these more fruitful avenues that particular participant could help us explore. as he exhorted these types of reminders and proclamations, we appreciated that, really, he was the perfect client. everything he said, every tip he gave, were things that we were already reminding ourselves to do. exactly those kinds of guidelines and hints would be the kinds of things we would undoubtedly try to instil in a student of the ethnographic method. very likely we would even phrase things similarly, perhaps even using his particular lexicon. if here it would perhaps have also been easy to be mildly annoyed and get wrapped up in thoughts of ‘of course, i know to do that,’ the more interesting issues to ponder were how he knew all 2 the ‘we’ in this sentence includes anthropologist stas shectman. journal of business anthropology, 2(2), fall 2013 164 these ‘truths’ and ‘hints’ about conducting ethnographic research and what it might imply, socio-culturally, that he did. undoubtedly, he knew, in part, about conducting ethnographic fieldwork because of projects he had commissioned with us before. but, for us, his comments suggested a greater appreciation of ethnographic ways of knowing. it spoke to us of a larger cultural current that also resides and resonates in broadcasts of national public radio, the pages of the new yorker, and perhaps even television’s relentless reality shows. the tacking back and forth between the micro and macro, the search for the meaning of experience, culture and society as something we should think about as being part of popular american parlance. for the purposes of this particular opinion piece, the socio-cultural implication of all this is that, for anthropological consumer researchers, there is hope. in the course of this particular project there were other reminders and glimpses of hope. one of the people recruited to participate in the project, one of those people with whom we jettisoned the interview guide, referenced in the interview how he really thought the phenomenon we were discussing cut to the heart of ‘civilization’ and told us that he had gotten these ideas from a book he’d read by an anthropologist. he promised to email the reference after the interview, which he did. throughout the time of the analysis and write-up of this project, we worked closely with the client with whom we had been in the field. he exhorted and critiqued on numerous occasions that not enough cultural implications were included. he wanted more explicit ties to the cultural underpinnings of what we were reporting as findings, and he wanted us to call out the ways in which our findings tied to larger socio-cultural trends. at the close of this project, during the final presentation to the corporation, the ceo spoke of how much he appreciated anthropology as a field – as an undergraduate that was where his heart had been. while life had taken him in other directions, he had himself thought of becoming an anthropologist. so, in essence, what we are writing about is that there is a place – in business and in consumer research – for anthropological casts of mind as well as methods. we can look at the ubiquity and commoditization of ethnography as an offer of consumer research firms, as well as the incorporation of ethnographic approaches within the field of design, not as problems and bad signs, but as signs of a flourishing and effervescence. and, as anthropologists, it is in our purview to take this further and employ ethnographic methods beyond the expected, the predictable, and the commoditized, and one way of doing this is by simply dipping – a little creatively – back into the established anthropological well. in jba’s autumn 2012 set of opinion pieces about business anthropology, moeran (2012: 294) argued in his coda that we must be comparative. in fact, he maintained that this point, his second programmatic statement for business anthropology was ‘so obvious it opinions: ethnographic methods in the study of business 165 shouldn’t need saying’. in our own methods we have drawn on anthropology’s established value and reliance on the comparative stance to devise some of our most fruitful consumer research projects. for instance, we relied rather directly on the anthropological tradition of using the insight gained from studying other societies as an illuminating lens on one’s own, when we suggested to a client that, to explore the terrain of personal space and sensations for the purposes of a new product for the us market, it would be best to do so by exploring personal space and sensation in very different socio-cultural milieus. research for this project led to fieldwork in paris and ho chi minh city, along with research in chicago.3 there was no question in our minds ‒ and, after the analysis, also our clients’ minds – that the foundation of ideas for potential new products for the united states would not have been nearly as rich, not nearly as intricate, nor nearly as illuminating, were it not for the practical and analytic comparisons that the fieldwork in france and vietnam afforded. in a slight twist of the rather literal cross-cultural comparison method, we have also conducted projects where the most illuminating findings were garnered by exploring a phenomenon beyond the domain of the client’s place of interest. for instance, we were commissioned to conduct a study that would inform advertising for the detroit institute of arts (dia) for its 2007 reopening after a major, multi-year renovation. the dia wanted to attract local residents to the museum. while local residents would attend sporting events in venues not far from the art museum, visit detroit science museums with their kids, and visit art museums when on vacation in other cities, as a rule they did not visit the dia, even though it includes one of the premier art collections in the united states. so, the advertising agency (perich advertising + design) and the dia knew they had a challenge on their hands, and requested an ethnographic study that would inform their own strategic and creative thinking. for this research, rather than visiting any art or other museums with them, we4 sought to understand what art and inspiration meant in people’s everyday lives. tapping into these meanings did in fact lead to the ideas that allowed the advertising agency to create ads that got residents to visit their local art museum in relative droves. as a result, the agency’s ‘let yourself go’ campaign5 itself became something to talk about, including the fact that anthropological research had been the catalyst for conceiving the campaign (berman 2008). likewise, a project for the brooklyn botanic garden (bbg), that had at its source bbg’s question of how to encourage more visits among diverse ethnic groups living in brooklyn, was carried out by going not only to the botanic garden, but also to the small community plots, backyard gardens, flower 3 for this project, fieldwork included collaboration with anthropologists christophe robert, dominique desjeux, and anne-sophie boisard. 4 anthropologist robert moise was an integral part of the ‘we’ here. 5 to see the campaign go to http://perich.com/case-studies/dia/ journal of business anthropology, 2(2), fall 2013 166 boxes, and even beloved ‘street trees’ of residents.6 understanding those gardens was the key to understanding what the bbg was – and what it could be – for brooklyn residents. beyond this dipping back into anthropology’s traditional well, anthropologists and others in consumer research have also found success in utilizing new technologies and modalities with participants, whether in the form of video and audio diaries or online interactions with individuals and groups. with the latter, we have found that participants can be particularly expressive in choosing or taking and then uploading photos that express what they’d like to communicate, as well as then writing about the meanings of those photos. we would also note that fully webbased ethnography, a reading of existing blogs, postings, and opinions, which scull (2009) has termed webnography, can also be a powerful tool. filtered through an anthropologically-informed mind, this reading in a new medium is not unlike anthropologists’ cultural readings of letters and documents, a respected means of gaining insight to times and places no longer accessible to the face-to-face. since so much of our current social life does not take place face-to-face, as ethnographers we do need to take part; and again here, even in doing so, we are also dipping into the tried and true. in the end, with these necessarily short snippets we are suggesting that anthropologists working in consumer research should have hope. we can garner energy from the ethnographic sentiment that lives in the atmosphere, even in the midst of pressured tides of quantitative and economic realities. there are many of us out there, as careful readers of the footnotes may have surmised; even the circumscribed ‘we’ of this small piece includes many anthropologists, and our firm is only one among many. as anthropologists forge into new territories, we also believe that by leaning into our own training and methods, the anthropological voice will have its place. ethnography may have become unbound and into, on, and for business, but it’s a good thing. moeran (2012:294) has provided us with a useful list of prepositions that currently can and do link anthropology and business: ‘in, on, for or against.’ we have been rather liberal in our borrowing of in, on, and for, but ‘against’ should also be included. if we view the ubiquity of an ethnographic offer among consumer research firms as part of the atmosphere, we can also push against the commodification. as anthropologists we have the ability to do so. we know that the ethnographic method has always encompassed a myriad of approaches, constantly changed as it has faced and lived amidst new social as well as new technological realities, and most importantly, constantly been reanimated and newly enchanted with, by, and through – and yes, also 6 the brooklyn botanic garden research was carried out by practica anthropologists michael donovan and charley scull, a fuller description of this research can be found in donovan (2013). opinions: ethnographic methods in the study of business 167 against – theory. so we have not only hope, but also heart. references berman, laura. 2008. clever ads transform dia into getaway. detroit free press. february 12. donovan, michael. 2013. when ethnography really works. qrca views 12(1): 28-34. moeran, brian. 2012. coda to opinions: what business anthropology is, what it might become … and what, perhaps, it should not be. journal of business anthropology 1(2): 290-297. scull, charley. 2009. market research, webnography, and chronic disease. paper presented at the 108th american anthropological association annual meeting, philadelphia pa. the anthropology of business ethics: worth thinking about! ghislaine gallenga abstract this article deals with epistemological thoughts about business ethics. my intention is to consider business ethics as a research subject in anthropology and not to judge the relevance of the morality or ethics: in other words, the integration of activities in a “common good” category. the article examines the philosophical ground of this notion and explores whether business ethics is related to this philosophical background. while, from an anthropological point of view, it is better to draw a value judgment from the notion of “business ethics” (applicability, truthfulness, intentionality, and so on), the argument presented here is that it is better to consider “business ethics” as a category of work management at the meeting point between theory and practice, and to observe in situ how this notion is used, articulated and circulated in the daily life of a workplace. keywords anthropology, epistemology, business ethics, ethics, morality, corporate culture page 1 of 13 jba special issue 3: 7-19, spring 2016 © the author(s) 2016 issn 2245-4217 www.cbs.dk/jba journal of business anthropology, special issue 3, spring 2016 8 introduction it might be assumed that anthropology is inherently wary of ethics and morality and is inclined to avoid it in the name of cultural relativism.1 as a matter of fact, the issue of the ethics or morality of anthropology has been around since the discipline emerged, although not addressed in the same terms as today. the work put together by pat caplan―even though it dates back a decade―draws a picture of discussions and dilemmas around ethics in anthropology and asks the question: “what is anthropology for? who is it for?” (2003: 3) and re-examines the relationships between the discipline and ethics since the 1960s (ibid.: 127). moreover, a rejection of anthropology and the knowledge of anthropologists being used for espionage or military purposes has marked the history of the discipline from franz boas (1919) to marshall sahlins (2007; 2013). more recently, an attempt to create a new field, named― depending on its authors―an “ethnography of moralities” (howell 1997), “moral anthropology” (fassin 2008), “anthropology of moralities” (zigon 2008) and anthropology of ethics (massé 2009; faubion 2011), seems to transcend the question of relationships between anthropology and the legitimacy of its practice. may edel and abraham edel (2000 1968) have opened a dialogue between philosophy and anthropology in an interdisciplinary approach and concluded, unsurprisingly, that both disciplines have benefitted symbiotically from one another, thus enabling an exploration both of how the theory of ethics is redefined when its cultural content becomes obvious and of the relations between morality and cultural schemes. today, ethics is an expression of the relationship with “what is happening.” ethics refers to the practice of regulating and shaping our comment on historical, technical and scientific, social or media situations. this norm regarding comments and opinions is embodied by institutions with their own authority such as the “national ethical commissions” appointed by the state (badiou 2003: 20). we are also witnessing an inflation of ethics (canto-sperber 2006) to such an extent that they are found, as if fragmented, in several fields, so that there are now an ethics of the workplace, business ethics, medical ethics, space ethics, and so on (see marzano 2008). parallel to this fragmentation of ethics into specialized domains, we are witnessing the emergence of a new professional category in the social division of work, whose representatives call themselves “ethicists” to distinguish themselves from thinkers of moral philosophy; these are “practitioners” of ethics (cantosperber and ogien 2006: 14). 1 this article is a revised version of a paper published in the review moussons, 2013, n° 21, 21-36. gallenga / the anthropology of business ethics 9 naturally, business ethics must consider the phenomenon of the social inflation of ethics in the world of work, especially as ethics and anthropology deal with similar issues and concerns. not wishing to make morality or ethics my central subject of study (fassin 2008), which would mean having “the ambition of making explicit and intelligible the evaluative principles and practices in different societies and contexts, of analysing and interpreting the way social agents form, justify and apply their judgements about good and evil” (fassin and stoczkowski 2008: 331), i wish to deal with the notion of “business ethics” in its emic meaning, as it is used by actors within the corporate world. business ethics can be understood as the construction of norms and values that have been made clear, that meet social demand, and that are used to formalise the principles of collective work (cardot 2006). however, such a definition brings the notion of “business ethics” closer to that of “corporate culture.” both notions refer to moral rules spelt out by the leaders of a company to legitimise work management and establish their corporate image (cuche 2004: 99). i do not consider business ethics as simply the laying out and carrying out of these values. business ethics is not simply a set of guidelines and ethical codes. it is also about how these values are received, embraced, manipulated, utilized, or evaded by participants in a specific business organization, be they managers, employees, contractors, or customers. research carried out so far, mainly in the fields of management or applied ethics, takes into account the moral aspect of companies in the normative sense: is the subject of these works “actually” moral or are their practices morally acceptable? how can production be moralised? however, these studies do not really look into “business ethics” as such: in other words, when a company displays, promotes and codifies values as if they were an object of its own. hence, browne and milgram (2009) explore the moral part of economy in the companies they have observed. others have attempted to tackle the moral side of the economy (browne 2009: 1) or the concept of moral economy, as defined by andrew sayer (2005). in this article, then, i shall explore the notions of morality, ethics and business ethics. the last should not be automatically understood as a category of analysis, for it is related to discourse and used as a managing tool by businessmen or managers. thus, business ethics encounters an increasing social demand for responsibility from companies, which should act as role models for society and make their inner workings more humane. however, without judging the relevance of morality or ethics within companies, i will explore the conditions that can make business ethics possible while avoiding, in the debate on ethics, the normative question of their application. my suggestion is that we go back to the philosophical roots of the notion. to do this, i will first examine the concept as defined by the journal of business anthropology, special issue 3, spring 2016 10 philosophers of business ethics, which will lead me to present a program for an anthropological reading of such ethics. my point is neither to speak as a moralist nor to perform a moral evaluation of the corporate world. naturally, organizational anthropology must deal with the social phenomenon of the increasing importance of ethics in the world of work, even more so because moral philosophy through ethics and anthropology share similar issues. i shall focus on “business ethics” as a subject by looking at its historical background and its social uses. philosophy versus anthropology the word “ethics” comes from the greek for “to inhabit” or “to inhabit the world,” or ethos: habits, customs, in the general sense of behaviour. for the greeks, it refers to a form of knowledge as to how to behave. morality is a word of latin origin, from latin mos (or mores in the plural) and also means “customs.” morality is indeed the classical latin translation of what the greeks call “ethics.” clearly, ethics and morality both deal with the definition and description of the categories of good and evil translated into values, but also into individual behaviour. for most authors, both words seem to be used as synonyms. however, a difference gradually appeared in the use of both terms. in more recent times, it has often been considered that the term “morality” should be reserved for values inherited from the past and tradition, or from religion. “morality more or less evolved into ‘what is transmitted,’ becoming a code of behaviours that were already more or less set” (droit 2009: 19). today, however, the term “ethics” is more widely used in fields in which norms and such behaviours are being constructed by means of individual or collective reflection. morality is thus related to acquired norms, while ethics involves the construction of norms made necessary by ongoing changes (ibid.: 20-21). “ethics has become the name of morality in the making” (ibid.: 22). a similar distinction is made by monique canto-sperber and ruwen ogien (2006). in other terms, they are both the same substance, “the ethical substance” as michel foucault puts it (1984), at two different stages of its production/reproduction. issues related to the links between nature and culture, between universalism and particularism, the relationship to the otherness, and so on, confirm that such concerns are shared. at the end of the day, ethical issues raised by moral philosophers appear to be the theoretical questioning of social anthropologists. as a matter of fact, both disciplines have become the target of a common social demand when it comes to tackling bioethical dilemmas, the universality of human rights, moral conflicts in situations where “cultures” coexist, and so on. the diversity of moralities thus constitutes one of the cornerstones of philosophy, just as anthropology claims that its epistemological foundations are diverse. isaiah berlin (1969) favours the notion of “moral pluralism,” and he champions the idea that there is no single value gallenga / the anthropology of business ethics 11 system. the meaning given to ethics today bears a reference to human rights―rights that are assumed to be natural―in the same way as some essentialist assumptions of anthropology are meant to be universal. such assumptions claim to make a distinction between cultural relativism and moral relativism in order to put the former on a pedestal in the name of a certain kind of ethics, while banning the latter from society. are ethics natural? and are they universal? clearly, these questions are issues for both moral philosophy and anthropology, as both disciplines operate within a vaguely defined scope in which there is tension between universalism and relativism.2 however, unlike the moral philosopher, the anthropologist is uncomfortable suggesting the existence of a universal morality. could we possibly go beyond the empirical observation that there is a variety of ethics in different places and eras, all equally valid, all being the expression and the outcome of human societies? is it really the role of the anthropologist to assume the superiority or validity of one morality/ethics over another? how arbitrary is this assumption, which results from a surgical thinking process that restricts the contours of “morality” and acts as a substratum unrelated to the context of a given culture? isn’t this position the expression of a fear that, in the name of cultural relativism, one may conclude that “ethics do not exist” (badiou 2003: 53)? if such ethical questioning carries universalism at its very heart, it seems relevant to try and test this universality, which always appears relative to specific cases, in order to examine how ethics become specific to a particular cultural background or to a variety of fields of human activities within a certain cultural context (in indonesia, in france, in india, in a grocery store, in a public company, in social work). ethics, as understood today, are an exercise in “consensual legislation” for human beings, for their needs, their lives, their deaths, or for an obvious and universal definition of what is evil and what does not suit human nature (badiou 2003: 25). for kant, ethics are seen as the ability to distinguish evil (for in the modern use of ethics, what is evil or negative comes first, thus implying a consensus of what is “barbarous,” and freedom of opinion means the freedom to identify evil) (ibid.: 27-28). it is assumed that there exists one general human subject and that the evil that happens to them can be identified through universal criteria. “as ethics considers evil to be inherently negative, it effectively refuses to address the singularity of a situation” (ibid.: 36). good, in contrast, allows us to define evil, not the other way around (ibid.: 38). the main difficulty in ethics is to adapt a rule meant to be universal and unspecific―that is to say, a law―to an individual’s behaviour. this difficulty of the dialectics 2 one of the factors that may explain the relative lack of interest in anthropological studies of morality by a generation of american anthropologists after world war ii is the intense debate surrounding cultural relativism and universalism that took place within the american anthropological association following publication of the united nations' declaration of the rights of man in 1948. journal of business anthropology, special issue 3, spring 2016 12 between universalism and particularism is also found in anthropology, which is probably more affected in its episteme than is moral philosophy. this constant oscillation between ethical thinking and anthropology is full of pitfalls and bias that the anthropologist must avoid for fear that he or she might become a moralist. moreover, it is difficult to consider ethics as a universal category, even though it is based on universalist concerns, because it is also based on some form of culturalism (ibid.: 51). in the name of “universal” ethics, one should acknowledge and embrace this difference, while simultaneously ignoring it. as badiou points out (ibid.: 39), “from the start, ethics are the ethics of others.” ethics are the main opening to the other, they subordinate identity to difference. ethics conquer distance in a way that could be summed up by saying: be like me and i shall respect your difference. the real question is therefore “recognizing the same” (ibid.: 49). very few scholars have managed to solve this contradiction. indeed, one may wonder if it is possible to address ethics, or the plurality of ethics, in an ethical way without falling into the pitfall of blind universalism, denying the difference of value systems associated with well-being or the pitfall of scientific cynicism that denies the universality of suffering―a moral truth of our times―in the name of intended scientific objectivity. ethics, therefore, carries with it an inherent paradox: it tends to standardise behaviour on the basis of an ostensible universality, while representing a mere contradiction between tolerance and tensions of identity (ibid.: 44). if ethical questioning and anthropology have a common origin (the tension between universalism and singularity, the questioning of man’s humanity when confronted with otherness), their paths―and, arguably, their destinations―are different. when anthropology deals with morality or ethics, it is not supposed to be in their applied form (fassin 2008). for anthropologists, one solution may be to relinquish a fixed approach to ethics and morality in favour of a dynamic approach in which there is no “one size fits all” ethics, but “ethics in progress” (badiou 2003: 38), or, to repeat a phrase used above, ethics “in the making.” rather than putting moral differences on trial, anthropologists should address and observe the process of morality―a process during which the individual or the collective deals with the possibilities of a situation, with the constraint of recollecting and reinterpreting what is transmitted (morality) in order to create (ethics). the multiplicity of processes by which ethics is produced should be addressed within a specific context. but how do the emergence and development of “business ethics” fit into these questions? before establishing whether the anthropologist is confronted with an ethical or a moral issue, one should take a closer look at “business ethics” as a subject by placing it against its historical background and social uses. is business ethics the daily construction of an ethical position, or is it a new language for the corporate world, reflecting gallenga / the anthropology of business ethics 13 the rise of moral categories in today’s semantics and politics? does the language of business ethics encompass the reality that it strives to show; that described by the philosophical discourse from which anthropologists draw their definition of ethics? this issue should not be addressed in normative but in pragmatic terms. where is “business ethics” to be found in the production process? how does it address production itself? where is business ethics found in production relations between workers and/or managers? how is it used in the company’s daily life? all these questions are possibilities for fruitful research in the field of the anthropology of entrepreneurial ethics, but this article is not intended to answer these questions definitively. rather, let us review the history of the notion of an explicitly “business ethics.” anthropology versus business ethics with its roots in the 1970s, business ethics emerged in the 1990s when companies started caring more about their social image while simultaneously trying to demonstrate that their efforts towards costeffectiveness were compatible with social or environmental justice and respect for individual rights. business ethics then appeared in the field of applied ethics―the latter not being ethics as understood by moral philosophy, but a mere “guide.” all professions are underpinned by values and principles that can clash with ethics. in the corporate world, this “reflection” has led to the drawing up of charters and codes of conduct by which employees should abide. we could ask ourselves whether obeying these various codes of conduct and charters under managerial pressure within a company (to avoid redundancy, for example) has to do with the notion of “ethics” as understood by moral philosophy. for kant, an act is moral when performed out of duty and pure respect for moral law. unlike the sense of duty, it is an applied constraint. the expression “ethics committee,” describing a group of people in charge of safeguarding the application of ethics by scientists, soon sounds like an oxymoron. if ethics are codified, defined, or even imposed by an external governing body, hence becoming a constricted duty, are we still in the field of ethics? one of the main differences between business ethics and discussions of ethics and morality lies in the fact that such discussions are an attempt to solve moral conflicts, to define what is good or fair. business ethics, however, does not deal with such principles. it belongs to the post-discussion phase, as if an original assumption has already been made, although no mention is made of how or by whom such decisions have been done so. in the light of this consensus, employees and customers must follow ethics as an order. individuals must comply with moral imperatives without discussing them before or afterwards. whereas customers can somehow take a stand on these notions of “good” and “fair” that underlie business ethics, by choosing one company over journal of business anthropology, special issue 3, spring 2016 14 another, this is not the case for employees, who are caught up in a system in which they have no say. does ethics not require, as theorists state, the independence of autonomous subjects and an examination of conscience? is ethics under an employer’s authority still ethics? for monique canto-sperber, the role of moral philosophy is to make sure that a debate on ethics does not just result in a series of rules or guidelines to be followed―which would amount to merely imposing moral standards―but in recommendations that have been discussed thoroughly and whose motives and conditions have been made clear (2012: 198). in a business, however, ethics are imposed from above. working groups may be organised ahead of time, giving employees the illusion that they are part of the decision-making process. in this respect, business ethics is not the same as ethics as defined by moral philosophy. it seems relevant to emphasize the necessary distinction in anthropology between things pertaining to the professional ethics of the businessman and this category of “business ethics”―which probably makes more sense on the emic level. according to monique canto-sperber and ruwen ogien (2006: 8), “professional morality can be seen as a concrete manifestation of the fact that professions […] go along with inherent values and principles.” professional ethics is, therefore, the application of such morality by a given participant. the category of professional ethics applies to individuals immersed in the working world rather than to working collectives of large companies. most of the “business ethics” literature is based on the idea that “ethics pays off” and that the expected rewards for a company’s good conduct will justify the money and staff invested in it. for michela marzano, “ethics is comparable to advertising: it sells and draws the public’s attention” (2008: 117). by spelling out its own rules, “an ethical company frees itself from both morality and politics. with its statements, charters and codes, it gradually places itself above any external body likely to decide on its responsibilities” (ibid.). business ethics can be seen as legitimate but paradoxical because it suggests that business and ethics are incompatible. there is a confusion between the end and the means, along with a newfound difference between the ethics of economic life and the ethics of business enterprises. it stays only one step away from “cynical manipulation.” anthropologists who carry out research in the workplace increasingly encounter similar conflicts in which codes of ethics are put forward in the production process, as well as in the collective organisation of work. what is called “business ethics” is now found everywhere. but how can it be conceived intellectually? what does this concept include? how can it be thought of in anthropological terms? firstly, it can be established that, in the same way that the concept of “business ethics” seems incompatible with a philosophical acceptation, gallenga / the anthropology of business ethics 15 it is not an anthropological category either. however, there are practices, codes and theories that anthropologists have a duty to question regardless of their purpose. there is a major difference between how this notion is used in practice, that is, in managerial discourse, and how it is used in philosophy and anthropology. for theorists and anthropologists, ethics is an intellectual exercise, a meaning-building process, a mode of producing moral subjects, or a research question. for the business world, however, ethics is an analytical and managerial tool, immutable and preconceived. it is therefore relevant to redefine “business ethics” as an empirical object and not as an intellectual notion, within the context of its own background and usage. however, to anthropologists, what is named “business ethics” by the actors can be studied in its emic sense, by describing how it is being used. as a matter of fact, the period that saw the field of business ethics emerge and develop has been identified as a “global turning point,” according to caillé and dufois (2013: 9). it was indeed in the 1970s that the idea of globalisation emerged and started to take hold. can business ethics be interpreted as a response to the loss of normative bearings, disorganisation, a lack―or conversely, an excess―of meaning in a globalised world? could the promotion of business ethics, or at least the social needs from which it arose, be an expression of a search for meaning in the context of a crisis of values? moreover, there is something paradoxical about this increasing importance of ethics: while it aims at making people more responsible, it has the opposite effect in so far as it is ethical charters that now guide people’s thoughts and behaviour. do such charters really promote autonomous thinking? ethics can answer questions such as “how should i act?” but business ethics does not pose questions such as “what should one think?” it tells people “how they should think.” can business ethics be considered as merely synonymous with―or an extension of―the much-talked-about corporate culture? if so, within a company, ethics would aim to negate differences between employees, thus imposing―while pretending to respect differences―a unified “corporate culture,” that is, identical behaviours. it appears legitimate to think that business ethics is a supporting tool for corporate culture within the context of organizational development. business ethics is a framework of principles of intervention aimed at a planned organization of how companies function. followers of business ethics, in the manner of those who promote the idea of “corporate culture,” consider ethics as well as culture as an asset, a resource that can be used to manage through symbols. however, it is within the context of negotiation that ethics are played out, and it is these conflicts of loyalty―between personal ethics and the organization’s ethical code―that can be a fruitful research object for the anthropologist. such attempts to make sense of things in production units collide with the journal of business anthropology, special issue 3, spring 2016 16 reality of the institution and the network of procedures and obligations in the business world. along with an attempt to artificially create an idea of group cohesion through the notion of “corporate culture,” there is an attempt to instill the ideas of “well-being” and humane management at work. is “business ethics” a way of avoiding “stress” at work? does it really have the objective of applying morals to the production process, and is it capable of doing so? if so, it would be merely corporate culture. consequently, ethics in the workplace would be relevant if the new reality of a business (as a network of production rather than as a physical unit of production) were taken into account and not reduced to the ethics of its employees or to the application of common standards of morality (cantosperber 2012: 120). business ethics would then come into conflict with the “invisible hand” and freedom. furthermore, it has become fashionable to consider a business as an entity that reflects values. behind such practical approaches and slogans, there is a wealth of literature aimed at drawing businesses into a virtuous circle of “social performance.” as a result, the thin line between the end and the means becomes blurred because of newfound differences between the ethics of economic life and the ethics of the workplace. business ethics is supposed to save businesses from the classic economic paradigm whereby the business world and the world of ethics were to be kept separate, in a kind of peaceful coexistence between profit and ethics. these benevolent intentions may well have originated from a will to free the business world of society’s moral judgements. conclusion as i have here demonstrated, business ethics is a polysemic term. anthropology has the right to use the notion of business ethics, but on the condition that it make a distinction between the empirical object and the philosophical notion of ethics. what we call “business ethics” fits into a corpus of technical and administrative procedures in business management that produces effects that are contrary to their own fundamental values. as business ethics attempts to create meaning, it comes up against the technicality of administrative and managerial procedures of the business world. the anthropology of “business ethics” requires that the concept be deconstructed and subsequently “anthropologized.” having explained how anthropology is concerned with morality and ethics, it is relevant to wonder what anthropology could bring to the study of ethics in the specific context of business. “business ethics”―like “corporate culture”―seems to be another avatar of the conceptual migration between the social sciences and philosophy, on the one hand, and the managerial line, on the other. gallenga / the anthropology of business ethics 17 in order to be approached anthropologically, the notion of “business ethics” should be viewed separately from any consideration of its purpose, applicability, or even the question of the “real” or imagined intentions of participants using them for other purposes. in short, “business ethics” should be considered as a category of work management at the meeting point between theory and practice, in order to observe how this notion is used and disseminated in the daily life of a workplace. in other words, the discussion of, ethics should be freed from any attempt to apply its results and from normative debate. an easy solution would be to circumvent the question of “business ethics” in order to avoid the difficulty of talking about ethics without talking about ethics. however, not only is business ethics part of the daily life of the workplace, it also gives anthropologists food for thought. this is worth thinking about! references badiou, a. 2003. l’éthique. essai sur la conscience du mal. caen: nous. berlin, i. 1988 (1969). éloge de la liberté. paris: calmann-lévy. boas, f. 1919. correspondence: scientists as spies. the nation 109, no. 2842 (december). browne, k. e. 2009. economics and morality : introduction. in k. e. browne and l. b. milgram (eds.), economics and morality: anthropological approaches. new york: sea monographs, 1-40. browne, e. k. and b. l. milgram (eds.), 2009. economics and morality: anthropological approaches. new york: sea monographs. caillé, a. and s. dufoix (eds.) 2013. le tournant global des sciences sociales. paris: la découverte, coll. « bibliothèque du mauss ». canto-sperber, m. and r. ogien 2006. la philosophie morale. paris: puf, coll. que sais-je ? canto-sperber, m. 2012. des valeurs partagées par toutes les cultures. rencontre avec monique canto-sperber, propos recueillis par catherine halpern, la morale. éthique et sciences humaines. auxerre, sciences humaines éditions, 196-202. caplan, p. (ed.) 2003. the ethics of anthropology: debates and dilemmas. london and new york: routledge. caplan, p. 2003. introduction: anthropology and ethics. in p. caplan (ed.), the ethics of anthropology: debates and dilemmas. london and new york: routledge, 1-34. cardot, f. 2006. l’éthique d’entreprise. paris: puf, coll. que sais-je ? cuche, d. 2004 [1996]. la notion de culture dans les sciences sociales. journal of business anthropology, special issue 3, spring 2016 18 paris: la découverte. droit, r.-p. 2009. l’éthique expliquée à tout le monde. paris: seuil. edel, m. and a. edel 2000 1968. anthropology and ethics: the quest for moral understanding. ny: transaction press. fassin, d. and w. stoczkowski 2008. should anthropology be moral? a debate. anthropological theory 8: 331. fassin, d. 2008. beyond good and evil? questioning the anthropological discomfort with morals. anthropological theory 8 (4): 333-344. fassin, d. 2010. la raison humanitaire. une histoire morale du temps présent. paris: éditions de l'ehess. faubion, d. j. 2011. an anthropology of ethics. cambridge: cambridge university press. foucault, m. 1984. histoire de la sexualité ii. l'usage des plaisirs. paris: gallimard. heinz, m. (ed.) 2009. the anthropology of moralities. new york, oxford, berghahn books. howell, s. (ed.) 1999. the ethnography of moralities. london & new york: routledge. marzano, m. 2008. l’éthique appliquée. paris: puf, coll. que sais-je ? massé, r. 2009. présentation: l’anthropologie face à la morale et à l’éthique. anthropologie et sociétés 33 (3): 7-19. sahlins, m. 2007. marshall sahlins on anthropologists in iraq (an open letter to the new york times). http://savageminds.org/2007/10/11/marshall-sahlinsonanthropologists-in-iraq/, accessed 27 november 2011. sahlins, m. 2013. "a protest resignation." interview with serena golden. inside higher ed. february 25, 2013. https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2013/02/25/prominentanthropologist-resigns-protest-national-academy-science . sayer, a. 2005. the moral significance of class. cambridge: cambridge university press. zigon, j. 2008. morality: an anthropological perspective. oxford: new york, berg. http://savageminds.org/2007/10/11/marshall-sahlins-onanthropologists-in-iraq/ http://savageminds.org/2007/10/11/marshall-sahlins-onanthropologists-in-iraq/ https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2013/02/25/prominent-anthropologist-resigns-protest-national-academy-science https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2013/02/25/prominent-anthropologist-resigns-protest-national-academy-science gallenga / the anthropology of business ethics 19 ghislaine gallenga is a social anthropologist whose research has focused both on the anthropology of firms (including comparative research in the field of public service) and on reflexive anthropology (working on epistemological issues arising from ethnographic relations, empathy, and ethics). she is currently associate professor in anthropology at aix marseille university (amu), and researcher at the institute of mediterranean, european and comparative ethnology (amu-cnrs idemec umr 7307, france), in aix-en–provence, france. she may be reached at ghislaine.gallenga@univ-amu.fr mailto:ghislaine.gallenga@univ-amu.fr vi opdaterer systemet vi opdaterer systemet... rauli.cbs.dk opdateres og er snart tilgængeligt. of old and new business ethics: how fair trade becomes patronage and paternalism in a darjeeling tea plantation arnaud kaba abstract this paper is about fair trade and business ethics. it analyses data from fieldwork conducted in a famous darjeeling tea plantation which practices biological and biodynamic farming and is labeled as fair trade. its aim is to show how the plantation owner, using aggressive marketing of his engagement with eco-friendly and corporately-responsible management, has managed to regenerate an old patronage system more or less similar to industrial paternalism, but with its roots in colonial as well as indigenous domination structures. disappointed by their unions, workers have had no alternative but to accept this form of governance, and some even acknowledge it as a good one. this case is a good example of how fair trade, which claims to empower workers, can be used to fuel a system which results in their disempowerment as social actors. keywords fair trade, labor, patronage, business ethics, tea plantations, neoliberalism page 1 of 20 jba special issue 3: 20-39, spring 2016 © the author(s) 2016 issn 2245-4217 www.cbs.dk/jba kabai / of old and new business ethics 21 introduction numerous authors have stressed the contradictions that revolve around the concept of fair trade, because it is a network of producers, ngos and suppliers trying to establish what they view as a fairer commercial system while using the globalized market economy to do so (cary 2004; diaz-pedregal 2007).1 this double bind has sometimes been regarded as a “dance with the devil” (jaffee 2007). daniel jaffee denounces the fact that this system of exchange, normally reserved for petty producers, has now been transposed to plantation work, thanks to the labeling organizations,2 which are attempting to protect not just the small peasant, but now a waged workforce (ibid.). for example, according to paul luetchford (2007), who studied the fair trade impact on petty coffee producers in costa rica, the results seem rather positive overall, despite some issues related, for example, to the employment of seasonal wage laborers. the problematic fact of translating this kind of system to a waged workforce is that the notion of fair trade, born around the 1940s, once relied heavily on international solidarity networks created by christian activists, often mennonites (jaffee 2007) or marxists (diazpedregal 2007), because its main idea was to introduce fairer relationships between the small producers from the south and consumers from the north by establishing direct contact between them. of course, the intermediaries were seen as the source of the oppressive nature of the relationship. after the creation of max havelaar, the first labeling organization, in 1988, two opposite visions emerged: one, sometimes called the “revolutionary” vision, which wanted to rely only on the “old” small activist networks; and the second, the “reformist” vision, which wanted to generalize the selling of fair trade products through the labeling system, albeit in supermarkets (diaz-pedregal 2007). it is the reformist vision which seeks to transfer the fair trade system to waged work. more broadly, gavin fridell (2010) argues that the fair trade network is indeed compatible with neoliberal institutions and that, to empower southern farmers, it has to set its actions within state policies instead of implementing programs that seek to replace the state welfare policies, thereby becoming an alibi for neoliberal institutions’ claim for economic deregulation.3 1 this article is based on a talk that was mainly a presentation of a book chapter on entrepreneurial ethics (kaba 2015) and is largely inspired by this publication in french. 2 before the rise of these labels, the fair trade associations used to buy directly from petty producers with whom they had a direct link (cary 2004). creating labels allows suppliers to obtain products from any producer and so makes the product’s origins harder to discover. moreover, the evaluation of the “fairness” practiced by the producer’s management remains at the labeling organization’s discretion. 3 the fieldwork used as the basis for this paper was conducted in a fairtrade darjeeling tea plantation, broadly during 6 months, from 2009 to 2010. i was home staying in the plantation as a tourist, and i conducted my research with the planter’s authorization but also under his observation. journal of business anthropology, special issue 3, spring 2016 22 the analysis presented in this article is polemical in two senses: first, because i discuss a fair trade tea plantation that makes use of an agricultural workforce, and because socio-economic and anthropological studies of tea plantations hitherto have viewed them as a neocolonial (chatterjee 2001), or even imperialist (chausuri 1995), exploitation system; and second, because i studied a plantation labeled by the fair trade labelling organization (flo)4 which has been criticized by daniel jaffee (2007) and paul cary (2004) for its ambiguous position regarding the modes of distribution (for example, the choice to supply supermarkets, and even starbucks). in this sense, therefore, this particular plantation is a company practicing a “merchandizing of ethics” (gallenga 2013). it sells partly ethical goods, because the consumer who buys its products thinks s/he is making an ethical gesture that justifies the price. according to sarah besky, an american anthropologist who has already conducted fieldwork in this plantation, the social situation there, though not bad, mainly consists in appliance of the law (with some corner cuts) but, more importantly, the democratic bodies meant to defend a worker’s rights are indeed controlled by the planter, and are in a sense eroding the power of the unions which are responsible for the law’s appliance (besky 2008). in these respects, fair trade could be seen as a neoliberal alibi allowing the planter to sell directly to importers, while also shortcutting the legal framework by being certified as having “fair” labor practices without having to deal with the state labor institutions (besky 2010)―an analysis that confirms fridell’s hypothesis (2010). given what has already been said, i will not here focus so much on fair trade certification issues as such, but analyze the way entrepreneurial ethics5 contained in the company’s marketing discourse copes with its actual management practices and ethics. in this regard, the company presented in this paper presents a sharp contradiction between the marketing discourses aimed at consumers and suppliers, which emphasizes ecological and socially-responsible management of the company, on the one hand, versus its actual management system, which in many aspects looks like a patronage system, on the other. this does not mean that the planter is avoiding all his social responsibilities: he is indeed redistributing some part of his capital in the form of social advantages to his workers; but the mode of distribution and the ethics behind it are very different. this mode of distribution looks like a kind of paternalism that reflects pre-industrial relationships, but which still has extensive influence in almost every hierarchical relationship in south asia. specifically, it involves a patronage system, or a set of relationships 4 the fair trade labeling organization is an ngo putting together, in a single network, twenty labeling organizations such as trans fair usa and max havelaar. 5 “entrepreneurial ethics” is a complex and contradictory concept which can fit many senses (gallenga 2013). in this article, i use it in the strict sense of a set of values meant to guide a company’s management. kabai / of old and new business ethics 23 based on protection against services. thus, a number of questions arise. how does the company produce a discourse based on corporate social responsibilities, at the same time as being based on worker’s empowerment, so as to satisfy its clients (suppliers, customers, labeling organizations)? how can the planter implement social benefits that are, indeed, inferior to those mandated by indian law; and are any claims made against him by his workers as a result? what kinds of social movements have been generated by this situation? did the planter use the social benefits claimed and obtained by the unions to establish a paternalism structured by the kind of clientelist system that is so typical of that found in south asia between dominants and subordinates? in the first part of this article, i will explain how the planter develops a discourse that conforms to the ethical model conveyed by the labeling organizations, and will show how it interacts with the actual governance of the plantation. i then discuss breaches in the company’s social responsibilities, especially in regard to the indian law and worker’s demands. i will show that it is indeed the workers, through their unions, who have brought about most of the social advances in the plantation’s management, but that the trade union movement finally declined because of the planter’s authority, as well as internal tensions. in the last part, i will show how the planter regained monopolistic control over social issues in the plantation by using an external discourse, which enabled him in a more coercive way to consolidate a traditional clientelist system that had formerly existed in this and other plantations. a cooperative in the marketing discourse: centralized and authoritarian governance the plantation discussed in this article is situated in the darjeeling district (west bengal, india). the domain, more than 500 hectares in size, includes, aside from the tea bushes, numerous spaces covered with forests, and seven villages, inhabited by more than 2000 people. many of them work inside the plantation, although this is not an absolute rule because the plantation cannot absorb everyone in its workforce and because educated young people tend to migrate out to seek better employment elsewhere. almost all the workers are of nepalese origin, as is a huge majority of the population as a whole in the darjeeling district. surrounded on its eastern side by the nepalese and chinese borders, this district has been populated by migrant workers and soldiers brought here by the british. they are is commonly identified as “gurkha,” an old name for nepalese people coming from the eighteenth century nepalese empire, and staking a claim for a separate state, the gurkhaland, for almost a century now (samantha 2000). the plantation practices biodynamic agriculture and is certified by journal of business anthropology, special issue 3, spring 2016 24 “demeter.”6 it is also certified as a fair trade plantation and offers ecotourist homestays. one of its unique features is that a single planter owns the land, since nowadays, in many plantations, the planter is only the plantation’s manager, while the land is often owned by private funds and companies. it is thus not necessary for the planter to have an intimate link to the soil he is managing: he is ultimately a boss, appointed by the merchants. in this case, however, the plantation is family owned, perpetuating a father/son transmission model: the plantation was one of the first to be managed by indians in the darjeeling district, back in 1859. since that time, the owners of the plantation have been born on this very soil―a fact which, unsurprisingly, the planter refers to when advertising his “terroir” on his website,7 alongside an ecological discourse based on his desire to regenerate the soil. the rhetoric of terroir, however, is not a particularity of this plantation: following the steps of the cognac producers, the planter is an amateur in marketing the quality of his plantation’s soil in order to sell his tea as a high-priced luxury good (besky 2010). the last heir of his lineage (his sons are not interested in the tea business), the owner has perpetuated the pioneering initiatives of his forebears, being the first plantation in darjeeling district to convert to biological farming, a conversion that was not especially costly, as the amount of pesticides used in the darjeeling plantations had never been high (besky 2008). furthermore, the choice to engage in biodynamic farming makes his plantation a rather unique case, even in a context where biological farming is becoming more and more successful (besky 2010). the planter’s marketing discourse advantage makes the most of these choices on a well-furnished internet site presenting numerous articles on the presumed originality of his ecological project, which he claims to have imagined after a mystical revelation following a fall from a horse. the plantation also markets its ethical side, presenting the workers’ rights provided and the overall wish to help their empowerment―especially those of women. the planter presents his management plan in a holistic view of the plantation that deals with ecological, economic and social challenges. his tea is also marketed, of course, with an argument for its quality: some years ago, it was the most expensive tea in india, and was therefore considered the best. there is also an autobiographical book written by the planter about his tea estate and the way he manages it, together with two documentaries and some advertising material given to visitors by the staff. however, the main way that the tea is marketed is through direct contact with importers, who are the main intermediaries between the planter and retail outlets, both in india and in the rest of the world. this is a specificity of the fair trade system, since otherwise the planter would 6 an organization certifying biodynamic exploitations. 7 as this paper in anonymized, i cannot give the references of the internet site or of any advertising documents from the company. kabai / of old and new business ethics 25 have to sell his tea by way of a broker and the tea auction system in kolkata, which acts as a financial center for tea exchange. there i saw him negotiating with indian and european importers. he also hosts them, visits the plantation with them, and tries to weave personal ties with them. he is, for example, a close friend of his main french importer and knows well another smaller french importer, who also made a documentary about the plantation with another friend. so the tea’s marketing is here based principally on personal relationships, and the marketing discourse somehow merges with the personality and charisma of the planter, who is by reputation a great story-teller. this very personal marketing was, so far as i understood, the main means by which he managed to present his holistic management model as a communitybased model and as a unique development project. this is a vision which copes well with the way fair trade is often perceived by its actors: a (relatively) direct, ethical (in the sense that the money is “fairly” redistributed to the producers), ecological, and community (often cooperative)-based economic exchange (jaffee 2008; cary 2004). therefore even without looking at the actual plantation’s management, one can see a sharp contradiction between the discourse itself (emphasizing the community) and the method used to spread it (a very personalized one). like the tourists and the importers, i was also in contact with this discourse during my numerous encounters with the planter. and i have to admit that the latter did a very good job in advertising his plantation― so well, indeed, that his french importer friend told me once that he seemed to have a magical power in the way that he charmed people. during my stay there, i was part of a tourist program normally conducted by the plantation (consisting of volunteering to do schooling, agricultural, or medical work), but as long as i was paying for my stay, i was tolerated as a “tourist researcher.” i did participant observation and worked in the tea processing factory, where the workforce is generally composed of men, and in the tea field, where women are in the majority. this rule is common to all tea plantations (chatterjee 2001; bhowmick 1984). i also observed workers’ daily and family lives. my data also include informal discussions, as well as formal interviews and narratives, conducted with unionists, regular workers, and politicians. as i was not a nepali speaker, i was dependent on an informant’s network, and, during the second year of fieldwork, on a translator who had to put up with some pressure from the planter who, after having read quite displeasing articles about his management, was wary of young researchers interviewing union members. the fieldwork conducted on this plantation revealed that although the planter sought to present it as a cooperative, the organization of labor had much the same hierarchical, postcolonial structure of any other plantation. there are four grades of foremen (the higher the grade, the more workers and lower foremen one can supervise), then division journal of business anthropology, special issue 3, spring 2016 26 directors (the factory is then considered as a division), a general director, and a planter. this is exactly the pyramidal structure of every tea estate since the colonial times (bhowmick 1984; chatterjee 2001; sharma 2000, 2005). there, the foreman’s authority is far from being absolute. on many occasions i have seen women workers answering back to their forewoman. thus discipline is by no means spartan: in the fields, women negotiate sharply over their break, while in the factory, men often show up for work half an hour late and take a lot of informal breaks. however, these kinds of informal daily resistance are common in india and do not indicate an absence of exploitation (de neve 2005). the harsh work, especially in the fields, leaves no doubt about this. furthermore, although the employees are from the formal sector, there is nothing like the “shirking” ambience that parry observed in the steel complex of bhilai (parry 1999). it is also important to note that my fieldwork was conducted during spring, when production is low and there is not much tea to pluck or process. according to my informants, coercion for extended and quicker work was far greater during the high season in summer (from june onwards). during that period, there is a lot of tea to pluck, and as the laborers obtain some extra wages when they have harvested extra weight, they will often discipline themselves to earn a bit more income. if we consider the staff, authority lies clearly in the planter’s hands. according to my informants, he takes all the important decisions and other members of staff have only a managing role. thus, during staff meetings, which took place in the administrative building hall, the foremen would sit on the side on some benches while ordinary staff members sat on their bottoms in the rear of the hall, while the general director and the planter sat at a desk in the middle. but the planter had a much better-looking chair and the most central position. the scene resembled a king’s council, with the planter/king in the middle with his chancellor to one side, the ministers behind him, and his court in front. at least, this is how popular hindi tv shows represent it. a colorful character, the planter looks like he had just come off a tv screen―but from another type of show, a nostalgic and extremely popular series about the colonial era. with his khaki jacket and shorts, his hat (though not the colonial pith helmet) and his horse, which he loves to ride when touring the plantation, he is indeed the perfect incarnation of a gentleman farmer. he has studied in the uk, and loves to bring the tourists (or importers) to his cottage, inviting them in with a charming british accent. he then feeds them with stories about his family and his own achievements, along with some biodynamically-produced miso soup.8 not only does this planter, with a bengali background,9 obtain 8 the miso soup is made from vegetables needing a lot of water to grow, even though workers’ villages experience a huge scarcity of water. 9 although it been established in the plantation, the family’s roots are in kolkata. kabai / of old and new business ethics 27 symbolic status with this image; he is also a brahmin, and his nickname means “king.” so he could hardly carry with him more symbols of power: the colonial administrator and the king of his domain, belonging furthermore to the higher caste status. so his stature of absolute power obviously contradicts the vision he would like to promote as simple manager of a community for which, as stated in the internet site (while explaining why the tea estate is fair and ethical, and using the “we” pronoun): “we sustain the right of the community for health, housing, education, but also to decide on its future with self-confidence and sovereignty”―guided by the mantra of “partnership, not ownership.” nor does it make credible his personal discourse when he sometimes calls himself a “small farmer” in front of the tourists. he indeed owns not only half the hill where his forests and tea bushes grow, but also (as in any plantation) the very soil upon which all the inhabitants’ houses are built. his omnipresence is also perceptible in the laborers’ discourse since he features in almost every single one of their conversations. the workers can express their attachment, their disgust, their recognition through their anger, but, however they do so, the planter remains central. when referring to the authority inside the plantation, the workers almost never talk about the managers, directors, or other staff, but about him directly. his decisions seldom encounter resistance, even though breaches in workers’ rights are numerous. breaches in social standards surprisingly, for a plantation which claims to engage itself in favor of workers’ rights, their empowerment, and community management―in other words, which claims to do more than what is compulsory―there are a number of breaches in mandatory labor rights as outlined in indian law. in addition, the premium provided by the sale of fair trade products should in theory be reinvested in “community projects” (nichols and opal 2005). the organization in charge of deciding how the income is to be reinvested into such projects is called the joint body. it is thus a compulsory element for any enterprise wishing to export goods labeled “fair trade.” when fair trade actors were still dealing only with cooperatives, the joint body was the council of each cooperative’s members. their goal was to decide democratically where people who own their means of production should reinvest their surplus income (ibid.). since plantations like the one under discussion are now labeled “fair trade,” the joint body is made up of workers’ representatives, but how are these representatives chosen? this is not openly made clear by those concerned. interestingly, the plantation’s website does make a reference to the “joint body” which is now (although this was not the case at the time of my fieldwork) described as a continuation of the village’s elder councils, which managed to handle “for over a century the wellbeing of their respective villages.” the management is then presented as an institution which is approached for help when an issue is beyond the joint journal of business anthropology, special issue 3, spring 2016 28 body’s control. in the plantation, as besky already noted, the joint body has only a representative role, mainly for the benefit of tourists, ngo representatives, and customers who ask to meet it. i was told during my fieldwork that the last joint body meeting had been held three years previously. similarly, when sarah besky arrived some years before me, she was also told that the joint body had not met for months (2008). hence, there is no clear evidence that the joint body has ever met in any other form than a decorative one. for example, during my stay, a fake meeting was held for visiting swedish students. this was more an interview, during which the translator was obliged to invent a discourse when the joint body members―mainly women, because the plantation pretends to act for gender emancipation―were asking themselves what they should say to these foreigners. they had received no orders from the planter and feared his reaction if they said anything wrong. the questions about money which were raised by the students had to be avoided, and for advice they turned to the general director. this is not to say that no community projects exist. they do, but except when―as we will see later―they are implemented by tourists or foreigners, it is the planter who is the president of this joint body―normally a consultative position―and, according to all my informants, he is the one who takes all the decisions, sometimes alongside his staff. an old joint body member, who can be seen on the internet site as a “the sole member of the nap-council of fairtrade labelling organisation, who has carved a niche for herself in the annals of fair trade international representation for all tea estates lady workers globally,” told me quite directly that they had no autonomy, although she had defended some proposals, for micro loans for example, that had been successful. but, again, other informants told me that it was generally the planter who decided which personnel could and could not obtain loans. the proposals she was talking about were old ones from the 1990s, when, according to my informants, the fair trade system was functioning in a much better way. at the time of my fieldwork, there were also breaches in the application of compulsory labor rights, this is to say, of the laws that all plantations―“fair trade” or not―should uphold. being a part of the organized (labor) sector, the tea plantation workers are part of the tiny minority of laborers (seven per cent, according to lerche 2012) who are protected by indian labor laws, especially by the plantation labor act of 1951. the first and the most notable of the rights provided by this act is that it is practically impossible to dismiss a worker, who is also sometimes allowed to bequeath his job to his son at the time of his retirement. this right was broadly respected on the plantation. workers have a minimum wage (which also exists in the unorganized sector) and diverse allowances: for example, the right to have their houses repaired free of charge (since the planter owned them), the refunding of medical expenses, help for children’s schooling, and some basic living materials. kabai / of old and new business ethics 29 although besky (2008) noted that the daily wage was slightly below the minimum at the time of her fieldwork, during my own research the company was respecting the minimum wage. medical expenses were sometimes refunded, usually after several years of delay, but sometimes not at all. it was somehow ironic that one of the main activities of the tourists was to participate in the health care volunteer program, on a plantation where the company should have been making donations for healthcare―at least, for all those in the plantation labor force. the repair of houses was erratic, and often carried out by the tourists themselves, who paid around fifteen euros a day for their stay, and who purchased materials and contributed their labor to help the villagers repair their houses―this on a plantation where, except for the (rare) houses where no one worked inside the tea gardens, house repair should have been at the management’s expense. this situation tends to occur especially in a context where tea gardens’ minimum wages are extremely low, partly because all these allowances are calculated as part of those wages. thus, when in 2010, i entered the darjeeling planters club to obtain documents and explanations about minimum wages in the plantations, i was told that the remarkably low paid salary of rs 6710 per day was such because the workers’ real wage when allowances were included was above rs 200 per day.11 the laborers, and the villagers in general, experienced an acute water scarcity problem, which stimulated their anger (as water provision is also compulsory according to the law on plantation labor rights). it is true that this is not specific to the plantation and that it is an endemic issue throughout the darjeeling district (banerjee 2010), but it was especially severe inside the plantation. thus, families from the plantation had to walk an average of 20 minutes every day in order to reach the springs, where they had to load around 30 liters of water per person in order to supply their household. one should keep in mind that this is a mountainous area, so that this task was particularly exhausting for them. 10 to compare: in my actual bhopal fieldwork, where people worked in the informal sector, the daily wage for unskilled to skilled workers ranged from rs 50 to rs 250/300, while extra-skilled workers could earn up to rs 500/600 on heavy working days. but, at the same time, being part of the organized sector, the tea plantation workers were considered to be included in what parry calls an “aristocracy of labor.” so one has to understand that, contrary to other sections of the organized sector where wages are significantly higher than in the informal sector (ibid.), their only advantage lies in the stability of their employment and their allowances. i do not make a conversion or rupees into euros or dollars because, although it is amusing to see that rs 62 comes to less than two dollars a day, with max havelaar declaring that “1 billion people are earning less than 2 dollars a day,” and that fair trade is meant to solve this kind of problem, such statements do not mean anything, except that they highlight the global repartition of capital because they are not linked with the local economy. in darjeeling, if you earn the local minimum wage, and if you have a permanent job with your allowances properly given, you can live a somehow poor but pretty decent life compared to local standards. 11 for example, when the “rental” price of the laborer’s house is taken into account. journal of business anthropology, special issue 3, spring 2016 30 the few waterworks that were constructed were built by tourists, especially by a british visitor who raised funds from the rotary club, and by an american couple who built a community center through the ngo care. again, this means basically that these benefactors used to pay almost ten times the laborer’s wage in homestay in order to carry out at their own expense what the planter himself should have done. almost half the sum was given back to the host family, the other half to the joint body (in other words, as stated earlier, to the company). this made hosting tourists a great opportunity for tea plantation inhabitants. all these breaches of the law are obviously not specific to this plantation. failure to respect the plantation labor act is common in the darjeeling district (sharma, 2000, 2003, 2005), and many informants stated that the situation on the plantation was acceptable, but not especially better than on any other plantation.12 besky (2008) also came to the same conclusion. therefore, the so-called corporate responsibility of the plantation is indeed a simple (and imperfect) respect of the law in terms of social benefits. we should not assume that the rights given to these workers by the owner reflect an effort to obtain fair trade certification, or are due to the kind of personal initiative presented on the internet site. the owner’s father was practically expelled from the plantation by his workers who, following mobilization in the late 1970s, established a union against his will and fought for their rights. the present planter had to manage a transition of power from father to son at a time of heavy social tension. it was under pressure from the first plantation union―a citu trade union (center of indian trade unions) affiliated to the communist party of india (marxist)13― that the main social improvements were made during the 1980s. many workers were given permanent positions, before being later dismissed in the low production period―something which is now impossible, and which further explains the low rhythms i witnessed while doing fieldwork during the low season. houses were improved, and the first school built on the plantation. previously, the children had to walk an hour in order to attend school in the neighboring town of kurseong. the 1980s saw fratricidal struggles between leftist and regionalist unions (affiliated with the gorkha national liberation front, a party that advocated a separate gorkhaland state). according to my informants, this conflict deeply compromised the relationships between trade unions in all plantations in the district. shooting incidents between communists and regionalist trade union members are said to have occurred. the planter’s french importer 12 they made this estimation based on what they were told by their family members and friends on the neighboring plantations. the unionists also made use of their trade union network to form judgements. 13 the communist party of india (marxist), founded in 1964, was born from a schism with the communist party of india and is one on the main leftist parties in india. it used to be extremely powerful in west bengal, and kept power there for more than 30 years (1977-2011) before being wiped out by mamata banerjee’s trinamool congress. kabai / of old and new business ethics 31 friend explained to me that during this period, he used always to walk around the plantation carrying a loaded gun. it thus appears that from both the planter’s as well as the workers’ perspectives, this period was one of considerable tension, approaching some kind of collective trauma. following this, the introduction of fair trade and several revelations concerning corruption scandals involving trade unionists,14 the involvement of workers in union militancy decreased inside the plantation. today, the only remaining union had only 50 members in 2010 and seldom received support from the workers. many believe that union members, some of whom evolved from being leftists to regionalists, are active only for the advantages that their position can give them vis-àvis the company and that, during negotiations with the staff, they will call on the planter to conclude a friendly agreement. today, people often prefer to approach the planter or other staff members directly when they want to get a loan or to raise an issue of some sort. the last noticeable victory by the union was over the issue of nepalization of the workers in the 1990s, when staff positions, previously allocated only to bengalis, were partly opened up to people of nepalese origin, born on the plantation. the only other issue that the union had recently negotiated―putting aside the continuous pressure to maintain wages following the regular raise of the minimum wage―has been the rehabilitation of houses following the cyclone in 2009 and some more recent landslides. it would be tempting to postulate a link between the decline of the unions, the end of the soviet union, and india’s entry into an era of globalization through the liberalization of its economy―all of which occurred in 1991. but we should not draw such a conclusion before understanding the particularities of indian labor conditions, which, according to rohini hensman (2011), have little to do with globalization as such, being more aggravated by neoliberalism rather than caused by it. this means that one should be cautious before linking a case study presenting poor labor conditions and low trust in trade unions to recent changes at international and national levels. for example, the communist party stayed in power until 2011 in west bengal, twenty years after the decline of the communist unions in the darjeeling district, a situation that seems to have been caused more by an inability of the communists to address regionalist claims than by anything else. another point has to be made about the unions. i agree with besky (2008) when she concludes that fair trade institutions, though they pretend the opposite, are acting in this case as neoliberal institutions competing against and threatening to erode the state-driven unions and legal institutions, which were already protecting the workers quite well on this plantation. i have every reason to believe that this might be the 14 for example, two scandals involved the union, as well as the planter, when funds from ngos for villages’ water connections were embezzled. journal of business anthropology, special issue 3, spring 2016 32 case throughout the darjeeling district. fair trade was seen by darjeeling’s planters as a way to expand their market and gain more flexibility with labor issues, being able to cut corners on labor laws without losing their certification (ibid.). in this sense, the link between fair trade and neoliberalism seems quite obvious. we have seen that in this plantation, the fair trade institutions allow the planter to market his product as a socially responsible tea, as he respects a law that would never have been respected without the trade union movement,. however, these institutions do not seem keen to support any efficient institution representing the labor force’s interests (as we have seen with the joint body’s inactivity). it is also important to stress the high level of corruption that sometimes occurs within the unions, including the union on this plantation. such corruption has contributed to their loss of credibility much more rapidly than the creation of fair trade institutions. of course, besky (2010) says that people are nostalgic for the old welfare model and even the colonial times, which they view―not necessarily correctly―as an era with less corruption. i myself suspect that the nostalgia of the darjeeling inhabitants is a fictive representation of a golden age, to help them deal with the trauma of bloody political rivalries of the 1980s, and may well be exaggerated. this may also be true of the discourses i collected about the early days of the union. corruption within indian unions is hardly new and has probably no link with neoliberal policies or globalization. based on his fieldwork in the nationalized coal mines of dhanbad in the early 1980s, heuzé (1987) stated that the miners did not trust their unions because they saw them as dishonest and clientelist. miners sought union assistance only because they could obtain some sort of personal benefit for themselves or family members from the union. these workers, as marxists, also operated under the illusion of a golden age embedded in a nostalgia for a fantasized village economy (ibid.). moreover, the discourse centered on the recent upsurge in corruption is popular in other parts of india and may be exaggerated (parry 2000). having dealt with these controversial points, let us now come back to the figure of the planter and try to understand how he was able to regenerate an old governance system through the use of clientelist relationships with his workers. a management system regenerating an old clientelist structure prior to the creation of the trade union, the planter’s father ran the plantation paternalistically, in a manner described by chatterjee (2001): the planter had to represent a strong authority, with a bit of benevolence (the plantation already had a dispensary at that time), so as to be both strict and just. thus, an old retired worker told me that he was nostalgic for the era of the planter’s father, when the workers were “innocents” (that is, not yet inspired by marxist ideologies) and when governance was kabai / of old and new business ethics 33 “fair” (it did not encourage shirking activities through a too lax position). there was also good social mobility at that time. a man started as a teenage tea plucker and ended his career in a good supervisor position. this kind of governance is characterized as a patronage15 system by chatterjee (ibid.), a relationship that presupposes obedience and deference on the part of a worker, and a mix of coercion, sense of justice, and even protection on that of the owner. this image derives from images of the colonial administrator and the mughal empire landlord called a zamindar.16 the planter was often called the maa-baap,17 the fathermother figure or supreme authority. the planter based his authority on coercion (the father’s side), but he was also a protective figure (the maternal side), which allowed him to convince his workers that he wishes them well. this governance system, applied by the current plantation owner, has obtained an implicit charter of values, an ethos of the dominant. it is also impossible to deny that the current planter allowed for significant social progress on his plantation, especially compared to the administration of his father. he agreed to negotiate with the unions, to implement social protection, to regularize the status of almost all the workers as permanently employed, and to implement some “community development” projects, although many of these failed or were started by external actors. finally, he opened up staff positions to the locals. nevertheless, the governance system has remained the same in essence. thus, the female member of the joint body mentioned earlier referred to the planter as “their mother and father.” in this sense, the owner stays completely within the maa-baap image: he is ostensibly distant from his employees, obliging them to salute him military-style whenever he visits the plantation―an act which could hardly be clearer 15 this kind of relationship, as we will later see, should not be totally confused with paternalism. rather, it is a specific form of patron/client relationships which, even today, frame a large number of hierarchical relationships in india: for example in political parties (rudolf 1998), pre-independence village life (dumont 1969; breman 1996), and even the structure of unions (ramaswamy 1983; chatterjee 2001). it was present even more in pre-revolutionary nepal (ramirez 2000). so this kind of relationship is a general pattern that exists in diverse forms, embedding distinct realities. 16 the zamindars were the local landlords of the mughal empire, consisting broadly of a class of petty or medium countryside nobility often coming from the lineages of village chiefs. they were used by the empire as intermediaries to collect the huge amount of land taxes fueling the mughal war machine. their power was conserved during british dominion, when administrators somehow imitated the domination system of the zamindars, particularly in how they also (partly) established their control over land revenues, thereby including themselves in indigenous domination structures. 17the maa-baap figure in an evocation of colonial power. as a patronage system, it has multiple forms―referring to the state as a protective entity, or to the colonial administrator himself. here, it is a reference to the figure of the administrator: the first planters, who were british, were like the administrators of their domains. in many plantations, the situation has evolved socially, of course, but little has changed concerning the nature of this power relationship (chatterjee 2001; sharma, 2000). journal of business anthropology, special issue 3, spring 2016 34 concerning the weight of the colonial legacy. he can be very harsh with his workers at times, and acts as their benefactor only if they also exhibit the required amount of deference and obedience. the owner’s protection is thus quite different from positive labor rights since obtaining any sort of material or social benefit is always seen as a favor. workers who have the most difficulties obtaining their refunds are generally those who did not act deferentially enough when requesting these refunds from the planter, or who are part of the trade union and do not accept his overtures of co-optation. the micro loans, so much advertised on the company’s internet site, are not given by the joint body, but have to be requested directly from the general director or the planter. the union is also trying to pressurize the staff in order to obtain more loans, but when it comes to health benefits, the workers often prefer to ask for these themselves, thus developing a personal―and, of course, very unequal―relationship of dependence with the planter. workers who are not docile fear the planter, and there are many rumors about “traitors” and “spies” (generally those who have obtained larger loans, time benefits, or the opportunity to host tourists) who are said to report any subversive statement to the planter. to what extent this is true i do not know for sure, but during fieldwork, the planter consistently demonstrated to me that he was well-informed of my progress and of my (potentially subversive) “findings.”18 the practice of granting loans is by no means a contemporary social measure implemented by fair trade actors and ngos. the loans may have a new name―“micro loans”―but, in fact, granting one-off loans for weddings, funerals, or to buy some drinks has been a very old practice among the colonial planters, and was originally used to tie the workers to the plantation when money-lenders’ interest rates were exorbitant and debts almost impossible to repay (engels [in robb 1993]; xaxa 1997; bhowmick 1981; chausuri 1995; chatterjee 2001). this system was not specific to tea plantations, and in the whole of rural india loans made by the dominant class are still used to acquire land and sometimes to put the dominated groups into bonded labor positions (breman 1974, 1985; heuzé 1989; picherit 2009). therefore, the use of micro loans to perpetuate an old practice of moneylending is not specific to this fieldwork or to the tea plantations. picherit (2009) observes how in andra pradesh (now telangana), the reddys, a cast of landowners, middlemen and moneylenders, have managed to acquire a monopoly on the micro loans officially attributed to them, thus giving formal borrower status to people who already owe them informal loans. the planter does not bond anyone by the debt because the interest he demands, around three per cent, is more than reasonable compared to the interest rates in the informal moneylender system (where rates for informal loans can 18 therefore i must thank him for not having expelled me from his plantation when he knew very well that my survey had come to reveal information that could be harmful to his company’s image. kabai / of old and new business ethics 35 easily be as much as 30 per cent). still, as the loans are not granted on formal, democratic terms, but by a unilateral act of benevolence, the planter’s micro loan arrangement reproduces this patronage system, in a somehow more benign way. this could be interpreted as paternalism, but it should be linked with an older colonial and indigenous genealogy of indian modes of domination. interestingly, the planter now assumes this genealogy, and states on the plantation’s home page (though presenting these characteristics as the management’s): the management―since its inception in 1859―has always done its best to augment or resolve a crisis that threatened the harmonious functionality of the community. this bond had always been the cornerstone for the bonding between the generations of the chatterjees19 and the resident working community. while this mode of governance certainly contradicts claims by the company to work for the empowerment, social rights, and selfdetermination of the community, it does not necessarily contradict the planter’s idea of a holistic community whose functionality he helps to keep intact in harmonious fashion. as i said, this mode of governance has some of its roots in indigenous patronage systems. hence, these systems reproduce an ethos coming from the hindu hierarchical ideology―an ideology which is precisely based on a holistic vision of society which, contrary to fair trade proponents and to western modern ideology, consists of hierarchical and unequal relationships between its members. western modernist conceptions envision a community formed of equal members, at least from an ontological point of view (dumont 1967). for dumont, the jajmani system, which ruled the economic exchanges and power relationships in the villages, came from that ideological framework. although this point is controversial, it is difficult to deny that there is at least some reference to the ethos of the hindu (brahmanical) rank hierarchy in the way patronage relationships are shaped (heuzé 1987). it should be noted here that the planter and his family are brahmins, which would make them particularly influenced by this brahmanical ideology. from this point of view, there is not much contradiction between the fair trade conception of community-oriented welfare and management, the holistic conception of nature from the biodynamic agriculture, and the brahmanical ideology. what is missing from this equation, of course, is any notion of workers’ empowerment! if the planter has managed to reproduce a governance system against which his workers have in the past rebelled, it is probably because he has also managed to take back social issues from the union’s hands. for their part, a huge majority of the workers are resigned and cynical. they have no more confidence in the union leaders, or in the promises of fair trade. some speak of the 1970s and1980s as a golden age for the 19 the family name has been changed. journal of business anthropology, special issue 3, spring 2016 36 union, with the beginning of fair trade certification. but, for many workers, hope for social justice vanished a long time ago. the majority are resigned to soliciting the benevolence of the planter, instead of defending their rights in some kind of labor struggle. this is not to say that they are unaware of the submission their attitude implies, or of the illegal nature of the situation: my interpretation is that, as with the corruption scandals and their internal struggles, the unions have failed to come up with an alternative vision. the workers feel that they hardly have a choice. whenever i raised these issues, the response was invariably one of “what can we do?” as he regenerated his soil thanks to permaculture, the planter could also regenerate his paternalist patronage―partly because of the fair trade neoliberal institutions; partly because of the foreign tourists and benefactors who funded his system of targeted and somehow authoritarian benevolence. by taking on an ersatz ethical position vis-àvis the outside, mainly for marketing reasons, the planter was able to regenerate his own kind of ethical governance. but the ethics here is paternalist, based on the protection of the obedient worker in this system. the corporate social responsibilities within the plantation are not exactly what they are supposed to be when presented to the outside world. the workers, even those most frustrated by the planter’s governance over their lives, recognize that he is a good businessman who can maintain the plantation’s finances by profitably exporting his goods to the entire world. with the fair trade strategy, the planter thus performs his first obligation of protection: keeping the plantation and the workers’ jobs out of danger. conclusion this model will probably soon come to an end. the owner recently sold his garden to a holding company, and he now owns only ten per cent of the shares. his sons will not take back the plantation, but he is still the general manager (nyogi 2014). having myself not returned to the plantation in six years, i do not know exactly how the decision to sell was taken by the planter, although there were rumors at the time of my fieldwork about his intention to do so. however, following the discussion above, i have every reason to believe that this paternalistic model would have survived a long time if the planter’s sons had taken over the estate. as we have seen, fair trade certification, with its neoliberal vision of the workers’ rights, probably helped the owner sell his tea at a higher profit, while providing him with a tool with which to deal with the social issues within the plantation in an old, clientelist planter’s way. it even enabled him to maintain some breaches in his application of the labor law. the planter’s adaptability was not the only factor behind his success, however. divisions resulting from regional political evolution, and the unions’ involvement in corruption, led to the latter’s loss of kabai / of old and new business ethics 37 credibility. i would, however, be very cautious before concluding which factor is the more salient or if the two are linked. nevertheless, we have described how an older system of governance, with roots in colonial and indigenous domination, was regenerated by internal modernization and csr-friendly marketing which provided it with discretionary funds in the form of micro loans. we have seen how “traditional” modes of governance can be dramatically competitive and extremely resilient, even in a context where supposedly new corporate social responsibilities are promoted. finally, it seem clear that the labeling organizations who supply this tea in the western world by labelling it “fair trade” have, probably unintentionally, allowed for the marketing of more expensive tea while sacrificing workers’ empowerment. fueling the system with the extra money collected, the plantation has benefited from the fair trade system, but undermined its workers’ ability to demand and receive more and better labor rights. but this is hardly surprising, given that the confrontation of fair trade ideals with local business ethics is essentially one of abstract ideologies, sometimes denounced as too abstract (besky 2008), with norms that are primarily pragmatic and functional (gallenga 2013). business ethics, as we have seen, can be developed not in order to be “fair,” but rather to manage the workforce more efficiently. references banerjee, r. 2010. rumble in the hills. darjeeling times, 2 (4). besky, s. 2008. can a plantation be fair? anthropology of work review 29 (1): 1-9. besky, s. 2010. colonial pasts and fair trade futures: changing modes of production and regulation on darjeeling tea plantations. in sarah lyon and mark moberg (eds.), fair trade and social justice: global ethnographies. new york: nyu press, 97-122. besky, s. 2014. the labor of terroir and the terroir of labor: geographical indications and darjeeling tea plantations. agriculture and human values 31(1): 83-96. bhowmick, s. 1981. class formation in plantation systems. new delhi: people's publishing house. breman, j.c. 1974. patronage and exploitation, berkeley. university of california press. breman, j.c. 1985. of peasants, migrants and paupers. delhi: oxford university press. cary, p. 2004. le commerce équitable: quelles théories pour quelles pratiques? paris: l’harmattan. chatterjee, p. 2001. a time for tea: women, labor and post-colonial politics journal of business anthropology, special issue 3, spring 2016 38 on an indian plantation. durham: duke university press books. chaushuri, a. 1995. enclaves in a peasant society: political economy of tea in western dooars in northern bengal. delhi: people’s publishing house. de neve, g. 2005. the everyday politics of labor. delhi: social science press. diaz pedregal v. 2007. le commerce équitable dans la france contemporaine: idéologies et pratiques. paris: l'harmattan. dumont, l. 1967. homo hierarchicus: essai sur le système des castes. paris: gallimard fridell, g. 2010. fair trade, free trade, and the state. new political economy 15 (3): 457-470. gallenga, g. 2013. l’éthique entrepreneuriale: un objet anthropologique? moussons 21: 21-36. hensman, r. 2011. workers, unions, and global capitalism: lessons from india. new york: columbia university press. heuzé, d.g. 1989. ouvriers d’un autre monde: l’exemple des travailleurs de la mine en inde contemporaine. paris: editions de la maison des sciences de l'homme. heuzé d. g., 1987. travail ouvrier et consciences communautaires: l'évolution des mentalités des travailleurs de la mine en inde contemporaine. cahiers des sciences humaines 23 (2): 245-260. jaffee, d. 2007. brewing justice: fair trade coffee, sustainability, and survival. berkeley: university of california press. kaba, a. 2011. les réalités du commerce équitable: l'exemple d'une plantation de darjeeling. paris: l'harmattan. lerche, j. 2012. labour regulations and labour standards in india: decent work? global labour journal 3 (1): 16-39. luetchford, p. 2007. fair trade and a global commodity: coffee in costa rica. london: pluto press. nicholls, a. and c. opal 2005. fair trade: market driven ethical consumption. london: sage publications. parry, j. 1999. lords of labour: working and shirking in bhilai. contributions to indian sociology 33 (1-2): 107-140. parry, j. 2000. “the crisis of corruption” and “the idea of india”: a worm’s eye view. in i. pardo (ed.), the morals of legitimacy. new york and oxford: berghahn books, 27-55. picherit, d. 2009. entre villages et chantiers: circulation des travailleurs, clientélisme et politisation des basses castes en andra pradesh, inde. thèse de doctorat. paris: universtité de nanterre. ramaswamy, u. 1983. work, union and community. new delhi: oxford kabai / of old and new business ethics 39 university press. robb, p., 1993. dalit movements and the meaning of labour in india. delhi: oxford university press. rudolf, l. and s. rudolf 1998 (1987). in pursuit of lakshmi: the political economy of the indian state. chicago: the university of chicago press. samanta, a.k. 2000. gorkhaland movement: a study in ethnic separatism. new delhi: aph publishing corporation. sharma, k. 2000. the himalayan tea plantation workers. dibrugarh: n.l. publishers. sharma, k., 2003. tea plantation workers in a himalayan region. new delhi: mittal publications. sharma, k. 2005. sociology of indian tea industry. new delhi: mittal publications. arnaud kaba is a phd candidate in social anthropology at ehess (toulouse), and is currently completing his thesis about the professional cultures and proletarian consciousness of the informal metal workers of bhopal, india. he is at present assistant lecturer in aix marseille university and can be reached at arnaud.kaba@gmail.com. mailto:arnaud.kaba@gmail.com vi opdaterer systemet vi opdaterer systemet... rauli.cbs.dk opdateres og er snart tilgængeligt. vi opdaterer systemet vi opdaterer systemet... rauli.cbs.dk opdateres og er snart tilgængeligt. playing with morality: business ethics of a professional baseball club in taiwan jérôme soldani abstract baseball is considered the national sport in taiwan. professional teams are owned by large local firms and are themselves small companies offering an archetypal model of society. their practices are based on moral values around which their fans are unified. this is also a legacy of the social responsibility transferred to the taiwanese firms by the former authoritarian regime (from the 1950s to the 1980s). based on twelve months’ fieldwork with a taiwanese baseball club now owned by a holding company, this paper shows how the club is viewed as a firm structured around moral values and whose players are established as moral paragons. the model of a united, hierarchical family is highlighted by the original owners, a family firm which founded the club in 1984, and by the team’s iconography. however, these methods of commodifying the team as a value-based family are faced with the realities of daily practices and the corruption scandals that regularly undermine the image of the taiwanese professional league. the current company owner (from 2014) has tried to maintain this image of virtue, with some adjustments, in order to maintain the fans’ identification with the club. the business ethics of the club is the outcome of these adjustments and negotiations between the owners, the players, and the fans. page 1 of 14 jba special issue 3: 40-53, spring 2016 © the author(s) 2016 issn 2245-4217 www.cbs.dk/jba soldani / playing with morality 41 keywords taiwan, professional baseball, business ethics, moral values, corruption, fans many people wonder how the brother elephants’ popularity has been so enduring and how its notoriety has remained so much stronger than that of the other clubs. there are, of course, several factors that account for this, such as its widely-held reputation as a “consistently victorious club,” its strong tradition of strict discipline and its legendary games packed with twists and turns. however, the foremost reason is definitely the sense of determination and duty inherent in the way the club is run. to sum up, “brother” is not a large consortium, but for twenty years it has wholeheartedly stirred a passion for baseball. this goodwill has earned the respect and support of many fans. this club has established a model of social responsibility among businesses in our country. (wang 2004: 6, translated from chinese by the author) this is how wang hueimin (王惠民), former sports reporter and high commissioner of the chinese professional baseball league (cpbl, 中華職業棒球大聯盟 zhōnghuá zhíyè bàngqiú dàliánméng, based in taiwan), described the brother elephants baseball club in a brochure edited in 2004, on the occasion of the club’s twentieth anniversary.1 brother elephants is indisputably the most popular team in the league, and it is generally described as the best representative of the so-called “taiwanese baseball tradition” (台灣棒球的傳統 táiwān bàngqiú de chuántǒng). the club claims to adhere to this tradition and has always actively promoted this through its iconography and public relations. the cpbl is a federation of large private companies, each of which owns a club that has itself been a limited liability company (ltd.) since 2007. in order to keep fans loyal, and in accordance with the educational role given in taiwan to both baseball―which benefits from the status of being a “national sport” (國球 guóqiú)―and business, clubs depend on the promotion of moral values. this practice is not always sufficient to cope with supporters’ demands for results, the players’ professional imperatives, and the recurring corruption scandals linked to illegal gambling and fixed matches that have weakened the league since it was 1 this article is a revised and updated version of a paper published in the french journal moussons (2013: 79-99). journal of business anthropology, special issue 3, spring 2016 42 created in 1990.2 what are these moral obligations, and how are they put into practice by the clubs? how are these norms negotiated between the directors who seek to impose them, employees who have to work with the daily constraints of their work, and customers (the fans) to whom the values are being promoted? these questions will be dealt with using field observations of the brother elephants club and its supporters, made during several stays adding up to twelve months of study between 2006 and 2014. the point is not to make accusations of the owners of these clubs or to denounce any attempt at exploiting these moral values, but rather to analyse how these moral values are articulated and to what purpose they are used. the observations of this articulation of moral values and the negotiations between the different actors can help us understand brother's business ethics. what is the role of the founding family, and from 2014 the holding company, that manages the club in fashioning an image of the club that is portrayed as a model of society? how is this reflected in the daily lives of the players? to what extent do the players obey the rules imposed, tacitly or otherwise, by the management? and what sanctions do they risk when disobeying these rules? what are the consequences of corruption scandals in a league that depends on strict adherence to moral guidelines? what is the relationship of the fans to the values promoted by clubs? all through this article, we will see that actors must choose between several competing value frameworks according to the context and to their own position. a family business the brother hotel baseball team was created in september 1984 as an amateur club. the club was renamed “brother elephants” (兄弟象 xiōngdì xiàng) when it became professional in 1990 and one of the founding clubs of the cpbl along with wei-chuan dragons (味全龍 wèiquán lóng), mercuries tigers (三商虎 sānshāng hǔ) and uni-president lions (統一獅 tǒngyī shī). the club became a limited liability company in 2007. it employs about eighty people, over half of whom are players; there are about ten coaches and physical trainers and almost twenty administrative staff (transportation, ticket sales, shop, administration, website, and so on). in a booklet produced in 2005 and for promoting the club to prospective sponsors, brother claimed it had about 70,000 fans across the country: half of them were born in the 1980s; more than 40 per cent lived in the capital and its surroundings; and 45 per cent were women. since the founding of the league, in 1990, until the present day, the elephants have won the championship seven times: in 1992-1994, 2001-2003, and in 2 on taiwan baseball history, see yu (2007) and morris (2010). soldani / playing with morality 43 2010. the history of brother elephants is closely linked with that of its founder’s family, which has played a major role in the recent development of baseball in taiwan―at least according to official biographies, which tend to go along the following lines: the club was founded by hung teng-sheng (洪騰勝,) considered “the father of professional baseball” in taiwan for his crucial contribution to the creation of the league. he was the eldest of a family of five brothers and three sisters, born in tainan in the south of the island. in the 1950s, his father, hung chao (洪朝,) started a factory producing sewing machines for export. hung chao was not a baseball player himself, but he supported the employees of his company who practiced the sport in their spare time. he created the team of huanan (華南,) named after his company, and encouraged his own children to practice the sport (wang 2004: 9). as a high-school student, hung teng-sheng became a member of the huanan team. he then left to study for a business degree at national taiwan university, the country’s most prestigious school. he later started a company importing typewriters (and more recently, printers) from the japanese firm brother. in 1975, following governmental incentives to develop tourist facilities, he diversified his activities and, in partnership with his four brothers, opened a luxury hotel named brother in the centre of the capital, taipei. hung teng-sheng is still a baseball fan and plays regularly with his employees and family. his hotel business having reached some sort of economic stability in the early 1980s, he created a baseball team in 1984, recruiting players after their graduation from universities or completion of military service. in 1985, he bought some land in lungtan, in the county of taoyuan, about 50 kilometres south of taipei, and had a baseball stadium built there. it opened in 1986. it is often said that hung gave up the opportunity to build a second hotel in order to achieve his dream of having his own stadium in which to play with his family and employees. the lungtan stadium, which used to host professional league games, is still used today as a practice ground for professionals, as well as a playing field for the hung family and the hotel employees who meet there every tuesday afternoon, all year round except during the spring festival week. the five hung brothers are all businessmen, baseball fans, and well-known sponsors in the taiwanese sporting world, as is shown by the iconography of the club, which emphasizes their active involvement in the country’s social life. “a role model for social responsibility” the club’s logotype shows a remarkable range of symbols that have been built up over the years. five letters “h” refer to the five hung brothers, whose names start with an “h” in english transliteration. these five “h” letters are also associated with the five virtues, spelled out in english as: journal of business anthropology, special issue 3, spring 2016 44 “health, honor, harmony, honesty, humility” (wang 2004: 157) or “5h.” in 2013, the homepage of the club’s english website points out that “5h” is more than a symbol, it is a tradition and soul of the brother hotel and the brother elephant” (see illustration below). each “h” is linked to two others in order to form a black and yellow plum blossom representing the team’s colours. plum blossoms, which bloom in winter and are resistant to low temperatures, symbolise resistance and perseverance, which echo the prevailing ideology of taiwanese baseball, where players of all ages are expected to take part in repetitive and exhausting training sessions in all types of weather. the possibility of wresting victory from the opponent’s hands until the very last second, according to the formal rules of the game, is also an incentive to extend efforts. finally, the plum blossom refers to loyalty to the regime of the republic of china, currently taiwan’s regime, for which it is an emblem (destrebecq 2002: 206-207). figure 1: home page of brother elephants english website in 2013 (http://www.brothers.com.tw/en/5h.php?cate=eh ) (accessed february 10, 2013). using the maxim of a few words as core values, such as those epitomised by the five “h” letters, is common practice in taiwanese companies. in southern taiwan, companies often refer to the four principles: “diligence, frugality, honesty and loyalty” (勤儉誠信 qín jiǎn chéng xìn) (guiheux 2002: 198). such exhortations have a mainly discursive and performative value. their meaning is flexible and can be adjusted according to address and context. they should not be taken literally, and they have no absolute moral sense. promoting values of peace, harmony, and understanding, which together position the company as a surrogate family and the boss as a surrogate father is also a way of rationalising http://www.brothers.com.tw/en/5h.php?cate=eh soldani / playing with morality 45 practices which are, to a great extent, disconnected from such values (strict hierarchy; boundaries between leaders and employees, and so on) and arduous working conditions (difficult tasks, long hours, low, nonnegotiable wage levels, and so forth) (guiheux 2002: 198-199). the common use of maxims like these reveals an objective that most taiwanese businessmen have in common: making their companies into social microcosms serving as role models for the whole population (paix and petit 1991: 30). this supervisory and educational objective was allocated to companies by the chinese nationalist government, which retreated to taiwan in 1949 after its defeat by the communists on the mainland (paix and petit 1989: 20). such an order to set a good example is clearly stated by the baseball professional league, which is run directly by member companies. the order concerns primarily the players, whose contracts (article 3) stipulate the following: the player hereby agrees that: professional baseball games are amongst the most popular forms of family entertainment in the republic of china. professional baseball players are often seen as role models by children and teenagers. consequently, professional baseball should remain positive, pure, healthy and unspoilt. in order to fulfil this major social responsibility, players should not only work diligently, but also be honest, healthy and respectful of all provisions of the club and the league. through good behaviour, fair play and sportsmanship, each player should become a role model for the citizens of the republic of china. (chinese professional baseball league 2008: 73, translated from chinese) thus brother has built part of its reputation on displaying respect for family values. the back of the bus in which players commute almost daily, which serves as a true advertising medium, shows a cartoon family of elephants in a car―grandfather, father, mother and son. marriage proposals, birthdays, or mother’s day celebrations are regularly organised for fans in the stadium during games. dictates, proscriptions and sanctions few taiwanese companies choose to own a baseball club because team maintenance is very expensive and the activity is deemed unprofitable. in twenty years (from 1984 to 2004), brother has spent around 500 million taiwan dollars (14 million euro) to maintain the elephants baseball team (wang 2004: 159). the income from selling tickets is generally insufficient to cover the cost of stadium rental. the rights to tv broadcasts are the main source of income for the clubs, with a maximum journal of business anthropology, special issue 3, spring 2016 46 of 46 million taiwan dollars (about 1.275 million euro) per year per team. the television channel videoland (緯 來 wěilái), which has been broadcasting baseball games from 1997, pays at the end of the season a sum fixed in advance with the professional league. the payment is increased or decreased according to the average viewing audience of each team. until now, no club has achieved the full amount, for lack of sufficient audience. brother, the team that attracts the most viewers, is regularly the least penalized team. sponsors are generally large companies with which the club owner maintains close relations of “mutual aid” (人助 rénzhù) (guiheux 2002: 206-208). budgetary balance is sought through merchandising: shirts, clothing, posters, fans, bracelets, key rings, and so on. until the present, however, brother is also the only club to have recorded profits after a season: that was in 2003, the year after it won a third consecutive championship title. the club’s advertising value, from which it draws most of its income (through sponsorships, merchandising, and so on), relies mainly on its public image. in addition to being a group of hard-working people, the club displays a whole range of significant educational values within taiwanese society. it is eager to base its reputation on emblematic players or coaches with a career and all the exemplary virtues it advocates. the main values extolled by the club are “perseverance” (恆心 héngxīn), “respect” (尊重 zūnzhòng) (for teammates, fans, opponents and their audience), and “politeness” (禮貌 lǐmào) as a manifestation of social hierarchy and conventions. at the end of each winning game, the elephants face the bleachers of the opposite team and bow before they salute their own audience (soldani 2011), and finally the field itself. the brother team is the only team that acts out this ritual, as most teams salute only their own fans before leaving the field, whatever the outcome of the game. “discipline” (紀律 jìlǜ) and “respect for the rules” (規矩 guījǔ) make up a series of restrictions which have been imposed on the players from their school years, such as refraining from drinking, smoking or chewing betel nut, and going out partying. these rules are openly applied and publicly spelt out, but in reality, they are discreetly broken in spite of financial sanctions―mostly in the form of deductions from wages―incurred by the offender. several players smoke, even in the locker room before the game, drink alcohol, or do not deprive themselves of nightlife, even though they generally ensure that their behaviour remains discreet. in private, these restrictions and accompanying sanctions are mocked by team members who deem them inept because of the discrepancy with their own reality. rather than applying rules and regulations, which they claim to ignore, players refer to a list of chores regulating their daily lives. in june 2008, these duties, handwritten on a board in their dormitory, consisted of cleaning baseballs, providing soldani / playing with morality 47 energy drinks, taking care of the ice bucket, pushing the ball cart, emptying the rubbish from the bus or the dormitory, washing clothes, turning lights off, and renting dvds. acting as role models for their club does not exactly correspond to the purpose players have set themselves as part of the game: namely, training meticulously, playing a game seriously to ensure victory, and ensuring winning and coping with losing. the club’s public image, defined by its social responsibility, therefore, does not necessarily correspond to the players’ idea of their profession (will 1991).3 fighting corruption fines and deductions from wages are applied for errors or mistakes made on the field during a game. these sanctions can concern hesitant running or a slow hit. the club establishes the terms and conditions of such penalties. rather than aiming at encouraging the players’ performances, however, their real purpose is to discourage cheating. this cheating often takes place in the form of deals made with bookmakers connected with powerful local criminal organisations (chin 2003). to this day, however, these anti-cheating measures have appeared to have had no effect. match-fixing scandals have occurred on a regular basis since the mid-1990s, each time involving a large number of players and coaches, politicians, and members of the police force. with the exception of the 2008 case involving mainly the d-media baseball club (wang and yu 2009), which in the final analysis belonged to the mafia, teams owners have never been involved in corruption scandals. these cases are the reason most often given by the actors from the world of taiwanese baseball (players, coaches, club management, journalists, spectators, etc.) to explain the decline in attendance that cpbl has been experiencing in recent years. fans are refusing to follow a competition considered to be completely distorted. “cheating” (放水 fàngshuǐ) due to threats or greed as the media describe, is a breach of the moral contract between the professional players and their fans. “betting in professional baseball” (職棒 簽 賭 zhíbàng qiāndǔ) is illegal and controlled by bookmakers linked to large criminal organizations in the country. it doesn't simply consist of ensuring a winner or loser; there is also betting on point spreads at the end of a game, or after a certain number of innings. to ensure the result, bookmakers seek the complicity of one or more players and coaches of at least one of the teams on the field. “cheating” consists of throwing easy balls to the batter, willingly missing a catch, running slower, and so on. the cost of ensuring these services is eased by the extremely lucrative market of illegal betting, 3 for a description of another professional baseball club in east asia, see kelly (2006) on hanshin tigers (阪神タイガース) in japan. journal of business anthropology, special issue 3, spring 2016 48 which is estimated by both judicial and journalistic sources at between two hundred and three hundred million taiwan dollars bet by gamblers on each game (huang 1997: 32). a recent large-scale scandal, in 2009, concerned mainly the elephants (wang and yu 2010; soldani 2015). following that, almost half the players and coaches were permanently barred from the league. since then, each club has been placed under close supervision by the local prosecutor. the club’s president, for his part, urged fans to report any player’s transgressions they might become aware of. these may range from smoking a cigarette on the street to mixing with suspicious people or having an extramarital affair. for this purpose, fans can fill in and submit a form found on the fans’ page of the club’s website. the president’s call opened with the maxim: “moral conduct distinguishes good from evil, serious training determines victory or defeat” (人品定優劣，苦練決勝負 rénpǐn dìng yōuliè, kǔliàn jué shèngfù).4 however, this call to report on others, a legal and common practice in taiwan (especially since the boom in modern technologies, social networks and 24-hour news channels), has never been followed up. “brother spirit” or “elephants’ spirit” brother is closely linked with its public, who are envisioned as the primary beneficiaries of the moral values extolled by the club. they are also the club’s main customers, and the club’s financial balance depends mainly on their numbers, their loyalty and how much they spend. the club therefore monitors fans’ activities closely. the creation of any local fan group (後援會hòuyuánhuì) needs to be approved by the club. elephants have support groups across the whole country. a company employee is responsible for relations with these groups and, before each game, brings them drums and flags, necessary to lead a taiwanese fan group in the bleachers (soldani 2011).5 brother has built a rhetoric around this fraternity that also includes supporters. one of the main slogans of the club, “we are all brothers” playing on the name of the company in english, or in mandarin, 四海 之 内 皆 兄弟 (sìhǎi zhīnèi jiē xiongdi)―meaning, literally, “between the four seas, all men are brothers.” this fraternal relationship, together with effort (even in suffering) and discipline, are values supposed to ensure success. they are celebrated in the club anthem, the “song of the brother 4 http://www.brothers.com.tw/apply_supervise.php?cate=pd (accessed june 20, 2012). 5 the taiwanese fans' cheering style has much in common with fans in japanese bleachers (kelly 1997; 2004). http://www.brothers.com.tw/apply_supervise.php?cate=pd soldani / playing with morality 49 elephants team” (兄弟 象 隊 歌 xiongdi xiang duìgē)6: flies the team flag in the wind of victory masters of every moment disciplined, energetic, we are the brother elephants team scattered across the seas enthusiasm of brotherhood that radiates the brilliance of our victories from the north to the south in the wind and rain, under a blazing sun, nothing can undermine our confidence become one in brotherly love write the legend that belongs to us focus on our labor and our efforts our hopes and mutual aid to accomplish together the mission that leads to triumph by showing their adherence to common values through the phrase “elephants spirit” (象魂 xiàng hún), the club’s fans distinguish themselves from fans of other teams and from the company, which prefers referring to the “brother spirit” (兄弟魂 xīongdì hún) as a unique set of behaviour and attitudes closely associated with taiwanese school baseball (soldani 2012)7 and otherwise absent, or less important, among the other professional teams. this mistrust of the company sometimes goes along with (possibly strong) criticism of the management’s choices and its expectations in terms of results, irrespective of moral considerations. spectators can be well aware of the discrepancy between their heroes’ real lives (even though they may not know all aspects) and the image provided by the club. their identity process is therefore more complex than a mere adherence to moral standards. it involves a sense of sociability and history, as well as personal choices. depending on circumstances, spectators can read into an event or work out their own values according to their own criteria and priorities, as shown by the following example. in 6 this song was written in march 2002 by lin kuo-jung (林國榮) and chueh chiahsing (闕家興). the lyrics are sometimes printed and distributed at the entrance to the stadium, just before a game, by members of the club's supporters group. the song was available for free listening on the website of the brother elephants: http://www.brothers.com.tw/player_song.php?cate=pl (accessed february 10, 2013). 7 this is also the case in japan, where high school baseball serves a similar function―especially the national high school championship (全国高等学校野球 選手権大会 zenkoku kōtō gakkō yakyū senshuken taikai), commonly named “summer kōshien” (夏の甲子園 natsu no kōshien), played annually in nishinomiya city (near ōsaka) from 1915 (gordon 2006; moeran 1984). some authors compare a distinctly japanese conception of baseball to its american counterpart, describing a "samurai style" characterized by the values of “effort” ( 努力doryoku) and “harmony” (和 wa) (whiting 1977; 1989). however, the american anthropologist william w. kelly points out that this opposition is more discursive than empirical (kelly 1998; 2009). http://www.brothers.com.tw/player_song.php?cate=pl journal of business anthropology, special issue 3, spring 2016 50 2006, one of the most popular elephants players was dismissed from the team on suspicion of cheating (throwing a game) and corruption. a few fans tried to defend him, arguing that he had borrowed money from mobsters to rebuild his house following the 1999 earthquake. this affiliation with the player’s “filial piety” (孝順 xiàoshùn)―helping his parents at any cost―could, in fans’ eyes, cancel out an act of disloyalty. elephants after brother at the end of 2013, the club was sold to the taiwanese holding company chinatrust, because―according to the team’s former owner―maintenance costs had become too high for the hung family. although hung jui-ho has never hidden his dismay over the corruption scandals, especially when his own players were involved, he never publicly mentioned other than financial reasons to justify the sale of the club. general conditions for players and coaches have hardly changed since then. their salaries have been increased and their practices in training or on the field haven't changed. however, their environment has changed, mainly with a new dormitory, and there has been a partial replacement of the team’s players, which caused quite a stir. during the 2014 season, the new management did not wish to make radical changes to the club’s image. they only tweaked things slightly so as not to provoke fierce opposition from the fans. the club’s colours and hymn have been kept, as have been the tight connections with its history (the club’s thirtieth anniversary was celebrated this year). the new owner’s name has been added to the club’s chinese name. an “s” was added to the english name, turning “brother” into “brothers.” however, the plum blossom, the symbol of the club, has been dropped, because it remains the symbol of the brother hotel. the moral values of the club under the management of the hung family have been kept and are still extolled. however, the club’s new management relies on larger investments (for recruiting, construction of a new training field, and so on), and on the promotion of a more aggressive and dramatic playing style (the slogan for 2014 was “strike hard!’); whereas the former management used to promote an organisation based on modest means (low wages, minimal recruitment, and so on) and a more reserved playing style, symbolising a more “traditional” (傳統 chuántǒng) running of the club based on japanese practices. as for fans, they ensure continuity through rhetoric, singing and artefacts from the previous management period, while still praising the “elephants’ spirit.” conclusion family and moral values promoted by brother are a model for the soldani / playing with morality 51 company’s management, as well as for the whole society and the nation. such values are both goods to sell and a way of exercising more effective control over employees, especially in the effort to fight corruption. however, the various actors (owners, players, fans) do not necessarily agree on how to define these values or on the priorities that should rule their activities. in an attempt to enforce respect for these values, strict rules and regulations are formulated and applied to the letter. however, these constraints, like all constraints, are distorted, overlooked, or even totally ignored by those who value more practical needs in their daily lives, or who privately condemn what they view as the nonsensical obligations imposed by the club’s owners. the confrontation of these values, which underlie each practice, with actors’ practical strategies shows that they rely on several competing value frameworks underlying each practice, from which actors must choose according to the context and their own position. with this overlap of norms, there is no contradiction in a baseball club like brother elephants remaining a “model for social responsibility” despite the corruption scandals, because it is the players who are considered individually responsible for the situation, and the club management itself is never questioned in these cases. if actors’ beliefs (including those of the owners) cannot be questioned, club members’ diverging practices must be taken into account, as well as the fact that spectators can put things into perspective. from an anthropological point of view, brother’s business ethics is not only the outcome of the former and current club owners endeavours to produce a commercial image, or a social model conforming to certain moral values. it is also, or even primarily, the result of constant negotiations between management and employees―mainly players and coaches―and between the club and its fans. business ethics is not a set of standards; it is the result of competing practical agendas. references brother elephants official website, http://www.brothers.com.tw/, accessed february 10, 2013. chinese professional baseball league 中華職業棒球大聯盟 (cpbl) (ed.). 2008. zhonghua zhiye bangqiu dalianmeng guizhang 2008 中華職業棒球大聯盟規章 2008 (rules of the chinese professional baseball league 2008). taipei: cpbl. destrebecq, m.-a. 2002. le symbolisme de la fleur de prunier dans la philosophie, la politique et l’esthétique chinoises des song à nos jours. études chinoises 21 (1&2): 197-209. chin, k.-l. 2003. heijin: organized crime, business and politics in taiwan. new york: m.e. sharpe. http://www.brothers.com.tw/ journal of business anthropology, special issue 3, spring 2016 52 gordon, d. 2006. changing of the guard in high school baseball. in g. gmelch (ed.), baseball without borders: the international pastime. lincoln: university of nebraska press, 3-21. guiheux, g. 2002. les grands entrepreneurs privés à taiwan. la main invisible de la prospérité. paris: cnrs. huang, y.-p. 黃英坡, 1997. taiwan zhibang heijin fengbao─diyishou dujia miwen 台灣職棒黑金風暴─第一手獨家祕聞 (black gold storm in taiwanese professional baseball. primary sources). taichung: shuiyong. kelly, w. 1997. an anthropologist in the bleachers: cheering a japanese baseball team. japan quarterly 44 (4): 66-79. kelly, w. 1998. blood and guts in japanese professional baseball. in s. linhart and s. frühstück (eds.), the culture of japan as seen through its leisure. albany: state university of new york press, 95-111. kelly, w. 2004. sense and sensibility at the ballpark: what fans make of professional baseball in modern japan. in w. kelly (ed.), fanning the flames: fans and consumer in contemporary japan, albany: state of new york university press, 79-105. kelly, w. 2006. the hanshin tigers and japanese professional baseball. in g. gmelch (ed.), baseball without borders: the international pastime. lincoln: university of nebraska press, 65-88. kelly, w. 2009. samurai baseball: the vicissitudes of a national sporting style. international journal of the history of sport 26 (3): 429-441. moeran, b. 1984. individual, group, and seishin: japan’s internal cultural debate. man (n.s.) 19: 252-266. moussons. 2013. special issue on business ethics in southeast asia, 21, https://moussons.revues.org/2071, accessed september 4, 2015. morris, a., 2010. colonial project, national game: a history of baseball in taiwan. berkeley & los angeles: university of california press. paix, c. and m. petit. 1989. espace graphique et pratiques de pouvoir : philosophies d’entreprises à taïwan, préceptes politiques à singapour. strates 4, http://strates.revuses.org/4262, accessed september 4, 2015. paix, c. and m. petit. 1991. l’entreprise à taiwan : le pouvoir des mots. revue française de gestion 82: 28-44. soldani, j. 2011. du côté des tribunes. supporter une équipe de baseball professionnelle à taïwan. les cahiers de l’idiotie 4: 65-116. soldani, j. 2012. l’ethnicité à l’épreuve du quotidien. ethnographie d’une équipe de baseball lycéenne à taïwan. tsantsa 17: 96-105. soldani, j. 2015. le cimetière des “éléphants noirs’. une étude anthropologique des matchs truqués relatifs aux paris dans le baseball taïwanais. anthropologie et sociétés 39(3): 217-235. https://moussons.revues.org/2071 http://strates.revuses.org/4262 soldani / playing with morality 53 wang, h.-m. 王惠民. 2004. feixiang 20 nian. xiongdi xiang gan’en jishi 飛象20年兄弟象感恩紀實 (elephants flying to them 20 years. a history in honor to brother elephants). taipei: minshengbao. wang w.-s. 王文昇 and j. yu 盂峻瑋, 2009. « taiwan zhiye bangqiu heian de zuji―xiaoshi de midiya » 台灣職業棒球黑暗的足跡－消逝的米迪亞 (a dark mark on professional baseball in taiwan―dmedia vanished), 競技運動 11 (2): 1-13. wang w.-s. 王文昇 and j. yu 盂峻瑋, 2010. « mishi de fang 「xiang」: 2009 nian xiongdi xiang zhibang jiaqiu an » 迷失的方「象」: 2009年兄弟象職棒假球案 (lost “elephants”: the club of brothers elephants in the 2009 scandal of match fixing in professional baseball), 競技運動 12 (1): 25-40. will, g. 1991. men at work: the craft of baseball. new york: macmillan. whiting, r. 1977. the chrysanthemum and the bat: baseball samurai style. new york: avon/discus printings. whiting, r. 1989. you gotta have wa. new york: vintage books. yu, j. 2007. playing in isolation: a history of baseball in taiwan, lincoln: university of nebraska press. jérôme soldani is a cultural anthropologist, postdoctoral fellow at the institute of taiwan history (academia sinica, taipei, taiwan), research associate at the taipei office of the french center for research on contemporary china (cefc, taipei, taiwan), the lyon institute of east asian studies (cnrs, lyon, france) and the institute of mediterranean, european and comparative ethnology (cnrs, aix-en-provence, france). he is the co-editor, with ghislaine gallenga, of an anthology on business ethics (archives contemporaines, 2015, https://moussons.revues.org/2071) and a special issue on business ethics in southeast asia in the french journal moussons (2013, 21). he is the co-founder, in 2010, and the current president of the francophone association of taiwan studies (afet, http://etudes-taiwanaises.fr/). he may be reached at jeromesoldani@hotmail.fr. https://moussons.revues.org/2071 http://etudes-taiwanaises.fr/ mailto:jeromesoldani@hotmail.fr business ethics as an ethical self-promotion? how advertising executives promote their activity léa porée abstract in this paper, i suggest that we untangle the business ethics of a french advertising agency as a social critique of the advertising field. i attempt to analyse the display and promotion of values used in order to enhance the agency’s activity. is the agency’s business ethics simply a form of commodification and a marketing strategy? or is it an attempt to introduce morality into a business that is supposedly not moral? i also intend to highlight the way that employees understand and negotiate this entrepreneurial discourse. ethics has multiple purposes: it is a communication tool that promotes the agency itself, and it serves as a guarantee for good advertising practice. the study of business ethics in the agency emphasizes how the firm reconciles its entrepreneurial logic with the moral values it claims. keywords: france, advertising agency, self-promotion, commodification, business ethics page 1 of 11 jba special issue 3: 54-64, spring 2016 © the author(s) 2016 issn 2245-4217 www.cbs.dk/jba porée / business ethics as an ethical self-promotion? 55 introduction: values displayed in plain view what are we to think of a graffiti showing the portrait of the iconic french leftist activist stéphane hessel on the door of an advertising agency? dvl extensive1 is a group comprising an advertising agency and a communication agency, with 200 employees, sharing the same premises in a working class area of paris called clichy, in the 17th district. the graffiti was painted on the agency’s door during the period when hessel’s renowned essay indignez-vous!2 was highly covered by the media and aroused great public attention. the agency staff did not know if the taggers knew that it was an advertising agency, but this civil act, according to my interpretation, by its sole presence, could be seen as an attack on advertising as the representative of capitalism. during an interview, laurent, president of the agency, said with a smile: “in the end it doesn't bother us that it is here.” the fact they did not remove the graffiti shows the use, or at least, a social reappropriation by dvl of an attack against the system as the stigma is overturned and made positive. if this tag might initially have tarnished the image of the agency, it has now, with the passing years, become an integral part of the agency’s selfimage. its promotion is based on small details which do not necessarily have a purpose in themselves when considered independently of one another, but, when assembled end to end, they form a managerial intention of the firm. dvl’s business ethics aim to show the values that advertising executives wish to present about themselves. the continued presence of the graffiti, for example, extends the agency’s presentation of itself as open-minded and committed (compared to other advertising agencies). here the advertising profession is shown as having positive values, such as open-mindedness and commitment. anne salomon in moraliser le capitalisme (2009) stresses the “fashion phenomenon”3 that constitutes business ethics and its “advertising expression.” however, viewing the dvl case as one of a mere “economisation” of ethics as defined by anne salomon (2004) would be an exaggeration since she would argue that ethics would be a meaningless and valueless product for the agency, and that the transfer of moral values in the actual economic context would be but a pretext for maximizing capital. i do not consider the notion of “business ethics”―a category set up by the management in the 1970s and which has been on the rise ever since―as equivalent to the notion of “corporate culture,” defined as the “firm’s internal characteristics which unite it by its practices and 1 all names mentioned in this article, including that of the agency, have been replaced by pseudonyms. 2 translated into english as time for outrage! (hessel 2011). 3 all translations from the original french references are by the author. journal of business anthropology, special issue 3, spring 2016 56 distinguish it from other firms” (bartoli and hermel 1986: 244).4 these notions are management tools for firms: “business ethics as corporate culture seem to be avatars of this conceptual migration between social sciences and philosophy, on the one hand, and managerial speech, on the other” (gallenga 2013: 33). this category of business ethics as understood by managerial sciences raises two essential problems. on the one hand, it reifies and essentializes ethics by creating charters to which the employees must conform; there is the idea that ethics is to be found in the charters. the managers endow the charter with an independent status above individuals. business ethics, as seen by the management, would make the employees act by dictating to them the tenets of good behaviour. on the other hand, there would be a second problem if those categories were adopted as such, without questioning, or trying to make explicit, what is implicit in them. my goal here, therefore, is to consider business ethics from an anthropological point of view: that is, the display and promotion of values by the firm but also the reappropriation of these values by the actors, understood as managerial speech constructed as an anthropological category (both 2007). it is a question of “anthropologising” business ethics (gallenga 2013: 33), in order to show that it is more than a framing of professional practice since it is also a process of constant negotiation for the individuals. i intend to describe the business ethics of the agency and show how it is used as a tool to promote the image of the company. how do agency staff promote themselves as a collectivity? i will show the reconciliation between moral and market values and the commodification of business ethics, that is to say that business ethics itself becomes a product of the firm, which singularises it in a competitive advertising landscape. an advertising ethical self-promotion dvl’s business, in my opinion, is a matter of a reconciliation between particular values and the economic requirements peculiar to the firm's environment. the geographical situation of the agency, the organisation of certain events, and its methods of work are just so many elements that constitute the abiding desire of the firm to demonstrate that advertising executives have values and ethics. 4 the term “culture” when used by management has been taken out of the context and vocabulary belonging to anthropology. according to gallenga, the idea of a firm’s culture is “conceptual abuse” (1993:145). she explains that the management uses this notion while underestimating all the theory attached to the concept of culture and therefore employs anthropological categories as rituals, myths, and so on, by modelling them on the firm’s field without taking necessary methodological precautions. porée / business ethics as an ethical self-promotion? 57 within dvl, different services co-exist: account services elaborates the strategy it thinks the client should adopt and sells it the ideas thought up by the creative department, which is in charge of developing ideas for the advertisements to be used. dvs’s communication department deals with the agency’s public image. a few months before i arrived, the communication department, consisting of only two people (agnès, its manager for the past ten years, and judith, the public relations officer, for the past seven), organized an event named “clichy extensive.” the idea for this event came into being after they recognized that the agency, which employs two hundred people, has real financial impact on the neighbourhood since its employees go out to eat, have a drink, or shop in the vicinity. in order to get better acquainted with the people they encountered there every day, the communication department invited some of their clients,5 together with some shopkeepers from the area. “clichy extensive” was also intended to enhance the image of the clichy district by exhibiting portraits of twelve emblematic and very popular shopkeepers whom the agency wanted to be seen as “representative” of the district. clichy, in the 17th district, is often thought of by parisians as an area frequented by drug dealers, prostitutes, pickpockets, and other asocial elements. agnès and judith told me that they no longer wanted people to think about the cliché of the area as being dangerous. that is why they displayed portraits of emblematic shopkeepers and local initiatives.6 in this way, the agency put itself in a positive light: as a source of creative ideas, and as part of the diversity and social mix inherent in the representation of clichy as a multicultural, bustling community.7 a booklet recounting that day was eventually edited in-house by the agency in order to send it out to clients, together with annual good wishes, and to distribute it among employees. an extract from the preface reads: clichy is our cooking pot, the melting pot of new ideas, the source of our creativity […] if its history affects us to such an extent, it is because it looks like our own history, a little world full of life, made up of people from the four corners of the world, of different cultures of varied and complementary experiences, many languages―written, spoken or digital―a world tingling with ideas […] we were overjoyed to discover 5 the clients designate the advertisers: the firms or labels for whom the agency advertises. 6 for example, the only barber woman in paris, the ceo of a shop called tati, famous in france for its low prices. 7 similar particularities of the dramatization of a space of otherness in the city of paris can be found in the areas of la goutte d'or and barbès-rochechouart (palumbo 2014). as emanuelle lallement (2005:134) has pointed out, “in barbès, it is precisely the popularization of the difference that is the stock in trade, and it forms the social pattern one designates by this name.” journal of business anthropology, special issue 3, spring 2016 58 what draws us together and especially our mutual passion for man's diversity. beyond the production of the emblems of the neighbourhood, there is the desire to claim the geographical location of the agency and to include it in a series of positive ideas. this positioning in the city is significant because it extends the vision that advertising executives wish to give of themselves. the agency itself becomes an emblem of diversity and openmindedness in the heart of the district. the name “clichy extensive” itself, putting the name of the neighbourhood (clichy) together with part of the agency's name (extensive), reminds us that the agency is an emblematic component of the neighbourhood to the same extent as the other emblems of the area (for example, the twelve shopkeepers). the agency's values, therefore, become part of the values of the district as seen by its employees. further on in the booklet, one can read: “we, too, are some of these men and women who write the history of clichy, this territory where we tread the pavements leading to our agency.” the agency's executives embody the same spirit as the symbolic people of the district. judith, the pr manager, speaks of the agency as having a certain status in the district owing to the architecture of its building. in this respect, during my fieldwork i noticed that a lot of people―including tourists, neighbours and passers-by―stopped in front of the premises to photograph the building and comment on the beauty of its architecture. the geographical location of an agency might seem to be a minor detail. but here it is a question of marketing. the fact that the agency is situated in clichy conveys values subsequently taken over and adapted in economic terms. these values are then nurtured for the benefit of the agency's public image. clichy extensive, like the accompanying booklet, helps to increase the values of the agency's activity. this display of values is a symptom of management’s desire to show that advertisers can have ethics, that they favour human and positive values. moreover, my entry into dvl in order to conduct fieldwork was largely in tune with the agency’s business ethics. the managers were thrilled by anthropology because it corresponds to a system of values that they wanted to spread. to recruit an anthropologist in an environment dominated by secrecy and confidentiality was a demonstration of their open-mindedness and intellectual curiosity. of course, it is also possible―even probable―that these advertising executives hoped that the anthropologist could improve the reputation of the advertising profession as a whole. in short, we are dealing with an advertising agency that advertises for itself. the agency therefore plays with a certain ethics of the advertising profession and the way they are used as a communication tool, both for marketing purposes and for the benefit of the agency, as they reveal the values of the agency in order to attract other clients. it seems that the employees of dvl, far from hiding their marketing of porée / business ethics as an ethical self-promotion? 59 ethics, openly recognise the nature of this practice. however, the fact that a marketing logic is accepted does not necessarily indicate a lack of values or cynical hypocrisy on their part. although ethics can be seen as being able to increase the firm’s capital (whether symbolic or financial), we should not automatically assume that the moral values put forward by employees are false. ghislaine gallenga asks the question: “can one speak of business ethics without falling into the ethics trap of thinking, that is to say making a personal judgment, about the cause or the actual outcome of the impact of ethics in the business world? how should we regard these moral categories in their intention to sincerity or authenticity from an anthropological point of view?” (gallenga 2013: 29). taking kant's formulation of ethics, that an action should be accomplished in a desire to be ethical and not with a view to making profits (kant 1795), we are not dealing here with a question of repudiating the moral values proclaimed by the staff of dvl; nor are we judging or assessing their relevance or their veracity. this is not the role of the anthropologist, and it is probably pointless to try to discover if the aim of the ethics advocated is real or not. the intentionality of ethics, moreover, can be twofold (a combination of an ethical will and the pursuit of profit, for example). a moral way to advertise dvl claims to exemplify a certain “philosophy”8 in a work tool called “disruption,” the aim of which is to develop an intensive creativity in order to be distinguished in the advertising market. this method demonstrates an alignment strategy with regard to the agency’s corporate culture and unites its employees, comprising the identification of “ready-made slogans” by studying the brand's field in order to find more original ideas that can successfully express what the brand aims to say of and for itself. the idea, finally, is to express something different, by reviewing previous advertisements devised by rival agencies, in order to point out which conventional ideas should be avoided. this method is rooted in an ethical vision of the advertising profession, exemplified by the agency through its business ethics: the values of the agency are displayed symbolically, for example, through the organisation of events like clichy extensive or with the graffiti on its entrance. the agency's method combines commercial logic (a way for the brand to become understandable more efficiently) and a moral use of advertising: the agency’s employees comply with this method daily with a view to improving their work by producing “better advertisements” and compare the activity of their own agency with what they call “bad advertising agencies” which do not seek to be original. through business ethics, the employees of dvl show their intent to do their job well by 8 dvl employs this term of “philosophy.” journal of business anthropology, special issue 3, spring 2016 60 conforming to ethics and by showing that they have values.9 so far as dvl is concerned, the objective is all the more important for employees in a world specifically open to social criticism (klein 2001; amalou 2001―to name but two authors in an abundance of antiadvertising literature and associations such as casseurs de pub and résistance à l'oppression publicitaire). my informants presented advertising as a highly criticised world. judith confided to me: “my family thinks that my job is 99 francs,” citing a well-known book exposing the french advertising industry.10 agnès pursued this idea, affirming that the advertising world is held responsible for present-day consumer society. she added that this vision was full of clichés deriving from the 1980s. the sapin law of 29th january 1993 introduced compulsory anti-corruption measures for transparency in media buying and politics. the french government introduced this law because before then, especially in advertising agencies and among the clients, billing practices were not regulated and often did not correspond to the actual provision of services. the advertising profession is often denounced as being amoral―willing to sell anything at any price. this idea would suggest that ethics would be an ideal or a model of perfection to which advertising executives could never aspire. however, i suggest that the employees’ ethics are an element that can be negotiated, and that they are not something rigid. indeed, timothy de wall malefyt and robert j. morais (2012), both of whom have worked in advertising companies, show their ethical dilemmas. for instance, they recognize themselves as having social responsibility for consumers, but at the same time as working for a company and being constrained by business necessities. ethnography is used by advertisers as a tool for making advertising more efficient. anthropologists work with advertising people, and a key priority is to protect the consumer from harmful ads. malefyt and morais (2012: 129) write: our contribution as anthropologists lies in accessing unprecedented and often deeper consumer input than is obtained by other marketing research techniques. in this sense, we enable consumer co-creation of brand innovation. we also know and accept that we are occasionally complicit with advertisers in the manipulation of consumers (…) as we listen to our clients' demands for more compelling 9 in his book, a japanese advertising agency, brian moeran mentions the business philosophy of a japanese advertising agency “as providing the best possible service to its clients” (moeran 1996:74). here, the important value of the agency, in which lie its employees’ ethics, is to be fair to its clients. 10 99 francs is a novel by frederic beigbeder (2000) openly denouncing the advertising world. he was subsequently dismissed from his creative position at the young & rubicam agency. porée / business ethics as an ethical self-promotion? 61 advertising, we nod our heads, smile, and, unless we believe the client's claims are patently false and harmful for consumers, we accept the call for action. in short, dvl tries to show that it is possible to advertise properly in a “fair” way. one can consider the employees as being placed in a double bind situation (bateson 1956), since they must reconcile moral values with economic demands―two spheres presumed to be contradictory. they have to negotiate with their own system of values while being subject to financial and wage constraints of the firm that employs them. it is customary for advertising agencies to conduct campaigns for charitable organizations without being paid a fee. if this charity work does not bring in much―or any―money for the agencies, the gain is still symbolic. these more “noble” clients equalise the scales such that clients who bring in high fees may be of poorer quality on a moral scale. charitable activities and contacts, on the other hand, bring in moral prestige and enhance the image projected by and of the advertising agency, which works for a client (charity) who has moral values: helping the poor most of the time. it is added value for the agency, since such work stimulates creative ideas among employees precisely because the financial aspect of the account is less important. there is, then, more freedom than with a bigger client such as a food producer or automobile firm. charity adds a moral dimension to the advertising work and affords employees pleasure because they are less tied to the economic and financial logic of their profession. claire, who has worked for seven years in the account services department, is a specialist in branding strategies. she was very hesitant when i asked her questions about the agency’s political engagement: “you know, humanitarian subjects are very important for the agency; they are its window display.” business ethics is the showcase of an agency, therefore, and is intended to broadcast the fact that “it is our job to help associations with moral values [helping people in need, and so on].” the agency's job of communication could therefore be analysed as a means of visualizing the ethical frameworks of the profession. it concerns putting forward ethics and values that are then adapted to the agency’s working methods. day by day, the two employees attached to the pr department produce ethics in their actions. they see themselves as guardians of the values inherited by the imagined “corporate culture,” mobilising and representing them in their work practices. thierry pillon (2011: 6) stresses the fact that employees in all professions “develop a know-how and methods adapted to place and circumstances. their inventiveness deploys within a moral economy fixing the boundaries between the acceptable and the intolerable, between what is enhanced and, on the contrary what is rejected, allowed and forbidden.” journal of business anthropology, special issue 3, spring 2016 62 the method of communication peculiar to dvl lies in the demonstration of the agency's values, to make them live and act in a certain way. it is the performative action of the firm's communication as “deliberate deployments of expressive abilities in front of a public” (winkin 2001:269). but it is also the performative action of advertising itself. in his book how to do things with words, austin writes: “the ethical proposals, for example, may aim to show an emotion or to advocate a form of behaviour, or to influence behaviour in some way” (1970: 38). thus, the performative “indicates that to formulate an enunciation is to accomplish it” (ibid.: 42). the work of the pr department consists of advertising “about and for advertising” (cochy 2011: 145). indeed, as an advertising agency, dvl applies to itself the know-how that it sells to firms. the work of the agency, in fact, is to play with codes, values and images so that their client firms can pass on their messages to customers. dvl does not employ an agency to do its own advertising. it does this job itself. through the values displayed by business ethics, then, the agency’s managers hope to be able to show more extensively that as advertising executives they, too, have ethics. for example, in 2012, the agency managed the election campaign for françois hollande, france’s current president. those taking part in the campaign did so of their free will. no team was designated by the management for the project. for example, richard, director of the creative department, chose not to work on the project. he said to me: “politics and advertising have nothing to do with each other―otherwise it becomes propaganda.” in this way, richard expressed both his ethics as an employee and his personal convictions. he showed that, as an ad man, he had ethics. this flexibility allows employees to withdraw from a project when they get to a point where they cannot reconcile their personal values with the job of advertising. conclusion the analysis of dvl’s business ethics highlights both the values displayed by the agency and also the moral aspects attached to advertising practices as professional standards. the business ethics of dvl, in my opinion, is a matter of conciliation―a happy medium between moral values and economic requirements peculiar to the business world. business ethics is the key term that justifies their activity. in fact, advertising executives rely on ethics to increase the standing of their profession by displaying the ethical dimensions of their work. it is a means of giving morality to a profession that is considered not to be moral. executives display ethics as the existence of good practice in their profession, and their moral decisions show their vision of what good practice in fact is. the analysis of what business ethics covers for individuals brings advertising work practices to light and makes it possible to understand the dialectic porée / business ethics as an ethical self-promotion? 63 between individual and collective. so far as individuals are concerned, it is useful to conceive of ethics as a space of adjustment. ethical considerations arise when an individual asks himself what attitude to adopt in front of a given situation. in social sciences, ethics can be seen as an interstice, a space of choice upon which depend the estimation and the negotiation of “wiggle room” (massé 2009a, 2009b). the ethics of dvl's employees can be a compromise between their emotions and the principles of the economic world, but one should not neglect the individual aspect of ethics that come up against or support the ethics negotiated by employees. the ethics of the employee is a space of negotiation between the self and the self at work. ethics is therefore not a system of values but a moment of compromise between different systems of values. references amalou, f. 2001. le livre noir de la pub. quand la communication va trop loin. paris: stock. austin, j. l. 1970 [1962]. quand dire c’est faire. paris: éditions du seuil. bartoli, a., p. hermel 1986. piloter l'entreprise en mutation. une approche stratégique du changement. paris: éditions d'organisation. bateson, g. 1956. toward a theory of schizophrenia. behavioral science 1 (4): 251-254. beigbeder, f. 2000. 99 francs. paris: éditions grasset et fasquelle. both, a. 2007. les managers et leurs discours. anthropologie de la rhétorique managériale. bordeaux: pub. cochoy, f. 2011. de la curiosité. l’art de la séduction marchande. paris: armand colin. gallenga, g. 1993. la notion de culture d'entreprise dans la littérature managériale. une critique ethnologique. l'uomo 6 (1 & 2): 135-147. gallenga, g. 2013. l’éthique entrepreneuriale: un objet anthropologique ? moussons 21: 21-36. hessel, s. 2011. time for outrage! translated by d. searls and a. arrikha. london: quartet books. kant, e. 2000 [1785]. fondements de la métaphysique des moeurs. paris: hatier. klein, n. 2001. no logo. paris: actes sud. journal of business anthropology, special issue 3, spring 2016 64 lallement, e. 2005. le populaire à l’épreuve des situations marchandes: “popu-chic” et “chic-popu” chez tati. hermès 42: 131136. malefyt, t. de waal and morais, r. 2012. advertising and anthropology: ethnographic practice and cultural perspectives. oxford: berg. massé, r. 2009a. présentation: l’anthropologie face à la morale et à l’éthique. anthropologie et sociétés 33 (3): 7-19. massé, r. 2009b. anthropologie des moralités et de l’éthique: essai de définitions. anthropologie et sociétés 33 (3): 21-42. moeran, b. 1996. a japanese advertising agency: an anthropology of media and markets. london: curzon. palumbo, m.a. 2014. barbès, château rouge, goutte d’or. ailleurs commence ici. anthropologie d’un espace d’altérité dans paris. doctoral dissertation. paris. ehess. pillon, t. 2011. présentation in ‘’travailler.” communications 89: 5-8. salmon, a. 2004. l’offre éthique des entreprises. cahiers internationaux de sociologie 1 (116): 77-96. salmon, a. 2009. moraliser le capitalisme? paris: cnrs éditions. winkin, y. 2001. anthropologie de la communication. paris: éditions du seuil. léa porée studies social anthropology. she has a master’s degree from aix-marseille university. her research focuses on french advertising agencies and especially the moral aspects of the profession. she can be reached at poree.lea@hotmail.com. mailto:poree.lea@hotmail.com the ethical epistemes of anthropology and economics allen w. batteau and bradley j. trainor abstract this article examines the separate epistemologies of anthropology and neoclassical economics, suggesting that both epistemologies are tied to and represent ethical stances. after discussing the differences between morality and ethics, it suggests that the epistemologies of both disciplines are rooted in colonial encounters. although numerous states and empires had previously encountered populations on their peripheries, the european colonial encounter of the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth century was uniquely on an industrial scale, creating new epistemological and ethical problems, out of which both economics and anthropology emerged. the global episteme and ethical stance of anthropology in its engagement with diversity now has as its frontier an engagement with powerful institutions in the business world. keywords epistemology, ethics, institutions page 1 of 20 jba special issue 1: 96-115, spring 2014 © the author(s) 2014 issn 2245-4217 www.cbs.dk/jba batteau and trainor / the ethical epistemes 97 the frontiers of the social sciences are both epistemological and ethical. as scientific insight advances, ethical insight must keep pace. this is equally true, whether regarding insights into statecraft supplied by political science, insights into markets supplied by economics, or insights into human nature supplied by anthropology. a hundred years ago, the frontiers of anthropology were found in confrontations with indigenous peoples, whether in africa, asia, or latin america, and in comprehending what their exotic customs meant for humanity. two hundred fifty years ago, the frontiers of economics were found in the newly emerging international markets, and what these implied for the meaning of value. today, the frontiers of both are found in the engagement of powerful research methods with contemporary institutions, whether in those of business, government, or medicine. in this article we examine how two social science disciplines, anthropology and neoclassical economics, have raised, if not always successfully resolved, ethical issues as their disciplines advanced. the ethical issues that we wish to stress are about redefinitions of the good life―redefinitions that ramify far beyond their respective disciplinary boundaries. although our focus is primarily on anthropology, we contrast the anthropological episteme with that of neoclassical economics, in part to make clear that these epistemes share a common historical specificity. we first examine the distinctions among morality, ethics, and epistemology. we then examine the origins of anthropology in european expansion and neoclassical economics in the rise of capitalism, pointing out that the epistemes resulting from these origins carry far-reaching ethical implications. the industrial revolution thrust concerns that might have been confined to drawing-rooms into political arenas, turning privileged debates into public issues. this political turn in debates that are fundamentally epistemological ‒ that is, having their foundation in what we can and cannot know and how we know it ‒ is recognition both of the power of these disciplines and their methods, and of unfinished business ahead of them. it may seem odd within the profession to characterize anthropology as “powerful,” inasmuch as it is frequently a conceit among anthropologists to view themselves as observers sitting on the edge of conversations, as in “marginal natives” (freilich 1970). power imbalances have always been central to anthropology, whether in the field, the classroom, or the professional association. if there were no power imbalances, there would be no public debates over issues of ethics. our methods, however, whether in participant observation or in curating and archiving, do have the potential to do great good or harm, just as our findings have the potential to do great good. these are facts that should journal of business anthropology, special issue 1, spring 2014 98 place ethical inquiry ‒ understood in the broader sense offered here of more than simple code compliance ‒ at the forefront of any anthropological inquiry. ethics, morality and epistemology in the past thirty years, numerous debates over ethics have troubled the anthropological profession, most typically in response to allegations over mistreatment of either indigenous peoples or colleagues. recent allegations of abuse ‒ such as chagnon’s noble savages ‒ are simply the latest chapter in a century-long history of accusations of divided loyalties, collegial abuse, and exploitation of vulnerable populations (caplan 2003; chagnon 2013; fluehr-lobban 2003; tierney 2000; whiteford and trotter 2008). these debates have frequently spilled over into questioning of anthropology’s fundamental character, of its inquiries into the customs, institutions, and intimacies of populations defined as “others.” at times, such inquiries are clearly predatory, whether harvesting folk customs for commercial exploitation or invading villagers’ privacy. in such cases ethical concerns are obviously warranted. much more subtle, however, and much more typical today, are inquiries into such areas as consumer research, or community-building, that attempt to bridge gulfs between indigenous peoples (whether in rain-forest amazonia or middle-class suburbia) and large, powerful institutions. the manner in which these debates frequently spill over into accusations about the good faith (or lack thereof) of the antagonists suggests that oftentimes something far larger is at stake. some of this heat reflects the fact that various conceptions of reason can have particular moralities tied to them (macintyre 1988:1-12). examining some fine-grained distinctions between the terms morality and ethics, and how they are embedded within the research enterprise, can help explain the controversy. although in popular usage the terms “morals” and “ethics” are synonyms and have the same or nearly the same meaning, there are differences. for our purposes here, the term morals refers to beliefs about proper conduct specific to some society or other group such as a religion (stanford 2002). while ethics, in contrast, refers to a set of abstract principles that we must interpret in order to determine what is proper behavior (audi 1995). thus, the difference is between moral conventions for proper behavior ‒ for example, on a hot day, always offer a guest something to drink upon their arrival ‒ and abstract ethical principles for how one should live one’s life ‒ for example, do unto others, as you would have them do unto you. confusion between morals and ethics can hold important implications for epistemology that sometimes have far reaching consequences. epistemology is the branch of philosophy that analyzes the nature of knowledge and how it relates to reasoning about connected notions like belief, and justification. one of the perennial epistemological batteau and trainor / the ethical epistemes 99 questions of relevance here is illustrated by the following: there is an indian story—at least i heard it as an indian story—about an englishman who, having been told that the world rested on a platform, which rested on the back of an elephant, which in turn rested on the back of a turtle, asked (perhaps he was an ethnographer; it is the way they behave) what did the turtle rest on?” “another turtle!” and that turtle? “ah, sahib, after that it is turtles all the way down.” (geertz 1973:28-29) geertz’s anecdote is a popular illustration of the problem of infinite regress: given some belief b, it is reasonable to expect a justification for b. if that justification takes the form of another belief, b2, it is again reasonably to expect a justification for b2, and so on, and so forth. one possible outcome to this search for justification terminates with certain self-justifying statements. this foundational model of the structure of knowledge is like a building with the privileged, self-justifying beliefs first functioning as the foundation and then providing inferential justification for other statements that build upon that foundation (sosa 1980:3-25). foundationalist theories of knowledge have been with us since at least the enlightenment, tracing back to descartes and kant, and are relevant here because of our discussion of the principles of ethics that derive from philosophies of life. such philosophical principles can, and often have, served as the privileged, self-justifying statements for various foundational theories of knowledge. the original principles were often drawn from rationalism or religion, and hence were thought to be universalizable to all human kind. claims of universal truth or validity were, of course, an aspiration of the enlightenment. however, as institutionalized religion has lost some of its privileged status in western society, the foundational principles have taken many other claims and beliefs as their source ‒ most notably, for our purposes here, that of utilitarianism, of which we will have more to say later. the challenge of cultural diversity and ethics, which has been discussed at least since kant (1724-1804), tends to undercut foundational theories and their aspirations towards universalizability. this epistemological challenge is spotlighted by anthropology’s careful, empirical work over the past century, work that has contributed to a different epistemology, inspired by the romantic era, which concentrates attention on what is particular and unique rather than on that which is universal; a coherentist model that offers a different basis for ethical discourse. a coherentist model for the structure of knowledge is somewhat akin to a ship at sea, maintained by repairs to any part in need. coherentists typically hold that justification is solely a function of some relationship between beliefs, none of which are privileged in the manner journal of business anthropology, special issue 1, spring 2014 100 argued by foundationalists. this view of justification of knowledge parallels the empirical findings of anthropology, and it is largely, although not entirely, within coherentist systems of epistemology that anthropological research is performed. to help illustrate the opposition between foundationalist and coherentist models, let us consider a simplified example of the opposition between formalist and substantivist models from economic anthropology. polanyi first formulated the formalist versus subtantivist opposition in his the great transformation (1944). he proposed that the substantive (that is, coherentist) model exists in pre-industrial economies where livelihoods are based on redistribution and/or reciprocity as part of longterm relationships. redistribution entails the presence of a robust central leadership often rooted in kinship that first accepts and then redistributes goods in concurrence with cultural principles. reciprocity is the exchange of commodities and/or assistance within long-term relationships, and the exchange largely makes those relationships possible. substantive economies are moral economies, where interlocking, coherent webs of beliefs about how people should behave in personal and social relationships are of crucial concern. the formalist (that is, foundationalist) model, by contrast, was the product of rational principles and largely operative in market exchange. these principles were derived from a philosophical system that assumed maximization of utility as key to the good life, and thereby replacing traditions, values, and emotions as behavioral motives with that of rational calculation. formalist economies are based on a utilitarian ethical system and suggest that aspirations to a larger or global scale, such as the scaling up of economies afforded by the industrial revolution, create new sorts of ethical challenges. in sum, the epistemological questions for any social science of what we can know and how can we know it are closely related to the ethical and moral systems to which they are tied. enlightenment-inspired ethical universalism can blind researchers to that which is particular, while a romantic-inspired particularism can miss universals in favor of that which is unique. the challenge comes when one of these perspectives is neglected―when, for example, the specific codes of one institution or discipline are assumed to apply universally. colonial epistemologies anthropology’s early work was always done in a colonial context, in which a dominant industrialized or industrializing power confronted a “primitive” other. thus, the anthropological episteme was, and often still is, always colored by such power imbalances. is this unacceptable, unavoidable, or just a fact of the human condition with which any social science will always have to struggle? batteau and trainor / the ethical epistemes 101 the term episteme, from which the word epistemology is etymologically derived, comes from the ancient greek word for knowledge, as in "justified true belief." an ‘anthropological episteme’ is used here in foucault’s specialized sense as follows: i would define the episteme retrospectively as the strategic apparatus which permits of separating out from among all the statements which are possible those that will be acceptable within, i won’t say a scientific theory, but a field of scientificity, and which it is possible to say are true or false. the episteme is the ‘apparatus’ which makes possible the separation, not of the true from the false, but of what may from what may not be characterised as scientific. (foucault 1980:197) in other words, foucault used the term to mean the epistemological prior assumptions that grounds what is accepted by society as justified true belief, also known as “knowledge,” within a particular historical period. these accepted epistemological priors are like the sea in which the fish of humanity swim, or the air which we all breathe. they are unconscious, basic, and invisible to the people operating within them. several such epistemes may co-exist and interact at the same time as part of a verity of power-knowledge systems and are not confined just to the scientific field (foucault 1972:31-40, 50-56). the anthropological episteme we discuss was characterized by the epistemological assumptions of modernity, because it developed within the context of a dominant modernist worldview that completely enveloped the academy. giddens describes the term modernity as: ...a shorthand term for modern society, or industrial civilization. portrayed in more detail, it is associated with (1) a certain set of attitudes towards the world, the idea of the world as open to transformation, by human intervention; (2) a complex of economic institutions, especially industrial production and a market economy; (3) a certain range of political institutions, including the nation-state and mass democracy. largely as a result of these characteristics, modernity is vastly more dynamic than any previous type of social order. it is a society ‒ more technically, a complex of institutions ‒ which, unlike any preceding culture, lives in the future, rather than the past. (giddens 1998:94). this future-oriented dynamism is thus historically specific, and it is little more than modernist self-congratulation to celebrate this dynamism in preference to stability. our focus on modernity here is on how it functions as a dominant journal of business anthropology, special issue 1, spring 2014 102 conceptual framework, acting as an epistemological sieve that sanctifies, validates, and orders what is and is not acceptable knowledge. one way in which modernity acted in this manner is through its mystification of an unrealistic “neutral” scientific objectivity (asad 1973:17-18). anthropology was deeply scarred by this mystification and the veil over the manipulations of the powerful that it helped to produce: academic anthropologists, like most academics, have little familiarity with the upper reaches of powerful institutions, and thus are vulnerable when they find themselves manipulated toward questionable ends by those institutions. epistemes thus have ethical consequences. the postmodern turn in the social sciences thoroughly discredited illusions of positivistic, scientific objectivity and helped reveal the manipulations of the powerful. unfortunately, this new found insight has sometimes resulted in a deconstructive stance which is, wittingly or not, founded on an ethic of nihilism. as an alternative to this negation of meaning, which we would suggest has only a shaky foundation; in our concluding section we will describe an ethic of anthropological engagement, which business anthropology can uniquely supply. liberalism and the retreat from the common good roughly contemporaneous with europeans’ encounters with “primitive” others were the rise of capitalism and the claim that private appropriation, aided by the “invisible hand” of the market, could contribute to the common good. classic treatments of this rise, and its moral implications, include weber’s the protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism, schumpeter’s history of economic analysis, r. h. tawney’s religion and the rise of capitalism, or david landes’s prometheus unbound. these developments have both epistemological and ethical consequences. entire libraries have been devoted to investigating the causes of these development and their moral consequences; far less attention has been paid to their epistemic consequences for the two social sciences that arose out of it, economics and anthropology. louis dumont, in from mandeville to marx, traced the genesis of economic ideology from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century, noting that in the middle ages what we now call economics was thoroughly embedded within and subordinate to statecraft. although his investigation was primarily in the realm of ideas, we can take note of some specific material antecedents: the increasing absolutism and corruption of state formations, primarily monarchies, both in england and on the continent; the accumulating momentum of material interests ‒ both in the countryside through enclosure movements, and in the cities through a rising mercantile class; and in new world explorations, which brought new sources of wealth, whether in the increasing supply of batteau and trainor / the ethical epistemes 103 precious metals, new “goods” such as tobacco and sugar,1 or new supplies of unfree labor. the net result of these developments, as dumont describes, was a fundamental questioning of value. religiously rooted ideas of the good life were called into question when the corruption of religious institutions was revealed. discoveries in the natural sciences unsettled the cosmologies on which these earlier value formations were founded. the growth of international trade, facilitated by an increasing money supply and the end of the wars of religion provoked a re-evaluation of trade: the exchange of goods and services, which hitherto had been seen as a zerosum game (your gain is my loss), came to be seen as mutually beneficial. wealth came to be seen as the exertion of human labor on nature, a point of view articulated in john locke’s second treatise on civil government. “in the beginning, all the world was america,” according to locke’s second treatise, meaning that before civil institutions were created, the earth was unspoiled nature ripe for man’s picking.2 locke asserted this not appreciating that the state of nature is invariably some other tribe’s commons. the enclosures of commons in england and the appropriation of fields and forests in the americas were both movements to elbow aside shared, communal goods with the creation of privately appropriated property. out of this intellectual ferment, adam smith’s the wealth of nations, provided a coherent view of the nature of wealth and its increase. for smith and the rising mercantile class, wealth was no longer a zerosum game, but rather could be increased through liberalised trade, in which the “invisible hand” would adjust supplies and demands thus creating a net benefit. the good, of course, was equated with human enjoyment and happiness; for jeremy bentham and the utilitarians, this meant that the greatest good for the greatest number should be the objective of public decisions. within the episteme of utilitarianism, there is an ethical statement, to the effect that value resides in whatever the highest bidder is willing to pay: the values of the marketplace. the consequences of this for institutional corruption have been widely discussed, and need not be reviewed here (see callon 1998, for example). we simply note that utilitarianism presents itself as a form of intellectual laziness, a disengagement with the complexities of value that history creates. an educated man or woman might discuss the relative aesthetic and moral 1 this, of course, vastly oversimplifies considerable economic history, and totally glosses over contemporary debates about the nature of value and where it might reside. for purposes of this brief article, we might simply note that the introduction of new goods and servants was central to the material expansion of the seventeenth century, and that it requires a particular point of view to regard tobacco, like several of these other developments as an unqualified “good.” 2 the gendered language here is intentional. journal of business anthropology, special issue 1, spring 2014 104 qualities of a mondrian or a rembrandt. likewise, scholars can debate the relative contributions of immanuel kant and jeremy bentham to the advancement of knowledge. but only an auctioneer or tax collector would think of assigning differential numbers to kant’s critique of human reason, rembrandt’s the syndics of the draper’s guild, or mondrian’s amaryllis, as meaningful statements comparing their relative values. yet, as we enlarge our social practices, either through colonial exploration in the nineteenth century or global engagement in the twentieth, the market episteme reduces all diversity to egotistical calculation. industrializing colonialism seventeenth and eighteenth century confrontations with europe’s other was distinguished from earlier state/tribal confrontations by the fact that the dominant party was an industrial or industrializing power, which enabled the confrontation to exist on a much larger scale. states and empires have confronted tribal others on their peripheries since the beginning of recorded history: tacitus’ first-century descriptions of the germanic tribes in scythia might be considered proto-anthropological, inasmuch as he was attempting to determine if they shared a common humanity with his fellow romans. colonial confrontations in the modern era, from the seventeenth century onward, have been tinged with enlightenment ideas of shared humanity, and from the eighteenth century onward, with ideals of equality and the recession of slavery. anthropology’s “colonial encounter” (asad 1973) in fact pre-dates academic anthropology by millennia. far more critical to modern anthropology’s character, however, is the fact that this encounter was occurring at the same time as the colonial powers were industrializing. the early days of industrialization were less about gangs of wage-laborers working in steam-powered mills, and more about large masses of the lower orders, forcibly impressed, working in sugar factories in the caribbean, textile mills in the midlands, or coal mines in northumbria. tobacco plantations in virginia and silver mines in mexico were later appearances of industrialization. in these factories and mines motive power was initially from horses or humans on treadmills. karl marx stated that the steam engine gave history the factory system and the bourgeoisie, but the fact that colonial sugar factories pre-date the invention of the steam engine by at least a century suggests that the causal sequence was the other way around.3 in short, a second element in anthropology’s character is that its colonial confrontations have been occurring on a large scale, the scale 3 the interplay of instrumental, institutional, and economic factors is a complex story, well started by lewis mumford’s technics and civilization. our objective here is less to re-tell the story than to make clear that it is more complex than the technological determinism with which it is often told. batteau and trainor / the ethical epistemes 105 afforded by the industrial revolution. what was previously a local and particularistic affair ‒ tacitus’ encounter with a tribal chief, or herodotus’ puzzlement over some barbarian rituals ‒ now acquired a global and universal scale. with european exploration and global circumnavigation from the 16th century onward, tribal others were no longer figures on the edge of the map, fringe areas fading off into insignificance, but could rather be imagined as sharing a single globe and a common humanity. it was this global and empirical episteme that created the other as a figure standing for the numerous others on the fringes of powerful régimes. this tension between particularism and universalism has been a hallmark of anthropology. on the one hand, anthropology has celebrated particularity and diversity, studying in careful detail the ways of life of many groups of indigenous peoples. the resulting ethnographic record is anthropology’s noblest and most lasting contribution, whose achievement is measured not in foundation grants but in lifetime commitments to indigenous peoples and the sacrifices of fieldwork among them. on the other hand, it has deployed categories that aspire to universalism, whether tylor’s “savage” and “barbarian,” or in the twentieth century distinctions between tribes and bands, or single-factor explanations such as cultural materialism. we will name this vision anthropology’s “global episteme,” inasmuch as it created an empirical understanding of shared humanity shaped less by theological commitments and more by scientific observation on a global scale. this idea is so ingrained within anthropology that we seldom reflect on how radical it has been. it is the global episteme that enabled franz boas to assert that europeans and indigenous peoples alike shared a common humanity, and that differences in race, language, or culture were accidents of history rather than marks of fundamental differences. it is the global episteme that has motivated tens of thousands of ethnographers to travel to every corner of the earth, balancing the frisson of exoticism with a commitment to shared humanity. and it has been the global episteme that has provided the intellectual foundation for the thorough discrediting of racism and ethnocentrism. this commitment to ideas of a common humanity is itself a foundationalist statement which, pace franz boas, careful empirical research can neither prove nor disprove. race, language, and culture demonstrated the inconsistencies (that is, lack of coherence) in assumptions about racial differences, but ultimately the meaning of humanity is as much a philosophical as an empirical question. these dual philosophical and empirical impulses have propelled the anthropological progress of the twentieth century. the global episteme is also an ethical commitment. with the increasing awareness of diverse cultures and value systems that were neither reducible nor commensurable with those of europe, a central journal of business anthropology, special issue 1, spring 2014 106 problem in moral philosophy has been to find ethical truths that apply to all of humanity. typical responses to this have included scepticism (the suspension of ethical judgment), nihilism (the denial of any ethical propositions), and relativism. anthropology’s commitment to cultural relativism is often interpreted as an ethical relativism, an acceptance of diverse codes of values with little or no effort to reconcile their differences. jeffrey stout, in ethics after babel (1988), develops the concept of “social practices” as the loci of ethical reasoning, activities where ethical choices are always present. similar to lave and wenger’s “communities of practice” (1991), social practices are those activities where goods internal to the practice can be achieved only through experience and engagement with others. stout gives examples such as medicine, baseball, chessplaying, and teaching as social practices; we might add developing innovative products or negotiating new business relationships as other examples. each of these can and frequently are pursued for external goods such as fame, glory, and monetary reward, but the internal goods, whether the achievement of skill or the cementing of relationships, are more permanent and less alienable. ethical dilemmas are frequently created when one places external goods such as monetary reward ahead of internal goods. anthropology’s global engagement is a social practice. over the past century it has created a community of scholars and practitioners who share the insights of a body of theory and the values and complexity of cultural relativism and who, most typically, hope to change at least one small corner of the world. the ethical reasoning within this episteme is one that embraces a vocabulary of diversity and growth, as alternatives to more dominant ethical vocabularies of religious orthodoxies or costbenefit analysis. this ethical center holds equally well as indigenous peoples are increasingly touched by, connected to, or assimilated within multinational networks. differential distributions of resources, technologies, knowledge, and power within these networks define human differences just as much as differentials in customs did a century ago. understanding these networks and institutions ‒ not as extraterrestrial invaders, but rather as parts of a shared project of humanity ‒ is the next anthropological challenge. when anthropology turned its gaze toward the institutions of capitalist business, it brought with it the methods of ethnographic immersion that had served so well with indigenous peoples. evading diversity through utilitarianism in sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth century europe, parallel developments in the discovery of new sources of wealth in the americas, the creation of the factory system, the exploitation of new resources in batteau and trainor / the ethical epistemes 107 africa, the acquisition of colonies in the new world, and the rise of slavery, had multiple consequences: these created an epistemological crisis in european thought, a political crisis in european governance, and an ethical crisis in european manners and morals. settled epistemes in the natural and political order were called into question by these developments, and leading philosophers and statesmen grappled with the answers. the rise of liberalism (understood here as the foundation of rational actor economics) is described by dumont’s from mandeville to marx, where he shows how early economic theorists―from quesnay and mandeville, and culminating in adam smith’s the wealth of nations―freed economics from subordination to politics, and provided the epistemological and ethical foundation for economics and the ascendance of business values. measured on its own terms, this was a tremendous success. the unquestioned economic prosperity of today’s world was possible only because economic values were no longer in thrall to religious, political, or familial values. optimizing a complex system for the performance of a single variable is easy once that variable is no longer functionally subservient to other variables. the entire career of modernization and modernity has been the freeing of individualistic, utilitarian values from other considerations. the rise of neoclassical economics is, we would suggest, a doppelganger to the rise of anthropology, inasmuch as the two represent mirror-images of a response to the same epistemological and historical developments: the one emphasizing individualism and acquisitiveness, the other representing social formations and sharing, for example, kinship. in the anglophone world, a dominant solution was crystallized in the wealth of nations. for adam smith, production through labor and appropriation from nature, and exchange, were the two sources of value, regardless of the peoples or customs involved. for smith, the ultimate good was human happiness, a position codified by jeremy bentham’s utilitarianism. this, however, dissolves the distinction between extrinsic and intrinsic goods, “drowning the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervour, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy bath of egotistical calculation” (marx and engels, communist manifesto). as a least-common-denominator solution to the experienced facts of cultural confrontation that european expansion was creating, the utilitarianism of neoclassical economics represents a form of intellectual laziness, an unwillingness to wrestle with the confrontations of value systems that were attendant upon european expansion in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries. the reduction of all values to a cash nexus is a least-common denominator solution which, journal of business anthropology, special issue 1, spring 2014 108 while having its own coherence, ignores huge swaths of the human condition. the reductionism of economics has been widely criticized, scarcely disturbing the hegemony economics and technocratic rationality in the world today. anthropological interrogations of this hegemony (graeber 2012, maurer 2005; parry and bloch 1989; zelizer 1994) have pointed out that numerous other value systems and institutional arrangements are equally capable of providing the necessities of life and supporting a satisfying existence, while doing less violence to the social or physical environment. in today’s global oecumene, acceptance and rejection of diversity are competing ethical stances. reductionism has always been epistemologically suspect, reducing complex causal and inferential webs to single-factor explanations. reductionism, we would like to suggest, is also ethically suspect, a displacement of the richness of value that the world presents in favor of a least-common denominator of pleasure or happiness. the values that the world presents are sometimes incommensurable ‒ think of the values of a conversation among close friends and the values of intellectual rigor ‒ but, as scott fitzgerald suggested, “the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.” in simpler times, complexity could be seen as an affectation; today it is an ethical obligation. engaging institutional diversity as an ethical stance anthropology implicitly embodies ethical stances, although whether those should be the ethics of the academy, the political world, or the business world, is an open question. each of these institutions – academy, politics, commerce – has its own ethical character, easily misunderstood and parodied from the outside, but taken with great seriousness on the inside. the ethics of the academy stresses intellectual probity, respect for evidence and learned authority, and respect for students and colleagues. open communication is an absolute imperative, and a test of scientific integrity is a willingness to report findings that don’t support the hypothesis one is trying to advance. within the academy, owning up to disproving experimental results is a badge of honor, if not always worldly success. the ethics of the political world, by contrast, emphasizes statecraft ‒ broadly construed here as institutional commitment and advancement. loyalty and commitment are imperatives, and detachment carries no merit. respect for authority is a must, although the legitimacy of authority and the manner in which it is bestowed or achieved varies widely. deception is frequently necessary, although it should always be in service of a larger good: in confrontational situations that political arenas afford, batteau and trainor / the ethical epistemes 109 the preciousness of truth often requires that it be attended by a bodyguard of lies.4 as broader areas of life become politicized and confrontational, the first casualty is integrity. in between these extremes of collegial cooperation and civic rivalry are the ethics of the business world. the rapid evolution of business ethics is described in an edited volume by philosopher julian friedland, doing well and good (friedland 2009). compared to states and academies, businesses, particularly multinational businesses, are exceedingly immature institutions. few businesses have had the centuries of experience needed to work through ethical dilemmas, or the traditional resources to fall back on for resolution of ongoing dilemmas. ethical dilemmas of the business world today include the relative priorities of profits, customers, employees, or communities. they include divided obligations inside and outside the firm. they also include definitions of the good: is product “good” because it can be sold, or because it embodies some more intrinsic values? although nearly all corporations have statements of ethics, these are frequently little more than windowdressing, containing statement about “doing the right thing,” or treating everyone fairly. platitudes such as these are a poor substitute for the difficult work of ethical reasoning. from an academic perspective, business is all too often seen as an other, and for a learned scholar to be mucking around in its messy priorities is considered by some academics to be an abomination.5 an historical and anthropological perspective would recognize that this immaturity is developmental rather than existential. just as new insights into kinship systems were achieved with goody’s concept of the developmental cycle of domestic groups (goody 1958; see also adizes 1988), a thorough analysis of the developmental cycle of domestic institutions is waiting to be written. karl marx, in the nineteenth century, saw capitalism as a revolutionary force, and joseph schumpter in the twentieth century coined the phrase “creative destruction” to describe the process of technological innovation. in any society, tradition is a resource for ethical reasoning, yet almost by definition traditions require decades if not centuries to develop. declaring an established social practice such as business to be off-limits and untouchable is itself a form of ethical shirking. 4 “in war-time, truth is so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies.” attributed to winston churchill during world war ii. 5 the strong language used here borrows from mary douglas (purity and danger), as adapted by jeffrey stout in ethics after babel, to describe unique forms of ethical problems having to do with defilement or pollution. it is intentionally used here to reflect our experience with some anthropologists who found the business world to be unavoidably polluting. the recession of such sentiments in recent years is as much reflective of epistemological progress in the academy as it is of changes in the business world. journal of business anthropology, special issue 1, spring 2014 110 applied scientific disciplines such as business anthropology or medical anthropology face an ethical dilemma, inasmuch as they must conform to, or at least take cognizance of, the ethical standards both of scientific inquiry and of the institutional context in which they are engaged. developmental anthropologists, for example, have to take cognizance of the (quite varied) ethical stances of development organizations, just as medical anthropologists must have a familiarity with medical ethics. within medical communities, ethical reasoning goes back to hippocrates (a tradition), and has been proven by centuries of experience, although increasingly challenged by the commodification of medical services. by contrast, within the business world, the institutional dominance of businesses in the modern world and their immaturity makes this more difficult. with some business institutions ethical judgments are easier than in others: the contrast between a small community hospital, on the one hand, and a medical institution that is part of a corporate chain, on the other ‒ between one that serves all members of a community and one that pumps up its profits with questionable tests and treatments ‒ is fairly obvious. the ethical character of firms in the business world mirrors the complexity of the larger society. some firms are virtuous suppliers of life’s necessities in food, shelter, and personal care. others (such as enron) have business models based on swindling their investors. some firms create new forms of value, enriching the lives of millions; others are frankly predatory. most businesses are somewhere in between. the simplistic resolution of standing above such engagements obviously won’t do. like all other sciences, anthropology’s progress as a theoretical discipline rested on its applied engagements in actual, empirical problems, which included those of colonial rule or multinational marketing. had malinowski or radcliffe-brown decided that they didn’t want to get their hands dirty in melanesia or the indian ocean, british social anthropology might never have been born. had franz boas been content to conduct “armchair anthropology,” progress against racial prejudice would have been set back by decades. had lloyd warner and his associates not studied the western electric plant, insights into observer effects (the so-called “hawthorne effect”) would have had to wait for some other practical engagement. debating the boundaries of such engagements is an important part of anthropological training. by going to the andaman islands and the trobriands, radcliffebrown and malinowski made the sort of ethical choices that are increasingly required in the modern world: a willingness to embrace and learn from diversity. instead of either disdaining the “savages” (which, itself, is a tribal solution, an othering), or seeking to exploit them or their environment (the utilitarian approach), the discipline they founded sought to learn from them, and to enlarge the scope of social practices in which edwardian england (and later the rest of europe and finally the batteau and trainor / the ethical epistemes 111 developed world) engaged. the social milieux of british (and american) academics in the early twentieth century was a comfortable insularity, with unpleasant confrontations outsourced to the colonies, or kept in check in the urban slums and industrial districts. by bursting the mental bonds of this insularity, the anthropologists of the first half of the twentieth century enlarged the social practices and mental capacities of all educated men and women. this was as much an ethical exercise as it was an intellectual achievement. by mid-century the racist and ethnocentric assumptions of numerous institutions were thoroughly discredited, even though some have been slow to catch on to this fact. by mid-century, educated men and women could accept that all peoples around the world shared a common humanity, even if their values, their religions, their dietary habits, and their mating rituals seemed quite varied and unusual. this is ethical progress. paradoxically, in parallel with these developments, the rise of global business formations in the last 40 years is creating new forms of differentiation, which we are only beginning to develop conceptual tools to address. most obvious among these is the emergence of multi-national financial institutions that can wreak havoc on entire regions and economies, yet which are beyond the writ of state regulation. global supply chains likewise represent unprecedented concentrations of power. technological advance creates new forms of peripheralization (batteau 2010) and new forms of control, and industrialization on the periphery creates both new forms of prosperity and new forms of misery. developments such as these create an ethical confrontation for which we offer no easy solution. large institutions, almost by definition, are ethically problematic, in that they concentrate power among insular elites, and extend that power into a diversity of communities, which share almost none of their assumptions and have almost no recourse in responding to that power: a very definition of tyranny. technological developments have enabled the global reach of power to exceed the grasp of mutual understanding. yet retreating into privileged ivory towers raises the ethical questions of using power and privilege to impede communication. for anthropologists, a corporate encounter is the ethical response to these developments. anthropology’s corporate encounter comes variously in the form of the anthropology “of” business, anthropology “in” business, and anthropology “for” business (baba 2012). anthropology of business goes back to warner and low’s social system of a modern factory, and is more recently exemplified by recent studies of financial institutions (warner and low 1947). anthropology in business is exemplified by numerous anthropologists working in software and other information technology industries, just as use of ethnographic techniques in marketing can be considered anthropology for business. researchers journal of business anthropology, special issue 1, spring 2014 112 and practitioners in these milieux successfully balance institutional affiliations with intellectual detachment, advancing goods of both intellectual pursuit and practical effect. each of these has contributed to anthropological theory and our understanding of contemporary institutions, so much so that making fine-grained distinctions about “of,” “in,” and “for” is probably an exercise better left to contemporary scholastics. anthropologists “studying up” into these institutions, whether exemplified by karen ho’s study of investment bankers (ho 2009), caitlin zaloom’s study of futures traders (zaloom 2006), or many other recent studies (see also baba, 2005, 2009; hertz 1998; krawinkler 2013; tett 2009; zelizer 1994) achieve a first-hand, immersive familiarity, not typically found among other researchers or critics, with institutions that are increasingly shaping the world. from these studies we learn how trust is constructed, how “shareholder value” is invented, and how global reach is performed. we begin to see that the man behind the curtain6 is doing little more than creating an illusion of smoke and mirrors, which impresses a credulous public. what is necessary at this point is to take some of these important findings and popularize them: coming of age on wall street, just might, one could hope, contribute as much to a turnover in social values as coming of age in samoa did for gender roles nearly a century ago. anthropology’s “colonial encounter” arguably resulted in relationships among nations that were less tinged with racism and more respectful of a shared humanity. although many other historical currents contributed to this, and although the religious violence of the sixteenth century and the nationalist violence of the nineteenth century are being replaced by structural violence today (farmer 2005), no one would argue that improved understanding among nations is not a good thing. the ethical foundation of this lies in the enlarged social world that anthropology and these other historical currents created, making it imperative for philosophers and policymakers alike to acknowledge issues of shared humanity. we should, of course, acknowledge that this is a project that has a uniquely modern specificity. anthropology’s epistemic challenge in the 21st century is to create a similar, empathetic, immersive understanding of the structural imbalances that exist in the world today, whether furthered by repressive governments, irresponsible institutions, or careless businesses. practices that from a distance seem morally repellent become more 6 this is an allusion to the wizard of oz, an allegory of 19th-century industrialization in america. in l. frank baum’s 1900 allegory, the farmers (the straw man) didn’t have a brain, industry (the tin man) lacked a heart, and wall street was a cowardly lion. mgm’s 1939 musical version of baum’s progressiveera classic lacked some of these acerbic insights. batteau and trainor / the ethical epistemes 113 understandable, less mystifying, and possibly more transient and malleable as one gets closer to them. this is not, however, an argument that anthropology become a form of do-gooding, helping hedge fund operators to see the error of their ways. rather, by de-mystifying the upper reaches of global institutions, by pinpointing the differences between true predation and business-asusual, and by contributing to the ethical balance sheet of business-asusual, anthropology has the tools and the intellectual capability to humanize and civilize institutions that today are too-frequently seen as inhumane and out of control. in an increasingly complex world, this is both an epistemological and an ethical imperative: to comprehend in depth the ethical priorities of two (or more) opposed life-worlds, and yet discern their shared humanity. references adizes, ichak. 1988. corporate lifecycles: how and why corporations grow and die and what to do about it. englewood cliffs. prentice-hall. asad, talal, ed. 1973. anthropology and the colonial encounter. new york. humanities press. audi, robert, ed. 1995. the cambridge dictionary of philosophy. cambridge. cambridge university press. baba, marietta. 2005. anthropological practice in business and industry: in applied anthropology: domains of application, editors. satish kedia and john van willigen. westport, ct. praeger publishing. baba, marietta. 2009. disciplinary-professional relations in an era of anthropological engagement. human organization 68(4). baba, 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the deployment and neglect of american anthropology in the second world war. durham, nc. duke university press. schumpeter, joseph. 1954 history of economic analysis. oxford. oxford batteau and trainor / the ethical epistemes 115 university press. sosa, ernest. 1980. the raft and the pyramid: coherence versus foundations in the theory of knowledge. midwest studies in philosophy 5, 3-26. stanford encyclopedia. 2002. stanford encyclopedia of philosophy, downloaded june 14, 2013 from http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/morality-definition/. stout, jeffrey. 1988. ethics after babel. princeton. princeton university press. tawney, r. h. 1926. religion and the rise of capitalism. new york. harcourt brace. warner, w. lloyd and j. o. low. 1947. the social system of a modern factory. new haven. yale university press. weber, max. 1930. the protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism. translated by talcott parsons. new york. scribner. zaloom, caitlin. 2006. out of the pits: traders and technology from chicago to london. chicago. university of chicago press. zelizer, viviana. 1994. the social meaning of money. new york. basic books. dr. allen w. batteau is an anthropologist and director of the business anthropology concentration at wayne state university. he is the author of more than thirty articles and published papers, including “negations and ambiguities in the cultures of organization,” reprinted in classics in critical management studies (mats alvesson, ed.). he may be reached at a.batteau@wayne.edu dr. bradley trainor is an applied anthropologist, who came relatively late in life to the discipline as a nontraditional student. hence his formative moral influences were more diverse than that of some anthropologists, a fact which led him to an interest in conflicting moral régimes. trainor received his phd in 2003, based upon an ethnographic study of an automotive engineering group working on billion dollar redesign of an suv. since graduation, he has mostly worked in the federal government as a program and policy evaluator. he may be reached at bradgergana@verizon.net mailto:a.batteau@wayne.edu mailto:bradgergana@verizon.net essay the phenomenology of aging michael donovan one could very well ask: why start an essay with such a big and potentially distancing word as phenomenology? my spell checker doesn’t even like it, though i would hardly select this tool as an arbiter of lexical nuance. and, based on a recent lecture i attended in which a media studies professor drew, quite glibly i thought, on the phenomenology of religion to talk about the “embodied” experiences of playing games on his iphone, it seems the word has achieved a certain populist intellectual fashionableness. this, too, is something i want to avoid. however, i have chosen to stick with it for a number of reasons. firstly to distinguish the topic from the physiology of aging, which is intensively studied and explored. i am not familiar with this literature―nor up till now have i had much of an appetite for it―but i think the subject will require at least a fleeting exposure as i continue writing, at least in referencing some links between the cognitive, the organic, and the experiential. it is, in fact, the experience(s) of aging that i want to examine, and the ways those experiences are shaped in and by contemporary america―shaped in the living, as a phenomenologist might express this. and this is why i did not simply title this essay “on getting older,” or something of the sort. i want to assert a little analytic, or at least descriptive, distance in engaging the topic and, truth be told, a bit of psychic distance as well―although this is, at its core, nothing more or less page 1 of 9 jba 2(1): 165-173 spring 2015 © the author(s) 2015 issn 2245-4217 www.cbs.dk/jba journal of business anthropology, 4(1), spring 2015 166 than a very personal essay. the thought for this essay was planted during an elevator ride going down from my gym. flush with the sociability that typically accompanies a good work out, i was telling otto, a gym buddy standing next to me, about the growth spurts that my twins were experiencing. these rapid transformations in the size and appearance of my children are startling and a bit disconcerting. how could people you know so well, whose very personhood and relationship with you are fixed in some unexamined ways in their diminutive forms, turn in a flash into lanky giraffes or nfl running backs? how are these spurts, and the psychic turbulence they trigger, implicated in the knowing of one and other? well, this is not elevator talk. so, i just made a remark about how “amazing” it was to witness such things when a woman standing right behind us piped up said: “there are aging spurts too.” now this stuck me as a provocative and slightly subversive thing for a stranger on an elevator to say. but most of all it felt true. it captured some felt experience that i had not fully recognized or clearly examined. aging spurts? not some kind of a counter-balance to growth spurts on the biological ledger of life, but a way to frame the quick shifts in perspective that i have been experiencing. did it make sense to think of these as “spurts” that disrupt and reframe my engagement with the world (sort of like what’s been happening with my kids)? and how does this track with physical changes that i imagined the stranger in the elevator was actually referencing? the elevator door opened and we all made a rather awkward exit. i remarked with cautious politeness that “yes, there must be aging spurts,” though i was not sure at all what she, or i for that matter, really meant by that. but it seemed neither of us was inclined to pursue this subject on the street. as i started down the sidewalk, i decided to screw up the courage to examine the idea. the fact that it was an idea or, more engagingly, a set of propositions, is what provided the spark. who wants to devote the time, even over a short walk, to taking stock of one’s mortality? but entertaining a proposition is another story. it captured my imagination, both as an assertion that could be interrogated and potentially as a way of framing, and thus of making sense of, some of my own experiences. my approach to exploring the idea of aging spurts was to apply my own experiences and see how well they fit. regardless of how analytically flimsy this seems, it might make my experiences more coherent, or at least cogent, to me. after all, it is the subjective that i wish to plumb, which―i think we all can agree―is a prerequisite for empathy. here are the propositions first articulated on my walk home:  p1. there are aging spurts; donovan / the phenomenology of aging 167  p1.1 there are (some) aging spurts that are not directly tied with physiological processes associated with aging;  p1.2 these kinds of experiences of aging involve a rapid shift in perspective, much like i experience when witnessing my children’s growth spurts. these last two propositions point to the experiential dimensions of aging that lie somewhere between the physiological and the cultural. they speak to the phenomenological assertion that aging is shaped in the living of it. they posit that aging is a set of interior or subjective experiences, as well as a set of biological processes. that’s clear enough, and seems consonant with common usage: for example the expression, “feeling your age,” as in the phrase “all of a sudden she was feeling her age.” but this opened up another door, and i quickly had to expand my propositions. for what could “feeling your age” (or acting your age) mean outside of a metaphoric or cultural context? aging is also a relational process―not some atomized experience―even though in present day america it may trigger a sense of anomie or isolation. we construct, and in some measure negotiate, the meanings of aging with others and with the world around us. so i added the following:  p1.3 even physiological changes that are attributable to the aging process, things like hearing loss, vision loss, word loss (aging seems to be a litany of losing things), are signifiers of aging that, independently of their etiology and physical effects, have potent social meanings. could this “shaping” of our experience of aging be understood, at least in part, by something called aging spurts―rapid shifts in perspective that change one’s engagement with the world? my set of propositions gave me a very wide berth to examine this question, even as the language itself pointed me towards some semantically fuzzy terrain. i was not interested in measuring aging spurts, like i might take a tape measure or a scale to measure my kids’ growing spurts. (such data about aging might be traceable, but i’m not especially keen on examining it). but i was intrigued by the idea of triggers. spurts have to have some kind of onset. and my propositions lavishly provide space to explore these phenomena since aging triggers, according to my definitions, need not be physiological: even if they are rooted in the physiological, they also have relatively autonomous social meanings. medical practitioners do recognize this dynamic in clinical terms. an older patient breaks a bone, loses their mobility, becomes dependent on others (family, friends, caretakers), suffers from depression and possibly cognitive impairment. this rapid cascade of events changes a person’s status and engagement with the world—their autonomy is compromised, and with it comes a kind of cultural reclassification into the ranks of the elderly. perhaps this is what my elevator mate meant by journal of business anthropology, 4(1), spring 2015 168 aging spurts. sophisticated approaches to managing a case like this are crossdisciplinary. they might involve orthopedics, physical and occupational therapy, psychiatry, pharmacology, psychology, social work, even family counseling. and, theoretically at least, they could draw on fields as diverse as architecture, sociology, public health, law, and anthropology, to name a few. welcome to the burgeoning world of gerontology, which moves in some fascinating ways between the biological, the behavioral, the psychological, the sociological, the cultural, the geographic, and the political. but where does the experiential fit in all this? of course, it has roots and tendrils in all these domains. the challenge, i felt, was to move past the indisputable but almost trite assertion that aging is “culturally mediated,” towards some understanding of the substrate of those experiences (i think it is more accurate here to think in the plural) that draws on social meanings, signs and symbols, and that is also grounded in organic, biological changes that are part of getting older. i am asking that we shift our gaze from examining and deconstructing (scrutinizing) the medical and cultural narratives of aging and look instead at how these narratives are lived and contested. let’s think about how they are encountered in particular life moments and become catalysts for change. perhaps there are gerontologists who study such things. my interest was not to stumble into new fields, but once again to interrogate my own experiences. let me give some examples. i am a 61 year old father of eight year old twins, and so firmly fall into a cohort of “older dads” that have at least a chimeric demographic footprint in my native brooklyn. i have (wincingly) heard or seen this cohort referred to as “those gray haired dads of brooklyn” somewhere in print or on the radio, so i guess “we” share some dubious sociological identity. i myself have had white hair for at least a decade and within the last year or so increasingly white eyebrows. these are indisputably signifiers, as well as physical expressions, of aging, though they did not feel that way till recently. relying on memory to reconstruct shifts in my subjective experience of aging is treacherous, since the process i am tracing was actually a stutter step, with glimpses of an older me flashing into focus. but i can say confidently that i did not see myself as an “older guy,” regardless of my chronological age and appearance, until quite recently. all this changed when i started regularly taking my kids to school. entering the courtyard at ps 295 where i drop my kids for elementary school, i find it absurd to assert that “age is just a number”. while there are expressions of absurdism that i admire, even aspire to, they do not fit within the morally staunch ethos that prevails among third graders, especially regarding grownups. i can only imagine such a chirpy donovan / the phenomenology of aging 169 call to arms carrying any weight in a (homogeneous) enclave like delray beach, florida. but at drop off time, where the mean age of adults, (teachers, parents, baby sitters) is probably around 32, i fall into an illdefined, but markedly separate, social and symbolic space. well, not altogether. many of the hispanic parents, their kids, and the occasional baby-sitting abuela confidently assume that i am “the grandfather.” but to the other brooklyn moms and dads, members of the “creative class” (like my wife and myself), i am somewhat of a liminal character―like the trickster of anthropological lore, betwixt and between. i could be their dad. perhaps i even look like their dad; yet there i am, a member of their social club as it were: one of parents. this in-betweeness can be unsettling. i occasionally catch this in the darting eyes of a parent who, i imagine, is at least subliminally in tune with the dangerous ambiguities of the situation. of course this may be my imagination gone amok: what sorts of dangerous ambiguities are we talking about? yet there is undoubtedly some jarring ripple that my presence can make in the normative order of things. typically, i can smooth the waters with a smile or a greeting. there are even a few fellow parents―dads mostly―with whom i have built casual friendships. it is here, engaging in those “bonding” moments with fellow parents, where the idea of aging spurts seems to make sense. questions of fluency and idiom arise and these can have a jostling effect. it is not that the chasm of generational experience is too, too wide, but really (and quite meaningfully to me) the tonalities, accents, ironies are different. this goes beyond the standard references to pop culture―the decembrists, rather that the doors, stretching to identify some pop middle ground in elvis costello or the ramones. is there any band out there that is even kind of like the fugs or captain beefheart? it runs right up against one’s most tacit and unselfconscious sense of self. hence the jostling effect. indexing one’s generational identity though music is cliché and fundamentally faulty. my dad liked duke ellington and gustav mahler; my mom liked ella fitzgerald and odetta; they both liked the beatles, or at least tolerated abbey road on the high fi, and i grew up carrying all those musical notes into early adulthood. so i imagine fellow ps 295 parents have their own epoch-crossing song books. there is in fact lots territory that we share and lots to learn from each other. there’s the topical stuff―like cross cutting experiences of parenting that bridge generational lines, cooperative projects for the school, strategies for pursuing our work, and being there for the kids. there are movies, the nets in their new brooklyn stadium, happy hour with tacos at chavela’s, an african pop performer at a local bar with the wesleyan girls swaying up front like senegalese villagers. the challenge for me is always one of translation. it’s back to the idioms. yes, the notes, the accents, tonalities, ironies, journal of business anthropology, 4(1), spring 2015 170 and such. in some ways you can look at these as aesthetic differences―different tropes and modes of expression, different filters―that can become conspicuous in inter-generational exchange or chatter. i hesitate about how much of this to assign to my personality or to generational differences. and i am reluctant to feed the uncritical reification of “generations” advanced by marketers, pollsters, advertisers, journalists and pop sociologists―those ethnographers of “millennials”, the current “creators” and “curators” of pop culture, along with gen y, gen c, gen x, and the “early” and “late” baby boomers―who have created, and with astonishing success persuaded us to embrace, the existence of separate tribes cut by fiat from the sweep of recent history. one can’t help but wonder (really?) how different it was to be in your twenties during the 70s, 80s, 90s, and 00s when, supposedly, the distinctive zeitgeists of each generation emerged. for the main i would say: plus ça change; plus c’est la même chose. throwing down the french always adds a bit of (faux) one-upmanship. however, generational notes do pierce the air―most definitely traveling in both directions. to the discrete, facebook weaned, moms and dads i rub elbows with, i must seem ham-fisted in my approach to discussions of school policy and the ultra-local politics of brooklyn public education. schooled in the style of the merry pranksters, my ironies tend to be broad, my language ribald. and theirs tends to be tuned to wider distribution: specifically, i think, to the semiotic field of social media. so much remains restrained, subtly or variably expressed, implicit. to me, this blending or merging of the virtual and real worlds (a spatio-temporal distinction that some who study millennials scorn), and with it the close management of multiple selves, is extremely foreign―a mare’s nest of the professional and the social, the intimate and the distant, the old and the new. these contrasting representations and experiences of self do not exactly create a sense of “otherness” between us (after all, we do exchange children for sleep-overs), but they do serve as subtle but profound markers of difference―that jostling shift in perspective that i have identified as an aging spurt. like a man wondering what is happening to his spurting children, i ask what is happening to my “self.” all of a sudden, in that potently theatrical space of the school courtyard, i feel my age. feeling one’s age. this could be read as a story of life passages, of reconciliation with a shift in “life stage.” anthropologically speaking, it could be cast as an illustration of transition, from a condition of “liminality,” being neither fish nor fowl, towards assuming a new social identity. it could be a story of self-examination and, at least partially, fulfillment. and this, at least partially, is the case. but, looking around at a larger social canvas, i find that there are some deep cracks in this narrative and underlying ideas about the order of things that support it. for my generation, or (eschewing the tribal connotations) for many folk my age, “feeling one’s age” is anything but settled. there is no new, or donovan / the phenomenology of aging 171 “next” modal state we are comfortably, or resentfully for that matter, moving into; no normatively defined next “stage” (a paradigm shift that is likely to play havoc with the schemas of developmental psychologists). “we” are working out new ideas about what aging means and reinterpreting age-old experiences of what aging is, what it looks and feels like. remember, aging is a relational process; its meanings are, at least in cultural terms, “to be determined” (viz. negotiated) in the “lived” world. the very fact that i am part of a cohort of dads who are both older guys and young fathers (in the life course sense that we have young kids) captures something of this. perhaps, in these turbulent times, it is wise to hold on to our ambiguous, liminal status: to play the trickster for a while. but to what end? playing the trickster can be a tiresome thing. victor turner, an influential anthropologist of the mid-twentieth century, devoted substantial effort to symbolically unpacking “rites of passage,” those rituals and ceremonies observable in all human societies―funerals, weddings, christenings, initiation ceremonies, bigger communal festivals such as coronations, or lenten passages like mardi gras―that work to move us, symbolically and experientially, from one state of being to another. he was particularly interested in those in-between moments and spaces in the ritual process, when we play with (and so make visible and explicit) the symbols and metaphors of the social order or “structure.” so, for example, during the saturnalia of mardi gras, the poor parody the rich, sexual mores are upended, gender and racial identities get mashed up. and, at least before the whole thing was disneyfied, this in-between time in the christian ritual calendar provided dramatic space in which our tacit understandings of the social order―class hierarchy, gender, racial, ethnic, local and sexual identities―were brightly scored, visible, and so accessible to ludic interpretation. in his early work, turner focused on the ways that these liminal moments revitalize and essentially sustain “structure” (hierarchies, identities, the social order). once the shenanigans have passed, successions are managed, the dead are no longer with us, young boys have become men, maidens wives, the resurrection is (once again) behind us, the existing social order is restored with new gusto. the king is dead… long live the king. perhaps sensitive to critiques that his work was “ahistorical,” caught in a kind of monotonic cyclical time where existing social forms are scrambled only to be reproduced, he came in his later writings to focus more explicitly on the disruptive and creative possibilities of such liminal moments. liminality, he saw, offered the possibility of generating new metaphors for social life, of reframing existing forms. he called this culturally creative potential (somewhat awkwardly) “antistructure.” in this sense, i think, liminality becomes an interesting paradigm for examining “my” generation’s ambiguous experiences of aging. not without a certain irony, advances in the biological sciences are upending journal of business anthropology, 4(1), spring 2015 172 our normative expectations of generational hierarchy and succession―our tacit understandings of the social order that are so deeply rooted in organic (cultural) metaphors of life giving way to disease, death and renewal… bury me under the old oak tree. in contretemps, the ponce de leon-like prophets of nanotechnology and genetic engineering draw their organizing metaphors from information science and “computers.” think in terms of “exponential progression”―the model applied to describe advances in computing, miniaturization and more recently our understanding of the human genome. where go the ancient organic metaphors of degeneration and rebirth, and those structural models of social order based on cyclical time, in the face of these ever upward trending graphs of growth and capability? we are told that, if we can hang in for another ten or twenty years, hold off the corrosive effects of free radicals and inflammation (with our antioxidants), keep our weight in check, get out dancing, and do the daily crossword puzzle, we can last another 70 years after that, with the help of sundry molecular sized “bots” on patrol in our bodies. so, are we old at 60 or 70? well, yes and no. bracketing for a moment class, genetics, and other vagaries of chance, from a medical standpoint some of us are and some of us aren’t. similarly, in many other domains―work, parenting, athletics, sexuality―our experiences, and yes, our cultural understandings of aging, are in play. back to victor turner and his observations about the disruptive or culturally creative possibilities of the trickster figure, the one who stands some “place” (symbolically, structurally, imaginatively, experientially) in contemporary american life that is betwixt and between. we are back in the school courtyard at ps 295. we have the opportunity, one could say special chance (and hasn’t “our” generation always thought of itself as special), of offering new metaphors for understanding and giving shape to our experiences of aging. this new phenomenology of aging will happen largely, and (one can hope) most productively, in conversations with others who are younger than us: our children, and our children’s children. regardless of the potentially subversive power of “bots” in remaking the course of human biology, new understandings and experiences of aging will come from intergenerational conversations, and from a deep historical sense of attachment to and caring for those who are our children. and parenthetically, they are growing up with bots around every corner and deeply embedded in their imaginations. perhaps some of these bots will be their aging parents. donovan / the phenomenology of aging 173 michael donovan holds and ph.d. in anthropology from new york university and works for partner practica group llc in new york, where he specializes in strategy consulting, marketing communications, branding, public policy and innovation. he has had the good fortune to bring his skills and experience as an anthropologist to an incredibly diverse set of projects. his work, which typically provides a fresh look at the cultural spaces inhabited by categories, brands, products and services, has yielded notable successes in new product development, retail design, portfolio management, audience development, messaging and strategic planning. he may be reached at mdonovan@practicagroup.com mailto:mdonovan@practicagroup.com opinions: what business anthropology is, what it might become… and what, perhaps, it should not be overture brian moeran one theme that came to the fore when christina and i were putting together this issue was what, exactly, business anthropology is. as we intimated in our editorial for the launch of the jba earlier this year, in some ways there did not seem to be a need to add to the various subdisciplines of anthropology already dealing with organization, work, industry, corporate affairs, and other forms of economic and applied anthropology. and yet, as we saw it, there is a constituency of readers who think of themselves as business, rather than economic, applied, organizational, corporate and so on, anthropologists. so what makes them different? and how might we appeal to that sense of difference? this line of thinking has underpinned the first two issues of the jba. given that we ourselves have not been entirely sure about how far to spread our sub-disciplinary net, we decided that i should get in touch with a number of distinguished scholars around the world who might have an interest in business anthropology, even though they were sometimes working in different disciplinary fields. perhaps they would page 1 of 58 jba 1 (2): 240-297 autumn 2012 © the author(s) 2012 issn 2245-4217 www.cbs.dk/jba opinions 241 have something of interest to tell us. the gist of the message that i sent out to two or three dozen people in late august went as follows: while some scholars are very excited about the notion of 'business anthropology', others (including myself at times) are less sure about what it might consist in. i've decided to ask a number of scholars who are either anthropologists or close in spirit to the discipline to write somewhere between one and three thousand words on what they think business anthropology is or might be. do you think you might be able to help out? two senior scholars who received this request happily admitted that their initial reaction was ‘no way’ – at least not by the deadline i initially gave them. but then one of them went to the gym, while the other seems to have opened a bottle of wine, and they found that these activities were conducive to both thought and writing. their contributions came back the following morning! many others have thought the invited topic important enough to put aside other pressing tasks in order to meet my rather swift deadline. i am extremely grateful to them for their support. although one or two of those to whom i addressed my initial request appear to have given it their serious attention before declining to participate, many others opted out with the classical excuse of being ‘too busy’ to write the requested number of words. two or three never bothered to reply. the most elegant excuse came from paul dimaggio who in his e-mail wrote: although not everyone would agree, i've always felt that to write an opinion piece, one should have an opinion, and that to have an opinion, one should know something about the issue – unfortunately, since i am not an anthropologist, i really don't have an opinion, or a basis for an opinion, on this issue. what could be fairer than that? the articles (a baker’s, or perhaps anthropologist’s, dozen) that follow are more and less subjective reflections by thirteen scholars on the nature of business anthropology. most of them are anthropologists of one sort or another; others have been working in the fields of ethnology and sociology for many years. most are employed in academic departments in universities and business schools; two are now retired; and one is working full-time in marketing research and advertising. in an ideal world, i would like to have solicited the opinions of more practitioners, as well as of academics employed in different fields of research – cultural, management, or tourism studies, for example. my excuse for failing to do so, as by now you will have quickly grasped, was ‘lack of time!’ we hope you enjoy these opinion pieces. hopefully, some of those who were unable to participate first time round will, once they have read journal of business anthropology, 1(2), autumn 2012 242 the reflections that follow, pause for thought and write something in time for the next issue of the jba. hopefully, too, the opinions expressed here on what business anthropology is, might be, and perhaps should not be, will inspire discussion among the jba’s readers in general. so, if you feel like adding to, or commenting on, the points made in what follows, please send them to our managing editor, frederik larsen (fl.jba@cbs.dk), who will then post them under comments on the jba’s home page. we need more discussion of what we are about. …………………………………………………… musings eric j. arnould (universities of bath and southern denmark) the following is not written from a privileged vantage point. but as it appears to me, privileged vantage points are not so obvious in business anthropology. contributors to this enterprise occupy such diverse roles and engage in such varied projects, none of which can claim dominance. a handful pursue academic anthropological careers; another band are scattered about in business schools in north america and europe; an entrepreneurial troop make their living in diverse management consultancy practices; a significant number are oriented towards public service in the tumultuous ngo community; and a final tribe are attached to major corporate enterprises again in a range of niches. moreover, newcomers seem to spring from across an array of anthropological graduate programs which generally display no special commitment to the enterprise of business anthropology. that we recognize these sometimes distant affinal relations through this new journal and the slightly less newborn epic powwows is remarkable testimony to a desire for voice, point of view, and legitimate seat at the anthropological table. what follows are some respectful if slightly polemical comments intended to stimulate rejoinders and other reflections. business anthropology as resistant practice insofar as it insists upon the cultural as a fundamental epistemological and ontological premise, as i strongly believe it should, business anthropology must always be pushing uphill against two dominant instances, even institutions, of bourgeois cultural expression. this view is inspired by sahlins (1976) perceptive, but perhaps neglected essay. as sahlins (1999) has more recently noted, culture has fallen out of favor in anthropology, but should not do for the very good reasons he suggests. mailto:fl.jba@cbs.dk opinions 243 one of the two instances the cultural trope should confront is emic notions of psychology, and even much of the academic variety, that enshrines the individual as the timeless and universal subject and object of knowledge and meaningful action, against all the evidence of anthropology. following sahlins and marcel mauss before him (1938), we should see the heroic self-defining individual as a cultural model, not a natural one. the other instance is economics, which enshrines a certain abstract ideal of action as teleology, based moreover on an empirically falsifiable myth about the origin of money and economic behavior more generally (graeber 2011). in other words, business anthropology should push back against the relentless naturalizing of these cultural expressions, both because this is where anthropology gains its competitive advantage as a source of practical insight, and because this perspective is critical for promoting theoretical insights. that is, when anthropologists insist on the socially and cultural embeddedness of individual action, and elucidate the particular contours of that embeddedness we generate insight. similarly, when we elucidate the manifold ways in which things are produced, circulated, and disposed in dialectic interaction with social and cultural contexts we similarly generate telling insight. and now comes around again a third orientation to resist, that of behavioral determinism enshrined in a misreading of human biological systems as pre-cultural ones, i.e., neuro-marketing (schneider and woolgar 2012). the anthropological insistence on the priority of meaning, those webs of significance that geertz (1973) colorfully revealed, has to some degree carried the day in forward thinking businesses. but there is much danger that the cultural turn (sherry 1991) in business thinking will be replaced by a neuro-biological turn unless business anthropology mounts a serious critique of biological determinism. in this way, the american branch of business anthropology can reassert a commitment to the boasian critique of simplified social darwinism, while building on recent research in the anthropology of mind and body. business anthropology as reflexive practice business anthropologists, like cultural anthropologists, always require for their success no small measure of reflexivity. this is of necessity a twotracked process: on the one hand, the ethnographic and ethnological track that asks “what is going on here,” given the boundaries of the dominant paradigms of bourgeois culture. so what is being asked of the business anthropologist, the assignments she is given, the testimony she is invited to give, the insight she is invited to provide will always be assessed in terms of these paradigmatic boundaries. and so the business anthropologist has to think tactically about how to frame, by for example finding ways to put executive decision makers within the experiential journal of business anthropology, 1(2), autumn 2012 244 frame of their customers, and how to provide the culturally deft metaphor that makes the strange blindingly obvious to executive decision makers. in the former case, i think for example, of point of view videography that illustrates the isolation, interminability, and lack of information the average visitor to the emergency room may face. in the latter, i think of revealing to execs that everyday consumer goods in the us context are jokingly referred to as wedding presents in a latin american context, to bring home their cultural impropriety. business anthropology as handmaiden of innovation of course, anthropological insight has been central to the innovation process in devising new products and services and even service systems, but going forward it may well turn its attention to a larger project. business is not what it used to be, or at least the commitment to a single firm-based model of business practice has been destabilized in recent years. and so it is possible to imagine that all of the alternative market forms that currently constitute a tiny fraction of the world of business, and in which anthropologists sometimes find a role as advisors and advocates (fair trade, community supported agriculture, social enterprise, microfinance, rural sales programs) may evolve towards some thing or things other than the capitalist forms nurtured into florescence in the 19th and 20th centuries. can anthropological expertise in community, household, (kinship) networks, the gift, cultural ecology, and social reproduction help us imagine new modes of value creating systems? here additional foundational work seems to be that of students of globalization processes, but also may be sited in the heretofore tentative insistence in economic anthropology that definite commercial forms of material practice should be viewed as legitimate, culturally specific modes of action (but see, for example lydon 2009). business anthropology as a theoretical project and thus, reinforcing the first form of reflexivity is the point that despite its unsavoury historical ties to the colonial project, anthropology is also heir to robust intellectual traditions dating back 250 years to the enlightenment. the meta-lesson of george stocking’s many labors on the history of anthropology should inspire business anthropologists to drink deeply and promiscuously at the well of previous anthropological thought. there are many lessons in the deep corpus of both basic and applied theory (e.g., medical anthropology, development anthropology, public policy work, etc.) of which some younger colleagues seem blithely unaware. cataloguing here all the theoretical contributions and their contemporary reverberations anthropologists have made would end in reproducing something like borges’ map of the world. but the general opinions 245 point is that business anthropology should be first and foremost edifying anthropological theory and not the poor step child of management, marketing, finance or accountancy or simply reduced to a method for rendering such practices more efficient and effective. thus, for example, much theoretical work has been produced on consumption by scholars affiliated with the consumer culture theoretical tradition, the material culture school at university college london, the sociology of consumption nurtured at the birmingham school, and so on. but i do not see much evidence that this work has become part of a shared theoretical vocabulary across the other diverse sub-tribes of business anthropologists referred to at the outset. we also have some wonderful if scattered work on finance, management, hr, and the like, catalogued in ann jordan’s (2011) heroic text, but these are theoretically sparse, i think. objects like the audit society (power 1997), collateral knowledge (rise 2011), and a current favorite donner et prendre (alter 2009; see also batteau 2000), which reveals the theoretical insights on organization to be derived from maussian exchange theory, perhaps point some ways towards more theoretically robust contributions. thus while grant mccracken (2009) has called for the institutionalization of a chief cultural officer, he has neglected the problem that such a cco would have a relatively limited theoretical tool kit to draw on in addressing various business sub-cultures, logics, and projects compared to competing c-suite colleagues in finance or engineering for instance. perhaps jba or epic might host reflections or workshops on the relevance of particular theorists for business anthropological practice. reflexivity again reflexivity is also important in assessing the nature of practice. for example, a recent ethnographic research project turns up strong evidence that one of the products of ethnographic fieldwork in business to consumer marketing research, that is b2c research, is what might be called figurations of target markets (rather than representations) that resemble the fetishes devised in analogizing ontological contexts (cayla and arnould, n.d.; descola 2005). these heterodox boundary objects circulate through firms and across departmental boundaries and seem to assume an ambiguous power to organize the practice of teams of designers and engineers subsequent to their creation. these and other such anthropological objects – for example, graphic presentations of big data − produced through business ethnographic practice merit epistemological, ontological and ethical reflection. the contributions of latour and callon’s actor network perspectives seem of self-evident theoretical and practical value. that is to say, our research should examine how ethnographic products are appropriated and assimilated into systems of organization knowledge and knowledge management. journal of business anthropology, 1(2), autumn 2012 246 at a more general level, if i may risk a critical tone, it seems to me that, in the review of canonical texts (jordan 2011), case studies in business anthropology are perhaps somewhat over committed to ontological realism, and that the re-recognition of the mythic, magical, narrative, ontologically challenging, and – dare i say – tribal dimensions both of business and business anthropological praxis would be of some value. in other words, bringing in again the lessons of writing culture to the work we do as business anthropologists may be of value. this is something quite different than some theory-denying postmodernism, however; rather a recommitment to reviewing the insights that foundational social philosophers like marx, mauss, the frankfurt school, foucault, luhman, bauman, morin, bataille, baudrillard, weiner, and others may offer in probing deeper into what we do as socio-historically constituted actors. conclusion business anthropology may act more forcefully on the strength of its own convictions, for like other of the hybridized anthropologies of agriculture, medicine, development, education, or health, it fosters the virtue of being in the world as it is, rather than how it was or how we might like it to be. as some sociologists have been perhaps quicker to recognize, we live in a globally marketized cultural ecosystem, whether we like it or not. this must be the subject of an anthropology that wishes to avoid the antiquarianism and solipsism that always threatens a discipline for which reflexivity has become so key since the postcolonial turn. and this means that there should be interconnecting networks of knowledge production and communication, an anthropology of business, an anthropology for business, and a business for anthropology all theorized as such, as well as a critical school of all of them. to achieve this, not only may discussion and debate be encouraged in the pages of jba and in sessions at epic and other anthropological conferences, but more robust academic programs are required such as the southern denmark university’s brand new degree in marketing management and anthropology. further, those who have achieved success may well wish to endow scholarships or programs in business anthropology at top degree-granting institutions. references alter, norbert (2009), donner et prendre : la coopération en entreprise, paris : la découverte. batteau allen w. (2000), “negations and ambiguities in the cultures of organization,” american anthropologist, 102 (december), 726-740. opinions 247 cayla, julian and eric j. arnould (n.d.), “consumer fetish: the symbolic imaginary of consumer research,” sydney: australian graduate school of management. clifford, james and george e. marcus (1986), writing culture: the poetics and politics of ethnography, berkeley and los angeles: university of california press. descola, philippe (2005), par-delà nature et culture, paris : gallimard. geertz, clifford (1973), the interpretation of cultures, boston: basic books. graeber, david (2011), debt: the first 5000 years, melville house. jordan, ann (2013), business anthropology, 2nd edition, long grove, il: waveland press. lydon, ghislaine (2009), on trans-saharan trails: islamic law, trade networks and cross-cultural exchange in nineteenth century western africa, cambridge: cambridge university press. mauss, marcel (1968/1938), “a category of the human spirit: the notion of the self,” psychoanalytic review, lv, 457-481. mccracken (2009), chief culture officer: how to create a living, breathing corporation, boston: basic books. power, michael (1997), the audit society: rituals of verification, new york: oxford university press. ries, annelise (2011), collateral knowledge, legal reasoning in the global financial markets, chicago: university of chicago press. schneider, tanja & steve woolgar (2012), “technologies of ironic revelation: enacting consumers in neuromarkets,” consumption markets & culture, 15 (june), 169-189. sherry, john f., jr (1990), “postmodern alternatives: the interpretive turn in consumer research,” handbook of consumer behavior,” in handbook of consumer behavior, thomas s. robertson and harold h. kassarjian, eds, englewood cliffs, nj: prentice hall, 549-591. …………………………………………………… howard s. becker (independent researcher) when brian moeran proposed the topic of “business anthropology” to me, asking me what i thought it might mean, i immediately thought of two quite different referents of the phrase. the first way of thinking about this, the one that i whole heartedly journal of business anthropology, 1(2), autumn 2012 248 approve of, is nothing more than good anthropology or sociology (for me the two aren’t very different) done in an organization or community that engages in business as conventionally defined. the name that immediately came to mind was melville dalton, whose men who manage describes the way the several businesses he worked in actually operated (as opposed to how they said they operated). the choicest gem in the book is his reconceptualization of employee theft as an informal reward system: the company let people (at every level, from vice-president to ordinary workers) steal company property in return for them agreeing to do things the bosses wanted done but which they couldn’t legitimately ask their employees to do. in one memorable case, a vice-president wanted a birdhouse built on the grounds of his country house, and it was in fact built by company carpenters on company time using company owned materials. the carpenters got to steal what they needed for their own home improvement projects. this would just be anti-business muckraking if dalton hadn’t identified the crucial elements suggested by the idea of an informal reward system. robert jackall’s moral mazes: the world of corporate managers, a darker book, goes to the heart of the moral problems that conventional business organizations pose for their managerial employees. many such studies over the years might not even have been labeled industrial sociology, let alone business anthropology, and were known to social scientists but probably not to many people in the business world. lucy suchman pioneered the anthropological study of the organization of daily life in the office, a tack leigh star, and other sociologists of science followed, which is now identified by the substantial mouthful “computer assisted cooperative work” (cacw). the other kind of work that came to mind when brian asked me to write about business anthropology can be succinctly described as "making a business out of anthropology." it’s represented by the people (mostly) who post their writings at http://businessanthropology.blogspot.com. and by the popular writer paco underhill who, with his collaborators, follows shoppers around stores seeing where they stop and look, where they buy and where they turn up their noses and walk on. i generally don’t approve of this kind of work. i’ll be the first to admit that i haven’t read a lot in this area and so am prepared to be proved wrong. here’s my complaint: research like this typically takes the client’s questions (and there are always clients in this form of research, people paying you to study something for them and thereby solve their problems, rather than your own) as givens. what the client wants to know is what the researcher wants to find out. well, you are probably saying, what’s wrong with that? what’s wrong is that clients typically do not submit the whole problem for investigation. some things are off limits, things the http://businessanthropology.blogspot.com/ opinions 249 client doesn’t think are important or relevant, which quite often means things the client does not want mentioned or thought about at all. here’s a mild example. many years ago, several colleagues and i did a several year study of a medical school. we were sociologists but we worked in classical anthropological style, spending days and weeks and months in all the places in the school and its associated hospitals that students spent time. we hung round, went to classes with them, went on medical rounds with them and the doctors who taught them, watched as they examined patients, and so on. we focused on the student experience and its collective character (what people like us were calling “student culture”), so we spent most of our time with the students. but one day i was talking casually with one of the medical faculty and started asking him a lot of questions, questions which interested him and to which he responded seriously. until he stopped and said, “wait a minute. are you studying me?” i said that, since i was studying the school and he was part of the school’s faculty, of course i was studying him. he got a little angry and tried to straighten my thinking out for me, explaining that he and the other faculty were not the problem; it was the students who were the problem to be studied. when we figured out what was wrong with them, then we could help with the faculty’s problems. that’s almost invariably what happens when you study schools. you study the students because they are the problem. of course, as a social scientist, you know that the problems of an organization are the problems of—a whole organization, not some part of it, with other parts off limits to investigation. the same thing occurs in studies of businesses undertaken at their invitation or behest. they explain what “the problem” is, usually something to do with some other kinds of people than the ones who are inviting you in, and especially so if they are paying for the research to be done. the employees are the problem, the customers are the problem, everyone is the problem except the people who are paying for it. and, of course, research done under such constraints can’t possibly solve anyone’s problems, since they leave out some of the key players involved in creating the problem(s). as a result, the solutions someone who is selling anthropological services has to offer are partial and doomed to failure. if the solution involves—as the solutions we suggested to the medical faculty to solve their problems did—someone in a position of privilege and power giving up some of that, they almost surely won’t do it, and will instead be glad to pay for a solution that won’t work. that will at least let them look like they’re doing something. it’s the same sort of solution as the one you get by appointing a committee, except you pay outsiders for it. that’s why hardheaded businessmen so often buy the most journal of business anthropology, 1(2), autumn 2012 250 specious kind of advice, advice that they must know won’t solve any problems. another anecdote. my daughter worked for a major international airline years ago, back when employees could often secure first class accommodations for their relatives for nothing. so i was sitting in a first class seat next to a classy looking older gentleman who identified himself as the ceo of a major conglomerate and, on learning that i was a sociologist, volunteered that he had just changed the work culture of his company. i said that was interesting but i hadn’t thought it was that easy to do. he explained that they had hired an expert (he didn’t say if it was an anthropologist, but it might well have been—who else is an expert on culture?) who helped them work out what the new culture would be and how to explain it to the employees who would thenceforth enact it (if that’s the verb). i said that my understanding was that culture was a set of shared solutions people worked out themselves to problems they had in common, and that if he told them what their culture was going to be, that would just be one more problem they would have to devise a (cultural) solution for. at which he picked up his magazine and didn’t say another word for the rest of the flight. my theory was that he had heard that a business culture was a good thing to have and you might as well have the best that money can buy, but that what he bought was not based on anything that had been published in man (now the jrai) or the american anthropologist. hiring experts to tell you what your culture should be, and the other kinds of ideas a business anthropologist might provide, might solve internal political problems in a company. but whatever the business anthropologist produces, it probably won’t be a contribution to anthropological knowledge. a business anthropologist might very well learn a lot of interesting stuff in the course of doing whatever he did, but wouldn’t be getting his fee for applying the data gathered to problems of interest to the general run of anthropologists. (is that why a new journal is needed to hold the accumulated findings of the new specialty?) i don’t know why business executives spend money on research of this kind. but i can guess at what’s going on, based on two sources. one is the wisdom i acquired at a very young age from my father, who was a partner in a small advertising agency in chicago during the thirties and forties. he said that the reason his clients advertised was not that they believed it worked but that they were afraid not to, just in case it actually did work. they thought that unlikely, but everyone else was doing it, so what the hell. not a very trustworthy source, of course. but michael schudson, in his 1986 book advertising, the uneasy persuasion, demonstrated similarly negative conclusions about advertising, testing the claims of the field’s representatives against the extensive literature which sought to prove its worth. he discovered, among other things, that my father’s most opinions 251 pessimistic but scientifically astute thought was true. the only kind of advertising that reliably increased sales was price advertising. if you advertised the same product at a slightly lower price you would get all the sales, and it would happen almost immediately. no other form of advertising had such conclusive positive results. but that knowledge was useless. because all you could do with it was lower the price and then everyone else would do the same thing and nothing would have been accomplished other than lowering your gross sales figures. more generally, schudson’s review showed that advertising never does much good of any kind. the example of milton hershey, who never spent a penny advertising his chocolate bars (which people in the ad business tried to hush up or ignore) showed the essential worthlessness of the whole enterprise. what’s more likely to be involved in buying research results from anthropologists (as from psychologists before them) is a search for ideas, no matter how goofy they are and without any concern for the kind of science they’re based on. if a completely specious study gives me an idea for a new product or a new advertising slogan or marketing gimmick, i can take it from there, and test it out in my own way. and that might be the opening for business anthropology, not providing scientific results business people can use the way they might use the results of chemical or biological research, but as a source of new ideas, most of which won’t work. still, maybe one will and that will be enough to make it all worthwhile. …………………………………………………… dominic boyer (rice university) i have two dominant associations with “business anthropology” as a field of knowledge. the first is a narrower definition: the mobilization of anthropological research techniques within and for the benefit of private sector companies. as marietta baba notes in a definitive historical overview of business anthropology (2006), anthropologists have worked with the private sector for as long as anthropology has existed as a professional field. and, anthropologists have performed “applied,” organization-oriented research within businesses at least since lloyd warner’s work with western electric in the 1930s. however, during the cold war, anthropology’s extra-academic engagements moved more in the direction of service to state or non-governmental development projects. as baba notes, the 1971 aaa ethics code’s prohibition of proprietary research symbolized how marginal applied private sector research had become (2006:13). the concept of “business anthropology” journal of business anthropology, 1(2), autumn 2012 252 an sich, then took shape in the 1980s as part of a reinvigorated engagement of anthropology with the private sector (see jordan 2010:19). there seem to have been both push and pull factors involved in anthropology’s return to business. on the one hand, the 1980s marked the first phase of the widespread authorization of neoliberal dicta of society-as-market and individual-as-entrepreneur/consumer in various domains of expertise. it would be inaccurate to say that, on this basis, research in business settings (let alone research partnerships with businesses) suddenly gained a positive valuation in anthropology. more fairly, one might say that the mainstreaming of neoliberal attitudes in domains of expert and popular knowledge helped neutralize the negative valuation of business enough to allow for a more lively and legitimate subdisciplinary margin to emerge. the founding of the national association for the practice of anthropology in 1984 to offer business practitioners and academic consultants space within the aaa surely symbolizes this partial re-opening of mainstream professional anthropology to business. however, business moved toward anthropology as well. in the 1980s, corporations, especially those operating in information, communication and design fields, began to seek out anthropological methodological and conceptual expertise more actively. i cannot explain why this happened with great certainty. but my hunch is that the postindustrialization of northern economies in the 1980s placed a new premium on experimentation with less “tangible” modes of commoditization, such as semiosis (e.g., “branding”) and user-experience. suddenly, anthropological expertise in matters of semiotic and participant-observational analysis seemed plausibly advantageous. the most famous laboratory for such experiments was likely xerox parc (palo alto research center), especially lucy suchman’s now legendary research on human-machine interfaces (1987). her projects at parc directly or indirectly inspired others in the emergent fields of participatory design, user experience and consumer behavior, notably jeanette blomberg, melissa cefkin, john sherry and rick e. robinson, the last of whom went on to found e lab llc, the first “ethnographic design” firm in the early 1990s (see wasson 2000). i was an occasional tourist to the e lab offices for personal reasons and had several uncanny encounters with business anthropology in-the-making, for example when i wandered into one meeting room and saw a flow chart based on bourdieuian practice theory as part of a client presentation or when clifford geertz was frequently invoked to backstop the firm’s proprietary analytic model. my defensive, somewhat cynical view at the time was that e lab was attempting to privatize a public good (anthropological theory). but the heart of e lab’s business model was actually more focused on opinions 253 troubleshooting user-object interfaces. in their consulting, e lab typically analyzed the epistemic, experiential and environmental factors determining user behavior and then advised how interfacing could be optimized. indeed, although e lab had already closed its doors by the time that the actants of actor network theory started to make landfall in anthropology in the early 2000s, “ethnographic design” had, in many ways, a similar interest in exploring the interstices of agency and actancy (and indeed this perhaps explains the current resurgence of interest in suchman’s work as anthropological science and technology studies has mainstreamed). although there is no doubt that many anthropologists still view business anthropology as ethically problematic, in its best moments it is capable of providing excellent reflexively attentive organizational ethnography. in an era when there have likely never been so many of us studying “cultures of expertise” inside and outside organizational environments, business anthropology appears to be an increasingly fertile area of research at the juncture of academic and corporate interests. this brings me at last to my second, more open-ended association with “business anthropology,” the one that is perhaps ultimately more in the spirit of brian moeran and christina garsten’s vision for this journal. what i hope this journal will encourage is more anthropological exploration of the rise of “business” as a prominent form of life and imagination across the planet. i would distinguish that project from an analysis, for example, of the origins and consequences of neoliberal policy consensus and from the study of “neoliberalism” as an epistemic and cultural force in various parts of the world. “business” certainly has done well in the neoliberal era but it existed before neoliberalism and will in all probability survive it. “business,” in my view of things, involves a field of linguistic registers in which business english features prominently; it involves certain styles of dress and hexis, certain aesthetics of work, leisure and environments; it involves preferred modes of conviviality, relationality and sexuality; it involves certain experiences of time and space and always more motion; it involves media messages and an entire knowledge industry whose artifacts are featured prominently in spaces (airports, for example) designed to enable business; it involves, above all, intuitions, worldviews and principles of judgment. “business” offers rich terrain for anthropological reflection and i find such reflection incredibly important since the global samenesses and variations of business exert profound influence on conditions of life and processes of social imagination across the world. business recruits and organizes desires, promises futures, incites imitation and action. regardless of the future of neoliberalism – i, for one, hope we are witnessing the decline of its monopoly on truth – the codes of “business,” i feel confident, will continue to mutate and endure. “business anthropology” will thus offer us journal of business anthropology, 1(2), autumn 2012 254 excellent red threads to the future and means for engaging the cultures of power. references baba, marietta l. 2006. “anthropology and business.” encyclopedia of anthropology. h. james birx, ed. thousand oaks, ca: sage publications. pp 83-117. jordan, ann t. 2010. “the importance of business anthropology: its unique contribution.” international journal of business anthropology 1(1):15-25. suchman, lucy. 1987. plans and situated actions: the problem of humanmachine communication. cambridge university press: new york. wasson, christina. 2000. “ethnography in the field of design.” human organization 59(4):377-388. …………………………………………………… ulf hannerz (stockholm university) one of my early publications was perhaps an instance of business anthropology – an article on “marginal entrepreneurship and economic change in the cayman islands” (hannerz 1973). it was a fairly serendipitous by-product of research on local politics, focusing on tourism and inspired, like so much of scandinavian anthropology at the time, by fredrik barth and the “bergen school” – its slim volume on the role of the entrepreneur in social change in northern norway (1963) was a sort of local classic, although its mode of publication probably meant that it did not reach a more dispersed anthropological public. anyway, since then i cannot claim to have been actively involved in business anthropology, so what follows draws on what may be described as a view from afar. and is perhaps quite banal. i think business anthropology should be an important part of anthropology – i see anthropology as a study of all human life, and business is in these times a central part of that. (there is an unfortunate tendency in some contemporary anthropology, i think, to retreat to quite marginal and/or trivial topics.) i also believe that in mapping its field of activity, one can perhaps learn something from earlier debates over emergent sub-disciplines in anthropology. one question may be about the direction of the flow of ideas and knowledge. when urban anthropology developed on a significant scale, in the 1970s or so, it seemed that the opinions 255 assumption was that anthropology could contribute to urban studies – and so a consequence of this was that much early anthropology in cities was about “urban villages”, an application of ethnographic routines with little in the way of conceptual and theoretical development. i wrote my book exploring the city (1980) in large part as an attempt to turn this around, and to ask what urban anthropology could add to the wider anthropological project of understanding human diversity. business anthropology might be in a similar situation – anthropology may well contribute to an understanding of business, but how can this particular anthropology contribute to the development of anthropological thought generally? then there is the case of the engagement of anthropology with development studies, also in large part from the 1970s onwards – not a field in which i have been active myself, although i have been an observer thereof. here there has been the tendency to a split between the “development anthropology” of more or less hands-on practitioners, frequently in non-academic employment, and the “anthropology of development”, a more theoretical critique of the notion of development itself, and its political implications. i can see the possibility – should i say risk? – of a divergence between a “business anthropology” and an “anthropology of business” along similar lines. my preference would be to hold them together in at least a productive dialogue, and with reflective practitioners involved. more dramatically, there have been the recurrent controversies, mostly in american anthropology, over the involvements of (a rather small number of) anthropologists in military affairs, counterinsurgency, international security, “human terrain” studies, whatever it has all been called. most of their colleagues, at least those heard from, have been strongly opposed to such engagements. i would mostly not expect business anthropology to generate quite so heated arguments, but i do sense that there are anthropologists with fairly general anti-business inclinations who might wish that there were no such sub-discipline as business anthropology, and no colleagues wishing to get into it. one productive consequence of this might be that the field will have a quite active and continuous debate over ethics in research and application – what are the acceptable goals and methods of business anthropology? i am generally in favor of openness – that may indeed be a banal declaration. in business anthropology, however, it may involve some particular issues. one of the keywords of our times is “transparency”, and in public life, not least in places where politics are in principle liberal and democratic, there is indeed some tendency not only to celebrate it but to put it into practice. in business, you can hardly expect quite so much of it. there is competition and there are business secrets. how do business anthropologists handle this – to get at the secrets, where this is desirable journal of business anthropology, 1(2), autumn 2012 256 in research, and to participate in keeping secrets, where this becomes a part of their line of work? again, there are ethical as well as methodological questions here. openness, i would suggest, is also a matter of dealing with subdisciplinary borderlands. although business anthropology may have had a fairly low profile so far, it is certainly close to, and may overlap with, some number of more institutionalized fields. economic anthropology may have had its ups and downs, but at present seems to be in a phase of renewal. it is certainly not synonymous with business anthropology, but there should be a great deal of interaction between them. anthropology and adjacent fields have had an interest in studies of advertising for some time, and this is clearly an area where commerce and culture come together in creativity. entrepreneurship remains a field of scholarly concern. tourism studies form a large interdisciplinary field. i would prefer these, and probably numerous others, to be “blurred genres” rather than specializations with sharply drawn boundaries. finally, i hope business anthropology in its continued development will attend not only to business in itself, but also to those organized activities which directly depend on it, and on which it depends. i have in mind especially the media engaged in business commentary, and the institutions of business training: “business schools” and others. and i think that the journal of business anthropology could well keep an eye on what is happening in popular business literature – those bestsellers i see when i look at the book stands in international airports, where “frequent fliers” choose their food for thought. here is a field of global public culture which seems to me to be still waiting for more anthropological commentary. references barth, fredrik (ed.) 1963. the role of the entrepreneur in social change in northern norway. bergen and oslo: universitetsforlaget. hannerz, ulf. 1973. marginal entrepreneurship and economic change in the cayman islands. ethnos, 38: 101-112. …………………………………………………… opinions 257 marianne lien (university of oslo) “until we have revealed how corporate power feels like truth instead of like force, we will not comprehend it.” kalman applbaum, rethinking economies, london, january 2008 can we love capitalists enough to study them? a few years ago, the anthropological truism that you have to love your people in order to do them ethnographic justice raised some doubts about the possibility of studying capitalism. some were concerned that we were too angry with capitalists to study them properly; others that our complicity with the agents of capitalism would make an ethnography of capitalism implausible.1 now that the most recent financial crisis has exposed flaws of financialisation (cf. hart 2011) and occupy-movements recruit academics to the streets, while, at the same time, universities are run by managerial models, the question could seem all the more relevant. yet, the current state of affairs hardly even gives us a choice. it is certainly the case that anthropologists have broken new ground recently through ethnographies of markets, finance, manufacturing, and management. this year’s launch of the journal of business anthropology reflects a renewed interest in economic anthropology, and thematic issues of mainstream anthropological journals reflect a sudden interest in contemporary finance.2 but we are still a long way away from being relevant in the way that we could. decades of marginalising economic anthropology have left the discipline somewhat unprepared3 for the important challenges that the world currently faces (climate change, financial crises). these are challenges for which the causes, as well as the solutions, are to be found within the societies that most anthropologists are likely to call their own. and although the financial crisis and subsequent bail-outs reveal the entanglements of the economy with everything social and political, it is still economists who are turned to for solutions. it is generally them, not 1 the questions were raised during the seminar rethinking economic anthropology, in london january 2008 (before the financial bubble hit the headlines) and i wish to thank sandy robertson for phrasing these questions so succinctly . 2 see especially the cultural anthropology’s theme issue on finance, may 2012 http://culanth.org/?q=node/561. 3 but see keith hart, whose thorough commentaries on the world economy in general and the financial crisis in particular are a consistent exception (see e.g. hart 2000, hart and ortiz 2008, hart 2011). journal of business anthropology, 1(2), autumn 2012 258 us, who are called upon for grand narratives of how we got ourselves into the mess and how to get out of it. we know, of course, that even the most ‘market-like’ markets have maussian traits. even when we locate our study in what appear to be prototypical capitalist institutions, such as the trading floors of european stock exchanges (hasselström 2003, zaloom 2006), tokyo’s fish market (bestor 2004), or marketing departments of food manufacture (lien 1997), we find our sites inhabited by people who are often much less keen on separating gifts from commodities than economic theories assume.4 more recently, advances in the study of financial markets (ho 2009) and financial management (røyrvik 2011) have taught us more about how finance and corporate power are constructed from within. such studies are extremely important. yet, in light of the current penetration of the market into all spheres of life, there is no need to limit oneself to studies of ‘capitalism at the core’ to understand how it works. if capitalism is pervasive, it hardly derives its strength from any one particular site or centre, but from the networks and relations that economic practices engender. perhaps we could begin by letting go of the idea that cores even exist. because, as recent ethnographies of marketing have revealed, if we look for people who orchestrate this mess, we are not likely to find them.5 most people who are insiders to the financial trade or marketing see the action as being ‘elsewhere’, and are often as oblivious as ordinary consumers about the consequences of the choices they make. if there is no inside/outside, if we are all somehow implicated, and no-one in particular is to blame, our economic world becomes more complicated, but also, paradoxically, more accessible. it means that, in principle, our current economy can be studied anywhere. the question becomes then, not so much of whether we love or hate capitalists, but of how people who are not normally classified as ‘the capitalist other’ accommodate, and even cultivate, rhetorics of the market through day-today practices. it becomes a question about the ‘capitalist within’: not as the self-interested entrepreneur who relentlessly maximises utility for his (yes, mostly his) own advantage (cf. neoclassical economics); but as reluctant, complicit or indifferent agents in the processes whereby economy becomes instituted, self-evident and, by the same token, somewhat impenetrable (cf. polanyi). such a pursuit would be less about the study of ‘the other’, and more about belief systems and material practices that together constitute the very foundation of peoples’ daily lives. in other words, it involves the study of ourselves. as the latter is far 4 as james carrier puts it, ‘sociability is a weed that propagates on the most stony ground’ (carrier 1998: 43, in carrier and miller 1998). 5 as daniel miller notes, when you look at businesses, it turns out that ‘economic calculation’ in the formal sense is continuously placed outside the frame of real economic transactions (miller in carrier and miller 1998; see also lien 1997; hasselström 2003). opinions 259 less developed in anthropology than the former, such a pursuit would necessarily need to be inventive, original, and bold. some tools and guidebooks exist already, but many more would be invented along the way. the potential outcome is not only a truly postcolonial discipline (one which no longer relies epistemologically on the distinction between own and other culture/society), but also one that complements other disciplines (economics, for example) in producing narratives and partial solutions to the many challenges we currently face. in other words, it would imply a discipline which sees the investigation of practical problems as being as relevant to the discipline as any other problem, and not one which, in the words of evans-pritchard (1946: 93) belongs in the ‘non-scientific field of administration’ (see moeran and garsten 2012). so how do we proceed? first of all, we need to turn our attention from what makes the economists’ model of the market wrong, to what it is that makes it so strong. we need to come to grips with the mechanisms that make businesses, as well as the trope of the market – expansive, forceful, efficient and capable of coordinating human and non-human resources on an unprecedented scale. how do we account for the persuasive power of the market model, and of economics as a whole? two sets of issues seem particularly pressing: one related to sustained autonomy of the economic sphere (hayek vs. keynes); the other to the mobility of models of the market. how does this translate into anthropology? in a short book called the hit man’s dilemma, keith hart has argued that the boundary between the personal and the impersonal is becoming increasingly difficult to sustain. hart uses the image of a ‘hit man’ – a gangster licensed to kill – as a metaphor for the ‘moral problems inherent in building modern society on the basis of impersonal institutions’ (hart 2005: 12). important ethnographic questions arise from this approach, such as how people, within and outside of business, handle the subtle boundaries of personal and impersonal agency, and how such boundaries are configured within the institutions in which people operate. i believe that a focus on institutions, rhetorics and practices, through which the distinction between the personal and the impersonal are continuously reproduced, may help us come to grips with some of the tensions, as well as the mechanisms that sustain the perceived autonomy of the economic sphere. thus, we may contribute to a better understanding of the dichotomous relation between ‘market’ and ‘society’ which frames so much of our transactional activity in western societies. the perceived autonomy of the field of economics is also likely to be fundamental to its current mobility. it has been argued that the universalising potential of economics rests upon its capability for abstraction (carrier and miller 1998). but while abstraction is essential, it does not, in itself, make things move. as penny harvey has argued with reference to science, abstract truths require social dramas to achieve their scalar effects (harvey 2007). as anthropologists we are particularly journal of business anthropology, 1(2), autumn 2012 260 well positioned to study the social dramas that allow neo-liberalism to march on. in order to do so, we need to examine how the day-to-day practices that unfold around us solidify and transform themselves and become solid points of reference, underpinning our ontological premises. in other words, we need to study how economic realities become real to us. such a programme necessarily transcends any narrow definition of ‘business’ as the sites in which transactions are being made, as well as an orthodox distinction between anthropologies of ‘the other’ and anthropologies ‘at home’. it would also benefit from a comparative approach. carving out an economic anthropology along these lines requires that we continuously challenge the institutional, as well as ontological, boundaries that are reproduced through the delineations ‘business’, ‘markets’ and ‘economics’. it means that business anthropology is defined less by the kind of people and practices it studies, and more by the kinds of questions it asks. so what can anthropology contribute? as always, it is our humanity that makes us good ethnographers. it is not the idea that there is a strange ‘exotic culture’ out there, but rather the other pole of our anthropological legacy: the notion of the universal that suggests that ethnography is possible because we are all human. as miyazaki (2012) notes: ‘the world of finance is made and remade by thinking subjects just like us who dream, are disappointed and try to gather together the courage to go on once again’. we don’t need to love capitalists in order to study them, but we need to humanise them. i believe that it is precisely our compassion, and our willingness to step beyond boundaries of the personal and impersonal that may help us towards an understanding of capitalism that may – if we ask the most difficult questions – contribute to a better understanding of our troubled times. references bestor, ted, c. 2004 tsukiji; the fish market at the center of the world. berkeley: university of california press. carrier, james and daniel miller 1998 virtualism. a new political economy. oxford: berg. czarniawska, barbara 2012 organization theory meets anthropology. a story of an encounter. journal of business anthropology 1(1): 118-140. evans-pritchard, e.e. 1946 'applied anthropology’. africa 16: 92-8. opinions 261 hart, keith 2000 the memory bank; money in an unequal world. london: profile books. hart, keith 2005 the hit man’s dilemma: on business, personal and impersonal. chicago: prickly paradigm press. hart, keith 2011 the financial crisis and the end of all-purpose money, economic sociology: the european electronic newsletter 12 (2) 4-10. hart, keith and h. ortiz 2008 anthropology in the financial crisis. anthropology today 24 (6) 1-3 harvey, penny 2007 ‘arresting mobility or locating expertise; ‘globalisation’ and the ‘knowledge society’. in: m. e. lien and m. melhuus (eds.) holding worlds together; ethnographies of knowing and belonging. oxford: berghahn hasselström, anna 2003 on and off the trading-floor. an inquiry into the every-day fashioning of financial market knowledge. stockholm: dept. of social anthropology, university of stockholm. ho, karen 2009 liquidated. an ethnography of wall street. durham: duke university press. lien, marianne e. 1997 marketing and modernity. oxford: berg. miyazaki hirokazu 2012 ‘the end of finance?’ theorizing the contemporary, cultural anthropology online. may 17th 2012. http://culanth.org/?q=node/574 moeran, brian and christina garsten 2012 ‘what’s in a name? editors’ introduction to the journal of business anthropology. journal of business anthropology 1(1) 1-19. røyrvik, emil a. 2011 the allures of capitalism. oxford: berghahn. zaloom, caitlin 2006 out of the pits. traders and technology from chicago to london. chicago: university of chicago press. …………………………………………………… orvar löfgren (university of lund) “i’ll never forget my first internship day working for a consultancy firm. i was expected to do an ethnography of a suburban setting that was about to be re-branded. in the evening i got a call from my new boss saying, ‘are you ready to start tomorrow morning? i’ll drop by your apartment tonight and give you a video recorder and some instructions.’ after an hour he appeared and called me to come down to his car. he was so stressed that he just gave me a couple of quick hints before handing over the camera. ‘are you ready to go ahead?’ he asked, and all i could answer was a faint ‘yes’. next day i went out there and tried to remember my training in ethnography, finding out what to look for. i was just thrown right into it.” http://culanth.org/?q=node/574 journal of business anthropology, 1(2), autumn 2012 262 the student came from a new masters program in applied cultural analysis (maca), that i have been involved in over recent years in the department of european ethnology at the university of lund, sweden. it is a training that takes students from the humanities and social sciences into the applied research world of corporations and public institutions. together with my colleague billy ehn, i have been interviewing students about their experiences in ‘going out there’ and doing business ethnography, as interns, thesis writers, and later hired ethnographers. we have also interviewed consultants with a background in anthropology and european ethnology who have long experience in trying to bridge the gap between academia and the business world (see the discussion in ehn & löfgren 2009). much of business anthropology today occurs in the border-zones between traditional academic research and applied studies by consultants and business ethnographers. i am interested in what goes on in these territories, but also why the dialogue between different actors is often weak. a complaint heard from consultants was “once you leave academia to do commercial anthropology, you can never come back and nobody takes much notice of what you are doing out there.” there is, therefore, every reason to try to improve the dialogue and it is clear that academia has a lot to learn from the world of applied research in the business field. listening to the students’ experiences was one way to begin this dialogue, and it has also been refreshing to hear consultants take a critical look at the traditions, routines and rituals of research among those of us who have remained in academia. what can they problematize in those research practices and perspectives that we too often take for granted? the maca program is based upon a cooperation between lund and copenhagen universities, and students and teachers have to take a 50 minute commute across the national border. “two universities and two national academic styles for the price one,” is the way our slogan might be run. it is a hands-on training with a focus on learning to understand the expectations “out there”. it is about doing projects and ethnographies under tough time pressures and learning to communicate aims and results in other ways than student papers and reports. most important and challenging, it is about learning that it is not enough to provide a critical analysis of the problem assigned, but about being prepared to answer the dreaded question: so what? how does one transform a business ethnography into implementation, with concrete suggestions for further action? for many students it is still a bit of a cultural shock to take on their first projects in the new settings. one of them got an internship in a big utilities company. he will never forget the first comment he got when, as a cultural analyst, he was presenting his new project and academic opinions 263 background to his new colleagues. his aim was to do a cultural analysis of how the customers viewed the company that provided electricity for domestic use. “culture? damn it, we don’t deal with culture here. we sell electricity!” well, he had to start explaining what he meant about cultural analysis and tell his new colleagues about customers’ reactions to the company he had encountered: for example the indecipherable complex monthly bills that they opened with trembling hands during the cold and expensive winter months. he realized that his immediate task was to elaborate on the many cultural charges found in an intangible product like electricity – a basic, invisible element in everyday life often surrounded by conflicts in the household. who forgot to turn off the light again and who is constantly fiddling with the thermostat? questions like waste and thrift, saving pennies or battling global warming, were often present. electricity was a commodity very much framed within different cultural understandings, conventions and moral norms. for many other students their first challenges were similar. they had to try to get employers or clients to understand the “cultural” part of cultural analysis. the arguments they used in the seminar rooms usually did not work here. one had to find new ways of getting the message across. what is it that i have to offer? what are my competences and analytical skills? what is the anthropological or ethnographic contribution to business studies? one student got involved in a project on waste management and found that the engineers she was going to work with looked puzzled when she said: “waste is very much about culture”. she convinced them by doing a quick project in which a group of students with diverse cultural backgrounds were asked to label and sort different kinds of food waste. how did they decide what should go where in the fridge, or devise a particular kitchen system for sorting garbage? gradually she was able to convince the engineers that waste reflected basic cultural ideas of value, order and power, as well as having strong emotional charges. the lessons to be learnt concerning communication are important, since a common complaint that we meet among students is that they lack confidence in their skills as cultural analysts, or don’t know how to present those skills in simple words. coming from the humanities where there isn’t much of a tradition of assured self-presentation, students are often insecure: what do i know, what kinds of competences do i have compared to an economist, a political scientist or a hands-on engineer? there is much that you have learned that you don’t even see as analytical skills or assets. some were afraid that their critical skills would not be appreciated “out there” in the world of business. writing about the tasks of a critical ethnography, jim thomas (1993: 2ff) points out that cultural journal of business anthropology, 1(2), autumn 2012 264 worlds tend to entrap people in taken-for-granted reality, and the role of researchers is to question commonsense assumptions by describing and analysing otherwise hidden agendas that inhibit, repress and constrain people in their everyday lives. he reminds us that the dimension of power is always there, though often found in surprising places and forms. strikingly enough, it is precisely this critical perspective that the consultants found most important in the academic luggage they carried with them into their new careers. this again underlines the importance of academic training in nurturing and developing critical thinking. as teachers we need to remind students that research that desperately starts out by trying to be “useful” or “easily applicable” may in fact end up becoming predictable or non-challenging if it loses its open, reflective and critical perspective. what employers and clients in the corporate world often expect is “the surprise effect”. bringing ethnography into the field of business studies should create new and different kinds of knowledge – making the mundane exotic or challenging. when they consider hiring an ethnographer, they want something different from the traditional world of surveys and focus groups. as students returned from the field and their first applied jobs, they brought back important insights, but also new skills and tools. they provided us with feedback on what was important in their earlier training and what could be improved. they had new experiences of team-work, communicating with people for whom cultural analysis was an unknown field, but they also acquired skills of working under strong time-pressures or making findings clear and sharp. most important, they returned with a feeling of actually having an analytical toolbox to turn to when all of a sudden finding themselves with a video recorder on a cold morning in a nondescript suburb that is eagerly waiting to be documented. references ehn, billy & löfgren, orvar (2009) ‘ethnography in the market place’. culture unbound. journal of current cultural research. vol. 1, 2009:1-16. www.cultureunbound.ep.liu.se thomas, jim (1993) doing critical ethnography. london: sage. …………………………………………………… http://www.cultureunbound.ep.liu.se/ opinions 265 george e. marcus (university of california, irvine) “kim clark says that romney was ‘very smart, but also great with senior executives, really capable of developing relationships with them. you have to be really good on your feet, good at understanding what people’s concerns are and how they think.’” [comment on romney’s time as a business consultant at bain capital] nicholas lemann, “transaction man: mormonism, private equity, and the making of a candidate.” the new yorker, oct. 1, 2012 asked of ira glass, creator of npr’s this american life, “what was the last truly great book you read?” “michael lewis’s the big short… he’s telling the story of the mortgage crisis and his angle couldn’t be better: he follows the guys who knew it was coming and bet on it. this lets him explain how they knew and tell the story through these amazing contrarians…” new york times book review, sunday, august 19, 2012 “every contemporary ethnographic project faces in its formative moments a distinctive conundrum. the long-established anthropological archive does little in the way of providing access and, in fact, may frustrate entry to the kind of ethnographic settings that most of us seek to explore: epistemic communities in which emergent social and cultural forms are being devised and enacted by our subjects themselves. put bluntly, the methodological preoccupations and theoretical conceits that have both legitimated and enabled the powerfully imagined scene of fieldwork exchange between anthropologists and subject in the past are of diminished value or have been fully eclipsed in many settings today. yet, at precisely the moment that we find ourselves bereft of an intellectual apparatus, we learn that within these milieus of contemporary fieldwork, the role of the ethnographer is, incidentally, anticipated. in other words, a space is created for the ethnographer prior to her arrival on the scene. the ethnographer is thus no longer fully a stranger, but a figure whose presence is awaited and foreseen, if only figuratively. and, these expectations can establish manifold bases for innovative forms of ethnographic collaboration.” douglas holmes, prolegomenon to his study of central bankers, forthcoming, university of chicago press journal of business anthropology, 1(2), autumn 2012 266 what business anthropology is, or could be (the question posed by brian moeran), very much depends on the contemporary protocols of ethnographic research in the anthropological tradition; especially as they are challenged and implemented within the kind of elaborate, big (global?), deeply trans-cultural projects in which business, finance, government, philanthropies, universities, sciences, ngos, and social movements are complexly entangled in the name of collaborations, as the imperative norm of sociality in big projects, and of market principles as faith. of course, business has its own norms, forms, history – culture – and this has long defined a special field of scholarly research for a number of disciplines and inter-disciplines, in which anthropology has in fact joined in. but it is the broader entanglements and meshings, the embracing of the social and cultural itself – sensitivity to stakeholders, shareholders, and the ‘vision thing’ – led by advances in bio and information technologies that are perhaps distinctive of business in this era. this doesn’t mean that business is more virtuous – by far – but it is more sensitive to, and aware of, the complexity of its fields of operation. along with the marketing of ideas and technologies, it is perhaps a bit more open − both to speculative thinking, but with a short term tolerance for the time it takes to produce what it recognizes as results (not always synonymous with profits); and to a range of experiments that are social/cultural in their conception and often technical in their mode of production or implementation. i dipped into this tendency in one of the late editions volumes that i edited at the fin-de-siecle: corporate futures: the corporation as a culturally sensitive form (1997, university of chicago press). that work was perhaps short sighted about the broader (global) organizations and arrangements – new collaborations (contracts?) − then in formation between business, government, universities, and the ngo sector. however, during the first decade of the new century especially, the fieldwork of distinctively anthropological ethnographic research became defined by its positioning within these global assemblages (ong and collier 2005), to use one of the influential conceptual framing markers of this period. the long-established techniques and commitments of ethnographic research remain recognizable. it is how they are applied and situated, and how fieldwork, as a recursive space of movement in inquiry, is negotiated for each project of research, that to me constitute some interesting new challenges to what kinds of anthropological knowledge might emerge from research on business in encompassing assemblages. and here the determining framework in anthropology is the rationale of social, cultural, and indeed, moral critique in the name of which so much ethnography has been written and argued since the so opinions 267 called ‘reflexive turn’ after the 1980s debates about authority, representation, and the narrative practices of ethnographic writing. ethnographers must not only work within the networks of collaboration that define the assemblages in which fieldwork occurs, but they must become part of them, or at least build parts of them for their own purposes. this is the politics of collaborative fieldwork that lacks sufficient discussion among anthropologists, as well as a sufficient sense of experimentation with method. do ethnographers have the power, or the relationships of patronage and funding, to forge collaborations for their purposes within larger defining ones? this is unclear and an exciting question to explore. what kind of parasitic collaborations can anthropologists create to conduct their own fieldwork within the professional, expert designs of others? for the non-applied academic anthropologist outside the business of consulting, these questions define new challenges to constituting fieldwork as it has been traditionally conceived – as something the anthropologist makes, does, and is responsible for herself. i might mention here in passing two developing projects that in my view are especially impressive for their production of just such collaborative forms from a deeply ethnographic sensibility, but without the latter’s methodological orthodoxies. the field takes shape as a kind of ‘collaboratory’ in which the ethnographic is diffused in its highly designed management: the asthma files web project, created by mike and kim fortun (www.theasthmafiles.com); and meridian 180, dealing with asia, pacific, and u.s. relations, created and directed by annelise riles (www.meridian180.org). both create the sort of collaborative space which might generate fieldwork projects of the traditional kind, but which are prior to them, and are a kind of cocoon for their development. it seems to me that a business anthropology, or an anthropology of finance, or an anthropology of science etc., will increasingly come to depend on the formation, in various imaginative and cunningly adaptive forms, of just such cocoons, for ethnography as we have known it, within the norms and imperatives of particular cultures of collaboration – amid global assemblages. but this is still pretty much the future, or one future (but i think a very near one). in the meantime, scholarly specializations like business anthropology operate as specific individual fieldwork projects of research amid larger projects that organize the kinds of assemblages that i have evoked. here, the particular style or ideology of ethnographic practice matters crucially in terms of what kind of anthropological knowledge of/in business, science, finance, humanitarianism, etc. gets produced. i want to identify here three such distinctive contemporary styles, modes, or ideologies of ethnographic research in action, making their way http://www.theasthmafiles.com/ http://www.meridian180.org/ journal of business anthropology, 1(2), autumn 2012 268 in this world of assemblages. all three involve sustained participant observation, immersion, the cultivation of particular subjects, and a certain liking of ‘quirkiness’ that characterize the aesthetic of classic ethnography; all three derive from or react to the rationale of critique that has so defined research in anthropology for over two decades; and at their best, they overlap and are mutually informative. style does matter in terms of what ethnographic research produces as knowledge, and thus what shapes research in the complex arrangements and institutions that define business (or finance, or science and technology, or infrastructure, or any global assemblage). i’ll briefly characterize each of the three and expand a bit on the third, in which i have been most invested. i will call them comparative alterity, reflexive critique, and alignment with the found paraethnographic. comparative alterity much productive ethnography on contemporary assemblages is being produced by the key classic virtue and technique of anthropological analysis of ‘making it strange’ – partly by the broad comparative commitments of the discipline and partly by the exemplary and sophisticated creation of analytic frames of this kind. for pedagogy and illustration, anthropology has always played with exercises such as juxtaposing the ‘doctor’ and the ‘shaman’, for example. but the comparative use of material and concepts developed in anthropology’s historic and continuing ethnographic archive of world peoples and cultures in the ethnography of contemporary assemblages, is strong, vigorous, and perhaps motivated by a ‘revitalization’ movement in the discipline, which seeks to restore or reinstantiate its founding concerns. this style has been pioneered and most acutely and prominently practiced by marilyn strathern, in my opinion, and by now has created a defined circle of mutual reference and practice in ethnography that is linked to revitalizing concepts such as animism, the gift, and the past and ongoing study of ritual and exchange systems generally, as sources of theory, ideas, and analytic frames for application to understanding, say, reproductive technologies, digital intellectual property, and many business topics, such as innovation advertising, etc. the spirit, however, is to revitalize anthropology and its historic questions, rather than to provide an ethnography of the contemporary. i think of this work in anthropology linked to a similar sensibility in the analyses of influential actor-network theory, spawned by the research projects of bruno latour, first in science studies, but now applied more broadly (consider the key role of ‘actants’ and the revival of opinions 269 interest in animism in the style of ethnographic alterity that i want to identify). this style focuses primary attention on novel and emerging ontologies (for which analogies to older anthropological concepts are well suited), and pays far less attention to epistemological questions which were at the core of the emergence of the current project of critique that encompasses so much present anthropological research. in its reclamatory tendency, this style of ethnography – while creative in its exposure of new ontologies – is self-consciously a departure from the project of critique of the past two decades. for example, it might like to forget foucault for a while, and perhaps revive the discussions around the work of levi-strauss. reflexive critique i use this term to refer to a style of ethnographic work that has flourished since the so-called ‘theory’ period of the 1980s into the early 1990s, across disciplines that study culture and consider various forms of critique as the core practice of their research traditions. in anthropology, this period gave rise to many angles, tendencies, and theory sects, but its practice richly continues in a so-called ‘reflexive turn’, where the work of ethnography is theoretically framed in terms of a long history of critical theory and philosophy that remains its primary conceptual resource. it is also very interested in the new ontologies of assemblages, but does not de-emphasize epistemological questions that have shaped the predominant paradigm of critical research in recent anthropology. the contemporary is engaged and negotiated by ethnographers in constant dialogue with this theory tradition as a source of creating new analytic concepts (like those that come more from biology than culture today) and framing arguments. there is hope, and occasional experiment, in this style through ethnographic fieldwork to contribute to the increased (selfcritical) reflexivity of organizations, institutions, and processes in which the fieldwork is undertaken. equally important are the relation and contribution of ethnography, at the level of applied analytics, so to speak, to the great (mostly western) traditions of critical social theory and philosophy. alterity (emerging novel ontologies on a global scale) is a disciplinary concern here as well, but the intellectual resources of this style derive less from the tradition of concepts that anthropology itself has pioneered, and more from continued involvement in the rich revival of critical theory itself in recent decades, and its continuing vitality in research programs and applications, like critical ethnography. alignment with the found paraethnographic journal of business anthropology, 1(2), autumn 2012 270 this style is an offshoot, perhaps a more eccentric and experimental one, of the style of reflexive critique. it goes very deep, so to speak, for its concepts – and even its rationale as ethnographic research – into its relations with particular subjects and the politics of these relations, before it surfaces and returns to, or reintegrates itself with the disciplinary history and traditions of question-asking and argumentmaking specific to anthropology. it is premised on the idea, firstly, that any line of critique that anthropology or its inter-disciplines think of, and through, in the academic sphere has its embedded parallel expressions and anticipations in the multi-sited scene of contemporary fieldwork itself, though not necessarily as obviously as characterizing a readily discernible ‘native point of view’ of one particular actor or subject; and, secondly, that ethnography best proceeds by creating concepts for itself by finding and engaging with such found ‘paraethnographic’ thinking whatever its found forms (this is very much the epistemological integrated with the novel and the ontological that the alterity style so values). the three epigrams that begin this commentary are intended to express the spirit and strategy of this particular style of ethnography. its special problems are the politics of association, and the strategies of recursive movement in a field which crosses both expert and non-expert knowledge-making endeavors. it is the style most challenged by the imperatives of collaboration in assemblages – to become part of them, while retaining a sphere of independent inquiry. its key interest is in basing eventual ethnographic results, reported to the academy, on alignment (and collaboration) with found critical perspectives, and on their translation and processing while doing fieldwork. this raises novel questions of the forms of scholarly communication that exceed their conventional framings as problems of theory or method. instead, there is a commitment to a kind of experimental practice with what hans-jorg rheinberger, in his probing of experiment in scientific method, has called ‘epistemic things’, but, in ethnography, without the firm commitment that these epistemic things (the found paraethnographic) can be resolved through experiment into more precise, general, and enduring results. how experimental, epistemic things in fieldwork become ‘worked’ into something more, requires more active strategies than classic fieldwork techniques envision. studios, labs, and workshops in and alongside the pursuit of fieldwork move its evolving ideas around in ways that wouldn’t be done by actors and subjects themselves. when created in an ethnographically informed way, experiments with and on ‘epistemic things’ constitute trials of ethnography’s evolving ideas before they reach professional reception. they are a primary prototypical means by which they first address professional reception. this aspect of ethnography perhaps resembles the way that the best reporting pursues ‘stories’ (as in opinions 271 the quoted admiration for an account by michael lewis of the recent financial collapse by following/aligning with those who benefited from it). this is a style that i favor (with a personal history in the study of elites when that idea was still quite exotic in anthropology). the challenge is to work collaboratively within expert cultures as ‘other’, but without succumbing to their blind sides. of course, the politics, ethics, and normative aspects of this kind of work with ‘elites’, especially when it comes to business, is often foremost in anthropological discussions, which to some degree have retarded its development. but exemplary work, especially in science studies, and on other assemblages (in finance, law, and infrastructures, especially), has forged a more probing course for this essentially primary focus on deriving anthropological thinking from engagement/alignment with thinking in the field all the way up (or back) to its restatements in academic scholarly debates. at base, the differences in these three styles of ethnography concern how eventually anthropology gives value added or higher consciousness to what ethnography finds in the field. alterity finds it in comparative difference domesticated (viz., ontology over epistemology); reflexive critique finds it in the enduring bank/exchange of critical thought; alignment with the paraethnographic ferrets it out relentlessly in the recursive scenes of fieldwork by experimenting with moving situated expressions of perspectives around and engaging them with others in a way that actors otherwise would not. aligning with the paraethnographic in fieldwork – observing observers observing – leads to broader views but no resolutions. it finally shares intellectual responsibility for argument in a demonstrated way through experimental invention and the fortunes of fieldwork. ……and finally, a comment on the situation of academic anthropologists now entering, in substantial numbers and from a range of theoretical and topical angles, the space of concern and activity that has long been occupied by the many anthropologists who have diversely made their careers in consulting and applied positions. this has been a virtual ‘no man’s land’ of discussion, debate – and indeed, collaboration internal to anthropology – in the past. it has been more than occasionally a ground for tension and sensitivity. there are indeed differences of concern and emphasis. the professionally consulting anthropologist might ask: what is the value added (the ‘so what?’ question) of ethnographic critique in any of the three styles. or, s/he might say: “i already know this and am acting on it.” the academic anthropologist responds with suspicion that the professional business anthropologist is ‘selling out’, or that the full development of ingenious, critical thinking in what is observed and studied is stunted by the constraints and demands of research for hire. journal of business anthropology, 1(2), autumn 2012 272 happily, over the past decade, increasing, more interesting and productive discussions—and even collaborations (see the very encouraging and impressive account by maurer and mainwaring in this issue of the jba) – are emerging in a sustained manner in this contentious space, and there are more hybrid practices of anthropology in the academy and outside (though inside academia, working with social movements seems more acceptable as applied work than working with business; in assemblages, however, the lines can become very blurred). the mutual recent interest of academic and applied anthropologists in design practices, thinking and disciplines, seems to be a powerful medium for cross discussions and collaborations. i merely point to the founding and flourishing of the annual epic, ethnographic praxis in industry conference(s), and the stream of publications and discussions that they have encouraged. social science disciplines are highly self-conscious organizations within assemblages, and the internal debates in anthropology – including the long-standing academic-applied divide about how to study the contemporary ethnographically, and how to constitute its research in business, in science, in finance etc. – depends most cogently upon how fieldwork, with all of its classic virtues, gets established and invented in each project of research. collectively, we need better ways of seeing and understanding this process beyond discussion of it as a matter of methodology or political-moral virtue – whether in academic pursuits or professional consulting and non-academic employment. reference ong, aihwa and stephen collier (eds.) 2005. global assemblages: technology, politics and ethics as anthropological problems. london: blackwell. …………………………………………………… opinions 273 robert j. morais (weinman schnee morais, inc., new york) the first articles on business anthropology trickled into the marketing and advertising trade press during the 1980s, the tenor of each piece implying that the author was discovering the business value of anthropology, normally in the form of ethnography, for the first time. titles shouting, “it’s anthropological! research takes ‘cultural bent’” heralded a methodology that would enable business executives to discover naturalistic consumer behavior and mine deep marketing insights. over the past three decades, these kinds of articles have continued to appear; “designing for technology’s unknown tribes” ran in the august 2012 issue of mechanical engineering. also harkening back to the 1980s, business anthropologist pioneer steve barnett stoked the flames in the advertising trade press as he taught a coterie of anthropologists how to engage in commercial projects. articles and books by scholars and scholar-practitioners began to flow, and the pace has intensified recently. in the past five years, there has been a torrent of scholarly publications, conference meetings, and online posts that describe, analyze, and champion business anthropology. but what is business anthropology and what should it be in the future? my reflections are based upon my reading of others’ work and my own experience as an observant participant in marketing research and advertising. my current practice is that of a principal at a marketing research firm, with which i have been affiliated since 2006. for 25 years prior, i was an advertising executive, working in the areas of account management and account planning. my recommendations here are eminently pragmatic; they aim to advance the careers of business anthropologists first and contribute to the theory of business anthropology second. i have expressed some of these observations elsewhere, particularly in advertising and anthropology: ethnographic practice and cultural perspectives (2012) with timothy de waal malefyt, but i am offering additional thinking here. anthropology and ethnography in the trade press and in practice, business anthropology is often conflated with, and delivered as, ethnography. this is not surprising because business anthropologists have focused almost exclusively on ethnography as their unique selling proposition (usp). this mode of operation made sense in the early phase of marketing and design anthropology, when ethnography was a novel technique to access consumer needs, wants, attitudes, and brand experiences. the methodology sold well to its target customers, business executives, in part because ethnography was exotic and intriguing. corporate research and marketing managers, along with the advertising agency professionals they hired, embraced ethnography as more than a new research fad. it was a means to become smarter than their competition. ethnography promised to help them win in the marketplace, and it often did. journal of business anthropology, 1(2), autumn 2012 274 within about ten years, the success of ethnography as a commercial research method led to a proliferation of observational research “experts” whose education and experience had little connection to bona fide ethnography or anthropology. in most instances, corporate and advertising agency executives did not know the difference. observation of consumers in homes, supermarkets, offices, and so on by researchers with no anthropological training gained traction just as ethnography became a “go to” methodology within the marketing research toolkit. business anthropologists found themselves competing with self-defined ethnographers, and the work of untrained practitioners has clouded the value of more profound ethnographic marketing research. anthropological theory can inform ethnographic work and it can also provide frameworks to analyze consumer beliefs, ideas, sentiments, actions, and culture that are not directly observed. anthropological concepts can be applied in non-ethnographic research settings such as focus groups, too. with this in mind, business anthropologists should move beyond the singular application of ethnography as a research methodology. we should think of ourselves, and market our skills, as anthropologists who sometimes conduct ethnography. well executed, theoretically informed ethnography will always be valuable for industry. it will have new applications online, as robert kozinets contends when he advocates for netnography, an approach that business anthropologists have been slow to explore. however, thinking about ourselves as anthropologists in addition to ethnographers will lead us to a richer understanding of the interaction between commerce and culture. a usp is an effective way to market a brand; ethnography as a usp for business anthropologists is not the best tactic for building and sustaining an applied career. strategic engagement business anthropologists contribute profound interpretation and creative ideas, many of which can improve organizational operations, generate product innovations, ignite advertising executions, and drive business success. too few of us work intimately on the codification of marketing and advertising strategies, the blueprints for initiatives that follow our research projects. perhaps this is a function of the roles we play as anthropologists. our primary responsibility is research. although we are lauded for providing the foundation for imaginative strategies, we seldom contribute actively to the crafting of strategic documents. greater participation in the nuts and bolts, not to mention the blood, sweat, and tears, of the strategic development process will expand our research-only role. if business anthropologists wrote strategy in the way we write culture, our profession and our clients’ businesses would benefit. business immersion grant mccracken suggests that corporations should staff a position called chief culture officer. this high level role is more of an aspiration for business anthropologists than a realistic objective, but mccracken’s idea is a worthy one. anthropologists should have senior jobs at corporations, and perhaps opinions 275 someday we shall. in the meantime, those of us who are employed outside manufacturing companies must understand our clients’ businesses. we need to view marketing research projects, for example, in the context of overall client learning needs, their marketplace position, corporate capabilities, and company philosophy; we must be able to assess how research projects will help a client meet their market share and financial goals. our clients will be best served if we know their company’s and product’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats, the components of a swot analysis. many business anthropologists are employed within corporations in research and development (r&d), design, marketing, and organizational behavior. anthropologists who serve as mid-level employees within these kinds of companies should broaden their thinking about the range of functions they can perform. they could work as brand managers, for instance, where they would bring an anthropological sensibility to their assignments, but not necessarily be employed as full-time business anthropologists. some younger, and even a few established, anthropologists may wish to pursue graduate business education, through selected coursework, an mba, or a similar degree. others may begin their business careers as i did: my anthropology degree was put on a shelf when i entered advertising and learned the profession. only later in my career, when i grasped how the advertising industry functioned and became an employee responsible for managing clients and advertising projects, did i begin “using” my degree. through all or any of these means, business anthropologists will be able to understand more than just applied research; we will understand business. hybrid approaches anthropology is by nature interdisciplinary, borrowing from psychology, sociology, history, economics, literature, and biology, among many other fields. as malefyt and i suggest in advertising and anthropology, the use of psychology in particular connects to the way clients think about marketing research and often answers their learning needs more completely than an anthropological perspective alone. i am not suggesting that anthropologists abandon their core strengths and become research psychologists. rather, i propose that we apply methods and concepts from psychology (and other disciplines) when they enhance our comprehension of consumer behavior and attitudes and then link that analysis with interpretations of consumer culture. psychological anthropology and cultural psychology represent viable academic disciplines, and business anthropologists have much to gain by embracing them. my company employs both phd-level psychologists and anthropologists. we often work together combining, for example, anthropologically-informed analysis about ritual transformations with the psychological concept of mindfulness. business anthropologists who adapt analytical frameworks and methods from other fields will produce extremely valuable insights. the contribution they make to their clients will be expanded and their own practices will benefit as well. journal of business anthropology, 1(2), autumn 2012 276 a voice for public anthropology in a 2010 speech to the american anthropological association published in the september 2011 american anthropologist, jeremy sabloff lamented the lack of anthropologists in the role of public intellectual. “where have you gone, margaret mead?” he inquired. sabloff suggested that anthropology’s “rich diversity has a great deal to offer the public…policy makers in particular.” as is apparent in sabloff’s phrase, public anthropology defined as anthropology in the public interest is endemic to what is increasingly termed, “engaged anthropology.” when hans baer reviewed the field of engaged anthropology for american anthropologist in 2011, he did not mention business anthropology. the closest he came to our sub-discipline was the topic of corporate globalization, which he linked to “power and inequities in the world system”; the other topics he included were squarely in the realm of noble pursuits: global health, climate change, natural disasters, and indigenous rights. as i read baer’s article, i was struck by how marginalized business anthropology is even within applied anthropology. a glance at the articles in any given issue of human organization or practicing anthropology provides additional evidence of this state of affairs. only rarely do papers on business anthropology see print in these journals. i wonder: are business anthropologists pariahs within mainstream anthropology because we engage in commerce rather than in efforts to repair the world? moreover, despite the many business anthropology trade articles and the recent burst of articles and books, our efforts are still largely invisible to the public. speaking to sabloff’s comments on public anthropology as a whole, this should not be the case. business anthropology, because it functions in the world, can become a clear and powerful public expression of what anthropologists do and how we can contribute – and why anthropology matters. in fact, i believe that business anthropology can become a leading voice for public and engaged anthropology. much of business anthropology, especially studies in marketing, advertising and design, is inherently interesting to the public. clotaire rapaille and paco underhill, neither of whom is a conventional anthropologist or a contributor to scholarly literature, have written popular books about the application of anthropological ideas and techniques in advertising and marketing. more of us should share our studies with the public, while protecting client confidentiality, as we must. the rewards can be gratifying. i wrote a short article in march 2012 on behalf of the american anthropological association for the huffington post that analyzed the american television series mad men. based on the likes, tweets, shares, and emails, that piece probably gained greater readership than all of my scholarly publications combined (www.huffingtonpost.com/americananthropological-association/mad-men-anthropology_b_1354540.html). as business anthropologists publish and speak more widely, perhaps academics will accept that we are positioned especially well to help carry the banner of anthropology to a wider population. we will need to harden ourselves against http://www.huffingtonpost.com/american-anthropological-association/mad-men-anthropology_b_1354540.html http://www.huffingtonpost.com/american-anthropological-association/mad-men-anthropology_b_1354540.html opinions 277 skepticism within the academy about the ethics and worth of business anthropology, but we should write for the public nonetheless. conclusion business challenges are vexing. change is constant. competition is relentless. anthropologists who wish to engage in marketing, advertising, innovation, design, and organizational studies must adapt to these conditions. we should expand our professional selling proposition beyond ethnography and incorporate other disciplines. we must actively contribute to strategy formulation, understand our clients’ businesses, and take on more varied roles. we will advance business anthropology and anthropology as a discipline if we share our work with general as well as academic audiences. there are additional issues that business anthropology should address; professional ethics, student training, greater interaction with academia, and job creation, among many others. these concerns are being discussed in print, at conferences, and informally among practitioners and scholars. as we continue a dialog and institute actions on the possibilities and promise of business anthropology, it will become a better, stronger, and more successful enterprise. …………………………………………………… hirochika nakamaki (national museum of ethnology, suita, japan) i wish to respond to brian moeran’s invitation to talk about business anthropology by discussing its development in japan, under the rubric of keiei jinruigaku. there are two origins of the term keiei jinruigaku (business anthropology) in japan. one was created and fostered in the academy of international management cultures and transdisciplinary studies, led by motofusa murayama, professor at chiba university, and is sometimes referred to as the chiba school of keiei jinruigaku. its major publication has been keiei jinruigaku: human theory of animal vitality (edited by motofusa murayama and kikuo ogashiwa, tokyo: sōseisha, 1998). another group originated in the national museum of ethnology (commonly referred to as minpaku) as an inter-university research project called ‘the cultural anthropological study of the company and salaryman’, starting in 1993. it was organized around two persons: koichiro hioki and hirochika nakamaki, scholars of business administration and the anthropology of religion, respectively. six books have been edited by these two scholars and published by tōhō shuppan, in osaka, under the same title of keiei jinruigaku (but rendered into english as ‘the anthropology of administration’). two other books were journal of business anthropology, 1(2), autumn 2012 278 also put out by this group through the same publisher, with the title of ‘company [or corporate] anthropology’ (kaisha jinruigaku), consisting of collections of short essays on company life. now the question is: what has happened during the course of this fusion of two major disciplines? on the one hand, anthropologists began to study their own culture, instead of other cultures, and moreover focused on highly systematized organizations such as the company and bureaucracy. on the other hand, scholars of business administration also took part in fieldwork – something that they had not previously done. the first common target of research was the company museum. over the years, we visited more than one hundred such museums together or individually throughout japan. hioki, for instance, looked at the veneration of company founders in museum displays and wrote about their legitimacy. nakamaki, on the other hand, regarded the company museum as a pantheon, and compared displays of history and business as analogies of the buddhist temple and shinto shrine respectively, in that the former mainly concerns ancestor rites and the latter promotes mundane prosperity. our next project was to tackle company funerals. these flourished during the period of rapid economic growth (1960s and 70s) and continue to be observed in japan, although nowadays hotels are preferred to buddhist temples as ritual spaces. a company funeral is financed and managed by the company itself in honour of its vips, and is usually held at a much later date on a large scale, while the bereaved family has a smaller private funeral immediately after the deceased has passed away. we analyzed this peculiar phenomenon of a social event which represents the change of human and corporate relations in company life. more recently, we have challenged company mythology. hioki assumed three types of mythology: namely, the founding myth, hero myth, and brand myth. members of the group contributed papers in which they tried to decipher mythological themes in the business world. in the founding myth, for instance, the founder of a restaurant, who had had experience in a zen temple in his youth, established a training course for his employees to enhance their service with a ‘zen mind’. in the hero myth, there is a paper about an employee who was about to be punished as a scapegoat, but who suddenly became a hero through practicing the logic of ‘making gain after loss’. in the brand myth, a company history was treated as a mythological text and analyzed as a process of mythification in which an anecdote from the founder’s discourse, ‘try to do it’, became a company style of business. others among us have asserted that cultural organizations such as public museums and orchestras also produce myths. opinions 279 if there are distinguishing features of our group’s approach to keiei jinruigaku, they may be seen as follows. one is that we look at the company not only as gesellshaft but also as gemeinshaft – in other words, as cultural community. each company has its uniqueness as an ‘ethnic group’ and possesses rituals and myths. the company history registers its diachronic occurrences and the company museum displays its most valuable persons and items. the company is a cultural entity which is productive and creative in its ‘company climate’. another feature is that we try to interpret the meanings of company presence. our approach is not purely scientific, nor objective, but rather hermeneutic in the sense that we try to decipher ‘story making’ and ‘ritual practice’. in june 2010, an international forum was held by the leading members of the keiei jinruigaku research group at minpaku, and entitled ‘the first international forum on business and anthropology’. the term ‘business anthropology’ (without the ‘and’) was carefully avoided on the grounds that we feared that we might lose the participation of some scholars of business administration. distinguished scholars of business anthropology were invited including brian moeran, ann jordan, tomoko hamada connolly, mitchell sedgwick, dixon heung wah wong, han seung-mi and zhang jijiao, to name some of those who attended from abroad. publication of revised papers presented at the conference are forthcoming in english as business and anthropology: a focus on sacred space in the senri ethnological studies series put out by the national museum of ethnology (minpaku). …………………………………………………… alan smart (university of calgary) josephine smart (university of calgary) although we have done anthropological research on businesses since our doctoral work in hong kong in 1983-1985, our initial reaction on hearing about “business anthropology” was to wonder why it was necessary. was it not simply reinventing the wheel of economic anthropology? was it perhaps an attempt to pander to the new prospective patrons of the underfunded discipline of anthropology? an attempt to cordon off the more critical of those who work in economic anthropology? or simply another case of niche differentiation and empire building? we were, as a result, relieved on reading the introduction to the first issue of the journal of business anthropology by brian moeran and christina garsten. after explicitly denying the desire to empire build, journal of business anthropology, 1(2), autumn 2012 280 they make the excellent point that anthropologists who study businesses need broad scholarship, and that increasingly people come to work on and in businesses from a wide variety of backgrounds, not necessarily from the traditions of economic anthropology, anthropology of work, or applied anthropology. they also note that those working on businesses who are not by training anthropologists, but find the anthropological approach to enterprises useful, may be more likely to recognize themselves in the rubric of business anthropology. with that said, let us turn to the attractions and challenges of studying businesses. in our cases, we both began with a more traditional topic: informal sector practices. for alan smart, that involved squatter settlements, which in hong kong included substantial numbers of shopkeepers and small and medium factories. for josephine smart, her research focused on illegal street vendors in hong kong, mostly selfemployed entrepreneurs. our postdoctoral work on hong kong-invested factories in china moved us more into the study of what would more normally be recognized as businesses. this did not develop out of an inherent desire to study businesses, but rather emerged from the serendipitous encounters with small-scale hong kong investors in guangdong at a time when foreign investment was a radically new thing in post-mao china. their prominence in guangdong province conflicted with the mainstream discourse that to do business in china required patience, difficult contract negotiations, and a willingness to defer profits until the middle term, concentrating instead on coming to understandings and relationships across sharp cultural and institutional divides. as small investors could not wait for profits later, we became fascinated by the puzzle of how they could succeed at something that the business press insisted was so challenging for well resourced transnational corporations. although they had some cultural commonalities, there were also sharp divides for entrepreneurs from the “most capitalist place on earth”, or the freest market, as milton friedman saw hong kong doing business in what in the 1980s was a people’s republic still opposed to capitalism, although experimentation with “socialist market economies” was becoming acceptable. answering our questions embarked us on what has been 25 years of research into these dynamics. our involvement in what now might be called business anthropology arose from fundamental research questions about economic culture, political process, and social and cultural consequences of political and economic innovation, and later from a recognition that the contribution of hong kong (and taiwan) to china’s rise through the facilitation of hard currency exports to developed countries was helping to change the world in ways that we are still learning about, and the characteristics of which are constantly transforming. the recent rapid growth of outward direct foreign investment from china to africa, opinions 281 southeast asia, latin america, canada and australia-new zealand is a current illustration of the emergence of fascinating new dynamics and puzzles. the other reason for doing work that always results in raised eyebrows when we tell people that we are anthropologists and doing this kind of work derives from a strong commitment to the relabeling of anthropology in the postcolonial era from the study of “primitive societies” to the study of human ways of life in its full range of diversity across time and space. if we are ever to deserve that grandiose job description, we cannot leave the study of the “capitalist heartlands” to economists, sociologists and business schools. the polanyian substantivist move of treating non-capitalist economies as socially embedded came with the unfortunate cost of appearing to accept the capitalist side of the great transformation as purely economic and explainable by formalist economics. but the more we study capitalist businesses, the more we discover the ways in which they are shot through and fundamentally dependent on human social relations, ideologies and religious beliefs; solidarities and conflicts; reciprocity, trust, faction and feud; and all the other human complexities and capacities that will be carefully analyzed in the virtual pages of this journal’s hopefully great future. in closing, we would like to add our comments to two issues that were briefly raised in the introduction by moeran and garsten in the first issue. both comments are directed at the widely held ideal of upholding a holistic approach in anthropological research, and the challenges this entails. within the broad arena of economic anthropology, there is a general understanding and practice that the holistic approach is intended to answer broader questions about society, human existence, and the directions of social-economic change. in our own earlier work on the informal economies in hong kong, the squatter housing and illegal street hawking sectors were used to interrogate colonial governance, economic development and cultural dynamics in hong kong society over time. we are in good company, given that many researchers share our conviction in the holistic approach with a strong emphasis on proper historical contextualization. yet it must be noted that such an approach is very demanding, and for reasons of either limited resources such as time or funding, or a diminished recognition of the merit of holism, some research undertaken by anthropologists and other scholars who profess to use anthropological methods turns out to be narrow exercises confined strictly within the boundaries of the “organization” or “enterprise” or “company”, and restricted to interviews without participant-observation. in the field of business anthropology, there is a potential risk that the label “business” may be misinterpreted by some to see the physical journal of business anthropology, 1(2), autumn 2012 282 structure and boundary of the corporation/company/sector as a universe in and of itself. the second comment points to the ethnographic challenges in doing business anthropology, which often requires the anthropologist to “study up”. at the risk of over generalizing, we would suggest that by and large anthropology had its beginning in the study of people “below” us and continues to study down because it is easier to accomplish. in our current research in canada, the cattle/beef farmers are happy to open their doors to us to look into the social and economic impact of bovine spongiform encephalopathy (mad cow disease) on farm production, and animal management. they want their voices heard because they believe the government has not paid them due attention, which in their mind explains a great deal about the ineffectiveness of government policies in counteracting the outcomes of agricultural crisis. we do not see them as “below” us, but they see us as having a greater chance to influence government policy than they do (which, of course, is not true). in contrast, gaining access to government officials and industry people to speak with us is difficult enough, and when you get to interview them, they are often saying nothing more than what their department or company website will tell you. the challenge of studying up is that the people you want and need to speak with are in positions of power to exclude you or to confine your access to people, information and place. participant observation takes on new levels of difficulty when you study up. we live with farm families on their property when we do fieldwork in canada; we cannot imagine anyone within the government or a company giving us the open access to executive meetings and industrial secrets that define their competitive edge in a dog-eat-dog world of global business. should access be allowed, this might be only on conditions that suit the enterprise’s agenda and interests. in our research, even the cattle producers are careful not to volunteer information about how and what to feed their cattle in their different stages of growth so that their secret to success in the feed-weight gain ratio will not be lost. there is definitely a lot to think about in terms of the scope and scale of our research in business anthropology, and the necessary adjustments to the ethnographic approach and strategies that can support our research endeavours. …………………………………………………… opinions 283 richard swedberg (cornell university) in the e-mail from brian moeran, in which he asked me to say something about business anthropology, he described what he wanted as “informal opinion pieces about different scholars’ understandings of business anthropology and what it should or might consist of”. i found this description very inspiring, but want to warn the reader that i may have produced more of an xmas list of what i myself would like than a picture of what brian moeran and his colleagues have in mind. my initial reaction to the term ‘business anthropology’ was very positive. my view of economics has over the years become increasingly pessimistic, in the sense that i see more and more distance between what is going on in reality and what i find discussed in the economics journals. the financial crisis that erupted in the fall of 2008 with the collapse of lehman brothers is only one of many examples of something that came as a total surprise to academic economists. if you live in the united states, as i do, you often learn more about the so-called real economy from reading the new york times than from studying the american economic review. this is where business anthropology, to my mind, comes into the picture. by closely observing what actually happens, rather than by engaging in theory-driven research of the type that economists tend to engage in, we would have a much better chance of understanding what is actually going on. modern economics is very abstract; while modern anthropology is refreshingly concrete. modern economics assumes actors are rational; while modern anthropology thinks the rational element is exaggerated, to the extent that it even exists in the first place. one can continue along these lines and say that business anthropology represents (or should represent) the very opposite of homo economicus on point after point. i am not opposed to engaging in this type of exercise, but since it belongs to a genre that is pretty common by now, i will restrict myself to one more point of comparison. this is that while homo economicus does not have a language and does not communicate (except through prices), this is not the case with the actor, according to business anthropology. he or she can actually speak, understand the meaning of things, and invest meaning in what he or she does. in brief, economists lack the concept of language as well as culture. are there any negative sides to business anthropology or to the associations that one may get while thinking about this expression? i must admit that i started to react a bit negatively to the term ‘business’ in ‘business anthropology’ after a while. the reason for this was that i found it restrictive. i thought that it was restrictive because the term ‘business’ is often used these days to indicate a firm or, more precisely, the management part of a firm. in other words, it excludes workers, support staff and the like. journal of business anthropology, 1(2), autumn 2012 284 but in thinking about this issue, i thought that one can also take the term business in a wider sense; and that is probably also what business anthropology intends to do. a business is always more than a business. for one thing, a business includes everyone who works there. and everything they do. while people are at work they do many more things than just work. they get tired, they daydream, they get sick, they make friends, they quarrel, they are happy, they are unhappy. just think of how many people find their partners and spouses at work! in continuing to think about this issue i also suddenly remembered alfred marshall. had not marshall – this man who was the founder of modern economics, the teacher of keynes, a truly empirical as well as an idealist economist – tried to define economics, precisely by referring to this wider meaning of the term ‘business’? i took a look in my copy of principles of economics (1890) and found that i was right. marshall begins his book by stating that “political economy or economics is a study of mankind in the ordinary business of life” (marshall 1986:1; my emphasis). he then goes on to say that “it [economics] is on the one side a study of wealth; and on the other, and more important side, a part of the study of man” (ibid.; my emphasis). a little later in his book, he says that “economics is a study of men as they live and move and think in the ordinary business of life [and it is mainly about] man’s conduct in the business part of his life” (marshall 1986:12). after having reconciled myself with the help of marshall to the term ‘business’ in ‘business economics’, my mind started to wonder in another direction. this time it was about the relationship between business anthropology and the project that i am currently engaged in, and deeply passionate about, namely how to revive social theory by shifting the emphasis to theorizing or more, precisely, to creative theorizing (swedberg 2012). maybe there was some link there, i thought. maybe one can be passionate about business anthropology as well. after all, it was after my lecture on theorizing at the copenhagen business school in the spring of 2012 that brian moeran had come up to me and told me about the project of business anthropology. “i think there are some points in common”, he said. i agree and i think that there exist at least two important links between the two enterprises. on the one hand, there are some parallels when it comes to understanding the general way in which studies are to be carried out. both argue that studies should be driven by facts, not by theory. to this i would add that when you try to theorize creatively, you have to start by observing what is happening in as relaxed and sensitive a way as possible, in order to get a good sense of the object of study. in proceeding in this way, at this very early stage of the study, one can pretty opinions 285 much use any sources, from poems and music to archives and statistics. the one and only rule is: anything goes! having now something to theorize about, you can start theorizing in the more narrow sense of the term. you first try to find a name for the phenomenon you are studying; you put together a few concepts, to tighten things up; perhaps you also construct a typology, a classification or the like. and then comes the tentative explanation. all of this, it should be emphasized, takes place in the context of discovery: that is, well before one draws up the research design for how the main study (as i call it) is to be carried out. one important reason for theorizing at this early stage is to provide an independent place for theory, well before the issues of methods and how to prove one’s case to the scholarly community come onto the agenda. by proceeding in this way, you maximize the chances for finding something new. you also maximize your chances of developing a new theory to go with the facts. now, will business anthropologists also go about things in the way i have just described? perhaps yes, perhaps no. but regardless of the answer, i think that if business anthropologists do want to develop creative and new theory, they will have to be factrather than theorydriven. and they will have to assign theorizing an independent place in the research process. and they will have to be passionate about what they do. the second link between business anthropology and theorizing that occurred to me is the following. to succeed, theorizing will by necessity have to be experimental and go against many of the existing ways of doing social science. it will have to develop new ways of approaching the old and important questions: how do you gather data; how do you construct concepts; how do you explain things? this always means taking a risk and of failing. but this is the way it goes when you try to innovate. failures are part of finding the way; and without failing it is not possible to progress. i obviously do not want to end on the theme that business anthropology will fail. but i do hope that its proponents are filled with a passionate interest for their project and that they believe that in order to succeed you also have to be ready to fail. you have to take risks to accomplish something and you have to do what you do with passion. in social science as in love, lord tennison was right: 'tis better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all. journal of business anthropology, 1(2), autumn 2012 286 references marshall, alfred. 1986. principles of economics: an introductory volume. 8th ed. london: macmillan. swedberg, richard. 2012. “theorizing in sociology and social science: turning to the context of discovery”, theory and society 41:1-40. …………………………………………………… richard wilk (university of indiana) i have decided to use this opportunity to talk about business anthropology from what is, perhaps, a slightly unusual angle: that of an anthropology of bad business. in 1985 while working as a contract employee of the usaid office in belize, i joined the organizing committee for the new belize institute of management and helped write the proposal to fund the organization. one of the statistics provided by the local chamber of commerce and industry struck me. in 1983 there had been 102 new business starts in the country with a capital investment of over us$100,000, quite a few considering the tiny size of the country and its general poverty. but at the end of 1984 only three were still in business. i remember being shocked by these figures. how did the country expect to keep attracting investors? political leaders were talking about getting belizeans who had migrated to the usa to come home and start businesses – did they have any idea what a dismal prospect they were offering? they were also trying to attract chinese investors through an “economic citizenship” program, which offered a belize passport for an investment of $50,000, but the chinese did not want to buy anything except urban rental property. while doing historical work on food history in the national archives, i ran across some court registries that showed an equally high rate of business bankruptcy in 19th century british honduras. the main business of the colony – mahogany logging – required a good deal of capital, and whenever a financial crisis in europe or the usa tightened credit and lowered prices, logging companies went bankrupt and were bought out by creditors. by the end of the 19th century only one large timber business was left, and it was bailed out by the colonial government in the great depression, by then ‘too big to fail.’ history tells us that the area was always a haunt of buccaneers, pirates, fugitive slaves and other outlaws engaged in illicit business and opinions 287 smuggling. several early european colonization schemes in the region were promoted through stock ‘bubbles’ in europe, leaving colonists stranded with no means of support. exiles from the american revolution and civil war and other regional conflicts like the caste war in yucatan fled to belize, but many moved on because there were better opportunities elsewhere. over the years, as i did other kinds of archival research, i collected folders full of economic development schemes promoted by a succession of colonial governments, from bananas to ramie, most of which had eventually collapsed or petered out. my favorites were the perennial projects to commercialize the nuts of the cohune palm tree, usually to produce edible oil from the kernels but sometimes chemicals or charcoal from the extremely hard shell. these rose and fell with great regularity, and one cohune oil plant even built a railroad and employed 300 workers before going bust right after wwi. as i continued visiting in belize, i could not help but run into eager investors in hotel bars and restaurants, on ranches and farms, and later the tourist resorts springing up all over the country. some of their schemes were new – shrimp farms and hatcheries, zip lines, organic farms and ecotourism resorts – but there were also some old favorites like logging, cattle ranches, banana farms and the perennial cohune oil. of course not all of them failed. as in the past, a few thrive, a few more survive, but all are shadowed by ruins – often hidden far off the highways or covered by encroaching forest. abandoned ranches, a warehouse tipped at a crazy angle on hasty and insecure swampy foundations, overgrown shrimp farms, and traces of old oil exploration seismic lines, barges lost on the barrier reef, phantom housing developments with their optimistic street signs and crumbling ‘for sale’ billboards. not far up the road from where we have built our own house, there is a seven-floor condominium/casino complex with its own international-size airport, unfinished and now slowly decaying. those who bought condominiums and time-shares clamor for refunds, while the principals answer charges in a canadian court, and a major investor is listed by the usa treasury department as a member of the mexican zeta drug cartel. businesses fail in belize today for the same reasons they founder in many developing countries. they are often undercapitalized and poorly planned, and cannot survive long enough to start showing a profit. foreign investors are often deceived by the relatively low price of land into thinking that other costs of doing business will be low, and are then shocked by the high cost of labor, fuel, and skilled services. taxes, permits and other government regulations are simpler than most other places in latin america, but navigating the bureaucracy still requires patience, some cultural knowledge, and some well-placed contacts. this is where business anthropology has traditionally helped, by explaining how to deal with cultural differences when working in another journal of business anthropology, 1(2), autumn 2012 288 culture. a nigerian sociologist, as well as a couple of expatriate americans, have written guides to doing business in belize, and there are many websites and bulletin boards that offer advice, and even long satirical poems warning about the dangers of jumping in without bothering to learn about the country and its people.6 business anthropology helps explain why chinese family businesses are so successful in belize – they have rapidly expanded in the last few years as new immigrants arrive from the mainland using family credit to build hundreds of new retail outlets and restaurants, even in small villages. the great success of the mennonite colonies in belize has also attracted social scientists, who explain how an ethos of hard work, religious enforcement of frugality, and community economic collaboration has led to their domination of agribusiness in the country. i believe there is a gap in business anthropology, though, when it comes to what drives people to come to belize, and places like it, to start their businesses in the first place, businesses doomed to failure before they even open. the iguana farm, the organic peanut butter factory, the nude resort in a mangrove swamp. some of the people i have interviewed over the years talk about their relationship with belize as a kind of romance, in which they ‘fell in love’ with the place. many stories start with a holiday visit, a random meeting with a belizean in another country, or even looking down on the country from an airplane window. some prospective investors, no doubt, are lured by the prospect of quick and easy money. but it is much more common to find people who have been prudent and financially very conservative all their lives, but who lose all their common sense and caution after seeing a caribbean beach property or sunrise from a rainforest waterfall. a sensible young viennese couple told me about how they had come to belize for a visit, and within a week had made a deal to put their life savings into building a gourmet austrian restaurant (belize’s first!) in an impoverished garifuna village, near two modest all-inclusive beach resorts. further down the road an american is building a sports bar on a deserted stretch of road. who knows, they may be a success – like the italian couple who run a gelateria a few more kilometers away. more likely they will just be building more ruins, joining the restaurant shaped like a mayan pyramid, and the geodesic dome bar, standing empty for years. you might think that people might notice that many of the occupied beach houses and condos, as well as most of the working hotels, restaurants, and dive shops sport “for sale” signs, and there are plenty of other vacant properties looking for tenants. but architects and 6 http://ambergriscaye.com/forum/ubbthreads.php/topics/426237/belizean_poem_o de_to_the_incom.html opinions 289 contractors tell me that investors rarely want to buy someone else’s dream house or business; they want to build their own, often in obsessive detail. such blindness cries out for an anthropological investigation. initially i had a very simplistic idea of a kind of generalized “tropical fantasy” that attracted people from europe and the usa to places like belize, not just as tourists, but as active investors, residents, and retirees. this would be akin to the kind of orientalism discussed by said, or the romantic notions of heightened sexuality that arise in studies of cruise ships and caribbean sex tourists. as i have met more foreign and local business owners, both successful and unsuccessful, i have found much more complexity than i expected, and not very much scholarship to help me understand it or put it in a broader context. many journalists and visitors single out particular ethnic groups as ‘lazy’ and say others have no ‘entrepreneurial spirit’ or ‘interest in business.’ anthropologists tend to distance themselves from these stereotypes for perfectly understandable reasons. but it is also clear that culture does have an effect on what kind of dreams, goals and schemas people follow in their lives, what kinds of opportunities they grasp. and anthropology should offer a serious analysis of good and bad business, of the kinds of enterprises likely to fail, and grounded explanations for why or why not. forensic anthropology has reached new heights of popularity on tv because it promises a supernatural ability to solve mysteries. here is another, more useful everyday kind of mystery that business anthropology can solve through its own form of forensic analysis. i am asking for a return to some very ambitious goals in the anthropology of business, to questions of the scope and breadth of those max weber was asking long ago, or those approached by geertz in his ambitious peddlers and princes. the drive to be an economic player in a foreign land has been one of the most important impulses behind the expansion of global capitalism for many centuries now – perhaps for several millennia. it remains a vitally important question that calls for further attention from a new generation of comparative ethnographers. …………………………………………………… journal of business anthropology, 1(2), autumn 2012 290 coda brian moeran each of the two words, ‘business’ and ‘anthropology’, presents its difficulties. what do people mean when they use them separately? we all know that ‘anthropology’ isn’t a monolithic discipline, whose tenets and practices are universally adhered to. anthropology departments in universities in the united states, for example, often make use of the concept of ‘four fields’ to encompass the differences between cultural, social, physical and applied anthropologies. yet, in general, american anthropology tends to be ‘cultural’ in its leanings, whereas anthropology in scandinavia and the uk is very definitely ‘social’. but several european countries (like germany, for instance) also have their ‘cultural’ forms of anthropology, which they usually call ‘ethnology’. each of these different takes on what the discipline of anthropology is affects how those interested in the study of business will go about their research. one or two of those expressing their opinions here explicitly note their difficulty with the word ‘business’; one or two others subconsciously avoid it where possible in their main arguments. so what do we mean by ‘business’? webster’s encyclopedia unabridged dictionary of the english language defines business in a number of different ways: as an occupation or trade; as the purchase and sale of goods in an attempt to make a profit; as an individual person, partnership, or corporation engaged in such activity through commerce, manufacturing or provision of services; as patronage revealed in, for instance, a store’s volume of trade; as the place where such commercial work is carried on; and as that with which a person is principally and seriously concerned (like ‘words are a writer’s business’). in addition, the dictionary entry lists more than a dozen other colloquial meanings – from assignment to application, by way of earnestness, harsh treatment and defecation – that can lead us into thinking that we understand one another when we use the word, when, perhaps, we don’t. this semantic density can cause confusion both historically and across cultures. six or seven centuries ago, our ancestors thought of ‘business’ only as industry, diligence, and thus occupation. other european languages may have equivalent words that cover at least some of the same meanings as ‘business’ does in english, but chinese and japanese, for example, do not. as a result, scholars in these countries are obliged to come up with neologisms of one sort or another for their interpretations of ‘business anthropology’, which they then supplement with age-old words like ‘administration’, ‘commerce’, ‘management’, ‘work’, and so on. so what happens when we combine the multiple nuances underpinning these two words, ‘business’ and ‘anthropology’? the opinions 291 opinions published here in many ways reflect our view that it isn’t all that easy to say what ‘business anthropology’ is. is it a kind of anthropology whose proponents study ‘business’ organizations and forms of one sort or another in a more or less objective manner? (in which case, are they merely conflating business anthropology with ethnography, as bob morais suggests?) or are these anthropologists themselves somehow involved in the businesses concerned, as formally identified anthropologists, or consultants, or marketers, or something like that? in which case, is business anthropology something that anthropologists do for, as well as in, business? if so, can or should it be distinguished from the kind of research conducted on business relations − or, as bill maurer and scott mainwaring argue in their contribution to this issue of the jba, with business partners − by academic anthropologists? is it, in the end, as howard becker posits, nothing more than good anthropology ‘done in an organization or community that engages in business as conventionally defined’? as these opinion pieces clearly demonstrate, the answers given to each of these questions necessarily influence the way in which one goes about talking about how best to theorize research conducted in this branch of anthropology. an anthropologist who strives for an ‘objective’ understanding of a business organization may well – and in the eyes of many here, should – make use of age-old anthropological theories based on studies of gift-giving, magic, totemism, social dramas, and so on. this kind of approach, following the example set by anthropological studies of development, we may – with ulf hannerz − want to call the ‘anthropology of business’. one who works in or for a business organization, however, may be more concerned with immediately practical results that result from what pedro oliveira refers to as an ‘ongoing translation’ of equivocations, which then has a positive effect on his or her employer’s marketing strategy or financial base line. this, perhaps, is closer to what we mean by ‘business anthropology’. for its part, ‘anthropology with business’ suggests a co-creation of interests, methods and theorizing that combines these two approaches and points to an intriguing way forward for us all. as orvar löfgren points out, we need to improve the dialogue between those conducting traditional academic research, on the one hand, and consultants and business ethnographers working in applied research, on the other. this, indeed, is one aim of the jba. whichever approach we prefer to adopt – and much will depend on circumstance regarding that ever-changing choice − no one of them should be seen as objectively ‘better’ than the others (precisely because of the different contexts in which research is conducted). some of us may have an overall predilection for business anthropology rather than for the anthropology of business, or vice versa. others may conclude that ‘anthropology with business’ offers a je ne sais quoi – in george marcus’s journal of business anthropology, 1(2), autumn 2012 292 term, perhaps, a ‘collaboratory’ − that the other two approaches do not. each makes its special contribution to the overall study of business relations, networks, and organizations of all kinds. but each also tends to have its own preoccupations and illuminating moments that are not necessarily shared by the other. anthropologists working with, in or for businesses, for example, may have to gauge and pay close attention to a client’s expectations (oliveira), while anthropologists of business may well be looking over their shoulders at the latest thing in theory coming from the pens (or keyboards) of colleagues located in institutions that are core to the discipline. the trick, if there is one, is to see business anthropology and the anthropology of business as complementary approaches and somehow to combine the two (maurer and mainwaring). but there should, perhaps, be more to business anthropology (let us, for simplicity’s sake, stick to the single term for now). richard wilk tellingly reminds us that businesses fail, and that it is our job as anthropologists to apply forensic analysis to reasons for such failures. indeed, we all know from fieldwork experience that it is when things do not go according to plan, when harmony breaks out into discord, that hitherto hidden social norms and assumptions are revealed. oh for the detailed case study, then, of a business failure, rather than the endless successes poured out by the harvard business school press! business, in dominic boyer’s words, ‘offers rich terrain for anthropological reflection’ of all kinds. this includes extending our anthropological lens to examine the apparent trivia of business, as hannerz also suggests – from popular business literature to business english, by way of frequent flier airport lounges and business school rankings. it also invites us to delve into business histories, in the exemplary manner that ralph hower, for example, did for advertising in the united states back in 1939. the history of an advertising agency: n.w. ayer & son at work 1869-1939 is still one of the very best sociological analyses of advertising ever written. so, what might a programme for business anthropology look like? one obvious theme – in particular, for cultural anthropologists studying business – is that of culture itself. this may take many forms. for instance, hirochika nakamaki observes, in the context of the development of ‘administration anthropology’ (keiei jinruigaku) in japan, that a focus on business had led many anthropologists to focus on their own, rather than on other, cultures. at the same time, it has become accepted that ‘culture’ refers not just to people and nations, but to those people’s work environments – either in companies (perceived as cultural communities) or in entire industries. indeed, there is much to be said in support of the argument that those employed in the advertising or whaling industries, for example, share more in common with one another across national opinions 293 cultural frontiers than they do with bankers, farmers, or shopkeepers within their own culture. corporate culture is often, of course, a management tool, as howard becker notes of a fellow traveller who prided himself on having changed the work culture of his company without, apparently, consulting any of his employees. it is, perhaps, for this reason that some of those employed in business can react quite strongly to the word. ‘culture?’ exclaimed one man employed in a swedish utilities company in response to one of orvar löfgren’s students who was trying to explain what cultural analysis was. ‘damn it! we don’t deal with culture here. we sell electricity!’ the challenge for this student was to work collaboratively within a professional culture as ‘other’, without succumbing to its blind side (marcus) – a challenge that is at the heart of the article in this issue by bill maurer and scott mainwaring, who describe in detail the plural possibilities opened up by an anthropologist working with colleagues employed in business. those who work with organizations like the swedish utilities company or intel have to explain ‘culture’ in fine detail, and make it relevant to their employees in such a way that they can move forward and act. for this, they need to take part in the nuts and bolts of cultural processes (morais). at the same time, eric arnould argues, business anthropologists must be prepared to ‘push back against the relentless naturalizing of cultural expressions’ resulting from, in particular, psychology, behavioural science and biological determinism. we must learn on occasion to resist business, as well as work with, for, or in it. in this context, marianne lien asks how we can account for the persuasive power of the market model, as well as of economics as a whole, and suggests that we focus on what makes the economists’ model so strong, rather than trying to prove it wrong. richard swedberg provides a partial response to this question. the founder of modern economics, alfred marshall, defined the newly emergent discipline as the study of wealth, on the one hand, and ‘of men as they live and move and think in the ordinary business of life [and it is mainly about] man’s conduct in the business part of his life.’ what makes the economic model strong, then, is its focus on the allure of wealth, not people, even though marshall himself argued that ‘the study of man’ was ‘the more important side’ of the discipline. if more anthropologists knew this, they might be less resistant to that branch of their discipline that seeks to examine the business of commerce – a resistance noted above by many commentators. the chances are, though, that they won’t. anthropologists seem inclined to align themselves with artists and others working on the creative side of cultural production: anything to do with money and profit-making is somehow tainted, and not to be touched with an intellectual bargepole! journal of business anthropology, 1(2), autumn 2012 294 what is clear from this broad discussion of culture and the economy is that business anthropology must, first and foremost, engage with theory. at the moment, and this is a criticism of many different disciplines, there is far too much citation for citation’s sake of other people’s work. this is in large part to be blamed on the mutually reinforcing structures of university and business school education, on the one hand, and of the journal publishing industry, on the other. but, ultimately, we have nobody to blame but ourselves for getting into this mess in the first place. for the most part, citations tell us little more than that: (a) the writer is positioning her/himself in a field without saying anything of import about your work; or, as part of this endeavour, (b) is a member of a mutual back-slapping group of scholars who cite only themselves, among whom you yourself may be fortunate enough to be a part; or (c) s/he cites you because s/he thinks your work is worse than useless and needs to be damned out of existence. but rarely does the person who cites your work engage with it through processes of examination, questioning, analysis, comparison, rephrasing and so on. worse, too many citations (like that of ‘geertz [1973]’ to reference ‘thick description’ in the management studies literature) are clearly secondary citations. there is a tendency for many of us, alas, to cite someone without actually bothering to read the work in question − as the reappearance, time and time again, of incorrect attributions, dates and/or pages, as well as, even, the spelling of an author’s name, attests! business anthropologists, then, must be rigorous in this regard. although we may make use of the occasional general anthropological or sociological theory (put forward by victor turner or pierre bourdieu, for example), we do not engage enough with what others in the field have written – as arnould remarks of consumer culture studies, in particular. as a result, and i am extremely conscious of this in the areas in which i myself have conducted research over the years, we have a lot of theories out there that have never been put to the test in other contexts. the challenge is not only how to overcome this lacuna, but also how to provide an independent place for theory which, somehow, must take place in a context of discovery (swedberg). it is precisely this that makes business anthropology, with its focus on fieldwork as its primary methodology, potentially so radical. this invites a second programmatic statement that is so obvious it shouldn’t need saying. we must be comparative. this entails adopting a holistic approach, as alan and josephine smart point out, which does not confine our analyses to the narrow confines of an ‘organization’, ‘company’, or ‘enterprise’, but extends outwards to embrace a field of relations that contains political ideals, religious beliefs, socio-cultural values, and so on – in other words, society as a whole. moreover, those anthropologists working in, on, for or against businesses must compare opinions 295 their findings with those of their colleagues working both in other branches of business and in other societies. we must continuously challenge the institutional, as well as ontological, boundaries reproduced through such delineations as ‘business’, ‘markets’, and ‘economics’ (lien). in other words, we need to adopt a broad perspective that does not limit comparison to other cultures. this is an essential aspect of engagement. thirdly, as hinted above, we should be discussing methodology far more than we do. as anthropologists, we have been brought up to learn about and practice – occasionally even to worship – the defining feature of our discipline: participant observation-style fieldwork. but there are two things about fieldwork that, as business anthropologists, we need to keep in mind: firstly, more often than not, we are ‘studying up’ (the smarts); and secondly, ethnography is not unique to the discipline of anthropology as a research methodology (morais). in recent years, some of our colleagues have argued over its former practices and suggested acceptable new ways of going about our craft: multi-sited fieldwork, for example, or paraethnography. with the digital revolution, too, anthropologists have turned to other ways of recording ethnographic material than by traditional means of pencil and notebook. some use video and audio equipment; others resort to various interactive fora made available by the internet. business anthropologists are in the forefront of these trends, challenging the ways in which fieldwork has traditionally been conceived and practised. they often take for granted their own everyday practices that would surprise their academic colleagues (like the fact that consultants of one sort or another may have to share their video material with their clients at the end of each day, for example). it strikes me that they could, and should, be leading the way in this particular field of anthropological interest. as george marcus says, business anthropology ‘will increasingly come to depend on the formation, in various imaginative and cunningly adaptive forms, of... ethnography as we have known it, within the norms and imperatives of particular cultures of collaboration.’ fourthly, to count ourselves seriously as business anthropologists, we need to engage with anthropological theory far more than we do. the last thing we want is for business anthropology to be ‘the poor step child of management, marketing, finance or accountancy, or simply reduced to a method of rendering such practices more efficient and affective’ (arnould). clearly, some anthropological theories – postmodernism, subaltern studies, deterritorialization – may not immediately seem that pertinent to our research and experiences. however, other classical concepts – such as animism, totemism, magic, and the gift – can and should be revitalised (marcus; see also oliveira). there is much that we can pursue as we continue to make use of our classic disciplinary technique of making the strange familiar, and familiar strange. journal of business anthropology, 1(2), autumn 2012 296 theoretical topics that immediately come to mind include in no particular order: family businesses, gender, law, entrepreneurship, markets, money and exchange, material culture, power relations, economic, social and cultural capital, limited stock companies, networks, bureaucracies, frame analysis, meetings, ritual, symbolism and religion, cct (consumer culture theory), globalization, development – the list can go on. the fact that it can go on, and on, and on, is of course a potential weakness, since it is in danger of becoming borges’s map of the world (arnould). too many theories may well merely dissipate the potential strength of business anthropology, in improving organizational operations, generating product innovations, igniting business executions, and driving its success (morais). this is not to say that we should ignore some theories and not others; after all, our fieldwork induces unanticipated lines of theorizing as we align ourselves with what marcus calls ‘the found paraethnographic’. but still, we might think about focussing our theoretical endeavours in order to be able to ‘configure’ our field of study. the questions then become: what directions should such theoretical endeavours take? and how can we build upon them effectively? should we go beyond conventional forms of scholarly communication and commit ourselves to experiment, as löfgren encourages his students to do? how can we make business anthropology, in howard becker’s phrase, ‘a source of new ideas’ (remembering that most of them won’t work)? how best should we be prepared to fail and, with richard swedberg, theorize experimentally? we all have our different theories about theories, but what i personally would like to see over – say – the next ten years is business anthropologists, or anthropologists of business, engaging with: (1) social relations and structures of power in, between, and dependent upon business organizations of all kinds, but particularly firms, in a broad social context; (2) explicit comparison between these social forms (companies, industries, conglomerates, and so on) and the various cultures (work, management, professional, regional, national, and so forth) that, in one way or another, impinge upon and form them, and by which they themselves are developed and sustained; (3) the things and technologies (goods, commodities, equipment, tools) in and with which business people of all kinds are entangled and which afford their organizational forms; and (4) fieldwork methods. at the same time, if we were able to render visible to the public what so often remains invisible about business, we might overcome the anxiety expressed by alan and josephine smart that ‘we cannot leave the study of the “capitalist heartlands” to economists, sociologists, and business schools.’ business anthropology would then, as bob morais argues, (5) become a clear and powerful public expression of why opinions 297 anthropology matters – especially if it can forge ‘parasitic collaborations’ with larger defining social relations (marcus). if we could do all this, and do it well, and in the course of doing it, provide detailed, readable ethnographic studies of business situations of all kinds, then, perhaps, our colleagues in anthropology might reluctantly agree that business anthropology and the anthropology of business are ‘good to think’. and that, without the customary cynical smirk, levi strauss can be a brand of jeans, as well as long-lived anthropologist. commentary rethinking old thoughts eric j. arnould rick and i are grateful to the editors of jba, and a bit bemused to have been given the opportunity to publish this cabinet castaway of a paper. in his commentary and in good archaeological fashion, rick resurrects more of the institutional context in which this paper was embedded than i, although i have discussed these issues somewhat elsewhere (arnould and thomson 2014). but, like rick, i think it is likely that our academic trajectories might have been different had some version of this essay been published in an anthropology journal when we wrote it, but in ways i cannot imagine now. perhaps the most enduring effect is that the absence of an anthropology of consumption in the early 1980s thrust me into the arms of the most adventurous and in some ways most scholarly colleagues in the consumer research community in marketing. and in that university milieu, after working as a development anthropologist like rick, and despite a brief sojourn in the anthropology department at university of colorado, denver, i labored for some years. looking back thirty five years on a paper primarily about consumer acculturation would compete for space among a crowded field of such papers, and even special issues of journals devoted to the explication of market mediated consumer cultures. the idea of consumption practices as significant carriers of culture, and of consumer goods as deeply impregnated with page 1 of 9 jba 5(1): 45-53 autumn 2016 © the author(s) 2016 issn 2245-4217 www.cbs.dk/jba journal of business anthropology, 5(1), autumn 2016 46 malleable, even ambiguous or contradictory, meanings is hardly news. thus, that people’s identities become the mobile product of social interactions mediated by mass produced consumer goods is recognized. indeed the proposition that object worlds and cultural worlds, and what we take to be agents enmeshed within them, are co-constituting would hardly raise an eyebrow now, but it was not so then. when rick and i wrote this awkward, fumbling text, we were working with limited primary and secondary source material. we drew on our own fieldwork in niger and belize respectively. in the nigerien case―then and still one of the more marginal cultural environments of the global economy―i was thunderstruck by two undeniable mega trends. on the one hand, there was the evident disappearance of a host of locally or regionally organized systems of production and consumption. in niger, this included spinning, weaving, tanning, hunting, leather working, pottery production, jewelry making, shoemaking, saddlery, and so on. at the same time, one could observe their replacements arriving from factories in nearby nigeria and, incredibly, from far away china, then hardly the industrial behemoth it is today. and accompanying these trends, new sortings of people occurred―according to the constellations of things they increasingly chose in the markets, rather than were allocated through systems of kinship, patronage, and institutionalized gifting. thus, the paper constituted an attempt to make sense of processes which i was ill prepared to apprehend―a point rick also makes in his commentary. my head was filled with ideas about levi straussian cold societies, leachian and turnerian steady state ecosystems and ritual processes, respectively; and precapitalist modes of production reinforcing the instituted economic processes, as laid out by meillassoux and other french marxist anthropologists. at the same time, anthropology had little to tell me about the consumption phenomena i observed. grant mccracken, danny miller, and even marshall sahlins’ work on consumption did not yet exist, or was not yet widely diffused in 1980. and jean baudrillard’s masterful interpretations of the consumer society had not been translated into english. indeed, baudrillard himself was hardly embraced by french academia at the time. as we pointed out in the paper, economic anthropology focused on production or exchange, and fought a wellintentioned, but ultimately ill framed, battle about the universality of economic rationality. but it had nothing to say about consumption, save for mary douglas’ limited structural-semiotic work. and indeed we found that our efforts to take these kinds of phenomena seriously were ill received among the “real” anthropologists and archaeologists who advised us at the university of arizona in those days. rereading the paper now, it seems that our first question―asking about the relative receptivity of different cultural systems to novel arnould / rethinking old thoughts 47 consumer goods―is both ill-framed and off point, not to mention the fact that we don’t answer it. ill-framed because a better grasp of the archaeology of ancient trade and a better consideration of political anthropology would have shown important linkages between political differentiation and “luxury,” without resolving the issue of selectivity of particular material manifestations of political differentiation. perhaps we could have built more on flannery’s (1968) text. at the same time, such considerations would have helped us better understand the cultural specificity of the “conspicuous consumption” about which veblen wrote. this might have helped us offer real alternatives to the emulationist model of diffusion that we did indeed criticize in our failed article. rereading weber, and reading colin campbell’s somewhat later book on the romantic ethos in western protestantism, could have unlocked some thinking about ideology’s culturally specific role in framing consumption as well. viewed from another angle, it seems like issues of relative globalization across time and space and a more thoroughgoing cultural ecology might have provided the tools to frame the first question we asked in a more sophisticated way. somewhere between mauss and marx i think we had more tools to apprehend the evolution of consumption in capitalist market-mediated society then than we understood at the time. this approach could have been linked to an appreciation for what existing studies of totemism and animism taught about materiality. the discussion of the hau in best, mauss, sahlins, and others, and of totemism (levi-strauss 1962; descola 2014)―not to mention the classic discussion of potlatch and kula in boas and malinowski―respectively should have alerted us to the radical alterity of concepts of self and object in non-western societies of previous epochs. understanding the ontologies linking things and men among such societies―that is, the idea of shared substances found in both animist and totemic ontologies―should have helped us understand more about the sticky linkages between things and roles than we did. thus men of value and women of renown (weiner 1976) in such societies, the relationships that recognized them as such, and the things that circulated between them as emblems of their groups, could have been seen as analytic wholes. there was far less “freedom” to transact roles and prestige than we recognized in our paper, which really failed to grasp how much freedom is an outcome of market capitalism rather than a general condition of it. such worldviews figure were not at all in mainstream western thought, which makes them hard even for anthropologists to understand. of course, the global proliferation of the brand, which is so clearly an entry in the category of analogic ontological entities, should perhaps makes us reconsider this assertion (arnould and cayla 2016; latour 2010). but to return to marx, his discussion of the separation of producer, product, labor, use value, and exchange value wrought by capitalism, and especially his ideas of the alienation between producer and product, should have been more central to our discussion of the journal of business anthropology, 5(1), autumn 2016 48 origin of demand as such in non-western societies. the massive appearance of such alienated things is truly fantastical. things without a soul, free-floating signifieds, as it were, seemed amenable to new attachments and associations in ways that totemic and animistic things are not. interesting questions still, it strikes me that understanding “how classes of prestige goods are defined or limited, and how and why they change over time” (as we wrote), the micro and meso-sociology of shifts in consumer preferences, or―viewed the other way around―the processes by which things become recognized and valued―and in particular how this occurs with novel things―continues to merit attention. our model tried to frame this in an abstract fashion. it’s both not enough and, in fact, erroneous to attribute the adoption of differentiated products ranging from soap (1996) to blue jeans (miller and woodward 2012) and botox (giesler 2012) to “marketing,” as we others (arnould 1989; izberk-bilgin 2012) have shown. indeed, complicated ideological shaping processes are at stake in which marketing is only one institutional mechanism. holt’s (2004) work has shown that marketed objects are enmeshed in myth and history, are buffeted by cultural disruptions, and are semiotically differentiated, thus carrying indexical or iconic associations by turns. back then, we sort of recognized this, but i think there is anthropology to be done on the sources of expectations, the emergence of taste regimes that make one’s first experience of something novel, with uncertain symbolic associations, nonetheless acceptable, even pleasurable rather than distasteful (wilk 1997). i encounter work on globalization today that elaborates on the mechanisms that bring in to relationship specific locales and specific cultural logics, in which reflexive contrasts in the meanings of things come into focus. we were right, i think, in arguing for the importance of paying careful attention to the articulation between the within-culture circulation of objects and the between-culture circulation, but in more detailed terms. the omnivorous capability of global marketing channels enabled by global techno and ideoscapes produces a plethora of examples. anthropologists, among others, recognize that cultural meanings and signs are generated by a series of constituting structures, such as political and social institutions, which produce and reproduce certain ideologies that express normative constructions of the relationship of material things (thompson and haytko 1997; cherrier and murray 2007). thus, smart’s (2004) concise account shows how french cognac could become a major item of consumption without being very much drunk during a particular historical moment in honk kong’s rise to economic prominence. but more work on the global structures of common difference in consumption practice and meaning, mentioned by arnould / rethinking old thoughts 49 rick―work that moves beyond simple descriptive terms, like glocalization or creolization, is still needed. it is rather a pity that we developed our process elements so little. the ideas we connected to terms like competition, displacement, promotion, identification, appropriation, escalation, and so on are still kind of interesting, although i think some of the terms are rather whimsically defined. the sticky, yet fluid, circulation of meanings and the factors and processes that structure this circulation have captured the attention of consumer culture theorists―as is evident in texts ranging from holt’s (2004) genealogical method, to thompson’s (thompson, rindfleisch and arsel 2006) idea of the doppelganger, and giesler’s (2014) idea of marketplace drama, but our ideas about process were kind of still born. we lacked the tools of practice or performance theory. moreover, recent work has really taken up the role of cultural intermediaries who orchestrate, manage, and take pleasure in what we termed the “symbolic competition” involved in consumption (kerrigan; et al: 2011). but it might be useful to have more of such work, incorporating nowadays the effects of social media. something that we only began to appreciate in this paper is the role of consumer goods in the creation of new templates for action and interpretation. our paper limited itself to talking about the ways in which unstable semiotic regimes produce space for innovation, and we drew attention to this as an aspect of what we now call globalization. but we under-appreciated the creative potential of market dynamics itself―like some of the early studies of brands in post-socialist eastern europe, which looked at brand meaning in a way not entirely unlike our failed paper (strizhakova, coulter and price 2008). but it seems that this culturally generative capacity is lurking in wengrow’s (2008) study of product marking in the prehistoric mideast. the recognition of the fuller creative potential of glocalized market dynamics is made explicit in some recent research in cultural branding for instance: brands do not only draw upon meaning resources from particular cultures and histories, but…new cultural meanings and practices emerge and develop in relationship to brands. indeed, there are many ways in which branding processes and practices―and brands themselves―go beyond a subsidiary role and co-create culture. (schroeder, borgerson and wu 2015: 262) importantly, such studies show that the idea of tension and contradiction, evoked if not fully developed in our paper, is integral to the dynamics of cultural reproduction through which marketer-produced resources both come to establish or rejuvenate cultural categories like “chineseness” (in the schroeder et al. [2015] example), not merely to provide new symbolic expressions of them. this seems entirely consistent with the hegelian take on materiality developed by miller (1987). similarly, some journal of business anthropology, 5(1), autumn 2016 50 colleagues and i have explored the creative emergence of glocalized cultural templates in the context of the development of greenlandic foodways as a new cuisine―a process involving both global templates for gourmet food, and local systems of resource procurement, preparation, and circulation. this process revalorizes local food while also appropriating it into global market processes. what this fostered after this aborted paper, my research in processes of materiality evolved from an interest in what makes things favored to what makes them inalienable, and from a phenomenological to a more meso level systemic perspective than we took in our paper. thus another rather naïve study looked into the why of favored things in a north american and nigerian context and discovered the not unsurprising links to personal and social identity respectively, although the idea of linking value (cova 1997) eluded us in that study. on the other hand, a certain interest in religious texts among nigerians was perhaps an early indicator of the wave of religiosity that has washed subsequently over the sahe,l and not only in the extreme variants featured in the global infoscapes. i missed an opportunity to inquire more deeply into the resurgent islamization that others examined (masquelier 2001). but another element that went largely uncommented in that work was the impact of the erosion of the material landscape rooted in local traditions of production―not only on cultural propriety, but also on images of success and interethnic relationships, and on how this was wrought by niger’s tighter insertion into global circuits of exchange. desertification and impoverishment realized in slackened social ties between ethnically specialized producers and consumers, and a progressive disappearance of a catalogue of objects, were part and parcel of the global financescape of advanced market capitalism. this study led to a consideration of inalienable possessions among elderly north american consumers, who were so much more interested in discussing the fate of family heirlooms than their putative vulnerability to the come-ons of unscrupulous sellers of deals of a lifetime. the capitalist captains of consciousness excoriated by the frankfurt school and their inheritors were far from central to these consumers concerns. it appeared that seniors were interested not merely in securing some form of secular immortality through transfer of their own legacy possessions, but also in reinforcing familial legacies. thus, there was real keeping-through-giving in the strategizing of elderly consumers with regards to the indexical symbols many of their things had become. and this, in turn, led inevitably to the relatively banal assertion of actor network theory that objects have agency, as consumer durables asserted all sorts of organizing dipositifs over generations of curators (curasi, price and arnould 2004). arnould / rethinking old thoughts 51 conclusion in sum, it is both personally gratifying and mortifying to resurrect this paper: gratifying because, though the paper itself is no great shakes, the idea that an anthropology of consumption, of consumer behavior, and consumable things has surely proven its merits; mortifying, because of the immaturity of the ideas, the missed opportunities to build on available anthropological theory, and the underdeveloped potential of some potentially useful ideas. while there is much scope for developing further material culture studies, as some prefer to term this domain, it is also clear, as we did not imagine then, that we need a theory of liquid things, digital things, human-object hybrids, and, above all, a non-apocalyptic consumer culture. while rick and i have pursued parallel rather than conjoined paths, i notice that, once again, our mutual interests in the latter were nascent in the passionate discussions that gave rise to this manuscript. references arnould, eric j. 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(1968), the olmec and the valley of oaxaca: a model for inter-regional interaction in formative times. in elizabeth benson, ed. dumbarton oaks conference on the olmec, washington d.c.: dumbarton oaks, pp. 79-117. giesler, markus (2012). how doppelgänger brand images influence the market creation process: longitudinal insights from the rise of botox cosmetic. journal of marketing, 76 (november), 55-68. kerrigan, finola, douglas brownlie, paul hewer and claudia dazaletouze (2011), spinning warhol : celebrity brand theoretics and the logic of the celebrity brand. journal of marketing management, 27 (13/14), 1504–1524. izberk-bilgin, elif (2012), infidel brands: unveiling alternative meanings of global brands at the nexus of globalization, consumer culture, and islamism. journal of consumer research, 39 (december), 663-687. latour, bruno (2010), on the modern cult of the factish gods. trans. catherine porter and heather maclean. durham, nc: duke university press. lévi-strauss, claude (1962), le totémisme d’aujourd’hui. paris: presses universitaires de france . masquelier, adeline (2001), prayer has spoiled everything: possession, power, and identity in an islamic town of niger. durham, nc: duke university press. miller, daniel (1987), material culture and mass consumption. oxford: blackwell. miller, daniel and sophie woodward (2012), blue jeans: the art of the ordinary. berkeley and los angeles: university of california press. schroeder, jonathan, janet borgerson, and zhiyan wu (2015), a brand culture approach to chinese cultural heritage brands. journal of brand management, 22 (april), 261-279. smart, josephine (2004), globalization and modernity―a case study of cognac consumption in hong kong. anthropologica, 46 (2), 219-229. strizhakova, yuliya, robin a coulter and linda l. price (2008), branded products as a passport to global citizenship: perspectives from developed and developing countries. journal of international marketing. 16 (4), 57-85. thompson, craig j., aric rindfleisch and zeynep arsel, (2006), emotional branding and the strategic value of the doppelgänger brand image. journal of marketing, 70 (january), 50-64. weiner annette b. (1976), women of value, men of renown: new perspectives in trobriand exchange. austin, tx: university of texas press. wengrow, david (2008), prehistories of commodity branding. current arnould / rethinking old thoughts 53 anthropology, 49 (february), 7-34. wilk, richard r. 1997. a critique of desire: distaste and dislike in consumer behavior. consumption markets & culture, 1 (2), 175-196. dr. eric arnould is distinguished visiting professor of marketing at the aalto university business school and adjunct professor at emlyon france. he formerly held a social science chair in the danish institute for advanced studies (dias). he has been on the faculty of universities in four european countries and held posts in north america. he has pursued a career in applied social science since receiving his ba in 1973 from bard college, receiving a ph.d. in anthropology from the university of arizona in 1982. ethnographic research in west africa―both basic and applied―provide the foundation for his approach to contemporary market mediated society. marcel mauss and marshall sahlins are two of his scholarly role models, although his intellectual debts are many. eric’s research on consumer culture, cultural marketing strategy, qualitative research methods, services marketing, and marketing and development appears in over 90 articles and chapters in major social science and managerial periodicals and books. his current interests include collective consumer creativity, human branding, sustainable business practice, visual representations, and digital mobility. he is at work on a collective text in consumer culture theory and may be reached at arnould@emlyon.com mailto:arnould@em-lyon.com mailto:arnould@em-lyon.com the “right way”: moral capitalism and the emergence of the corporate ethics and compliance officer steven sampson abstract under the influence of u.s. government regulations, enforcement of antibribery laws and embarrassing corruption scandals, major global corporations have realized that unethical conduct may affect not only their reputations but also their profits. this development has given rise to a new position within the traditional management team: the ethics and compliance officer (who differs from the established corporate social responsibility function). based on field research in the compliance industry, this article describes how the moralization of firms has led to the emergence of a new corporate function: the ethics and compliance officer. it further describes how ethics and compliance officers learn their craft and how they cope with their role as moral compass of firms that need to compete in a global market where ethics may be viewed as a cost that inhibits profitability. keywords morality, business ethics, compliance, moral capitalism page 1 of 22 jba special issue 3: 65-86, spring 2016 © the author(s) 2016 issn 2245-4217 www.cbs.dk/jba journal of business anthropology, special issue 3, spring 2016 66 introduction: morality and economy during a four-day conference of ethics and compliance professionals, held in atlanta in 2014, i was part of a group of 50 participants who had paid an extra us$250 each for a special half-day field visit to coca-cola headquarters.1 our goal was to learn about the company’s compliance program. we were welcomed by the head of coca-cola’s ethics and compliance department, who reminded us of coke’s brand slogan: “the real thing.” but the compliance chief also revealed that coke has a second slogan: “the right way.” she then explained how coca-cola, certainly the world’s most well-known and long-established brand, sold in 207 countries, has become a prototype for the ethical business regime. without “the right way,” we were told, there could be no “real thing.” the example of selling coke around the world gives us a vivid picture of the apparent fusion of global commerce and ethical practice in a multinational firm. selling soft drinks is now an ethical project. how did this happen? how has ethics become such an integral part of modern global capitalism? this article is about the process of moralizing capitalism and the way in which ethics and compliance officers learn their craft. in particular, i will try to use ethics and compliance as a window to understanding the ethical developments in modern global capitalism and neoliberalism as such. i will do this by first outlining the process of moralization, and then describing how morality enters the everyday world of modern corporations in the form of ethics and compliance organization. finally, i will suggest certain avenues of how anthropologists might understand moral projects within business, viewing ethics not as a ploy or tactic, but as an essential part of today’s global economy. with every new corporate scandal, policymakers and other observers invariably call for more ethics, transparency and moral responsibility in the modern corporation. such appeals certainly arose with enron in 2001, the 2008 financial crisis, the 2014 volkswagen emissions scandal, and the recent leak of the so-called “panama papers.” on first sight, it appears that morality and ethics―doing the right thing, corporate social responsibility, and so on―are something new, an innovation. ostensibly, we would then have to explain how ethics has recently penetrated the operations of the firm. we would be describing a process of “moralization.” such a discussion would be somewhat 1 earlier versions of this paper were presented at the panel on policy language held at the 2014 american anthropological association meetings and at the panel on business ethics at the swedish anthropological association meetings in 2015. i wish to acknowledge the valuable comments by participants at these meetings, as well as by the two anonymous reviewers from the jba. financial support for my research on compliance was provided by a grant from the swedish research council (vetenskapsråd). sampson / the “right way” 67 misleading, however. in fact, discussions of the market economy’s moral character and the influence of moral and ethical considerations in market practice have a long history (hirschman 1982; fourcade and healy 2007). one might instead remark on the increasing salience of moral and ethical considerations as an integral part of business practices. social anthropology offers an alternative approach to the issue of whether moral and ethical considerations are a recent addition to business life. anthropologists begin with the premise that all economic systems have moral components: there are socially approved and disapproved ways of producing, distributing and consuming resources, and in every society, there are certain goods, services or exchanges that ought not, indeed must never, be commodified (gifts and parental care for example). anthropologists studying the norms and limits of exchange in primitive or peasant societies have relied on the concept of “moral economy.” breaching this moral economy, as we learn from the works of james scott (1976, 1985), e.p. thompson (1971), karl polanyi (1956), marshall sahlins (1972), and many others, can lead to sanctions, conflict, or even social revolt. all economies are thus moral economies in so far as they rely on moral precepts and norms for their functioning (this does not rule out calling them “political economies” as well). norms of reciprocity (gouldner 1960; mauss 1967) are the most well-known of these moral precepts. but norms of “fair exchange,” “accountability,” “trust,” or “efficiency” can operate as well. such norms certainly exist in the modern redistributive welfare state, where citizens contribute to the collective in the form of taxes so that certain vulnerable groups―as long as they are legally or morally entitled―can obtain essential services. breaches of this modern moral economy, in the form of tax evasion, bribery, or welfare benefits fraud, are more than just legal violations; they carry moral weight. now the term “moral economy” means very little unless we can specify what an immoral or amoral economy might look like. maybe an economist, using a theoretical model of exchange and cost/benefit, could construct such a model. perhaps this model might be based solely on mutual advantage or contract. but, as an anthropologist, i cannot think of any economic transaction that would be devoid of moral precepts, moral expectations, admonitions against moral breach of standards and rules, notions of fair play, efficiency or even “honor among thieves.” research on fiddles and cheats at work in the uk, or the culture of thieves in russia, describes the moral elements within these shadow economies. there is honor, moral honor, even among thieves and swindlers. contracts may be legal documents, but they are also moral ones, which is why they must be signed, or at least affirmed with the proverbial handshake. while debate over capitalism’s moral dimensions goes back several centuries (hirschman 1982), some discussions have assumed that capitalist economies, with their ceaseless accumulation and dispossession journal of business anthropology, special issue 3, spring 2016 68 (harvey 2004), are somehow devoid of morality. today’s anti-capitalist activists often talk as if they want to restore a moral order that capitalism has destroyed, invoking images of community, equality and solidarity that ostensibly existed in the recent past. this kind of rhetoric has existed for over two centuries, as hirschman pointed out (see also fourcade and healy 2007).the question here is not whether capitalism as a system should be norm-based, that is, more than just the sum of contracts and exchanges. rather, it is about what kind of norms should operate. for proponents of the market economy, the morality of the capitalist firm should be restricted to its moral obligations to shareholders; hence, milton friedman’s famous dictum (1970) that “the social responsibility of business is to increase its profit.” the idea that capitalism is without morality, and that the penetration of ethics is somehow new, is specious. readers of this journal who sit for just a few minutes in any group of modern capitalists, be it a board meeting, a sales conference, or in a bar after work, will quickly identify a variety of moral discourses, especially centered on the proper way to do business. the morally “proper” way, as our business colleagues would have it, may not be the legal way, of course, but there is certainly a moral discourse involved. the ideology of business ethics assumes some kind of overlap between legal norms and a moral code operating within the firm and its employees. this overlap would be embodied in a company code of conduct, for example. once in a while, however, the moral code and the legal code clash. and we obtain the stories of how certain firms and/or managers, in their own moral enclave, swindled, cheated or bribed. this clash between the ideal and the actual, between the informal norms and formal structure, between the moral and legal―this is the stuff of anthropology. but from a business ethics perspective, it poses a different sort of problem. there is apparently, a right and wrong way to be a capitalist. in ideal terms, the right way to be a capitalist involves, firstly, following established laws and regulations. but it also includes following certain accepted moral and ethical codes (the right culture) and making ethically justifiable or accountable decisions. this discourse of the right and wrong way to do business is not new. it has existed long before the founding of the discipline of business ethics, which itself is now decades old. as andrew stark notes in an article from 1993, “there are more than 25 textbooks in the field and 3 academic journals dedicated to the topic. at least 16 business ethics research centers are now in operation” (quoted in hoffman et al. 2014: 669), and one major textbook on business ethics is now in its fifth edition (ibid.) with the publicity of various corporate scandals of the 21st century, where the volkswagen emissions scandal in 2015 and the panama papers leak are but the most recent additions, the urgency of ethics within sampson / the “right way” 69 businesses seems to have become more pressing. mark schwartz, a leading business ethics scholar and co-editor of a major textbook (hoffman et al. 2014: 676) notes that “the range of illegal and unethical activity taking place is extensive and includes corruption, bribery, receiving and giving gifts and entertainment, kickbacks, extortion, nepotism, favoritism, money laundering, improper use of insider information, use of intermediaries, conflicts of interest, fraud, aggressive accounting, discrimination, sexual harassment, workplace safety, consumer product safety or environmental pollution’ (schwartz 2013).2 what we might call an “ethical turn” in modern business is not simply a result of scandal or pressures for increased transparency. state authorities are also taking their tasks more seriously. hence, modern business enterprises now risk prosecution by the u.s. or uk governments for corruption or tax evasion, and these legal risks are aggravated by reputation nightmares that can be magnified by social media in a matter of hours. corporations have thus painfully recognized that they need to acknowledge both moral and legal guidelines. they need to respect laws simply in order not to risk prosecution. but they also need to be transparent and accountable to preserve their public image. they need internal codes and standards in order to eliminate temptations to unfair competition and to protect fragile corporate reputations from bad publicity and lawsuits. moreover, corporations need employees who understand these laws, guidelines, codes and standards so that they can act appropriately. managers and employees need to learn that failing to respect these laws, guidelines, codes and standards may have immense consequences. acting immorally may mean gigantic monetary penalties for the company, or even jail time for managers or executives. capitalism, still ruthless and cutthroat as it is, is now an openly moral, or perhaps “moralized,” economy. there are good and bad ways to do business; there is fair and unfair competition; there are level and uneven “playing fields.” and, at the state level, there is an increasing frequency of “enforcement actions” by the u.s. department of justice or the uk serious fraud office. and thanks to government surveillance, the whistleblower or the wikileak, the bad guys can occasionally get caught and punished. they have realized a need for a special kind of person who can impart to others “the right way” to do business. the intensification of global trade and financialization over the past two decades has been one of the factors behind this ethical turn. the change is centered on the state’s more active pursuit of illegal corporate behavior and corruption, especially as corporations pursue global profits and boardrooms become dominated by financial institutions rather than by individual founder-owners. these governmental campaigns for more 2 schwartz and other business ethics scholars cite a host of other ethical issues connected with life in organizations, which are not necessarily a concern to ethics and compliance officers: for example, moving production overseas, or pursuing affirmative action policies. journal of business anthropology, special issue 3, spring 2016 70 ethics in business are pushed by non-state actors with moral or transparency agendas, such as environmental ngos, financial transparency ngos, or the un global compact for csr. more important, however, is the fact that firms themselves now realize the penalties that can be incurred when accused of unethical behavior―penalties that carry with them not just legal sanctions but losses due to “reputation risk.” in short, firms that act unethically can not only face prosecution and fines. they can see their stock value decline by billions of dollars (volkswagen); they can go bankrupt from astronomical fines and legal costs; and their ceos can go to prison (arthur anderson, enron, and others). this threat from both prosecution and reputation has resulted in the emergence of a particular specialist within the firm―the specialist in charge of respecting the gamut of legal, ethical and moral rules and regulations set by others and by the management; a specialist who ensures proper conduct, integrity, and whose job it is to enhance the firm’s moral and ethical fiber, both within the organization and in its relations with other firms and with society. the duties of this specialist go beyond the legal office (the general counsel) that most firms have. it is more than just legal advice to the board of the kind: ‘will we go to jail if we do this?’ “do the right thing” i am instead talking about a relatively new kind of function, known as the “ethics officer,” “ethics and compliance officer,” or “chief ethics and compliance officer” (abbreviated eco, cco, or ceco, with the field often called e&c). the job of the eco, unlike the general counsel, is not simply to avoid prosecution or keep executives, managers, or sales staff out of jail. it is to encourage employees to do the right thing. the e&c staff should not be confused with the csr team, which relates to the firm’s link with society; nor do they necessarily handle issues of corporate citizenship, even though these specialists may be found in the same department. the ethics officer certainly evaluates risk, as does the financial officer, but for the e&c officer it is “reputation risk” rather than financial risk which is at stake, and particularly, the risks to reputation caused by breaches of integrity by employees, sub-units or contractors. the eco is thus considered to articulate the moral core of the company, its mission, or “values.” if capitalism is now acknowledging or even promoting its morality, it is the ethics and compliance officer who is at the forefront of this campaign. for the researcher, the compliance officer can thus be seen as a window towards understanding contemporary capitalist morality. in a world of demands for accountability following revelations of scandal, where firms are being accused of (or admit to) swindling and bribing for hundreds of millions of dollars, of covering up illegal or unethical transactions, of simple bad conduct, the firms need to have a sub-unit that can pursue or assure some sampson / the “right way” 71 level of integrity, the “right way.” they need a unit that establishes, promotes, and then monitors the relevant laws, guidelines, codes and standards that everyone must adhere to, even third-party suppliers. this activity is called the “compliance function,” and it is headed by a compliance officer. let us therefore look more closely at the ethics and compliance officer. e&c officers have now taken their positions inside the firm’s infrastructure, alongside human resources, the legal office (general counsel), and the internal audit office. the formerly tripartite executive known as the c-suite (chief executive, financial, and operation officers) is now augmented by the chief compliance officer. the compliance function in a firm is often subsumed under what are called the “soft areas” of business operations, known as governance, risk, and compliance (grc). grc contains functions such as csr, diversity management, and risk assessment, including reputational risk, as well as ethics and compliance issues. the term “compliance” takes on different connotations in various languages, sometimes remaining in english (in denmark and germany), but on other occasions translated as the french conformité, romanian conformitatea, or swedish efterlevnad (lit. live-after/according). as a profession and field of discourse, ethics and compliance have certainly become popular. one can find a compliancedictionary.com on line; the wall street journal now has a weekly “risk and compliance” blog. and with the hundreds of ethics and compliance jobs advertised on-line, we are left with a single conclusion: compliance has arrived.3 the world of compliance over the past two years, largely through attending training sessions, conferences, and unstructured interviews with compliance officers, i have tried to learn what it is like to be an ethics and compliance officer in the post-enron era.4 like any ethnographer entering a new “tribe,” my initial task was to try and decipher the language of compliance by listening and conversing with trainers, presenters at conferences, leaders of compliance associations, and especially vendors selling compliance “tools” (for instance,. software/consulting). i have therefore attended compliance conferences and instructional seminars of the ethics and compliance officers association and the society for corporate 3 linkedin search criteria yield the following under “ethics and compliance”: 1172 positions open, “ethics and compliance” + specialist: 32515 positions; “chief compliance officer”: 370 positions. (oct. 19, 2015). monster.com had 915 jobs listed under “ethics and compliance.” 4 enron, by the way, had what at the time was a highly praised code of conduct, which was later available for sale on ebay, in mint condition, for us$15; former enron officers now, reborn as ethical guardians, often speak at compliance and fraud examiner conferences. journal of business anthropology, special issue 3, spring 2016 72 compliance and ethics. i have endured endless power-point checklists of ethical do’s and don’ts by lawyers, accountants, fraud investigators, trainers, and company compliance officers. i have been to training courses and seminars, generally costing as much as us$1200 per day, and obtained limited access to magazines with subscription rates of us$1000 a year. i also read websites and magazines such as compliance insider, compliance week and compliance professional, textbooks such as compliance 101, and training brochures such as “dealing with your grc demons,” and “fighting compliance fatigue.” i have participated in compliance simulation games and perused brochures and software proffered me by compliance vendors and consultants.5 and to participate, i also wrote articles in compliance publications/websites about how we anthropologists view the concept of culture (sampson 2014a, 2014b). my research was piqued by the fact that one of the most common expressions used in the field is that of “the culture of compliance.” for compliance professionals, this “culture” combines values, attitudes and practices. “building a culture of compliance” requires engaging employees with the company values and creating a climate of trust; hence the mantra, launched by the ceo of ford motor company: “trust is the new black”. what encompasses this domain of ethics and compliance? as most compliance specialists underscore, it has a dual character. it consists, first, of respecting externally (external to the company) imposed laws, regulations and standards (“what we have to do to keep us out of jail”). typically, these compliance obligations have to do with financial reporting to regulatory authorities, obeying anti-bribery laws, showing that the firm has a compliance policy, and conforming to industry standards. this legal/regulatory framework―whether national, eu, or industry-based―involves penalties for not complying. compliance in this sense carries no connotation that the firm, team, or manager agrees or supports the laws or rules to which he or she is complying. at the firm level, compliance is expressed through training and respecting the company codes of conduct, in areas such as conflict of interest, “facilitation payments,” or hospitality. beyond mere compliance, however (“doing things right”), e&c also has a further, normative aspect of ethics, to “do the right thing.” ethics and compliance officers, therefore, are supposed to pursue an ethical mission: they are the ethical watchdogs of their companies, ensuring that employees, managers, and even the board follow the company’s code of conduct, and that potential abuse is detected before the company is subject to investigation or its offices raided by the fbi (or, as one 5 for one such game, called the global business ethics challenge, see http://impactonintegrity.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/ioi-gbec-2015english.pdf. tools and training are supplied by large accounting firms such as pwc and kpmg, and by specialist ethics and compliance firms such as red flag or lrn. a large compliance gathering would have about 100 such vendor booths. http://impactonintegrity.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/ioi-gbec-2015-english.pdf http://impactonintegrity.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/ioi-gbec-2015-english.pdf sampson / the “right way” 73 company counsel described it, “before being visited by people carrying guns and with initials on the back of their windbreakers”). a breach of ethical standards that becomes public knowledge (or is leaked by a disgruntled, whistle-blowing employee) brings with it reputation damage. customers may now assess the moral quality or image of people with whom they do business. in such cases, clients, customers, or partners may decide to take their business elsewhere. well-known examples of compliance breaches here are exposés of dangerous working conditions in bangladesh textile factories or the vw misrepresentation of its diesel emissions. in this light, ethics and compliance is therefore intimately involved with risk assessment, and the principal risk here is reputational risk. among compliance officers, in ethics training and at meetings of compliance professionals, the prevailing understanding of unethical behavior is that it is largely about “good people doing bad things.” they do bad because they did not know it was bad. in this self-understanding, the sociopaths have largely been weeded out by the human resources department, before being hired or along the way. in this understanding, the firm has the occasional bad apple, but bad apples are not the source of ethical breaches. the explanation for breaches is a culture of noncompliance, a culture whereby top management has not communicated its integrity standards strongly enough: top management has not had the proper “tone at the top.” or perhaps employees are afraid to report ethical abuse because there is no encouragement from management or no safe, anonymous whistleblower channel. from a compliance perspective, the “good people doing bad things” discourse means that explanations for occurrence of bribery, corruption, slush funds, personal trips, speed payments, conflicts of interest, double bookkeeping, or embezzlement can be attributed to poor communication from the top, inadequate incentives to avoid or report bad behavior, or to simple temptation. these are the notorious grey zones. it is these grey zones that can be ironed out if the firm has a “robust ethics and compliance program” (to use the common phrase) with clear messages and continuing training. in this optic, people in the modern firm are basically competent and good, employees are ethical, and ethics and compliance officers the most ethical, the very conscience of the company. this is perhaps why, at a recent gathering of e&c officers, all 1,500 of us stood up for a minute and simply applauded ourselves for pursuing this struggle to do good. it is why a leader of one compliance organization insisted to me that ethics and compliance officers “lose sleep at night”―not because they are ambitious for profits, but about doing the right thing. e&c officers are the embodiment of this new ethical turn in modern business. they are apparently burdened by their moral mission. journal of business anthropology, special issue 3, spring 2016 74 origins of ethics and compliance regimes how did all this moralization of capitalism get started? in the u.s. and europe, it appears that the impetus for the moral company comes from two well-grounded fears: fear of government prosecution and/or fear of loss of reputation in a world where social media are so powerful. in the united states, the rise of the compliance industry is generally attributed to the u.s. government’s 1991 “federal sentencing commission guidelines,” and specifically chapter 8, which covers sentencing for corporate/organizational crimes, and which were revised in 2004 as a result of the sarbanes-oxley act.6 the federal sentencing guidelines specify that an organization or company convicted of violating federal criminal or financial statutes can receive a reduced penalty if it demonstrates that it had a “robust compliance program.” the sentencing guidelines thus mandated that firms be ethical, and specifically, that they establish “an organizational culture that encourages ethical conduct”. according to the guidelines (section 8b2.1), such a robust compliance program must have seven basic elements: (1) the organization shall establish standards and procedures to prevent and detect criminal conduct. (2) the organization's governing authority shall be knowledgeable about the content and operation of the compliance and ethics program and shall exercise reasonable oversight with respect to the implementation and effectiveness of the compliance and ethics program (i.e. board responsibility). (3) avoid using any individual whom the organization knew, or should have known, has engaged in illegal activities or other conduct inconsistent with an effective compliance and ethics program. (4) communication and training of employees in the compliance and ethics program. (5) monitoring and auditing to ensure the compliance program is followed, including whistleblower arrangements. (6) incentives to act in a compliant manner, with sanctions and appropriate disciplinary measures for engaging in criminal conduct and for failing to take reasonable steps to prevent or detect criminal conduct. (7) after criminal conduct has been detected, the organization shall take reasonable steps to respond appropriately to the criminal conduct and to prevent further similar criminal conduct. under u.s. federal law, a company caught, for example, bribing a foreign 6 see chapter eight at http://www.ussc.gov/sites/default/files/pdf/guidelinesmanual/2015/glmfull.pdf. for an overview, see findler and warnecke (2008). http://www.ussc.gov/sites/default/files/pdf/guidelines-manual/2015/glmfull.pdf http://www.ussc.gov/sites/default/files/pdf/guidelines-manual/2015/glmfull.pdf sampson / the “right way” 75 official to obtain a contract would receive a certain number of points on the government's “culpability index.” however, its sentence would be reduced if could show that it had set up a viable ethics and compliance program; a company flouting or not having such a program would receive more culpability points and risk additional financial penalties, fines, or even imprisonment for the guilty ceo (see sections 8c24(d) and 8c25(b)). using the compliance program as a lever, the federal government, the securities and exchange commission, and the u.s. department of justice are now empowered to negotiated criminal sentencing agreements. these deferred prosecution agreements and nonprosecution agreements can be used with companies suspected of bribing, tax evading, making illegal contributions, slush funds, price fixing, and other crimes. under such arrangements, a fine of several millions of dollars can be reduced to a few thousand dollars. in addition to this “carrot,” there is also a “stick”: a strengthened government whistleblower program grants generous rewards to employees who reveal crime in their companies, up to 30 per cent of the total amount of the violation. under this program, the u.s. government has paid out millions of dollars to individual whistleblowers, including a us$30 million award (in september 2014) and us$10 million in april 2016.7 in 2014, the government whistleblower program received 3,600 such whistleblower tips, rising to nearly 4,000 in 2015.8 since august 2011, 22 whistleblowers have received us$54 million in rewards.9 the federal sentencing guidelines, now enhanced with new laws on financial reporting, ceo personal responsibility, and whistleblowing reward incentives (the sarbanes-oxley and dodd-frank acts) along with enhanced enforcement of the foreign corrupt practices act―and now in the uk, the uk anti-bribery act―have led to a new emphasis on ethics and compliance within corporate management in both the u.s. and abroad. according to most compliance experts, the initial mood was one of “compliance” rather than “ethics.” that is, it was based on formally complying with the laws and regulations in order to avoid prosecution. compliance was based more on a fear of doing things wrong rather than on a moral awakening to do things right. companies began to realize that they needed to ensure that their employees acted ethically, that they would follow rules, regulations and codes of conduct, that they would report violations of these through internal hotlines, and that managers 7 sec announces largest-ever whistleblower award, sept. 22, 2014. https://www.sec.gov/news/pressrelease/detail/pressrelease/137054301129 0 cftc announces whistleblower award of more than $10 million, april 4, 2016. http://www.cftc.gov/pressroom/pressreleases/pr7351-16 . 8 see https://www.sec.gov/whistleblower/reportspubs/annual-reports/owbannual-report-2015.pdf 9 ibid. https://www.sec.gov/news/pressrelease/detail/pressrelease/1370543011290 https://www.sec.gov/news/pressrelease/detail/pressrelease/1370543011290 http://www.cftc.gov/pressroom/pressreleases/pr7351-16 https://www.sec.gov/whistleblower/reportspubs/annual-reports/owb-annual-report-2015.pdf https://www.sec.gov/whistleblower/reportspubs/annual-reports/owb-annual-report-2015.pdf journal of business anthropology, special issue 3, spring 2016 76 would not retaliate against them. as compliance departments were established, the ethical dimension began to make its impact. today, most major companies now have e&c departments who conduct risk assessments, formulate codes of conduct, ensure that these codes are actually read and respected by employees, and who evaluate potential ethical dilemmas that might face their company. siemens has over 600 compliance officers, coca cola 500, united technologies 500, johnson and johnson 240. the role of siemens is prominent here, precisely because the company was found guilty of corruption under the foreign corrupt practices act, with a fine of us$800 million (including disgorgement of profits).10 today, siemens’ compliance program―with its slogan of “prevent, detect, respond” on its web site―is considered a model to be followed. according to the siemens website, it received 653 compliance complaints or queries in 2014, of which 195 resulted in disciplinary action.11 who are these compliance officers? of those i have interviewed at conferences and heard speak at workshops, both instructors and professionals seeking certification, the vast majority are lawyers who have worked within the firm. others are audit officers, fraud investigators, and hr professionals. unlike law, finance, management or accounting, ethics and compliance is a new field, which is not (yet) a formalized field of study at most business schools so that, at best, the new compliance officers has had a course in business ethics at college. ethics and compliance is thus learned on the job, or through in-house training, or short courses and conference seminars. a compliance officer must acquire a complex package of skills: knowledge of laws, regulations and codes of conduct; awareness of risky business practices in the branch of business they are in (pharmaceuticals, for example, would have different risks from defense contracting, retail sales, or financial services). in addition, they need to know how to communicate ethics to the rest of the employees without being patronizing or intimidating. they need to make sure that their employees know the compliance framework, and that they themselves are acting in an ethical manner. however, more than these organizational skills, ethics officers are supposed to have certain personal qualities. most of them are younger women (below 45) trained in law, and in this new field they must learn to assert their ethical authority over older men, especially engineers, financial officers, and those in the sales force. this more 10 siemens ag and three subsidiaries plead guilty to foreign corrupt practices act violations and agree to pay $450 million in combined criminal fines (https://www.justice.gov/archive/opa/pr/2008/december/08-crm-1105html); siemens to pay $1.34 billion in fines (new york times, dec. 15, 2008). the siemens penalties also include repayment of illicit profits (disgorgement), such that the most cited penalty amount for the siemens case is 800 million dollars. 11 see http://www.siemens.com/about/sustainability/en/coretopics/compliance/management-facts/ https://www.justice.gov/archive/opa/pr/2008/december/08-crm-1105-html https://www.justice.gov/archive/opa/pr/2008/december/08-crm-1105-html http://www.siemens.com/about/sustainability/en/core-topics/compliance/management-facts/ http://www.siemens.com/about/sustainability/en/core-topics/compliance/management-facts/ sampson / the “right way” 77 established group may find ethics and compliance an unnecessary burden, a cost of doing business “out there,” “in the real world.” the job of the compliance officer is to implant a culture of ethics in the organization. hence, they must possess, and reflect, a high degree of integrity. they must act by example. expansion and professionalization beginning with financial services and the rest of the private sector, public organizations in fields such as health, education, city administration and utilities have developed their own ethics and compliance programs. the impetus here is not so much ensuring profitability, or avoiding financial or reputation risk, but to improve the workplace climate, prevent losing federal grants or contract,s and prevent litigation by disgruntled employees, clients, patients, or other user groups who might feel mistreated or abused. the health care compliance association (hcca), bringing together both public and private healthcare providers, was established in 1996, and now has over 3000 members. many hcca formed the core of what would become the society for corporate compliance and ethics, now with 15,000 members.12 with fear of prosecution and of reputation risk, the compliance field has expanded to pursue professionalization, beginning and advanced training, compliance officer certification, and other indices of credentialization typical of any new profession. there are now competing compliance officer associations in the united states and abroad with thousands of members. there are frequent ethics training courses, and an entire certification system with programs enabling one to become a certified e&c officer at beginning, advanced, sectoral, and international levels. there are e&c software companies (one of which, appropriately, is called “red flag”) selling a diverse range of services: due diligence investigations to vet third party contractors, training programs for antibribery law, employee monitoring systems to ensure that employees have actually read the company code of conduct and not just clicked through it, and so on. there is now an iso standard for compliance programs, 196002014, as well as an anti-bribery iso, no. 37001 currently in its final approval stages.13 a few universities and business schools now offer a master’s degree in ethics and compliance, while compliance professionals can read various blogs and magazines, such as compliance insider or compliance week, or the foreign corrupt practice act blog (fcpablog.com) to learn about the newest compliance enforcement actions. compliance 12 see http://www.hcca-info.org. for another example, see the state of illinois guide to health care compliance at http://www.icahn.org/files/healthtech_management_services/field_guide_to_ healthcare_compliance_manual_final_01062016.pdf 13 see https://www.iso.org/obp/ui/#iso:std:iso:19600:ed-1:v1:en and http://www.iso.org/iso/iso37001 http://www.hcca-info.org/ http://www.icahn.org/files/healthtech_management_services/field_guide_to_healthcare_compliance_manual_final_01062016.pdf http://www.icahn.org/files/healthtech_management_services/field_guide_to_healthcare_compliance_manual_final_01062016.pdf https://www.iso.org/obp/ui/#iso:std:iso:19600:ed-1:v1:en http://www.iso.org/iso/iso37001 journal of business anthropology, special issue 3, spring 2016 78 association meetings that i have attended have had from 500 to 1,300 attendees with dozens of presentations and workshops. smaller training courses lasting four or five days and costing about us$1,500 have had 3060 participants. at each of these meetings, participants can earn credits or points toward e&c certification which can be placed on a résumé. the e&c field is now so specialized that there are separate ethics and compliance meetings for those working in higher education, energy/utilities, and health care. compliance is now what we anthropologists might call an “assemblage” (ong and collier 2005 ), although i would rather term it a “package” of norms and practices―a package that travels (sampson 2010, 2015). the traveling is facilitated by compliance officer organizations that market their ethical project as good for business, and that promote the need for skills and competencies in ethics and compliance and, therefore, a certification regime. the package is also promoted by the vendors, who market ethics and compliance tools as a risk-reduction solution in an environment where large multinational companies need to control the practices of all their employees, and where noncompliance can be extremely costly. governments are also promoting ethics and compliance, and highlighting the essential roles and responsibilities of the compliance officer. to this end, the u.s. department of justice offers an anticorruption resource guide for firms, along with its official reports on corruption prosecutions and publicizing whistleblowing stories and statistics.14 the oecd, world bank debarment program, and the uk serious fraud office, which enforces the comprehensive uk bribery act, are all starting similar compliance programs encouraging firms to come forward and self-disclose. firms themselves are doing their utmost to avoid, preempt, or reduce federal fines for financial irregularities. compliance is hot. on the other hand, compliance officers also note that there are still those who view ethics and compliance as an obstacle to doing business. the e&c industry’s task is to convince skeptical businesses, especially small firms, that investment in ethics is good business. one survey, for example, concluded that firms with ethics programs made sixteen per cent more profits over a ten-year period than firms without them (ethics resource center 2014). some of the skepticism comes from within the ranks of e&c professionals, who explain that the image of ethics as “just talk” has limited its impact. it is only when ethics is applied, they say, using tools and skills inside an organization, and applied by the competent ethics and compliance officer, that ethical precepts become genuine compliance. the role of ethics and compliance professional 14 a resource guide to the u.s. foreign corrupt practices act (https://www.sec.gov/spotlight/fcpa/fcpa-resource-guide.pdf) https://www.sec.gov/spotlight/fcpa/fcpa-resource-guide.pdf sampson / the “right way” 79 associations, then, is to promote their members as business professionals, rather than as ethicists wagging their fingers and telling sales teams or engineers that “you are not allowed to do that.” the task of compliance officers is to avoid this kind of stigma, even while they themselves insist that they must have a higher ethical sensibility. at one compliance panel that i attended, for example, a compliance officer working for a travel and tourist firm explained that she herself could never receive a free trip. she would feel compromised. her fellow travel agents, of course, took several such trips a year as part of their work, but as a compliance officer such perks would be off limits. as a relatively new profession within the business community, with compliance sometimes being imposed on companies following a plea bargain, e&c officers must also be able to sell their financial value to management. compliance officers must ensure that they can enter the csuite, that the board takes them and their tasks seriously, in a situation where the board only wants them to “put out fires.” this trend, sometimes called “compliance 2.0,” is much discussed in the compliance training literature (greenberg 2014). hence, one of the major challenges discussed by e&c organizations, trainers, and professionals is to show others that e&c is not simply mere ethics―that is, doing the right thing―but that it is good business. this view is usually promoted with examples of “the costs of noncompliance”: the spectacular fines or jail terms imposed by the government on wayward companies, or the hundreds of millions spent in penalties and legal costs to fight misconduct accusations in federal courts.15 inside the firm, however, compliance officers are often without sufficient resources to ensure that their programs will actually work. the monitoring, record keeping, training, and updating of employees on the latest laws, standards, codes, or regulations―the policies and procedures―can be costly in employee time and operating expenses. several codes of conduct or policies may be operative at the same time. changes in a single area, such as “gifts and hospitality,” need to be transmitted, and translated down to front line employees in all the branches of a firm that may have thousands of employees and hundreds of subcontractors. in a complex, global business climate, compliance officers complain about being unable to keep up with the daily changes in laws, regulations, standards and codes, much less reflect on the ethical and compliance risks they entail. when requesting additional resources―for example, new data processing or document management systems―they need to reaffirm 15 avon corporation, for example, was assessed us$135 million for bribes in china to obtain licenses. (see http://www.fcpaprofessor.com/avon-resolveslong-standing-fcpa-scrutiny-byagreeing-to-135-million-settlement.) yet avon did not even make it to the “top ten list” of anti-bribery enforcement, with siemens at us$800 million; see the “fcpa professor” blog at http://www.fcpaprofessor.com/fcpa-101#q17 http://www.fcpaprofessor.com/avon-resolves-long-standing-fcpa-scrutiny-byagreeing-to-135-million-settlement http://www.fcpaprofessor.com/avon-resolves-long-standing-fcpa-scrutiny-byagreeing-to-135-million-settlement http://www.fcpaprofessor.com/fcpa-101#q17 journal of business anthropology, special issue 3, spring 2016 80 their position internally, to show that ethics and compliance also produces a return on investment similar to that added by the legal office, it, or hr. the moral compass the ethics and compliance officer is not simply another part of the firm’s management team. more than other employees, and resembling accountants, the e&c officer has an obligation to adhere to public values of trust and honesty. like accountants, they are supposed to represent the highest ideals of their profession, respect public values of accountability and trust vis-à-vis the authorities, while at the same time being loyal to the company. greenberg (2014) thus speaks of the “privatisation of compliance,” in so far as compliance officers become tools of government anti-bribery enforcement. the ethics and compliance officer now has a responsibility to government as well. ethics and compliance is now devolved from the government to the ethics and compliance department and the e&c officer. the chief compliance officer is supposed to have independence within the firm. however, there are pressures and costs. the cco herself may be vulnerable to government investigation and may be compelled to reveal misconduct. the cco does not have the kind of attorney-client privilege that the general counsel has with the board. the career and legal risks here are obvious. when such conflicts of interest occur, a company accused of financial crimes can elect not just to fire their e&c officer for incompetence, but can even take her to court. e&c officers even have a special job insurance to protect them against litigation, as they do not qualify for the standard director’s and officer’s liability insurance (known as d&o). to add to these pressures, the government can also impose fines if they view a cco as having acted in an illegal manner for not revealing company misconduct to sec investigators.16 pressures indeed. “culture of compliance” and “tone at the top” with these pressures, how do e&c officers demonstrate their moral compass? how do they convert cold-blooded conformity to laws, regulations, rules and standards―compliance―into “doing the right thing”? one way is by speaking the right way. two major tropes in the compliance industry, tropes which occur repeatedly, are “culture of compliance” and “tone at the top.” i have chosen these the two phrases because, in hours and hours of compliance meetings and pages and pages of articles, they were uttered most frequently and in various contexts. 16 the u.s. securities and exchange commission imposed a $25,000 fine on a compliance officer for poor implementation of compliance, i.e., failing to prevent embezzlement by a firm’s president; see killingsworth (2015). sampson / the “right way” 81 search for these two terms on google, and we obtain up to 400,000 hits for each of them. the culture concept is a pervasive part of organizational and management thinking. in everyday management consulting, and at meetings of those who teach or are learning about the compliance profession, culture is viewed as a set of values, attitudes and practices. as one compliance officer insisted, “we are in the behavior business.” from a compliance perspective, cultures can therefore be “strong” or “weak,” “proper” or “improper.” instituting an ethics and compliance program, therefore, is viewed as an intervention, a culture change. a statement about culture also involves invoking a company’s “vision” with catchwords such as “excellence,” “quality,” or “communication.” in one seminar that i attended, the compliance trainer asked our group: “how many of you in this room have integrity as a value?” with culture being so important, the compliance officer’s task is to promulgate these key values to the employees and engage them in the vision, a process often referred to as “onboarding.” ethics and compliance is thus a kind of vehicle that one enters, sometimes reluctantly. compliance professionals are well aware that organizations based on rules and regulations alone do not create an engaged work force. it is the organizational culture―“the way we really do things around here,” to use a catch phrase―that governs how employees act in their everyday practice. this culture as practice trickles down from middle and senior management in the form of behaviors to be imitated or as informal instructions as to how (or how not) to really get things done. the ethics and compliance officer interferes in this trickling down process by promoting codes of conduct and clarifying the grey zones.. in organizations, the culture is grounded in the way employees are rewarded or punished by superiors when they meet or breach key values. thus, compliance officers are aware that simply diffusing the code of conduct will not in itself create the desired culture. something more is needed: employee engagement. compliance officers thus talk of creating what they call “a strong culture of compliance.” one of the most common expressions was “making the culture part of your company’s dna”―certainly a strange mix of nature and nurture. embedding these values in employees of a global company is certainly a challenge. there are differences of language, skill, and attitudes among those working for global firms. engagement and loyalties vary among the dedicated managerial staff, the front-line sales force, the temporary and part-timers, and the outside contractors. compliance officers speak of how difficult it is to reach those who are in the field, typically the sales force which is paid on commission, and which finds itself encouraged or even forced to cut corners (by giving bribes, and so on) in order to make sales or import goods. “how do you walk away from a sale?,” they lament. “how can you let your imported goods sit there in journal of business anthropology, special issue 3, spring 2016 82 customs?” issues like these arise continually between compliance officers in the home office and the field staff “out there” in the world. ethical commitment is impossible without management commitment, the proverbial “tone at the top.” lack of tone at the top was the cause of enron’s demise: it had an award-winning code of conduct and an exceptionally competent board, but there was no management commitment to ethics. the tone at the top mantra is another way of saying that top management must show a genuine commitment to ethics and compliance in order for employees to engage with the company’s ethical code. besides tone at the top, firms also need a “message in the middle,” or “tone in the middle,” such that middle managers and field staff will be involved. in this optic, ethics and compliance is not just the e&c officer’s responsibility alone. it is everyone’s responsibility, beginning with senior management. one of the challenges for the e&c officer is thus to prevent an “e&c silo” in the organization. as one compliance officer explained: “you have to think of yourself as a citizen of your organization.” a company legal officer intoned: “i think we have a doctor phil moment here. it’s all about relationships.” how do compliance officers actually learn to implement an ethical culture in their organizations? how do they make sure that there is a tone at the top? one way is by cautionary tales: at training sessions, some lasting a few hours, others for as long as five days, we hear what happened to firm a when its hospitality payments got out of control, to firm b when its chief financial officer was arrested for breach of the foreign corrupt practices act, when firm c entered the european market and ran afoul of eu privacy laws, or when a whistleblower revealed to the sec that his company d was fudging its books. besides cautionary tales about the costs of noncompliance, these training sessions consist of sets of checklists. there are lists of what to remember, what to do, how to do it, what to look out for, how to involve the sales force, how to involve middle managers, how to get the board to take your work seriously, and, most importantly, how to diffuse ethics and compliance so that it becomes an integral part of the company’s culture. in the meantime, the most recent corporate scandal (vw at the time of writing) becomes a teachable moment. accomplishing these goals is a difficult task for the compliance officer. for most of them, it is not their first job, but it is their first job in compliance. compliance requirements and compliance teams are also new and expanding. there is no older generation of compliance officers to learn from about how it was “in the old days.” at a recent annual meeting of the society for corporate compliance and ethics, the 1,300 attendees were presented on stage with four individuals who, it was said, “were the founders of the compliance profession.” these founders were young enough to be still working, for compliance is barely 20 years old, and it has only taken off only in the last decade. one of these “founders” sampson / the “right way” 83 exclaimed: “accounting and law are thousands of years old. you people are pioneers.” all modern firms and public organizations must deal with ever changing government regulations, new demands for product quality and control, and ambitious personnel who have their own career aspirations. for this reason, compliance officers are constantly seeking out the latest pedagogical tools, courses, software to make their jobs easier, to simplify the kinds of data or measurements needed (the search for “metrics”), and to demonstrate to senior management that they are indeed doing their jobs right and generating revenue. the softness of ethics and compliance makes it difficult for e&c officers to demonstrate their value. they need help. and there are numerous vendors who can offer such help, from software to in-house training courses to due diligence assistance. for hundreds or thousands of dollars, these vendors will not only offer training, they will design a complete compliance program, and operate the company’s whistleblower hot line, taking over the compliance function in some cases. without being bombastic, we can call this the “outsourcing of ethics.” conclusion: moral capitalism? with the ethics officer and compliance discourse, we have an assemblage in the making. we are witness to new relations between employees and their firms, relations based not on contracts and performance, but on degrees of ethical adherence to codes, laws and standards. employees in modern capitalist firms and in public organizations must be flexible and career oriented. but they must also be loyal and engaged. the compliance officer must act ethically―not only vis-à-vis the firm in which she is employed, but possibly to the united states department of justice. the activities of the firm must now be grounded not only on profitability but on a code of conduct, on morally sanctioned actions. we are witnessing the construction of a moral universe inside the firm―its moralization. ethics and compliance is the right thing to do; and the ethics and compliance officer the moral compass. listening to the manager from coca cola tell us what she called “war stories from compliance,” learning that coke was both ‘the real thing” and ‘the right way,” and that coke was now spreading its ethics and compliance culture to all its partners in the 207 countries in which it operates, one can only conclude that capitalism and morality now share the same bed. that morality and ethics now pervade modern capitalism hardly means that capitalist practice has become ethical. incidents of outrageous corporate scandals, bribery, and corruption have not abated. we can only guess what the panama papers will reveal as the 11 million documents are examined. a us government prosecutor for anti-corruption, speaking journal of business anthropology, special issue 3, spring 2016 84 at an anti-corruption review conference (in october 2014) complained that the number of firms that continue to pay hundreds of millions of dollars in bribes is simply “stunning.” a conspiracy theory of ethics and compliance would say that ethics and compliance is just talk and window-dressing, if not smoke and mirrors. yet the conspiracy approach is a little too neat. modern capitalism is constructing its own morality with its own theory of human agency, with “good people doing bad things,” and its own theory of building “strong cultures” and “cultures of compliance.” as modern firms demand a specific kind of worker with a specific kind of skill set, it needs workers with a particular kind of moral skill set, those who know the costs of violating laws, regulations, and codes. it needs workers who can identify those grey zones and risk areas that might cost the company a lot of money or loss of reputation, and loss of their jobs or even jail time. we often believe that the entrance of moral considerations into social life is some kind of positive sign, that morality is some kind of brake on ruthlessness. in this optic, capitalism can be softened around the edges with a bit of corporate social responsibility, a code of conduct, and an anti-bribery policy. it devolves on the ethics and compliance officer to carry out this “softening” task. capitalism is not moral, certainly, but it has become moralized. the ethics and compliance officer is the agent of moralization, the one who 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(5th ed). killingsworth, scott. 2014. the privatization of compliance. in greenberg, 33-45. killingsworth, scott, 2015. cco liability: mixed messages from the sec. compliance and ethics professional 12(9) se.tember, 48-52. komter, aafke, 2005. social solidarity and the gift. cambridge: cambridge univ. press. mauss, marcel. 1967. the gift: forms and functions of exchange in archaic societies. new york: norton. ong, aihwa and collier, stephen (eds.). 2005 global assemblages: technology, politics, and ethics as anthropological problems. malden, ma: blackwell. polanyi, karl, 1957. the great transformation. boston: beacon press sahlins, marshall. 1972. stone age economics. chicago: aldine-atherton. sampson, steven. 2010. the anticorruption industry: from movement to institution. global crime 11: 261-78. sampson, steven. 2014a. culture and compliance: an anthropologist’s view. compliance and ethics professional, june 2014, pp. 35-39. http://lup.lub.lu.se/luur/download?func=downloadfile&recordoid=520 4644&fileoid=5204645 sampson, steven. 2014b. fighting fraud with sociology. impact on integrity. http://www.soc.lu.se/en/stevensampson/publication/5204649 sampson, steven. 2015. the anticorruption package. ephemera: theory and politics in organisation 15: 115-23. schwartz, mark s. 2013. developing and sustaining an ethical corporate culture: the core elements. business horizons 56: 39-50 (reprinted in http://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/conf_proceedings/cf300/cf322/rand_cf322.pdf http://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/conf_proceedings/cf300/cf322/rand_cf322.pdf https://www.worldcat.org/title/gift-forms-and-functions-of-exchange-in-archaic-societies/oclc/343645&referer=brief_results https://www.worldcat.org/title/gift-forms-and-functions-of-exchange-in-archaic-societies/oclc/343645&referer=brief_results https://www.worldcat.org/title/global-assemblages-technology-politics-and-ethics-as-anthropological-problems/oclc/53932585&referer=brief_results https://www.worldcat.org/title/global-assemblages-technology-politics-and-ethics-as-anthropological-problems/oclc/53932585&referer=brief_results http://lup.lub.lu.se/luur/download?func=downloadfile&recordoid=5204644&fileoid=5204645 http://lup.lub.lu.se/luur/download?func=downloadfile&recordoid=5204644&fileoid=5204645 http://www.soc.lu.se/en/steven-sampson/publication/5204649 http://www.soc.lu.se/en/steven-sampson/publication/5204649 journal of business anthropology, special issue 3, spring 2016 86 hoffman et al. 2014). scott, james. 1976. the moral economy of the peasant: rebellion and subsistence in south asia. new haven: yale university press scott, james. 1985. weapons of the weak : everyday forms of peasant resistance. new haven: yale university press thompson, e. p. 1971. the moral economy of the english crowd in the 18th century. past and present 50: 76-136. volkov, michael. 2014. redefining the relationship of the general counsel and chief compliance officer. in greenberg, transforming compliance. pp., 56-68. steven sampson is professor (emeritus) of social anthropology at lund university. he has studied ngos, the anti-corruption industry and most recently the ethics and compliance in private firms. he can be contacted at steven.sampson@soc.lu.se. mailto:steven.sampson@soc.lu.se commentary 30 years later―does the shoe still fit? richard wilk there are some very obvious things to say when re-reading a paper (which i will call “adidas”) authored so long ago―one i have not read in many years. yes, it was ahead of its time, and it does hold up pretty well in the light of subsequent scholarship. since it was published only in a very truncated form in conference proceedings, it has had little impact or influence. it is also very much an artifact of its time, raising issues that were novel then, but that have now become commonplace. most important, the paper also raises some fundamental questions, which still have not been answered, about why people want particular material goods. subsequent research has moved on to other issues, leaving the most basic questions unanswered about value, desire, and materialism behind. on the negative side, the images that seemed shocking and humorous at the time, the juxtaposition of indigenous and modern material culture, are no longer funny, and may even be seen as demeaning or offensive. the concept of a “mode of consumption” still has some resonance―at the time we optimistically thought a taxonomy and typology would help us organize and compare different case studies, a kind of ethnological exercise which has since fallen far out of favor. it is also strange to see just how much of what i have been doing in the last 30 years is presaged in this paper―including my present interest in the relationship between food and gender. page 1 of 8 jba 5(1): 37-44 autumn 2016 © the author(s) 2016 issn 2245-4217 www.cbs.dk/jba journal of business anthropology, 5(1), autumn 2016 38 in these comments, i discuss the things that i still find surprising and significant in the paper, and use it to reflect on the way disciplines work, and the way career pathways intertwine with global changes and the peculiar boundaries of anthropology as a discipline. disciplinary context reading is just as much a temporally-placed process as writing, so reading adidas today communicates very different messages and meanings from those we intended in the early 1980, as we were both embarking on our careers. at that time we were dealing with a strong feeling of disconnection from the anthropology we had learned in graduate school. the paper uses the established anthropological vocabulary to describe phenomena and to organize things we had seen in our own fieldwork that could not be described or encompassed by the wisdom of our teachers and advisors. with hindsight it is much easier to place the paper in a disciplinary context. there were probably many other young anthropologists in the same situation at that time, a pre-paradigmatic state of dissatisfaction that ultimately drove the discipline through what has been called a crisis, a collapse, or a reinvention during the 1980s and 90s. there were other anthropologists working on consumption and consumer culture, but lacking any kind of label for our work we were isolated from one another. looking back, i can recall that we took the marginality of our work very much as a reflection of our marginality in anthropology. when this paper was rejected by journals it seemed like the discipline was not only ignoring a topic we found important, but rejecting us as well. we both finished graduate school in the first years of the collapse of the job market in academic anthropology, as the rapid expansion of the 1970s entered a time of retrenchment and austerity. both of us covered walls with pinned-up rejection letters, and again it was hard not to take this personally. now that we are both very successful academics, it is good to be reminded of that angst, because it helps us remain open to new ideas, to radical rethinking, and challenges to a status quo that we have now helped construct. both eric and i started graduate school at the university of arizona in 1974, both bringing an east-coast sensibility and records of student activism and enthusiastic participation in what was then called the counter-culture. i think we both saw anthropology as a radical way of rethinking our own culture, finding alternatives by learning from the examples of others. but what we found in our classes was a very conservative discipline, which had little engagement with the rapidly changing american culture of the time. we were still learning about nuer kinship terminology, while our country was facing an oil boycott and fighting proxy wars in asia, africa, and central america. the discipline just did not have the tools or lexicon needed to describe a world that was wilk / 30 years later 39 becoming mass-mediated, where norms and boundaries were crumbling, and citizens were becoming consumers. in graduate school we heard almost nothing about research methods, ethics, or even the most practical issues of research design and beginning fieldwork. as graduate students we were rebellious and uncomfortable in a discipline and department that was devoted to its tradition and reputation, intent on training us in esoteric knowledge, codes, categories, and the names of carefully selected intellectual ancestors. we were encouraged to choose from a discrete set of sub-fields with names like “political anthropology,” “kinship and social organization,” “symbolic anthropology,” and “cultural ecology.” it is no surprise that we failed to place our thoughts about consumption in any of these mainstream traditions, which could have brought our ideas to the notice of senior colleagues. as it happened, we were junior scholars with newly minted ph.d.s, with no influence or audience. consumption would only take center stage when endorsed by more senior scholars at high status institutions.1 it is possible that if we had been trained at a higher status institution, we never would have had the freedom of thought that went into this paper. this paper is also autobiographical, in that it was the starting point for our divergent careers―eric in applied anthropology and then consumer research; and my own in teaching archaeology, applied anthropology outside the academy, and then back into anthropology through the back doors of development anthropology and economic anthropology. while we both built successful careers around the issues we defined in this paper, we followed different, though often parallel, paths. the global context this paper marks what we can now recognize as an important transitional period in global culture, the passing of the last vestiges of the colonial world where our teachers had done their fieldwork. our professors and mentors worked in a world where the white scholar was a highly privileged character. in those waning years of colonial power, europeans and americans still had strong cultural, political, and economic ties with their colonies. when anthropologists went to the field they could still find people who seemed “primitive” and “untouched”―a state we now recognize as an effect of colonialism itself (e.g. fabian, and others). we were taught that people like the !kung bushmen, or the yanomamo, were the survivors of a rapidly disappearing era, when economics was subordinated to kinship and cosmology, and people followed timeless 1 appadurai and colleagues began this process with the edited the social life of things…. in 1986. journal of business anthropology, 5(1), autumn 2016 40 customs and traditions, rather than self-interest. they lived suspended in an imagined “ethnographic present,” which left them entirely out of the contemporary world (see fabian on the denial of coevalness), the detritus of survivals doomed to disappear under the steamroller of modernism. a visit to the field was a voyage back in time. eric and i did our fieldwork in a far different world, where it was hard to identify discrete cultures, and where our informants themselves were completely familiar with the story of an inevitable clash between local tradition and a western modernity. this is why, when i told people in belize that i was an anthropologist, they immediately assumed i was working in the remote southern district with “indians” or on the coast with exotic “caribs” (now called garifuna), like all the other anthropologists. nobody at the time had thought to work with latino or afro-caribbean people who comprised the majority of the population (except for zora neal hurston, who never published the results of her work). the fact that the southern district was also the poorest, with negligible infrastructure and by far the worst schools and hospitals in the country, was just―in the eyes of the british governor and district officers―a consequence of its inhabitants’ primitive nature. they were said to cling to primitive farming―their esoteric languages and superstitions would eventually disappear when modernity arrived. in my dissertation, i attacked these myths and excuses using the dependency theory i had recently learned in robert netting’s seminar. i argued that poverty was not caused by a lack of development, but by 500 years of “peripheral capitalism,” as outsiders took what they wanted and hired indians to work on plantations during boom times, and then departed during recessions, leaving nothing behind for the people who lived there. the incongruity of what i had seen in southern belize did not really affect me until i was back in tucson trying to write the dissertation. i could not find anything written by anthropologists that explained, or even described, the things i had seen and heard. and my fieldwork experience was totally unlike that of my teachers, or what i had read about in hundreds of ethnographies. rather than being assisted by the local government, i was mostly ignored or resisted by almost every level of officialdom, in a colony that was trying very hard to show that it no longer needed educated white people to show it how to govern. people did not want me checking on their work and exposing it to public scrutiny. i expected at least some degree of acceptance by the rural people i intended to study. instead, the villages i visited were unwilling to talk, suspicious of outsiders, and often openly hostile at the prospect of being observed, photographed, and monitored. they kept asking what kind of help i could offer in exchange for their allowing me to live among them. they already had experiences with foreigners who wanted to study them, who left and were never heard from again. some suspected that i was wilk / 30 years later 41 going to portray them as backward and ignorant, abetting the way that they were patronized, derided, and exploited by the belizean outsiders they had met. as i found out later when delving onto the history of the area, they had been abused and virtually enslaved for centuries, driven into constant migration when their land was stolen (grandia). already most of the private land in the district was in the hands of foreigners. i am sure that anthropologists have always had difficulties dealing with the people they do fieldwork with (see malinowski’s diary, for example), and have dealt with gossip, theft, insults, unpleasant practical jokes, and constant begging for money or possessions. but most drew on the exaggerated respect paid to scholars and teachers, and worked in settings where white foreigners still enjoyed a privileged status. there was always an implicit danger that the law or government stood behind the intrusive stranger. by the 1970s, though, things had changed dramatically in many parts of the world. even though belize was still a british colony, i was usually treated as a potential threat; people worried that i was a missionary, a mennonite looking for land, or a spy from neighboring guatemala (then pursuing a land claim against belize). i had no support from the government because i had no official status, and the nearest british military garrison had no interest in me once their field intelligence officer had determined that i was harmless. the first village i visited where i hoped to do fieldwork had a community meeting where i was to explain myself and ask permission to stay. as a beginner in q’eqchi’ i did not understand what was said, though the argument was loud and vigorous, but in the end the alcalde (elected village leader) said that they might let me stay if i agreed to pay them an unspecified amount of money, but i would have to come back in a month and ask again. the only way i was finally able to gain the trust of a community was through the agency of the local catholic priest, an american who had taken anthropology classes in college. he agreed to vouch for me, as long as i did not tell anyone i was a jew, went to church every sunday, but did not take communion. more to the point, just like eric, i could not make sense out of the events and practices i saw every day, and unearthed in archives. kinship theory, durkheim, and levi-strauss offered nothing useful when confronted with a mule-load of coca cola passing by the door. the ecological anthropology that inspired my fieldwork was mostly about how “population pressure” drove culture change and innovation. it said nothing about desire for the money to buy a radio, clothes for school, a cold beer, makeup, and measles vaccinations for one’s children. in the world i was trained to study, teenagers did not have a deep desire for tennis shoes, village life did not stop for the afternoon soap opera, and people did not grow huge amounts of rice―a food thy did not eat―to sell so they could put a down payment on a pickup truck. cultural materialism journal of business anthropology, 5(1), autumn 2016 42 tried to rationalize the desire for jewelry and guns as some devious form of functionalism, an investment for the future.2 the intellectual tools that anthropology offered us for this new world were vague concepts like “assimilation” and acculturation,” which essentially meant, from the white man’s perspective, “becoming more like us.” this made sense from the perspective of early anthropologists like franz boas, an immigrant who learned to join the “melting pot”―particularly during wwi when germans were decidedly unpopular―and many changed their names and cuisine. how exactly acculturation and assimilation worked was never clearly defined, assuming somehow that culture flowed, like a thick viscous liquid, from the dominant larger vessel to the smaller, accounting for the global spread of modern western culture, and the inevitable disappearance of the indigenous cultures that boasian anthropology was intended to record. resistance was futile, as proven by the failure of native american revitalization movements like the ghost dance. the only alternative to being assimilated was a pathetic “deculturated” life at the margins. even today some anthropologists continue to decry the loss of true culture, and its replacement by an ersatz, commoditized shadow. after all, the passing of the traditional world was the founding charter for the work of anthropology. in our paper, eric and i found these concepts quite useless, because they assume exactly what we were trying to explain, and did not even hint at the complexity we saw in our fieldwork. instead of assimilation, we used images of extreme juxtaposition of the “modern” and “indigenous” to show how consumer culture was being absorbed, adapted, and indeed assimilated, through the continuing creativity agency of diverse peoples. at the time we had no terms like appropriation, creolization, or resistance; we had learned about levi-strauss’ concept of bricolage in our classes, but it seemed to be an almost random process, a reprise of lowie’s classic depiction of culture as “shreds and patches.” the political movements of the time affected our skepticism about the inevitable triumph of modernity. we had both been draft eligible during the last, losing gasps of the war in vietnam, and the iranian revolution had overthrown the modernizing regime of the shah while we were both in the field. the “new immigrants” to the usa, the ones who were refusing to assimilate and give up their culture, were arriving in the usa at the same time as we returned from the field to write our dissertations. we were learning that the old notions of assimilation and acculturation were hiding a violent political process under a label that made it seem like a natural progression, regrettable but inevitable. the governments of the countries where we and our friends were working were just as oblivious―the seemingly radical visions of mao, 2 see gross et. all cited in the paper―a truly remarkable publication. wilk / 30 years later 43 fidel, khadaffi, and khomeini were just a translation of modernism into a local language. prosperity and rising “standards of living” were still the end goal, even if achieved through different means. even the most stern and fastidious leaders had to face a population hungry for consumer goods, to the point that seeking american consumer culture was often seen by many of their citizens as a form of opposition, liberation, and resistance to a fossilized leadership and a failed economy. the ussr could not keep its people from seeking levi’s and rock and roll. hindsight we had no idea writing this paper in 1982 and 1983, that we were at the opening of a decade that would transform anthropology, and bring globalization and consumer culture into the ambit of the discipline. at the end of the decade, consumer culture itself was expanding through a global reach melded with new consumer technologies, the entry of mass media into even remote areas, and a fall in the real prices of many manufactured goods―particularly those made in china. the decade culminated with the opening of the first mcdonalds in moscow in 1990, just as the ussr was crumbling away. this was also the decade which saw the birth of neoliberalism under the reagan administration, and the dominance of the world bank and imf in reshaping global economics. we were certainly right when we tried to shake anthropology into paying more attention to the movements of the time, and broaden its vision and vocabulary. we also argued that, rather than being forced or coerced into the marketplace, many people were enthusiastically embracing it, finding new sources of pleasure and engagement, and escaping some of the discomforts of poverty. this bias towards victimology, based on ideas of coercion and false consciousness, is still very common, and leads to many strangely disconnected encounters. i am reminded of the hippie migrants to rural belize in the 70s and 80s seeking authentic rural culture, farms, and closeness with nature―exactly what so many belizeans were fleeing from, as about half the population migrated to the usa. my favorite image of the time was the slightly leaky jars of locally produced organic peanut butter alone on the shelves of grocery stores, since the government was encouraging local production by banning imports. belizeans would not touch the local stuff, and depended on a thriving black market in jif and skippy―only the peace corps volunteers and tourists would buy the local stuff. there were always anthropologists who understood the tragedies of capitalism, people like sidney mintz who was deep in the writing of sweetness and power (1986) when we wrote this paper. he understood that there was a close connection between the promises of prosperity and abundance, and the other side of consumer capitalism: savaged forests, exploited labor, land seizure, drug wars, pollution, and waste. we had already begun to see that consumer culture could be both liberation and journal of business anthropology, 5(1), autumn 2016 44 slavery, that creative creolization had a counterpart in demeaning appropriation. we were entering a twilight zone where we are all willing victims. as beginning professionals, i think both eric and i felt marginalized, that our concerns had no place in our chosen profession. we could not see that we were in the early stages of a much larger scale transformation in the discipline and its engagement with the world. but, as with consumer culture, change often happens by addition rather than replacement. there are still many anthropologists who would still reject this paper as “not anthropological,” so perhaps it is still worth reading. richard wilk is distinguished professor and provost professor of anthropology at indiana university where he co-manages the indiana university food institute and a ph.d. program in food anthropology. he has also taught at the university of california (berkeley and santa cruz), new mexico state university, and university college london; and has held visiting professorships at gothenburg university, the university of marseille and the university of london. he has lived and worked in belize for more than 40 years, but has recently begun fieldwork in singapore with a fulbright teaching and research fellowship. trained as an economic and ecological anthropologist, his research has covered many different aspects of global consumer culture. much of his recent work has turned towards the global history of food and sustainable consumption. his most recent books are a textbook on the anthropology of everyday life, co-authored by orvar lofgren and billy ehn, and a coedited collection with candice lowe swift, teaching food and culture. he may be reached at wilkr@indiana.edu mailto:wilkr@indiana.edu musings on an archaeology of business anthropology timothy de waal malefyt and ghislaine gallenga business anthropology is an emergent hybrid discipline (baba 2006) that is still in the process of becoming (ingold 2013). even if this process is generally at work, temporal gaps are observed in its development, following national traditions. we thus observe differences between usa and europe, probably in relation to the dichotomy between fundamental anthropology and applied anthropology, due to different colonial heritage. however, this hybrid discipline ostensibly bridges an anthropological focus with business, design, and organizational practices and beyond. the anthropologist’s ability to “look beneath” apparent behavior and uncover deeper motivations, and link these insights to shared values and beliefs, is based on broader understandings of human behavior that organizations find useful. as obvious as this all may appear today, from the most unlikely or serendipitous of circumstances, a few pioneering adventurers in the1980s in the us and europe began this enterprise first employed as business anthropologists. these papers collected here reflect the thinking, wanderings, and adaptations of what are now prominent anthropologists, who at the time were pioneers in applying practices of observation, human group formation, and new digital technology to human behavior, and noting their influence on organizational structure and consumer markets in the business world. they trace their influence to the foundational works of other scholars, who explored materialist and capitalist concerns in the page 1 of 5 jba 5(1): 1-5 autumn 2016 © the author(s) 2016 issn 2245-4217 www.cbs.dk/jba journal of business anthropology, 5(1), autumn 2016 2 meaning of goods (douglas and isherwood 1979), or innovators and entrepreneurs at work (barth 1963; rogers and shoemaker 1971; rogers 1962); questioned how and why consumers made choices in the global marketplace (baran 1962); noted changing patterns of consumption among west african elites (goody 1982); discussed the relationship between demand and supply on a global scale (mintz 1979), or as an integrated world system (wallerstein 1974). the six papers (and two commentaries) that follow depart from these studies in their own applied ways, to inform an “archaeology” of the emergent discipline of business anthropology. they query why natives might prefer a popular sport shoe (wilk and arnould, in a paper written in 1984, but never previously published); they reflect on the ways they provoked ideas for advertising campaigns (barnett); they inform us how woman led creative work in an all-male elite advertising club (olsen); how they worked creatively as an american in a japanese ad agency (mccreery); how itinerary wanderings led to the development of a successful business socio-anthropology in france (desjeux); or pioneered approaches in the human use of emerging digital technologies (anderson). these scholar-practitioners were the first to draw attention to the value and novelty of using anthropological theory in practice for what now seems self-evident. since then, the world of anthropologists has vastly changed, but so, too, has the world of business. the “turn” of events in anthropological approaches to the study of culture occurred when ideas of mass consumption of goods in the 1980 and 90s were viewed less as a detriment to culture and more as an enlightened outlook, which acknowledged consumption as the very means by which people expressed—and continue to express—creativity and diversity (baba 2006). anthropologist daniel miller (1995, 1997) contends that consumption is the contemporary means by which people express their cultural identities and relate to one another. brian moeran studied a japanese advertising agency (1996), with new considerations for the social networks and liaisons afforded beyond capitalistic profit. all this coincided with novel views of consumer society and capitalistic business engagements, revealing how consumer agency and choice operate independently to act on, even to appropriate, consumption for constructive purposes. from this perspective, consumers were worthy subjects of study— no longer passive dupes compelled by marketing messages, but “conceptualized as interpretive agents” who sought to form “lifestyles that defy dominant consumerist norms or that directly challenge corporate power” (arnould and thompson 2005: 875). consumers were now seen to demonstrate creative choice and independence in interpreting consumption for their own use, such as using advertising as a positive force to create social bonds that reinforced togetherness through consumption ideals (malefyt 2015). indeed, even the consumption of malefyt and gallenga / musings on an achaeology 3 goods—once seen as evidence of the conspicuous display of wealth (veblen 2009)—was now seen as a contributing factor to fostering social interactions and strengthening personal bonds (belk 1988; douglas and isherwood 1979). the marketing of goods offered consumers a way to engage people towards positive ends and “apprehend the world” (sherry 1987: 442). as anthropology changed, so did business. the increasing emphasis on interaction between consumers and corporations called for new forms of engagement. marketing, for one, now shifts from product to consumer approaches, which place the consumer at the center of interactions (edleman 2010). this has led to new forms of hybrid marketing that blur the boundaries of customer-corporation co-creation. as nigel thrift notes, “consumers are expected to make more and more extravagant investments in the act of consumption itself, through collecting, subscribing, experiencing and, in general, participating in all manner of collective acts of sense making” (thrift 2005: 7). daniel miller suggests we reexamine the traditional divisions between consumption and production to ask: “what is a relationship?” (2007). in this we look at the complexity in relations between goods and people, and the multiple types of inter and intra-connections they create. anthropological views on consumption have also influenced marketing literature and marketing departments in business schools. anthropologists and social theorists—such as eric arnould, russell belk, grant mccracken, and john sherry—forged a path for hybrid marketing studies from cultural and humanistic viewpoints. accordingly, several new fields in the departments of marketing and consumer studies have recently emerged to redirect marketing as a positive force in society, and they have spawned new conferences, journals, and academic departments devoted to their inquiry. two such groups evolved from the association of consumer research using more humanistic and cultural methods for assessing consumption: transformative consumer research (tcr) represents a movement within marketing organizations that seeks to encourage, support, and publicize research that benefits consumer welfare and improves quality of life for all persons affected by consumption across the world. for its part, consumer culture theory (cct) investigates consumer behavior from a decidedly social and cultural orientation, and includes a family of theoretical perspectives that address the dynamic relationships between consumer actions, the marketplace, and cultural meanings (arnould and thompson 2005). these approaches integrate insights from other disciplines and explore peoples’ relations to material culture and each other in terms of making consumption more effective. from these mutual borrowings, other ways of practicing ethnography have been developed and evolved, in the same way as have anthropology and business. if one of the most important changes concerns the temporal dimension and the necessary adaptation of the long duration of the ethnographic survey, new ethnographic journal of business anthropology, 5(1), autumn 2016 4 methods are developed more in line with the prerequisites of marketing: “blogging ethnography,” for example (minvielle and wathelet 2014). a convergence is also occurring in anthropology among the fields of cultural studies, organizational management, marketing, and consumer research, driven by practitioners and academics in search of new explanatory frameworks and managerial applications. scholarly societies, academic journals, conferences, and professional organizations are rising, devoted to contemporary marketing and consumer behavior. the rise of napa (national association for the practice of anthropology) reflects the increasing number of practicing anthropologists in the field of business and marketing; the emergence of business anthropology and two new scholarly journals―the journal of business anthropology and the international journal of business anthropology―along with epic (ethnographic praxis in industry conference), which is devoted to advancing the practice of ethnography in industry, all attest to the increased interest in investigating the effects of consumption and marketing on human behavior from anthropological and other humanistic perspectives. the collection of papers in this issue of the jba informs the various challenges and clever solutions these early front runners managed, as they also inadvertently or purposefully set the stage for a radical convergence of business and anthropology that many of us benefit from today. it is because of these pioneers that we have and can discuss business anthropology as a discipline. references arnould, eric and craig j. thompson 2005 consumer culture theory (cct): twenty years of research. journal of consumer research 31 (4): 868-882. baba, marietta. l. 2006 anthropology and business. in h. j. birx (ed.), encyclopedia of anthropology. thousand oaks, ca: sage. baran, paul a. 1962 a marxist view of consumer sovereignty. monthly review press. barnet, richard and ronald muller 1974 global reach. new york: simon and schuster. barth, frederik (ed.) 1963 the role of the entrepreneur in social change in northern norway. oslo: universitetsforlaget. belk, russell 1988 possessions 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contact and the relations of consumption richard r. wilk and eric j. arnould abstract the study of the consumption of goods has never achieved the prominence in anthropology of either production or exchange. yet the accelerating consumption of western goods in non-western societies is one of the most obtrusive cultural and economic trends of the last three centuries. this article addresses the general issue of why goods flow between cultural groups by re-examining the concept of consumption. it raises questions of importance to studies of development, material culture, ethnohistory, and symbolic anthropology. keywords economic anthropology, consumption, acculturation, symbolic anthropology, material culture page 1 of 31 jba 5(1): 6-36 autumn 2016 © the author(s) 2016 issn 2245-4217 www.cbs.dk/jba wilk and arnould / why do the indians wear adidas? 7 introduction peruvian indians carry around small rectangular rocks painted to look like transistor radios.1 san blas cuna households hoard boxes of dolls, safety pins, children's hats and shoes, marbles, enamelware kettles, and bedsheets with pillowcases in their original cellophane wrappings. japanese newlyweds cut three-tiered white frosted inedible cakes topped with plastic figures in western dress. q’eqchi’ maya swidden farmers relax at night listening to freddie fender on a portable cassette player while bana tribesmen in kako, ethiopia, pay a hefty price to look through a viewmaster at “pluto tries to become a circus dog.” tibetans, bitterly opposed to chinese rule, sport mao caps. young wayana indians in surinam spend hours manipulating a rubik's cube. the elaborate white mountain apache puberty ceremony features the massive redistribution of soda pop. when a swazi princess weds a zulu king, she wears red touraco wing feathers around her forehead and a cape of windowbird feathers and oxtails. he wears a leopard skin cloak, and both are recorded with a kodak movie camera while the band plays “the sound of music.” in niger, pastoral bororo nomads race to market on camelback, carrying beach umbrellas. veiled noble tuareg men carry swords modeled after the crusaders” weapons and sport mirrored sunglasses with tiny hearts etched into the lenses. behind these incongruous and sometimes humorous images lies a serious anthropological problem which has never achieved the prominence it deserves. in their concern with production and exchange, anthropologists have tended to slight the importance of consumption. yet through the more poignant examples of the introduction of iron axes to stone-age australians and powdered milk to numerous third-world mothers, we are all familiar with the central role of consumption patterns in the process of culture change. because we come from a society in which consumerism and conspicuous consumption are accepted as part of human nature, we see this process as being somehow obvious and selfexplanatory. so, on the contrary, we suggest that this is a complex, problematic topic which needs to be integrated with contemporary studies of development, material culture, and symbolism. we are actually asking a number of different questions about the reasons for the transfer of objects between cultures, and we intend to distinguish a number of underlying causes and motives beneath what seems, at first, to be a unitary phenomenon. 1 acknowledgements: many people have had their hands, directly and indirectly in helping us write this paper. susan greenhalgh, robert netting and richard randolph have read drafts and offered comments. william rathje, michael schiffer and michael reilly gave us ideas that were very influential. harold wilhite and barbra heyerdahl provided a kitchen for us to work in. none has any responsibility for the final project's errors. journal of business anthropology, 5(1), autumn 2016 8 we will pose some key questions to help divide up and define the realm of inquiry. first, why are some cultures more resistant or more accepting of objects from outside their own symbolic and economic system? second, given the range of possible objects or artifacts which could be adopted or incorporated, why and how are some selected and others rejected? third, why are the consequences of adoption in different circumstances destructive, constructive, or benign? fourth, and perhaps most generally, what are the motives which impel people, in so many diverse settings, to seek and adopt novel artifacts, customs, and symbols? to answer these questions, we think it necessary to introduce the concept of “mode of consumption” to describe the ways in which objects are used materially and symbolically within a society. while our ultimate goal is a classificatory scheme for consumption, we intend this to be a complement to existing schemes for classifying economic systems in terms of exchange and modes of production. this will allow us to define the ways in which consumption articulates in different ways with exchange and production. in this essay we will limit our discussion to a number of examples, and will concentrate on the symbolic dimension of artifacts and objects rather than on their utilitarian aspects (which have been treated thoroughly elsewhere, notably by historical archaeologists). we begin with a quick survey of relevant literature in a number of fields, and then present an analytical scheme for understanding different modes of consumption. we then suggest some general, testable answers to the questions we have posed above, and define the topical areas which are most in need of further inquiry. themes in the literature speaking on the question of how and why consumers make choices in the global marketplace, paul baran (1962: xii-xiv) defines two ideological positions which are worth quoting at some length: the conservative reaction ... appears in two variants. one school of thought deals with the problem by denying its existence. this school holds that the molding of consumers” tastes and preferences by the advertising and high-pressure sales efforts of corporate business is nothing but a bogey, because in the long run no amount of persuasion and no ingenuity of salesmanship can change “human nature,” can force upon the consumer what he does not want… another conservative current of thought... freely acknowledges that the consumer's revealed preferences have nothing in common with the traditional notion of consumer choice, that the power of the giant corporations is such as to mold consumers” tastes and preferences for the benefit of wilk and arnould / why do the indians wear adidas? 9 corporate interests, and that all of this has a deleterious effect on both our economy and our society... this is not the stance of the so-called liberal. considering the consumers” revealed preferences to be the source of our societies irrational allocation of resources... the liberal is exercised about the pernicious impact of advertising, about fraudulent product differentiation and artificial product obsolescence; he inveighs against the quality of culture purveyed by the educational system, hollywood, the newspapers, the radio and tv networks... baran defines three of the existing explanations for acculturation and the diffusion of consumer goods. we find other root causes proposed or elaborated upon elsewhere: 1. human desires are insatiable... this gives rise to constant discontent in the human mind and a weariness of the things they possess; and it is this which makes them decry the present, praise the past, and desire the future (machiavelli, as quoted in burnham 1968); 2. in most nations, foreign trade has preceded any refinement of home manufactures and given birth to domestic luxury. the temptation is stronger to make use of foreign commodities which are ready for use and which are entirely new to us, than to make improvements on any domestic commodity, which always advance by slow degrees, and never affect us by their novelty (hume 1752, cited in wilks 1979: 7); 3. the bourgeoisie, by the rapid improvement of all instruments of production, by the immensely facilitated means of communication, draws all, even the most barbarian nations into civilization. the cheap prices of its commodities are the heavy artillery with which it batters down all chinese walls, with which it forces the “barbarians” intensely obdurate hatred of foreigners to capitulate (marx and engels 1848: 53); 4. as native subsistence systems undergo pressure because of sedentation and encroachment, people respond by intensifying subsistence production and adopting different technologies in order to do so....the availability of steel axes, knives and machetes, and firearms is especially important. these are more efficient and durable than their handmade counterparts... “luxury” items... may be a way of conserving capital because such items as radios, wristwatches, and handguns hold their value batter than cash...thus, we think that while industrial goods may have an intrinsic allure to native peoples, practical requirements brought about by sedentation, encroachment, colonization, and subsistence intensification are of greater importance (gross et al. 1979: 1048-1049). journal of business anthropology, 5(1), autumn 2016 10 we abstract the following contradictory themes from these representatives of a much more extensive literature:  consumers are essentially autonomous and uninfluenced by advertising or other pressure. demand for goods flows in some unspecified fashion from human nature, which is inherently acquisitive (see sociobiologists such as wilson 1975);  demand for goods is essentially the product of corporate and business leadership and coercion through advertising or force. some see this as benign or progressive, while others see it as pernicious, and seek to regulate or modify this power for more rational purposes;  novelty, as represented by “foreign” goods, is inherently interesting to human beings, so that artifacts from other systems will always be more attractive than equivalent local products;  that ideological and material domination causes the flow of goods from capitalist to precapitalist cultures, as part of the extraction of surplus value in the process of “primitive accumulation”;  some goods, mostly those manufactured in industrial societies, are technologically superior to native products. the adoption of new products is part of an adaptive strategy for coping with pressure on subsistence production;  that, as freud proposed, “acquisitiveness and possessiveness come from fixations at or regressions to two different stages of psychological development” (belk 1982:19). these are oral fixations or anal fixations, stemming from incidents in psychological ontogeny. this last factor will not be dealt with as a central issue in this essay, although psychological explanation is a major orientation in studies of consumer behavior. these various themes are used and interwoven in a number of implicit and explicit ways in a number of bodies of literature. next we will briefly examine various schools of thought in different disciplines, and bring in some concepts from economic and symbolic anthropology which can help resolve issues of causality. within anthropology, especially during the 1940s and 1950s, the issues of culture contact between “primitive” and industrialized society were treated within the category of “acculturation.” a whole series of studies considered the impacts of technological change, culture contact, and economic development on non-western peoples (e.g. mead 1955, spicer 1952), often explicitly considering situations of forced change in which dominant political and economic systems disrupted “traditional” patterns. as long as the issue was enforced change, the question of motive on the part of traditional societies could be evaded. wilk and arnould / why do the indians wear adidas? 11 nevertheless, case studies like that by murphy and steward (1956), proposed a model by which traditional peoples were “seduced” into dependence on imported manufactures and foodstuffs, through a process of luxuries becoming necessities. foods, tools and ornaments, which at first were cheap, effective, or novel, drew people into market relations, which gradually expanded to include the majority of their material culture and livelihood. the cause of the process was the desire of western traders for the products―like fur and rubber―of native areas, and the progression of dependence was designed to intensify that production. in this model, indigenous peoples were essentially passively exploited through their initially innocent acquisitiveness. another theme in acculturation studies is that of emulation. in discussing the gradual intrusion of western material culture into san blas cuna life in the absence of any coercion or force, stout (1947) claimed that a major motivation was the cuna desire to mimic the dress and behavior of the foreign groups which they most admired. he pointed out that the cuna borrowed heavily from the english and americans who they admired (and received political support from), and virtually ignored the material culture of the spanish and panamanians with whom they were in conflict. this “desire, largely unconscious, to identify themselves through imitation and emulation with english-speaking whites” was seen as the outcome of “free selections” (stout 1947: 108-109). the unstated general principle, drawing on the prevailing diffusion theories, was that material culture “traits” are inherently mobile. small, relatively unorganized societies are predominantly recipients, while larger and more dynamic societies are donors. at the same time, this trend of “deculturation” was seen as an inevitable part of the process of increasing world trade and the growth of an amorphous “world culture.” material culture intrusion was merely a symptom of the progressive loss of the “little tradition” at the hands of the “great tradition.” at the village scale, the process was motivated by the “increasing volume of trade and growing desire for cash wealth,” which resulted in “a growing loss of interest, especially among the young men, in their own culture” (ibid., p. 77). “there is also a growing conflict between the old hospitality and sharing pattern and the new competitive and individualistic values” (ibid.). while studies of acculturation were quite correct in linking flows of material culture to larger and more encompassing patterns of socioeconomic change, they used an inadequate macro-scale model of global historical economic processes. in addition, they never seriously questioned either “native” motivations for borrowing, or general assumptions about human economic rationality―a line of question which eventually led into the cul-de-sac of the formalist-substantivist debate (godelier 1977). journal of business anthropology, 5(1), autumn 2016 12 the recent flourishing of the “world systems” approach to economic history has similarly skirted important issues of consumption and demand. wallerstein, in discussing early mercantile exploitation of the periphery, exclusively dwells on the demand for luxury goods in the core economies (1976). demand for goods among the emerging elites of the periphery is again traced to the emulation of the elites in advanced countries (furtado 1963). by concentrating on the flow of wealth from periphery to core, world systems theorists end up depending on marx's explanation for flows in the opposite direction, that both are enforced through tribute, taxation, or ideological imperialism. perhaps the most productive arguments about consumption patterns and the growth of demand to grow out of the study of world systems are those which focus on the growth of internal demand for imported goods within the core zone. the questions here are essentially the same ones we ask in this paper: “precisely how demand ‘arises'; precisely how supply ‘stimulates’ demand even while filling it―and yielding a profit besides; precisely how ‘demand’ is transformed into the ritual of daily necessity and even into images of daily decency...” (mintz 1979: 65). again the answers seem to lie, at least partially, in the supplanting of subsistence economies and self-sufficient economic enclaves by proletarianization and wage labor, and the concomitant dependence on purchased, imported goods. but as wolf (1982) points out, this is not a uniform or unitary historical process. furthermore, if the origins of proletarianization and wage labor are to be found partially in people's desires for the luxury products of the marketplace (as proposed by murphy and steward among many others), we are led into an explanatory paradox. if demand stimulates new relations of production, and production stimulates demand, it seems essential to settle the issue of the origin of demand. contemporary marxist approaches to the spread of capitalist relations of production take a similar stance, oriented towards production and exchange rather than demand and consumption. the growth of consumerism is an inevitable by-product of the proletarianization of the workforce. “commodity fetishism” grows as people compensate for their lack of control over production and exchange through an elaboration of their control over consumption (e.g. the poor rural americans studied by fitchen 1981). this seems a useful explanation for the maintenance of high-consumption rates among industrialized populations, but it sheds little light on the origin of those patterns and the particular choices of consumer goods in each case. an influential, and often credible, argument about the growth of consumer demand in the modern “periphery” can be found in the laudatory and critical literature on multinational corporations (the modern practitioners of the “world systems approach”). multinationals do an increasing business in luxury goods in both urban and rural areas of wilk and arnould / why do the indians wear adidas? 13 the underdeveloped world, and both proponents and critics agree that advertising campaigns, bolstered with more subtle ideological imperialism, are the effective agents. these billboards, prepared with the latest techniques of modern advertising, offer technicolor fantasies of luxury, love, and power that no message from the department of health, however uplifting, is likely to disturb. throughout the underdeveloped world global corporations are thus successfully marketing the same dreams they have been selling in the industrialized world. stimulating consumption in low-income countries and accommodating local tastes to globally distributed products is crucial to the development of an everexpanding global shopping center. the world managers argue that they are cultivating tastes and educating for progress...telling poor people about products they have the money to buy right now, such as coca cola and itt's twinkies, opens up new horizons. how, the world managers argue, can the transfer of the consumption ideology, which had so much to do with the expansion of the us economy, be bad for poor countries? (barnet and muller 1974: 173) the same helplessness of third-world peoples in the face of advertising by multinational corporations is cited by the critics of the powdered babyformula industry. a crucial ingredient to the success of these products is said to be the role of “opinion leaders,” and again the impoverished are seen as emulating the elite. but how all-powerful is advertising, and how constant is the emulation phenomenon? mechanical models of innovation and diffusion, no matter how mathematically elegant, are usually post-hoc devices with equivocal explanatory power. they skirt the question of why people respond, or why they choose to remain unaffected. studies show that marketing and advertising are moderately successful in influencing brand choice, but are ineffective in creating primary demand for new product categories (ray 1981; zaltman and wallendorf 1983). advertising and diffusion effects may only augment, rather than create, existing trends. furthermore, demand for foreign goods often grows in areas where there is no advertising, and consumers often request or pursue commodities which have not been pushed or marketed. what are lacking in advertising models of consumer demand are concerns with internal processes, within societies and sub-groups. treating indigenous cultures as black boxes and using “top down” models of demand can only take us part of the way towards the answers we seek. we will now turn to some perspectives on internal processes of demand. journal of business anthropology, 5(1), autumn 2016 14 a considerable literature on the processes of innovation and spread of practices and artifacts takes up the question of which people are most likely to initiate demand and how demand spreads. special attention has been given to the channels of communication both between the innovator and sources of information, and between innovators and followers (rogers and shoemaker 1971). minimally, studies of innovation are descriptions of actual events and speculation about why innovators’ practices are emulated and copied by others. most studies are concerned with economically “rational” innovations which improve productivity (rogers 1962). at best, however, the study of innovation involves an examination of the social context of innovation, and the kinds of competition between social strata which influence subsequent events (cancian 1979). the relationship between competition and consumption seems essential in clarifying the origins of demand as well, but in most innovation studies the focus on productive innovation clouds the issue. at their most basic, these studies are concerned with the processes of exchange of information and material culture, not with the genesis of a demand for innovation. classical economic theory has long used a simple and explicit model of demand which describes the basic consumer dilemma as choice between a series of alternative purchases. the goal is to construct indifference curves which depict how alternates are chosen, based on a posited mental ranking of values or “utility functions” (haines 1973, lerner 1969). by using the concept of “revealed preference,” measuring the internal set of values by actual choice behavior, economists skirt the issue of how preferences originate and change (houthakker 1950, gorman 1971). these topics have never been of central concern since the pioneering studies of veblen (mason 1983). in this, modern economists continue to follow the formulation of alfred marshall (1891), who claimed that economics was primarily concerned with production and exchange, and that demand (the science of wants) could be generally subsumed because wants were essentially infinite and could be taken for granted. his final words on the matter are quite prophetic: such a discussion of demand as is possible at this stage of our work, must be confined to an elementary analysis of an almost purely formal kind. the higher study of consumption must come after, and not before, the main body of economic analysis; and, though it may have its beginning within the proper domain of economics, it cannot find its conclusion there, but must extend far beyond. (marshall 1891: 148) wilk and arnould / why do the indians wear adidas? 15 economic anthropology has never explicitly taken up this task as its own. production and exchange have dominated economic anthropology from its early years, but recent work on “primitive economics” has powerful and important implications for a theory of demand and consumption. one of the major conclusions to come out of the formalist-substantivist debate is that non-market economic systems limit and regulate access to and demand for most commodities by linking them to social positions and roles. through exchange, but also through the accumulation and consumption of goods, social positions are enacted and transacted. perhaps the most basic example of limitation on consumption and accumulation through rules of social exchange is that of the band-level egalitarian society as discussed by harris (1975). because of rules of obligatory gift-giving, there is little incentive to produce or accumulate, and perhaps as important, to innovate. the establishment of reciprocal gift-giving bonds between two individuals or groups does provide some incentive for production and procurement of goods (weissner 1982), but there are often strict social limitations on the kinds of goods which can circulate in such a manner. a tiv expecting brass bars in exchange for a bride would be unlikely to accept a beach umbrella instead. in systems where politics and competition for power are predicated on the exchange and movement of particular classes of goods, the same limitations may apply. in kinship-based socio-political systems, the consumption and accumulation of particular goods are the prerogative of particular kin roles. “in the world of the self-sustaining society, wealth has no existence apart from the individual, it is not dissociated from he who embodies the status of which it is the attribute” (althabe 1962). the famous example of the stone axes among the yir yiront (sharp 1952) illustrates the importance of the social control of particular categories of objects in the maintenance of social structure. a similar argument might be made for the circulation of bride wealth in west african societies. in both cases, the linkage between object and social position is so intimate that the introduction of new objects can create new roles and modify old ones, disrupting the distribution of power. the exchange, extraction, and accumulation of goods within a particular social system rest ultimately on a shared system of values for the objects, a system which places some objects within the realm of “prestige” or “status” items. what kwakiutl title-holders, ashanti asafohene, and the emperor of ninth century japan had in common was the control over the flow of these objects and a special right to their possession and use. what we have here is a proposed explanation for why people desire goods―as a means to acquire and transact their social positions. within particular socially defined arenas, particular goods are sought, consumed, accumulated, destroyed, exchanged, and given away in particular situations for particular purposes. the assignment of meaning journal of business anthropology, 5(1), autumn 2016 16 and value to objects is then a political and social process, in which the objects themselves are both the means and the ends. furthermore, the internal systems for the circulation of prestige goods are closely articulated with external systems of marketing and exchange. jonathan friedman has related the maintenance of marked political hierarchies and tribute in eastern polynesia to the maintenance of chiefly monopolies on long-distance exchange of prestige goods, and the smaller-scale, big-man systems of feasting distribution of goods in melanesia to a higher density of inter-group exchange which allows no chiefly monopoly (1981; see also rathje 1978). the contrast is between “societies… in which goods are accumulated and withdrawn from circulation for ceremonial purposes, often buried with great chiefs, and one in which all goods circulate in a more strictly ‘economic’ fashion” (friedman 1981: 292). a similar linkage between political hierarchy and chiefly monopolies on long-distance exchange of prestige goods has been proposed for nineteenth century west african states (coquery-vidrovitch 1969, rey 1973). what is completely lacking, nonetheless, is a systematic depiction of how classes of prestige goods are defined or limited, and how and why they change over time, especially under the impact of western marketexchange systems. friedman gives some interesting clues by noting that the more hierarchical eastern polynesian systems managed to feed imported western goods into existing prestige circulation, and thereby strengthen the power of the ruling group, while more open western polynesian systems disintegrated into civil war (see similar cases in west africa discussed by ekholm 1977). it would seem, however, that the competition for status using objects and goods is predicated on the system which defines objects and gives them their symbolic power. the symbolic attributes of objects are not themselves inherent, and are subject to negotiation, disagreement, and even conflict (f. bailey 1969). this process is an essential part of the transfer of objects between cultural systems, when the very definition of the meanings and symbolic loadings of objects can change drastically. anthropologists who have explicitly studied symbolic systems and their dynamics have documented the ways in which symbolic objects and actions are related to each other as parts of larger ideological constructs. but the crucial matter for this discussion is how new objects are brought into existing symbolic systems, and how those systems change over time. they can explain to us why a white layer cake cut by a sword is consistent and complementary with the existing japanese symbols of marriage, but they cannot explain why those symbols were sought, or how it happened that they were adopted in the first place (and why the cake can be made of plastic) (edwards 1982). when a sociopolitical system is changing, or when people are actively competing for power or status through the use of prestige goods, wilk and arnould / why do the indians wear adidas? 17 many objects will have ambiguous meanings which are the subject of dispute and negotiation. sumptuary laws, which seek to punish those who improperly use objects, are a common result (although they are usually a futile stopgap, as in the japanese case described by shively [1955]). another crucial consequence (as some symbolic objects percolate downwards through the social scale or lose their power) is that those involved in competition may seek new objects from outside the existing systems―objects whose meaning and social role can be defined and controlled by themselves. a perfect example are the czech enameled bowls, which secluded hausa women in ibadan have chosen to hoard in huge, carefully tended stacks, which are then used to attract unmarried errand girls and aides (cohen 1969: 59, 66-68). flannery (1968) has proposed that it is emerging elites, those who are struggling for legitimacy and an ideology which solidifies their power, who are most prone to systematically borrow both symbols and the content of those symbols from other elites who have successfully achieved a secure status. it is not a coincidence that the japanese borrowed chinese religion, philosophy, symbolic objects, and parts of the chinese language at the very time that a ruling class was first transcending the previous kin-based political system and setting up a bureaucratic state (wilk 1976). islam was initially adopted into sahelian political systems as part of a similar effort at solidifying a central authority (trimingham 1964), and continues to expand as one response to european intervention. the implication of these examples is that the circulation of objects of material culture between cultures cannot be separated from the processes by which objects circulate within cultures. the assignment of values and meanings to foreign objects is predicated on a system which regulates the assignment of meanings to all objects and actions within a cultural context. moving towards general models of “boundary exchange” (see cohen 1983) will therefore follow more directly if we are more specific in our discussion of the circulation and consumption of objects in general. towards a taxonomy of modes of consumption the general absence of discussions of consumption in the anthropological literature stems partially from poor definition of the term and a tendency to meld aspects of consumption with social and material exchange and production. but the ties between individuals and groups created by shared consumption, and in the negotiation of the meaning of consumed objects are as real and important as those relationships stemming from production and exchange. to begin this discussion we will therefore define consumption in the broadest possible way, and then proceed to discuss some of the ways in which consumption might be divided and classified in a way which is useful in approaching the problems which have been outlined above. the discussion will rest upon, rather than journal of business anthropology, 5(1), autumn 2016 18 repeat, the analytical and illustrative accomplishments of hyde (1983) and douglas and isherwood (1979). at the most general level, consumption consists of actions or activities which change the culturally assigned meanings and values of material objects. consumption both changes the meaning of objects, and demonstrates them; it has connotations of “use.” but in between active use of goods are passive periods of possession. let us combine both acts of consumption and passive periods of possession into a process of consumption, which includes the entire period of time after a good is produced, until it is destroyed, exchanged, or disposed of. certainly we must remove the comestible metaphor from the concept of consumption; consumption does not mean destruction, and often has the opposite effect. a mercedes-benz is often worth more after it has been consumed than before, and goods exchanged in melanesia increase in value with each act of consumption. consumption begins when an object becomes an artifact, when it leaves the natural world and enters the cultural one through a process of production. consumption only ends when an object leaves the realm of human society, when it departs from what schiffer (1976) calls “systemic context” and enters the “archaeological context.” defining consumption in such general terms poses difficult problems in dealing with specific cases, and we have by no means worked out all the implications of defining consumption in this way. nevertheless, this is a more useful definition than that offered by douglas and isherwood (1979: 57): “use of material possessions that is beyond commerce and free within the law.” the emphasis here on freedom of choice in consumption is perhaps a byproduct of the desire to differentiate a category of “consumer goods” from other, presumably more utilitarian, goods which are subject to much less selection and choice. but, surely, this is a matter of degree rather than kind. from the acheulean period of prehistory onwards, even the most utilitarian tools, like handaxes, have had a stylistic component which reflects consumer choice rather than strict utilitarian determination of function (see jelinek 1976). further, should it not be said that food eaten without choice between alternatives (as with prison rations) is still “consumed”? certainly the interplay between utilitarian function and “free choice” (what archaeologists call style ) is a vital and important topic of investigation, but should our definition of consumption be predicated on such a complex investigation in each case? better to use a more general definition which allows many dimensions of contrast, and does not exclude whole categories of material culture. the definition we offer above allows many of the useful distinctions drawn by douglas and isherwood to be kept, defining kinds of consumption rather than cutting off consumption from other kinds of uses of artifacts. thus consumption through production (as with a tool wilk and arnould / why do the indians wear adidas? 19 used up in the process of making other items) can be distinguished from consumption through display (for example, wearing jewelry). consumption by individuals can be differentiated from consumption by groups of people, and highly constrained consumption from that which is more unconstrained (“free”). consumption and exchange exchange and consumption are intertwined, because the value and meaning of a good often change at the time of exchange. this leads us into making one of the most important distinctions within the general category of consumption, one which has been touched upon by all who deal with exchange and consumption. when consumption and exchange are so intertwined that the value and meaning of a good change as it moves from one owner to another, we are speaking specifically of gift exchange. on the other hand, when value and meaning are the same before and after the exchange, and no personal relationship has been created, a commodity exchange has taken place. it is possible to differentiate types of economies, depending on which kind of exchange is predominant, and to distinguish sub-types of both gift and commodity economies (see gregory 1977). the differences have led some authors to posit a fundamentally different kind of “economic rationality” for giftexchange systems from that found in our own commodity-oriented society (see mauss 1967, sahlins 1972, hyde 1983, reilly and arnould 1983). compared to commodity exchange, both the means and the ends of gift exchange appear to be distinctive. as mauss pointed out in 1925, three norms as fundamental and unquestioned as our own concept of individual maximization behavior lie at the heart of gift exchange: the obligations to give, to receive, and to reciprocate. goods are not predominantly acquired on the marketplace on the basis of agonistic relations amongst transactors through a rational decision amongst alternates, but are bestowed upon people in acts of apparent altruism. the operation of these norms results in a constant flow of goods passing from hand to hand. as we know from studies of the kula and the potlatch, among others, individuals were often only the temporary bearers and protectors of goods. when goods cannot be personally appropriated and consumed, they remain inalienable and enrich the patrimony of the whole group. in a sense, while individuals pass goods from hand to hand, the group as a whole actually consumes them. by moving, gifts set up a perpetual reciprocal flow. behind the concept of the “indian giver” bequeathed us by the pilgrims, we can discern the native american's urgent concern that the movement of goods be reciprocal. when the movement stops, the gifts become journal of business anthropology, 5(1), autumn 2016 20 something else, the parties change from partners to strangers, and tend to continue the transformation, becoming enemies. in consumer society a market transaction normally creates little effect on the social boundaries between buyer and seller. the immediate object is the consumption of the good. in contrast, in the gift economy each transaction makes, maintains, or redefines a social relationship. the focal point is not the goods, which are often standardized, but the transaction. in our society, “coke is it,” and the “it” is a happy communion provoked by coke consumption, as graphically depicted in beach-party advertisements. in a gift economy the reverse occurs; coke would be the recipient of special status by virtue of its role in the celebration. the ends of gift exchange are not accumulation. potlatchers might amass hundreds of blankets, kula partners fathoms of shell necklaces, and new guinea highlanders thousands of pigs, but the aim of such accumulation is dispersal in order create and accumulate social ties. significantly, traditional concepts of wealth, such as the hausa notion of arziki, gloss as disposition over persons, not goods. gift debt creates personal obligation in many societies which have only recently adopted commodity exchange, the memory of gift economies is still strong. here the gift may come to represent an entire way of life which may or may not have ever existed. the gift is seen as an opposing principle to the commodity, and its strength and articulation may flow from cultural and political opposition to the inroads of commodities and the agents of the commodity economy. we should, therefore, be careful of reifying this opposition in our historical analysis; it is likely that all societies have elements of gift and commodity in their economies, and that the tension between the two provides both vitality and the potential for change and manipulation. rather than typologizing economies on the basis of their “exchange rationality,” we might find more evocative and provocative questions in an exploration of the coexistence of the gift and the commodity. in practice, how do we differentiate, within the same cultural system, between exchange-without-consumption (the commodity) and exchangewith-consumption (the gift)? the distinction is admirably defined and dissected in lewis hyde's book (1983) the gift: imagination and the erotic life of property . in gift exchange the value of objects change, and the relationship between donor and recipient is transformed as a consequence. the function of the gift exchange is the changing of the relationship, and in the act the object exchanged is drastically affected. to say that the gift is used up, consumed and eaten sometimes means that it is literally destroyed...but more simply and accurately it means that the gift perishes for the person who gives it away. in gift exchange, the transaction wilk and arnould / why do the indians wear adidas? 21 consumes the object. no, it is true that something often comes back when a gift is given, but if this were made an explicit condition of the exchange it wouldn't be a gift...this then is how i use “consume” to speak of a gift―a gift is consumed when it moves from one hand to another with no assurance of getting anything in return. there is little difference therefore between its consumption and its movement. (hyde 1983:9) in a gift exchange, the motivating factor is the act of exchange: whatever the parties expect to achieve from consumption is largely accomplished in the act of transferring it. the life of a commodity, on the other hand, begins after the exchange; it is possession rather than exchange which is the intent of actors in respect to commodities. hyde confuses the effects of gift-giving (the creation and maintenance of social ties, the breaking down of boundaries) with the definition of gifts as a general category. his mixing of the categories of exchange and consumption is useful in the case of the kula and the potlatch, but causes problems in more commonplace cases where exchange and consumption may overlap in complex ways, but may not be congruent. it is possible to imagine an exchange in which the donor gains status and gratitude for giving an important and valuable object to a kinsman, who then claims that the object was given in payment for services rendered, and parades it around the village as a token of his prowess. here the exchange is interpreted as a gift by some, and as a commodity exchange by others. the same object is consumed at the time of the exchange by the donor, and by the recipient through his possession and display. our definitions must be flexible enough to allow us to discuss these important ambiguous cases, as well as the clear-cut extremes of the potlatch and the modern department store. in actual practice, most noncapitalist “gift” exchange systems actually oscillate between two modes of consumption, with periodic accumulation through commodity exchange and display, followed by massive gift-giving. social limitations on consumption in many ways it can be argued that modes of exchange are predicated on modes of consumption. what motivates exchange of any kind, if not the desire to consume? it has commonly been observed in many pre-modern societies that goods cannot be exchanged freely for one another, but fall into categories of objects which can be exchanged for each other, or which must be acquired through gift exchange (gregory 1982, bohannon 1955, davenport 1962). this peculiarity of exchange is in fact a function of the association of particular kinds of social roles and statuses with the consumption of particular kinds or class of goods. journal of business anthropology, 5(1), autumn 2016 22 the human predilection for associating objects with social categories is an ancient one. the stronger the association, the more potential there is for people to change and alter their status through the manipulation of objects. thus, the creation of strict rules creates the incentive for breaking them (this might be an addendum to murphy's law). much of social structure can be interpreted as systems meant to restrict material symbols to those who have earned or inherited them, to limit the consumption of goods. by consequence, social evolution and change, is largely the product of continual attempts to bypass or change those systems.2 the role of consumption in placing boundaries around groups of people, of creating and recreating those boundaries on a daily basis, is well known to archaeologists (e.g. hodder 1981, pollock 1983). but because consumption habits can change, can be mimicked or emulated, appearances may be deceiving. archaeologists tend to assume that the material traces of consumption reflect social boundaries, when ethnographers show clearly that consumption can create and break down boundaries, and can be manipulated to cross them or dissolve them. douglass and isherwood emphasize the role of consumption in setting boundaries and “making visible and stable the categories of culture” (1979:59). but there is surely no need to make those categories visible unless they are also subject to question. the same devices which define social categories allow people to move across them. it is this fact which introduces an inherent, if culturally variable, dynamism into modes of consumption. thus to share in consuming items is to accept someone into the group, sometimes abruptly and sometimes gradually: “now that we have drunk, let us greet” is a frequently heard remark [in northern ghana], indicating that the verbal exchange of greetings and information should attend the act of hospitality, an act which turns the alien individual into a “stranger” to whom obligations attach, the principle of which is to provide him with food for a limited period. “after three days,” runs a sierra leonan proverb, “you give him the hoe.” (goody 1982:75) thus the alien becomes a guest, and then a producer and familiar member of the group. food is a particularly potent symbol of membership and boundaries, because it is consumed frequently by everyone―it can be extremely redundant as a source of information when there are few social distinctions to be drawn, but, at other times, it can be exquisitely sensitive 2 here we draw heavily on the work of frederick bailey and abner cohen among others. wilk and arnould / why do the indians wear adidas? 23 as a symbolic tool. in the united states, an invitation to a cold lunch, a buffet, a barbecue, or a cookout are devices to bring strangers to the threshold of intimacy, while attendance at cocktails and dinner takes them into the circle of more intimate friends (farb and armelagos 1980: 122). the definition of male and female foods or dishes is virtually universal, and is a frequent tool in the construction and maintenance of gender identities. as a popular manual of machismo has it, “real men don't eat quiche.” inclusion through shared consumption is the obverse of exclusion through prohibiting consumption. secret knowledge and secret consumption are one solution to the problem of exclusivity, but the complementarity of inclusion and exclusion is revealed by the fact that the secret always lacks power and importance unless everyone knows that there is a secret that they are not allowed to have. we all recognize the pathology of possessing a stolen picasso which can never be displayed, which nobody will ever know about. similarly, mbuti secret masks and ceremonies are known to all, but the illusion that they are male secrets is carefully maintained. “secret societies,” like those of the masons and the rosicrucians, function through a series of nested secrets, so the recruit is always learning more, and is also learning that there are more secrets.3 the binding part of the secret is that it is consumed, possessed, by the initiate. here again, the contrast between consumptionthrough-giving and consumption-through-possession is crucial. perhaps secret sacred knowledge and artifacts were the first things which humans consumed-through-possession, and these “primitive commodities” then served as the avenue by which other kinds of possessions were developed. initiation ceremonies sometimes involve… the revelation of hitherto secret knowledge; almost always they entail a change in diet and the relaxation of previous taboos (farb and armelagos 1980:99). while societies of all kinds use the boundaries of secret knowledge and secret possessions to differentiate consumption and keep categories firm, those societies with complex and hierarchical institutions for leadership have developed other methods as well. the most common form these take are legal or quasi-legal restrictions on the consumption of particular categories of goods. the sumptuary laws of the tokugawa regime of nineteenth century japan have already been mentioned, and surprisingly similar sets of regulation are to be found in medieval spain (defourneaux 1979) and france (tuchman 1978), as well as in aztec mexico and almost any other early state which has been studied. the sacred rulers of even small chiefdoms were often distinguished by the consumption of special food, dress, ornamentation, drugs, and housing. in modern niger, a precise social ranking can be based on different brands of cars. only ministers may drive peugeot 504s, for example. 3 see cohen (1981) for a discussion of how these societies function on a larger social scale. journal of business anthropology, 5(1), autumn 2016 24 anthropological accounts of chiefdoms tend to present a timeless snapshot of material culture, leading us to posit a perhaps illusory stability in the categories of what the elite were consuming. the view we get is that the elites in these societies were very successful in keeping the boundaries between elite consumables (the symbols and means of elite power) and “common” consumables relatively intact and stable. what the elite wanted to possess would have remained stable over long periods of time, and the consequence would be long-term stability in the styles of elite objects. certainly, what we see in historical data from state level societies is far from this posited stability. sumptuary laws rarely work in the long run; despite often harsh punishments, people who “should not” be consuming particular items end up doing so, trying to change or even just retain their position within the system. thus, elite symbols percolate downwards, losing their power in the process; this is what economists call the “snob effect” (mason 1983). burial in mound-tombs, originally the prerogative of the fourth century japanese emperor, had become so common by the sixth century that rich farmers were having mounds raised, and futile sumptuary regulations were enacted (kidder 1959:160). the same process took place with egyptian pyramids, the latest of which are no more than small piles of mud brick. the spreading consumption of mercedes benz, rolls royce, and bentley automobiles among the aspiring elites of the american sunbelt seems to follow a similar logic. it is probable that the rate of change in the styles of what the elite consumed were much slower in the less complex, gift-based economies of small chiefdoms, than they were in complex states and modern commodity-based economies. since archaeologists have tended to measure the passage of time by looking at stylistic change in artifacts, they are hampered in comparative studies of the rates of change under different social circumstances. it is certainly clear that, even in the relatively simple chiefdoms of the american prehistoric pueblo southwest or the pre-classic maya of mesoamerica, some categories of material culture (for example scrapers and ground stone milling stones) changed very slowly, while others (notably decorated ceramics) changed shape and decoration very quickly. questions of degree of competition through consumption in different kinds of societies must therefore await more careful empirical analysis. we should not just assume that chiefdoms are static and ridden with stable consumption patterns, while states are more dynamic and changeable. if there are pressures in every society for the widening of consumption groups, the breaking down of barriers to consumption and the sharing of the power conferred by exclusive rites to consumption, how then is stability ever achieved? it is not possible here to summarize all the ways in which boundaries are made concrete and reinforced against transgression, but we should mention a few of the more wilk and arnould / why do the indians wear adidas? 25 important ones. the aztecs always held out the prospect of achieving more rights to consumption through accomplishment on the battlefield: capture one prisoner and have the right to wear white clothes; capture two and get a headdress. controlling access to the actual physical material for consumption through force or ownership is a very important method. elites, from earliest times, control―or attempt to control―the exchange of foreign goods. by control we mean limit access to them, not facilitate cheap and ready movement. this explains why people like the olmecs and sumerians were so intent on taking exotic consumer goods like jade and gold out of circulation by burying them. reciprocal ties between elites are crucial to maintaining the monopoly on exchange of such items (see the discussion by cohen [1983] of how elites can actually emerge through the control of such trade). as long as an exchange system remains closed, and inter-regional trade lies in the hands of the elite, consumption of restricted classes of goods can be limited, and the limitations can remain stable. the principle of elite monopoly, still seen in goods like diamonds, is certainly an ancient one. an alternate strategy, followed by elites in many african kingdoms (as well as by the uji clans of yamato period japan), was to attach craft producing groups to the elite households or courts. the elites enjoyed privileged access to the goods produced, encouraging the preservation of trade secrets, and sharing in the fruits of exchange and trade in them (e.g. nadel 1942). theorists have posited that the earliest societies to develop strong political hierarchies were then able to stimulate the formation of elites in other societies through the extension of the monopoly on elite goods: external trade brings exotic prestige artifacts, which confer status on those individuals controlling the supply. a prominent hierarchy can thus emerge in what was formerly only a partially stratified society. in this case, the society supplying the goods is already highly organized and stratified, and with the goods comes information, a set of values, and social procedures which are more readily adopted because of the sophistication of the source society's products and the prestige in which they are held. (renfrew 1975:33, see also flannery 1968)] the trade of such objects is not enough; they must be integrated into each society's symbolic system in such a way that their consumption is meaningful, and does strengthen rulership in desired ways. those involved in such trade are often aware of the necessity for display, as well as trade. when the powerful emperor of china received “gifts” of slaves from a japanese chieftain in the early third century a.d., he sent gifts in return, along with the following revealing message: we have granted them (the ambassadors from japan) audience in appreciation of their visit, before sending them home with gifts. the gifts are these: five pieces of crimson brocade with dragon designs; ten pieces of crimson tapestry journal of business anthropology, 5(1), autumn 2016 26 with dappled pattern; fifty lengths of bluish-red fabric and fifty lengths of dark blue fabric. these are in return for what you sent as tribute. as a special gift we bestow upon you three pieces of blue brocade with interwoven characters, five pieces of tapestry with delicate floral designs, fifty lengths of white silk, eight taels of gold, two swords, five feet long, one hundred bronze mirrors, and fifty catties each of jade and red beads...when they arrive and you acknowledge their receipt, you may exhibit them to your countrymen in order to demonstrate that our country thinks so much of you as to bestow such exquisite gifts upon you. (tsunoda1951: 14-15) the cloth was an ideal consumer good, which was turned into clothes and decorations for the ruler and his court. the mirrors and swords were used in japan as sacred objects, representing the power of the leader in the shinto cult. the beads were buried with the elite at death. another means of limiting consumption of goods to particular groups or individuals is through the involvement of the dead in consumption. goods are not always consumed at the death of the consumer. instead, they can be transferred from generation to generation; when their value is based on a series of generational transmissions, they become a powerful exclusionary device, and an excellent means of limiting the flow of symbols downwards in social level. old wealth is qualitatively different from new wealth―this tradition survives even in our own society. consumption can symbolize continuity, and it is no coincidence that elites are so concerned with rites of the dead, and have designed especially elaborate consumption-rituals to accompany the burial of high status dead. through inheritance of goods for consumption, or through their transmission via brideprice or dowry, the consumption of goods is inextricably linked with social ties between kin. again, consumption of goods is restricted by limiting the terms of exchange for them. in some societies, like those of the tiv and lele in africa, spheres of exchange involving women and consumption goods (certainly people can be “consumed,” as we have defined the term) are preeminent. it is to be expected that consumption of this kind, delimited and limited by negotiable and non-negotiable bonds of kinship, has special dynamics of its own, and may prove to provide boundaries which are most resistant to change. kinship structures persist in commodity-exchange based societies like our own, at least partially because they continue to be spheres in which gift exchange is important (hyde 1983: 95-102). goods which are consumed within the bounds of the family are still subject to very special rules; strangers are not allowed to partake of the exchanges between husband and wife. wilk and arnould / why do the indians wear adidas? 27 the definition of meaning in consumption as we have mentioned above, the consumption of goods is a crucial activity in both creating and changing systems of meaning, and the categories of culture. above we have discussed some of the ways that the meanings of goods are stabilized or disputed; here we will define some terms which help move the discussion of consumption forward.4 the most general terms we will use are symmetry and asymmetry. in a symmetrical situation, all members of a society agree on the meaning of goods, both those who consume them and those who do not. in a system of asymmetry, however, there is disagreement over the meaning of goods: because they are new, because some people are trying to change the meaning of those goods, or for other reasons (which merit further research). here we are speaking of public meanings only, ignoring for the moment the “bivocal” (cohen 1981) character of symbols, that they have individual and personal meanings, as well as impersonal and public ones. the contest over asymmetrical meanings is a counterpoint to the agreement over symmetrical meanings; we can also apply these terms to the partners in an exchange. in order for symmetry to be maintained in a changing social scene, or for asymmetry to be resolved, the meanings of goods must change, must go through transformations. the transformation of the meanings of goods is one of the central concerns of actors in any society, and we can broadly define several kinds of transformation process. competition is the general term we will use for contest and dispute over the meaning of goods and over their uses. unless the system tolerates ambiguity (often through the use of secrecy), allowing asymmetry of meaning to persist without dispute, competition of some kind will take place. this competition is managed in a number of ways: displacement eliminates a category of goods and replaces it with a new one which has the same meaning. this can be envisioned as an old category being transformed into a new one through substitution. hudson's bay blankets in the northwest coast might be an example. identification involves the linking of categories of meaning together, so that a new object takes on aspects of an old one. airtight efficient woodstoves are accepted because they are given meanings associated with open fireplaces and cooking hearths. promotion is the lifting of an item by a series of steps in a graded hierarchy of meanings within a larger category. thus, running shoes are promoted from the level of athletic footwear to the level of fashion footwear. 4 this discussion draws heavily on the work of f. bailey and y. cohen. journal of business anthropology, 5(1), autumn 2016 28 appropriation removes a good from competition by linking its consumption to a particular situation or category of person. until quite recently bright hair coloring in our society was not subject to competition; the practice had been appropriated by older women, especially widows. escalation sees the widening of a dispute over the meaning of particular goods to include other matters. this may take the form of identification, as the meaning of new objects is linked to the meaning of old ones. when modern towns decide who may or may not consume video games, alcohol, or pornographic literature, they generally compete by escalating the dispute to include other matters, such as the morality of divorce, the education of children, the amount of crime, and so on. in extreme cases, a combination of escalation and identification can spread a dispute over the meaning of objects so widely that chaos ensues and the very fabric of society is threatened. this seems to be what happened to the yir yiront in the case of the steel axes. this case should be contrasted with that of the introduction of shotguns into new guinea, where appropriation took place and the stability of the system was maintained (mitchell 1973). change in consumption given these admittedly incomplete definitions of process, we are now in a position to talk about change in consumption in a systematic way by envisaging a cycle by which new objects and meanings are brought into circulation, showing how symmetry and asymmetry alternate in a cyclic pattern. in this model, the manipulation of symbolic objects in public and private contexts ordinarily exploits their ambiguity. innovation occurs when this manipulation actually transgresses the boundary of acceptable manipulation, as bailey (1969) points out, this creates contradictions in the system of meanings embodied by the symbol; there is now asymmetry of meaning between the members of the group which must be resolved. all of the means mentioned above can be used in this resolution, and the results are either a return to the status quo, a change in the system of meanings, or some degree of chaos. in the two former cases, symmetry is reestablished. change in consumption regime is a kind of social drama (turner 1974). the most provocative question to arise from use of this model concerns motivation, which impels the use of objects or symbols in ways which cause asymmetry. who are the innovators, the entrepreneurs (barth 1963), the outcasts, upstarts, angry young men, avant garde, tastemakers, rebels, deviants, and manipulators? why choose symbolic competition, breaking the bounds of convention, rather than some other form of competition? one is reminded of the example of the aztec pochteca, the medieval european jewish moneylenders, and the nineteenth century japanese merchant classes―groups which amassed wilk and arnould / why do the indians wear adidas? 29 wealth, but did their best to disguise it, to give the appearance of poverty, taking pains to stay within the social persona assigned them, even though economic changes had given them the capability of consuming at a much higher level. in the japanese case, at least, there has always been a careful distinction drawn between real power, and the display of power; they have a long tradition of “powers behind the throne,” who appear to be ordinary people, while those who consume and display all the trappings of power are in fact powerless. lewis hyde argues that the single, and perhaps fatal, flaw in systems of gift exchange is the damping of individual expression, which flows from participation in the greater commonality. he says that there are therefore always times when we wish to act upon our disconnection from the group, times when bonds become strictures. the “excitement of commodities” for those living in a gift-based economy may lie in the possibility of alienation. young people, who are often prohibited from full participation in the consumption of gifts, are the first to be lured away. hyde says that “all youth wants to be alienated from the bonds that nurture, to be the prodigal son. sometimes we go to the market to taste estrangement” (1983:67-68). in the new guinean societies discussed by gregory (1983), and in many sahelian societies (meillassoux 1981), youth also goes to the market with the intention of obtaining familiar consumption goods using new methods. their intent may be to participate more fully in their own community’s patterns of consumption, but they usually end up returning with competing goods. new symbols and new knowledge which they bring home inevitably introduce “asymmetry” into existing systems of meaning. thus, the lele system of ranking survived only through the successful exclusion of belgian francs from the system of meaningful commodities, while the tiv system burst apart under the pressure of british coinage when that medium was accepted as meaningful (douglas and isherwood 1979). as mintz (1979) points out, there is a feedback relationship operating here between demand and supply―one which economists count on, but do not really understand. a key to understanding it may be found in goody's discussion of changing consumption patterns among elites in west africa (1982). he begins with an historical discussion of social structure, emphasizing that predominant social divisions were permeable and vertical, between lineages, clans, moieties and tribes. while commodity production and exchange were common, they did not form the basis for horizontal class divisions. material culture tended to be more uniform, less differentiated by social rank, than in eurasian societies. the elite consumed more of everything, but not different kinds of things, and this was directly reflected in the elite cuisine (goody 1982:204-205). the colonial experience can be seen as a transformation from consumption journal of business anthropology, 5(1), autumn 2016 30 differentiated by quantity into consumption which differentiates by quality as well. consumption patterns changed in concert with productive systems. colonialism disrupted consumption units by encouraging individualized production of cash crops, migrant wage labor, and task specialization. thus, production also came to be differentiated by quality (measured by labor value) where before it had been mainly measured by quantity. as new productive arrangements emerged, new demands emerged, and colonizers introduced novel industrial foods. some helped to overcome seasonal cycles of glut and famine through superior storability (as with tinned beef and fish). bread, that compact and transportable food of conquerors, also arrived and was absorbed. drugs and cheap energy foods met the demands of new classes of labor. as they had in europe, tobacco, beer, coffee, sugar and tea changed from luxuries into staples. what of the new bureaucratic, military, and entrepreneurial elites who rose under the tutelage of the colonial powers? their social position is highly ambiguous, lacking traditional legitimacy, as well as traditional duties and obligations. they are neither gift givers nor gift receivers. their relationship with colonial powers―far from being one of emulating the admired―is equally ambiguous. goody (1982) suggests that their solution has been to borrow the “gear of western modes of consumption,” to fill in where they lack models for differentiated cuisine, couture, and architecture within their own cultures. the attachment to traditional modes of consumption is still strong in a reduced sphere of domestic gift exchange, but formal occasions require formal food, drink and clothing. these tend to be defined as eurasian, and are acquired through impersonal market transactions. both moslem and european cultures provide the models; hence one sees the juxtaposition of leopard skins and movie cameras at a ceremony at once formal and domestic―that is, at the marriage mentioned at the beginning of this essay. emerging elites borrow both symbols and the content of symbols from other cultures. they emulate elites who have secure and stable social status. competing groups may even choose to emulate different foreign elites; one group may choose pumas, the other adidas; one guinness, and the other schlitz. conclusions explaining how culture contact leads to the diffusion of goods is ultimately just a part of a social science of demand. anthropologists must take the lead in this endeavor. the economist's marginal utility theory, as well as the marxist and humanist alternatives, agree that consumption patterns are inherently dynamic within an economy dominated by wilk and arnould / why do the indians wear adidas? 31 commodity exchanges. but no discipline or dogma offers a theory for explaining what goods will be adopted, nor why, nor how. until we possess more studies (and more sensitive studies) of adoption which deal with the social basis of consumption, answers will tend to be based more on dogma than fact. in addition to the suggestions offered above, there are other clues about where and how to look at the diffusion of new goods to new consumers. one important domain of inquiry is that which economists call “exceptional consumer behavior,” or “non-functional demand” (mason 1983). examples are the bandwagon, veblen, and auto-ritual effects (see rook and levy 1982 also). bandwagon effects occur when demand snowballs, and the main reason for acquiring a good is that others have already acquired it. veblen, or snob, effects are those where demand increases as price rises, rather than vice versa. an auto-ritual effect is demand which crystalizes around private atavistic fantasies. all of these effects violate the core assumptions of formal economic marginal utility theory, rather than just secondary assumptions such as perfect information and profit maximization (which have already been relaxed in marketing theory). they show that satisfaction is not a function of utility, but of real or imaginary audience involvement. maximization is not achieved in the isolation of the consumer's home as a private individual outcome, but in a social setting with the participation, and even at the expense, of other consumers. this kind of behavior inevitably involves the “irrational,” or erotic, rather than the “rational,” component of goods. the imagination and affective lives of consumers are drawn to the market with a combination of counterfeit gifts (“free” samples, introductory offers, million-dollar sweepstakes, and exclusive tastings) and advertising images which draw on the deepest emotional bonds. the liveliness of the imagination is enlisted to move products quickly, before the fad passes, the exotic becomes mundane, or the exclusive becomes the norm. these unexplored territories of consumer behavior are as rich a source of information on modes of consumption as the gift giving of any aboriginal festival. while the answer to the question of why natives wear adidas does not require us to know why new yorkers wanted them first, both questions 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overlapping foci bring theoretical innovation to studies of human behaviours in the marketplace. in this paper, we provide asynthesis of cct research since its inception, along with more recent publications. we follow the four thematic domains of research as devised by arnould and thompson (2005): consumer identity projects, marketplace cultures, the socio-historic patterning of consumption, and mass-mediated marketplace ideologies and consumers’ interpretive strategies. additionally, we investigate new directions for future connections between cct research and anthropology. keywords cct, consumer identity projects, interpretive strategies, marketplace cultures, marketplace ideologies, socio-historic patterning of consumption page 1 of 33 jba 1 (1): 141-173 spring 2012 © the author(s) 2012 issn 2245-4217 www.cbs.dk/jba journal of business anthropology, 1(1), spring 2012 142 introduction miller’s exhortation (1995) to the anthropology community to research consumption in conjunction with production helped engender a sea change in consumer behaviour research, as disciplines increasingly melded, blurring their innate distinctions, to create new modes of research. a number of terms were deployed since the mid-eighties to describe this new approach: humanistic, naturalistic, interpretive, postmodern. an official term for this multi-disciplinary approach surfaced in 2005, introduced by arnould and thompson (2005) as “consumer culture theory.” cct has since become a shorthand acronym recognized in all major marketing journals. this paper provides an overview of cct research, drawing from the journal of consumer research, the journal of marketing, the journal of marketing research, the journal of retailing, consumption, markets and culture, and qualitative market research, among others, with particular emphasis on seminal papers. our paper is both a tribute to research already conducted, and a call to inspiration for further research, highlighting the underlying connection of linked study that enables researchers in anthropology and consumer behaviour, among other disciplines, to share common ground. we begin with the obvious: what precisely is cct? a method of assessing consumption apart from the usual frames of economics and psychology, cct provides “a distributed view of cultural meaning” (hannerz 1992: 16), one created, sustained, and transformed by larger social and cultural forces such as myths, narratives, and ideologies. unfettered from stereotypical conceptions of broad social patterns, cct nonetheless emerges from particular socio-economic systems, with the impact of globalization and market capitalism explicit in all cct studies (arnould and thompson 2005: 869). since the late 70s, researchers have discussed the need for new perspectives in consumer research (belk 1975; 1976). cct has roots in such discussion, and more specifically in the naturalistic inquiry embodied by the consumer behaviour odyssey project in the mid-1980s, when a group of consumer researchers set off across the u.s. in an rv to conduct a multi-sited ethnographic field study (anderson 1986; belk 1976; 1986; 1987; belk, sherry, and wallendorf 1988; belk, wallendorf, and sherry 1989). the resulting literature sparked intense interest in consumer research that highlighted the cultural and social complexities of consumption (graeber 2011). often cited anthropologists in interpretive consumer research include wilk (2006), appadurai (1986; 1996), arvidsson (2006), callon, méadel, and rabeharisoa (2002), douglas and isherwood (1979), mazzarella (2003), miller (1987), moeran (1996; 2006a), and schor (1998). joy & li / studying consumption through multiple lenses: an overview of consumer culture theory 143 cct illuminates the contextual, symbolic, and experiential aspects of consumption as they unfold across the consumption cycle, from acquisition to consumption and disposition (arnould and thompson 2005; mccracken 1986), encompassing frameworks that are interpretive, critical, emancipatory, and transformative. it interweaves disciplines as varied as anthropology, sociology, media studies, critical studies and feminist studies, among others (arnould 1989; belk 1988; 2010; sherry and camargo 1987; diamond et al. 2009; borghini et al, 2009; joy, sherry and deschenes 2009; joy, sherry, venkatesh and deschenes 2009; kozinets 2001; marcoux 2009; scott 1994a; 1994b; sherry 1995; schroeder 2006). each research area provides a unique lens through which to study consumption behaviour; many researchers use multiple lenses to generate frameworks of understanding (belk 2010; epp and price 2010; 2011; humphreys 2010; karababa and ger 2011; kozinets 2008; ozanne and saatcioglu 2008; peñaloza and barnhart 2011; venkatesh, joy, sherry, and deschenes 2010; üstüner and holt 2010). the success of the cct tradition in contributing to theory and methodology in the field is evident in macinnes and folkes’ (2010) identification of cct as a sub-discipline in the field of consumer behaviour. they argue that consumer behaviour is, by its nature, a multidisciplinary phenomenon; adjoining disciplines can expand the intellectual horizons of the field, and add insight to theory building. arnould and thompson (2005) identify four domains within which a number of researchers have made theoretical and methodological contributions. they are: (1) consumer identity projects, (2) marketplace cultures, (3) the socio-historical patterning of consumption, and (4) mass-mediated marketplace ideologies and consumers’ interpretive strategies. in what follows, we will sustain those categorizations, allowing for the fact that some studies exhibit relevance within multiple categories. additionally, we will summarize earlier findings, analyse current and new directions within each category, and identify potential future directions. while multiple methods are used by cct researchers ethnographic approaches are dominant. since the limitations of this overview are many, we urge the indulgence of our readers. recent studies on consumer identity projects identity via consumption is a topic shared by anthropologists (miller 1995), sociologists (featherstone 1991), and cct researchers here in north america and abroad (ahuvia 2005; belk 1988; cova and elliot 2008: caru and cova 2008; levy 1963; sandikci and ger 2010). personobject relations are the focus of this theme, in all its complexity and journal of business anthropology, 1(1), spring 2012 144 variations. objects are central to definitions of self, and in particular become extensions of the self (ahuvia 2005; belk 1988; tian and belk 2005) although such constructions are complex (curasi, price, and arnould 2004; kates 2004; braun-latour, latour, and zinkhan 2007), often riddled with ambivalence (arsel and thompson 2011), internal contradictions (luedicke, thompson, and giesler 2010; lastovicka and fernandez 2005), and even pathology (lastovicka and sirianni 2011). the impetus to look at commercial goods in the service of identity emerged with belk’s (1988) oft-quoted article on the extended self, and with sherry’s (1983) early, key article on gift-giving. cct literature focuses on the economic and utilitarian motives of equivalence and equality as the springboard of giving behaviour, although the symbolic value of the gift continued to be dominant (joy 2001; sherry 1983; sherry, mcgrath and levy 1992; otnes, lowrey, and kim 1993). marcoux (2009) in particular shows how consumers use the market to free themselves from the straitjacket of social expectations and the sense of indebtedness. other researchers have looked at the circulation of objects within a social network to illustrate commodity agency (epp and price 2010, curasi, price and arnould 2004; price, arnould and curasi 2000). by adopting kopytoff’s (1986) theory of singularization and concept of re-commodification, epp and price (2010) show how objects within a household become a key resource for the family to construct their individual, family, and social identities (see also epp and price 2008). bradford (2009) examines the immaterial and material dimensions of gift –giving, and demonstrates how interacting parties create, sustain, or destroy the gifted assets. belk (2010) resuscitates the concept of the gift as an act of selfsacrifice through his seminal study of sharing. in a study on intracommunity gifting in new orleans by weinberger and wallendorf (2012), the authors critique the existing literature on the gift with its focus on interpersonal relationships, building in multiple units to intra-community gifting. one outcome of such collective giving is a new sense of community, one defined with limited recourse to market ideology. while all such studies are centered on the moral economy, they also consider its intersection with the market economy. a predominant theme in the identity project literature is the malleability of crafting identity. the ideology, at least in the industrialized world, that one is free to choose an individual mode of self-presentation has become widely accepted, certainly since mccracken’s (1986) article on the movement of meaning notwithstanding multiple constraints (foster 2007). joy, sherry, and deschenes (2009) describe the many joy & li / studying consumption through multiple lenses: an overview of consumer culture theory 145 consumption meanings associated with virtual selves, ever-evolving and re-constructed at will. person-object relations can be viewed as an extension of the self (belk 1988), or as disguise or sublimation of the self, such that the world is seen only from the inside out (lastovicka and sirianni 2011). consumer identity and marketing myths the recent focus on examining how identity projects are constructed encompasses moral considerations. through a study of adversarial consumer narratives relating to the hummer brand, luedicke, thompson, and giesler (2010) show that consumers’ moralistic identity work begins with a cultural myth of the moral protagonist, which transforms their ideological beliefs into dramatic narratives of identity. arsel and thompson (2011) advance related theorizations delineating how sociocultural forces deter consumers from abandoning a consumption field associated with undesirable meanings. epp and price (2008) reveal how families draw on communication forms and use marketplace resources to manage interplays among individual, relational, and collective identities. schau, gilly, and wolfinbarger (2009) illustrate an increase in the breadth and depth of identity-related consumption by the elderly, which they term a “consumer identity renaissance.” venkatesh, joy, sherry, and deschenes (2010) investigate links between the aesthetics of luxury fashion, the body, and identity formation. coupland (2005) throws a new spin on how brands need not stand out in people’s lives, but rather can become invisible. new research on material possession attachment that critiques the notion of the extended self is presented in lastovicka and sirianni’s (2011) study. they argue that smitten individuals are often socially isolated, leaving object love as a form of compensation. another take on object-person relations is provided by fernandez and lastovicka (2011) in their study of fetishes in contemporary consumption. consumers use contagious and imitative magic to imbue their objects with unique auras. persistence and its impact on consumers achieving goals, such as conceiving a child (the parent identity project), is the focus of a study by fischer, otnes, and tuncay (2007). they show how cognition and cultural discourses jointly shape women’s decision-making processes. scientific rationalism, self-management, and fatalism similarly intervene. of particular interest to the notion of identity is bahl and milne’s (2010) article. instead of focusing on just one self, the authors maintain, researchers must consider consumer experience through the prism of multiple selves, and in the interaction of selves. while consumer journal of business anthropology, 1(1), spring 2012 146 researchers have examined multiple selves, especially when they are in conflict, they have not examined the dialogical nature of the self. the level of the self under scrutiny needs to be highlighted; the dialogical self provides a new framework for studying consumers at multiple levels. global consumer identity projects identity projects are complex for consumers in ideologically constraining cultures although similar constraints exist in the west as well (tarlo2007). sandikci and ger (2010) show how stigmatized identity can become fashionable through co-optation with the market – i.e., when the market appropriates and commercializes subcultural practices (schouten and mcalexander 1995; thompson and coskuner-balli 2007). these authors study veiling among women in turkey; the decision to wear a veil is an act of resistance and empowerment, as well as of escape. üstüner and holt (2007), argue that in developing countries such as turkey, identity projects of migrant women reveal a generational divide: while the migrant women themselves have created an identity that values living in squatter settlements in the city, their daughters have acculturated, and, stymied by economic limitations, are less content than their mothers. another take on global consumer culture and identity formation at a macro-level is provided by dong and tian (2009), who discuss how chinese consumers employ western brands to assert competing versions of chinese national identity. consumers use select discourses of eastwest relations, with the west viewed alternatively as liberator and oppressor, its brands as symbols of democratization or as domination. karababa and ger (2011) provide a scintillating account of the formation of the consuming subject in early ottoman culture. they interpret the popular view of an actively self-identifying consumer, using an anthropological–historical approach to understand the formation of the consumer subject vis-à-vis market forces and institutions. their study extends two important theoretical claims in cct: (1) consumption resolves tensions between the pursuit of pleasure and morality (belk, ger and askegaard 2003); and (2) market cultures are co-created through discursive negotiations and practices (peñaloza 2000). karababa and ger (2011) show that the co-creation of market cultures includes an entire slate of actors – the state, religious institutions, and market-related intermediaries of various sorts. their analysis of how consumers resist the marketplace highlights that inclusion, instead of focussing on the impositions from the marketer (maclaran and brown 2005; kozinets et al. 2004a; 2004b). one can look joy & li / studying consumption through multiple lenses: an overview of consumer culture theory 147 at the consumer as enjoying a certain level of freedom of choice in opposition to the marketer (zwick, denegri-knott, and schroeder 2007). thus, the marketer and the consumer are not always in opposition. additional work in this context is also evidenced in the study by cayla and eckhardt (2008), who investigate how brand managers create regional asian brands and markets through the construction of imagined asian identities. these managers focus on the common experience of global experience, evoking a generic and hyper–urban experience infused with diverse cultural references. in turn, these asian brands contribute to the creation of an imagined asia as modern and multicultural. another view on the topic of identity constructed through global consumption is provided by bardhi, eckhardt, and arnould’s (2012) study of global nomadic consumers. this research counters belk’s (1988) study that possessions are used to extend the self while anchoring identity in space, as consumers configure the world into a place of belonging. global nomadism by its nature involves de-territorialization. during ongoing travel, relationships to objects are temporary and situational, and possessions are appreciated for their instrumental use value and immateriality. such individuals do not wish to acculturate – they prefer enduring mobility and detachment from national geography. consumer identity and post-assimilationist research recent studies demonstrate that ethnic identification is a complex and dynamic process, mediated by market logic and influenced by sociocultural contexts. askegaard and ozcaglar-toulouse (2011) note that ethnicity is a key resource in consumer identity projects, and that the study of ethnic identification should therefore demonstrate the complexity of the social processes involved in the formation of contemporary ethnoscapes (217). luedicke (2011) also builds on the notion of consumer acculturation. his model suggests that a focus on identity construction, acculturation agents (media, market agents, and political institutions) and boundary crossings would provide a richer and deeper understanding of acculturation. migrant groups and their consumption patterns open up new possibilities for understanding global consumer culture. while research on such topics in the 1980s, 1990s, and early 2000s (oswald 1999; peñaloza 1994; peñaloza and gilly 1999; stayman and deshpande 1989) provided insights into how acculturation occurs, new research focuses on how consumers negotiate their cultural identities through consumption (bardhi, ostberg and bengtsson 2010). in their research on the greenlandic consumer acculturation process, askegaard, arnould, and kjeldgaard (2005) introduce an oscillation model to illustrate the journal of business anthropology, 1(1), spring 2012 148 dynamic and reflexive nature of consumer identities in a transnational context. they argue for a spectrum of hybrid identities constructed by immigrant consumers, one affected by socio-historical factors, political ideology, and market-mediated cultural practices. jafari and goulding (2008) introduce the notion of the “torn self” to express how iranian immigrants suffered from the negotiations between the two cultural ideologies in the u.k. chytkova’s (2011) study of romanian women in italy examines how the negotiation of gender roles of immigrant women is an important component of consumer acculturation. areas ripe for future research include power relationships between the dominant group (mainstream marketers and consumers), minority consumers, and entrepreneurs in a multi-cultural marketplace. also worthy of attention: boundary creation, management strategies, and public policies that shape immigrant acculturation. in sum, the breadth and depth of cultural categories and cultural principles have been mined to produce important insights into how socio-historical forces impact consumption. consumption environments and consumer experiences although the concept of experience is implicit in the consumer identity projects, it was articulated more clearly in several subsequent articles. in their landmark article on hedonic consumption, hirschman and holbrook (1982) had earlier critiqued the then popular notion of the consumer as a rational decision-maker. thompson, locander, and pollio’s (1989) research returns the focus to consumer experience (thompson 1997). joy and sherry (2003) study aesthetic consumption and aesthetic experiences. they highlight the value of an imaginative, embodied, and emplaced self in the pursuit of aesthetic pleasure. a raft of papers detailed the rich experiences created through marketplace interactions, such as thematized spaces (maclaran and brown 2005; kozinets 2002a; kozinets et al. 2004a; 2004b); including las vegas (belk 2000); nike town (peñaloza 1998; sherry 1998); rodeos (peñaloza 2001), and espn zones (kozinets et al. 2004a; 2004b). diamond et al.’s (2009) study of the american girl phenomenon provides a holistic understanding of the socio-cultural construction of an intensely emotional brand. researchers have also explored the construction of experience in liminal spaces such as festivals and carnivals (kates and belk 2001; belk and costa 1998; and kozinets 2002a). cotte and latour (2009) examine how gambling behaviours and experience changed after the introduction of online gambling. overall, sensory and experiential aspects of consumption have taken center stage in most of the cct studies described above. joy & li / studying consumption through multiple lenses: an overview of consumer culture theory 149 identity, public policy and transformative consumer research consumer researchers such as ozanne and saaatcioglu (2008) have a transformational view of society, advocating participatory action research (par) for improving lives. pars agenda calls for (1) a reflexive understanding of the posionality of the researcher, (2) an evaluation of the goal of social change by new criteria (3) the creation of more sophisticated theories of power and social change to improve consumer welfare (4) the development of more personalized methods of research and (5) the dissemination of knowledge that is culturally appropriate and feasible. transformative consumer research is a relatively new approach in understanding consumer identity, as researchers have highlighted the link between public policy and consumer response (mick 2008; ozanne 1992; ozanne & saatcioglu 2008). disadvantaged or vulnerable consumers have been studied (hill 1991; hill and stamey 1990). adkins and ozanne (2005) study low-literate consumers, wong and king (2008) research patients with chronic diseases, kjeldgaard and askegaard (2006) study children and adolescent consumers, and crockett and wallendorf (2004) focus on minority consumers. moisio and beruschvalli (2010) explore the supportive community of weight watchers. the dark side of consumption – obsessive and compulsive behaviours, such as uncontrolled credit card debt, alcoholism, and other addictions – has also received attention (bernthal, crockett, and rose 2005; henry 2010; peñaloza and barnhart 2011). a different issue taken by henry (2010) examines consumer rights and responsibilities in the context of credit card users in australia. he asks how consumers view their own rights and responsibilities. his query ties in with the broader theme of the role of moral responsibility in markets consisting of relatively disconnected consumers. surprisingly, the research shows that both libertarian and liberal consumers equally valorize the mythic ideal of autonomy. the nuances of consumer responses suggest an ideological perspective, revealing a broad range of often competing beliefs that mute sympathy, high functioning, and activism (henry 2010: 683). cct research on consumer identity projects has received significant attention for good reason: its contributions are substantial. marketplace cultures in research focussing on marketplace cultures, consumers are viewed primarily as culture producers, rather than merely as culture bearers. arnould and thompson (2005) ask how consumers forge collective or journal of business anthropology, 1(1), spring 2012 150 community identity, and how they share common value through interaction with the marketplace. how does the emergence of consumption as a dominant practice reconfigure cultural blueprints for action and interpretation, and vice versa? under this rubric fall area studies (joy 2001), subcultures of consumption (schouten and mcalexander 1995; muñiz and schau 2005), and a culture of consumption (kozinets 2001). in the context of major socio-cultural transformations that have eroded traditional bases for sociality, consumers search for ways to collectively identify and participate in rituals of solidarity. often such searching occurs online (cova and pace 2006; kozinets 2002b; kozinets et al. 2010). these experiential subcultures have used consumption as a raison d’être for fostering community –whether fleeting or permanent. in some instances, these groups define themselves in opposition to dominant lifestyles and sensibilities. worthy of note are how such subcultures present themselves – through displays of localized cultural capital, and through skill in combining and reworking the pool of symbolic resources shared by group members (kozinets 2001) brand communities and consumer resistance schau, muñiz, and arnould (2009) examine collective value creation processes within brand communities. they identify four themes of value creating practices: social networking, impression management, community engagement, and brand use. they note that corporations can derive significant benefit via creatively exploiting, and, to a degree, ceding control to willing customers, which in turn increases consumer brand engagement, thereby strengthening the brand community. consumer involvement and engagement are also the topic of research by kozinets et al. (2010) who identify the importance of the network co-production model. new social media marketing platforms offer brands broad-based communication strategies with micro-targeted appeals, which are themselves ever-expanding avenues ripe for exploration. thompson and arsel (2004) develop the concept of a hegemonic brandscape. goulding, shankar, elliott, and canniford (2009) argue that the practice of clubbing is a marketplace culture that is legally sanctioned, even as it supports a range of illegal practices that are easier to control and concurrently economically productive (fortuitously enough for club owners). rather than viewing clubbing as a reaction to consumer alienation, or an act of countercultural ideological resistance, these practices are seen as part of everyday life. while marcoux’s (2009) previously referenced study examines how people use the market to free themselves from oppressive relations within the gift economy, belk (2010), also previously referenced, shows joy & li / studying consumption through multiple lenses: an overview of consumer culture theory 151 how sharing is very much a part of families and communities, albeit one being slowly eroded by market commoditization. what belk labels “sharing in” calls for research on “sharing out” – a phenomenon studied by visconti, sherry, borghini, and anderson (2010). they extend understanding of consumer agency beyond the domain of privately owned and consumed goods, by unpacking the dialogic agentic confrontation between street artists and dwellers through their different ideologies of public place consumption. geisler’s (2006) study of file sharing via napster critiques the dyadic model of the gift, and elaborates on the distributed model exemplified by file sharing. however, social distinctions, norms of reciprocity, and rituals characterize such gift systems as well. thompson and coskuner-balli (2007) develop further the concept of brand communities by focusing on a polit-brand community, the community supported agricultural community (csa). despite their ideologically framed perspectives, csa members are still part of the larger whole that supports global consumer culture. as a re-embedded consumption community, csa offers consumers reaffirming experiences of emotional immediacy, confidence in outcomes, direct participatory involvement, and personal engagement that are difficult to replicate in a dis-embedded polit-brand community whose relational networks and real political consequences are diffused. as referenced earlier, dong and tian (2009) focus on chinese consumers employing western brands to assert competing versions of chinese national identity; the authors account for not only the socioeconomic/socio-cultural, but also political factors. the complexities of marketplace cultures are evident in how youth cultures are a manifestation of transnational, market-based ideology, evident through a dialectic between structures of common difference (wilk 1995), and the adaptation and objectification of these structures in local contexts referred to as glocalization, a term encompassing the local impact of global consumer culture (askegaard, arnould and kjeldgaard 2005; kjeldgaard and askegaard 2006). these authors argue that coconstitutive relationships between globalization and everyday consumption practices are an important framework for understanding consumer behaviour. cayla and eckhardt (2008) examine how brands help forge new ways for consumers to think beyond their specific nationality to an “imagined community.” branding managers and other market-related intermediaries contribute to creating a regional consciousness, especially in asia. cayla and eckhardt build on peñaloza’s (2001) idea that marketers play a key role in structuring these positions. they also further the view of brands as journal of business anthropology, 1(1), spring 2012 152 stories in consumers’ collective imaginations. by showing how brands can help forge inter-connectedness, the authors encourage us to assess the resulting stream of research from a global perspective. they extend the prevailing view of globalizing consumer culture, recognizing that globalization is far more than a western-oriented oneor even two-way street—it is a multiplicity of streets, from hong kong, beijing, singapore, and many other urban hubs, with cultures freely intertwined. overall, miller’s (1995) call for focusing on both production and consumption ushered in a new era one vibrant with fresh insights in cct research. the socio-historical patterning of consumption arnould and thompson (2005) summarize how institutional social structures such as gender, ethnicity, class, and community help structure consumption and vice versa (bristor and fischer 1993: cova 1997; dobscha and ozanne 2001; fischer and arnold 1990; hill 1991; holt 1997; 1998; 2002, 2004; schroeder and borgerson 1998; wallendorf and reilly 1983). they ask bluntly: what is a consumer society, and how is it constituted and sustained? institutionalization of consumption ideologies more recently, üstüner and thompson (2012) provide an understanding of consumer status games, by focusing on marketplace performances (especially those situated in a longer term, consumer-service provider relationship) that enable consumers to use economic, social, and cultural capital. specifically, the authors study longer-term multifaceted status games via the hair stylist industry in turkish cities, in which the service providers – typically men – have little or no education, but have skills essential to delivering service to highly educated and affluent customers – typically women. both groups vie for dominance and control. by virtue of their wealth and ongoing patronage, clients wield class-based authority over the stylists, and, within the microcosm of the salon, are simultaneously free of the patriarchal norms prevalent in turkish society. humphreys (2010), in her study of the legitimization of casino gambling in the u.s., uses institutional theory to define how the market normalizes, rationalizes, and legitimizes gambling. overall, the breadth and depth of cultural categories and principles have been mined to produce important insights into how socio-historical forces impact consumption. joy & li / studying consumption through multiple lenses: an overview of consumer culture theory 153 mass-mediated marketplace ideologies and consumers’ interpretive strategies mass-mediated marketplace ideologies fall within the purview of cct (mcquarrie and mick 1992; 1996; 1999; rinallo and basuroy 2009; scott 1990; sherry and camargo 1987; stern 1993). consumer ideology refers to the systems of meaning that channel and reproduce consumers’ thoughts and actions, thereby defending dominant interests in society, a field of study examined in critical theory and media studies. arnould and thompson (2005) ask what normative messages commercial media transmit regarding consumption. how do consumers make sense of these messages and formulate critical responses? consumers are viewed as interpretive agents whose meaning creation activities range from tacitly embracing the dominant representations of consumer identity and lifestyle ideals portrayed in advertising and mass media, to those consciously deviating from such ideological instructions. often, this line of inquiry surveys criticism of capitalism and marketing as social institutions. kozinets’ (2008) study of technology and ideology grappled with the complexities of understanding both technology and ideology and their interpenetration as expressed in the narratives of consumers who move among various categories, such as techtopian ideology (technology as progress, albeit with moral overtones); the green luddite ideology (technology as fear-inducing, unnecessary, and unsustainable); the work machine ideology (technology as central to economic growth), and finally the techspressive ideology (technology as an extension of people’s identities based on pleasure). kozinet’s (2010) book based on his (2002b) seminal article on netnography, (ethnography on line) has had wide appeal, and has spurred further research (munar 2010; bilgram, bartl and biel 2011). another line of research into anti-consumption movements and ideology is represented in the work of varman and belk (2009). the anticoca-cola sentiment expressed by villagers in north india reflects attempts by locals to evoke the nationalist swadeshi movement in india, introduced by gandhi fifty years earlier. the revised version of swadeshi, while focusing on materialism, took a different tack--protesters used spatial politics to create strong feelings of “us” vs. “them.” the corporation and its various products are framed negatively (with cocacola sold in india deemed inferior to local soft drinks because of its high pesticide content); the renewed nationalism, rather than serving as a reversal to the old ideology of nationhood, instead indicates the power of consumers. journal of business anthropology, 1(1), spring 2012 154 through the medium of advertising, zhao and belk (2008) examine china’s ongoing evolution from communism to a consumer society. the authors assess how advertising has appropriated a dominant anti-consumerist ideology to justify its promotion of consumption, how it has bridged the apparent ideological tensions between communism and consumerism, and what structural patterns of representation have facilitated this ideological transition in advertising (zhao and belk 2008: 231-32). their research underscores the idea that the marketplace is not only alive with cultural mythologies, but also saturated with political ideologies. ironically, as china changed from a capitalist to a socialist system, and then moved toward market socialism, its advertising drew on a rich tradition of political propaganda to recast china as a consumer society. the broad framework used in the focus on the impact of media on consumers is borrowed from anthropology and media studies. such studies typically use semiotic and literary analysis to search for symbolic meanings, the messages in popular cultural texts, and the rhetorical strategies employed to make such ideological messages appealing (escalas and stern 2003; hirschman 1990; holbrook and grayson 1986; mcquarrie and mick 1996; phillips and mcquarrie 2010; scott 1990, 1994a, 1994b). these studies question purely psychological assessments of advertising and media, and underscore the importance of considering the cultural contexts within which decisions are made. by decoding and deconstructing mass-mediated marketplace ideologies, cct theorists reveal the ways in which capitalist cultural production systems seduce consumers into particular lifestyles and their associated products, with consumers as willing participants. finally, phillips and mcquarrie (2010) investigate why women engage with advertisements in which the product itself is framed, as opposed to the more typical images of airbrushed young women or enticing landscapes featuring a given product. their findings revealed that one group looked at advertisements as fictional representations, imagining themselves transported into another world. others responded to advertising images as art, and appreciated their beauty. the resulting greater engagement, by either means, led to a more meaningful consumer experience. reviewing the established research, both over the past twenty years and particularly in the last seven, during which much invaluable research debuted, one sees clearly that cct research is concerned with cultural meanings, socio-historic influences, and social dynamics that shape consumer experience and identities in the many, messy contexts of everyday life (firat and venkatesh 1995). cct researchers use multiple joy & li / studying consumption through multiple lenses: an overview of consumer culture theory 155 data sources and triangulate methods: what consumers experience is neither unified and monolithic, nor transparently rational. most consumers’ lives are constructed around multiple realities shaped by consumption experiences (arnould and thompson 2005). discussion: the nexus between anthropology and cct in 1995, miller had already noted imminent changes in the study of consumer culture: (1) production and consumption would be, and should be, studied concurrently rather than in isolation, (2) the relation of firstworld local consumption models and their impact on production in thirdworld contexts would be of deep importance, (3) the study of major shifts in first-world consumption and their cosmological foundations, for example, the green movement and associated practices, would necessarily increase, (4) the transformation of shopping into a major instrument for the enactment of a commitment to family values would be increasingly studied as well, with the modern christmas and its foundational myth pointing to a fundamental dialectic in modernity between the freedom represented by commodities, and the continued desire for normative sociability represented by kinship; and (5) the intrinsic link between kinship and consumption would be increasingly relevant, as evidenced by recent studies of consumption activities centered on home and family. in response to miller’s (1995) suggestions, the concept of marketplace cultures, which include brand communities and practices (cova and pace 2006; brown, kozinets, and sherry 2003; muñiz and o’guinn 2000; mcalexander, schouten, and koenig 2002; muñiz and schau 2005; schau, muñiz, and arnould 2009) and collective/family identities (epp and price 2008; 2010) can be seen as evidence of the application of this model of co-production in cct research. major shifts in first-world consumption and their cosmological foundations, witnessed in studies of green consumption – precisely as miller (1995), above, predicted – are emerging in the cct literature (maarkula and moisander 2012; moisander 2007). belk’s (1989; 2010) studies of christmas consumption and sharing, respectively, embody this line of research, along with studies on the gift by marcoux (2009). finally, fischer, otnes, and tuncay’s (2007) article on pursuing parenthood, described earlier, addresses the links between kinship and consumption. in his recent article on the semiotics of brand, manning (2010) summarizes a group of studies on branding that are inspiring to cct researchers. wilk’s (2006) study of bottled water is a good example of how branding strategies condense a social ontology shot through with contradictory attitudes of nature and technology, the state and the journal of business anthropology, 1(1), spring 2012 156 market, public and private spheres, and firstand third-world economies. wilk (2006: 320) calls for a symbiotic relationship between branding/marketing and anti-commercial resistance and the rhetoric of individuality, family, morality, and religion. foster (2007) likewise argues that if the reflexive destabilization of products (as an outcome of cocreation) concerns marketers, it also concerns consumers. meneley (2004; 2007) pinpoints the disparities in products/brands from particular regions of the world. the positive image of the mediterranean and its healthful diet, along with its pastoral associations, imbues tuscan extra virgin olive oil as an object of desire. in contrast, extra virgin olive oil grown in the west bank – associated with strife and poverty – has no such positive associations. (meneley 2007). the associative framing easily trumps reality. such metaphoric consumption of alterity, manning (2010) reports, is matched by metonymic alterity – the desire for actual objects from elsewhere, e.g., labels and containers of western goods, often detached from use value, came to be self-valuable mediums of contact with the imaginary west in the ussr (yurchak 2006). üstüner and holt’s (2010) study of the western-oriented upper-class consumers and the local-oriented rich consumers in turkey explores this contradictory phenomenon in detail. arvidsson’s (2005) study of brandscapes elaborates on the idea of atmospherics, extended to the scripting and styling of a service interaction, including the consumer, who co-produces the experience. schau, muñiz, and arnould’s (2009) study of brand practices describes how consumers co-create experiences for themselves, even as the regulating and appropriating component of brand management is also clear. kozinets et al.’s (2010) study of corporate use of social media communication details how such communication regulates while simultaneously enabling consumer creativity. virtual identity is another fruitful area of research. de waal malefyt (2009) studies companies that gather consumer data via technology while interacting with customers. while kozinets et al. (2010) and schau, muñiz, and arnould (2009) recommend actions to be taken by corporate brand managers, the authors’ respective studies do not explore how such action might unfold an area ripe for further exploration. although appadurai’s (1990) opinions on globalization have been fleshed out sufficiently in the marketing and consumer literature, his view on the “imagined communities” of the nation-state being replaced by “diaspora public spheres” has been critiqued by cayla and eckhardt (2009). however, his view that media and migration together produce an enormous degree of instability in the creation of selves and identities joy & li / studying consumption through multiple lenses: an overview of consumer culture theory 157 needs greater empirical substantiation in cct and anthropology. the new areas of global consumer culture studies are just beginning to tap into these processes (askegaard and kjeldgaard 2002; kjeldgaard and askegaard 2006). the structure of experience in anthropology (throop 2008) is another area growing in relevance. despite the massive amount of work done in anthropology (e.g., durkheim, turner, and geertz, among others), experience is, as throop states, often embedded in the narrative and taken for granted as a construct. in their study on consumers’ lived experience, thompson, locander, and pollio (1989) suggest that the meaning of an experience is always situated in the current experiential context, and is coherently related to the ongoing project of the life world. their suggestion has found resonance in other studies of extraordinary experiences (e.g., cristel and levy 2011; celsi, rose and leigh 1993; arnould and price 1993; thompson 1997; joy and sherry 2003; tumbat and belk 2011). achrol and kotler (2011: 37) argue that consumer experiences have taken center stage in digital age of information. more work needs to be done on temporality, embodiment, and emplacement of selves in experiential context. the meaning of consumption and identity in recent years, easily the two most provocative articles exploring anthropology and cct have been graeber’s “consumption” (2011), referenced earlier, and leve’s “identity” (2011). graeber urges fellow researchers to critically examine the very concept of consumption. since consumers take pleasure in, and partially craft their identities through, their consumption. graeber (2011: 490) argues that, in denouncing consumption, researchers risk simultaneously denouncing that which makes lives meaningful. he raises an important issue: why are all forms of self-expression and enjoyment reduced to a blanket notion of ‘consumption’? rather than conceiving of consumption as a purely analytical term, graeber approaches it as, inescapably, an ideology, one deserving of – even requiring – a critical approach. lauren leve (2011) likewise questions the uncritical use of the term “identity” – one central to our culturalist approach to consumption (carrier 2004. using macpherson’s (1962) discussion of possessive individualism, she reimagines for a modern age his argument that possessive individualism, emphasizing the individual as proprietor of self, transforms the logic of the labour market into a theory of the self. the move toward a service-based economy, she argues, has created a shift in focus from production to consumption. drawing on the buddhist emphasis on seeing the continuity of self or material objects as illusions, journal of business anthropology, 1(1), spring 2012 158 leve counsels anthropologists to challenge the concept of “identity,” and to neither perpetuate nor naturalize a concept that itself requires explanation. cct and consumer sub-disciplines macinnes and folkes (2010) argue that consumer behaviour can be seen as a multi-disciplinary field with sub-disciplines advancing the field. rather than being separated into discrete research camps, the subdisciplines are unified by a core concern with acquisition, consumption, and disposal of marketplace entities. indeed, specialization has resulted in expansion in the number of sub-fields (arnould and thompson 2005). moreover, macinnes and folkes (2010) argue that specialization can fuel novel insights and energize the field. in our examination of the cct literature, we have identified important articles that would classify as new sub-field hybrids. as early as 1989, belk, wallendorf, and sherry argued in their article on the sacred and the profane that the concept of consumer involvement, as defined in consumer research, was too limiting in terms of understanding person object relations. since then, implicitly or explicitly, most articles in the cct tradition have provided one form of critique of the information processing or behaviour decision theory (firat and venkatesh 1995; hirschman and holbrook 1982; holbrook and grayson 1986; holbrook and hirschman 1982). allen’s (2002) study explicitly critiques choice theories in consumer behaviour, and offers an alternate approach that supplements decision-making processes. cristel and levy (2011) use a cultural approach in discussing repeat consumption as an extraordinary experience filled with the emotional luxury of delight, novel sensations, and intellectual insight, showing that hedonic re-consumption is not merely habitual, addictive, or even ritualistic – the three main approaches to the study of re-consumption to date. business anthropologists such as moeran (2005; 2006b), and sunderland and denny (2007) provide new perspectives on the inclusion of employees, managers, consumers, and others in corporate organizations, collaboratively creating market cultures. in the field of consumer research, a different twist in the identity projects (also leading to hybrids within the field of business) is provided by press and arnould (2011) in their study of organizational identification. they describe how employees are involved in sense making, and how the three processes of epiphany, emulation, and exploration forge identification with an organization. while still in its nascent stages, such applications of cct research within organizations, or collaborative efforts with scholars of organizational behaviour and strategic management, are needed, and joy & li / studying consumption through multiple lenses: an overview of consumer culture theory 159 could lead to hybrid understandings with other sister disciplines, such as finance or neuro-psychology. the study of consumer welfare is broadly aligned with analyzing issues of ethics in consumer behaviour and marketing. studies that examine moral aspects include those of borgmann (2000), commuri and gentry (2005), hill and stamey (1990), karababa and ger (2011), sandikci and ger (2010), and thompson and troester (2002). green consumerism is researched by moisander and pesonen (2002). joy, sherry, venkatesh, wang, and chan (2012) assess issues of sustainability within the context of fast fashion and luxury fashion brands. the discursive confusion endemic 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illness narratives,” journal of consumer research, 34 (february), 579-94. yurchak, alexei 2006 everything was forever, until it was no more: the last soviet generation, princeton university press. zhao, xin and russell w. belk 2008 “politicizing consumer culture: advertising’s appropriation of political ideology in china’s social transition,” journal of consumer research, 35 (august), 231-44. zwick, detlev, janice denegri-knott, and jonathan schroeder 2007 “the social pedagogy of wall street: stock trading as political activism?” journal of consumer policy, 30 (3), 177-99. annamma joy is professor of marketing at the university of british columbia and has been a visiting scholar at the hong kong university of science and technology, china-europe international business school and sda bocconi, milan among others. her research interests are primarily in the area of consumer behaviour and branding. she has published widely in consumer behaviour and marketing journals such as the journal of consumer research, journal of consumer psychology, international journal of research in marketing, journal of cross-cultural psychology, journal of economic psychology, consumption, markets and culture. annamma.joy@ubc.ca eric ping hung li is an instructor at the university of british colombia and holds a phd from schulich school of business, york university, toronto. eric.li@ubc.ca http://www.medill.northwestern.edu/uploadedfiles/medill/faculty/faculty_bios/imc_faculty/full-time_faculty/weinberger%20and%20wallendorf%20jcr%202012.pdf http://www.medill.northwestern.edu/uploadedfiles/medill/faculty/faculty_bios/imc_faculty/full-time_faculty/weinberger%20and%20wallendorf%20jcr%202012.pdf http://www.medill.northwestern.edu/uploadedfiles/medill/faculty/faculty_bios/imc_faculty/full-time_faculty/weinberger%20and%20wallendorf%20jcr%202012.pdf mailto:annamma.joy@ubc.ca mailto:eric.li@ubc.ca ethnographic log agency growing pains: ethnography in the 1980s barbara olsen (school of business―suny old westbury) this contribution to the jba is a retrospective of my career as written down in an ethnographic log, when my agency, imc marketing group, ltd., expanded to europe to service internationalizing clients. the move served a growing interest on my part to learn filmmaking. this advertising ethnography captures the enthusiasm of transitioning from print advertising into filmmaking and video production, where i believed i could bridge the advertising/anthropology divide by making films that would have a social purpose. total achievement was constrained by the dysfunctional management style of a self-destructive partner, and by my divided commitment while simultaneously completing a ph.d. in anthropology. advertising ethnography my engagement with advertising began as an artist and ended as an owner. the journey was predicated on friendship with a man i call adam wilson (a pseudonym) who introduced me to his agency, adam wilson & friends, in 1972. this is a continuation of a previous article (olsen 2016) that explored liminality while working on three campaigns in the 1970s, when anthropological contributions were not yet appreciated. by 1979, competing accounts and corporate chaos had led me to incorporate imc marketing group to continue creative services for many of our clients. page 1 of 16 jba 5(1): 89-104 autumn 2016 © the author(s) 2016 issn 2245-4217 www.cbs.dk/jba journal of business anthropology, 5(1), autumn 2016 90 the unspoken full name, international marketing communications, was already taken, but refers to the direction i was heading, as my clients expanded their sales to global markets. from 1972 until 1988, i kept my log in chronological order, variously drawing emotions and recording states of mind and business dealings with clients and employees, similar to fieldwork notebooks recorded by taussig (2011). the log reflects misplaced loyalty to my partner, adam, who struggled with his own demons as he descended into delusional thinking and pathological behavior antithetical to success. studying anthropology throughout the 1980s not only preserved my humanity, but also prohibited my total immersion in a competitive industry requiring total dedication. by mid1980s, agency diversion into music videos was my calculated effort toward future ethnographic filmmaking. initially we were located in new york at 65 west 55th street, before moving to 485 madison avenue; other offices were in los angeles and london. the agency promoted syndicated television clients, and while media is in flux today, the 1980s are relevant for when syndicated shows dominated television. i used participant-observation to chronicle my corporate life. our staff consisted of an office manager-receptionist, secretary, two account supervisors, a traffic person (to follow jobs in time), bookkeeper, and accountant. mark and tom were account supervisors. george, our copywriter, had been with adam since the 1960s. as president, i was in charge of new business, payroll handled by adp, and cash transfers between banks. adam transitioned as director of the agency responsible for management, and excelled as creative director. all creative concepts were conceived by adam and rendered by the art director in new york. initial work was executed as paste-ups and mechanicals―the term for rough layouts drawn or pasted with type and visuals by our art production manager and assistants in the bull pen (the name of the room where art production was carried out). lawyers and publicity consultants were on retainer. bob blansky, my friend at dolphin computer image, introduced me to adam. i hired him to do video production. luke thornton and laurie keller would become my partners in front row films. with adam managing production, my primary focus was finding clients and completing my masters’ (1981) and ph.d. (1989) in anthropology. unfortunately, it was my experience during the 1970s and 1980s that few colleagues on either side of the advertising-anthropology equation valued contributions from the other. baba (1986: 4-7) provides an excellent analytical overview of applied anthropology’s positive acceptance in government as well as in industry from the 1930s through the 1950s. she maintains, however, that the 1960s and 1970s “was characterized by an alienation of anthropological research from business practice – alienation growing in large measure from ethical crisis and intensive debate in the discipline concerning the appropriate uses of applied anthropology” (ibid., p. 7) in the private sector. while baba notes olsen / agency growing pains 91 that business anthropologists experienced a rebound in the 1980s (ibid., p. 8-9), i still felt mutual disdain from both sectors: academic anthropologists’ negativity and little industry appreciation for anthropology. cefkin (2010: 2) writes that corporate anthropological practitioners are attuned to “evaluation through both the kind of perspective afforded by an ethnography of the ethnography in and of industry as well as through the reflections of practitioners themselves.” since my ad agency chronicle is captured from the log and files of client campaigns, i rely on these sources to describe my participation over time. what is recalled, in sometimes painful recollection, is an atmosphere thick with tension, turmoil, and employee churn. cefkin (ibid., p. 3) continues: “just as ethnographic practitioners in industry contexts are particularly situated within the everyday sites of their work, this work emerges as well out of particular histories.” this ethnography unfolds with added clarifying commentary. the log reveals emotional and financial entanglement (hodder 2012). the longer i stayed, the harder it was to leave. there was little opportunity to creatively apply anthropology beyond working on educational tv animations, before selling the agency to adam in 1988. i loved the creativity and have since shared that affection with my marketing students. looking backward helps us understand how we can use what we learn to move forward. the irony of hindsight ethnography is most often thought of as something we do for other peoples’ projects. “autoethnography,” however, is the process of introspectively recording the observation of our own participation in social and/or corporate contexts. these situations, once inscribed, provide particular insight into choices we make for the path we take. revisiting log fieldnotes, i was struck by instances where i should have acted differently, including the late start i made in connecting with practicing anthropology. 2/24/87―tuesday: bob blansky and i worked at nexus all day today on the troll series first animation, monster under my bed for alan shalleck [shalleck wrote and illustrated children’s stories we animated for television.] i joined the society for applied anthropology and just got the practicing anthropology newsletter. i realize that if i kept better notes observing my madison avenue surroundings, i can do an exposé of advertising. if only the new school anthropology department thought it was worthy, i could have been writing on this all along. in the early 1980s, i considered making ethnographic films. imc advertised clients’ syndicated television programs and movie packages. i wanted to distribute my creations. journal of business anthropology, 5(1), autumn 2016 92 2/2/84―i started going to nyu monday and wednesday nights. monday with saul taffet seems to go by fast and is well taught. this is actual filmmaking. wednesday night, their 55th st. classroom in the synagogue is taught by thierry pathé. it is a lighting and sound class that seems thin and off track much of the time. work is better than i could have imagined. i go to lunch with adam and our clients―a different one each day. i correct colleen’s [office manager] mistakes and realize she needs help. i enjoy going to usa cable taking linda [client] to lunch alone. 5/28/84―work is preoccupied with 20th century fox movie brochures and their mash campaign. we need to go to la soon to firm up the mash brochure. we are almost finished with dickens. 1984: 20th century fox: charles dickens classics i loved this collection with eight 90 minute specials for children. the charles dickens classics were animated movies made for television: oliver twist, a christmas carol, great expectations, a tale of two cities, the old curiosity shop, nicholas nickleby, and david copperfield. because each movie had a moral to the story, it was supported as “recommended viewing” by the national congress of parents and teachers association (pta) and by the national education association (nea). the brochure began with “the future is in the hands of our children. the values and ideas we give them on television today will help shape the kind of society we’re all going to have to live in tomorrow.” discussions i was having with our creative staff, especially with george, the copywriter, were paying off in poignant copy like this. i hoped for more film packages like this to influence television content as an educational medium. 6/12/84―tuesday: adam and i left on the 9 am flight to los angeles arriving in time for lunch with ron [snow] and jerry [greenberg], our west coast contacts at 20th century fox. twentieth century fox is the biggest account we have at imc, because we also do a lot of the other fox tv shows and film packages for tv. fox has offices all around the world: sydney, australia; sāo paulo, brazil; montreal, toronto, canada; london, england; paris, france; tokyo, japan; and mexico. it’s why we’re trying to find affiliates to form joint ventures with to service our european syndicators. when columbia pictures television transferred its sales office to los angeles in 1980, we opened an office there to handle promoting charlie’s angels. over time, we hired previous clients, paul shrage from columbia pictures and ron snow and jeff shadlow from fox, to run the la office to service accounts and hire freelancers to finalize work for client approval. olsen / agency growing pains 93 thumbnail sketches or rough drawings were sent over the phone on purolator (an early fax). finished artwork was sent to la by overnight delivery using dhl to get approval from clients at offices in century city. there were always problems. adam and i interviewed potential employees before hiring, but they would be working directly under him and his personality guaranteed churn. 1985: making new connections 2/19/85―tuesday: the day unfolded and i had a sour attitude because adam wouldn’t tell me how much money to transfer to cover petty cash and the expenses for the bills this week. he treats the staff in ny differently than california, probably because the account executives there used to work for our clients. 2/20/85―adam watches every move we do and asks, “what are you doing? who are you talking to?” this scrutiny drove many employees to find new jobs before they had settled in. keeping staff was difficult, especially in new york where he was particularly abusive. a large part of my day was spent listening to employee complaints and healing bruised egos. 3/19/85―tuesday: it’s pretty bad. adam and i are manifesting old behaviors. he blames everyone else for all his problems, screams and yells all day. today, i took the phone off the hook and tried to create peace by calming everyone down. 3/21/85―thursday: i survived another day, but barely. mark and i went to hbo at 10. then lunch at la caravelle with adam, tom, mark [our account supervisors] and larry schecter [adam’s friend]. i told mark i wanted to sell imc to adam. he talked me out of it, at least until april and the end of the first quarter when, hopefully, their percentage of profits comes through. mark said he’s giving it until august. my desire was to produce and distribute highly demanded children’s educational films. in 1984, i had incorporated pinnacle productions, and named it after a mountain in jamaica populated by rastafarians escaping urban persecution. 3/27/85―wednesday: last friday was the worst. i told adam i couldn’t work with him in the office anymore. i set up my film office in our engraver’s building on 42nd st., near pfizer, so it would be easier for me to handle the quigley and pferrocal accounts [manufacturers of steel mill products]. for now, the film company would be pinnacle. i’m getting an off-line video machine and video editor where i can work on the movies we produce in peace and quiet. imc also needed an office in london as we increasingly were involved in journal of business anthropology, 5(1), autumn 2016 94 client projects produced for the european market. by 1985, 20th century fox television was selling their shows across europe and needed our agency to have a presence in london. 4/16/85―tuesday: flew into london yesterday on pan am first class with adam to meet potential english partners. we checked into the athenaeum hotel near hyde park. today started with breakfast downstairs (in the athenaeum hotel) with our lawyer, who lined up agencies for us to interview for partners. then to peter espley (our first interview) and lunch. he and adam got on very well. they complement each other. i was instrumental in adam’s credibility as i’ve worked with him for 13 years. there was minor conflict, mostly recognizing adam’s personality is not acceptable to british clients. 4/17/85―wednesday: breakfast with luke thornton and iain brown from thornton-keller productions [bob morin’s contacts]. they do commercials, but mostly music videos and film production, and need help with money and a us location. we’re perfect. also they distribute a jimmy cliff film they made. nice group of guys. bob morin provided a lot of work, first from lorimar where we promoted eight is enough for syndication. next, he became president of syndication at 20th century fox, where we worked on film packages and syndicated shows such as mash and the fall guy. finally, he became president of new century entertainment,where we promoted movies for distribution. 4/18/85―thursday: each day is just a penciled mark on the page for memory―in some distant future when i’ll want to read or write my memoirs. breakfast with luke, iain and laurie [keller] downstairs in the hotel, then to tower street and their office. i saw their music videos. excellent work. it’s decided that luke and laurie will be our partners in london. we decided to do a joint venture with this small company, eventually relocating to grape st. as front row films. imc would use their office in london. their directors wanting to make tv commercials in the us would use ours. the collaboration was mutually advantageous. 4/19/85―friday: breakfast with luke, laurie, iain, jan [producers] and adam. then to manufacturers hanover trust and opened a bank account [for imc] and on to the lee film studio in wembley out of town. ate at an indian restaurant across the street. dinner at wilton’s was with bob morin and his wife talking future business till 2 am. 4/20/85―saturday: it has been an incredible week, coming to london to find business and walking right into a situation made for us. it was bob morin’s set up because of his affection for laurie keller, an ex-20th century fox salesman, now here in the olsen / agency growing pains 95 uk. their business is in need of reorganization. breakfast again downstairs with laurie, jan, luke, iain and brian ward, director of videos. then to their office where we worked from 11 am. adam laid out his office procedure and everyone made folders, sorted invoices and statements, two-hole punched and filed. he wrote a letter for suppliers and finally finished by 6:45 pm. then, back to the hotel and to the athenaeum bar to meet morin, laurie and iain. later, to dinner at maggie jones near kensington church road and high street. old rustic ambience. iain’s friend, glynnis, showed up and reminisced being production assistant in the making of chariots of fire and the killing fields. we talked about them wanting me to rep them and their video production for jobs from the states. adam was wonderful, on his best behavior, and everyone we’ve met seems to like and respect him. as morin said at dinner, “to get to a morin or a wilson, you’ve had to have done your homework!” [symbolized their shared hubris]. 4/29/85―monday: i’m back to new york life as usual: fast paced, balancing my phd with a flurry of activity at work. 6/11/85―tuesday: it was a good day, presenting again to entertainment media co. and lunch with linda from usa cable at il menestrello. i’ve been reflecting on our mark-up on new century: a job costing $85,000 to 90,000, we’re charging $270,000. bob said, “is adam getting rich on me all by myself? he may win this argument, but it will be his last.” i thought long and hard about how much i really want a change. we needed to keep this account. however, my new business efforts were fruitful. d.l. taffner hired imc to promote their syndicated show: 6/21/85―friday: rosemary berry [my contact at taffner] called, wanting estimates on a 30 second commercial and a 10 second spot for three’s company [each episode]. 6/25/85―tuesday: today i went to tvc and spent time with alan brown where he’s made it to producer in video tape in only 1½ years [he could do the editing]. back at the office, i got the figures from california for the [three’s company] commercials. ron said taffner’s commercials will cost $925 an episode, or 130 (episodes) x $925 = $120,250, or $120,500 for one 30’ (second) plus one 10’ (second) for the whole job. 7/1/85―monday: it’s been a wonderful, productive week. adam went to california last week and i started asking bob blansky for help. i’d like to work closely with bob. he’s got a lot of good ideas and i know him longer than adam. 8/21/85―wednesday: moved to my office on 42nd street and working on the resumes. journal of business anthropology, 5(1), autumn 2016 96 8/31/85―saturday: the week went fast. lots of interviews for cameramen and production managers. 9/7/85―saturday: yesterday i got a quote from bob blansky [to make our promotion video] of 5 to 10 minutes that he’ll make at dolphin computer image for $2,500, which is good because we only have a $5,000 budget to have everything done. so, i told adam and he replied, “oh, no, the video will be ½ hour” [that’s too long]. i’m really confused and a bit numb about the entire project. adam is weird and i don’t trust him. i think he’s becoming unhinged. i realize now he had no intention of using dolphin’s talent to do our job. in the meantime, i’m starting to work with film. 9/13/85―friday: work is picking up. adam said we’d get an edit for the ac/dc long form music video from england. i’m still going around to studios to get quotes on editing. going into imc is schizophrenic. adam was supposed to bring the script back from england for the sade shoot in three weeks. he said he forgot it and i have a production manager, stan bickman, standing by waiting for a concept to do a budget, get locations, etc. how sad. overview of the sade video: 13–26 september, 1985 i got stan bickman [producer of the iconic rocky horror picture show] to be the producer for our front row films nyc portion of the music video shoot of sade’s songs is it a crime and the sweetest taboo. laurie and luke got brian ward as director, iain as cameraman. i am assistant producer and work tightly with stan. postscript recollection for is it a crime: i did a dry run as closely as i could gauge the timing of events to be filmed. we were not using union personnel, and had to shoot at night to finish before dawn. a critical shot was over the 59th st. bridge filming inside a classic checker taxi cab with a hood-mounted camera. another problematic shot was the ride down fifth avenue, shot from inside the cab looking south toward 34th st. with a constant view of the illuminated empire state building. we would make a right turn onto 42nd st. and proceed to the deli on eighth ave. and 46th st. these shots would be tricky with possible traffic on the bridge and with the lights on the empire state building turned off at exactly 11 pm. the last shots would be filmed throughout the night till early morning on 46th st. and eighth avenue, in front of a deli-convenience store that participated in the production. problems that occurred with the timing got us to fifth avenue about 10 minutes to 11 and just as we were turning the corner onto 42nd, the lights on the empire state building went dark. i had arranged for a police presence at the deli as all filming in new york city needs to register with the city. what i didn’t expect was grievance from union members reporting to their jobs around times square in the morning as they passed our shoot, questioning our using non-union workers. it was a olsen / agency growing pains 97 wrap before any altercations erupted, but the realization of our discovery was uncomfortable for us all. my notes recorded the details: 9/18/85―wednesday: another week flying by. we’re shooting sade next tuesday on yom kippur eve. stan is very competent. he got the insurance permits, etc. and i got the police detail to stay with us during the shoot. i bought an onkyo dual cassette deck, and duped my [front row films] logo music that i taped at home last night. 9/26/85―thursday: incredible week. monday, iain brown and brian ward came to ny with denis martinelli, the actor, and oliver, another cameraman. with stan bickman, i put together a good crew and we started shooting for sade music videos, is it a crime and sweetest taboo. we began in front of the plaza hotel at central park south at 6:30 pm on tuesday night. it was fun. the second shot was uptown on broadway at 42nd street and we stayed at 46rd street and 8th avenue for hours, ending at 6:45 in the morning after going over the manhattan bridge and shooting at the river café. ed newins, the rigger, was great. tonight ate at the palm with laurie and luke and adam. adam said iain and brian were a terrible combo and wasted a lot of film, so may be fired. we’re going to start a heavy publicity program for front row in the trades. 10/1/85―tuesday: yesterday laurie, luke and i signed the bank papers for the front row film co. accounts [here]. but, today at manufacturers hanover trust, there was a problem. the bank decided to bounce imc checks. who knows which ones? so, george wolf, our manager at the bank, helped me out by covering our deposits in his bank after we called new century entertainment’s bank in la to find out if their $174,000 check we deposited was good. i’m worried about my new credit situation. tomorrow i go to the insurance company with stan. i keep blocking out the real problem. adam had been promising tom a mortgage from crossland bank and it never came. he’s done this so many times, keeping people waiting for broken promises. problems with money, fearing adam’s duplicitous behavior, became the “dominant narrative” (rhodes et al. 2010) near every success. the year progressed busily working on commercials, editing music videos, and delivering masters to clients. a lot of work came through my 42nd st. film office. unfortunately, our own educational videos never came to be. typical scenarios like the following repeated week after week. 10/16/85―wednesday: adam came down and we had a meeting with ted folke and john lavee who proposed travel videos. i watched adam through different eyes and saw a crazy man filled with mood swings from pure genius to defeat―filled with good ideas, but no back up. he gets in the way of his own success. journal of business anthropology, 5(1), autumn 2016 98 10/20/85― sunday: i realized that adam worries about taking money out of the ad agency to spend making videos. robin can’t get her reels edited for $100 and stan said there’s too much work around, we should be doing some of it. but, no one will work for the low amount adam pays. i can’t get him to budge on the budgets. 10/24/85―thursday: today was an absolutely horrible day. i went to my 42nd st. office and put my phone on call forwarding. i dropped the wire train [music video] contract off at imc. from 4:30 till 6:45 pm i went to see the insurance agent and had a hard time with cbs records―no 1” master without a check. i’ll deliver a ¾” tape first, before the master. [i do not recall what videos these were for.] 12/3/85―tuesday: today i saw the sade video. i think it’s boring. but, i got the dupes. 12/12/85―wednesday: an active week. today, luke and i signed more papers making us partners and hopefully will bring in some new business. london just edited the video to jewel of the nile and it should make maurice [phillips, director] a hero. 1986 1/3/86―friday: very crazy week. i see the chaos again―pure insanity all around me. people acting nice on the outside, seething inside. adam acting out – then saying it was a joke or some such nonsense. he tells me his mind is gone and i recognize the pattern. i think, deep down, he may have an inkling insanity lies around the corner. tom is still here. andre, the art director, got yelled at by adam for having a bad sense of type. andre put on his coat, grabbed his phone book, and told adam he couldn’t stand being treated this way anymore, saying adam doesn’t know how to talk to people. but, then adam talked him out of leaving. i’m sorry adam didn’t want to see ran, kurosawa’s movie, with joel and me tonight. an interesting allegory about paying for your sins, for reaping what you sow. and the end product of ravage, rape of property and lack of a sense of humanity in one’s plunder for success is chaos turned against oneself and madness. an insanity that delivers one from feeling that which the mind comprehends. the three’s company campaign for d.l. taffner led to more syndication work for imc in 1986. i picked up their check it out! promotion kit, and we hired heidi star as an intern from suny old westbury. i’m auditing ethnographic film at the new school with faye ginsburg, and incorporated chrystal mountain productions to hopefully produce and olsen / agency growing pains 99 distribute my educational films. the name came from the mountain in the snow leopard by peter mathiessen. luke introduced us to storm thorgerson who wants to make commercials in the us. 1/23/86―thursday: yesterday, i met a film producer, keith cavele, at la caravelle for lunch. then, dinner with anthony taylor working with storm thorgerson about doing music videos with us. storm is a partner in hipgnosis, his company that made pink floyd’s album cover art and music videos. i also bought out laurie keller, so just luke and i are partners in front row films. today, rosemary at taffner asked me to leave alan at imc when going to our meeting. we decided not to do the box press kit and to make a folder instead. while mark and i were there, we picked up a press kit for the ted knight show. tomorrow, i deliver my area and track papers to my committee at the new school and tell them my ph.d. supervisor will be harner. 1/24/86―friday: a terrible day. adam is absolutely schizophrenic―at least three different people. yelling at everyone. my thinking about him is that he dreams of glory, but is totally incapable of pulling it off. doomed to failure because he has built an image predicated on pathos, wallowing in “poor me.” he’s surrounded by capable, competent people and prides himself on breaking their spirits. he becomes neurotically preoccupied with minutia [and] made the new intern, heidi, cry twice. 1/25/86―saturday: the longer i get from yesterday, the more obscure it becomes. it was absolutely awful. adam was crazy. i got to imc around noon. we needed to firm things up with stan bickman, the producer for sade’s video, whom adam wants to produce a feature film next. adam wants crews ready to shoot. stan says we need a script first. adam says, get the crew for $1-2 million for each picture. stan left, but he called later and said he needs to know his pay. adam said, not to worry, he’d take care of him. meanwhile at lunch with keith cavele on wednesday, adam said we could only use a crew a few times, not regularly, because he’d “have to step on ’em”―meaning make them work for next to nothing until they’re so disgusted they won’t talk to him anymore. and adam’s history repeats itself―penny wise and pound foolish! he’s really pathological and completely unhinged. 1/27/86―monday: at imc i told them i’d be downtown. an hour later, adam called me to let me know that noreen, the office manager, just quit, but he has two new bookkeepers coming in next week. i had my first class with faye ginsburg in ethnographic film tonight. it was great. we saw nanook of the north with much more background information and a new view. we got journal of business anthropology, 5(1), autumn 2016 100 some good readings, too. 1/28/86―tuesday: a terrible day in many ways: the space shuttle blew up this morning, the 25th mission. watching it on tv tonight is incredible. like a smoke bomb with fireworks. chris mcauliffe, a teacher from concord, nj, was the first civilian onboard and was killed with seven crew members. stunned. all her students watched it happen on tv. i was at work when it happened. after hearing that andre [the art director] quit telling adam to shove his job this afternoon, michael, the young mechanical artist, came into adam’s office and said he was leaving, but adam convinced him to stay till friday. noreen [the office manager] leaving yesterday may have triggered a purge. it was the beginning of the end. over the next three months, most of our employees in new york and los angeles quit. my log entries are filled with exciting prospects on the horizon. i worked with luke and had positive lunches with keith cavele, who was instrumental in raising $16 million for four movies. my log notes that “when we met with them last, adam was strange, saying ‘go cheap, cheap, cheap.’ he [adam] would direct or provide financing, but not both. they told him that you have to spend money to get good stars, sales and tv deals. the only thing adam said that made sense was that he couldn’t do both” (log entry 1/30/86). 2/7/86―friday: the first thing i did today was transfer $5,000 to london. when i got to imc, i found out that ron snow, our imc account supervisor in la turned in his resignation and another rep, chris whorf didn’t want to be associated with us anymore. adam had been squabbling with them over money. and, yesterday the photographer who took arnold schwarzenegger’s picture we used for a new century ad wanted $10,000 for using his photo in all our ads. we bought the picture from movie star news! it was a legitimate photo, but today we agreed to pay the photographer $3,000. later, at imc, i saw tom printing a letter on george’s printer and asked why. he said it was his resignation letter. effective immediately. adam said it was because of his health, but promised “not to say what he had. it’s not imc. it was the pressure of his parent’s business failing just got to him.” tom was pretty smart getting out of this one without becoming the scapegoat. whoever quits in animosity, becomes the reason for all the current problems. two more imc’s employees quit the next week including jeff, our conduit for fox. within the year, tom and george, our copywriter, formed their own ad agency in new york. 2/11/86―tuesday: london needs money again and adam doesn’t want to send it. in fact, they asked for $100,000. it was depressing! i stayed to work on the check it out! press kit, writing the synopsis and credits on computer for seven hours. olsen / agency growing pains 101 my eyes feel like sand is in them now. heidi told me today that the art department did the sony mechanicals [for a movie poster] six times and the client told nancy, the new account executive, “it’s the last time we’ll see you!” too bad, i think adam blew it. i need to study [for the ph.d. written exam in march] but no time. 2/14/86―friday: luke arrived from london yesterday. we ate at frankie and johnnies. jackie and caroline arrived today from london. we ate at the palm. five lobsters were $364. i studied both mornings at the donnell library. there was always money for lavish meals and entertainment and to invest in our shearson lehman stock account, but never enough for operations. adam was a hoarder of money for emergency and my protection should he die. i intended to leave it to him for his sons. 2/24/86―monday: an awful day. george told me he gave adam notice of one week and is leaving. only mark is left. i wonder how long till he quits. heidi said adam was red faced today. i asked him if he wanted a cold drink. he said, “yeah, poison.” what a day! thank god for anthropology. i knew it would soon be time to leave. i intended to sell imc to him for $1 before departing to write my thesis and teach. i did fieldwork in jamaica during april 1986 and summer 1987. luke increasingly did more business in the new york office. i introduced him to bob blansky who continued to bring in new business and work with them. on return and into the fall, imc and front row filmssuffered financially with delayed payments from all syndicators. this hurt as imc had to pay upfront to place client ads in the media before getting paid by the clients. 10/17/ 86―friday: we just about wiped out every account to cover over-drafts and cover payroll here and in la. i expect $10,000 early next week and 20th century fox owes us $120,000. we have $400,000 coming in over the next few months from other jobs in the works. but the edit of the trailer for the neat & tidy television film by syndicast services may take me to london next week to firm up the trailer and make the sales film. my log continues about meeting storm in london and working on the syndicast film edit. 10/24/86―friday: we wrote up a contract with storm thorgerson. he’s 48 and a “difficult” creative by his own admission, but i think he’s a very nice man. his work for pink floyd has always been my favorite. maybe i just like the crazy people more than others. time will tell. 10/30/86―thursday: it’s 1:45 am and an awful day. it was hell and adam was no help telling everyone what to do the wrong way. turns out that everyone says yes to adam and then continues journal of business anthropology, 5(1), autumn 2016 102 with their thing, doing it the right way. he never knows the difference, and ends up saying how he made it great. i’m so mad. i want to tell him what he is, to get my anger out and to help him change. but, he can’t change, so i’ll keep quiet. 10/31/86― friday: at our office on grape st. we worked organizing the production schedule for the month. luke had to tell adam about amy, our office manager in la, telling nasty tales about adam’s broken promises to maurice phillips. adam was glum and solemn all afternoon. my instinct was to fire her. i’m sure he was thinking the same, but she’s the daughter of our client at fox. 11/4/86―tuesday: since i didn’t want to be responsible for the money side of the business, adam’s personality keeps ruining relationships by deferring payments. i can’t believe it! ann marie, a valuable account executive in london, called to complain that adam won’t pay her for the last three weeks because her signature was faxed and not original. she’s broke because he owes her 1500 pounds. now, she wants luke and simon to pay her personally. adam sets himself up for disaster. 11/10/86―monday: i’m seeing through adam’s pathologies, like keeping people at work late because he doesn’t want to be alone and then taking them to dinner. 11/12/86―wednesday: imc lunch with adam and luke. we need money to make the dupes for front row’s new promotion video. instead, adam gave luke $20, so he could go to the limelight tonight. unbelievable! later, luke told us he got a promise today from mike lang to do a joe cocker special, and possibly another film for dragon, a new group. stevie ray vaughn and kbc are on hold for now. but, luke and anne marie say they have lots of groups that are on the fire. 11/21/86―friday: today i edited video at ipc doing the strobs and wheat thins billboards for neat & tidy. mike takeshun taught me how to use the paint box. very exciting. it’s a great machine. this week has been fun since i started producing. at imc, amy is in from la and telling adam about all the people out there who will never do any work with him. it’s like he’s tainted with a bad reputation. 12/23/86―milton rich, our publicity/pr rep, asked me how the staff can continue to take it from adam dishing it out at everybody. even stan bickman said adam’s personality is wearing thin. he said i deserve a medal. back at the office at 6:15, i told adam i wanted to leave to write my thesis. i was having a breakdown over the chaos and stress in the office. i’ve been training bob to take over the video olsen / agency growing pains 103 commercial division for front row films in new york. 12/26/86―friday: i’m home. adam called to report his brunch with al silver and bob blansky. he said bob will start the week of january 12th. he’ll work on computer animation and get commissions for the commercials he brings in to our company. adam liked storm thorgerson’s cutting edge computer techniques, and told him we received a chrysler commercial for him to shoot. the problem was none of us believed it. i was hoping storm would work with bob in new york. 1/6/87―tuesday: bob asked me, “is the car commercial (for chrysler) real? without a po (purchase order) it can’t be.” i said, “my worst fear is that it isn’t real.” bob replied, “it’s too bad that adam has to live in that world, to make up his reality. he needs that? incredible!” storm thorgerson was here last week and we went for drinks and adam talked it up. incredible! to succeed we have to protect ourselves from adam. 1/9/87―friday: at imc, i went with bob to windsor (editing company) and we created the syndicast logo in gold, using ado and abacus. 1/15/87―thursday: a great week working with bob blansky in front row trying to get jobs for directors and for bob. he’s great on computer graphics. really the best, having worked at dolphin computer image since it opened. for the rest of the year until summer, when i left to do fieldwork in jamaica, bob blansky brought in several jobs that we worked on at front row films. from start to finish, we created story boards and final animations. we received an order from alan shalleck to make animated children’s stories for 40 books in the troll series. we produced an aids commercial for the ny department of health in albany, ny, and an animated flyway diagram for an audubon documentary on pbs. computer generated art and video was fast becoming an ingredient in commercials and video entertainment. i was fortunate to have been part of this new direction with experienced teachers whetting my appetite for how i could take video into my anthropological future. 9/7/88―wednesday: i wrote my letters of resignation and transferred my shares in imc, front row, pinnacle and crystal mountain, to adam. adam said that he was partnering with a publishing company at 383 fifth ave. and taking the rest of the staff there to do advertising if he closes imc [which he soon did]. i defended my thesis on march 14, 1989. at my graduation in may, adam and his two sons were there to cheer me on. ironically, that summer i began teaching advertising in the marketing department at suny old westbury. journal of business anthropology, 5(1), autumn 2016 104 references baba, m. 1986. business and industrial anthropology: an overview. napa bulletin volume 2: 1-29. the university of california: national association for the practice of anthropology. american anthropology association. cefkin, m. (ed.). 2010/2009. ethnography and the corporate encounter. new york: berghahn books. hodder, c. 2002. entangled: an archaeology of the relationships between humans and things. chichester, west sussex, uk: john wiley and sons. olsen, b. 2016. liminality in advertising from the mad men era. journal of business anthropology (spring) special issue 2: 77-104. taussig, m. 2011. i swear i saw this: drawings in fieldwork notebooks, namely my own. chicago, il: the university of chicago press. essay hard cases steve barnett (bardoconsulting, steve@bardoconsulting.com) anthropology as a non-academic vocation was all but unknown when i started consulting in 1978 (previously i had taught at princeton, brown, and mit). consumer research was “market research,” based on survey questions that were mostly obvious and “focus groups” that were slanted and artificial. i decided on a radically different approach, although familiar enough to anthropologists; rather than ask people what they did and why, i observed them as they were doing it and inferred patterns based on larger cultural themes. i also saw that a single research strategy to cover all consumer issues was inadequate. instead, i listened to each client's concerns, developing a unique research design for each problem. i first tried this out in a consulting group of successful economists who thought my plans were tangential to their core business. after a year my group was the most profitable and after discussing alternatives, we decided to become independent―the cultural analysis group (cag) based in new york. we were the first consumer consulting team of ph.d. anthropologists plus a statistician. initially we were an oddity, written up in the new york times and many other publications. one article headlined, “an anthropologist without a pith helmet.” but our business grew rapidly as companies tried to move beyond learning the same things as their competitors. ad page 1 of 10 jba 5(1): 54-63 autumn 2016 © the author(s) 2016 issn 2245-4217 www.cbs.dk/jba mailto:steve@bardoconsulting.com barnett / hard cases 55 agencies and companies began to see advantages in an anthropological approach. one ad agency, saatchi & saatchi, offered clients “the anthropological search”; this was in fact cag behind the scenes. eventually cag anthropologists outgrew our start-up and went on to form other consulting ventures, most notably the practica group in chicago. i was hired as a strategy executive by nissan north america, citigroup, and ogilvy one. as my experience deepened, i became more involved in longer-term strategic issues―political, economic and social―becoming a managing director of the pioneer scenario consulting firm, the global business network. now anthropologists populate many non-academic niches. but as the numbers increase so does the “normal science.” the application of anthropological strategies to practical problems increasingly suffers from what a literary critic called “the dead hand of competence.” some ethnographic observations (usually done superficially), a few group interviews, invoking the magic incantation “getting close to your customers or the public,” and the job is done. when i started the cultural analysis group in the early-1980s, we were unique in the consulting world; now anthropologists are ubiquitous―in business, ngos, government, etc. and with numbers comes routinization: the use of received methods, no matter what the problem. this brief essay is a plea for creativity, for matching approach and method to problem, rather than falling back on standard comfortable (and comforting) techniques. i will focus on actual cases (identities concealed), not guidelines; unusual options, not off-the-shelf techniques. and so i will not dwell on theoretical issues (like the use of the popular notion of “memes” or post-modern doubts about the entire enterprise of anthropology). instead i will look at what kinds of experiments, unique research tactics, and reporting methods i had to invoke to respond to difficult client problems. in one sense, being creative is what field ethnographers do―understanding what is going on around them by participating in multiple ways. when i did fieldwork in south india, i played drums in a local religious band, helped start a neighborhood news-sheet, played cards weekly with a group of men who were neighborhood leaders, and so on. applying this strategy to consulting anthropology suggests both a problem and a benefit. the problem is client expectations. clients typically hire anthropologists with clear expectations about research design. deviating from those expectations requires much client discussion and soothing, something many working anthropologists are understandably reluctant to, and often not trained to, embark upon. the benefit, to put it bluntly, is fun; using your skills and imagination to develop an approach that best tackles the client’s concerns. of course there is another, more practical, benefit: creating and deepening a client journal of business anthropology, 5(1), autumn 2016 56 relationship based on ongoing conversations about the complex problems they face. (anthropology is not well suited to routine problems―should we put it in a blue box with a yellow border, or in a yellow box with a blue border―since these are not really conceptual issues, but straight market research.) each case will be discussed separately, starting with the problem, exploring a strategy, and finally communicating with the client. case 1: the evolution of glamour the client was a major cosmetics manufacturer that wanted to introduce a line of products embodying contemporary concepts of female glamour. the client realized that their idea of glamour was an outdated hollywood 1940s version, but had nothing to replace it. the expectation was that we as researchers would talk to women and somehow uncover their notions of glamour. this seemed weak, not likely to provide insights deep enough for product differentiation. my anthropological team and i came up with these alternatives: (a) talking to the cosmetic specialists working for individual companies on the main floor of bloomingdales in new york. they make up women on the spot with the brand of cosmetics they are promoting, and so know what glamorous look women are asking for now. (b) doing a semiotic analysis of hollywood glamour photos, then and now, to explore changes in how stars are positioned, clothing, make-up, posture, backgrounds, and so on. (c) talking to and watching performers in drag, men who have to create glamour from the ground up, and who are hyper-aware of the latest glamour trends. the client agreed to (a) and (b), but hesitated at (c). i had to take senior executives to a drag performance to convince them that the performers were truly glamorous. they were just barely convinced enough to agree to go ahead with (c). combining the three research approaches resulted in a profound understanding of how much glamour has changed in recent years. without going into specifics, the key finding was that glamour used to be believed to be intrinsic to the person, but now is seen as a pose, something that can be put on and taken off. before, a person was or was not “glamorous,” no matter what the context. now, a person might appear glamorous in one setting and ordinary or even dowdy in another. and this in turn led us to think of the person in contemporary culture as having multiple performative selves rather than a single self for all contexts. our report included videos of women being made-up in bloomingdales, presentation of hollywood photos, and clips of drag barnett / hard cases 57 performances. i repeated the presentation in europe for the holding company since the us executives said the europeans had to see it to believe it. as it turned out, the drag performers were most convincing. the client developed the product line emphasizing women becoming glamorous in a narrowly constructed setting rather than simply being glamorous. case 2: sedan to sports car an auto manufacturing client was concerned that their “lower middle” sedan was underperforming compared with, say, toyota’s camry or honda’s accord and wanted advice on repositioning and redesigning the next version. they asked for an understanding of why their vehicle was doing poorly and what alternatives might prove compelling. i pressed them on the “lower middle” focus and asked if we couldn’t look for nonstandard market niches. the car industry has traditional, unexamined categories for vehicles and sells to those categories. my feeling was that there were possibilities in the interstices between these categories. they reluctantly agreed, but only if we also researched that “lower middle.” we developed these research strategies: (a) examining the demographic data provided by the client to see if there were unexploited niches hidden by the immediate reliance on pre-given categories. (b) once we saw that this demographic information suggested a huge cohort of baby-boomers entering the householder lifecycle stage, we decided to explore their lives more deeply. this involved giving baby-boomers hand-held audio recorders to note interesting, amusing, important aspects of their daily lives as they unfolded. (c) observing how cars (sedans, sports cars, small suvs, vans, smaller vehicles, etc.) were actually driven, by taking videos of various driving situations (urban, highway, commute, etc.) before we explored (a) through (c), we looked at the existing data on perceptions of the client’s current sedan and found it was “stuck in the middle”―it had no distinctive features in potential buyers’ minds and so was easily omitted from their decision-making. it also appeared that for many boomer men, no sedan option was strongly desired; rather it was an instrumental decision and purchase. the data from the recorders strongly indicated that men looked longingly on their “wilder,” younger days and were reluctant to display signs of maturing, like driving a minivan, eating healthier food, or compromising on a high ticket item like a tv or car. when we analyzed driving videos of boomer men, they tended to drive somewhat recklessly: jackrabbit starts, speeding to stop signs, and so on. in other words, they drove as if they were not behind the wheel of a “boring” minivan or large journal of business anthropology, 5(1), autumn 2016 58 sedan. we suggested a four door vehicle positioned between “lower middle” and “upper middle,” an unexploited niche with a rapidly growing number of car buyers given a strong economy at that time. we also suggested focusing on the sport car-like qualities of the vehicle (acceleration, handling, racy design), rather than on the size and comfort of a sedan. given the length of time needed to develop and manufacture a new vehicle, it took seven years for the company to market the only vehicle in a unique sport/sedan category between the traditional lower and upper middle segments. that car is still unique and still sells well. case 3: launching a luxury car an asian car maker wanted insight into how to launch an expensive vehicle designed to compete with german luxury cars (mercedes, bmw, audi). the problem was how to convince american luxury consumers to spend more money on an asian car, given the status reward of a german car. we decided on this research sequence: (a) exploring potential target markets for the most likely initial buyers, rather than try to market to all potential luxury car buyers. we talked with individuals who were actively looking for a new luxury car to learn what issues mattered to them, as well as listening to them converse with car sales staff. (b) determining where that target market searched for reliable information about new cars. we had access to a golf club where we asked members how they decided on major purchases. (c) developing ways to influence the identified reliable information sources. the potential target market identified was a value-oriented upper middle class, plus wealthier consumers, people who would not pay extra just for status―based on conversations indicating a significant number who did not want to get “ripped off” by paying a high price for something based on image. we then did an online study (an innovation at the time) of a sample determined by their value orientation to determine where they got reliable information about major purchases. for the overwhelming majority, it turned out to be consumer reports. we then reviewed every car rated by consumer reports since the magazine’s inception to determine those attributes most highly regarded by the magazine. with a list of key attributes we then suggested to the manufacturer that they develop and position the inaugural luxury vehicle to fit those attributes. the consumer report evaluation of that vehicle was outstanding (including a line about excellent value for the price) and sales took off. barnett / hard cases 59 case 4: nuclear power plants a midwest state regulatory agency wanted to understand citizen attitudes to a nuclear power plant being built in the state. they were hearing contradictory arguments: the utility company building the plant said “outside agitators” were causing hostility to the plant, not local citizens. citizen’s groups argued the opposite: it was prominent local people who were opposed to the plant (being built on the fringes of a large city with limited evacuation routes). at the same time, a “public service” commercial sponsored by the utility trade association was aired that tried to emphasize nuclear power plant safety by saying there was more radiation generated from the stone steps of a state government building than from a nuclear power plant. we decided to use that commercial as a starting point: (a) using a unique group interview technique (unfocus groups), we created a miniature city, with buildings, a nuclear power plant and surroundings made from paper maché blocks that participants could manipulate to create a “safe” environment. we also decided against using a “moderator,” instead letting the group function on its own (with minimal initial instructions), because we were interested in their language and priorities rather than in imposing our queries and perspectives. (b) based on their language, we designed a survey to explore who actually opposed the plant and why. (c) the results of five “unfocus” groups were surprising. in every case, the group tried to create an impermeable barrier between the city and the nuclear plant. one participant even spoke to us after the group to say they made a mistake; the barrier should extend beneath the city as well as above, providing a complete bubble of protection. we now knew why the commercial was a failure: rather than convincing people that the plant was safe, it informed them that some radiation was leaking from the plant (contrary to the desired impermeable barrier). most participants thought of radiation on the analogy of an on-off switch, not the analogy of the commercial―that radiation is like a thermometer, less is better. the survey was very short, exploring whether respondents were opposed to the plant and the reasons why, including the notion of an on-off switch versus a thermometer. a significant number of prominent individuals (based on income and location) were opposed to the plant and invoked the on-off switch analogy to make their point. they were local citizens, many of them doctors, lawyers, and other professionals. this became evidence during a long process of negotiation leading to the eventual abandonment of the nuclear power plant construction. journal of business anthropology, 5(1), autumn 2016 60 case 5: re-imagining candy bars a company making candy bars wanted to differentiate from candy bar ads that basically said the same thing: chocolate, peanuts, gooeyness, and sweetness. in one sense, the ads all saw candy bars as a treat, almost a forbidden delight. my team and i took the company’s request to mean they wanted to reframe the category “candy bar.” is there another way that consumers are thinking about candy bars in relation to their daily lives? we decided to understand how people made the decision to buy one candy bar versus another. to observe this decision-making, we installed a video camera near a busy news and candy stand in new york’s grand central terminal. since that only showed us that some people spent a minute or so before choosing, picking up and putting back options, but did not reveal what they were thinking as they chose, we asked candy bar choosers to observe themselves on the video and tell us what was going through their minds. for many, deciding was complex. they looked at calories, saturated fat, and other nutrition-based information. they thought about their favorite versus choosing something new. they thought about their clothes and the messiness of some candy bars. but one dimension emerged that was most relevant for many―the substitution of the candy bar for lunch. this might be seen as a nutritional disaster, but consider if the lunch alternative is high calorie, high saturated fat fast food, as it is for so many. looking at published data on the lunch habits of working people (including white collar workers), it was obvious that the traditional hour off for a sit-down lunch is fast becoming history. most workers eat on the run, grabbing what they can―given that days are structured by digital access, not fixed hours. to that extent, a candy bar can become lunch and so the choice of a specific candy bar significantly includes the question: “is this a possible substitute for lunch?” this concept of candy bar as lunch was not in the client’s toolkit. we did not record responses as participants reviewed their candy bar buying behavior on the video (a mistake). to convince the client (and their advertising agency) that our analysis was on target, we repeated the experiment at grand central with the client present. the results were corroborated. the ad agency created a new strategy focused on the lunch substitute aspect of choosing a candy bar, anticipating the emergence of health bars like power bars. case 6: doing the dishes a major dishwashing detergent company wanted to understand how women actually did the dishes at home. they had a research lab where invited consumers would wash dishes while being observed by staff barnett / hard cases 61 literally in white coats taking notes. of course, under those circumstances people washed dishes carefully, using two sinks―one for detergent and one for rinsing―not wanting the observer to think them unclean. our team decided to observe people washing dishes in their homes. first, we set up video cameras in kitchens (with participant permission) triggered to start when the sink water was turned on. to make the cameras feel less intrusive, we left them in the kitchens for four weeks and only looked at the data from weeks 3 and 4. leaving a camera in participants’ kitchens provided moments of humor. some people selected only the dishes they need to use now from the pile of dirty dishes in the sink, never actually washing the whole pile. one woman gave her parakeet a bath under the faucet. oddities aside, we focused on patterns of doing dishes. our initial observations revealed dishwashing behaviors not seen in the detergent lab: (a) almost no one used the two sink method (one for washing, one for rinsing). most put detergent directly on the sponge or dish and washed under running water. and no one washed glasses last despite an advertising campaign that promised the detergent was so powerful you could wait to do glasses. no matter what the ad promised, participants felt doing glasses last would leave them “filmy.” (b) two distinct styles of dishwashing became clear:  very slow―actually lingering over the dishes;  very fast―speeding as fast as possible through the entire dishwashing process. when we looked deeper, most of the women who lingered were married with children living at home. most of the women who zipped through were young singles. for married women, doing the dishes was not simply a boring chore, but an escape, a time alone for fantasy and contemplation, since no one in the family would bother them knowing they might be asked to help. younger singles just wanted the task done asap so they could get out of the kitchen and get on with their lives. the client and their advertising agency were quite surprised by these findings, presented to them first in an oral report, only later showing videos of dishwashing styles. since our results contradicted the given wisdom of their own research lab, there was pushback until they saw the videos. the ad agency responded by developing a commercial aimed at young women that never showed a gleaming dish, the kitchen, or a woman seeing her face reflected in a shiny dish (all standard dishwashing ad visuals). instead, it showed a woman wiggling into a party dress with dance music in the background, and the voice-over saying this detergent will get you out of the kitchen so you can have a good time. journal of business anthropology, 5(1), autumn 2016 62 thoughts as you can imagine, these projects were creative, as well as providing significant insights for business clients, or public sector clients who needed advice on citizen views. the guiding principle was what kinds of research will get us as close as possible to the client’s concerns in ways that do not duplicate the kinds of research the client’s competitors are doing. how can you differentiate if you are sitting on the same information as your competitors? that means not doing the same focus groups and/or mostly poorly thought-out quantitative surveys. since most executives expect standard focus groups and surveys (having been taught to submit to traditional market research company “expertise”), this implies a close give-and-take relation with clients. quantitative and quasi-quantitative findings are not intrinsically more insightful than qualitative pattern recognition, especially if they are based on inept questions and moderator-driven focus groups. in spite of this, it should also be noted that most clients are reluctant, at least initially, to make big decisions without the reassurance of the usual kinds of data. the caution here is that some clients simply will not accept research innovation. but many do; they are more likely to agree to something new if these approaches are presented in a language they understand and buy into. each client will have a different background, education, and experience, as well as reporting to bosses who have their own mindsets. the skills of anthropology need to be applied to the client relationship, as well as to the actual research and analysis. i spend more time than is usual for consumer and public research consultants on understanding clients and building client trust. doing innovative research is a start, a way to get past superficial data. the real point is pattern recognition, discovering the deep connections between participant thought and action, and in turn deriving usable insights from research findings. going back to case 1 (the evolution of glamour), spotting changes in glamorous images led to rethinking cultural concepts of the self and that led to new ways to develop a line of cosmetics. or cases 2 (sedan to sports car) and 5 (reimagining candy bars) where research led to the pattern recognition that male boomers didn’t want to give up youthful self perception, and that as sit-down lunches vanished, the search for food and nourishment was extended. a brief note on significance: anthropological research is often about obscure topics, of interest to professionals in the same sub-field or as a small part of an ongoing but constrained discourse. there is no intrinsic reason why research on cross-cousin marriage should be more “meaningful” than research on automobile models. both can lead to larger insights about culture, both traditional and emerging, and both can have no further implications. the consulting research i have done for clients has resulted in many published papers and articles in academic journals barnett / hard cases 63 and the popular press. theoretical insight is where you find it, and to that extent there is no validity to the phrase “applied anthropology,” implying that consulting anthropologists only apply what they learned at university. good ethnography is good ethnography, whether academic or consulting. if anthropologists are to create a valid consulting niche distinct from marketing research and not become just another category, we need to apply all our skills in developing research suited to client problems, using ethnography and other techniques to solve those problems. if we allow free rein to our creativity, we are not a one trick pony, but a horse of a different color. developing work uniforms for women: the role of ethnographic research mari bjerck abstract this article is makes use of fieldwork to discuss and analyse a norwegian product development project aimed at developing workwear for women in male dominated manual occupations. making use of ethnographic methods and analysis can be valuable in showing how users’ experiences and practices can be studied also where there are poorly developed concepts and language for formulating and discussing products, such as workwear in use. the article aims at answering how ethnographic studies may contribute to the development of products and services. understanding people and things in their everyday relations and achieving action-oriented results may be a challenge in innovation and development processes. this article explores such challenges in studying the use of clothes in specific work contexts, as well as capturing and mediating this experience with workwear in use. keywords ethnography, product development, user-driven innovation, clothes, gender page 1 of 17 jba 5(1): 137-153 autumn 2016 © the author(s) 2016 issn 2245-4217 www.cbs.dk/jba journal of business anthropology, 5(1), autumn 2016 138 introduction in innovation research, particularly within science and technology studies, the design process has been focused on technological objects and systems. this may produce scientific and technological knowledge that leads directly to the design of new products, systems, processes, or services, but research involved in the design process need not be technological in its form. the ways justifications, perceptions, practices, considerations, and structural conditions for how products and services actually figure in people’s lives are challenging to grasp, taken for granted, and neutralized. when it comes to clothing and work uniforms, the topic of discussion in this article, the articulation of embodied knowledge falls short. it is common to be able to express what feels wrong or right, but articulating why it feels that way is far more complicated (klepp 2008, 2009). research on uniforms and uniform dressing have to a large extent documented that women dressing in uniforms is problematic in practical, functional and social-symbolic terms (joseph 1986; kidwell 1989; barnes and eicher 1997; craik 2005; larsson 2008). for men, uniforms (like the business suit) are a part of a civil clothing practice (rubinstein 2001; pettersen 2004), but for women, clothing is both closer to the body and mutually different from men’s clothing (klepp and storm-mathisen 2005). the complex relationship between gender, dress and work is at the core of designing work uniforms, and can be problematic when designing for occupations where authority, danger and physical strain is involved (ewing 1975; craik 2005). making use of ethnographic methods and analyses can be valuable in showing how users’ experiences and practices can be studied, as well as in identifying where there are poorly developed concepts and language for formulating and discussing products. ethnographic methods may contribute substantially to translating this knowledge into a business world whose focus is on the innovation and development of products, services, strategies, and markets. understanding people and things in their everyday relations and achieving action-oriented results are challenges within such innovation and development processes. this article aims to answer the question of how ethnographic studies may contribute to the development of products and services. it explores the challenges that lie in studying the use of clothing in specific work contexts, as well as capturing and mediating this experience with workwear in use. my focus is on a norwegian product development project aimed at developing workwear for women in male-dominated manual occupations. it was initiated due to the fact that previously-designed workwear for women in male-dominated occupations had not been successful (it did not sell well when launched on the market). a norwegian workwear and sports company wanted to learn why this initiative failed, in order to bjerck / developing work uniforms for women 139 improve future releases of workwear designed for women. this company had a successful tradition in handling user-driven innovation in its sports and leisure-wear section. even so, it was not able to answer this question by itself. therefore, a project consortium was assembled and an application was sent to the norwegian research council’s program for user-driven innovation (bia) in order to find out if there was any unexploited potential in work uniforms for women. together with the norwegian defence logistics organization (ndlo)1 and two research institutions from oslo and akershus university college of applied sciences―consumption research norway (sifo) and work research institute (afi)―the project was accepted and received a three-year funding grant, staring from 2009 and ending in 2013. this article’s concern is not with whether the products or the development process was a success or not. it simply discusses the use of ethnographic research in the product development process and shows possible ways to employ methods, as well as interpreting and communicating results that invite and bring forth tactile, silent structures. i will start with a description of the fieldwork carried out in the project, after which i will answer the questions of what, how, and why this research work was done. i will point to why designing work uniforms was challenging against the background of empirical findings in the field; how knowledge of these empirical findings was shared with product developers; and what product and service solutions came out of the work and collaboration between ethnographers and product developers. ultimately, i intend this article to add to the discussion about whether ethnography adds value to product development and innovation in general. ethnographic research let me start by dealing with the ethnographic research that was done in the study as a response to the challenge of designing work uniforms for women. from the outset, the research was designed in such a way that its methods were not dependent on verbal statements, in the manner hitherto dominating social research and clothing research. thus, the study mostly focused on the actual uses and practices tied to clothing, rather than on the way clothes were talked about. much of our clothing practices function as tacit knowledge, as they are involved in everyday routines (gronow and warde 2001), which, especially in the use of 1 the norwegian defense logistics organization (ndlo) is responsible for procuring, developing, maintaining, updating, and eventually decommissioning all norwegian armed forces material. in this article, the research of sifo and the product development of the larger workwear company is in focus, which means that afi and ndlo has been left out of the analysis. two researchers with anthropological backgrounds carried out ethnographic research, while the writer of this article was most actively involved in the development process and conducted most of the fieldwork that appears in this study. journal of business anthropology, 5(1), autumn 2016 140 workwear, are characterized by being automated and invisible even to the person who practices them (klepp and bjerck 2014). in selecting methods, it was important to choose methodological techniques that grasped the non-verbalized experience and practice of the work clothes in use. collins, green and draper (1985: 329) identify the articulate and the tacit as a crucial division in knowledge. in design processes, user needs are articulated on behalf of the user in several ways. most often they are articulated as user representations, in which certain claims are made as to who the supposed users are and what they want. even though innovators are constantly interested in their future users (akrich 1995), stewart and williams claim that technological studies tend to “inscribe particular views of the user, user activities and priorities into the artefact,” and that these views are based on an “inadequate or misleading view of the user and their requirements” (2005: 39). in selecting methods, it was important to choose methodological techniques that grasped the non-verbalized experience and practice of the work clothes in use, by actual users of work uniforms. grasping and communicating knowledge of experiences that are tacit in their form may be problematic to the extent that they are neglected in the innovation process. specialists and non-specialists, here represented by a workwear company and users of workwear, express themselves in different ways. much of the knowledge that users inhabit is incorporated in different repertoires of body techniques (mauss 1979), which―simply put―refer to ways to use the body that may seem natural, but that are in fact culturally bound. the concept points to the fact that much of what we know, we know with our bodies and sometimes we do not even know that we know.2 the aspects of what we know with our body, such as the ways we use work uniforms and how uniforms on the body integrate with the socio-cultural work environment, cannot always be verbally accounted for. to deal with this, the use of methods had to take into account ways to integrate with, internalize, and observe the dressed body in action. this was done through fieldwork at fifteen selected locations involving six male-dominated manual occupations: construction, handicraft, industrial production, petroleum production, fishing, and the navy. we gained access to and conducted fieldwork on two navy vessels in the norwegian armed forces, one land-based petroleum production site, one offshore petroleum production site, an industrial fishing vessel, three different construction sites, one roadwork site, one cellulose production site, one plastic industrial production site, one roadwork company, one electrical production and installation site, one stone production site, and an auto mechanic’s garage. due to difficulties over 2 http://hyllanderiksen.net/natur.html http://hyllanderiksen.net/natur.html bjerck / developing work uniforms for women 141 access to the petroleum production sector, we had to make use of alternative methods of interviewing and talking about pictures taken by the workers themselves describing different aspects of everyday work. these occupational categories were chosen against the background of the types of occupations that the workwear company was interested in. the choice of locations and work sites was made by sifo, and made on the basis of having at least one female employee working there. these locations were not easy to track down, however. when the necessary permissions were acquired, we spent anywhere from a couple of hours (at the oil and gas land-based production) to up to two weeks at each site.3 the workwear company was not involved in the fieldwork at any time. fieldwork was carried out by three different techniques in this study: participant observation, practice study and interviews. these were chosen in order to account for the tacit structures at the work sites and embodied experiences related to the work uniforms in use, as well as the verbal accounts and material objects observable in the field. by conducting participant observation in the field, we acted as participant observers (bernard 1994). this specifically involved following women around in their work spheres, helping out with the work they performed, following their daily routines, taking coffee breaks with their colleagues, using workwear similar to what they wore, getting dressed in unisex wardrobes and sharing cabins with other employees. in this way, we were able to internalise data relating to the socio-cultural structures of the work spheres. fieldwork also enabled a movement in and out of the participant role in order to observe and register behaviour and movement in relation to the clothing. this is called practice study. here we registered how clothes were used, how such use was or was not integrated in actual work tasks and social relations. we also registered how men or women wore outfits differently or similarly, and how gender was communicated or under-communicated in the work spheres materially through the garments, bodily repertoires, and accessories that were used but also immaterially through conversations and other forms of verbal communication. being present in the different work contexts enabled us to experience working life as women workers in a maledominated occupation, even though it was just for just a short while. ethnographic studies are considered immensely useful in their ability to gather a large amount of empirical data and thereby enable comparison. in addition, fieldwork provides the opportunity to experience relations in real life, or “in vivo” as glaser and strauss (1967: 40) put it. doing an ethnographic study provides the possibility for collecting as much comparable data as possible in a short amount of time 3 we refer here to the three researchers from sifo who conducted fieldwork within this project: mari rysst (associate professor), marit vestvik (researcher), and the author. journal of business anthropology, 5(1), autumn 2016 142 on relevant issues to satisfy aims for both a commercial industry and academia. qualitative interviews were also an important supplement to this fieldwork. these interviews facilitated a deeper understanding of the world views of male and female workers (kvale 1997), which were tied to experiences with work, workwear, and gender. in addition to those who dealt specifically with the acquisition of workwear at the work sites, both male and female workers were interviewed. a total of 67 interviews were conducted, with 36 women and 31 men, but many more contributed to the participant observation part of the study. these methods were chosen in order to allow the workwear company to benefit from including users’ experiences and user knowledge in the process of developing improved workwear. in order to do that, it was crucial that the design and development team put aside silent and explicit assumptions about users’ wants and needs, and integrate the experiences of real users into the process. this allowed for extensive information from the field to be integrated into the design and product development process. some of the findings from the fieldwork that were most relevant for the development of female work uniforms will be presented in the next section in order to show why designing work uniforms for women may be challenging. why designing work uniforms for women is challenging findings from fieldwork pointed to several aspects in the intersection between work, gender, body, and work clothes. gender is here understood as relational (connell 2002), and as a process, that is to say something that is done (west and zimmermann 1987; butler 2006). how gender is performed varies between women, between men, and between women and men (neumann et al. 2012: 243). however, certain things and facilities ensure that potential users are left with a wrong or inappropriate gender (mühleisen and lorentzen 2006: 278), and work uniforms fall into this category. one of the challenges for women in wearing work uniforms is that they are made on the basis of a standardization of the masculine body, stemming from a ready-to-wear industry. this industry, of which work uniforms are a part, creates clothes in a particular size range based on what size and form appeal to most of their potential wearers. naturally, women are not the primary potential wearers of workwear in male-dominated manual occupations, as statistics show that more than 80 per cent of the workers in these occupations are male (meld. st. 7 2015-2016). there are in fact physical differences between women and men that are relatively stable. this points to a need for a different form and size range of clothing. according to neumann, rysst and bjerck (2012), these physical differences essentially come down to the fact that women have breasts and have a more curved shape along their waistlines and on their lower backs. in addition, women usually have narrower shoulders and bjerck / developing work uniforms for women 143 shorter arms and legs than men do. the relative measurements for the ratio between the length of the back, the waistline and the hips are also different between women and men. this is often (though not always) taken into account in the design of ordinary clothing, but is very seldom considered when it comes to workwear and uniforms. this is an aspect that is related to the physical nature of male and female bodies that has implications for what and how clothes are worn every day at work. however, there are other socio-cultural aspects of clothing that challenge both the use of these work uniforms and how to design them better. two of the findings from the fieldwork were particularly relevant to the challenges of developing workwear for women, as they were not transferrable to clear-cut or hands-on solutions. the first was related to an ambivalence both in the use of work uniforms made on the basis of masculine norms and the gendered position that women workers found themselves in at work. this ambivalence was further related to their status as workers, in which they wanted to be seen as equals; yet their gendered position as women in the work space was often a hindrance to their ability to be fully included. this integration process happened socially, physically, and materially through the work uniform. in this way, women made a greater effort to be taken seriously as an equal part of the work community, and as “one of the guys” (neuman et al. 2012; bjerck 2013). according to jennifer craik (2005), the uniform possesses characteristics beyond those that are tied to authority or affiliation with a group―what craik calls “open lives.” a uniform may also possess “hidden meanings” (ibid.). for example, the gendered qualities of a uniform that has been made in a masculine-defined world constitute a part of the uniform that contains hidden meanings. the work uniform does have the ability to facilitate the integration of women in the workplace. at the same time, however, this necessitates downplaying the female gender, as often reproduced aesthetically in popular cultural forms. female workers in our study wanted to be included in their workplace on equal terms with their male colleagues, but they were also unwilling to let go of their femininity. this manifested itself through the discreet use of makeup, hairdo, nail polish, jewellery, colourful undergarments, and the like. work uniforms were modified by cropping or sewing, and were supplemented with personal items, so that the work uniforms worn by women were mainly the same as that of their male colleagues, but with differences in certain elements. in addition, the overall look that the uniformed workwear and the gendered body formed together revealed that the person wearing the work uniform was not male. there was a widespread belief that feminine markers reflected a focus on clothing, body, and personal appearance that did not belong in the workplace. uniform regulations found in the norwegian armed forces (vestvik and bjerck 2012), for example, did not allow the use of journal of business anthropology, 5(1), autumn 2016 144 such feminine or individual markers to be added to the uniform. this was neither formally accepted in other occupations, nor an accepted part of informal regulations. nonetheless, feminization occurred. herein lies a strong ambivalence that can be difficult to grasp. how can workwear companies develop work apparel for women, when women themselves are ambivalent about how they want to appear? women say that they want to be included in the workplace on equal terms and wore their uniforms every day; yet, in observing and participating in different work contexts, we realised that the picture was complicated. when it came to presenting this ambivalence to the workwear company, we spent a lot of time discussing how to understand this, and, especially, how to transfer it to specific products in a workwear collection. a second finding was tied to the organization of acquisition and routines of redistribution and ownership of the work uniforms. common to all occupations (except fishing) was the fact that employers paid for most, or at least a part, of the workwear. this came with the stipulation that someone higher up in the administrative system, management, or department would make the final decision about acquisition. decisions were made about choice of clothing manufacturer, budgets, the overall appearance of the uniforms (colours, types of garments, quality of fabrics, and other minor details affecting acquisition), and additional work equipment. these structural conditions created a distance between the decisions being made and the end users, and limited workers’ access to functional workwear on the free market―workwear that suited their body shape, preferences, and the nature of the work in which they were involved. many of the work uniforms in larger companies were acquired through processes of public bidding where the winning workwear company was given the opportunity to provide all workwear for the company through a predetermined contract lasting several years. the process in the different companies that decided what work garments to purchase and redistribute worked as a bottleneck and blocked workers’ access to well-functioning clothing. it also hindered a flow of information and contact between the producer, distributer of workwear, and end user. in short, when the procurer and the user are not the same, it can be assumed that something will get lost along the way. entering contexts where work uniforms are used with an open mind allows the ethnographer to gain a fuller picture of the clothes and its users. however, this gives rise to issues that are not easily transferrable to products and services because “what anthropology has to say is multifaceted, complex, nuanced and revealing; it shows how difficult it is to separate ‘right’ from ‘wrong’, which is a total anathema to business managers charged with making quick decisions” (moeran 2006: 120). this points to how ethnography may complicate the productdevelopment process, even though it helps understand patterns of bjerck / developing work uniforms for women 145 behaviour and beliefs from participants’ point of view (howard and mortensen 2009: 19). it may therefore be challenging to accept or even understand findings considered different, strange, and contradictory. dealing with ambiguous results presented by the researcher in the process of development can therefore be a challenge―both for the anthropologist who tries to get her views and understandings of the context right, and for the product developer who tries to transfer his or her understanding into concrete products. everyday practices are not a coherent and rational set of acts quantifiable into categories and schematic structures directly transferrable into products and services. as cefkin (2010: 47) has stressed, “realities that matter on the ground need to be understood as situated, dynamic and often negotiated and even contested.” transferring and communicating understandings from work to a business context puts the ethnographer in juxtaposition with complex, context-bound data and the need for information that can be converted to products and services. understanding and making use of what may be seen as contradictory findings could nonetheless provide opportunities for successful innovations and lasting products. the next part of the article will deal with how insights into the use of work uniforms gained from fieldwork were passed on from ethnographer to product developers in the meeting between ethnographic researchers and a product development team. how to share knowledge: ethnography meets product development the researchers’ contribution to the innovation project was not simply to pinpoint the challenges in developing and innovating work uniforms for women. it also required finding ways to work around and solve these challenges. this depended on the ability, firstly, to present information from fieldwork and ethnographic analysis in an understandable form so as to benefit product development; and secondly, to grasp extensive contextualized information and turn it into relevant theoretical models presentable to an academic audience. in this article, this is treated as an issue of challenges to the communication of knowledge, which in the project at hand was solved by establishing a platform of communication at the very beginning. in order to feed information from ethnographic work into product development, the project team developed informal meeting points in between fieldwork and analysis, sketch boards, and strategy planning. the informal meeting points in which ethnographic understandings met product development were labelled work meetings. engaging the whole project team in work meetings was done to try to close the gap between users and product developers. these meetings also enabled an exchange of perspectives and knowledge of the concrete material properties of the garments (as communicated by the workwear company), on the one hand, and the garments in the work context, on the body and in social journal of business anthropology, 5(1), autumn 2016 146 relationships (as communicated by the researchers), on the other. work meetings were arranged in between bouts of fieldwork where findings from the latest fieldwork were presented. these were held every, or every other, month and there were thirteen meetings in all. some were directly related to a particular work arena, while others had a more summary form relating to several work arenas within one specific occupational category. when all the fieldwork had been completed, a final summary and presentation were made. these work meetings were carried out with verbal presentations from the researchers at the location of the workwear company, who were supplied with bullet points, quotes, and anonymized photos in powerpoint format. the internal project leader from the company’s research and development department, a marketing consultant, several designers, fabric experts, the category manager, and others who had the time and interest to participate were present at these meetings, when all participants were given the opportunity to discuss the findings presented and query the details of user contexts, garments in use, or work settings. due to methodological techniques that left room for a wider perspective of workers and workwear, it was possible to present user contexts that took all workers into account, and not just women. routines of acquisition and problematic issues relating to ownership, information strategies, and ideas about proper dress at work (neumann et al. 2012; vestvik and bjerck 2012; bjerck 2013) were also presented. the development team used these meetings to discuss main findings, but also small details revealed in the presentation both amongst themselves and with the researcher. they talked through design-based solutions and practicalities around garments, labelling, size range, marketing and information strategies, sales pitches, communication strategies, and more. this led to possible solutions for products, concepts, or services. it also led to a development in perspective that the researcher took back into her subsequent fieldwork. as such, fieldwork could accommodate issues that both researchers and those involved in the design process were interested in. this way of exchanging back and forth between the contexts of the user in ethnographic fieldwork, scientific analysis, and presentation in a business context could be considered a feedback loop. this feedback loop ensured that it not only fed information to the workwear company through findings and discussions in the field, but that the discussions, questions, and constructive critiques also fed back into the fieldwork. the work meetings and feedback loop affected the fieldwork in that they sharpened the researcher’s eye for material realities that surrounded the workers. they also forced a clearer and more reflective view of materiality in the analysis―both that which was presented in scientific publications (neumann et al. 2012; vestvik and bjerck 2012; bjerck 2013), and that which was presented to the business world. this was also reflected in the analysis of data in which, early on, the researcher bjerck / developing work uniforms for women 147 had to transform findings into analysed material presentable to the clothing industry. this feedback loop brought about developed perspectives in the work of the ethnographer, as well as in the design process. work meetings enabled ethnographers and product developers to work together despite the differences in time (the rapid product development against a slower, ethnographic serendipity approach), and expert knowledge (the high level of knowledge of products and design against the deeper understandings of user context). the researcher’s intermediary position between the user and those involved with product development became a guiding position where perspectives were developed in juxtaposition between these two parties. this provided information that could be ambiguous and not easily transferred into physical products and services, so that, in this sense, the use of ethnography has the potential to complicate the product development process. work meetings functioned as an arena where products and services could be designed on the basis of grounded ethnographic fieldwork. as will become clearer in the next section, the ethnographic research carried out during the project was converted into both products and services. what solutions come from ethnographic work and collaboration the product development team from the workwear company discussed their understanding of the findings from fieldwork. for them, the ambivalence in women workers’ dress practices was particularly difficult first to understand, then to relate to, and finally to convert into designbased solutions. another obstacle was the structural conditions of the acquisition, redistribution, and ownership of the garments. issues surrounding the findings presented above were discussed in almost every work meeting, more directly relating to the type of work arena and occupation that was presented, although it was not the task of the ethnographer to come up with a concrete solution for how to transform the results of ethnographic research into products. at the last summary work meeting, the top manager for the workwear company participated and was apparently upset over the presentation of the finding that concerned women’s relation to their work uniforms. with regards to gender and work uniforms in particular, he wanted a direct answer about whether or not women workers wanted to be “women” or not―that is to say, whether they wanted to be feminine at work, and whether they wanted their own feminine work uniforms, or not. not having participated in the other work meetings he did not have the same understanding of this ambiguity as did those who had discussed the matter earlier. this is where expectations of clear-cut answers were most apparent. however, many of the perspectives from fieldwork were easy to trace back to improved or new products and services launched on the journal of business anthropology, 5(1), autumn 2016 148 market. the main question that the workwear company was interested in exploring was if it should make its own female workwear line. the ambiguity of workwear complicated the decision and made those concerned doubt the market potential of making a workwear line especially designed for women. in addition, several of the findings about women and workwear in the study also applied to men in the same occupations―size range, shape and functions, in particular, but also uses of that same workwear. initially, a decision was made on the basis of the findings and market potential not to make a collection of workwear dedicated to women workers. however, due to the structures of acquisition and in particular due to the public bidding, the workwear company felt obliged to offer women workers products that were directed specifically towards them. these garments were not particularly visible as feminine, in either form or appearance. the workwear collection was in general dominated by dark and grey colours, with a splash of orange or yellow on high visibility garments. the female workwear had seams or details hidden or discretely placed inside garments, pockets, zippers, or buttons. undergarments in wool or cotton, or more technical garments, were also offered in different colours inspired by the company´s sports collection and not used in the outer layers of workwear. the shape and sizes of these garments were also discreetly more female in form with a narrower shape, but one that left room for hips and breasts. the challenge here was to create a shape that was not too narrow and tight fitting in a manner that drew attention to the women workers. solutions were also found to improve work uniforms for both men and women. a greater variation in size range in the work uniforms was among the first solutions deriving from the study of women and men’s use of workwear. this made it easier for workers of all sizes to find a size that fitted. having a more gender-neutral sizing system meant that sizes were communicated in a way that was more comfortable for women workers. they did not, for example, have to choose “small man” when selecting a size. the shape of the different garments was also improved for both sexes and made according to feedback gathered during fieldwork. in the work meetings, it was also discussed as to whether or not to offer variations in the length of the work pants and jumpsuits, so that variations in length, placement of kneepads, pockets, and other technical functions were placed correctly on the lower parts of the body. this was not done, however, due to the fact that along the way the workwear company came up with a solution to the garment design, which made the garments more flexible. this mean that, among other things, length could be solved by incorporating the ability to easily fold down or fold up the lower parts of the pants. increasing the possibility for variation and creating flexible bjerck / developing work uniforms for women 149 solutions in the workwear products became a solution to the problem of getting clothes that better fitted the body not only of women and the work that was done every day. designing flexible garments was related to the placement of pockets and the use of zippers and buttons, but it also incorporated uses of particular textiles for different garments. labelling each garment to accommodate information for all users was also discussed as part of a flexible solution. other solutions included using images to quickly grab the attention of the wearer and to accommodate problems that existed in the transfer of knowledge between those who purchased and redistributed the products, on the one hand, and end users, on the other. in addition to design solutions for work garments, more structural changes in marketing, information, and sales were discussed. one discussed option was to offer sales channels where users of workwear in general, and not just representatives from different male-dominated occupations, could purchase garments directly from distributors. offering products directly to workers was a response to finding a way improve workers’ access in all occupations to work uniforms and thus to shorten the supply chain. in this way, the ethnographic production of knowledge about user contexts was incorporated in design-based solutions to workwear and services. ethnographic research as added value the background for the study of work uniforms in male-dominated occupations offered little or no knowledge about the functional requirements and aesthetic expectations employees had towards their workwear, nor about the social and practical aspects of workwear in use. workwear is an essential part of all workers’ physical, social, and symbolic daily life, but this is seldom articulated or studied. ethnographic research was used to overcome the challenge of translating between nonverbalized, tacit knowledge and experiences of the work clothes in use through language, and to assist developers and designers by providing them with guidance for design-based solutions. at the same time, stewart (2014: 140) has identified the application of complex and contextualized ethnographic findings as one obstacle for ethnography in management studies. in juxtaposition between the various users and the product developer, the ethnographer may find himself/herself in a tricky position between users’ ambivalence and complex feelings towards their work and workwear, and a need for rapid, clear-cut, and easily transferrable knowledge about the clothes in use. likewise, howard and mortensen have identified “the handoff from ethnographers to designers and business decision makers” as “the biggest challenge to success” (2009: 17). they claim that although the use of ethnographic methods has grown in the business world, the outcomes have not grown at the same rate. in an attempt to “make the research journal of business anthropology, 5(1), autumn 2016 150 stick and have long-term impact beyond any individual project” (howard and mortensen 2009: 20), they stress the fact that ethnographers have to act as guides to discovering customer insights instead of behaving like gurus who know more about people than anyone else (ibid. 21). along this same line of thought, it could be said that the work meetings and feedback loop that the researcher was involved in enabled the ethnographer to act as a guide to the contexts and understandings of workers’ dress practices. acting as a guide to users and user contexts can be a challenging and daunting commitment. but, it is not a position that the ethnographer is unfamiliar with, given that her role has always been to speak on behalf of others, and to translate the understandings gained in the course of fieldwork into a scientific or academic language. the difference when relating to the business world is that the transfer of knowledge from users to designers cannot be communicated in an academic language, but instead must be articulated in a way that is understandable to the business world. the ethnographic fieldwork discussed here not only provided information about the work uniform and the workers, but also studied the contexts, practices, and work relations in which both male and female employees were involved. in this way, ethnography became a valuable tool for improving products, both in regards to their design and to the structural systems that enclosed them. analysing the findings that are ultimately incorporated into the development of products and services (and those that are omitted) tells us something about the handoff of ethnographic research and points to ways in which it can contribute in making products better 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(oppdragsrapport nr. 7 -2008). oslo: statens institutt for forbruksforskning. klepp, i.g. 2009 “klær, kropp og velvære.” in m.p. mcintyre and l. gradén (eds.), modets metamorfoser. stockholm: carlsson bokforlag. klepp, i.g. and bjerck, m. 2014 “a methodological approach to the journal of business anthropology, 5(1), autumn 2016 152 materiality of clothing: wardrobe studies.” international journal of social research methodology 17 (4): 373-386. kvale, s. 1997 det kvalitative forskningsintervju. oslo: ad notam gyldendal. larsson, m. 2008 uniformella förhandlingar. hierarkier och genusrelationer i postens kläder 1636-2008. stockholm: nordiska museets förlag. latour, b. 1996 aramis, or the love of technology. cambridge, ma: harvard university press. mauss, m. 1979 “part iv. body techniques.” in m. mauss. sociology and psychology. essays. london: routledge & kegan paul. meld. st. 7 2015-2016. 2015 likestilling i praksis. like muigheter for kvinner og men. oslo: norwegian ministry of children and equality. moeran, b. 2006 ethnography at work. london: bloomsbury academic. miller, d. 2005 “introduction.” in s. küchler and d. miller (eds.), clothing as material culture. oxford: berg. müleisen, w. and lorentzen, j. 2006 “kjønnet får hvile.” in j. lorentzen and w. mühleisen (eds.), kjønnsforskning. en grunnbok. oslo: universitetsforlaget. neumann, c.b., rysst, m., and bjerck, m. 2012 “en av gutta. kvinner og klær i mannsdominerte arbeiderklasseyrker.” tidsskrift for kjønnsforskning 35 (3-4): 240-254. nielsen, f.s. 1996 håndbok i antropologisk feltarbeid. bergen: fagbokforlaget. pelto, p.j. and pelto, g.h. 1978 anthropological research: the structure of inquiry. cambridge university press. pettersen, k. 2004 dress med press en studie av mannlig klesbruk i stortingssalen. (sifo fagrapport 7-2004.) oslo: statens institutt for forbruksforskning. reckwitz, a. 2002 “toward a theory of social practices. a development in culturalist theorizing.” european journal of social theory 5: 243-63. rubinstein, r.p. 2001 dress codes. oxford: westview press. stewart, a. 1998 the ethnographer’s method. london: sage publications. stewart, j., and williams, r. 2005 “the wrong trousers? beyond the design fallacy. social learning and the user.” in h. rohracher (ed.), user involvement in innovation processes: strategies and limitations from a socio technical perspective. munich: profil-verlag. vestvik, m. and bjerck, m. 2012 sjøforsvaret i ny drakt. utviklingen av ny uniform for sjøforsvaret med vekt på tilpasning til det kvinnelige og mannlige personellets ulike behov for arbeidsbekledning. (sifo bjerck / developing work uniforms for women 153 oppdragsrapport nr. 3-2012). oslo: statens institutt for forbruksforskning. west c. and zimmerman d.h. 1987 “doing gender.” gender and society 1 (2): 125–151. woodward, s. (2007). why women wear what they wear. oxford: berg. mari bjerck is a ph.d. fellow at copenhagen business school, department of intercultural communication and management, and research fellow at consumption research norway (sifo), oslo and akershus university college of applied sciences. her ph.d. is concerned with exploring the potential of materiality, specifically work uniforms, in acting as a change agent for the gender-segregated labour market in norway. her recent research has mainly focused on material culture, product development, and user-driven innovation. she may be reached at mbj.ikl@cbs.dk mailto:mbj.ikl@cbs.dk o organization, where art thou? tracing the multiple layers of ambiguous and shifting boundary processes in a formal organization marte fanneløb giskeødegård abstract in this article, i use an empirical case from a norwegian transnational maritime company to discuss organizational boundaries and, implicitly, organizational form. i focus on the relationship of the formal organization as a legal entity to its outside world and ask how boundary work toward external actors takes form. my empirical case shows that there is not an unproblematic “inside” that engages with the outside world and, as a result, i question the usefulness of some of the concepts used to talk about boundary processes. to understand the latter, where the boundaries drawn are multiple, flexible, and dependent on the situation, i adopt bowker and star’s (2000) concept of “boundary object,” which allows the discussion to focus on boundaries in terms of the continuous work of making a “shared space”, rather than of limits between the various parties. keywords organizational anthropology, organizational form, organizational boundaries, boundary object, organizational theory, norway page 1 of 21 jba 5(1): 116-136 autumn 2016 © the author(s) 2016 issn 2245-4217 www.cbs.dk/jba giskeødegård / o organization, where art thou? 117 introduction the geographer peter dicken (2011: 110) defined a transnational company as a firm with “the power to coordinate and control operations in more than one country, even if it does not own them.”1 moreover, he described transnational companies as “networks within networks,” owing to both the companies’ internal structure and their complex bonds with the outside world. this description is a helpful point of departure for the current topic as it raises timely questions concerning what arenas are most relevant when defining what makes up “the organization.” in this article, i use an empirical case from a norwegian transnational maritime company to discuss organizational boundaries. i focus on the relationship of the formal organization as a legal entity to its outside world and ask how boundary work toward external actors takes form. here i want to raise the question of whether this “inside” world is easily identifiable. i thus explore the question of how to identify a formal organization by problematizing what criteria define actors as “inside” and “outside,” as well as the significance of situations where boundaries between actors are emphasized. a great deal can be learned about social and organizational dynamics by examining boundary processes (paulsen and hernes 2003). my aim is to show the continuous processes involved in creating a formal organization. i also stress how these processes involve multiple layers of ambiguous and shifting organizational boundaries that are actualized simultaneously, and how it is possible to draw boundaries at different places, depending on the position taken and the boundary marker chosen. as such, my empirical case should have both theoretical and methodological implications for anthropologists studying formal organizations. empirical case the norwegian transnational maritime company under examination in this study, supply inc.,2 provides the merchant fleet with products and services. its customers are primarily ship owners who own multiple vessels and manage these vessels’ various needs as they travel from port to port around the world. supply inc. promises to make this management process easier by offering them reliable, high-quality products and services worldwide. key to the company’s sales offer is a globally distributed delivery network, combined with a locally sensitive customer 1 the empirical data is from my phd project conducted at the department of social anthropology at ntnu. i want to thank the committee members, ann jordan and jakob krause-jensen, for their critique of my dissertation, which inspired this article. i also want to thank the anonymous reviewers for providing constructive criticism that helped me develop it further, finally, i want to thank møreforsking for providing funds that contributed to the possibility of my writing this article. 2 fictitious name. journal of business anthropology, 5(1), autumn 2016 118 service structure that includes customer service centres. the ship owners always call their local customer service centre—regardless of where in the world they need the company’s services. it is then up to supply inc. to make the arrangements internally, so that the vessel in need of products receives them at whatever port in the world it happens to be located at that given moment. supply inc. consequently needs to be represented both in the country of origin of the customers and in the ports frequented by the vessels. as a result, supply inc. has a market-oriented drive for transnational expansion (dicken 2011). to meet the needs of these customers, supply inc. offers its services in over 120 countries around the world, with multiple ports in many of these countries. to achieve such a far-reaching presence, supply inc. must rely on hired external agents to deliver its products on its behalf in ports where it is not financially sound to set up its own branch. hence, for supply inc. to uphold the promise it makes to its customers concerning the vast reach of its delivery structure, these external agents are an essential part of its business network. figure 1: organizational chart illustrating the administrative chain of command in supply inc. these agents are administered by the nearest proper supply inc. branch office. as is evident in the organizational chart displayed below in figure 1, the company has administratively divided the world into regions, but all sections ultimately answer back to the headquarters in norway. within this company, i have conducted fieldwork at its headquarters in norway, at a regional headquarters for the americas located in the united states, and at a branch office in argentina.3 if this 3 in total, i have spent about sixteen months of participant observation in these offices in two different projects, divided between six months in 2005 and the rest in 2008/09, and i have supplemented these data with individual semi-structured interviews both during these periods of time and in the following years. company headquarters (norway) regional hq regional hq americas north america south america argentina agent regional hq regional hq giskeødegård / o organization, where art thou? 119 region is taken as an example, all of the branches in america answer to the regional headquarters in texas, but the americas have been further divided into north (texas) and south (brazil). this means that argentina most often answered to brazil, and that brazil then reported back to texas. the supply inc. office in argentina, for its part, administered the company’s relationship to four hired external agents spread across the country. another significant factor concerning the topic at hand is that supply inc. is part of a wider conglomerate, where the company makes up one part of a larger group of companies that are involved in the maritime industry in various ways. the conglomerate consists of several different companies, with the largest one having over 4500 employees. because the various companies are involved in different kinds of activities (in addition to the maritime industry), the conglomerate has grouped companies into business sectors based on industry affiliation, resulting in three levels of organizational hierarchy at the headquarters. the conglomerate therefore had some elements common to the entire group, but each company within the group is its own legal entity with its own business profile. according to the senior vice president of hr, the members of central management in the conglomerate see themselves as global policymakers, whereas the respective companies carry out the delivery of these policies locally. as a case in point, corporate values are common to the entire conglomerate. in the event that the conglomerate does not have a policy on a certain topic, the actors are free to create their own policy as long as it complies with the conglomerate’s philosophy and policy framework. as illustrated in figure 2, the line between the conglomerate and supply inc. seems well defined, and there exist clear lines of communication. however, the relationships within the conglomerate are far more intertwined than the organizational hierarchy suggested in figure 2. while the conglomerate as a whole has thousands of employees, only eighty individuals work directly in its headquarters. the vast number of employees are therefore found in the respective companies. the lower levels of the hierarchical structure are part of the “team” on the level of organizational hierarchy above them. for example, the central management team for the maritime business sector includes all company presidents for the companies that make up this particular sector. this complicates the idea of the conglomerate fulfilling the role of global policymaker. staff and business activities are primarily conducted by the respective companies, and the companies therefore must have a say in how the policies for the group are outlined. journal of business anthropology, 5(1), autumn 2016 120 figure 2: organizational chart illustrating how the conglomerate organizes its activities this brings the discussion back to the focus on organizational boundaries. to understand organizational life one needs to address the complexity of organizational form head on—in particular, how boundaries are conceptualized, constructed, and negotiated through organizational activity (e.g., paulsen and hernes 2003, dahles and leng 2005, nardi 2007, scott and davis 2007). the globally distributed organization of supply inc., its dependence on external agents, as well as its membership of a wider conglomerate, position it as a good empirical case for learning more about organizational boundary processes. how can employees have a clear sense of supply inc. as an entity in its own right— separate from the conglomerate and the hired agents—while such actors at the same are an essential part of what supply inc. offers its customers and/or participate in the making of some of the company’s policies and guidelines? based on auge’s work, garsten and nyquist (2013: 12) have argued that “the notion of the frontier and the boundary are good to think with, as they create meaning in an otherwise unruly universe. and, critically, they provide leads to what there is to protect—what is really at stake. drawing attention to such boundary processes can thus shed light on the social and organizational dynamics in an organization (paulsen and hernes 2003: 13). organizational boundaries boundaries—contrary to borders, which can be said to refer mostly to territorial limits—refer to socially constructed elements that a group has established and linked together to separate it from the world around it conglomerate maritime business supply inc company x company y business x company business y company giskeødegård / o organization, where art thou? 121 (fassin 2011: 214).4 hence, boundaries relates to classification, which bowker and star (2000) define as “a spatial, temporal, or spatio-temporal segmentation of the world” (ibid. 10, italics in original). in their seminal book on ethnic groups and boundaries, barth and his colleagues (1969) illustrated the important role of boundaries by demonstrating how these boundaries remained relevant despite the fact that people changed groups and information crossed ethnic boundaries. barth argued that boundaries exist because they are socially relevant, and that these boundaries canalize social life. as such, one learns more about a group by focusing on the boundary processes than on the cultural elements emphasized within those boundaries (ibid:15). managing who is part of the organization and the quality of their attachment is a key task for formal organizations (batteau 2001).5 the continual process of defining who is inside and who is outside these boundaries can be referred to as “boundary work” (gieryn 1983). to understand the implications of boundary processes in formal organizations, the open system perspective can be a useful point of departure. according to scott and davis (2007), three perspectives on the nature of organizations have dominated organizational theory in various combinations over time: (1) the rational perspective; (2) the natural perspective; and (3) the open system perspective. the first emphasizes the importance of an organization’s formal structures to understand organizational life. the second attacks the first for not taking into consideration how its surrounding environment influences the organization. and the third, the open system perspective, criticizes the previous two for their understanding of organizations as closed systems, rather than as having an interdependent relationship with their surrounding environment (scott and davis 2007). organizations are “open to and dependent on flows of personnel, resources, and information from outside” (ibid. 31). this interdependent relationship with the outside world complicates a formal organization’s boundary processes, particularly in terms of the control and coordination of activity. an organization’s boundaries need to be “sieves, not shells” (ibid. 152)— not only porous enough to allow desirable flows of people, technology, and ideas to cross the organizational boundaries, but also sufficiently impermeable to enable some control and to protect the organization from 4 sociologists lamont and molnár (2002: 168) further make a distinction between symbolic and social boundaries. symbolic boundaries refer to the conceptual distinctions people use to categorize the world around them, and social boundaries refer to more objectified forms of difference that affect the resources and social opportunities to which people have access. this distinction is a useful reminder that, even if all boundaries are a result of relational processes, some are more institutionalized than others. 5 batteau focuses on staffing, selling, and bookkeeping as three fundamental instruments in an organization’s effort to define who is in and who is out, what role a person has, and what resources are at the organization’s disposal. journal of business anthropology, 5(1), autumn 2016 122 undesirable elements. control is further complicated in that the criteria for assessing whether something is harmful or desirable can vary depending on the situation (scott and davis 2007). one illustrative case is garsten’s (2003) empirical study which shows how the use of temps means that these individuals can mediate between organizations and be involved in transforming organizational boundaries by playing an active part in both making and breaking them. the open system perspective focuses on the individual parts that make up a system, the connections between them, and the critical role of information in linking these various parts of the system together. most important, it does not presuppose that all parts of such a system are necessarily equally connected, which turns the connections into empirical questions. moreover, it implicitly suggests that there might be situations where external relationships can be more influential than internal ones for employees to conduct their activities. thus, rather than treating the outside world as something from which an organization needs to protect itself, the outside world is now acknowledged as an indispensable part of how the organization structures its activity. while the critique from the “open system perspective” raises important questions challenging our understanding of organizations, it contributes less in respect to how to answer these questions. in my view, this is a call for anthropology to engage more closely with such matters in the study of organizations. one of the strengths of anthropological studies of organizations is how they demonstrate cultural complexities, and how corporate ideas get challenged by various cultural practices (e.g. garsten 1994, salzermôrling 1998). however, with a few exceptions (e.g. batteau 2001), there seems to be little reflection within anthropology on what is said to be an organization. as paulsen and hernes (2003) have pointed out, fluidity and complexity do not mean that boundaries are disappearing, but rather that they are being reconfigured in various ways. anthropology should be particularly suitable to shed light on such processes. kraakman (2001: 158–59) has noted that, on a legal level, the boundaries of the organization are still clearly set (quoted in scott and davis 2007: 388). yet both dicken’s (2011) definition of transnational companies, which focuses on their ability to control and coordinate activity, and the open system perspective’s emphasis on how “external” relationships might be just as important as “internal” ones for a company’s operation, challenge the value of an a priori definition of the organization by these legal boundaries. hence, these legal lines surrounding the organization might very well be a relevant boundary marker for the employees. yet, when organizations build influential bonds with parties outside these legal lines; who is to say that these parties are not just as important for the employees’ definition of the organization they work for? one should look at the various social dimensions used by members of a “community” to set their boundaries, rather than assume the boundaries beforehand by giskeødegård / o organization, where art thou? 123 defining them according to some presumptions about what is most relevant (gusfield 1975:31-33 in van maanen and barley 1984: 26). in my view, the fact that a company is receptive to making influential external bonds also invites the following question: is the inside as unproblematic to define as one might conclude from organizational theoretical concepts like “outsourced”? is there an easily identifiable organizational entity that involves itself in “external relations”? in the case of supply inc., a large part of its marketing concept focuses on a global reach, which requires the use of external agents. yet, despite the existence of external bonds, it is important for supply inc. to be recognized as an organizational entity in its own right. the boundary processes involving these external relationships can provide important clues as to what it is important to control and protect to be able to exist as an organizational entity called “supply inc.” which is separate from these interdependent relationships. the ever-changing processes that help define the boundaries are thus essential to understanding how supply inc. functions. as paulsen and hernes (2003: 7) advocate, “if boundaries exist and they are decisive, we have to make sense of them in their complexity. it is not helpful to resort to the explanation that they are simply contentious, multiple, ambiguous, and changing.” earlier, i briefly mentioned barth’s contribution to the study of boundaries. while barth’s perspective is a fundamental contribution towards focusing our attention on empirical investigation of how boundary markers communicate difference between social groups, his focus on difference lacks the analytical vocabulary to address the shared space that is created through the interdependent relationship described above. in my view, the perspective is also less helpful when our aim is to understand how multiple boundary markers can be at play simultaneously, resulting in a situation where people use these markers to draw boundaries in different ways depending on the given situation. how can it, at one level, make sense to include these other parties in our analysis of what this company is, when, at another level, it also makes sense to talk of this transnational company as an entity in its own right? here other conceptual tools are needed, and i find the concept of “boundary object” useful (star 1989, star and griesemer 1989, bowker and star 2000). this is a concept that seeks to understand how an object can remain relevant for multiple users despite the fact that they do not share the same definition of the object. an example of such a “boundary object” in a transnational company can be a computer system where management and workers use the same system, but for different purposes. a key point here is that, as it is difficult for an object to perfectly fulfill the needs of all users simultaneously, such objects will always involve a tension between these different needs. bowker and star (2002: 286 -87) refers to this tension as “categorical work.” one might also view the transnational company in itself as a boundary object. the concept is useful because, rather than focusing on boundaries journal of business anthropology, 5(1), autumn 2016 124 as limits between the various parties, it focuses on boundaries in terms of making a “shared space” (star 2010). as lamont and molnár (2002: 187) comment, the concept helps focus attention on what connects and enables coordination in social groups. yet, it always treats the object like a work in progress requiring significant “categorical work” from the employees involved. harvey (2012: 122) comments that “boundary object,” as suggested by star, “allows the coexistence of ontological difference and commensurability. boundaries are thus negotiated but not erased.” the boundary markers that come into play through the negotiations between the actors involved will provide important information about their own understanding of this object.6 in what ways are boundaries constructed and negotiated? how does boundary work toward these external actors take form? when, and in what ways, do boundaries become relevant? to answer these questions, i present a rather complex picture of situations where boundary processes are actualized within supply inc. i purposely focus on different levels of the organization, as well as on boundary processes along different dimensions. i endeavour to show how boundaries are negotiated and even manipulated. according to the literature discussed above, managing boundaries is essential for organizations; these boundaries need to be flexible as the definition of who is inside and outside them might depend on the situation and perspective. hence, it is vital to examine how boundaries are actualized at different levels and in different situations. ambiguous organizational boundaries the three cases presented in the following section all shed light on different dimensions of boundary work for the employees of supply inc. i aim to problematize the criteria for defining who is inside and who outside these boundaries, as well as in what situations it matters to emphasize this difference between insiders and outsiders. in quite different ways, these three examples also touch upon the significance of geographical localization. the first two examples shed light on the relationship between the two parts that are not formally part of the legal entity supply inc., but play an important role in its formation. in the first empirical case, i focus on the relationship with the conglomerate by presenting a situation that occurred when the strategic marketing staff at the headquarters worked 6 the term “boundary object” can be criticized for being a slippery concept in that it can refer to everything and nothing, a critique star (2010) has tried to answer by clarifying what goes into it. i am sympathetic to the critique, yet still find the concept useful because of its specific emphasis on what keeps things going despite differences, e.g., the infrastructure necessary for cooperation and communication to take place. it allows a dimension to the discussion that i find difficult to capture using other concepts. giskeødegård / o organization, where art thou? 125 with the company’s visual profile, a job that led to close interaction with the relevant staff at the conglomerate headquarters. the second case focuses on the branch office in argentina’s interaction with one of the external agents they administer—in this particular case, an external agent with which the company has had a relationship for many years. the third example addresses boundary work within the formal legal entity of supply inc. as mentioned earlier, supply inc. delivers a range of different products and services to its customers, and this vast offer is divided into four different business streams—all with their separate organizational chain of command, yet ultimately answering to the same senior vice president of global operations (vp). in this empirical case, the message the employees are presented with that these four streams result in the “unity” of a single company is questioned as one stream is asked to compete on the same basis as other firms for a contract for one of the other business streams. the conglomerate all members of the marketing department at the headquarters for supply inc. were on their way to a small café located a short walk from the office. the invitation to this excursion came from their boss, the vp of marketing, and the reasons given in the email invitation were that the sun was shining, it was friday, and, above all, they deserved a treat after finally winning the battle against the conglomerate concerning the graphic profile of the company’s business cards. the atmosphere among the employees was therefore good. the story was that supply inc. had recently changed its company name and implemented some organizational changes. such changes demanded the creation of new business cards, so the marketing department ordered the cards and, at the same time, sent out new guidelines to all supply inc. employees. however, the marketing department had to halt its order upon learning that the new guidelines concerning the combination of capital and small letters in a person’s title on the business card did not comply with the conglomerate’s guidelines. initially, the employees involved in the marketing department figured that this was going to be an easy matter to settle because they were sure that, in contrast to the conglomerate’s version, their suggestion complied with english grammar rules.7 however, the dispute dragged on, and the matter was settled only after the president of supply inc. addressed the issue at an executive board meeting of the conglomerate. with the dispute settled in their favour, supply inc.’s marketing team enjoyed their buns and coffee. while celebrating, the dispute came up as a topic of discussion, and all present agreed that they found it quite 7 english was the official company language. journal of business anthropology, 5(1), autumn 2016 126 absurd that a dispute about a small detail (such as the type of capitalization used on a business card) had to be settled at an executive board meeting. they were also convinced that this was not a one-off incident. as a case in point, one of the marketing employees, a graphic designer, shared with her colleagues around the table the fact that a similar discussion was being carried out concerning what colours to use on the marketing materials for supply inc. in a meeting she had attended, along with representatives from the conglomerate, about “identity web” (a shared platform where all the companies that were part of the conglomerate could find their graphic profiles), one of the conglomerate representatives rejected one of the chosen colours for supply inc. on the grounds that, according to the graphic designer, she “did not like it.” the frustration of the employees seated at the table while discussing this incident was palpable. the group seemed to perceive her stated reason as a subjective judgment, and not one related to company guidelines. the graphic designer said that she felt her professional competence had been called into question. at this point, the vp turned to me and indicated that the conglomerate had a tendency to get too hung up on small details. he commented dryly, “if you want to buy another company, that’s no problem; but changing business cards—now, that’s impossible!” (my translation). the vp of marketing’s statement reflected a view that central management in supply inc. had much more autonomy when it came to making strategic decisions (e.g., whether or not to buy a company), as opposed to other decisions that were decidedly less so (e.g., the capitalization style used on business cards). while this in some ways was an exaggeration to prove a point, he touched upon a key element concerning how the conglomerate was constructed—a structure involving many different sectors, but with some commonalities. as scott (1998) argues, an important aspect of standardization is who has the authority to set the standards. those areas where the actors involved make a point of emphasizing their authority hint at what is important for the people involved to protect. i asked the vp of human resources (hr) for the conglomerate, whether it was really the case that it was easier to buy a company than change business cards. she laughed and said that yes, this was partly true. hr and visual profile were key elements for the conglomerate to control, relating to reputation and to the possibility of being recognized as a group. the span in industry affiliation within the conglomerate however, means that the companies had to have a great deal of autonomy in day-today business-related manners. for example, if the staff within supply inc. wanted to buy a company to strengthen their own market position within an already existing business area, the competence to assess this strategic move was primarily located within the management structure of supply giskeødegård / o organization, where art thou? 127 inc., as it alone knew both the industry and the market. in regards to supply inc.’s relationship with the conglomerate, this explains the managers’ impression that it was easier to buy a company than change business cards. the empirical example presented seems to suggest a relationship that extends to the conglomerate, where the internal processes of supply inc. come to a full stop if the conglomerate meddles in certain matters. at the same time, it indicates that defining the boundaries between the two parties is a continual process, wherein the actors implicitly debate the authority to set the standard—yet in a way that makes the supply inc. employees emphasize the boundary between the two parties. it is clear that if the analytical goal is to understand supply inc. in respect to hr policies, visual profile, and so on, this discussion cannot ignore the wider setting of the conglomerate. this has implications for any discussion of organizational form. the agents after a long bus ride, i arrived at the location of one of the four agents that supply inc. uses in various locations as part of their operation in argentina. the staff at the supply inc. office in argentina had encouraged me on several occasions to visit this particular agent who had been working as their agent for several years. his office was situated in a port visited frequently by customers of supply inc. and he was one of two agents in argentina who had their own warehouses stocked with goods from supply inc. that were often sold in their port. although this agent’s office was allowed to have product stock, it did not have access to the computer systems used by supply inc. to manage stock at the latter’s warehouses (with the exception of limited access to one particular computer program). this restricted and heavily-controlled access to the supply inc. computer systems allowed the company to position its agents outside the supply inc. boundaries, as it systems were an important tool used to manage these boundaries (giskeødegård, 2013). yet, the agent has quite a liminal position between inside and outside if one considers the long-term relationship between the branch office and the agent office, the agent’s contact with supply inc. customers on their behalf, and the fact that they did have product stock. as such, a closer look at how the agents and the argentine staff give meaning to this relationship provides valuable insights into these boundary processes. although this office consisted of twelve employees in addition to the manager, the staff in argentina often referred to it by the name of the current manager, who had assumed responsibility for this office from his dad. father and son had been running the office together for years, and had a relationship with supply inc. that went back twenty years—a relationship which had survived several changes and acquisitions. in fact, throughout the duration of the relationship between this office and the journal of business anthropology, 5(1), autumn 2016 128 supply inc. office in argentina, the latter has undergone at least three different company name changes. i would not be arriving empty-handed. i was transporting two things on the bus that day: one was a personal gift from the employees at the argentine office to the manager at this office who had just had a baby daughter; the other was a package of t-shirts and vests with the supply inc. logo for all the staff at the agent’s office. upon my arrival, all twelve employees gathered to greet me. when the manager introduced me, he mentioned that i had brought the tshirts. the most common comments elicited from people in the room at this news were “finally” and “about time.” the staff seemed genuinely happy to receive the clothes. one explained that five years had passed since they had first formulated the idea of wearing clothes with the company logo on them when delivering to supply inc. customers. when they initially mentioned this idea to the staff at the supply inc. office in argentina, they had had the impression that this would be possible to arrange. when i asked the manager to describe their relationship with supply inc., his answer was somewhat ambivalent. he was hired simply to do a job for the company. he explained that his company did not introduce itself as supply inc. when making deliveries. however, he added that as far as the vessels were concerned, they were supply inc. because they arrived with supply inc. papers and stated their purpose as delivering supply inc. products. he also characterized the staff at the supply inc. office in argentina as being good colleagues. the manager mentioned that he had the employees’ private phone numbers and that he felt free to call them if a situation should arise. they always answered the phone, no matter what time of the day or night, although—he added with a twinkle in his eye—not always with a cheery voice. in this empirical case, boundaries are also on the agenda, as when the agent challenges a given boundary marker by asking supply inc. to provide him with supply inc. clothes to wear when his staff represent the company in port. the agent is also quite ambivalent in his answer to the question of affiliation, describing a personal bond with the local staff that he does not see as valid for the organization as a whole. in matters relating to supply inc. deliveries, one might say that access to supply inc.’s technological infrastructure and visual profile separates the two parties as being either inside or outside the company’s organizational structure. the importance of the visual profile is demonstrated in how tedious the process was to get t-shirts with the company logo on them to use when delivering products to relevant customers. however, the relationship between the two parties is more personal than one might expect from the organizational labels. in fact, staff members at the office in argentina have known this agent office longer than their own central management at the company’s headquarters. when the same office has giskeødegård / o organization, where art thou? 129 been the agent in one location for twenty years, and many of the vessels frequently travel to the same port, one might presume that, as far as the vessels are concerned, this agent is the face of supply inc. the agent, moreover, knows the company well, understands how the argentine context affects that type of business, possesses a great deal of knowledge about internal procedures carried out in supply inc., and is familiar with relevant people in the organization. as such, the cost of replacing him with another agent would be quite significant. there were several situations where the staff in argentina felt that the headquarters for supply inc. did not understand local conditions (often related to dealing with complex argentine customs), thereby making the agent and the local branch office “allies” in advocating their case. in other situations, the agents were clearly outside the company core. for example, the new manager at the office made a point of a social visit to each of the agents when she started, which she said also was a way in which she could control the office. however, for supply inc. and the agent alike, the relationship between the company and the agent was a formal, impersonal one—a point that sheds light on how boundaries depend on both situation and position. products vs. logistics the two cases described so far addressed boundary work towards entities that are not formally part of supply inc., yet which are crucial in its formation. as such, the core of the “inside” remains unproblematic, as the examples address situations where these boundaries are expanded to include other actors who would be defined as outside if the legal entity were the point of reference. however, my last example is included precisely to challenge the notion of an unproblematic, unquestionable core. in the last empirical example, all parties involved are formally employees of the legal entity supply inc. as such, the empirical case is important because it demonstrates that boundary work, as discussed in this article, is not just relevant when the involved parties belong to different legal entities, but also exists within the same legal entity. together, these three example open up for a later discussion further on challenging how we think about boundaries in the light of concepts like outsourcing. this last empirical case involves two different supply inc. business streams—that for products and that for logistics. similar to how the conglomerate sectors its activities based on industry affiliation, supply inc. organizes the various types of company activities into different business streams. supply inc. mainly advertises these business streams both internally and externally as complementary parts of the same unit and organizational “community.” in other words, supply inc., with all its parts, is one global organization. there are some situations, however, where this message of unity becomes somewhat ambiguous. journal of business anthropology, 5(1), autumn 2016 130 one such situation occurred when the business stream for products was looking for someone to transport these products around the world. this job did not automatically go to supply inc.’s own logistics division; instead, central management asked the latter to provide a tender for the business in the same way as was required of supply inc.’s external competitors. this request for a tender came despite the fact that these two business streams ultimately answered to the same vp, brian, responsible for the overall company value chain/global operations. as the logistic division was writing this tender, the atmosphere at the supply inc. headquarters in norway grew rather tense. i asked the employee writing the tender, to explain the arguments for this arrangement. she replied that this was just how things were done. however, following the last reorganization that had resulted in the two business streams ultimately answering to brian, she expressed surprise that he had not intervened to make the divisions focus on the broader picture (i.e. supply inc. as a company). the topic of requesting tenders resurfaced at the branch office in texas when brian (the vp in question from norway) and a central manager from another european office were visiting. this topic was not on the agenda for the meeting, but quickly became one. the local employees who were present seemed eager to convince brian to reverse the decision to ask for tenders for delivering products, rather than simply using the internal logistics division. the atmosphere at this meeting was unlike any other i had witnessed so far, as it was clear to me that there was considerable tension between the parties. it soon became apparent that johnny, the american manager of logistics, and a coworker of his wanted to use this opportunity to demonstrate their own competence so as to try to change the decision to use tenders rather than just automatically turning logistic of products over to their own logistic division. finally, johnny even asked brian directly if he were on board with the decision to turn it into a competition. brian dodged this question by simply stating that the decision had been made; he then led the discussion in another direction. in many ways, this situation made the setting of boundary markers debatable. it demonstrates a strategic manipulation of boundary markers by central management, where one of the business streams for a specific purpose was defined as external. thus, two parallel messages were being communicated simultaneously: one idea of the “global community” supply inc., and another of specific tasks separating the organization according to business activity. the seeming lack of connection between these two messages was evident in the tense atmosphere that arose from the decision to call for tenders, since it clearly challenged employees’ understanding of the organizational message of common purpose and unity. understood through the concept of “boundary object,” one can read this situation as a tension between the giskeødegård / o organization, where art thou? 131 particular needs of each division—products wanted the best price, and logistics wanted the business. in this case, “logistics” refers to the “shared” supply inc. as it in this situation in an argument in their favour considering that meant products should use their services as they were part of the same team; in the light of this rhetoric of “one” company, it makes sense to think of the “bigger picture” where the costs of hiring someone to perform the logistics would ultimately go back into the company as the cost in the product division would end up as earnings in the logistics division. discussion concepts like “outsourced” imply a certain way to think about boundaries, where the inside and outside are two clearly separated entities that can be discussed in relation to each other. yet, the empirical data here call into question the idea that such an inside “core” exists—or at least, what that core consists of. in the third empirical case, internal company boundaries are redefined for seemingly financial purposes, in a way that makes the employees question the parallel message of “unity.” besides, the empirical example from the argentine agent shows that identifying an activity as “outsourced” says nothing about the type of relationship that exists between the parties, nor about the importance of the outside actor to the company involved. this begs the question of what we actually understand about the particularities of organizational life through concepts like “outsourced.” bowker and star’s (2000) use of “boundary object” provides a helpful concept to make sense of the boundary processes involved in such relationships, because it shifts our focus to how these boundary negotiations are part of creating a shared space. it leads to a discussion that takes seriously barth’s advice to look closer at how boundaries are drawn, rather than at where they are, as this gives important insight into what people take care to protect. yet, the concept stimulates a shift in focus towards the process of creating of a shared space rather than a quest to get to a definitive answer about the difference between these parties (i.e. where the boundary between them is actually drawn). the empirical cases demonstrate that multiple layers of ambiguous and shifting organizational boundaries are actualized simultaneously, where what is included inside the boundaries (as well as what is excluded from them) depends on the position taken and the boundary marker chosen. yet, the entity “supply inc.” never ceases to be a relevant point of reference. in the case of the conglomerate, the empirical example clearly illustrates the power of the conglomerate to influence internal processes within supply inc., as the employees had to relate to their input. in terms of organizational boundaries, this situation shows a quite ambivalent boundary process—the conglomerate is simultaneously journal of business anthropology, 5(1), autumn 2016 132 defined as inside (in terms of authority), and outside, through the negotiations of power that put the company boundary on the agenda between the two entities. the relationship between the two legal entities is even more complex due to the intertwined organizational structure presented earlier. there were examples of employees whom did not necessarily relate much to other employees within the same company in their daily work; for example, the vp of hr in norway performed a substantial amount of his work outside the entity supply inc. (taking supply inc. as being defined by legal boundaries). moreover, the conglomerate and supply inc. headquarters had offices in the same building (but on different floors). in this building, there was a joint personnel canteen where the staff of the various companies belonging to the conglomerate ate lunch at the same time. various social activities (e.g. aerobics classes, golf lessons, sailing courses) and recreational and leisure facilities (e.g. company cabins for rent) were also open to all local employees of all the companies belonging to the conglomerate. in many situations, the employees located in the headquarters joined in activities together and, in the process, created a sense of fellowship across these various companies. on the other hand, the employees of supply inc. located in norway, who worked closely with staff from the conglomerate, were also the ones who had the clearest sense of the difference between the two organizational levels. as barth would comment, difference is always most important when two groups are in close contact. their work means continually negotiating these boundaries and the difference between them is as a result visible, crucial, and reproduced every day through their work. all these empirical cases demonstrate that, on one level, it makes sense to draw both emic and etic boundaries around the legal entity supply inc. even though the formal organization “supply inc.” is viewed as interconnected with its surrounding environment, it is nevertheless recognized as an organization—and remains a relevant point of reference for the employees. yet, making the boundaries equal to these legal lines would be highly misleading. the three empirical cases presented above all show boundary work involving different dimensions, where the same employees draw lines in different ways depending on the matter at hand. these processes not only expand the outer ends of this legal unit by including alternately the agents or the conglomerate, but also questions the core when one business stream is defined as an entity outside the other business stream, under-communicating their shared platform as parts of supply inc. as such, it is helpful to understand these dimensions by viewing them as “categorical work” of the transnational company, where these boundary processes are where the needs of the “shared” and the “particular” are negotiated. these examples also hint at the importance of physical presence and day-to-day interaction with regard to staff members’ perception of who their closest colleagues are. anthropological studies have always giskeødegård / o organization, where art thou? 133 emphasized the importance of paying attention to informal interaction and social arenas when creating a community (e.g. orr 1990). the relationship with the conglomerate is interesting in this respect because, on the one hand, geographical proximity facilitated a sense of affiliation and community in the wider conglomerate through day-today interaction and shared activities—including a christmas and summer party. on the other hand, the fact that many of the employees worked on tasks closely related to the conglomerate’s concern also made these supply inc. employees acutely aware of the two organizational levels as they interacted through their work. this awareness differed from the situation in the other offices i visited. in argentina and the office in the united states, the difference between the conglomerate and the supply inc. headquarters was not particularly clear. when employees spoke of upcoming activities initiated by one of them, or policies they had to follow, they talked about them as coming from the headquarters, or “norway,” which meant a conflation of the two levels in the regions. hence, this empirical case shows that the geographical dimension is simultaneously working to create distance and closeness between the two organizational levels. for the company world geographically far from the headquarters, these two levels are largely conflated, as it matters less there who decides what, than it does at the headquarters where the work means constantly negotiating authority to set standards. in argentina as well, the geographical dimension is important because the agent and the branch office share an understanding of the intricacies of argentine customs and legal regulations, the challenges caused to deliveries by the long-stretching geography of the country, and so on. yet, while the relationship between the people involved is quite personal, employees and agent alike see themselves as two different organizational entities. geographical proximity might very well be very important for employees’ sense of community, but, as the third empirical example in particular illustrates, there might also be situations where business activity might be more relevant to creating a sense of common purpose and community. the situation could indicate a sense of common purpose along organizational lines, rather than between employees working in the same office, as the logistics division’s staff members in both norway and the us found when they shared the common purpose of trying to overturn this decision. in all these cases, employees’ understanding of their own purpose and task is key to understanding boundary processes. inclusion and exclusion seem defined by the criteria of how they allow employees to best perform their own job as supply inc. employees. in one way, one might say that the shared space of supply inc. as a boundary object concerns what supply inc. does, while negotiations between the employees representing the various parties largely concerns the journal of business anthropology, 5(1), autumn 2016 134 definition of who does what and in what way. that is, the main concern for employees is their ability to perform their tasks as they see best. concluding remarks in the theoretical debates above, one talks of the relationship that a formal organization has with the world “outside” itself. i find that the empirical data presented here raise the question of whether this “outside,” or even “inside,” world is easily identifiable. as such, the empirical examples suggest that there is a need for new analytical concepts if our aim is to understand the particularities of organizational life. moreover, the situation quite clearly calls for a type of empirically based studies for which anthropology is particularly suited. however, this requires the anthropologist to engage more seriously with the topic of organizational form—to turn the boundaries of the organization into an empirical question. thinking of the organization through bowker and star’s (2000) “boundary object” enables a shift in focus towards the effort of creating something shared rather than inside versus outside. the negotiations between the parties can be understood as a result of the tension between the particular needs of each of the individual actors/divisions that continually help produce the shared space. supply inc. never ceases to be a relevant point of reference for employees in these negotiations within a constantly changing landscape, an activity bowker and star (2002) refer to as “categorical work.” supply inc. as a company has a given purpose—to deliver products and services to its customers. the other actors appear as supplementary to this purpose. the criteria for defining actors as inside or outside seem directly related to employees’ ability to perform their tasks as they see best. supply inc.’s formal organization works as a way to communicate this difference and to state their ground if needed; yet the formal organizational structure does not seem to be the primary way to define the relevant organization. the focus on the task at hand helps explain how it is possible to draw boundaries around the organization at different places, depending on the position taken and the boundary marker chosen. references batteau, a. 2001. 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mailto:marte.giskeodegard@moreforsk.no essay fond remembrances of past futures ken anderson (intel) in january 2016 the world economic forum declared that humankind stands on brink of the fourth industrial revolution. like the last three, this revolution will be driven by technology and the lines between the physical, digital, and biological will become more blurred, if not indistinguishable. but the fourth era will be distinct for its velocity, scope, and systems impact. change has never happened as quickly or powerfully; it has never been so widespread. obviously, large-scale change—driven by technologies such as the internet of things, artificial intelligence, autonomous cars, nanotechnologies, ubiquitous high-speed networks, and robots—will affect how we work, live, play, and socialize. the promises can be great, but so are the economic and social threats. we’ve already seen ominous trends, including the centralization of power, decreasing economic security, and increasing public and corporate surveillance. i was actively involved in the intersection of business, technology, and anthropology in the third rev—the digital one—specifically with personal computing devices. i’ll present some examples of challenges we faced, mistakes we made, where we were effective, and give you “pro tips” from life in the business technology sector during the 3rd industrial revolution. then i’ll ask you to take stock: do you want to be a change agent in the fourth industrial revolution? anthropologists working in technology innovation have to act as change agents, not only in page 1 of 12 jba 5(1): 77-88 autumn 2016 © the author(s) 2016 issn 2245-4217 www.cbs.dk/jba journal of business anthropology, 5(1), autumn 2016 78 companies but in society as well. how i lost my soul and began a career today, i work at intel corporation, a semiconductor manufacturing company where, quite remarkably, we make computers out of sand. put another way, intel is a global company of over 100,000 employees providing computing infrastructure for the digital era. the company is home to the oldest continuous group of anthropologists in the technology sector. why? intel engineers know a lot about shrinking the size of transistors to build faster processors. what they don’t know is what people will do with faster transistors five years from now. this knowledge gap has given social scientists extraordinary license to explore people around the globe in a quest for business and technology innovation. intel wasn’t my first foray into technology, anthropology, and business. i started in graduate school in the mid-1980s. remember 1984? apple had released its famous super bowl commercial in which society is saved from a dark orwellian future by the mac, which ushers in a world of creativity, joy, and life by giving computing power to the people. at that moment i was sitting in the basement of the brown anthropology department with an apple lisa (pre-mac apple), on one side of me, and an ibm xt pc on the other. two forces put me there: intellectual and financial. intellectually, i had hated pcs from the first time i had to use one. they were so literal, unforgiving, isolating, and impersonal. at the same time, it was clear to me that computers were going to be part of the future for everyone. i felt it was important to understand pcs and their effects on the social, cultural, and economic in order to create a better world—at least better than “1984.” at the same time, my department couldn’t fund all of its graduate students and i couldn’t afford to be a student without financial assistance. fortunately, a number of companies were offering research scholarships to study computing in education. for five years i worked on grants from corporate sponsors like apple, ge, and ibm. to this day i remember site visits by the ibm corporate sponsor: yes, i had to wear a tie, and of course i had to hide my apple mac under my desk. during this period, i studied intermedia, an educational system that ran on a local network but otherwise replicated the linking and interactivity of the internet. intermedia was created by the computer science department and was being used on campus. i was part of a team of graduate and post-doc anthropologists studying its development and impact on teaching and learning. we examined how teachers taught in the classroom, what resources they used and how, their personal classroom styles, kinds of content—basically everything about teaching. we studied learning practices of students in and outside of the classes that used https://youtu.be/axsnw-ygu5g anderson / fond remembrances of past futures 79 intermedia. i worked, ate, and drank with computer science faculty and students. there was interdisciplinary camaraderie among anthropologists and techies; there was a lot of cheap beer and chinese food. it was the ’80s. it was also an introduction to a recurring theme: the engineers wanted us anthropologists to tell them what to build, or to create a point-of-view on the options they had established. on the other hand, our charter, as we saw it, was to study “impacts” or “effects” of their software, not to be involved directly in its creation. it seems striking to me now, but at that time, there was no language that provided easy translation between anthropology and engineers. we were the observers. they were part of what we were observing. the other major project i worked on during that time was the networking of the second dorm in the usa. ibm-funded networked pcs for every freshman in one of the dorms on our campus. with a team of anthropology and sociology grad students and post docs, i studied the impacts that a computer network would have on the social and academic life of students. i lived with the freshmen in the dorm, observed the social dynamics, interviewed students, and monitored their pc activity. it was classic fieldwork: i was studying a village right in the backyard of the anthropology department. all told, i had conducted five years of ethnographic research, including long-term fieldwork in one community on technology, social life, and education. sounded like solid experience in the disciplinary tradition to me. the anthropology department, however, felt that for my dissertation research it would be better for me if i did not work on a team, did not focus on technology, did not do “applied” work, and did not do my fieldwork in the usa. these were expressions of what anthropology valued—or didn’t—at the time. about a dozen years later, at intel we were hiring a social science researcher. among the applicants were four anthropologists who had conducted their dissertation research on mobile phones in “modern” countries. the person we hired held a phd from the very same department that tried to steer me in a different direction all those years ago. anthropology as a field changes, but you have to take a very long view. twenty years after i sat in an anthropology department basement watching apple vanquish our orwellian future at the super bowl, tracey lovejoy and i were in dallas, standing at the registration table at the society for applied anthropology meeting. two young volunteers pulled out our badges, emblazoned with our affiliations intel and microsoft, and gasped, almost in unison, “what are you doing here?” they couldn’t understand what technology companies had to do with anthropology. i had set up a session around privacy with people from across more traditional sfaa sectors such as health and government. tracey was there journal of business anthropology, 5(1), autumn 2016 80 for a session around design. it wasn’t particularly new or strange to get reactions of surprise, or even contempt, from academic anthropologists; i’d been weathering it for over a decade, including at the aaa annual meetings. but that evening over cocktails tracey and i decided to launch a conference specifically for anthropologists working in businesses to have a safe place to meet, exchange ideas, and develop careers. a year later we launched the first ethnographic praxis in industry conference (epic). in 2016, we are working actively with the aaa to offer the greater exposure of anthropology to the businesses world and business paths for anthropologists. pro tip never work alone. even the lone ranger didn’t work alone. working alone can be a fine thing for an academic anthropologist, but anthropology in business needs a tribe to survive. there are many reasons for this, but one is demonstration of value. the innovation groups at intel have tried to mitigate risk of the loss value by having a diverse portfolio of projects. by diverse i mean different in scope, scale, content, delivery times, and target audiences. every year we need to demonstrate success as a team to continue the capability. there is no tenure. there is no accumulation of a record. every year is a new thing, and especially after every re-org, we need to demonstrate value again, and perhaps in new ways. with a tribe, this is possible. alone, it becomes an impossible task. bringing the outside in i was sitting in one infinite loop in 1993. i was in a meeting at apple labs and introducing myself to people whom i would be working with on a project. meetings happen a lot; introducing myself, and trying to explain what i do, also happens a lot, even these days. going around the table i counted one industrial designer, two user interface designers, three interaction designers, and me. what was i? well, i’m pretty good at spotting patterns, and “anthropologist” didn’t seem to fit. so when it was my turn, i said, “design anthropologist.” it didn’t really fit, but i hoped it would provide a way to understand what i did in relation to what their jobs were. i explained that i study what people do in their everyday lives and apply it to creating the future. it worked. part of the problem we faced was we were bringing in a new set of research perspectives and skills to organizations. we had to create ways we fit into their already existing frameworks, but that were also different. file:///c:/users/boochan/desktop/epicpeople.org anderson / fond remembrances of past futures 81 pro tip have the 30-3-30, anytime, anywhere you never know when you will need a 30-second spiel. and if you don’t have one, you’ll never get to the three or 30-minute versions. i was walking out of the bathroom at intel when a gm of a consumer group i recently began working with asked, “are you new?” i told him in fact i was—less than a week! so he asked what i did. i said anthropologist. eyes get puzzled. why?! having just introduced myself to the marketing department in the morning, i said i was there to help intel understand its customers. the gm literally laughed out loud—“you’re not going to last long. i was just out golfing with michael dell last weekend. i know mike better than you ever will.” he proceeded to walk away before i remembered my new 30-second intro was about knowing our customers’ customers better than they did. 30-3-30 anytime, anywhere. i was fortunate to be at apple in the early 1990s. they had excellent facilities for studying people in labs, but had become interested in studying people in everyday life for opportunities where they could use new technologies. the field of human computer interaction had already begun studying work practices, but hadn’t moved onto people outside of work; it was natural to see what value anthropologists could add. anthropologists would be part of the movement to realize that innovations could emerge from outside tech labs. unlike hci, however, instead of a capability as expertise, the person became the expert. one time i spent four months or so doing field research in the homes of a wide spectrum of people in silicon valley about how they searched and found things. “things” could be absolutely anything from yarn to tax records to toys to photos. i wrote up a white paper detailing findings about different practices of searching and filing stuff. in the process of writing the final report, i created a disk full of video recorded interviews, observations, photos, concepts for future products. it was created as a packaged version of the field that any designer or engineer could go back to in order to trace our work or discover new paths through our materials. to my knowledge, no one ever did. instead, in the ’90s, the field researcher became the go-to expert on his or her “people,” and “the field” a special area of privileged knowledge and experience. by the end of the 90s we were occasionally taking market researchers, managers, and engineers out into the field with in an effort to create shared experiences for innovation, as well as having reference points for our eventual findings. we created multiple points of participation for others in the research process that somewhat surprisingly created a greater aura of expertise. journal of business anthropology, 5(1), autumn 2016 82 business temporalities of value—the long and short of it i was talking over coffee with designer sally grisedale about just one small thing i had observed as part of a larger project—how a small set of people had arranged their icons to match how windows opened. based on our conversation, sally went away and created some user interface designs for a bar at the bottom of the screen to hold applications. over the next couple weeks, we talked and she iterated on the design ideas. she added new colors and animations to the icons so a user could know where they were, and so on. those led us to gavin miller, who was famous for creating the first realistic water animation. he built out a rough prototype of the concept and we did some quick user tests in-house. the observation the innovation was based on was not a deep understanding, but was still critical in creating the seed for an interactional design element in the apple os. though our prototyping efforts were quick, technology change is seldom rapid. it took about two years before the concept would materialize as a product the apple dock. business anthropologists love to tell stories of deep ethnographic insight (there are plenty of these stories in the press), but deep ethnographic insight is not always how ethnographers deliver value. there are times and places where transformational shifts in corporate thinking are needed, but they can’t be the only point of value for anthropologists. further, companies can’t make big shifts frequently, or something isn’t right with the company. finally, ethnographic work needs to build over time. it is rarely the case that one study will create a transformational change in a corporation. usually, a small number of field projects have come before the tipping point for corporate change. in this process, we can demonstrate value by participating in a range of activities, like in this case of brainstorming a new ui design. anthropologists and their teams need to structure a portfolio of work that has a variety of scope, scale, and audiences to assure continuous value. what about external value? my academic anthropologist friends frequently ask why i don’t submit papers to academic journals. again, time—the typical time to press is around two years from submission. in the last two years within intel i’ve worked in three different organizations and had four different managers, each with their own agendas. publication in a journal paced outside of intel’s annual review cycle is unlikely to return value for my career. the yearly performance cycle is one reason why, when tracey lovejoy and i set up epic (ethnographic praxis in industry conference), we modeled publication after acm and ieee tech conferences that publish proceedings at the time of the conference. anderson / fond remembrances of past futures 83 pro tip get an agent a pr agent, that is. an intern gave me that advice. i didn’t listen, but it works. external validation makes people more effective inside. it has worked for some of the more famous ethnographers who have worked at intel, ibm, and xerox. once anne mcclard and i were featured in the new york times for work we did at mediaone. it was a typical enough pr story, the kind we’ve been seeing since the 1970s: hey look at these anthropologists inside a corporation! an offshoot of that story was a little blurb on me in hemispheres magazine (the one in your united airlines seat pocket). the next month the vp of my lab called a meeting to tell me the ceo wanted to set up a series of regular meetings with me. what happened? turns out the ceo had been golfing with the ceo of a business partner. during the game the other ceo mentioned how incredible he thought it was for mediaone to have anthropologists solving wicked problems. if your company has pr people, become their friends. if you are solo, hire your own. anthropologists― the other. i wasn’t hired as an “anthropologist” until i went to intel in 2001. in the late 1990s i worked at a series of companies (us west, mediaone, at&t) that had no existing ethnographic competencies. at us west a team of us had made a pitch to develop this competency. it backfired. we held a twoday event to highlight our field research and brought in leading outside experts from noted consultancies and corporations. we created a story that “the cool kids” were beginning to have ethnographic practices in their innovation research. if we acted quickly, ethnography would provide us with a competitive advantage. result? the executive vp of the lab banned us from using the word “ethnography.” she felt it required too much explanation—it came from a discipline not associated with technology research and so was suspect as a method. fortunately, we were able to do low visibility work that had value for lab directors under her. over time management changed and we had a portfolio of projects that had demonstrated value. pro tip keep latour in the backroom really, latour is a nice guy; he won’t mind. same goes for sloterdijk, tarde, strathern, or whatever theorists you use in the analysis. good projects take full advantage of working through theories in the data analysis and having rigorous debate around journal of business anthropology, 5(1), autumn 2016 84 them and the data; just leave the jargon and citations out of reporting and recommendations. i remember going to a talk in grad school by a famous american academic anthropologist. during q&a someone asked a long question with no possible answer, talked mostly about her own work, and quoted a passage from derrida in french. this, my friend, will be you, if you start doing theory in readouts and reports. the job of academic anthropologists is to educate people. the job of business anthropologists is to be change agents. ok, occasionally you may need to do some performance art to demonstrate you are anchored in a discipline. but in a corporate context, you were hired to know your stuff so the management wouldn’t have to. think of theory like programming code. senior management doesn’t care what the code looks like. users don’t care what the code looks like. they care about whether or not the app works, the final result. theory is somewhat analogous to “coding” in doing our work—critical but often invisible to our audience. during these years i began almost every talk with a malinowski quote about understanding the native’s point of view. this established our general research approach and situated our work in a discipline that, even if it was unfamiliar to my audience, had deep historic roots. malinowski was also an important referent to the kind of work we were doing at this time. the bulk of it was what is commonly called “longitudinal” in business circles. we were studying physical communities and communities of practice over months and years. we would embed ourselves for a period, leave, and then return. loosely, this was a corporate version of community studies. capturing a baseline and subsequent changes allowed us to speculate on future directions. like malinowski, we had become the experts of “the other”. the growth of anthropology in business on this basis came at a price. it became increasingly common to hear our work being converted into language about “uncovering” or “discovering” or “capturing” the “deep insight” or “unmet needs” of the consumer or user—language around “the other.” like malinowski and other colonial anthropologists, we were claiming to bring insights from exotic people and locals back to the corporate capitals where executives marveled at the “golden nuggets” in the research that would help the corporation. on the one hand, this was great for the ethnographers because it put us into a position of power, turned us into experts within the corporation. on the other hand, it simplified both the complicated nature of the research and analysis. we made it appear anyone could gather these insights with minimal effort. further, it created a false understanding and distancing of our research participants and the corporation, even as we tried to create opportunities for global participation in projects with the corporation. anderson / fond remembrances of past futures 85 pro tip tell your boss’ boss what to do you’ve done all the research. you know what it says. you have figured out the implications. now it’s time to tell management what to do. rookie mistake is to go into a meeting with senior management, present them with findings or a list of implications, and expect them to know what to do. these are busy people; they have million dollar deals to make, super-senior management making demands on them for more revenue, kids waiting to be picked up at school, alpacas waiting to be fed…the list goes on. they need answers. you’ve got them. share. then they can claim that the decision, which is the real power, was theirs. what was then, is not now; successes have become challenges issues and strengths of doing ethnographic work in the early days aren’t all relevant to the work going forward. anthropologists have brought new ways of knowing and representing that knowledge into business and technology. we’ve expanded the realm of what counts as important for consideration by moving beyond the interaction of the user and the technology to a more holistic view of the person, and the often-invisible social and cultural forces in their lives. we’ve made the invisible visible, ironically, often through video and photography. deconstructing artefacts (products), or capturing practices in images, became one powerful form of data in the ethnographic tool kit. there was nothing more compelling in the late 1990s than seeing research participants through these images. to get sense of a lived experience. i clearly remember showing a timelapse video of people getting snacks from a refrigerator side-by-side with “snacking” on a broadband computer. as i showed this and told a story around changes in household dynamics, one could almost perceptually see frame changes happening in the minds of engineers, marketers, and management. if images were the new data of holistic research, narrative became the mode of communication we used to enable frame shifts. but we need to move beyond narrative and image modes. stories and imagery are powerful; they have the kind of emotional, empathetic impact that is often necessary to move people out of a worldview to see a new framing, a new opportunity, a new disruption. they can get someone to say “ah hah!” but stories alone are no longer compelling. further, while ethnographic work was perhaps dominated by anthropologists for a part of the 1990s, this is no longer the case, especially in the areas of design and development. while few art or design schools routinely offered training in field research, today these same schools have required courses and programs in design research or user journal of business anthropology, 5(1), autumn 2016 86 experience research, including field research. design thinking, which includes field research, is de facto the corporate process for new product or service development. hci training in computer science departments or information schools offer specializations in user experience research and social research. the graduate students coming out of these programs can spend as much time in field research as anthropology graduate students, and are as well-read theoretically. based on the affiliations of editors of this volume, one can expect business schools to follow suit, especially in areas of pricing and strategy. the different fields bring new tools into the corporation like personas, customer journeys, and lean development. anthropology has not kept up. pro tip just say yes! when att acquired mediaone, the vp of the att lab came out and visited senior people in our labs. i was in a meeting with him when he asked: “would you rather be right, or have impact?” it was clear you couldn’t try the graduate student response: “be impactful by being right.” we had spent a couple of years trying to become more impactful in the corporation, so i said, “impactful.” he wrote my name on a list. i left the company shortly thereafter. three years later i was at intel where our group had a new lab director who asked the same question: “would you rather be right, or impactful?” i answered, “be right.” it wasn’t exactly true, but we had spent the previous two years trying to be impactful. he smiled. three months later, i got a written reprimand from him because of a thank you note from the gm of our enterprise group. why? we had been impactful. our strategic recommendations about directions for china were well received in the enterprise group. i didn’t change my work, but i did publish two papers that year to demonstrate i could be right too. the work never changed, but outputs and audiences did. recently, intel colleagues and i have been experimenting with new ways of knowing and representing ethnography. particularly, we are trying to move beyond qualitative/quantitative data to hybrid data forms. one experiment in this direction was with the national day of civic hacking (ndoch). ndoch was a government-supported event across the nation to try to stimulate use of open government data. we worked with the white house to develop the challenges used in ndoch to create applications using public and personal data for good. the ndoch incited over 95 events across the usa with over 11,000 participants. we participated at many sites (not all 95) to participate with people to understand what values they hoped were being created in the apps that anderson / fond remembrances of past futures 87 they and others would find valuable, and why. on the national scale, we were about to capture projects, concepts, and applications from all the sites, and analyze key themes, value propositions, and proposed business disruptions. after the ndoch, we worked with fourteen winning teams as they spent a year developing their applications. these data of applications and business plans became an excellent measure of understandings around personal data―much richer than, say, survey―that also provides the authority of scale: we covered a country, which just the working with the fourteen teams in the incubator would not have achieved. another tool we experimented with to move beyond the quantitative/qualitative distinction was a networking science tool. we were starting a project that aske:, “what would it take to create a world where data worked on behalf of us—the creators of that data—in new and multifaceted ways that reflect the complexity and multiplicity of our lives, instead of just configuring us merely as eyeballs for advertising?” we instantly had twelve ideas about how to do that in our group. instead of debating for days amongst ourselves, we experimented with an online tool created by eric berlow at berkeley. we used it to bring together 50 experts from around the world to work through 6500 linked possibilities around 90 problem areas to identify four grand challenge areas for research. network science appreciates the fact that the world is made up of organized complexity, that there is interdependence that’s missed when we talk about things like market segments. further, it was a tool that enabled us to engage the community, another of our recent research goals. we aren’t the experts; the community is. further, the platform provided a way for everyone to see their own contribution and enabled key insights to emerge. the process was easy to visualize, which made it compelling as data to our partners in management. in the end, it had analytic, visual, and persuasive value. our experiments may or may not be paths to success, but what is clear is that the tools and paths to success, as anthropologists entered into the tech-business world, are not as apt today. pro tip in batman vs supergirl, be supergirl ethnographic vendor companies, aka consultancies, are like batman. some vp, equivalent of police chief commissioner jim gordon, flashes the bat light up in the sky signaling the company is in distress. we need a super hero to come and save us. batman comes rushing in with his special gadgets and techniques to reveal “unmet needs” and golden insights from users/consumers to save the company. once the company is safe, batman heads back to the bat cave and his millionaire lifestyle until the company needs rescuing again. of course, given that it is some vp hiring this caped http://vimeo.com/59856148 http://vimeo.com/59856148 journal of business anthropology, 5(1), autumn 2016 88 crusader, whatever they did would have had to be a success or the vp would be looking for a new job. meanwhile, supergirl, working inside the company, has to put up with all the office politics, cafeteria food, and uncomfortable cube chairs, but never gets credit for actually saving the world. tiny everyday acts are hardly ever as impressive as a big one at the moment, but over time, that is where lasting culture change often occurs. the tech business anthropologist transformation opportunity business anthropologists have been active change agents in the third industrial revolution. we started off small, but our numbers have grown as we’ve been embedded in corporations like microsoft, google, and intel. the need for anthropological understanding is greater than ever before as technology enters, often invisibly, into more aspects of our society and lives. imagine the fourth industrial revolution as an opportunity to create a society where principles like liberty and justice are deeply rooted in our technology philosophy and design, where businesses can profit alongside flourishing communities, where ecological restoration is valued over ecological destruction. to achieve sustained prosperity in the fourth industrial revolution, we must transform corporations and revitalize communities. business anthropologists have the potential to be key change agents in this revolution, but only if we continue to grow, change, and adapt how we practice anthropology. are you ready to be a business anthropologist and bring in the new future? pro tip lay low or fly high working under the radar or up there with executives—these have been my two primary strategies in the business world. senior management support has certain advantages in terms of visibility, job security, and value of the work; however, senior management has a high turnover rate. with management change comes house cleaning, replacing a predecessor’s footprint and establishing a new order, including anthropologists. flying under the radar offers freedom of research; the downsides are getting others in the company to care and being the most expendable at layoff time. so make the most of where you are—the grass is always greener on the other side. value the people you work with and do good work. opinions: all about culture edgar schein, jana costas & gideon kunda, majken schultz, tomoko hamada connolly, susan wright, gert jan hofstede, and dixon wong heung wah some thoughts about the uses and misuses of the concept of culture edgar h. schein (mit sloan school of management) the word “culture” has been used in so many ways in the last few decades that it has virtually lost all meaning. in this short opinion piece, i want to bring back the concept of culture, as it has been used by anthropologists, and show its power when used in relation to nations, organizations and occupations. the multiple uses of the word culture today have led me to reinforcing a concept drawn from anthropology that is applicable to organizations and occupations (schein, 1985, 2010). i think culture is a property of a group of some sort, reflecting the shared learning that the members have experienced in their efforts to survive, grow, and remain internally integrated. culture thus always has shared components that deal with managing the external environment and other components that deal with the rules and norms of how to get along inside the group. one of the commonest mistakes in recent usage is to link culture only to the inside “how we get along” components. i had the good fortune as a social psychologist to get my ph.d. at page 1 of 45 jba 4(1): 106-150 spring 2015 © the author(s) 2015 issn 2245-4217 www.cbs.dk/jba opinions: all about culture 107 harvard’s department of social relations in the 1949-1952 period, when the departments of anthropology, sociology, clinical and social psychology decided to merge and expose ph.d. students to all four disciplines. i therefore was exposed to the thinking of clyde and florence kluckhohn who were trying to make us understand not only how to think about culture, but also how to use culture as a concept that permitted the comparison of a number of cultures that co-existed in the u.s. west―several indian cultures, mormons, and “anglos.” i developed a deep respect for the concept both from classes and from my interaction with fellow students who had lived with the navahos. i also got to know margaret singer, a clinical psychologist who told us many stories of the difficulties of delivering medical care in the utah area because the different cultural groups had very different rules and norms about exposing the body, taking pills, and so on. i mention all of this because, when i later encountered organizations, i approached trying to understand the cultural elements from this same broader anthropological perspective. when my job at mit facilitated doing some consulting, i had the further good fortune of working simultaneously in a very yankee computer company (digital equipment corp., dec) during its early start-up years and throughout its history to its end 30 years later; and, at the same time, spent five years with ciba-geigy, a large swiss-german chemical company. the huge cultural contrasts that i experienced could be attributed to the national differences between yankee u.s. versus swiss-german switzerland; to the differences in age between a young company and very old one; to the differences in the technologies and resulting occupations of the employees and managers (chemical versus electrical engineers); and to their organizational histories based on founder values and subsequent historical experiences. all four factors were in play. when i first wrote about “organizational culture” in 1985, what struck me most about my work with these two companies was that we could reconstruct quite a lot about their actual histories, and could, in fact, even observe some of that history in the here-and-now by watching the founders and leaders in action (schein, 1985). i was intrigued by the fact that most anthropological accounts of cultures could only speculate about the origins of what they observed. in the case of dec, i could actually watch a founder/entrepreneur create a culture in imposing on his employees his model of how the organization should function by whom he hired, by how he trained and managed them, and by the kind of structure and processes he created to support his values. in the case of cg, i knew less of its history and founding, but was hired by a ceo who wanted to start some new ways of thinking in a very settled and highly structured organization whose culture went back a long way, involved a merger, and was well embedded in the “basel aristocracy.” dec illustrated how culture formed, c-g illustrated how stable culture can become and how hard it is to change any one element of it. journal of business anthropology, 4(1), spring 2015 108 how were we to figure out whether “organizational culture” made any sense in this cognitively diverse landscape? two further sets of data helped to sort this out. every dec office or plant i ever visited, whether in finland, germany, switzerland or singapore sounded and felt just like the hqs office in maynard, ma. i could easily see how national culture further influenced the local scene, but there was no question that dec had a unique feel and identity that could not be explained by local culture. in c-g i had a related experience. i had been asked to interview and observe c-g employees and managers to learn about and describe “the cg culture,” concentrating on the basel hqs. a year or so later, i was working in the u.s. with the c-g subsidiary and was asked to give a lecture to the u.s. management about what i had learned in my basel research. i described the c-g culture as i understood it and had written about it. the reaction in new jersey was shock. they said, “my god, you have just described us.” until that time they had had no sense of how much their local norms, values, and behaviour patterns were basically the same as the basel ones. in my studies of indoctrination of pows and civilians by the chinese communists in the 1950s, i learned that if people cannot easily exit an organization, they will either socialize themselves into what they perceive the norms to be, or will be explicitly indoctrinated (schein, 1961). dec actually ran “boot comps” where new employees were taught the right way to think, feel and behave, if they wanted to make it in dec. one of my students later wrote about culture as a socializing and coercive control force (kunda, 2006). i could easily see such coercive socialization processes in both companies, and could see how conformity was created both by those processes and by the exit of people who did not fit. the conceptual problem was how to express what i had learned in the field as a consultant in academically and practically useful language. the solution was to describe how culture is created by observing this process over several decades in dec and finding similar stories in the literature about other companies. the three-level model i ended up with is basically a sequential model presented at one point in time (schein, 1985, 2003, 2010). the founder, entrepreneur and early leaders impose their will on their organization and create what we can think of as “artifacts,” the visible shared components―behavioural rules, structures, processes, symbols, buildings, and so on. at this point it would be wrong to call this a culture, because we don't know whether what was imposed has survival value. lots of organizations don't make it. however, and this point is crucial, if what the leaders have imposed works―if the organization is successful both externally in terms of its products and services, and internally in terms of its management system―a subtle cognitive transformation begins to take place in the employees. they come to believe that they’ve got it right. it worked and continues to work. so what were originally the founder’s personal values opinions: all about culture 109 now come to be seen as valid, as correct, and, therefore, to be perpetuated and taught to newcomers. some of those values come to be appreciated and named as official values, what i called the level of “espoused values.” we might now be tempted to say that those espoused values are the culture, but then i encountered some further data that made that impossible as well. the espoused values were usually a list of very abstract concepts like “integrity,” “team work,” “quality” which, however, often did not mesh with what i observed in the actual behaviour of members of the organization. something deeper was “driving” the observed behaviour. in order, therefore, to describe what i saw to be the stable elements of the “culture” of the organization required a three level model: 1. the level of artifacts, by which i meant everything you see and feel when you enter the organization (or country), the behavioural “how we do things around here.” 2. the level of espoused values, by which i meant what the organization claims it is and wants to be―which may or may not mesh with the observed behaviour and other artifacts such as the structures and processes in place. i often observed that there were strong disconnects between the artifacts and some of the claimed values. how then do we explain stable artifacts, processes and structures? what is maintaining them? there must be a deeper level that “drives” the behaviour, which is not necessarily public, visible or even conscious if the organization has a history of several generations of managers and employees. 3. the level of shared tacit assumptions, which were at one time explicit values but, because they worked so well, became taken for granted and increasingly non-negotiable. to me this is easiest to illustrate in the u.s. where countless organizations will espouse team work and group values, but all of the artifacts and the observed decision process are based on individual performance, especially the critical processes of how people are hired, trained, paid, promoted, and otherwise treated. the notion of “group pay” or “group accountability” is considered unthinkable. it is inescapable, therefore, that one of the shared tacit assumptions underlying most u.s. companies, and certainly dec, was “rugged individualism,” and “individual competition is the key to success.” i was able to reconstruct the patterns of interlocking shared tacit assumptions of dec and c-g and built my early writings about organizational culture around the explication of this model (schein, 1985, 2003, 2010). the most important word is “shared.” i made this part of the definition of culture to give the word “culture” a specific meaning, and argued that culture is a learned response to survival in the environment journal of business anthropology, 4(1), spring 2015 110 and the need for internal integration. i felt that this definition jibed best with what the anthropologists described in their ethnographies. the question then arose of what we do when we see an organization in which some things are shared, but others are not, and there are all kinds of conflicts in the organization. there are always two possibilities in this situation―that there really are no shared tacit assumptions; that no culture has formed at the total organizational level; or that there are very few overall “corporate” shared assumptions, but lots of groups within the organization who have for various reasons evolved their own subcultures with their own artifacts, espoused values, and shared tacit assumptions. we then have to view the total organization as a “multi-cultural system.” what we then discover is that the growth of these “subcultures” is very much related to the age, size, and success of the total organization (schein, 2003). it also then becomes an empirical question whether, in an organization with many subcultures, one can even talk about an organizational or corporate culture (martin, 2002). there will, undoubtedly, be some shared tacit assumptions having to do with the basic mission, products, and services that the organization provides, but many of the shared processes, structures, and behaviour patterns may turn out to have more to do with national culture. for example, in the u.s., the assumption of rugged competitive individualism will probably be found in most companies. but the examination of the subcultures will be no less important because that will reveal that the most important driver of behaviour derives neither from country nor organization, but from occupation (schein, 2010). this point of view meshes well with the tradition started by everett hughes of studying various occupations about which we knew relatively little (hughes, 1958; becker, 1963). as i think about it now, the best way to “explain” the dec culture is to say that it is how young electrical engineers think and act, and the best way to think about c-g is to consider how chemists and chemical engineers think and act. the country cultures and the company experiences clearly influenced this, but the core of the culture, the dna of it, lies in the kind of thinking that the members of these occupations learn worldwide. my recent work has been in “safety,” which has taken me into nuclear plants and hospitals (schein, 2013; amalberti, 2013). what i found in the nuclear industry is the domination of nuclear engineers; the obsession with understanding the uniqueness of nuclear technology; and the fear that, if someone other than a nuclear engineer runs the plant or the site on which the plant sits, safety problems may increase. in the field of patient safety, i find that the biggest problems are the communication failures between doctors, nurses, and techs―especially where you have not only the different occupational cultures of doctors and nurses, but also the additional fact that they have different status and rank in most opinions: all about culture 111 societies. i have found that to understand a hospital’s culture, the most important thing is to understand the subcultures of medicine, nursing and administration. if a change program is to be launched to improve effectiveness and safety, my consultant friends argue that one must begin with changing the “compact” between the doctors and the administration, which is de facto saying that both groups have to examine their cultures, their “taken for granted” assumptions about what to give and what to get from each other, and renegotiate toward something that both can accept (kornacki & silversin, 2012). a recent ethnographic study of the implementation in hospitals of the rule that resident should not work more than 80 hours brings out how the different subgroups engage in their effort to resist or foster the change (kellogg, 2011). as a final example, i note that when the computer industry went from hardware to software innovation, even the concept of “engineer” changed from hardware types to software types. the kinds of people who now populate facebook and google are occupationally a different breed. creative programmers may well be the ultimately cosmopolitan occupation, which may produce cultural assumptions that are shared worldwide and evolve quite independently of both national and organizational forces. in focusing on national, organizational, and occupational cultures, i have deliberately tried to highlight the stable elements of culture, the tacit, taken for granted assumptions, the skeleton, so to speak, which changes slowly. an alternative view of culture is that it is constantly being renegotiated in the present interactions of members of groups, organizations, nations, occupations, and in all the temporary relationships that exist between them (smirchich, 1983). i could see how, in both dec and c-g, the daily interactions displayed the culture, and also how culture evolved slowly as new leaders and members changed some of the characteristics of those interactions. i had also observed culture creation and evolution in the many sensitivity training groups i had run for the national training labs in bethel, maine. i could see that, within a few hours, the shared experience of the group created norms and special meanings, which a newcomer to the group could not understand, and i could see how the newcomer’s arrival forced evolution of some of those norms and meanings. in retrospect, my decision to go for the more structured anthropological definition of culture was based on the decision that the dynamic here-and-now view of culture formation and evolution could be incorporated into the structural model, while the reverse was not true. the emergent meaning point of view did not “explain” the obvious stability of organizations and the difficulty of “changing culture.” i find the biological analogy useful here, in that my bones and early memories are pretty stable while i am still learning new things, constantly journal of business anthropology, 4(1), spring 2015 112 reformulating ideas, and constantly rediscovering that the only new things that make sense fit somehow into the structures that are already there. both with culture and with personality/character i find the verb “evolve” more appropriate than the verb “change.” elements of culture can change, but the deeper levels can only evolve. as we look ahead, it seems to me that where we have seen and will continue to see the most such evolution will be in the occupational cultures that spring up around new technologies. the social media and the new forms of information technology that are being created will bring with them new skill sets that create new occupations, and those new occupations will evolve basic assumptions that may be quite different from what the occupational cultures of today reveal. for example, as we watch the next generation “locked” onto screens engaging in rapid multitasking of the sort that video games require, i note that while some parents deplore the lost ability to “go deeper” into a subject, i find myself wondering whether the external world with its growing number of social media requires rapid multi-tasking as a minimum competence for survival. we might be made uncomfortable by these changes, but they may be necessary. as i watch my grandchildren, i realize that they are growing up into a world that i neither understand nor can change. my best option is to watch them closely and learn from them. in conclusion, i believe the concept of culture can be an important and meaningful construct in organizational psychology and sociology but only if we capture in the definition both the multi-level complexity and dynamic evolutionary quality of the concept. references amalberti, r. (2013) navigating safety. new york: springer. becker, h. s. (1963) outsiders. new york: the free press. gerstein, m. s. & schein, e. h. (2011) “dark secrets: face-work, organizational culture and disaster prevention.” in c. de franco and c. o. meyer, eds. forecasting warning and responding to transnational risks. london: palgrave macmillan, pp. 148-165. hughes, e. c. (1958) men and their work. glencoe, il: free press. kellogg, k. c. (2011) challenging operations. chicago: university of chicago press. kornacki, m. j. & silversin, j. (2012) leading physicians through change. tampa, fl: american college of physician executives. kunda, g. (2006) engineering culture. revised edition. philadelphia, pa: temple university press. opinions: all about culture 113 martin, j. (2002) organizational culture: mapping the terrain. newbury park, ca: sage. schein, e. h. (1961) coercive persuasion. new york: norton. schein, e. h. (1985) organizational culture and leadership. san francisco: jossey bass. schein, e. h. (2003) dec is dead; long live dec. san francisco: berrett/kohler. schein, e. h. (2010) organizational culture and leadership. fourth edition. san francisco: jossey-bass, wiley. schein, e. h. (2013) humble inquiry. san franscisco: berrett/kohler. schein, e. h. (2013) “the culture factor in safety culture.” in safety management in context. white book. zurich, switzerland: eth, mit, and swiss re center for global dialogue. pp. 75-80. smirchich, l. (1983) “concepts of culture and organizational analysis.” administrative science quarterly, 28, 339-358. * * * when i hear the word culture… i reach for my gun1 jana costas (european university viadrina) and gideon kunda (tel aviv university) this well-known, provocative statement was the first phrase that came to mind when considering the invitation to reflect and write on our experience in applying the term culture to business and organizational settings. as a cursory browse through the web reveals, it is a phrase that has captured the imagination of commentators on matters cultural, in settings as diverse as popular music, theatre, cinema, and the sciences, and is oft repeated and widely quoted with little awareness of its rather dark origins: the play schlageter by the nazi playwright hanns johst. why, we asked ourselves, does this ominous connection between culture and the gun appear so appealingly, if perhaps ironically, insightful and intuitively relevant to our topic? why does it evoke an immediate response of recognition even though its significance remains, when the texts of its invokers are closely studied, frustratingly vague? who exactly is, or should be, reaching for the gun? against whom, and why? what 1 another translation is: “i release the safety on my browning.” journal of business anthropology, 4(1), spring 2015 114 exactly is its nature? and what, if anything, can students of culture learn from the juxtaposition, both metaphorical and literal, of culture and the gun? we have in the past been engaged in studying organizations from a cultural perspective, and in teaching students and practitioners about this way of seeing and understanding the world, and we continue to do so. our experience suggests―and indeed we believe―that “culture,” with all its conceptual baggage, is an important, legitimate and indispensable concept, vital to our comprehension of the human condition in general, and business and organizational contexts in particular. and we continue to apply this concept in our work and everyday life. yet we, too, when called upon to reflect on our experience with the term, found this stirring and evocative image strangely appropriate, even satisfying. why? while the exact meaning of the statement is far from self evident, its significance, we believe, lies in capturing how the concept of culture in general, and when applied to organizations in particular, is inextricably tied to―and in fact has its foundation in―battles, struggles and conflict, of both the real and symbolic sort. in this opinion piece, we want to unpack various ways in which the term culture has emerged from, been defined by, and used in the context of fighting―fighting over what is a legitimate way of being in the world; how and by whom it is to be determined; and what, if anything, one is to do about it. in doing so, we wish to cast light upon its troubling baggage, questionable usage and potential danger, as well as to reiterate our view of its continuing relevance for observers of, and actors in, the world of business and organizations. there are several ways to look at the connection between culture and the gun: fighting with, fighting against, and fighting for culture. fighting with culture the anthropological concept of culture, and its associated method ethnography, grew―it is commonly asserted―out of or in conjunction with the colonial encounter, broadly defined and understood. the close study of “others,” often explicitly or implicitly labeled “primitive” or otherwise considered inferior, was predominantly built on the observer’s assumption that one’s culture and therefore oneself was inherently superior to those under study. this view justified changing, reforming, dominating, or even destroying existing social groupings and their ways of life, or at least assisting or not standing in the way of such projects. despite a growing critical awareness of these origins, and efforts to correct its problematic implications, a similar stance seems still to dominate the world of those who study and use culture in organizational settings. here the cultural perspective is often a manifestation of the widespread assumption that there is an inherently superior way of being (often labeled “management” or “leadership”), and that those associated opinions: all about culture 115 with it have the right to make such a claim and act accordingly. if nothing else, the right to study the culture of the other, and to take steps to design or change it even if one claims a benevolent motive―progress, profit, efficiency, innovation―is itself the assertion of taken-for-granted privilege. culture, therefore, can or should be managed and imposed on those regarded as inferior, in order to accomplish goals that those who speak in its name consider worthwhile. culture, in this case, is either literally backed by a gun, or by the authority of those who, in the final analysis, assume, wittingly or not, its authorized presence on their side if all else fails. by using the term, deny it as one might, one therefore is either reaching for one’s gun, or is inspired by and relies on those who, with the blessing of legitimate authority, can deem it necessary to do so. conversely, and just as significantly, one might reasonably be suspected by the objects of one’s study, should they find ways to critically consider their reality, of doing precisely this. they, in turn, might be motivated, or encouraged, to respond in kind. all the more reason, then, to keep one’s gun, or gunmen, close at hand. fighting against culture those targeted by the proponents of culture and the wielders of its weapons might indeed take steps to defend themselves and in fact fight against the dismantling of old, and the creation and imposition of new, culture. the history of industrial conflict teaches us that facing authority is perhaps easier, or less confusing, when its agents do not disguise themselves, but make their means and goals overt. the more subtle and less overtly conflictual forms of culture management, characteristic of many organizations today―inspired, it would seem, by prevalent academic rhetoric and its underlying assumptions―represent an organized effort to regulate, shape, and control behaviour, experience, and indeed the self of employees in business and organizational settings. the use of the weapon of culture in the name of the common good often produces, or is thought to produce, collaboration, incorporation and acceptance, and can easily blind its objects to the subtly oppressive forms of control to which they are subjected. here, too, with awareness comes humiliation, perhaps rage, sometimes resistance, but most often impotent cynicism: the final rebuke of and resignation to culture. when culture managers are at large, the gun, imagined or real, is not far away. indeed we have ourselves felt the impulse to reach for it in organizations that tried, often with our tacit collaboration or full-blown support, to shape us in their organizational mold, or where we observed these processes at close range. in such cases, the gun―when reached for―may, and often has been, turned on anyone in range―from ourselves, through our peers and colleagues, to our managers. if nothing else, our experience indicates, and our moral and political position suggests, that the targets of culture studies would do well to prepare, and indeed arm themselves, journal of business anthropology, 4(1), spring 2015 116 conceptually at least, because their space, both external and internal, and with it their autonomy and dignity, might soon be under attack. fighting for culture given the troubling realities surrounding the study and use of culture, one might argue that these problems are inherent in the concept itself, and that, in order to avoid being coopted by those who fight with culture, and perhaps to support those who fight against it, it is best to discard the concept entirely. indeed, in the course of our work, we have often felt this temptation ourselves. despite these moments of despair, however, in the final analysis we believe that it is worthwhile fighting for the concept of culture, its well-documented potential for abuse notwithstanding. the subject matter of culture, we believe, is inherently part and parcel of social and organizational life, whether we choose to conceptualize it or not, study it or not, apply it or not. if we aim to comprehend social and organizational reality, for whatever purpose, it seems to us practically axiomatic then that we need to use, and that people naturally and intuitively use, cultural constructs. indeed, the failure to do so leaves the study of human life in general, and of organizations in particular, at the mercy of “scientific,” mechanistic, and deterministic perspectives, and those who stand to benefit from them. with whom, then, and how must one do battle in the name of culture? the co-opters, misusers and detractors, academic and managerial, who, in the name of their interests often either deny or contaminate the conceptual space of culture, are an important if not easy target. an obvious effort is thus called for, sisyphian though it may be, to engage in an ongoing critical study of the organizational contexts in which culture is propagated. this involves an effort, as it were, to turn culture studies upon its own institutions, its colleagues―both proponents and detractors of culture―and itself. similarly, and just as obviously, it seems to us necessary to continually search for, recognize, explore, conceptualize, and illustrate the conflictual nature of culture in all its subtle, elusive and well disguised forms, along with our own role in these conflicts―for it is in these conflicts that culture in all its complexity, promise, and menace is both brought to life and put to death. moreover, and perhaps less obviously to the residents of our comfortable academic environments, for the study of culture to become meaningful, and for its students to be equipped for the job, we believe it is important to step outside the boundaries of the secluded academic world of journals, with their stylized modes of writing and limited readership, and of detached and overly theorized classrooms. rather, one must engage with and participate in the life under study. this should take place in ways that are more than merely “research, teaching and consulting” as commonly understood. the problem is not how to identify the ways to participate more fully in the life around us―they are abundantly documented and opinions: all about culture 117 immediately available―but in the choice to do so and in the recognition of its vital importance. finally, and perhaps most crucially, as teachers we believe that it is important to recognize, for ourselves and for our students, many of whom are headed for careers in the world of business organizations, that we were all born with innate ethnographic skills and are constantly try to making sense of the social and cultural world around us. indeed, the skills we develop, hone, use or lose in the course of our lives―asking, listening, observing, interpreting, and theorizing―are the foundation of all action in all the domains of our lives. fighting for culture thus means helping ourselves and our students rediscover and reconnect with these basic skills when teaching. the most important fight of all then seems to us to be an attempt to improve our students’ ethnographic skills and promote their understanding and use of the concept of culture. this includes a critical awareness of its strengths and pitfalls, and an ability to form their own interpretations and theories, rather than parrot readymade ones, in all the locations relevant to their lives―and not only as employees, workers, and managers, but also as citizens, partners, parents, and friends. this we must do in the face of concerted and well organized efforts (with which we often wittingly or unwittingly collude) to discount, distort and undermine these abilities. in conclusion, if one is necessary, we call then not for abandoning culture for its faults, but rather for fighting to promote it wherever it is in danger of succumbing to them―based on the recognition that the fault of the distortion of culture lies not in the concept, but in ourselves and in the way we choose to use it. * * * time for culture majken schultz (copenhagen business school) organizational culture is one of the most paradoxical phenomena in organization studies, illustrating both the best and the worst of academia. however, it still has huge unexploited potential―a potential which is long overdue, for it is indeed time for culture to blend with current thinking in organization studies and take advantage of its rich conceptual heritage in a cultural revival. this, i want to suggest, should depart from a view of organizational culture as temporal process, although in this essay i will only address the treatment of culture in organization studies and realize that the development of the construct may have taken a different path in journal of business anthropology, 4(1), spring 2015 118 other fields, given its rich history outside of organization studies. the paradox of culture organizational culture illustrates the best of academia in the way that the concept, drawing on anthropology and sociology, created a profound renewal in the understanding of organizations, when it entered the field in the mid-70s and was used thereafter. serving as inspiration for both established and new generations of scholars, the concept of culture gained traction in ways that demonstrated academia’s ability to explore new conceptual territories and to rethink established wisdom at the time. culture gave importance to phenomena in organizational life, which previously had been overlooked or deemed irrelevant to organization scholars―from stories exchanged around the water-cooler to the subtleness of meaning creation. in addition, the concept of culture was early on embraced by practice which, in spite of numerous conceptual disagreements, showed the relevance of culture to people in and around organizations. but organizational culture also became a victim of the worst in academia in that paradigm wars, numerous elaborations of critical and postmodern perspectives, and the inability to create fruitful dialogue between them turned culture into a conceptual battlefield which proceeded to implode from the inside. at the same time, culture had peaked in the cycle of conceptual fashion, with the result that new generations of scholars have shown little interest in the construct. this created a paradox that has been inherent in the development of the culture construct ever since, in that it is now both largely ignored in organization studies and embraced by practice and other disciplines. on the one hand, culture faded away during the 1990s and is now, at best, mentioned only in relation to the history of organization studies. in academic work thereafter, the concept has either been replaced by related constructs, such as organizational identity, where culture is reduced to an empirical question (e.g. albert and whetten, 1985. 265-66), or it is displaced from its organizational origin to an institutional level of analysis. either way, the quest for culture in organizations studies has come to an end. on the other hand, the insights provided by organizational culture have been picked up by a host of scholars working in other fields encouraged by the fact that culture has become an integrated part of practice, whether in management practices or the ways organizational actors understand life in organizations. in my opinion, a variety of new fields have embraced and further developed fundamental insights from culture: for example, studies of strategy-as-practice; the “signature processes” behind dynamic capabilities; the growing interest in materiality and artifacts in science-and technology studies; the focus on consumer cultures in marketing; and the concern with corporate branding in corporate communication studies. so, while organizational opinions: all about culture 119 scholars for a decade ignored the culture construct, its inherent relevance and importance to all kinds of organizational processes have paved the way for its movement into other fields. the re-emergence of culture recently, however, culture has started to re-emerge in organization studies. in their introduction to a special issue on “cultural life in organizations,” weber and dacin (2011) challenged a conception of culture associated with classical studies as inward-focused constraint, and argued for the need to develop a new view that sees culture as an externally oriented tool-kit―thereby reclaiming swidler’s early work. similarly, in an extensive review of three decades of the study of culture in organization studies, culture becomes even more “agentic,” as the authors recast 30 years of development of the culture field as an integrated framework based in values and tool-kits drawing on frames, categories and stories (giorgi, lockwood and glynn, 2015). while these are important steps in setting culture free from what in management and organization studies had become a rather inward-looking, essenceoriented and pre-determined path, these reviews first and foremost suggest new analytical categories in the elaboration of cultural agency, by stressing how culture as a tool-kit, category, and/or frame can be mobilized and used by organizational actors. although such emphasis on cultural agency is a much needed reaction to the behavioural constraints imposed by culture, the risk is that the configurations that also constitute culture―whether it is the “webs of significance” coined by geertz (1973: 5), or “patterns of basic assumptions” argued by schein (1985/2010: 18)―are lost in the development of such a “neo-instrumental” view of culture. in my own opinion, the profound contribution of the culture concept is its ability to overcome established distinctions and explore the processes that connect them: for example, how culture both resides within ritualized tradition (the past) and serves as a resource for the construction of novelty (the future); how it emerges from life in organizations (internal), while being entangled with the outside world (external); and how it is both embedded in practices distributed among employees (at the bottom) and influenced by managerial actions (at the top). a cultural awakening in organization studies should be able to both acknowledge and go beyond such fundamental distinctions―an approach which, in my own opinion, is enabled by drawing upon the emerging process views on organizations. as stated in several contributions, a process view is characterized by a pursuit to understand the inherent processes that constitute the continuous unfolding of the phenomena at hand: that is to say, organizational culture (e.g. langley and tsoukas, 2010; hernes, 2014). instead of searching for a fixed set of cultural categories that are seen to define the substance or essence of culture, a process view invites us to journal of business anthropology, 4(1), spring 2015 120 “acknowledge and absorb, rather than to reduce the complexity” (schultz & macguire, 2012: 6) inherent in the ongoing reconstructions of culture in organizations. in addition, a process view is based on temporality in that phenomena are always conceived of as constituted in time, while relating to others. this notion of a temporal process view, in particular, invites a new conceptualization of culture, or more accurately, enhances dimensions of organizational culture which was full of potential in its early development, but which somehow got lost in the academic paradigm wars, as well as in the reliance on simplified dichotomies in its practical application. culture in time i want to suggest two areas where such a temporal process view may add to the further development of the culture concept in organization studies. the first concerns how a temporal view sees organizational culture as constituted in time by asking how cultural processes contribute to the continuous reconfiguration of the relations between past, present, and future in organizations.2 this suggests a reconceptualization of culture, where the focus is not on how culture develops across time so much as on how it is constructed in time. the notion of time has been inherent in the conceptualization of culture, in the sense that culture is often constituted by its formation and transformation across time. for example, it has been conceived as consisting of those behavioural patterns, narratives and values that are passed on from one generation to the next, or as following the cycle of organizational life as it passes through stages of birth, midlife and maturity―seen most explicitly in the works of schein (1985/2010). here, culture is constrained and somewhat pre-determined by its assumed organizational role within a given organizational cycle, just as it imposes constraints on organizational actors by limiting the path in which a possible cultural future may develop. for example, actors operating within the early development of a culture find themselves looking into a future of cultural conflicts associated with growth and organizational diversification, whereas those in mid-life can expect a future of cultural inertia. others have conceived the development of culture across time in terms of shifts between periods of cultural stability and change. they have searched for explanations for what enables cultural change or, more often, for ways to overcome cultural resistance to change―thereby associating culture with references to a past treasured and maintained by organizational actors. studies of culture have added complexity to such a period conception of culture across time by elaborating how often a culture changes (for example, by positing differences between fast-paced, 2 i here draw upon hernes and schultz (forthcoming). opinions: all about culture 121 high tech cultures and slow-moving, bureaucratic cultures); or how long time it takes for actors to let go of the past and be assimilated into the new culture. however, seen from a temporal perspective, such conceptions of culture externalize the notion of the future and the past from culture in the present, by implying that the future will happen and the past did happen independently of the present. in contrast, a temporal process view departs from the present only, and internalizes both future and past in the ongoing construction of culture by asserting that conceptions of what the future may become, and what the past might have been, are cultural constructions influenced and contextualized by the present. on the one hand, this provides cultural agency, in that actors are actively constructing their cultural future and past, and the relations between them, while being in the present. for example, actors make deliberate choices about which past cultural resources to evoke to support their envisioned future, while the unfolding of the future, in turn, influences what they conceive as cultural resources. on the other hand, a temporal process view imposes a temporal configuration on the construction of culture, which can never escape time, but is always taking place in time suspended between past and future. any culture has layers upon layers of pasts and futures, which cannot be erased regardless of the intentions behind cultural transformation. the ongoing construction of culture in time is found in (although it is not the only focus of) the study of a five-year transformational change process in the carlsberg group following a mega-merger in 2008 (hatch, schultz and skov, 2015). the study suggests how the notion of the cultural past is reconstructed as change unfolds, and how the conception of the future is transformed from a post-merger integration of multiple nationally-based brewing cultures into an aspiration for a new, possible shared, future identity as a fast-moving-consumer-company sustained by a culture of professionalized efficiency. while actors are in the process of redefining their future, they reconstruct the past correspondingly―both through a process of stigmatizing aspects of the brewing heritage as inefficient, and by remembering forgotten cultural symbols and narratives, which are evoked and retold to enhance an image of how carlsberg has always been dedicated to professional excellence. one such example is the story of how the founder, due to his dedication to scientific methods, was able to invent clean yeast and thereby provide a foundation for excellence and efficiency in the carlsberg breweries. however, this unfolding construction of culture is riddled with tensions in that, for example, cultural resources originating from its brewing past are seen by top management as opposed to their push for efficiency, while several middle managers around the world see a brewing past as a potential shared point of reference in an even more dispersed globalized future (referring to growth by global acquisition in the brewing industry). journal of business anthropology, 4(1), spring 2015 122 co-created cultures the second area where a temporal process view may help development of the concept of culture in organization studies concerns how both external and internal stakeholders are active co-creators of culture―providing new sources for the development of culture, and forging relationships largely ignored by organizational culture studies. the notion of co-created culture draws on recent developments in brand and marketing studies (e.g. mertz and vargo, 2009), where scholars have shown the emergence of consumer-to-consumer relationships derived from a shared passion for specific experiences, such as driving old vintage saab cars (muñiz and o’guinn, 2000), or sharing their dedication to construction play by using lego way into their adulthood (antorini and mûniz, 2013). consumers may form more regular networks or communities, and so develop their own cultures underpinned by rituals, values and meaningful practices (e.g. schau, muñiz, and arnould, 2009), which, in turn, enhance their motivation to actively engage with the organizations central to their network (such as the lego company in relation to its communities of adult fans of lego). however, although studies in branding and marketing have gone into great detail in exploring the formation and development of cultural practices among consumers, they have shown less interest in the processes that connect community members with actors in the related organization (i.e. the lego company). by the same token, studies of organizational cultures have focused on relations inside the organization―whether they unfold between managers and employees, or among employees―and have paid less attention to relationships with external stakeholders, such as consumers. studies of organizational culture have, of course, included the role and importance of external stakeholders in culture, but most often they have been conceived as a substantial category belonging to a different level of analysis, such as that of “institutionalized environment,” thereby allowing scholars to show how organizational cultures imitate institutionalized environments; or that of “external environment,” which demonstrates how organizational culture adapts to shifting external environments. following the insights from a process view that “‘what is’ has no existence apart from its relating to other things in time and space―what also is, what was, and what might be” (schultz and mcguire, 2012: 6), i think we need a shift in focus from how cultures are influenced by, or adapt to, their external environments to the processes relating organizational actors to external stakeholders. in this way, we can conceive of stakeholders as engaging actors interacting with an organization, instead of as representations of analytical categories. the emergence of such entangled relations between actors inside and outside organizations has been discussed in areas of innovation and co-creation, where the relations between organizational actors and lead-users, or dedicated individuals, have proved to be of value both to the opinions: all about culture 123 organizations involved (e.g. merz and vargo, 2009) and to the participating consumers/users (e.g. ind, inglesias and schultz, 2013). however, actors are often conceived in terms of their individual competencies, experiences and emotions, while the impact of their belonging to a community or organizational cultures is underexplored. by the same token, the processes underpinning co-creation are often described in instrumental or value-creating terms (such as the four building blocks of co-creation by prahalad and ramaswany, 2004), rather than in terms of how they work as mechanisms for exchanges of cultural resources―such as symbols, stories and meaningful practices―between different culturally embedded actors outside (e.g. community cultures) and inside (organizational culture) the organization. a significant example of co-creation processes between an organization and its consumers is found in the lego group, where selforganized communities among adult fans of lego have had a profound impact on the innovation and revitalization of both lego products and their associated brand meaning (antorini and muñiz, 2013). here, scholars suggest the importance of a cultural resonance within the organization in order to reap the full benefits of co-creation with users, as well as the risk of corporate systems overshadowing users’ contributions. in a further development of the concept of culture, therefore, i want to suggest a stronger emphasis on how these ongoing relationships with users and/or consumers influence organizational culture itself, since the emergence of new forms of dialogue, exchanges of symbolic material, and the development of shared practices are all expected to impact cultural pockets with an organization. in addition, this raises questions of how such external relationships are distributed among organizational actors and how this, in turn, influences cultural processes in the organization itself. together these ideas propose a notion of organizational culture as becoming, as being always constructed in time through interwoven internal and external relationships. conceiving culture in time opens up our research to studies of how actors influence the ongoing reconfigurations of the relationship between past and future, while being restricted by their culturally informed imagination for how the past and future may unfold. conceiving culture as intertwined internal and external relationships paves the way for studies of how shifting actors participate in the ongoing construction of culture, each bringing their unique potential of cultural resources constructed in their own time. references albert, s. and whetten, d. a. (1985) organizational identity. research in organizational behaviour. 7: 263-295. journal of business anthropology, 4(1), spring 2015 124 antorini, y. m. and muñiz, a. (2013) the benefits and challenges of collaborating with user communities. research technology management. 56 (3): 21-28. geertz, c. (1973) the interpretation of cultures: selected essays. new york, ny: basic books. hatch, m. j., schultz, m. and skov, a.m. (2015) organizational identity and culture in the context of managed change: transformation in the carlsberg group, 2009–2013. academy of management discoveries. 1 (1): 56-88. giorgi, s., lockwook, c. and glynn, m. a. (2015) the many faces of culture: making sense of 30 years of research on culture in organization studies. academy of management annals (in press). london: routledge. hernes, t. and schultz, m. (forthcoming) organizational culture and identity as process in time. in langley, a. and tsoukas, h (eds.), the sage handbook of process organization studies. thousand oaks, california: sage publications. hernes, t. (2014) a process theory of organization. oxford: oxford university press. ind, n., iglesias, o. and schultz, m. (2013) building brands together: emergence and outcome of co-creation: california management review. 55 (3): 5-29. langley, a. and tsoukas, h. (2010) introducing perspectives on process organization studies. in langley, a. and tsoukas, h. (eds.), perspectives on process organization studies. oxford, uk: oxford university press. merz, m. and vargo, s. (2009) the evolving brand logic: a servicedominant logic perspective journal of the academy of marketing science. 37 (3): 328–344. muñiz, a. and o’guinn, t. (2001) brand community. journal of consumer research. 27 (4): 412–432. prahalad, c. k. and ramaswamy, v. (2004) the future of competition: cocreating unique value with customers . boston, ma: harvard business school press. schein, e. (1985/2010) organizational culture and leadership (4th edition). san francisco: jossey bass. schau, h. j., muñiz, a. and arnould, e. j. (2009) how brand community practices create value. journal of marketing. 73 (5): 30–51. weber, c. & dacin, t. (2011) the cultural construction of organizational life: introduction to special issue. organization science. 22 (2): 287-298. http://web.a.ebscohost.com.esc-web.lib.cbs.dk/ehost/viewarticle?data=dgjymppp44rp2%2fdv0%2bnjisfk5ie46bdirqewsbok63nn5kx95uxxjl6qrvctqk5js5axurgoueuvlr9lporweezp33vy3%2b2g59q7sbavrlc0qbrnt5zqeezdu33snoj6u9jygktq33%2b7t8w%2b3%2bs7ulwqs0i0rby%2b5oxwhd%2fqu37z4uqm4%2b7y&hid=4106 http://web.a.ebscohost.com.esc-web.lib.cbs.dk/ehost/viewarticle?data=dgjymppp44rp2%2fdv0%2bnjisfk5ie46bdirqewsbok63nn5kx95uxxjl6qrvctqk5js5axurgoueuvlr9lporweezp33vy3%2b2g59q7sbavrlc0qbrnt5zqeezdu33snoj6u9jygktq33%2b7t8w%2b3%2bs7ulwqs0i0rby%2b5oxwhd%2fqu37z4uqm4%2b7y&hid=4106 opinions: all about culture 125 * * * on the meaning(s) of culture tomoko hamada connolly (college of william and mary) mckinsey’s survey of 1,420 global corporate executives in 2013 found that―despite women’s aspiration, competence and performance―many ceos were not yet convinced that a female manager had the long-term capacity to move up to the c-suite. the survey revealed that the career demand for “anytime, anywhere” availability of top executives imposed a severe penalty on female managers, and that they felt more confident about rising to positions on the board when the top’s leadership style was compatible with their own leadership and communication styles. it concluded that “cultural factors” limited “gender diversity at the top” (mckinsey 2013). with a new gender-diversity policy in hand, i have been promoting more female managers to the top echelon of a japanese multinational which hired me as its first external board member in 2013. in order to devise an effective strategy for organizational transformation for genderequality, i have found recent findings in neuro-sciences quite useful. this essay will briefly summarize my ideas about culture, therefore, in the context of the field of corporate governance. anthropologists of organization in general agree that “culture” is an amalgam of historically derived meanings that include values, conventions, artifacts, norms, discursive practices, power-relations, and institutional habitus, which together constitute daily social realities for individual people. people constantly spin tales and retell stories. stories are units of meanings that connect their images of past, present and future (bruner 1986). in recent years scholars in the neighbouring discipline of cognitive science have begun to reveal the actual neurological process about how the human brain processes socially-relevant, symbolic cognition and emotion. we now know that our brain learns by adding or removing connections, or by adding cells, and that new learning takes place through shifts in the strength of the connections of neurological firings, when connections are added or removed, or when new cells appear (hagmann et al. 2010). the brain’s neural wiring network is called the “connectome.” what is significant is that, when a particular piece of new information from the environment adds more connectomic weights in different regions, this particular association of neural firings and their connectivity becomes more stable and less transitory. in other words, if we repeatedly “register” more and more relevant information from the journal of business anthropology, 4(1), spring 2015 126 environment, the brain’s networked firings become more “routine and automatic.” here, repetition is the key: as we get repeatedly exposed to similar stimuli-responses over time, these webs of connectivity in our brain become more and more firmly created for long-term memorymaking. in this process called “priming,” the brain progressively decouples deeper and more reflective “meaning creations” separate from mere “knee jerk” responses to environmental stimuli. this mechanism for reflective meaning-creation is considered to be a relatively resilient system due to its strong interconnectivity with multiple neuron activities in the brain. here, social and biological factors work in concert in our learning, sense-making, and long-term memory retention (turner & bruner 1986). what is anthropologically significant is the fact that the more firmly primed, the more consistent the established schematic system of interconnectivity becomes. this way, the brain eventually develops complex connectivity webs of neural firings for moral and ethical judgment. the brain does this work by bringing in previously stored information and knowledge and by repeating and adjusting previous firing mechanisms (rudebeck et al. 2008). in doing so, it deals with more context-based (value-oriented) “reasoning,” together with such emotional responses as pride, honor, guilt, respect, embarrassment, worthiness, disillusionment, and disdain. these feelings are socially-induced emotive reactions that can be categorically differentiated from primary emotions such as raw anger, fear, and sexual impulse. with these new webs of reasoning schema, the brain can now deploy a kind of cognitive guideline or “cultural gps” for future events. environment is full of stimuli and if we see and register everything it will cause total chaos. when the brain gets repeatedly exposed to similar (meaningful) stimuli over time, then certain patterns of neuron connectivity become more primed, reinforced, and stabilized. then the brain begins to guide us as to how and in what ways we “see” the future stimuli from the environment. the important point here is that the brain’s cultural gps guides us not to see certain stimuli while selectively guiding us to see other stimuli. due to the fact that all human perceptions and experiences are mediated through this brain’s priming mechanism, we tend to hold certain firing mechanisms for interpreting particular beliefs or behaviour as being more meaningful than others. when we encounter a new situation―such as a new business meeting, for example―our brain’s cultural gps promotes or demotes certain forms of behaviour in complex ways: for instance, as to when and how we should speak out, or remain silent in the meeting. the relatively stable sets of integrated schema dictate not only “how we think,” but also “how we feel.” from a neuro-scientific standpoint, we can thus define culture in the following manner. please imagine a situation where two persons experience very similar life circumstances of mental schema creation, while receiving opinions: all about culture 127 similar positive and/or negative reinforcements (such as awards and punishments). it is likely that they will develop a somewhat similar “how to think” and “how to feel” schematic connectivity over time. just as important as their sharing of cognitive connectivity is the sharing of affective connectivity, because affect impacts these individuals’ mutual feelings, trust, friendship, and camaraderie. it is predicted that these two people will develop the neural capacity to understand each other’s learned perspectives and behavioural outcomes. although this argument does not take into consideration the stakeholders’ biological or genetic make-ups, it is important to note that individuals who have similar priming experiences share some “circuits in the brain.” thus the experiences of the individual brain overlap with those of others to form collective aspects of group-level gps. this means that the same brain areas in different stakeholders in a group are likely to get activated not only when they are involved in the first person perspective (i do/i feel), but also when they are concerned with the third person perspective (i “see” what he does and i know how he feels). it is quite likely that these individuals with particular cognitive circuits feel more comfortable with those who possess similar sets of neural connectivity because they are able to predict how the other tends to think/feel. if these persons share dense schematic connectivity with one another, it is easier for them to “put oneself in someone else’s shoes,” and to get the exact meaning of an issue almost instinctively without further articulation. predictive knowledge may also enhance trust, respect, and momentum for collaboration, because “trust” is belief in a positive future outcome due to the perceived probability of the actions of others. in other words, if people can count on one another, they can collaborate with ease. although never clearly stated in this way, this sense of trust is the base logic underpinnig some ceos’ desire to maintain the good old boys’ tacit communication at the top. the argument i present here helps us improve cultural strategies for organizational change. we now know that brain pathways can change as long as they are fired in certain scripted ways over an extended period of time, repeatedly, with positive or negative rewards and punishment. if this priming takes place in a scripted way, the brain neurons begin to be wired together. thus new learning takes place and, as a result, the human mind and its cultural gps become “retooled” for future stimuli. culture is a malleable medium for priming cognitive and emotive connectomes inside the human brain in order to see, register, memorize and act on certain environmental stimuli. here, what and how culture lets us see is just as important as what we cannot see and register. therefore, conversely speaking, culture is a malleable medium for priming cognitive emotive connectomes inside the brain not to see, nor to register, nor to memorize, nor to act on certain environmental stimuli. by examining culture this way, we will be able to move beyond the conventional journal of business anthropology, 4(1), spring 2015 128 exploration of “polyphonic, contested and often disharmonious, discursive interactions among actors,” and to ponder what is happening in individual brains. by viewing organization as cognitive and emotive maps, we will be able to pinpoint “mental” overlaps, gaps, stresses, stretches, and, most importantly, those not-yet visible connectomic connections among stakeholders’ activities. when enough people think and feel their shared sense of purpose, retooling of connectomes for organizational change becomes possible. the highly-entrenched connectivity among core stakeholders such as board members tends to spawn a monolithic or dominant “way to see” and “way to feel.” since they share multiple decades of socialization and professionalization, and since they communicate with one another almost daily, their brains are highly primed to the existing ways of “seeing” and “not seeing.” what is more, it is not just the brain that handles this task of registering stimuli. we know that the microbes inside our “guts” may have crucial roles for our “gut feelings.” although sciences have not revealed the mechanism completely, it is an exciting new area for anthropologists to think that what we consume inside our colons may have much to do with our cultural orientation. equipped with the abovementioned neuro-sociological construct of culture, we can see that a new strategy for organizational change is now taking shape. culture does not exist without people. one role for an anthropologist, then, is to explicate the linkage between the individual agency’s neural activity for sense-making, socio-political structure, and institutional dynamics for collective transformation of our community. references bruner, edward. m. 1986 “ experience and its expressions.” in victor w. turner and edward m. bruner (eds.), the anthropology of experience, champaign, il: university of illinois press, pp.3-32. hagmann, patrick, sporns, o.,, madan, n., cammoun, l., pienaar, r., wedeen, v. j., meuli, r., thiran, j-p. and p. e. grant 2010 “white matter maturation reshapes structural connectivity in the late developing human brain.” pnas (the proceedings of the national academy of sciences of the united states of america) vol. 107, no. 44: 19067–72. http://www.pnas.org/content/107/44/19067.full mckinsey & company 2013 women matter: report 2013. gender diversity in top management. http://www.mckinsey.com/features/women_matter rudebeck, peter h., behrens, t. e., kennerley, s. w., baxter, m. g., buckley, m. j., walton, m. e. and m. f. s. rushworth 2008 “frontal cortex http://www.pnas.org/search?author1=p.+hagmann&sortspec=date&submit=submit http://www.pnas.org/search?author1=o.+sporns&sortspec=date&submit=submit http://www.pnas.org/content/107/44/19067.short#aff-3 http://www.pnas.org/search?author1=n.+madan&sortspec=date&submit=submit http://www.pnas.org/search?author1=l.+cammoun&sortspec=date&submit=submit http://www.pnas.org/search?author1=r.+pienaar&sortspec=date&submit=submit http://www.pnas.org/search?author1=v.+j.+wedeen&sortspec=date&submit=submit http://www.pnas.org/search?author1=v.+j.+wedeen&sortspec=date&submit=submit http://www.pnas.org/search?author1=r.+meuli&sortspec=date&submit=submit http://www.pnas.org/search?author1=j.-p.+thiran&sortspec=date&submit=submit http://www.pnas.org/search?author1=p.+e.+grant&sortspec=date&submit=submit http://www.pnas.org/content/107/44/19067.full http://www.mckinsey.com/features/women_matter http://www.jneurosci.org/content/28/51/13775.short opinions: all about culture 129 subregions play distinct roles in choices between actions and stimuli.” journal of neuroscience. vol. 28, no. 51: 13775-85. turner, victor w. and edward bruner m. (eds.), 1986 the anthropology of experience, champaign il: university of illinois press. * * * culture and keywords in organisations: a case of continual contestation susan wright (aarhus university) i approach “organisational culture” as a continual contest over keywords that are never capable of a closed meaning or final resolution. central to this approach is, first, analysing how managers, or those aspiring to leadership, try to assert the right and power to shape an organisation’s central concepts―not least the concept of the organisation’s “culture” itself. often the meaning of a keyword does not change alone, but its previous associations with other words are broken up, and its meaning is reformed through linkage to new words, in what i call a new “semantic cluster.” this contest over the power to define keywords and assemble new semantic clusters is analysed to see what kind of organisation the leaders are trying to create. the second question is whether and how other participants in the organisation are unpacking this semantic cluster and exposing the meanings that are being asserted for these words? and third, are they able to put forward alternative meanings for these words, or a different semantic cluster around the keyword, in order to project an alternative vision of the organisation and its management? who in this contest has the skill and power to make their definition of keywords “stick” (thompson 1984) and become instantiated in institutional practices? this approach to organisational culture derives from the way “culture” was being discussed in anthropology and cultural studies in the 1980s and 1990s, and is in contrast to the way organisational studies focused on culture at that time (wright 1994, 2005). in organisational studies, following peters and waterman (1982), writers came to expect that all employees of a private company would endorse certain core values and would associate such values with the organisation’s “culture.” they often looked to anthropology to legitimise their use of this concept. in doing so, they were appealing to an “old” idea of culture from which anthropologists were fast distancing themselves (wright 1998). this is http://www.jneurosci.org/content/28/51/13775.short journal of business anthropology, 4(1), spring 2015 130 the idea that a “people” or society has one shared and consensual set of values that is homogeneously spread among all the members and underpins all aspects of the way they organise their life. when this idea of culture was adopted as a management tool, the challenge for managers was to establish a set of core values for their organisation that would cohere all its members together, from the ceo to the doorman, and underpin the way they all did their work. initially this unitary idea of culture had enabled anthropologists in the 1920s to make the radical argument that it was not just colonial powers which had culture; every “people” had a culture and all cultures were valid, if different, and should be respected. by the 1980s, this idea had lost its radical edge. this idea of culture had become a tool of government: spaces to be governed were divided into “cultures,” the supposedly static and homogeneous characteristics of each culture were “known” and even listed, and practices of government and methods of control were developed accordingly. anthropologists critiqued their own practice and realised that their depictions of a people’s culture had often been through fieldworkers” using dominant men as their “chief informants.” instead of lending authenticity to dominant voices, there was a growing call within anthropology to “study up” and explore how people’s lives were shaped or influenced by systems of bureaucratic government or new forms of imperialism (nader 1969, gough 1968). an article by talal asad (1979) was especially influential in making anthropologists realise that the unitary view of culture is a representation of a dominant ideology; that people positioned differently in the society might have very different ideas; and that culture is always changing―it only seems homogeneous and static in moments of hegemony. at the same time, cultural studies developed a repertoire of new concepts and methods for studying how people in their everyday lives interacted with processes of governing. central to their approach was the idea that culture is contested. stuart hall at the birmingham centre for contemporary cultural studies (cccs) drew on gramsci, among other european political philosophers, to examine the thatcher years in the uk as a contested process of asserting hegemony (hall 1988). strongly informed by cccs, the core cultural studies course at sussex university posed, as the central question to ask of any situation: “who has the power to define what, for whom, with what material consequences?” raymond williams at cambridge showed that central to any process of social transformation is contestation over the meaning of “keywords” (1976). he drew on gallie’s much earlier insight that some words are central to debates over how to conceptualise and organise society and polity. these words never have a closed and final meaning; they are “essentially contested concepts” (gallie 1956). williams showed how words such a “culture” accumulate a history of meanings and in emergent situations, they acquire new meanings, existing meanings are stretched, or old meanings come again to the fore. street (1993) brought these strands of opinions: all about culture 131 thinking from anthropology and cultural studies together by declaring “culture is a verb.” that is, he argued against anthropology’s old nominative definition of the culture of a people and argued instead that culture is a “doing word,” constantly shaping and changing in a process of social contestation. how can these ideas of culture be used to analyse the significance of current contestations over the keyword “freedom” in u.s. universities, as an example of organisations that are in a process of transformation? u.s. universities were once famously depicted as systems where departments and other units were only “loosely coupled” to the central management (weick 1976). in the last 20 years presidents and chancellors have been trying to turn universities into top-down managed and coherent organisations. they model their idea of a university as an organisation on an image of a private sector business with its “corporate culture” asserting hegemonic control and apparent consensus among employees (kunda 1992, casey 1995). to make “culture” into a tool of management, they need to appropriate its keywords, and especially the “bedrock” of university culture: academic freedom. analysing this process through the perspective of “new” ideas of culture in anthropology and cultural studies, the first step is to question how presidents and chancellors are trying to redefine the meaning of “freedom,” often by breaking up its previous associations with other words and linking it to new words in a new “semantic cluster.” the second question is whether and how academics and students are exposing the meanings that presidents and chancellors are asserting for these words? and third, are academics and students able not just to contest the presidents” and chancellors” ideas of freedom but to put forward alternative meanings for these words which convey a different vision of the organisation and management of the university? finally, whose ideas gain such dominance that they become authoritative by being incorporated into the university’s procedures and practices and sometimes become so widely accepted and taken-for-granted that they gain the hegemonic status of the new normal? where there is access for ethnographic research these questions can be followed through events and through time to analyse how a process of transformation of the key cultural concepts comes about – a research strategy wright and reinhold (2011) call “studying through.” however, some of this process can be gleaned by asking these questions of publicly available documents, as is the cases below. in 2014-15, university chancellors and presidents in the u.s. issued a spate of open letters to their faculty arguing that academic freedom had to be exercised with “civility” in order to make the campus “safe” for all students, academics and staff. this set off a debate about whether it was just chancellors and presidents who had the power to define university “freedom,” or whether academics and students also had the right to journal of business anthropology, 4(1), spring 2015 132 participate in defining and practicing “freedom” as a concept that is central to university culture. ever since the students” free speech movement on the campus of the university of california, berkeley in 1964-5, u.s. universities have been a prime site for americans to exercise their first amendment protection of speech, both civil and uncivil. these civil rights have been reinforced and enhanced by agreements on academic freedom (regarding research and teaching), security of tenure against dismissal for political reasons, and shared governance between faculty and university administration (in which the former are involved in decisions that rest on academic evaluation, including hiring, tenure and promotion). together these are the bedrock of “freedom” as the core principle of the u.s. university. university faculty and students are to use this freedom to fulfil their responsibility to society: it is their role to identify injustices, critique conventional wisdoms, and question prevailing ways of doing things in their own disciplines, in their society and in the world, and to propose alternatives. what happens to this concept of academic freedom if presidents and chancellors try to assert the power to define it and associate it with “civility” and “safety’? one example of the language linking “freedom” to “civility” and “security” is found in the statement that chancellor dirks (2014) made to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the free speech movement at the university of california berkeley: “… free speech is the cornerstone of our nation and society … for a half century now, our university has been a symbol and embodiment of that ideal... [but] when issues are inherently divisive, controversial and capable of arousing strong feelings, the commitment to free speech and expression can lead to division and divisiveness that undermine a community’s foundation. … specifically, we can only exercise our right to free speech insofar as we feel safe and respected in doing so, and this in turn requires that people treat each other with civility… insofar as we wish to honor the ideal of free speech, therefore, we should do so by exercising it graciously.” this sounds very reasonable and many academics also dislike the gratuitous insults and nastiness that sometimes oust attempts at academic discussion, but why is a chancellor telling his faculty this? a faculty member and blogger, michael meranze (2014), pointed out that “civility” had been deployed to demonise students in the 1960s” freedom of speech movement as “barbarians at the gates of proper university discourse and debate.” meranze surmises that the chancellor, as a scholar of indian history who showed how a long period of english colonial rule had been justified under the terms of liberal civility, surely realises that his repetitive invocation of "civil" and "civility" and his paternalistic opinions: all about culture 133 instruction in “gracious” manners does not facilitate open debate. rather, by equating safety with a “crimped vision of civility” and anodyne debate, the upper administrators have employed the language of civility to override the outcome of the academic process and to intrude into the independence of academic decisions (ibid.). calls for “civility” were also made the chancellor at penn state when there were deep disagreements among alumni, faculty and students over controversial management actions that followed their deputy football coach being found guilty of 45 counts of child sexual abuse. whereas the football team had been a focus of college unity and sense of community, now it was divisive. on the eve of the first home match of the season, the new president (barron 2014a and b) published a letter, backed by the entire leadership of 83 people, and he made a youtube video appealing to faculty and students to restore the “core values” of “respect and civility” on which an academic community is based. these core values may be indisputable, but those contesting the decisions of the university leaders felt civility was being mobilised to close off debate. this language, linking “freedom” to “civility” and “security” is found in other instances when questionable administrative decisions have provoked divisions among the faculty, and when leaders are trying to assert a right to top-down management of what others maintain is an academic community with shared governance. for example, in a blog, the chancellor of the university of illinois at urbana-champaign explained to colleagues why the board of trustees had rescinded a tenure-job offer just prior to the professor starting teaching (wise 2014). steven salaita is a palestinianamerican who researches and teaches native american history. in a private capacity, he tweeted in strong terms about the israeli bombing of gaza. the chancellor explained that she is absolutely committed to the “bedrock principle” of academic freedom, but that it is her responsibility to ensure that differing points of view are “discussed in and outside the classroom in a scholarly, civil and productive manner” (ibid.). she is committed to “creating a welcoming environment for faculty and students alike to explore the most difficult, contentious and complex issues facing our society today,” but: “what we cannot and will not tolerate at the university of illinois are personal and disrespectful words or actions that demean and abuse either viewpoints themselves or those who express them…. “a jewish student, a palestinian student, or any student of any faith or background must feel confident that personal views can be expressed and that philosophical disagreements with a faculty member can be debated in a civil, thoughtful and mutually respectful manner” (ibid.). three hundred faculty responded in an open letter (weblog 2014) journal of business anthropology, 4(1), spring 2015 134 contesting the chancellor’s definition of academic freedom. they argued, first, that shared governance was also a bedrock of academic freedom. professor salaita had been selected for the job on academic grounds and by following due process from the department through the echelons of the university. by retracting salaita’s job offer just before he started work and a few days after his gaza tweets with no apparent faculty consultation, “the chancellor violated the university’s established procedures and principles of shared governance.” second, they defended the right of academics, as citizens, to exercise freedom of speech. they argued that “a faculty member’s extramural political opinions have no place in the evaluation of that individual's scholarship, teaching, or collegiality” and “salaita’s record of highly reputed scholarship and teaching is nowhere in dispute.” they called the decision “a dangerous attack on academic freedom which will exert a chilling effect on political speech throughout our campus.” third, they asserted that it was they who were defending the integrity of the university. if, as it was reported, the decision was a hurried response to “particular donors” and a “campaign by off-campus political groups to tarnish salaita as an anti-semitic critic of israel,” the university of illinois appeared to have disregarded its own protocols for handling concerns from the public. this meant “the integrity and reputation of our campus has suffered a terrible blow.” they were “concerned that the revocation of salaita’s position might embolden intolerant forces in the community and on campus. these actions have already created a climate of fear and stoked an already tense racial climate” (ibid.). fourth they exposed and critiqued the chancellor’s association of academic freedom with “civility” and “safety.” they recognised the importance of civil discourse, but it was “troubling” that the chancellor and board have described this decision as a victory for civility, academic excellence, and “robust debate.” acting “in the name of promoting student “comfort” or assuring a "welcoming environment" is, in effect, to license political censorship and arbitrary decree. it unacceptably endows the chancellor and board with authority to monitor, evaluate, and punish faculty members for the way they exercise their rights and duties as citizens” (ibid.). in their letter, the faculty effectively challenged the chancellor’s definition of “freedom” and the link she claimed between freedom, citizenship, civility and comfort; and they asserted the right to participate in shaping their organisation through their version of “freedom,” by defending the university’s public reputation, its heated though reasoned debates, internal diversity and shared governance. but the faculty campaign, backed by letters from several professional associations (aaa 2014, aha 2014, mesa 2014), did not reverse the decision. opinions: all about culture 135 to sum up the general points arising from these examples, first, it is not an unusual tactic for people in senior positions to publish statements in which they claim the right to define a word that is key to the culture of their organisation or community and to translate that into an associated set of practices for their institution. home office ministers in the u.k. have periodically issued statements claiming the right to define “british culture” at moments when their hegemony is threatened. notably, following the ayatollah khomeini’s fatwa against the author salman rushdie, the home office minister sent an open letter to british muslims explaining how they should abide by the core institutions of british culture (asad 1993). more recently, in the face of scandals in some muslim schools, the department of education (2014) issued advice to all heads of schools and teachers that translated their legal obligation to “promote the spiritual, moral, cultural, mental and physical development of pupils” into “actively promoting british values.” second, the contest is focused on warm words that all in the organisation or community hold dear and that cannot be opposed. nobody in the university can advocate the opposite of “freedom,” nor could they be outright opposed to freedom’s new subalterns, security, civility and democracy. the contest has to be conducted inside these words. the challenge is to uncover the ways particularly positioned people are making subtle shifts in the meaning of the keyword itself and through a new cluster of associated words, and to expose the implications for the “bedrock” values of the institution. a third common feature is that the contest over the power to define keywords has material consequences and is intimately linked to changes in institutional practices. in the above examples, the leadership is advancing “civility” to close down discussion of its own controversial actions, and diminish the role of academics and students in shared governance and political participation in the shaping of “their” institution. at the same time, leaders are claiming their universities depend for their vibrancy on being “communities”―just ones that they themselves define. by envisaging organisational culture as continually contested rather than as an a priori unity, “culture” becomes a powerful analytical tool for investigating such moments of organisational change. references asad, talal 1979 “anthropology and the analysis of ideology.” man: journal of the royal anthropological institute, 14(4): 607-27. asad, talal 1993 “multiculturalism and british identity in the wake of the rushdie affair.” in his genealogies of religion. baltimore: hopkins university press, pp. 239-268. journal of business anthropology, 4(1), spring 2015 136 casey, catherine 1995 work, self, and society : after industrialism. london and new york: routledge. gallie, w. b. 1956 “essentially contested concepts.” proceedings of the aristotelian society, 56: 167-98. gough, kathleen 1968 anthropology and imperialism. boston, mass.: new england free press. hall, stuart 1988 the hard road to renewal. thatcherism and the crisis of the left. london: verso. kunda, gideon. 1992. engineering culture: control and commitment in a high-tech corporation. philadelphia, pa: temple university press. nader, laura 1969 “up the anthropologist : perspectives gained from studying up.” in dell hymes (ed.), reinventing anthropology. new york: random house. peter, tom and waterman, robert h. 1982 in search of excellence. new york: harper and row. street, brian v. 1993 “culture is a verb: anthropological aspects of language and cultural process.” in graddol, d., thompson, l. and m. byram (eds), language and culture. clevedon, uk: baal in association with multilingual matters. pp. 23–43. thompson, john b. 1984 studies in the theory of ideology. cambridge: polity. weick, karl 1976 “educational organizations as loosely coupled systems.” administrative science quarterly, 21: 1-9 (part 1). williams, raymond 1976 keywords. a vocabulary of culture and society. london: fontana press. wright, susan 1994 “‘culture’ in anthropology and organizational studies.” in s. wright (ed.), anthropology of organizations london: routledge, pp. 1-34. wright, susan 1998 “politicisation of culture.” anthropology today, 14(1): 7-15. wright, susan 2005, “processes of social transformation: an anthropology of english higher education policy.” in john krejsler, niels kryger, and jon milner (eds), pædagogisk antropologi―et fag i tilblivelse. copenhagen: danmarks pædagogiske universitets forlag. wright, susan and reinhold, sue 2011 “‘studying through’: a strategy for studying political transformations. or sex, lies and british politics.” in cris shore, susan wright 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https://www.historians.org/news-and-advocacy/statements-andresolutions-of-support-and-protest/letter-of-concern-to-university-ofillinois-chancellor-regarding-salaita-case (accessed 8 april 2015) barron, eric j., president of penn state university 2014a “a message from the leadership at penn state.” 5 september http://news.psu.edu/story/325057/2014/09/05/message-leadershippenn-state (accessed 8 april 2015). barron, eric j., president of penn state university 2014b “civility and respect.” you tube video, 4 september, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nzt3wcsuvc8 (accessed 8 april 2015). dirks, nicholas, chancellor of university of california berkeley 2014 “from the free speech movement to the reign of civility.” an open letter to faculty, staff and students. 5 september. http://reclaimuc.blogspot.dk/2014/09/from-free-speech-movement-toreign-of.html (accessed 9 april 2015). meranze, michael 2014 “the order of civility.” remaking the university blog, 7 september. 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chancellor of university of illinois at urbana-champaign https://aaanet.files.wordpress.com/2014/09/140904-aaa_officers_ltr_wise_re_salaita.pdf https://aaanet.files.wordpress.com/2014/09/140904-aaa_officers_ltr_wise_re_salaita.pdf https://www.historians.org/news-and-advocacy/statements-and-resolutions-of-support-and-protest/letter-of-concern-to-university-of-illinois-chancellor-regarding-salaita-case https://www.historians.org/news-and-advocacy/statements-and-resolutions-of-support-and-protest/letter-of-concern-to-university-of-illinois-chancellor-regarding-salaita-case https://www.historians.org/news-and-advocacy/statements-and-resolutions-of-support-and-protest/letter-of-concern-to-university-of-illinois-chancellor-regarding-salaita-case http://news.psu.edu/story/325057/2014/09/05/message-leadership-penn-state http://news.psu.edu/story/325057/2014/09/05/message-leadership-penn-state https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nzt3wcsuvc8 http://reclaimuc.blogspot.dk/2014/09/from-free-speech-movement-to-reign-of.html http://reclaimuc.blogspot.dk/2014/09/from-free-speech-movement-to-reign-of.html http://utotherescue.blogspot.dk/2014/09/the-order-of-civility.html http://utotherescue.blogspot.dk/2014/09/the-order-of-civility.html http://utotherescue.blogspot.dk/2015/03/crisis-over-expression-continues-at-uc.html http://utotherescue.blogspot.dk/2015/03/crisis-over-expression-continues-at-uc.html http://mesana.org/committees/academic-freedom/intervention/letters-north-america.html#us20140811 http://mesana.org/committees/academic-freedom/intervention/letters-north-america.html#us20140811 http://uiucfaculty.blogspot.dk/?m=1 http://uiucfaculty.blogspot.dk/?m=1 http://uiucfaculty.blogspot.dk/2014/08/open-letter-to-chancellor-phyllis-wise.html http://uiucfaculty.blogspot.dk/2014/08/open-letter-to-chancellor-phyllis-wise.html journal of business anthropology, 4(1), spring 2015 138 2014 “the principles on which we stand.” chancellor's blog 22 august. https://illinois.edu/blog/view/1109/115906 (accessed 8 april 2015). * * * what “culture” can do for business anthropology gert jan hofstede (wageningen university) on my 58th birthday, i received a friendly email message from jakob krause-jensen asking me for a “short and informal opinion piece about ‘culture.’” jakob explained: “it should be about the way you’ve used it and the role it has played in your research; whether you think it’s a meaningful analytical concept or whether, as many anthropologists seem to believe, we should discard it.” you see, i am used to being invited by companies, universities, governments, cross-cultural psychologists―but rarely by sociologists, let alone anthropologists. here was an anthropologist inviting me, knowing full well that i was not in-group, for my deviant opinion. i decided it was a birthday present and gladly accepted. of course, i have found “culture” an analytically most useful concept. as a researcher, i consider myself an explorer, a “forager in intellectual space” (a phrase from yoshi kashima, a psychologist from melbourne) who wants to chart new territory. in my case my dream is to achieve a helicopter perspective on human behaviour that is of practical use. an explorer needs tools: a compass, a swiss army knife, some good rope. these tools have no need to be “true,” but they need to be useful in the real world: to allow me to cut branches, climb trees, achieve perspective and find my way. as such, culture has served me very well. besides being an explorer i am also, by education, a biologist. when i started in 1976 the choice was between levels of aggregation: cell, individual, population. dna had just been discovered, and the brain hype had not yet begun. anyway, i chose population, focusing on animal behaviour and plant ecology, but i never forgot that reality is too complex for us to grasp it all using one level of analysis. after my studies, the job market drove me to computer programming. the advent of the world wide web in the mid-nineties brought organizational life back within the scope of information systems professionals, and since then i have happily been a biologist of human social behaviour. i read the second issue of the jba (moeran, 2012) with some care and considerable pleasure. if my understanding is good, here is a group https://illinois.edu/blog/view/1109/115906 opinions: all about culture 139 that is concerned with its delineation and raison d’être, that values style, erudition, examples from practice, and inclusive democracy. it hesitates to claim truth. its mission is something like “describe organizational life as it really is, and make the members of the organization see this.” that’s an aim close to my own one, zoomed in on life in organizations. please forgive me for digressing into a little argument at this point. an out-group mentioned by some―for instance, eric arnould and richard swedberg―with derogatory undertones is constituted by economists. the latter writes “by closely observing what actually happens, rather than engaging in theory-driven research of the type that economists tend to engage in…” (p. 283). while i sympathize with the feeling that quite a few economists tend to disregard social reality, i highlight the remark about theory, because you might be throwing out the baby with the bath water. i have had the experience that sociologists have criticized my work for being theory-driven. what is wrong with that, if the theory can help people make sense of things? nothing is more practical than a good theory; it is dogmatic use of poor theory that we should avoid. in what follows i’ll try to argue which theories, including culture, have served me well and could serve business anthropologists. i shall cut corners in the most dreadful way in so doing, for which i ask your tolerance. in particular, i shall not summarise any theory on culture, nor discuss various possible meanings of the word. i’m adding references that fill some of the gaps. levels of analysis social simulation has been my focus recently. this implies inventing models that re-create aspects of social life in virtual humans, and it therefore leans heavily on theory. what levels of analysis do i think are crucial to my grand aim? these are the individual, the group, and humanity as a whole. of these, the last is the most important. it is about regularities that apply to everyone. everyone as a biologist, i consider myself and my conspecifics to be social mammals living in a world of group-based status relationships, with power as a mechanism for when things go wrong. my most helpful tool in this area is theodore kemper’s status-power theory (kemper, 2011). because i believe this theory to be useful for business anthropologists and too little known, i shall give a succinct summary of its argument here. kemper, a sociologist based in new york, posits in a brilliant book that the essence of our social lives is to confer, and to claim, status. “status” here can mean attention, love, respect, honour, proficiency, and so on and so forth. we wish for nothing better than to confer status upon the worthy. whatever journal of business anthropology, 4(1), spring 2015 140 substantial aim anyone tries to achieve, says kemper, there must be a status-power impact to it. for instance, when jacob invited me to write this paper he conferred a lot of status upon me: it was a flattering request. the fact that i consented is a status claim on my part: i claim to be interesting and instructive to the community of business anthropologists. whether this community grants my status claim remains to be seen; i hope to be found worthy. in kemper’s language, power enters the arena when this game of mutual status conferral and granted claims fails, which it does as soon as claims outweigh conferrals. a refusal to publish a paper constitutes a power move by an editor. power can be institutionalized. if a community has granted certain powers to some of its members, kemper calls this authority. power use always comes at the price of creating resentment, though this can be much mitigated in the case of authority. hence it always pays to be nice about things, and to disguise status claims and power moves as status conferrals. groups in outlining his theory, kemper adds that people play their status-power game in groups, not just as individuals. they like to be with groups that confer status on them, and try to get away from groups that do not. they also play the game at a group level, trying to claim status for the groups to which they commit, and downplaying the status of other groups. grouplevel phenomena of this kind have been extensively tested by social psychologists, well summarized in the work of the english psychologist, rupert brown (brown, 2000). my most useful tool regarding groups is “culture.” culture, as i use the word, constitutes the unwritten rules of the social game (g. hofstede, hofstede, & minkov, 2010). culture is in our nature: that is, all people share the capacity for culture. culture in this sense fits seamlessly with kemper’s model. this is not the place to enter into detail (but see g. j. hofstede, 2013). let me indicate that culture is about the social unit that is worthy of status conferrals, the desirable degree of symmetry of status relationships across ages, genders and roles, the degree to which power use is acceptable, the rigidity of status-power rules, and similar broad questions that make up the basic fabric of societies. we are socialized into our culture from birth, in inescapable ways. in my father’s famous phrase, culture constitutes the “software of our minds.” individuals so far, i have not said anything about individuals, and yet it is individuals who carry the behavioural tendencies described by kemper, hofstede, brown, and thousands of other scholars. this only seems to be a paradox. opinions: all about culture 141 certainly, every individual, every dyad, every group, every work situation, is unique. still, it is possible to make statements at higher levels of aggregation that have empirical validity and predictive power: for example, about an organization or country. it is not because every day has its own weather that we cannot speak of a country’s climate and talk sense. this is where i believe that anthropologists tend to differ from biologists. anthropologists like to zoom in and see differences, where biologists look for regularities. the former wish to know the weather, the latter the climate. these can be complementary endeavours. for instance, using interviews over an eleven-year interval, a recent case study of a cross-cultural merger discovered that, while dimensional theory predicted what kinds of problems could occur, social constructivist theory found out whether they were likely to occur in this particular case (lee, kim, & park, 2014). the fact that these authors found merit in both approaches, by the way, testifies to a “swiss army knife attitude” towards theory. i like that. institutions one thing i’d like to add here, although it is not a level of analysis, is the fact that we humans are so good at what biologists call niche construction. we do this not only in the physical world, which we are altering at a staggering scale, but also in the symbolic world. we construct reputations and myths. we admire heroes. we engage in rituals and spend our lives doing things in the name of institutions. some or other species of social animals do most of these, but we have refined language and added script and money. a theory that helps me here is us philosopher john searle’s “social construction of reality” (searle, 1995). yet i do not believe that all this impressive institutional activity makes us any less biological, or diminishes in any way our basic nature as a social mammal living in groups with intensive fission-fusion activity. we have merely added a trick or two to the bag used by other mammals. summing up to conclude the tour of levels of analysis: i believe culture to be right at the centre of our lives as social mammals. culture makes up the unwritten rules that keep us from having to fight over social and physical resources all the time. it allows us to stay away from the use of power and to successfully play the status game. any group of people put together for any amount of time will develop culture. getting to know that culture is a central endeavour for business anthropologists, and a difficult one, because of the tendency of both the status-power game and its cultural variations to be hidden from the consciousness of its players. journal of business anthropology, 4(1), spring 2015 142 culture in my research how have i myself used the concept of culture? this takes me back to lausanne, switzerland, in the early seventies, where i had a wonderful time at the college de l’elysée. although i’d learned french in the netherlands, nothing had prepared me for the social life in my new country. on the one hand, there were discussion groups in which teachers and pupils sat together in the most egalitarian way. on the other hand, there were adversarial relations, including the pupil-made weekly zéro de conduit; the ritualized wrestling sport lutte suisse only accessible to boys; the strange fact that boys had no first names and girls no family names; and a sit-down strike ended by a school director brandishing a whip. such a man would have been considered mentally deranged back in the netherlands. these and other events were discussed at home, and my dad used the burgeoning “dimensions of culture” he was discovering in his research material to make sense of differences between the netherlands and suisse romande. i remembered these lessons twenty-odd years later when, as a computer scientist, i became involved in a project about the “international office of the future.” this led to a phase in which i created simulation games about information management in international settings, using my father’s dimensions as scripting devices: so-called synthetic cultures (g. j. hofstede & pedersen, 1999; g. j. hofstede, pedersen, & hofstede, 2002). these games found wide application. they showed among others that the same explicit game rules, when played by people from a different culture, lead to predictably different game dynamics (g. j. hofstede & tipton murff, 2011). my next research phase involved transparency and trust in networks of organizations, centred on supply chains. this led to some publications that show how building a supply chain, rather than another form of governance, is much more likely in some cultures than in others (g. j. hofstede, spaans, schepers, trienekens, & beulens, 2004). during the past decade i became involved in social simulation, which has the aim to reproduce aspects of human social behaviour. the trick here is that one has to teach one’s virtual humans every little thing. unlike real people in a simulation game, virtual “agents” have no innate drives or culture. so in order to program them, one really has to get to the bottom of the matter. kemper’s and hofstede’s theory so far seem to do the trick pretty well for me (g. j. hofstede, dignum, prada, student, & vanhée, 2015), although other theories can work too (see, for example, heise, 2013). a crucial, particularly thorny aspect of social simulations is that “we do not intend the consequences of our actions” (italian psychologist cristiano castelfranchi): we collectively self-organize into patterns that nobody ever intended. social simulation models allow opinions: all about culture 143 investigating these emergent patterns. concluding remarks culture has been useful to me in the sense that i have helped many practitioners make more sense of their organizational lives using culture. do i recommend “culture” for business anthropologists―or should i say for other business anthropologists? that depends on the level of analysis they seek. a researcher could zoom in on one case and be descriptive about it, without using any preconceived theoretical notions other than those embedded in language. this can yield enlightening case accounts. be this as it may, brian moeran is very explicit in stating that “we must be comparative” (moeran, 2012, p. 296). he means this in the sense of comparing either across organizations, or across societies, or both. if the community accepts this, then decidedly the two distinct concepts of culture in the hofstede perspective can be useful. i refer, first, to organizational culture, learned on entry and centred on the shared meaning of practices in organizations; and second, to national culture, learned from birth and centred on shared unwritten rules of the social game. depending on what one is comparing, other levels of culture might also be useful: for example, gender, age cohort, profession, ethnicity. to repeat: theories are best used as tools. a researcher can try if s/he can to do the job of helping compare cases; if so, they are worth using. the track record of the national culture dimensions in this regard is not bad. they tend to explain around 35 per cent of the variance of sundry phenomena that were studied using them (kirkman, lowe, & gibson, 2006; taras, kirkman, & steel, 2010) . while this is impressive, the good news is that it still leaves room for a lot of explorative work on the part of scholars, whether or not they sport the beautiful name of business anthropologists. though this be madness, there is method in it. references brown, r. (2000). group processes: dynamics within and between groups (2nd ed.). malden, ma: blackwell. heise, d. r. (2013). modeling interactions in small groups. social psychology quarterly, 76(1), 52-72. doi: 10.1177/0190272512467654 hofstede, g., hofstede, g. j., & minkov, m. (2010). cultures and organizations, software of the mind (3rd ed.). new york: mcgraw hill. hofstede, g. j. (2013). theory in social simulation: status-power theory, national culture and emergence of the glass ceiling. paper presented at the aisb 2013 social.path, exeter. hofstede, g. j., dignum, f., prada, r., student, j., & vanhée, l. (2015). journal of business anthropology, 4(1), spring 2015 144 gender differences: the role of nature, nurture, social identity and selforganization. in f. grimaldo & e. norling (eds.), mabs 2014 (vol. lnai 9002, pp. 1-16): springer. hofstede, g. j., & pedersen, p. b. (1999). synthetic cultures: intercultural learning through simulation gaming. simulation & gaming, 30(4), 415440. hofstede, g. j., pedersen, p. b., & hofstede, g. (2002). exploring culture: exercise, stories and synthetic cultures. yarmouth, maine: intercultural press. hofstede, g. j., spaans, l., schepers, h., trienekens, j. h., & beulens, a. j. m. (2004). hide or confide: the dilemma of transparency. netherlands: reed businessinformation. hofstede, g. j., & tipton murff, e. j. (2011). repurposing an old game for an international world. simulation & gaming, 43(1), 34-50. kemper, t. d. (2011). status, power and ritual interaction; a relational reading of durkheim, goffman and collins. farnham, uk: ashgate. kirkman, b. r., lowe, k. b., & gibson, c. b. (2006). a quarter century of culture's consequences: a review of empirical research incorporating hofstede's cultural values framework. journal of international business studies, 37, 285-320. lee, s.-j., kim, j., & park, b. i. (2014). culture clashes in cross-border mergers and acquisitions: a case study of sweden's volvo and south korea's samsung international business review(online first). moeran, b. (2012). opinions: what business anthropology is, what it might become...and what, perhaps, it should not be. journal of business anthropology, 1(2), 240-297. searle, j. r. (1995). the construction of social reality. london: penguin. taras, v., kirkman, b. r., & steel, p. (2010). examining the impact of culture's consequences: a three-decade, multilevel, meta-analytic review of hofstede's cultural value dimensions. journal of applied psychology, 95(3), 405-439. * * * taking culture seriously: the role of culture in the study of business wong heung-wah (the university of hong kong) opinions: all about culture 145 i have been asked to contribute an opinion piece to the journal of business anthropology about the role of culture in the study of business. i myself see the mission of the journal as a campaign not only to promote a dialogue between anthropologists and management scientists about the study of business, but also to advocate the establishment of business anthropology as a discipline. this way of seeing the journal’s mission, of course, is idiosyncratic and not necessarily agreed upon by the founders of the journal. however, i believe that it is still worthwhile exploring the theoretical and political issues involved in this two-fold mission, and that is why i am more than happy to accept the invitation. i think it is important to see the differences between the two parts of the mission. the latter is a political campaign aimed at establishing business anthropology as a new discipline, and so involves a re-allocation of resources within academic organizations, recruitment of personnel, and institutionalization of the field. that is to say, the campaign itself is not just intellectual. i have already explored the political character of the campaign in an invited lecture at kyoto university in march of this year and i do not intend to repeat what i said then here. i would rather spend the rest of this piece on the first part of my self-claimed mission of the journal: the role of culture in the study of business. to ask about the role of culture in the study of business is to ask what the place of culture is in the sociological chain of being. to answer this question involves finding out whether culture can be seen as an independent variable, or as a residual factor to be added to the more basic reason―be it sociological, economic, ecological, or what sahlins (1976) called practical. the general view among sociologists, economists, and even british social anthropologists is that culture is always a factor secondary to a more fundamental reason for, or logic of, human behaviour. most sociologists and british social anthropologists (such as radcliffe-brown), for example, have regarded culture as something idealistic or ideological, and thus less “real” than something concrete―that is, society or social structure―and it is social structure, they have said, that explains human behaviour. economists, especially our colleagues from the chicago school of economics, tend to argue that culture as a residual factor might change the priority of valuable objects people pursue. but for them the fundamental logic for human behaviour is still the principle of maximization of self-interest. in other words, so far as they are concerned, all human behaviour can be reduced to social structure or maximizing self-interest. my position is that culture is the essential condition of human existence. in this regard, i would like to point you in the direction of chapters 2 and 3 in clifford geertz’s famous book, interpretation of cultures (1973); in these he suggested that archeological discoveries proved that the emergence of culture preceeded, and to some extent journal of business anthropology, 4(1), spring 2015 146 overlapped with, the evolution of pre-human primates into homo sapiens. that is to say, to contend that pre-human primates become homo sapiens first, and then created culture, is not correct. rather, culture is a part of the environment that asserts selective pressure on the evolution of homo sapiens. it follows from this that the emergence of homo sapiens is both cultural and biological. in other words, culture is an essential condition of, rather than an additive factor to, human existence. another important observation geertz made in his book is that the major difference between homo sapiens and chimpanzees lies in the fact that homo sapiens has a much larger brain than chimpanzee because the former, geertz argued, needs a larger brain to facilitate culture as a control mechanism to discipline human behavior, while almost all of a chimpanzee’s behaviour is genetically determined. i hastily have to add here that culture can not only control but also facilitate human behaviour because it can provide meaning and thus reason for it. human behaviour is meaningful and takes place in terms of that meaning provided by culture as a symbolic system, which is never the only one possible. no chimpanzee can distinguish a cup of red wine from christ’s blood offered to christians in church every sunday because the two are the same chemically. culture is a species-specific capacity for homo sapiens rather than an additive factor to something more fundamental for human behaviour. the important implication of geertz’s excellent argument is that anything human―including business behaviour, economic organizations, and social institutions―has to be cultural, or it is nothing. it follows that the term “cultural” is a redundant word, because everything human is cultural and, more importantly, everything “social”, “economic”, or “political,” is also cultural, because society, economy, and politics are meaningfully constituted. understanding culture as a meaningful system that is never the only one possible has several important implications for the study of human behaviour. the first is that different cultures attach different meanings to the same behaviour. eating dogs is considered cannibalistic in american, but is totally legitimate in chinese, society because americans regard dogs as their family friends while chinese put them in the same category as chickens, pigs, and so on, which are edible. in the context of studying modern corporations, we cannot assume a priori that the meaning of a corporation is the same in every culture. my early ethnographic research on the hong kong subsidiary of a japanese supermarket, yaohan (wong 1999), sheds considerable light on this point, for it discovered that, although the structure and organizational patterns of japanese companies (kaisha) are similar to those of their western counterparts, the meaning of kaisha is very different from that of a western “company.” to simplify enormously, in the west, neoclassical economists tend to understand companies as an opinions: all about culture 147 instrument to maximize shareholders’ profits, while transactional economists consider them as an effective tool to minimize transactional costs. japanese people, however, tend to treat the kaisha as an end in itself. all the stakeholders of any one kaisha―including shareholders, management and employees―have to sacrifice their own interests for the continuity and prosperity of their kaisha. this is a far cry from the shareholder profit/transaction cost approach taken by western economists. the same research also discovered that when japanese people borrowed the idea of “joint-stock company” from the west in the meiji era (1858-1912), they interpreted the idea in terms of their own ie (household) tradition, in the course of which “joint-stock company” was transformed into kaisha. my anthropological conclusion of this research is that in order to have a better understanding of japanese companies, we need to pay close attention to the native, social (as opposed to economic) concept of kaisha (and we might note here that the two chinese characters used to write it are the reverse of those used to refer to “society,” or shakai). we cannot assume that the term itself is just a translation of the western “joint-stock company,” even though the two are similar structurally and organizationally. the same goes for the study of family business. as far as i know, although family business is assumed in business studies to be different from non-family business and thus deserves a discursive space for investigation, scholars of the discipline seldom take seriously the fact that different cultures have different ideas of family and that, as a result, family businesses in different cultures will display very different forms of organizational behaviour. take the chinese and japanese families as an example. again, to simplify things enormously, chinese people tend to emphasize the continuity of the genealogical line of their chia-tsu (family), while japanese people stress the continuity of the economic aspect of ie (household). this different emphasis on family ideology is also reflected in the family companies in chinese and japanese societies. chinese people do not hesitate to sacrifice the interests of their companies to ensure the continuity of the genealogical line of their family. this is why they will still pass their business to a son, even if he is clearly incapable, or even stupid. this is why family wealth in chinese societies never lasts beyond three generations. japanese people, however, will bypass their incompetent sons and hand over a family business to a capable adopted son, and more often to an adopted son-in-law (muko yōshi), in order to ensure that it can continue successfully. it is not difficult to find a small ramen (japanese noodle) shop that has 300 years of history in japan. we cannot assume, therefore, that families in different cultures are the same. neither should we regard family businesses in different cultures as displaying the same forms of corporate behaviour. again, we have to take culture seriously. journal of business anthropology, 4(1), spring 2015 148 i am not going to deny that there are and have been some scholars in business studies who pay particular attention to culture. for example, in the 1980s, as we can see in other opinions expressed here, some scholars advocated the idea of corporate culture and argued that the creation of corporate culture could help enhance employees’ productivity; others such as geert hofstede treated culture as an independent variable, and tried to explain management in terms of cultural traits. the major problem with the former, so far as i myself am concerned, is that they seem to believe that culture can be easily created out of nothing for pragmatic purposes such as profit maximization. this reminds me of what anthropologists have been (mistakenly) arguing about the invention of tradition. all traditions are created―there is no doubt about that―but traditions cannot be created in any way people want. ethnographic examples from all over the world testify to the fact that traditions are created in terms of culture: so, different cultures, different modes of inventing tradition. the problems of the second approach are, in my opinion, even more serious. first of all, what i like to think of as “hofstede co. ltd” tends to reduce the complexity of culture to a series of dimensions, and to measure different cultures in terms of these dimensions through questionnaire surveys, in order to delineate the configuration of different national cultures. these are in turn used as an independent variable to explain the differences in management practices across cultures. one of the major problems of this approach is the arbitrary selection of cultural dimensions. we can always come up with different sets of cultural dimensions to classify national cultures differently. another major problem is that such an approach ignores the intra-cultural differences caused by gender, ethnicity, age, class, and so on. more seriously, hofstede co. ltd presumes a simple cultural determinism that assumes a one-toone correspondence between culture and individual behaviour. but marshall sahlins has taught us that there is always a gap between culture and individual behavior, because the conventional value of a cultural category is different from an individual’s interest in that category. as he effectively argued (sahlins 1985: 150; italics in original) : “the value of a 5-franc is determined by the dissimilar objects with which it can be exchanged, such as so much bread or milk, and by other units of currency with which it can be contrastively compared: 1 franc, 10 francs, etc. by these relationships the significance of 5 francs in the society is determined. yet this general and virtual sense is not the value of 5 francs to me. to me, it appears as a specific interest or instrumental value, and whether i buy milk or bread with it, give it away, or put it in the bank depends on my particular circumstances and objectives. as implemented by the subject, the conceptual value acquires an intentional value―which may well be different also from opinions: all about culture 149 its conventional value.” of course, the personal objectives of individuals and their interpretation of particular circumstances, are both culturally constituted. on another occasion, sahlins (2004) argued that the family, in which the individual concerned is brought u,p has a major impact on how s/he formulates his or her objectives and interprets his or her particular circumstances. that is to say, the intervention of family is a major reason for the existence of the gap between culture and individual behaviour. all of this suggests that individual behaviour and culture are phenomena of two different orders: the former cannot be directly reduced to the latter, and vice versa. it follows that individual behaviour cannot explain the configuration of a culture; nor can the latter determine the former. as sahlins argued, “[j]ust because what is done is culturally logical does not mean the logic determined that it be done―let alone by whom, when or why―any more than just because what i say is grammatical, grammar caused me to say it” (sahlins 1999: 409). this decisively undermines the simple cultural determinism assumed by hofstede co. ltd. in short, any theoretical framework through which human behaviour is understood has to consist of three terms: culture, individual behavior, and mediation of the two. under such a theoretical framework, scientific explanation should consist in showing: first, how individual behaviour is ordered by culture; and second, how and why individual behaviour is not prescribed by culture. obviously, this scientific operation does not aim to reduce the complex to the simple, in the way that the natural sciences have been doing and are continuing to do. rather, it aims to substitute a complex picture of human behaviour with another picture produced by researchers which is as complex as, but more intelligible than, the original picture. i believe this is what good anthropologists have been and are doing. what the anthropologist does in ethnography is to reproduce in his or her mind the cultural logic displayed in the behaviour of the other that s/he observes in the field (sahlins 2000). this competence in reproduction of the cultural logic of the other can be attributed to the common species-specific capacity: culture. in other words, for the study of human behaviour, the method and the object of study are the same. the researcher and the object of study have the same ontological status. in the study of nature, on the other hand, the researcher is a species with symbolic ability and the object of study is not. thus the basic assumption of the distinction between subject and object may not be applicable to anthropology. the implications of this argument are several. any understanding of human behaviour involves human subjective reproduction of the cultural logic of the other by the researcher. it follows that the general impression we generated from natural science that “objectivity” is a critical criterion that guarantees the “trueness” of research results may not be applicable journal of business anthropology, 4(1), spring 2015 150 to the study of human behaviour. secondly, if we agree that by reproducing the cultural logic of the other, we make the other familiar and thus understandable, it follows that we should understand the other subjectively from within. this notion of understanding is very different from that found in natural science, which tends to start from an opposite standpoint; that is, understanding natural things objectively from outside. as sahlins (2000: 30) argues: “indeed, the more we know about physical objects the less familiar they become, the more remote they stand from any human experience. the molecular structure of the table on which i write is far removed from my sense of it―let alone, to speak of what is humanly communicable, my use of it or my purchase of it. nor i will ever appreciate tableness, rockiness, or the like in the way i might know cannibalism. on the contrary, by the time one gets to the deeper nature of material things as discovered by quantum physics, it can only be described in the form of mathematical equations, so much does this understanding depart from our ordinary ways of perceiving and thinking objects. the reason anthropologists can understand the other is because we and the other are the same: both of us have culture. that is to say, culture is both our genesis and our tool to understand the other. or, culture is what constitutes our business organizations and management behaviour and also our tool to understand those forms of organization and behaviour. references geertz, c. 1973 the interpretation of cultures. new york: basic books. sahlins, m. 1976 culture and practical reason. chicago and london: the university of chicago press. sahlins, m. 1985 islands of history. chicago and london: the university of chicago press. sahlins, m. 1999 two or three things that i know about culture. the journal of the royal anthropological institute, 5(3), 399-421. sahlins, m. 2004 apologies to thucydides: understanding history as culture and vice versa. chicago and london: the university of chicago press. wong, h. w. 1999 japanese bosses, chinese workers: power and control in a hong kong megastore. richmond: curzon press. stull formatted with page numbers v.2           cows,  pigs,  corporations,  and  anthropologists     donald  d.  stull               abstract   “industrial  meat”  is  produced  by  many  actors—from  growers  to  eaters,   from  processors  to  retailers,  from  multinational  corporations  to   unauthorized  immigrant  workers.  it  epitomizes  what  joseph  schumpeter   called  capitalism’s  “creative  destruction,”  as  companies  rise  and  fall,  all   the  while  providing  meat  to  an  ever  expanding  population.  for  three   decades,  the  author  has  critically  examined  the  social,  economic,  and   environmental  consequences  of  the  meat  and  poultry  industry  for   livestock  producers,  processing  workers,  and  host  communities  in   kansas,  nebraska,  oklahoma,  and  kentucky.  his  research  has  taken  him   not  only  to  farms  and  ranches,  but  also  to  the  killfloors  of  massive   meatpacking  plants.  he  has  worked  with  local  governments  and   community  groups  as  well  as  union  and  industry  representatives  to  apply   knowledge  gained  from  his  research,  and  he  is  actively  involved  with   advocacy  groups  to  resist  and  reverse  the  negative  consequences  of  the   corporate  concentration  and  vertical  integration  that  define  industrial   meat  and  poultry  production.  from  experience-­‐distant  research  on  the   industry  to  experience-­‐near  fieldwork  for  the  industry,  the  author  has   employed  long-­‐term,  multisited  ethnography  to  build  an  ethnology  of  the   modern  meat  and  poultry  industry,  and  the  food  factories  that  produce   and  process  its  products.           page  1  of  17       jba  6(1):  24-­‐40   spring  2017     ©  the  author(s)  2017   issn  2245-­‐4217   www.cbs.dk/jba                                                                                                           stull  /  cows,  pigs,  corporations,  and  anthropologists       25   keywords     meat  and  poultry  industry;  applied  anthropology;  ethnography;  united   states     over  the  course  of  the  20th  century,  american  agriculture  relentlessly   industrialized.  small,  largely  self-­‐sufficient  farms,  relying  on  a  mixture  of   crops,  livestock,  and  wild  foods  gave  way  to  highly  mechanized  and  highly   capitalized  large  ones,  producing  a  limited  range  of  crops  for  commodity   markets.  as  control  of  our  food  system  shifted  from  independent  farms  to   highly  concentrated  and  vertically  integrated  corporations,  agriculture   became  an  industry,  manufacturing  food,  fiber,  and  fuel.     meat  is  what  mary  douglas  (1970)  called  a  natural  symbol,  the   “the  food  most  directly  associated  with  the  idea  of  both  symbolic  and   functional  power”  (montanari  2006:123).  it  has  also  become  “the  symbol   of  a  balance  needing  to  be  restored”  (ibid.:122).  “industrial”  meat  is  the   product  of  many  actors—from  growers  to  eaters,  from  processors  to   retailers,  from  multinational  corporations  to  unauthorized  immigrant   workers  (phillips  2006:41).  it  epitomizes  what  joseph  schumpeter   (1947)  called  capitalism’s  “creative  destruction,”  as  companies  rise  and   fall,  all  the  while  providing  meat  to  an  ever  expanding  population.  the   beef  trust  that  dominated  north  america  early  in  the  20th  century— swift,  cudahy,  morrill,  armour,  and  morris—survives  only  in  a  few  brand   names.  ironically,  the  very  firms  that  supplanted  those  earlier  giants  by   revolutionizing  the  industry  in  the  1960s  and  1970s—ibp  and  conagra   red  meats—have  disappeared  as  well,  absorbed  by  a  new  generation  of   companies,  most  notably  tyson  and  brazilian-­‐owned  jbs.       what  follows  is  a  brief  “confessional  tale”  (van  maanen  2011)   about  my  ethnographic  research  on  the  north  american  meat  and  poultry   industry  over  the  past  three  decades,  and  my  efforts  to  apply  what  i  have   learned  to  the  mitigation  of  its  negative  consequences  for  host   communities,  processing  workers,  and  livestock  and  poultry  producers.  it   is  also  a  “critical  tale”  of  the  challenges  anthropological  advocates  and,  for   that  matter,  activists  of  any  kind  face  in  bringing  reforms  to  an  industry   entrenched  in  a  multinational  oligopoly.     garden  city,  kansas,  where  it  all  began     i  came  to  the  study  of  the  meat  and  poultry  industry  in  a  roundabout  way.   after  the  opening  of  ibp  and  val-­‐agri  (later  conagra)  beef  plants  in  the   early  1980s,  the  population  of  garden  city,  kansas,  jumped  by  one-­‐third   to  become  the  state’s  fastest  growing  community.  most  of  the  newcomers   who  flocked  to  jobs  in  these  plants  were  refugees  from  southeast  asia  and   immigrants  from  mexico  and  central  america.  beginning  in  the  summer   of  1987,  i  led  a  team  that  investigated  changing  ethnic  relations  in  garden   journal  of  business  anthropology,  6(1),  spring  2017      26   city,  as  part  of  the  ford  foundation’s  national  study  of  what  was  then   called  the  new  immigration  (see  lamphere  1992).  overwhelmingly  anglo   and  agrarian  at  the  beginning  of  the  1980s,  by  the  time  we  arrived,   garden  city  was  in  the  midst  of  dramatic  social  and  cultural   transformations  that  presaged  a  tide  of  economic  and  demographic   change  that  was  to  sweep  across  rural  north  america  in  the  years  ahead   (see,  for  example,  gozdziak  and  martin  2005).     we  submitted  our  final  report  to  the  ford  foundation  in  february   1990  (stull  et  al.  1990).  it  concluded  with  a  series  of  recommendations  to   the  people  of  garden  city  on  education,  housing,  health  care,  day  care,  and   social  services.  in  collaboration  with  the  school  district,  we  organized  an   advisory  board  representing  public  school  teachers,  city  government,   garden  city's  three  main  ethnic  groups,  and  service  organizations.  we   worked  with  this  committee  to  fine  tune  our  recommendations  and   present  them  to  appropriate  institutions  and  agencies.     social  service  agencies  used  our  findings  to  obtain  external  funds.   the  school  district  revised  policies  and  procedures  on  curriculum,   bilingual  and  english  as  a  second  language  (esl)  instruction,   extracurricular  activities,  community  outreach,  personnel  training,   evaluation,  and  retention  with  our  recommendations  in  hand.  the  city   commission  established  a  cultural  relations  board  with  wide  community   and  ethnic  representation,  and  local  law  enforcement  sought  to  increase   its  minority  personnel.     from  community  ethnography  to  industry  ethnology   what  we  did  not  know  as  we  concluded  more  than  two  years  of  fieldwork   was  whether  the  changes  we  witnessed  in  garden  city  also  confronted   other  packinghouse  towns.  over  the  next  decade,  social  geographer   michael  broadway  and  i  studied  lexington,  nebraska,  where  ibp  opened   another  beef  plant  in  1990,  and  guymon,  oklahoma,  which  attracted  a   seaboard  pork  plant.  broadway  launched  a  study  of  brooks,  alberta,   canada,  which  became  home  to  an  ibp  beef  plant.  i  turned  my  attention  to   my  birth  community  in  western  kentucky,  which  in  the  mid-­‐1990s  began   sprouting  the  commonwealth’s  newest  cash  crop—chickens—and  the   plants  to  process  them.                                                                                                         stull  /  cows,  pigs,  corporations,  and  anthropologists       27     figure  1:  don  stull  stands  between  feeding  trays  and  a  water  line  inside  a   western  kentucky  broiler  house  in  1998.  each  house  holds  some  25,000   broilers  (eating  chickens),  which  are  grown  to  maturity  in  about  seven   weeks.       like  garden  city,  each  of  these  places  faced  rural  industrialization   and  rapid  growth,  creating  an  array  of  problems  common  to  so-­‐called   boomtowns:  population  mobility,  severe  housing  shortages,  soaring   school  enrollments,  rising  rates  of  crime  and  social  ills,  inadequate   medical  services,  strains  on  infrastructure  and  social  services,  dramatic   increases  in  cultural  and  linguistic  diversity,  and  environmental  concerns.   journal  of  business  anthropology,  6(1),  spring  2017      28     our  ethnography  of  garden  city,  intended  to  explore  ethnic   relations  between  native-­‐born  kansans  and  new-­‐immigrant  mexicans  and   vietnamese,  became  an  extended  natural  experiment,  evolving  into  an   ethnology  of  the  meat  and  poultry  industry  and  its  impact  on  host   communities,  processing  workers,  producers,  and  the  environment.  while   our  work  has  made  significant  scholarly  contributions,  its  greatest  value,   we  believe,  has  been  to  inform  communities  of  the  consequences  of  the   meat  and  poultry  industry  and  help  them  prepare  for  and  mitigate  its   impact.  to  that  end  we  have  consulted  with  and  provided  technical   assistance  to  a  number  of  communities  in  the  united  states  and  canada.   our  research  combines  the  methods  and  insights  of  cultural  anthropology   and  social  geography.  we  favor  longitudinal  analysis  of  selected  sites   using  long-­‐term  participant  observation,  in-­‐depth  interviews,  and   extensive  review  of  pertinent  documents.  we  have  returned  to  garden   city  periodically  to  update  our  research,  especially  following  significant   events,  such  as  the  fire  on  christmas  night  2000  that  closed  the  conagra   plant,  putting  2,300  out  of  work  (broadway  and  stull  2006).1         the  first  of  what  crowley  and  lichter  (2009)  call  latino   boomtowns,  which  spread  from  the  midwest  in  the  1980s  to  the   southeast  in  the  1990s,  garden  city  is  a  prime  example  of  what  the  u.  s.   census  bureau  now  defines  as  micropolitans:  “mini-­‐metros  with  rural   sensibilities”  or  “rurbans”  (francis  2005)  that  blend  agricultural   economies  commonly  associated  with  rural  areas  and  immigration   patterns  typically  associated  with  urban  areas  (brown,  colmartie  and   kulcsar  2004;  zehr  2005).     in  addition  to  garden  city,  we  have  carried  out  long-­‐term  research   in  two  other  places:  broadway  in  brooks,  alberta,  and  me  in  western   kentucky.  our  research  has  expanded  beyond  industry  impact  on   communities  to  include  its  consequences  for  plant  workers,  growers,  and   the  environment.  slaughterhouse  blues:  the  meat  and  poultry  industry  in   north  america  (stull  and  broadway  2004,  2013)  provides  an  overview  of   our  research  and  presents  in  depth  the  methods  and  findings  from   several  of  our  studies.             anthropologists  (and  some  honorary  anthropologists  like   broadway)  have  led  the  way  in  documenting  the  environmental   consequences  of  concentrated  animal  feeding  operations  (cafos)  (thu   and  durrenberger  1998);  the  impact  of  the  meat  industry’s  restructuring   and  relocation  on  rural  communities  (stull,  broadway,  and  griffith  1995);   the  poor  working  conditions  inside  meatpacking  plants  (grey  1999;  stull                                                                                                                   1  jennifer  ng,  associate  professor  of  educational  leadership  and  policy  studies,   university  of  kansas,  and  i  conducted  ethnographic  research  for  several  months   in  2013  on  how  garden  city’s  schools  and  educators  have  dealt  with  four  decades   of  increasing  and  constantly  changing  ethnic,  cultural,  linguistic,  and  religious   diversity  (stull  and  ng  2016)  thus,  in  some  sense,  i  have  come  full  circle  to  the   issues  that  brought  me  to  garden  city  in  the  first  place.                                                                                                             stull  /  cows,  pigs,  corporations,  and  anthropologists       29   1994;  stull  and  broadway  1995;  broadway  and  stull  2008);  and  how   essential  immigrants  are  to  meat  processing  (horowitz  and  miller  1999;   fink  2003).       mark  grey,  a  member  of  the  garden  city  research  team,  founded   and  directs  the  iowa  center  for  immigrant  leadership  and  integration.   located  at  the  university  of  northern  iowa,  the  center’s  technical   assistance  and  publications  are  valuable  resources  for  communities  and   agencies  facing  the  challenges  of  ethnic  and  linguistic  diversity  that   accompany  the  meat  and  poultry  industry  (see,  for  example,  yehieli  and   grey  2005).       anthropological  research  has  informed  prize-­‐winning  exposés   (horwitz  1994),  best-­‐selling  books  (schlosser  2001),  and  gripping   documentaries  (food  inc.),  which,  in  turn,  have  brought  many  of  these   issues  to  ever  wider  audiences.  as  a  result,  a  growing  number  of   americans  are  now  aware  of  how,  where,  and  by  whom  their  food  is   produced  and  processed.  and  they  are  increasingly  concerned.     by  the  late  1990s,  a  loose,  but  growing  coalition  of  secular  and   religious  organizations  was  condemning  the  environmental,  animal   welfare,  and  social  consequences  of  so-­‐called  factory  farming.  the   research  of  kendall  thu  and  his  associates  (thu  and  durrenberger  1998)   fueled  opposition  to  air  and  water  pollution  associated  with  industrial   pork  production.  our  work  drew  attention  from  those  concerned  about   industry  impacts  on  workers,  communities,  environments,  and  animals.  i   was  often  asked  to  speak  at  public  forums  in  towns  where  new  packing   plants  were  being  proposed  or  were  soon  to  be  built.  i  became  a  regular   source  for  news  stories  on  meat-­‐related  issues,  from  the  strike  by  tyson   workers  in  jefferson,  wisconsin  (bill  moyers’  now)  to  the  first  case  of   mad  cow  disease  in  the  united  states  (new  york  times)  to  president   george  w.  bush’s  proposed  guest  worker  program  and  amnesty  for   unauthorized  immigrants  (western  livestock  journal)  to  demonstrations   across  the  nation  for  immigrant  rights  (new  york  times)  and  concomitant   fears  of  a  reconquista  (the  hutchinson  [kansas]  news)  to  the  recall  of  500   million  eggs  after  salmonella  sickened  1,500  in  the  summer  of  2010  (dan   rather  reports).  i  have  been  featured  on  public  radio  talk  shows  and   invited  to  write  on  industry  concentration  and  working  conditions  for   corporate  social  responsibility  newswire’s  series  talkback.       but  producing  useful  information,  even  if  it  reaches  broad   audiences,  is  not  enough.    anthropologists  and  other  social  scientists   must  find  better  ways  to  influence  users  of  that  information.  one  such   opportunity  seemed  to  come  my  way  from  a  most  unexpected  direction— the  corporate  office  of  a  major  meatpacking  firm.       journal  of  business  anthropology,  6(1),  spring  2017      30   on  the  packinghouse  floor   late  in  the  summer  of  1992,  the  “running  iron”  beef  plant  in  the   midwestern  town  of  “valley  view”  abruptly  announced  it  would  change   second-­‐shift  fabrication  hours  from  1:15-­‐9:45  p.m.  to  3:15  p.m.-­‐1:45  a.m.   the  next  day  38  workers  called  in  sick—22  of  them  were  fired.  their   termination  triggered  a  wildcat  strike  by  some  200  workers  who  walked   off  the  job,  citing  unfair  treatment,  racism,  poor  working  conditions,  an   unsafe  workplace,  and  low  morale.  running  iron  was  an  industry  leader   in  wages  and  benefits,  and  the  work  stoppage  caught  management  and   union  officials  alike  by  surprise.     in  the  settlement  it  reached  with  striking  workers  a  week  later,   running  iron  agreed  to  change  operations  of  second-­‐shift  fabrication   lines,  adequately  staff  crews,  improve  communication  between  workers   and  management,  and  rehire  strikers.  as  part  of  the  settlement,  running   iron  and  its  union  formed  a  joint  cultural  diversity  committee  to  address   issues  raised  by  the  striking  workers,  most  of  whom  were  mexican   immigrants.  corporate  executives  were  concerned  with  their  “inability  to   recognize  cultural  differences  and  then  manage  them.”  they  wanted   outside  researchers  to  identify  concerns  of  management  and  labor,   recommend  changes,  and  work  with  them  to  implement  improvements.  a   year  after  the  strike,  the  company’s  labor  relations  officer  invited  me  to   propose  such  a  study.  [i  later  learned  the  invitation  came  in  part  because   of  a  paper  i  had  written:  “dances  with  cows.”  the  industry  executives   who  awarded  me  the  research  contract  liked  the  title,  and  the  fact  that  it   criticized  their  primary  competitor.  an  expanded  version  of  the  paper   later  appeared  as  gouveia  and  stull  (1995).]     i  asked  ken  erickson,  a  practicing  anthropologist  and  a  former   member  of  the  garden  city  research  team  who  speaks  spanish  and   vietnamese,  and  the  late  miguel  giner,  an  industrial  psychologist  and   mexican  immigrant,  to  join  me  on  the  project.  we  studied  running  iron’s   valley  view  beef  plant  for  eight  months  in  1994.       the  executives  who  chose  our  proposal  over  several  others   expected  us  to  survey  a  random  sample  using  a  standardized   questionnaire,  what  they  viewed  as  “proper  scientific  research.”  we   convinced  them  that  participant  observation  was  more  appropriate  as  a   primary  method.  it  began  with  a  tour  of  the  plant  one  saturday  in   february.  by  august,  we  could  give  tours  ourselves—and  i  did  on  one   occasion.  our  work  days  began  at  7:00  a.m.  with  the  “morning   management  meeting,”  and  often  did  not  end  until  the  second  shift  shut   down  well  after  midnight.       we  examined  company  and  union  policies  and  documents.  we   went  through  new-­‐hire  training.  we  talked  with  and  interviewed   managers,  union  officials  and  stewards,  line  supervisors  and  line  workers,   men  and  women,  english  and  non-­‐english  speakers,  anglos,  hispanics,                                                                                                         stull  /  cows,  pigs,  corporations,  and  anthropologists       31   and  asians.  interviews  were  problem-­‐focused  and  questions  open-­‐ended.   respondents  were  chosen  for  their  knowledge  or  position  (union   business  representative,  plant  manager,  trainer,  line  worker)  and  to   replicate  workplace  diversity  (gender,  ethnicity,  department,  job,  shift).   our  report  addressed  relations  between  anglo  plant  managers  and  their   multicultural  workforce,  recurrent  complaints  by  hourly  workers,  and   training  for  supervisors  and  new  hires.       in  february  1995,  a  year  after  we  began  our  study,  we  presented   our  findings  to  company  executives  at  corporate  headquarters.  briefly,  we   found  that  the  company  had  not  one  workforce,  but  two:  one  consisted  of   old-­‐time  packers  who  had  been  with  the  company  for  many  years;  the   other  was  made  up  of  newcomers,  mostly  mexican  immigrants.  company   ideals  of  safety,  quality,  productivity,  and  loyalty  were  widely  shared  by   both  groups,  but  their  interpretations  of  these  ideals  and  how  to  achieve   them  often  differed.  breakdowns  and  contradictions  between  company   ideals  and  managerial  behaviors  often  led  to  resentment  and  conflict   between  workers  and  managers.  especially  problematic  was  the  tension   between  the  stated  ideal  of  “safety  first”  and  managers’  constant  efforts  to   reduce  costs  and  increase  product  output.  invariably,  safety  (and  product   quality)  took  a  backseat  to  “getting  it  out  the  door.”       corporate  officials  asked  us  to  propose  solutions  to  problems   identified  in  our  report.  three  months  later  we  submitted  a  proposal  for  a   pilot  training  program  for  running  iron  supervisors.  we  never  heard   from  the  company  again.       we  were,  however,  invited  to  present  our  findings  at  a  major   industry  convention  and  publish  our  findings  in  meat&poultry  magazine,   the  industry’s  leading  trade  journal  (stull,  erickson,  and  giner  1996).  i   have  maintained  good  relations  with  the  union  and  have  been  invited  to   speak  at  their  conventions.  but  i  have  never  again  been  asked  to  work   with  any  meat  or  poultry  company.       the  working  conditions  that  spawned  the  walkout  are  endemic  in   the  meat  and  poultry  industry.  managers  will  tell  you  they  care  about   their  workers  and  they  spend  huge  sums  on  training,  but  they  will  also   tell  you  employee  turnover  and  elevated  rates  of  occupational  injury  and   illness  are  the  price  of  doing  business.  despite  what  managers  say,   solutions  to  the  problems  that  continue  to  plague  running  iron—and  the   rest  of  the  industry—are  no  mystery.  pay  a  fair  wage.  provide  better  and   longer  periods  of  training  for  supervisors  and  line  workers.  adequately   staff  work  crews.  vary  job  tasks  to  relieve  muscle  strain.  provide  longer   recovery  periods  for  injured  workers.  most  of  all,  slow  down  the  chain.       fifty  years  ago,  tom  lupton  (1963:201)  concluded  his  shop-­‐floor   ethnography  in  a  similar  vein:  “management  would  be  better  employed  in   putting  its  technical  house  in  order  than  [in]  complaining  about  ...  the   workers.”   journal  of  business  anthropology,  6(1),  spring  2017      32     but,  as  the  late  del  jones  (1976:222-­‐223)  said  in  “applied   anthropology  and  the  application  of  anthropological  knowledge”:   [o]ne  does  not  influence  policy  through  the  collection  of  accurate   information  but  through  pressure  politics.  it  is  also  true  that   policymakers  could  do  a  better  job  if  they  utilized  accurate  and   complete  information.  but  this  will  not  come  about  until  the   producers  of  information  organize  as  a  pressure  group,  or  work   through  pressure  groups,  to  influence  the  users  of  information.  at   the  least  it  should  be  the  responsibility  of  the  producers  of   information  to  make  sure  that  relevant  facts  are  made  available  to   appropriate  parties.     i  have  studied  the  meat  and  poultry  industry  for  30  years,  making  “sure   that  relevant  facts  are  made  available  to  appropriate  parties”  and  doing   my  best  to  influence  policy  makers.  but  as  jones  (ibid:  222)  also  observed:     [i]t  is  almost  a  perverse  arrogance  to  even  assume  that   information  collected  will  automatically  be  used  by  policymakers.   that  “useful”  information  may  be  known  and  not  utilized  by   policymakers  is  itself  a  policy  decision.  political  processes  are  not   guided  so  much  by  truth  as  by  political  ideology,  group  interest,   pressure  politics.     the  executives  who  hired  us  to  help  them  “recognize  cultural  differences   and  then  manage  them”  knew  what  we  would  find.  they  commissioned   our  study  to  mollify  disaffected  workers  and  the  union  in  the  wake  of  a   strike,  not  to  be  a  catalyst  for  improved  working  conditions.       to  19th  century  cattle  barons,  who  worked  their  cowboys  long   hours  at  dangerous  jobs  for  short  pay:  “men  were  cheap,  cattle  cost   money”  (adams  1903:52).  to  the  men  who  sit  in  the  boardrooms  of  the   21st  century  corporations  that  control  the  meat  and  poultry  industry,  and   those  who  do  their  bidding  in  its  massive  factories,  workers  are  still   cheap.  and  cattle,  hogs,  and  chickens  still  cost  money.       corporate  control  of  america’s  food  system   american  agriculture  is  controlled  by  large  corporations  like  running   iron.    virtually  all  chickens  sold  in  the  united  states  are  grown  under   production  contracts  to  a  handful  of  companies,  who  own  the  birds  from   egg  to  supermarket.  tyson  foods,  the  largest  u.s.  poultry  company,   contracts  with  about  6,000  of  what  it  calls  family  farmers  to  raise  its   chickens.  they  are  expected  to  grow  birds  to  slaughter  weight  under   strict  company  guidelines  as  quickly  and  as  cheaply  as  possible.  if  tyson   is  not  satisfied,  it  may  cancel  growers’  contracts  with  little  notice  and   even  less  recourse,  leaving  them  under  a  mountain  of  debt  for  their   otherwise  useless  chicken  houses.                                                                                                           stull  /  cows,  pigs,  corporations,  and  anthropologists       33     nine  out  of  10  hogs  are  owned  directly  by  or  raised  under   contract  to  companies  like  smithfield  or  tyson.  more  than  half  of  the   cattle  now  slaughtered  in  the  united  states  are  secured  through  what  is   known  as  captive  supply:  they  are  owned  directly  by  corporations,  raised   under  contract  or  according  to  company  specifications,  or  sold  by  feeders   that  have  only  one  viable  buyer.  and  the  companies  that  bring  us  our   burgers,  bacon,  and  wings  are  very  often  one  and  the  same.         the  packers  and  stockyards  act  of  1921  makes  it  unlawful  for   meat  and  poultry  companies  to  engage  in  “unfair,  unjustly  discriminatory,   or  deceptive  practice”  [or  to]  “give  any  undue  advantage  to  any  particular   person  ...  or  subject  any  particular  person  to  undue  disadvantage.”   congress  and  the  u.s.  department  of  agriculture  (usda)  have  done  little   to  enforce  this  law.  meanwhile,  concentration  and  vertical  integration   have  destroyed  meaningful  competition  in  livestock  and  poultry  markets   to  the  detriment  of  both  farmers  and  eaters.       in  his  first  term,  president  obama  promised  to  reform  american   agriculture  through  vigorous  antitrust  enforcement.  and  congress   included  language  in  the  2008  farm  bill  to  require  the  department  of   agriculture  to  write  regulations,  using  the  packers  and  stockyards  act,  to   restore  fairness  and  competition  in  livestock  and  poultry  production.  in   2010,  the  usda  and  the  department  of  justice  held  joint  workshops   across  farm  country  to  hear  from  producers—60,000  comments  were   received.  but  some  voices  are  louder  than  others.  under  pressure  from   the  interests  that  dominate  industrial  agriculture,  congress  refused  to   either  approve  or  fund  enforcement  of  almost  all  of  the  proposed  reforms.     organization  for  competitive  markets   in  1998,  i  joined  with  a  group  of  concerned  farmers,  ranchers,   economists,  and  social  scientists  in  kansas  city  to  found  the  organization   for  competitive  markets.  ocm  is  a  nonprofit  research  and  advocacy  group   dedicated  to  fighting  concentration  and  vertical  integration  in  agricultural   markets.  in  2011,  i  was  elected  to  its  board  of  directors  and  currently   serve  as  its  vice-­‐president.       ocm  was  active  in  the  successful  campaign  to  require  country  of   origin  labeling  (cool)  of  meats  and  some  other  agricultural  products.   labels  were  first  required  in  2002,  but  the  meat  industry  vigorously   opposed  full  implementation.  in  february  2015,  the  u.s.  district  court  for   the  district  of  columbia  dismissed  a  lawsuit  brought  by  the  american   meat  institute  and  the  multinational  meatpacking  corporations  it   represents  to  stop  the  usda  from  implementing  this  popular  law.  but   later  that  year  the  world  trade  organization  (wto)  upheld  complaints   by  canada  and  mexico  that  cool  put  their  meat  and  livestock  at   competitive  disadvantage  in  u.s.  markets.  wto  threatened  to  impose  a  $1   billion  in  retaliatory  import  tariffs  if  cool  was  not  repealed.  the  repeal   journal  of  business  anthropology,  6(1),  spring  2017      34   was  included  in  an  omnibus  spending  bill  signed  into  law  by  president   obama  in  december  2016.     efforts  to  stem  corporate  dismantling  of  livestock  markets  and   egregious  mistreatment  of  poultry  and  livestock  producers  have  yet  to   succeed  (see  stull  and  broadway  2014:60  for  one  example  of  a  failed   attempt).  one  arena  where  ocm  believes  it  may  be  able  to  weaken   corporate  control  over  livestock  production  is  the  “beef  checkoff.”       the  beef  promotion  and  research  program,  commonly  called  the   beef  checkoff,  assesses  cattle  owners  $1.00  each  time  an  animal  is  sold.   the  checkoff  program  was  created  to  promote  beef  consumption  through   research  and  marketing.  remember  “beef,  it’s  what’s  for  dinner”—that   was  checkoff  dollars  at  work.  similar  checkoff  programs  exist  for  pork,   milk,  and  other  agricultural  products.  the  beef  checkoff  is  administered   by  the  board  of  the  national  cattlemen’s  beef  association  (ncba).  in   2010  a  performance  review  of  1  percent  of  transactions  over  29  months   by  an  independent  auditor  found  the  ncba  had  misappropriated   $217,000.  no  penalties  were  imposed.  the  ncba  continues  to  operate  as   the  prime  contractor  for  the  beef  checkoff,  from  which  it  derives  over  70   percent  of  its  operating  expenses.  this  audit  raised  serious  concerns   about  what  the  ncba  does  with  the  $80  million  from  cattle  producers   each  year.       in  august  2012,  ocm  joined  with  the  humane  society  of  the   united  states  (hsus)  to  mount  a  legal  challenge  to  the  beef  checkoff   program.  the  suit  maintains  that  the  ncba  misused  checkoff  dollars  to   lobby  against  country  of  origin  labeling  and  to  support  meatpacking  firms   to  the  detriment  of  small  farmers  and  ranchers,  whose  numbers  have   fallen  sharply  since  the  checkoff  was  implemented.  ocm  and  hsus   continue  to  seek  access  to  40,000  pages  of  unreleased  documents  under   the  freedom  of  information  act  (mcgraw  and  lowe  2015).         with  11  million  members  and  assets  in  excess  of  $100  million,   hsus  is  the  most  influential  animal  welfare  organization.  many  farmers   and  ranchers  view  hsus  as  the  enemy,  and  ocm  was  sharply  criticized   and  lost  members  when  we  joined  with  hsus.  but  ocm  and  hsus  agree   that  only  by  joining  forces  can  farmers  and  eaters  hope  to  bring  about   significant  change  in  our  food  system.     the  forces  of  creative  destruction  in  the  meat  and  poultry   industry  have  affected  plant  locations  and  labor  force  composition,  and   they  have  stymied  efforts  by  unions,  farmers,  politicians,  scholars,   journalists,  and  activists  to  reform  it.  it  has  been  more  than  a  century   since  the  first,  and  still  the  best  known,  expose  of  the  meatpacking   industry—upton  sinclair’s  the  jungle—appeared.  its  publication  in  1906   prompted  the  passage  of  the  meat  inspection  act  and  the  pure  food  and   drug  act.  in  1999,  journalist  eric  schlossier  reignited  public  concern  over   the  meat  industry  with  fast  food  nation,  which  was  made  into  a  motion                                                                                                         stull  /  cows,  pigs,  corporations,  and  anthropologists       35   picture  and  inspired  the  popular  documentary  food  inc.  industry  exposés   continue  to  pile  one  on  top  of  another.  foodopoly:  the  battle  over  the   future  of  food  and  farming  in  america  (hauter  2012);  the  meat  racket:   the  secret  takeover  of  america’s  food  business  (leonard  2014);  the   chain:  farm,  factory,  and  the  fate  of  our  food  (genoways  2014)  are  the   best  examples  of  recent  investigative  journalism  on  the  meat  industry.             the  crescendo  of  scholarly  and  journalistic  indictments  of  the   industry  has  certainly  raised  public  awareness.  but  upton  sinclair’s   (1962:126)  famous  lament—“i  aimed  at  the  public’s  heart  and  by   accident  i  hit  it  in  the  stomach”—is  shared  by  today’s  would-­‐be   reformers.  the  american  public  is  quick  to  react  to  reports  of  evils   lurking  in  their  meat  and  when  abuses  are  heaped  upon  the  animals  from   which  it  is  made.  the  industry  has  reluctantly  responded  to  mounting   public  pressure  to  reduce  nontherapeutic  use  of  antibiotics  in  animal   production  and  to  treat  farmed  animals  more  humanely.  but  repeated   exposés  of  low  wages  and  oppressive  working  conditions  in  meat  and   poultry  plants,  as  well  as  corporate  practices  that  have  destroyed   competitive  and  equitable  livestock  and  poultry  markets,  raise  scant   concern  with  eaters  or  policy  makers.  if  anything,  things  may  be  getting   worse.  as  just  one  example,  in  october  2014,  the  usda  approved  the  new   poultry  inspection  system  (npis)  that  allows  turkey  and  chicken   processing  plants  to  increase  line  speeds  and  replace  most  government   inspectors  with  company  employees  (usda  2014).     america’s  food  system  remains  in  the  grasp  of  an  oligopoly  of   multinational  corporations,  and  the  factory  system  it  has  created  remains   the  dominant  model  of  meat  production  and  processing.  alternative   production  models  in  which  animals  are  raised  locally  and  sustainably  on   family  farms  under  socially  just  conditions  have  reemerged,  however.   whether  they  will  effectively  challenge  the  hegemony  of  industrial  meat   production  for  all  but  the  wealthiest  eaters  in  high-­‐income  nations   remains  to  be  seen.         in  january  2015,  ocm  and  hsus  convened  a  meeting  of   representatives  of  other  organizations  that  also  work  to  end  the  abuses  of   industrial  agriculture  and  develop  viable  alternative  food  systems.  slow   food  usa,  food  for  america,  the  new  america  foundation,  the  farmers   union,  and  the  united  food  and  commercial  workers  were  among  those   represented.  these  organizations  and  many  others  have  pursued   individual  goals:  animal  welfare,  competitive  agricultural  markets,   sustainable  agriculture,  wholesome  foods,  environmental  and  social   justice,  better  conditions  for  food  processing  workers.  even  within  these   general  movements,  efforts  have  been  fragmented  and  poorly   coordinated.  the  goal  of  this  meeting  was  to  begin  to  build  networks  and   develop  collaborations.  the  long-­‐range  goal  is  to  develop  and  implement   effective  challenges  to  the  dominant  food  system  and  to  nurture  viable   alternatives  that  are  sustainable,  fair,  just,  and  affordable.  under  ocm’s   journal  of  business  anthropology,  6(1),  spring  2017      36   leadership  this  collaboration  has  been  formalized;  it  has  established   priorities  and  developed  campaign  strategies  around  each  goal.  goals   include  passage  of  legislation  ending  marketplace  abuses  of  commodity   checkoff  programs,  promoting  fair  and  just  contracts  for  poultry  growers,   and  pushing  for  adoption  of  the  good  food  purchasing  policy  for  public   schools  in  several  major  u.s.  cities.       the  system  that  currently  dominates  production,  processing,  and   distribution  of  our  food  is  not  likely  to  be  replaced  in  the  foreseeable   future.  but  alternatives  at  each  stage  of  the  food  chain  have  already   emerged.  the  challenge  is  now  to  grow  them,  to  make  them  more   available  and  affordable.  as  one  of  the  reviewers  of  this  article  reminded   me,  alternatives  are  much  more  viable  today  than  when  i  began  studying   the  industry  30  years  ago.  farmers  markets  and  expanding  digital   platforms  bring  food  producers  and  eaters  into  direct  contact.  “local,”   “sustainable,”  “organic,”  and  “humanely  produced”  foods  give  progressive   groceries  and  restaurants  competitive  advantage  in  more  markets.  as   people  become  disenchanted  with  or  afraid  of  “industrial”  foods,  they   turn  to  alternative  providers.  if  these  new  producers  and  processors   resist  the  siren  call  to  sell  out  to  the  companies  that  currently  dominate   the  food  system,  we  may  yet  see  decentralized  food  systems  as  viable   competitors  to  the  concentrated  and  centralized  system  of  today.  but   eaters  must  seek  out  these  options,  actively  participate  in  them,  and  be   willing  to  pay  for  their  products.  and  emergent  food  providers  must   eschew  the  “cheap  food”  model  of  the  dominant  companies,  the  low   wages  and  oppressive  working  conditions  that  have  gone  with  it.       “shall  we  therefore  mix  science  with  politics?”     anthropologists  have  historically  studied  one  people  in  one  place  for  one   year  or  so,  then  left,  perhaps  to  return  once  in  a  while,  but  more  often  not.   increasingly  ethnographers  have  “entered  the  corporation,”  to  use   melissa  cefkin’s  (2009:1)  apt  phrase,  “invited  there  to  influence  the   organizations’  understandings,  and  effectiveness  and  profits.”  by   happenstance  and  by  design,  i  have  ended  up  studying  one  industry  in   scattered  locations  for  three  decades.  i  have  examined  each  of  its   sectors—beef,  pork,  and  poultry—on  farms  and  ranches,  in  factories  and   towns,  scattered  across  rural  north  america.  i  have  looked  at  it  from   varied  vantage  points:  the  towns  that  host  its  massive  plants;  hourly  line   workers  who  make  meat  on  its  kill  and  fabrication  floors;  farmers  and   ranchers  who  grow  its  raw  product.       this  research  has  added  to  the  social  science  of  boomtowns.  rapid   growth,  high  wages,  and  social  disorders  characterize  energy  boomtowns.   meatpacking  has  created  a  different  kind  of  boomtown,  with  high   turnover,  minimal  benefits,  dangerous  working  conditions,  low  wages,   and  rising  tides  of  impoverished  residents  (broadway  and  stull  2006).                                                                                                           stull  /  cows,  pigs,  corporations,  and  anthropologists       37     some  ethnographers  have  conducted  clandestine  research  in  meat   and  poultry  plants  (fink  1998;  pachirat  2011;  strifler  2005).  i  have  not.   this  has  meant  i  have  often  been  kept  at  a  distance  by  industry   gatekeepers,  but  clandestine  researchers  have  uncovered  no  more  than   me.  and  as  a  running  iron  consultant,  with  my  own  company  id  and   parking  place,  i  learned  more  than  i  could  ever  have  dreamed  possible.  it   was  an  opportunity  that  never  would  have  come  my  way,  had  i  masked   my  identity  and  intentions.       i  have  come  to  my  research  sites  as  a  traditional  outsider   anthropologist  and  as  a  native  ethnographer,  living  and  working  in  my   hometown  among  relatives  and  lifelong  friends.  i  have  been  a  basic   researcher,  an  applied  researcher,  and  an  advocate.  had  i  not  committed   myself  to  the  long  haul,  and  had  i  not  actively  pursued  broad  exposure  to   the  industry  from  diverse  perspectives,  i  would  never  have  seen  what  i   have  seen  or  learned  what  i  have  learned.       in  an  influential  presidential  address  to  the  american   anthropological  association,  which  he  called  “the  anthropology  of   trouble,”  roy  rappaport  (1993:295,  297)  warned  that  to  survive,  let   alone  flourish,  necessitates  “the  relocation  of  both  engaged  and  domestic   research  from  anthropology’s  periphery  toward  its  center….  to  publish   critiques  of  institutions  or  values  in  the  society  in  which  they  prevail  is,   almost  unavoidably,  to  support  or  subvert  them…  increasing  distance   from  value  neutrality  increases  responsibility  for  precise,  accurate,  and   well-­‐grounded  accounts.  they  need  to  stand  up  not  only  to  critical   reviewers  but  also  to  hostile  lawyers.”           my  work,  and  that  of  other  social  scientists  who  have  examined   the  meat  and  poultry  industry,  has  stood  up  to  critical  reviewers  and   more  importantly  to  a  hostile  industry,  and  its  high-­‐powered  lawyers.   but,  in  all  honesty,  they  are  more  worried  about  disenchanted  eaters  who   are  voting  with  their  forks  and  powerful  interest  groups  that  are   influencing  legislation  and  challenging  industry  practices  in  court.                 american  anthropology  languishes  at  a  crucial  juncture,  desirous   of  greater  recognition  and  influence,  but  “branded”  as  peripheral  to  policy   formation  and  the  solution  of  contemporary  social  problems.  it  is   imperative  that  we  “direct  the  discipline  toward  the  generation  of   knowledge  that  has  some  more  useful  purpose”  (blakey  et  al.  1994:297).     none  other  than  malinowski  himself  declared  that  “research  in  order  to   be  of  use  must  be  inspired  by  courage  and  purpose...  shall  we  therefore   mix  politics  with  science?...    decidedly  ‘yes.’”  (quoted  in  hackenberg  and   hackenberg  1999:1).           journal  of  business  anthropology,  6(1),  spring  2017      38   references     adams,  a.  1903  the  log  of  a  cowboy:  a  narrative  of  the  old  trail  days.   boston:  houghton  mifflin.     blakey,  m.  l.,  f.  dubinskas,  s.  forman,  c.  maclennan,  k.  s.  newman,  j.  l.   peacock,  r.  a.  rappaport,  c.  g.  velez-­‐ibanez,  and  a.  w.  wolfe  1994  “a   statement  to  the  profession:  the 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 urban  anthropology  19:  303-­‐427.   _____________  1994  “knock  ‘em  dead:  work  on  the  killfloor  of  a  modern   beefpacking  plant.”  in  l.  lamphere,  a.  stepick,  and  g.  grenier  (eds.)   newcomers  in  the  workplace:  immigrants  and  the  restructuring  of  the  u.s.   journal  of  business  anthropology,  6(1),  spring  2017      40   economy,  pp.  44-­‐77.  philadelphia:  temple  university  press.      stull,  d.d.,  j.e.  benson,  m.j.  broadway,  a.l.  campa,  k.c.  erickson,  and  m.a.   grey  “changing  relations:  newcomers  and  established  residents  in  garden   city,  kansas.”  final  report  to  the  ford  foundation's  changing  relations   project  board,  binghamton,  new  york,  february  5.  institute  for  public   policy  and  business  research  report  no.  172.   stull,  d.  d.  and  m.  j.  broadway  1995  “killing  them  softly:  work  in  a   modern  beef  plant  and  what  it  does  to  workers.”  in  d.  d.  stull,  m.  j.   broadway, 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 durrenberger  (eds.)  1998  pigs,  profits,  and  rural   communities.    albany:  state  university  of  new  york  press.   usda  2014  “modernization  of  poultry  slaughter  inspection.”  federal   register  79(162),  august  21.  9  cfr  parts  381  and  500.  food  safety  and   inspection  service,  us  department  of  agriculture.     van  maanen,  j.  2011  tales  of  the  field:  on  writing  ethnography.  second   edition.  chicago:  university  of  chicago  press.     yehieli,  m.  and  m.a.  grey  2005  health  matters:  a  pocket  guide  for  working   with  diverse  cultures  and  underserved  populations.  yarmouth,  me:   intercultural  press.         zehr,  m.a.  2005.  “newcomers  bring  change,  challenge  to  region:  spike  in   english-­‐learners  strains  resources,  traditions.”  education  week  24(34):  1,   18-­‐19,  21.   don  stull  is  professor  emeritus  of  anthropology  at  the  university  of   kansas,  where  he  taught  from  1975  to  2015.  he  has  been  editor-­‐in-­‐chief   of  human  organization,  president  of  the  society  for  applied   anthropology,  and  a  recipient  of  the  sfaa’s  sol  tax  distinguished  service   award.  in  2001  he  was  presented  with  the  key  to  garden  city,  kansas,   and  made  an  honorary  citizen  in  recognition  of  the  value  of  his  work  to   this  community.     essay the itinerary approach of a business anthropologist: between mobility, diversity and networks dominique desjeux (professor emeritus at the sorbonne [paris descartes university, sorbonne paris cité], and international consultant) speaking about oneself is always complicated when one knows, as a social anthropologist, that one is not the centre of the world, and that what one has realised is partly the result of the forces which govern us, and partly that of the collaboration of a network of friends, colleagues, and various teams in the field. however, it is also a pleasure―one of witnessing that there is a future, that things are possible, and that the humanities are useful even if their efficacy cannot always be demonstrated. here i will add that this is like all human activity, as we are reminded by the myth of sisyphus, who pushed his stone up to the top of the mountain only to see it go down, and then started pushing it up again. mystery is the source of energy which leads us to go up again. religious and political origins of the desire to transform the world: from vatican 2 to may 1968 in a paradoxical manner, even though today i am entirely agnostic in terms of religion, i think that my interest in the applications of sociology and anthropology stemmed from my catholic past. it is a progressivist past―in other words, one characterised by the belief that the objective of a christian is to change the world to make it better, more efficient, and page 1 of 13 jba 5(1): 64-76 autumn 2016 © the author(s) 2016 issn 2245-4217 www.cbs.dk/jba desjeux / the itinerary approach 65 possibly more just. in the early 1960s, the second vatican council transformed some catholics’ relationship with the world, being more in favour of the search for a transformation in society than in an improvement of relations with god. in south america, this gave rise to “liberation theology.” 50 years later, it is the conservative extremist side of religions which seems to be gaining the upper hand. this means that the content of a religion explains little itself. social actors select from each what fits in their justification for conservative or transformational action. being agnostic does not mean being an atheist, since saying that god does not exist is a belief which is as impossible to demonstrate as the belief in his existence. instead, it means saying that i do not know. for me it has remained a great epistemological rule to avoid saying that what i cannot see does not exist, as i was to theorise later in the 1980s and 1990s with scales of observation. the latter show that no observation is possible without a sectioning of reality, and that what is observed on an extreme microsocial scale of observation, such as the individual, disappears at a macrosocial scale of observation. this helped me to avoid saying that social classes have disappeared or that individuals do not exist, to pick up on a classic debate in the humanities and social sciences, at least in france, from the 1980s. may 1968, in paris and in the western world, was a moment of great effervescence and of the questioning of institutions which had seemed to be well-established―such as the authority of the father and the subordinate role of the woman in the family―and, more generally, of social hierarchies in organisations and society. it was a time of learning of a form of social and intellectual transgression with respect to catholicism, with the discovery of various marxisms―from karl marx himself to rosa luxembourg on imperialism, passing via kautsky on ground rent and hilferding on financial capital, to social classes with pierre bourdieu in his book the inheritors (original les héritiers published in 1964, translation published in 1972). in december 1968, i created a reformist political student movement, marc 200, which stood for mouvement d’action et de recherche critique (movement for action and critical research). everything was in it: action, exploration, and deconstruction. what remained of it was this energy to wish to transform and create new things and relativise religious, ideological, and political beliefs in favour of a comprehensive approach which took actors in situations as a point of departure, as well as the progressive adoption of an agnostic position as a scientific rule, and learning transgression. these are probably the elements of personal life which led me at the same time to practise both empirical research with an operational target for companies, administrations, and ngos, on the one hand, and theoretical research, with the publication of these investigations in the form of books and articles, on the other. of course, what seems clear today comes from a journal of business anthropology, 5(1), autumn 2016 66 “retrospective illusion,” as at the time i acted without clearly knowing where i was going, and very often i did not understand what i had done until after it was done. learning the task of contractual investigations: responding to a requirement rather than starting out from one’s own centres of interest the development of this taste for concrete matters and for empirical investigations, which form the basis of business socio-anthropology, would not have been possible if i had not met the sociologist michel crozier in 1967, at the university of nanterre, next to paris. he had just introduced to france the sociology of organisations, with the bureaucratic phenomenon (1964), which was based on strategic analysis as a mode of explanation of social interactions, on the basis of power relations constructed around zones of uncertainty. this work followed on from alvin gouldner’s investigations in patterns of industrial bureaucracy (1954), which he had made us read as students, as well as from asylums, by ervin goffman, which had just been published in french by pierre bourdieu (1968). i worked with crozier at the cso (centre de sociologie des organisations [centre for the sociology of organisations], which belongs to the cnrs/national centre for scientific research), as well as with erhard friedberg and jean-pierre worms, between 1969 and 1971, thanks to some contractual research programmes on industrial politics and the corps des mines, one of the most powerful networks at the summit of the french state. this meant that at the age of 23, i learnt to carry out investigations not based on my own objectives, but based on the requirements of a sponsor, the french ministry of industry. i understood the importance of networks in the functioning of companies and in collective processes of decision-making and innovation. one of the objectives of this finalised investigation was to provide some lines of thought on the ways to improve the system of decision-making in french administration. it was my first experience of action research, and the result was published in micro-fiche by hachette in 1973. strategic analysis is the most operational tool i have been able to deploy, over the past 50 years or so, and which i have been able to use equally well to understand sorcery in the congo and power relations within the family― in france, china, brazil, and elsewhere. in other words, it partly explains the consumer choices, the functioning of markets, the survival strategy of the poorest groups with purchasing power constraints, or the social conditions for the realisation of processes of innovation. in sociology in france the practice of fieldwork investigations was only to become generally established between the 1980s and 1990s. desjeux / the itinerary approach 67 during the 1960s, sociology was very theoretical, very moral, and very militant. it was centred on the state and the social classes, which, as i was to show 20 years later with scales of observation, may be entirely relevant at a macrosocial scale, but loses a lot of its value at the microsocial scale in terms of interactional strategic analysis, the microindividual scale, and the person. at this period, the realist empiricism of michel crozier was badly viewed in the university left-wing milieu. this is why he developed his network more towards political and economic circles. his work was taught a great deal in french business schools, but much less in universities, until around twenty years ago. i drew a lesson from this: it is necessary to work on the margins of the academic system, inside or outside, and try to widen one’s networks in france and internationally, in order to retain sufficient room for manoeuvre to continue to explore, to make detours, and to innovate, if one wishes to work in the direction of forming a connection between the academic and the business world, but without allowing oneself to be destroyed by one or the other. the anthropological detour: from imaginary denunciation to realistic description of usages in everyday life in 1971, i left to teach for four years at the école nationale supérieure d’agriculture in antananarivo, madagascar, where i led an investigation into the effects of a rural development project on the transformation of the malagasy countryside. i tried to use simultaneously a marxist approach, which denounced bureaucratic domination, and a strategic approach in terms of the interplay of actors. i also became the editor of a multidisciplinary review, terre malgache. i therefore learnt to work with engineers and economists, such as philippe hugon. i began to discover the diversity of logics in the explanation of human phenomena. it was to be the beginning of a long career as an editor, which was to pass through l’harmattan, puf (presse universitaire de france) and the review sciences humaines created by jean-françois dortier and jean-claude ruano. moreover, i learnt to deal with the tension created by my report with the organisation in charge of distributing agricultural rice-producing technologies to the villages of the high plateaux in madagascar. the company did not greatly appreciate its actions being denounced―something which i can understand now better than i did at the time! this investigation was published by l’harmattan under the title la question agraire à madagascar [the issue of agriculture in madagascar] (1979). i was later to have other tensions with other clients which i would learn to deal with better. later, in the congo, i understood that such denunciations may be of limited effectiveness. showing the interplay of actors and their power journal of business anthropology, 5(1), autumn 2016 68 relations in a realistic and comprehensive manner, without enchanting them with an imaginary aspect which allows them to escape from reality, is often disturbing for social actors, as it shows the constraints―and hence the room for manoeuvre and opportunities―which are within their reach. once these realistic constraints have been understood, actors can remobilise the imagination which will give them the energy to act as a manager or a militant. in the congo, where i worked as an anthropologist from 1975 to 1979, i taught at the institut de développement rural de brazzaville (brazzaville rural development institute), still with engineers. in parallel, i carried out a new investigation into the effects of a rural development project financed by the undp. it was there that i was to refine most of the anthropological methods which i was later to use in order to analyse the behaviour of consumers in france, china, and denmark, with tine françois and dominique boucher; in england, spain, and senegal, with emmanuel ndione and the ngo enda; and in brazil and the united states. observation of the process of agricultural work, from working the earth up to the harvest, inspired me to formalise the “method of itineraries” in order to understand consumers’ collective decision processes relating to usage and purchase; in the city, too, i moved from discussions at home to domestic usages, including the stages of transportation, acquisition, storage and disposal, as sophie alami, isabelle garabuau-moussaoui and i were to demonstrate later in les méthodes qualitatives [qualitative methods](2009). this working method based on itineraries is found in the sociology of science and technology, in the anthropology of sickness, with therapeutic itineraries, as well as in economics, with the study of particular industries. unlike marketing, which is focussed on the individual and the moment of purchase, the anthropological approach makes it possible to understand that purchase is only one moment of a collective process. purchase is under the constraint of the social interplay which develops inside the family in different rooms in a domestic space, such as the kitchen, the living room or the bathroom. these rooms are the equivalent of different kinds of agricultural spaces―lowland fields, hillside fields, the gardens around the house, and orchards―which i observed in the village of sakamesso in the congo. anthropology allowed me to learn how to transpose. consumption practices, centred on usages, are embedded in three structures: one of the systems of objects which form material culture; another of social interactions and “pre-digital” social networks; and the third of sense, symbolism, and personal and professional identity. they also vary as a function of lifecycles. above all, the observation of these practices varies as a function of the scales of observation. this is what i suggest at the end of my book on the congolese countryside, stratégies desjeux / the itinerary approach 69 paysannes en afrique noire [farmers’ strategies in black africa] (1987), in which i show that the necessity to reflect on operational solutions leads to a minimisation of determinist approaches. and yet this dimension does exist, even if it does not function in a mechanical manner as in physics, but is only visible at the macrosocial scale, or alternatively at the lowest microscale, as in genetics. at the microsocial and microsocial scales, what can be observed is the interplay of actors who have room for manoeuvre and who therefore have opportunities to help with the development of the system being observed (1987: 215 ff.). the important thing, therefore, is not to look for the best scale of observation, but to start with the scale in which one is most competent, and to regularly change scales in order to observe what is emerging elsewhere and what is not necessarily visible at the scale of our anthropological observation. the force of business anthropology: an ability to observe what is emerging based on requests from clients who are faced with unknown or uncertain problems between 1979 and 1981, coming back from africa, i found myself unemployed for two years. when i left for africa in 1971 there were 100,000 unemployed workers in france. when i came back in 1979 there were 800,000. today there are more than five million. this period taught me how to develop my profession and become an entrepreneur. at the time this was rather original. in 1981, i became professor of sociology at the école supérieure d’agriculture d’angers, where i was to continue working on innovations in the agricultural field, and to begin developing investigations for companies on the behaviour of consumers, thanks to bernard nazaire and adriant, a company specialising in sensorial analysis. in 1985 i did my first investigation on the use of an agricultural book-keeping programme, in a milieu of people who, like me, mixed up the screen, computer, keyboard, and software, and did not even know where they could buy a computer. in 1994, i published a book with sophie taponier entitled informatique, décision et marché de l’information en agriculture [information technology, decisions and the information market in agriculture], thanks to a series of investigations financed by the it department of the ministry of agriculture, directed by vincent wahl. we composed the chapter on sigs (systèmes d’information géographique, geographical information systems) which were the ancestors of big data. mentioning these investigations and publications makes it possible to understand the long-term contribution of empirical anthropology. very often, when we work under a contract, the client calls on us because he is confronted with a new problem and does not know how to deal with it. this area is just as unknown for the anthropologist. the method of observation is the strength of empirical anthropology. we know how to locate ourselves in an unknown environment in which we journal of business anthropology, 5(1), autumn 2016 70 have no landmark. the great reference here is that of bronislaw malinowski, who had to describe the unknown world of the trobriand islanders when he found himself plunged into it by chance, owing to the beginning of the first world war in 1914. i had this same feeling of strangeness when exploring sorcery in the congo in the 1970s, it in companies and used by french consumers from 1980 onwards, and daily life in china from 1997 onwards. the strength of business anthropology, which works to the requests of its clients, is its ability to understand what is in the process of emerging in the form of a weak signal, without us knowing exactly where it will lead us. business anthropology is an anthropology of emergence. in 1988, i was dismissed from esa d’angers following a conflict at work. i found myself unemployed, in divorce proceedings, and with the care of my four children, including my oldest daughter who is disabled. two months later, in 1988, i was appointed professor of social and cultural anthropology at the sorbonne, the name of which is now paris descartes university, sorbonne paris cité, in order to develop an interface between the academic and business worlds. this is what i was to do by taking charge of the masters course in social sciences, focusing on intercultural matters, consumption, and sustainable development. at the same time, i joined l’harmattan publishing house, where i published around fifteen collections over a period of twenty years. my objective was to favour the publication of empirical investigations, whatever the theoretical school of the researchers, and to avoid the publication of purely conceptual books. i made an exception in 1990 with the unconventional thesis of bruno péquignot, pour une critique de la raison anthropologique [criticism of anthropological reasoning]. as an editor i feel incapable of judging the value of a theory, since i find them all essentially interesting. however, i do feel capable of judging the methodological value of a field investigation. moreover, publishing empirical investigations potentially favours the formation of links between academic knowledge and the world of companies. scales of observation, a professional tool which makes it possible to develop an anthropological expertise in multidisciplinary cooperation in 1990 sophie taponier and i created argonautes, a private research and projects company. she passed away in 2001, a few days before the 8th interdisciplinary conference on research in consumption, at the sorbonne, which we had organised with daniel miller, russel belk, soren askegaard, olivier badot, alison clark, sophie chevalier, fabrice clochard, peter falk, guliz ger, isabelle moussaoui, peter otnes, don slater, richard wilk, and yang xiao min. we carried on with the seminar thanks to the support of everyone. a professional network is also a network of friends. desjeux / the itinerary approach 71 scales of observation are the key professional tool which we developed over a period of 30 years, along with sophie taponier, sophie alami, isabelle moussaoui, fabrice clochard, gaëtan brisepierre, and many others. this is a flexible tool which shows that the system of explanation may vary as a function of the sections of reality examined, following three types of causality: correlation, which is mobilised in quantitative studies and experimental behavioural sciences; sense, which is mobilised primarily when working on individuals; and the effect of the situation, which comes from mobile causality varying as a function of the interplay of actors, uncertainties, and changes in configuration of the situation. understanding that the system of causality is not the same for all the actors, and in particular that for most clients, whether they are in general management, r&d, studies, planning departments, marketing, or in an ong as militants, the only scientific causality is that which is proved by correlations, and hence outside of a concrete situation, outside of interactions between members of a family. this makes it possible to understand the difficulties encountered in selling anthropology, and hence to be able to argue better. an unexpected conclusion is that it was my experience in negotiating contracts which allowed me to progress in my practical epistemological reflections, which led to the scales of observation, as i show in 2004 in my book les sciences sociales, published by puf. what anthropology shows when applied to consumption is that the brand does not have much explanatory value with relation to the usage and purchase of a product. the purchase is the result of a collective activity, which is visible at the microsocial level, but also of tensions surrounding the definition and regulation of the rules of the game of consumption―as a market and hence as a system of action which is visible at a mesosocial scale; or in the development of modes of life and geopolitics, which is visible at the macrosocial scale. however, in the 1980s and 1990s, large-scale clients in consumption believed that the brand, brand loyalty, the territory of the brand, and its assets were the key explanatory factors for its purchase by consumers. it was therefore difficult to sell anthropology, which disenchants belief in the brand as held by actors in the milieu of large-scale consumption. by chance for business anthropologists, the 1990s were to see some new customers emerging, thanks to the internet and the rise of new mobile telephones and new communication technologies which required a more complex learning process than soap, washing powder, or shampoo. our main clients were to be france télécom, which subsequently became orange, and bouygues télécom. another unexpected customer was to be linked to electric energy. electricity determines the functionality of the internet. its cost also plays a key role in the purchasing power of different strata of consumers. the poorest among them were threatened by the economic crisis following the stock market crash of 1987, and then the rise of the brics between 2000 and journal of business anthropology, 5(1), autumn 2016 72 2008. these two phenomena were also to be the origin of new markets for anthropologists of consumption. thanks to edf (electricité de france) and the numerous investigations with which it assigned us, in 1996 we published anthropologies de l’électricité, les objets électriques dans la vie quotidienne en france [anthropologies of electricity, electric objects in daily life in france]. a third topic was to be that of mobility, with the ministry of infrastructure and transport and the research commission of la poste, which financed an investigation on house moving. it is always difficult to know whether or not university colleagues appreciate this mixture of academic and business related work. sometimes a polemic surrounding a book which we published, such as that on les méthodes qualitatives [qualitative methods] in 2009, shows that some colleagues are strongly opposed to the professionalisation of sociology and anthropology, in the name of scientific purity, even if all of the investigations which we have carried out in laboratories in france and africa show that there is in fact little purity in the sciences. more and more, i have been asked to explain how i created a professional ph.d. at the sorbonne between 2007 and 2014. very often, in such meetings there has been somebody who opposed this kind of diploma, denouncing the fact that anthropology is “instrumentalised” by companies. however, more recently, in 2016, i participated in a round table facing an audience where there were more than 150 people, most of them ph.d. students, and encountered no opposition. this indicates that under the constraint of job openings, some ph.d. students are prepared to professionalise. business anthropology still remains a divisive subject. however, it is also possible to think that the professionalisation of anthropology and sociology―which makes it possible to confront emerging realities, and hence avoid being trapped in scholastic debates about abstract concepts that have little connection with this reality―represents a new opportunity for academic sociology. the remaining question to resolve―that of financing―is not simple, as private companies may favour anthropological research more if it allows them to solve their problems better, and if the humanities prove that the way in which they approach problems is more efficient than marketing or that of management consultants. one of the weaknesses i feel about my way of doing anthropology is that i do not seek to enchant reality, which is often something that is asked for by the client. instead, i seek to show the world as it is―with its resistances, its power relations, and its consumers as autonomous actors, with problems to resolve and, today above all, with the ability to oppose what is imposed on them by companies. business anthropology, a practice which demands geographical mobility, networks and a diverse range of investigation topics between 1994 and 2001, i taught for one month a year as a visiting desjeux / the itinerary approach 73 professor at usf, tampa, florida. thanks to discussions with douglas harper, i discovered visual sociology. with eric arnould, one of the future founders of the cct (consumer culture theory), i saw for the first time how an anthropologist who had worked on niger applied his competences to consumption. with mark neumann, author of on the rim: looking for the grand canyon (1999), we were to make an audio documentary with a group of mexican workers who were protesting against the low price of tomatoes. in the decade after the year 2000, with patricia sunderland and rita denny, later editors of the handbook of anthropology in business (2014), we worked on body care for l’oréal in new york. in brazil, these were the investigations which we were to carry out further with roberta dias campos, maribel carvalho suarez, leticia moreira casotti, and estelle galateau on body care or economic consumption. in china, investigations were carried out with ken erickson on cars, with laurence varga on infant diarrhoea, and with anne sophie boisard on the chinese middle classes. in 1994, i discovered at the congress of the aaa (american association of anthropology) in atlanta that 50 per cent of anthropologists who have a ph.d. work outside universities. the objective of the master’s course which i directed at the sorbonne has been to train social anthropologists so that they are capable of working outside academia and, in some cases, of creating their own company, on the model of argonautes. the latter, therefore, has been of strategic importance for the training of students. it makes us open to companies. it allows students to professionalise themselves. they learn to observe the usage and hence the social conditions of the acquisition of a new technology. moreover, at l’harmattan, we created a series to publish the investigations of young researchers, which makes them more attractive on the job market. in 2015, all of this was to lead to the creation of a network of 45 french-speaking business anthropologists, following an idea of de lionnel ochs, whom we met in 2014 in london at the conference of the professional network epic. we called the new network “anthropik.” this network follows numerous professional networks in which i have participated: aps (association professionnelle des sociologues) in the 1980s in france, with renaud sainsaulieu; napa (national association for the practice of anthropology) in 1994, with elizabeth briody, julia gluesing, and marietta baba, whom i was to meet again in a project for motorola with john sherry, jean canavan, gary bamossy, and janeen costa; in 2007, there was a seminar on qualitative methods at the sorbonne with our usual american, chinese, brazilian, and french network, as well as hy mariampolski and bruno moynie for visual anthropology. in 2012, came the launch by robert tian in guangzhou, china, of the international conference on applications of anthropology in business, with timothy de waal malefyt and maryann mccabe in particular, and around thirty other business anthropologists. the fifth http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/asin/0816627851/hearingvoices http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/asin/0816627851/hearingvoices http://www.argonautes.fr/2006-campos-roberta-dias-suarez-maribel-carvalho-casotti-leticia-moreira/ http://www.argonautes.fr/2006-campos-roberta-dias-suarez-maribel-carvalho-casotti-leticia-moreira/ journal of business anthropology, 5(1), autumn 2016 74 conference was to be held in beijing in 2016. all of these networks show that business anthropology is also the result of a social construction, and that it is not just an individual’s work. moreover, these networks have a particular dimension―the importance of trust. we are in a competitive market, which demands that we must be sure of the reliability of people whom we recommend or with whom we work. the constraint of the market guarantees methodological rigour. friendship guarantees trust. the constant improvement of qualitative techniques of information collection and observation using the internet guarantees reliability. financing of investigations: a permanent uncertainty following geopolitical developments in 1997, i was invited to guangzhou in china by my friend and colleague zheng lihua, director of the french department of guangdong university of foreign studies, to spend three-and-a-half months teaching the methods of anthropological investigation to chinese students who were learning french. consumption is in the process of emerging in china. beaufour ipsen international laboratory asked us for an investigation of the social usages of memory in china. edf asked us to work on the poor outlying suburban areas around guangzhou. orange commissioned us to carry out an investigation into usages of the mobile telephone. next we developed fieldwork with l’oréal and chanel on body care and make-up, with pernod-ricard on usages of alcohol, with danone on non-alcoholic drinks, with la française des jeux on game-playing practices of the chinese, and also with asmodée on parlour games. most often we worked with the team of guangdong university of foreign studies and chinese ph.d. students such as wang lei, hu shen, and ma jing jing. the interviews and observations were carried out in chinese, and then translated and discussed in french. for around the past ten years, i have been learning chinese in order to gain better access to the social and cultural logics of chinese society. progress has been slow, but there have been major benefits. for around the past twenty years, these observations financed by private companies seeking to understand the functionality of chinese society have enabled us to see the new chinese urban middle class emerge. some of these investigations were carried out in the framework of ph.d. projects co-financed by private companies and the french state. others were financed by fixed-term contracts. several of these ph.d. projects have been published by l’harmattan. with yang xiaomin and hu shen, we have just published an article entitled “classe moyenne et consommation ou les mutations silencieuses de la société chinoise, depuis 1997” (2016) [middle class and consumption, or the silent changes in chinese society since 1997]. this publication is a good example of the reasonable compromises which can be made between non-disclosure desjeux / the itinerary approach 75 clauses to which we are bound by companies (when they think that certain results may be of strategic importance with respect to their development), the quality of fieldwork investigations, and the demands of a scientific publication. the important point to note is that most of the investigations whose results i have published for the past 40 years have been financed by private companies, administrations, or ngos, and that for me there is not a great deal of difference between fundamental research and applied research. in both cases, the quality of the field investigation is the same. what may vary is the time required to have between twenty and 50 interviews carried out and then processed. the time may be between two and nine months for a privately financed investigation, and between one and two years for one that is financed by public money. in a university context it may exceed three years. however, it is the use of the results which differentiates an academic study from an applied study. for an academic study, the time spent on modelling and the reading necessary for this modelling will be much greater. in applied research, the time for translation of results into operationalisable information will be much greater. conclusion today, the main conclusion at which i have arrived, in practical terms, with respect to social usages of anthropology by companies, is that the anthropological tool provides a real contribution with respect to knowledge of the final user―whether it be a consumer, a company, or a department within a company, which orders the anthropological investigation. however, once the results have been presented, the anthropological knowledge is absorbed by the mechanisms which govern the functionality of the organisation. at the stage of output from the company, at the moment of introduction onto the market, the contribution of anthropology is often invisible. moreover, it seems to me that for anthropology to be accepted in a company, its results need to be reinterpreted and transformed by actors who are seeking to develop a new good, a new service, more economic consumption, or aid for the poorest. this is what i went further into with annie cattan and pragmaty, a company specialising in the carrying out of change, of which i am a shareholder with my company daize & co. however, anthropologists are there to provide a reminder that if the company wishes to innovate, it must constantly take into account unresolved problems in the daily lives of users―something which companies often have a tendency to forget, as they focus instead on the brand and the internal logic with which it functions. another conclusion is that anthropology only represents part of the solution. the constraints of production related to the machines which journal of business anthropology, 5(1), autumn 2016 76 manufacture the products, the constraints of financing which limit or promote investment in favour of an innovation, and the modes of management, which may or may not promote flexibility within companies, all often have an influence which is greater than the knowledge provided by anthropology. i have nonetheless noticed that some clients were greatly interested by data relating to cultural or geopolitical contexts, or by comparisons with other situations, which the anthropologist was able to provide them―an interest that extended well beyond the product or new service for which the investigation was originally assigned. a business anthropologist not only provides information on the motivations and sense which a consumer assigns to his practices, but also provides a vision of society, an analysis of the field of forces within which a company is acting, and the emergence of social movements which transform modes of life and political life, as well as paying attention to the new technologies which may or may not threaten its business model―in other words, on all of those contexts that may make the development of a company uncertain. essay conditions of creativity: adding historical perspective john mccreery (the word works, ltd. jlm@wordworks.jp) beyond the ethnographic present a google search for “creativity” takes 0.54 seconds to produce 220 million hits. a search for “creativity” on amazon.com discovers 25,156 books. the same search on slideshare produces links to 115,791 presentations. what can anthropologists and business anthropologists, in particular, bring to this conversation? one answer is ethnography, the close study of creativity in specific contexts where the anthropologist adds insights from anthropological theory to participant-observation and native exegesis. ethnography based on intensive fieldwork can produce compelling accounts that ring true, to industry insiders as well as to those who conduct similar studies (see, for example, moeran 1996, mccreery 2001, moeran and christensen, ed., 2014). however, as clifford geertz observed in his introduction to islam observed (1968), the value of ethnographic insights depends on larger conversations. and today these conversations are more widespread. as marcus and fischer (1999: xx) have famously noted, anthropologists no longer enjoy the privilege of traveling to places unknown to their readers or writing an ethnography that becomes an authoritative account: “rather we step into a stream of already existing representations page 1 of 11 jba 5(1): 105-115 autumn 2016 © the author(s) 2016 issn 2245-4217 www.cbs.dk/jba mailto:jlm@wordworks.jp journal of business anthropology, 5(1), autumn 2016 106 produced by journalists, prior anthropologists, historians, creative writers, and of course the subjects of study themselves.” for business anthropologists, this predicament is particularly poignant. our clients and our readers include industry insiders, individuals whose knowledge and experience may far exceed our own. we are fortunate, then, when our resources include an active trade press, a resource i discovered while working and doing research in japan. ethnography enlarged the focus of my current research is the advertising industry in japan. my wife and i moved to japan in 1980. in 1983, i was hired as an englishlanguage copywriter by hakuhodo, inc., japan’s second largest advertising agency, where, as a copywriter in hakuhodo’s international division i was a frog at the bottom of a narrow well. hakuhodo is a very large company, with roughly three thousand employees. i worked on dozens of projects with a great variety of people. was what i observed and what i was told by my colleagues typical of advertising in japan? how could i possibly tell? the answer is both simple and overwhelming. japan’s advertising industry is covered by a large and active trade press. every month, just two of its most prominent publications, sendenkaigi [publicity forum] and brain, publish four hundred information-packed pages of industry news and commentary. choosing what to include in my notes is like standing in front of a firehose and trying to select the important drops of water. fortunately, the same trade press that publishes sendenkaigi and brain also publishes books in which industry stars discuss such topics as how advertising differs from one medium to another, the implications of new media, how to manage creative teams, and how to develop and present creative ideas. treating these authors as key informants helps to orient my thinking. to do justice to what they have written would, however, require another book. in this essay, i turn to another source, the advertising contest annual published each year by the tokyo copywriters club (tcc). each year, several thousand ads are submitted to the tcc ad contest. roughly ten percent of submissions survive the initial round of judging and appear in the annual. but the ads themselves are not my focus here. the data for this paper are taken from the editors’ introductions, judges’ comments, and interviews with winners. they fascinate me because they have, for more than sixty years, provided an annual window on a long and still on-going debate. the debate is about a perennial issue: the roles of copy and copywriters in advertising. following its ebb and flow reveals how economic fluctuations have changed the mood of the mccreery / conditions of creativity 107 industry and the advent of new media, first tv, and now the internet, have transformed the field in which copywriters and other advertising creatives do their creative work. industry background in 2009, when i first spoke to maki jun, one of japan’s most renowned copywriters, he remarked that during the 1970s putting together a creative team was still mainly a matter of meeting people in bars. by the 1980s, production companies had appeared. assembling teams to produce tv commercials was one of their critical roles. during the1990s, the large agencies took control. production companies and freelancers alike were dependent on the agencies. i was thinking of what maki had said as i read amano yukichi’s kōkoku mo kawatta ne [advertising has also changed] (2008). as founder and editor of kōkoku hihyō [advertising critique] (1979-2009), amano had closely tracked the history of advertising in japan. he identifies three turning points. the first was during the 1960s, as japan’s postwar economy took off. the japanese advertising industry embraced marketing concepts imported from america, and advertising creatives were entranced by ddb’s “think small,” “lemon,” and other ads for volkswagen. in them they saw models for advertising that could both be critical of contemporary society and create new markets. the second turning point was during the 1980s, when tv, which had overtaken newspapers in share of advertising spend in 1975, became the dominant form of advertising in japan. instead of insights expressed in clever headlines designed to capture and hold the attention of newspaper and magazine readers, the new dominant form of ad was the 30-second, and then increasingly 15-second, commercial. action, music, and visual imagery captured audience eyeballs. the role of language was sharply reduced. the 1990s were “the lost decade.” japan’s economic bubble had collapsed. at this third turning point advertisers were cutting their budgets. a “return to basics” movement shaped advertising creative. clever writing was still highly valued; but bean-counters increasingly demanded straight sales talk. in the new millennium, japan’s economy remained sluggish, but new media―first satellite and cable tv, and then the internet―appeared. when amano shut down kōkoku hihyō in 2009, he explained that as advertising shifted away from broadcast tv, the ad world that he had known was finished. journal of business anthropology, 5(1), autumn 2016 108 the tokyo copywriters club in november 1957. yoshida hideo, the president of dentsu, japan’s largest advertising agency, invited 150 leading designers, art directors, and advertising photographers from all over japan to a party at the imperial hotel to network and discuss the state of advertising in japan. but only a bare handful of copywriters were invited, a slight that reflected their low status in the industry. the japan advertising artists club (jaac) had been formed six years earlier, in 1951. the tokyo art directors club (adc) was already in formation. the copywriters lacked an organization of their own. in january 1958, a small group of copywriters founded the kopii tōkakai [copy on the 10th club]. the club started with seventeen members, who met on the 10th of each month to discuss the nature of copy and what copywriters could do to improve their professional status. by october 1961, when the third issue of ten, the club newsletter, was published, the membership had risen to 84. by then, the adc had already begun publishing an annual, whose credits did not include copywriters. copywriters in japan were still being treated as assistants who need not be mentioned. the copywriters needed their own annual, and the club needed a new name. “kōpi tōkakai” sounded too much like an informal, private association. a group claiming to be a professional association needed something more official sounding. thus, in 1963, when it held its first contest and published its first annual, the club also changed its name to the tokyo copywriters club (tcc). the debate begins the annual was launched as part of an effort to enhance copywriters’ professional status. it did not, however, focus on copy alone. in the introduction, club founder ueno sofu argued that it made no sense to assert the old claim that “the copy is the advertising.” “today’s copywriter should start a step further back and accept the thinking that the problems of advertising copy are a part of the total advertising communication which integrates language and visual forms within a limited space.” (tcc 1963: 1) ads selected for inclusion in the annual were judged as ads, creative concepts in which copy and visual work together. a decade later in the 1973 annual, the editors note that their theme, “advertising and words,” may seem commonplace. but, they write, copywriters face a new threat. mccreery / conditions of creativity 109 “as we look at the copy in the last ten annuals, we see how step by step, copy and copywriters have been buried in organizations. copywriters must retain their independence… today's copywriters seem shackled. we see a danger here.” (tcc 1973: 7) in 1973, the rapid growth of japan’s economy during the 1960s had stalled. clients were retrenching and less willing to embrace experimentation. the early eighties by 1980, japan’s economy was growing again. the copywriter’s independence was still a major issue, but now the mood was optimistic. “neither the company's face. nor the consumer's face. copy fosters a third, independent face. our own discoveries. our own feelings. our own sensibilities. our own dreams. our own words. we turn them into our own copy. copy is always me, for as many different me's as there are copywriters.” (tcc 1980: 1) but good copy alone was not enough. in the 1981 annual, the editors write, “when you just do it, that’s nothing to brag about. when you stand up and say, "i'll do it," that's a big deal. talent takes courage, talent takes guts. to transcend everyday rhetoric, everyday feeling, you have to be bold, sometimes you have to write nonsense.” (tcc 1981: 1) the copywriter boom as economic growth accelerated during the early eighties, copy became almost literally magic. in 1982, “one line of love, one line of infatuation, one line of dreams, one line of tears, one line of youth, one line of promise, one line of joking, one line of life, one line of miracles, one cosmic line. neither poet, nor novelist, what works for the copywriter is a one-line love letter.” (tcc 1982: 5) in 1983, “everyone has a small god in his heart. when we are most honest with ourselves, the god will grant us an astonishing gift.” (tcc 1983: i) journal of business anthropology, 5(1), autumn 2016 110 this annual is, however, the twentieth in the series and, thus, a moment for reflection. advertising legend tsuchiya koichi recalls that 1963 was a great year for gags, but also a year in which copy had a clear, decisive tone. by 1983, “let’s point our eyes at outer space” for toshiba, or “transistors have changed tv” for sony, seem old-fashioned. the boom peaks in 1984, the copywriters are no longer seers, waiting on their gods. creative genius is a talent, a gift. “delicious, cute, new, accurate, big, beautiful, amazing, outstanding... the beautiful copy collected here attracted all these words of praise. every line is the finest flower of a copywriter’s talent.” (tcc 1984: 3) in 1985, kansei, aesthetic sensitivity, had become a marketing buzzword. functionality and product quality were taken for granted; products made in japan were seen as the best in the world. paradox was fascinating. “advertising copy is an arena called kansei. we are trying to be both soft and hard enough. our winners achieve this goal.” (tcc 1985: 7) in 1986, hubris filled the air. the annual’s theme was “hitmen.” copywriters were men (yes, almost entirely men) who turned products into hits. editor-in-chief okada naoya posed in the nude. the art used in the annual was a pastiche of penises and pistols. “advertising is art. but advertising is business as well. company, strategy, market, product. words, images, music, casting. pressures from all sides, and the copywriter stands in the middle. conditions are hard, goals unclear. that is why, all the more. we can't be timid. unless we pull the trigger, the advertising won't fire.” (tcc 1986: 3) attention has shifted from copy, the art of producing magical words, to the copywriter, the man of the hour, tough, determined, unbowed, the one who pulls it all together. but the tide was already turning. mccreery / conditions of creativity 111 the boom is over by 1987, the copywriter boom had peaked. to akiyama sho, writing as jury chair, the relationship between copy and historical moment was neither the result of careful calculation nor the exercise of unstoppable genius. serendipity, that’s the word. “we clap our hands, but which do we applaud? the one on the right or the one on the left? great copy captures what people are thinking and feeling in that year, that moment, the copywriter and the mood of the moment are just right for each other.” (tcc 1987: 23) by 1988 only three years have passed since the “hitmen” of 1985, but now the tone is plaintive. “writing good copy is a good thing; copywriters want to believe that.” (tcc 1988: 3) what’s in a name? in 1990, fifteen years after tv surpassed newspapers in share of advertising billings, the annual’s name was changed from kopī nenkan [copy annual] to kōkoku nenkan [advertising annual], a change that remained in effect through 1999. onoda takao defended the change, likening it to a woman in her thirties choosing a new, more appropriate dress to replace what she had worn in her twenties. (tcc 1990: 7) editorin-chief nakahata takashi complained that most of the prize winners were big campaigns. great work in lesser formats like one-off magazine ads was being ignored. (tcc 1990: 9) itoi shigesato chose a campaign for rolling-k, a cheap whiskey, which contained no copy at all, for the jury chair’s prize. he likened copywriters to carpenters who no longer have to plane for themselves the wood used in the houses they build. (tcc 1990: 15). in 1991, jury chair maki jun writes: “the leading characteristic of this year's submissions was the shift from one-line to multi-line copy. instead of single phrases, what we found were short poems like those found in collections of traditional japanese poetry. instead of trying to capture a message in a single, beautiful, powerful line, today's copywriters participate in "comprehensive proposals," "comprehensive decisions," "comprehensive executions." what a nuisance that is.” (tcc 1991: 9) journal of business anthropology, 5(1), autumn 2016 112 the new regime in 1993, the editor is sasaki hiroshi, who during the next decade will, as copywriter or creative director, be associated with more award-winning ads than any other individual. sasaki compares copywriters to doraemon, the cartoon cat from the future, who always has something in his hyperspace pocket to bail out nobita, a boy who is always getting into trouble. the japanese business world is full of nobitas, he says, clueless boys turning to copywriters and hoping to be handed some new device. “the role of the copywriter has changed substantially. more than someone who just produces words, the copywriter is now expected to come up with concepts, to be a planner or creative director. on the positive side, the scope of the copywriter's job has broadened. on the negative side, it is often hard to tell what it is that we are supposed to do. the framework that defines our expertise seems in danger of collapsing. be that as it may, here is what i think. it is wrong for copywriters to give up their role as the people who discover the right words.... the words they come up with may not appear in print; they may be spoken or visualized instead. what we need to be are people who come up with big ideas, persuade others to adopt them, produce them and take responsibility for them.” (tcc 1993: 6) in 1996, three years later, nakahata takashi returns as jury chair and offers a different perspective. “advertising never says anything new. to communicate something radically new to our audience would be hugely expensive. to communicate efficiently, advertising creative should articulate the preconscious thoughts for which the audience has not yet found words. from this perspective, advertising creative is the product of what society is thinking.” (tcc 1996: 8) and what will the future hold? thirteen years later, in 2009, japan’s advertising industry is confronted with a global financial crisis and the rise of new technologies that disrupt its traditional business model. nakahata is once again the jury chair. “corporations are on the defensive. one effect is a turn to realism. the preferred technique is to have a celebrity explain the product benefits. advertising creative is an add-on to product features or corporate image. thoughtfulness, playfulness, frankness, cuteness, depth, openheartedness, charm… where are they? we see nothing but ads that show no affection for the audience.” his closing words reflect a growing pessimism, “would you buy anything from a salesman who shows not a bit of human feeling? will you stop to listen to someone who is just mccreery / conditions of creativity 113 running through a list of product features? even selling snake-oil or hawking bananas provides a better service.” (tcc 2009: 6) looking back to look forward reviewing this brief account of the still on-going debate about the role of copy and copywriters, i ask myself what i see here that was missing in my previous attempts to write about advertising in japan. i addressed issues raised by anthropological theory, but wrote in the ethnographic present. i ignored a vigorous trade press that had, ever since the early 1960s, been covering the industry in which i was interested. in “malinowski, magic, and advertising” (mccreery 1995), i noted that, while advertising resembles the symbols found in religion and magic, the latter value conformity and repetition of received models. in contrast, nothing is more damning when evaluating an ad concept, than to have someone say, “that’s already been done.” advertising embraces change in a way that neither magic nor religion does. in “creating advertising in japan: a sketch in search of a principle” (mccreery 2001), i imagined a program of systematic research in which ethnographers working in different agencies pile up enough empirical cases to support a theory of how creativity works in japanese advertising. then, however, i noted that the number of possible ads and possible paths to reach them are, if not infinite, larger than the number of electrons in the visible universe. predicting creative output seems, by definition, impossible. i argued that we can, nonetheless, explore the procedures by which ads are created, a series of familiar steps: orientation, brainstorming, preparing the presentation, the presentation, and, if all goes well and the client buys an idea, production of the finished ad. i also suggested that victor turner’s “social drama” (1974), pierre bourdieu’s “habitus”(1992), and brian moeran’s “tournament of value” (1996) offered theoretical perspectives from which to better understand this process. here i would like to say a bit more about turner’s social drama. social dramas are conflicts in which perennial issues surface; individuals occupying different social positions align themselves with one side or another. the roles of copy and copywriters in advertising is a classic example. i cannot recall a single instance in the projects in which i participated while working at hakuhodo in which this issue did not arise. should a project start with copy or visual? which should be given priority? should the copy be long or short? was copy even necessary? but focused on the job at hand, i ignored the historical moment in which i was working. i only gradually came to appreciate how differences in economic mood and medium, further constrained by product life cycles and client corporate culture, shaped what was possible in any particular case. then, journal of business anthropology, 5(1), autumn 2016 114 stepping back even further, i began to note how economic fluctuations and the advent of new technologies affected all these factors. considering what i learned required rethinking turner. as a manchester school social anthropologist trained by max gluckman, turner assumed that perennial issues resulted in a cyclical process: rituals restored the status quo. as noted above, however, that is precisely where advertising diverges sharply from ritual as turner conceived it. every ad attempts a revolution, to change the world, if only a little because the status quo has been judged, from a business or critical perspective, to be unsatisfactory. ritual attempts to deny history. advertising embraces change. creativity in advertising must, i now conclude, be examined and explained in historical context. to combine anthropology with history is not, of course, a new idea. as i was revising this essay, i saw on the internet that one of anthropology’s most towering figures, sidney mintz, had died. the obituary in the boston review quoted mintz, and no one ever said it better. “though i do not accept uncritically the dictum that anthropology must become history or be nothing at all, i believe that without history its explanatory power is seriously compromised. social phenomena are by their nature historical, which is to say that the relationship among events in one “moment” can never be abstracted from their past and future setting.” (mintz 1985: xxx) in turning to history, however, i see more than a methodological assumption. i see an opening for a new approach to business anthropology: by exploiting the wealth of historical information that an industry trade press makes available, we can identify perennial issues specific to particular industries. industry-specific issues define the fields within which creativity occurs. having identified those issues, we can then go on to explore how economics and new technologies affect those fields. here there is room to develop new theory to fill the gap between routine procedures that industry insiders take for granted and creativity’s always unpredictable outcomes. adding history to ethnography, we can engage in larger conversations. in the c-suite as well as the academy. references amano yukichi. 2008. kokoku mo kawatta,ne [advertising, too, has changed]. impress japan. geertz, clifford. 1968. islam observed: religious development in morocco and indonesia. phoenix books. marcus, george e. and michael j. fischer. 1999. anthropology as cultural critique: an experimental moment in the human sciences. 2nd edition. university of chicago press. mccreery / conditions of creativity 115 mccreery, john. 1995. “malinowski, magic and advertising: on choosing metaphor.” in john sherry, ed., contemporary marketing and consumer behavior: an anthropological sourcebook, pp. 309-329. sage publications. mccreery, john, 2001. “creating advertising in japan: a sketch in search of a principle.” in brian moeran, ed., asian media productions, pp. 151-167. curzon press. mintz, sidney. 1985. sweetness and power: the place of sugar in modern histor . viking elizabeth sifton books. moeran, brian. 1996. a japanese advertising agency: an anthropology of media and markets. curzon press. moeran, brian and bo t. christensen, eds. 2014. exploring creativity: evaluative practices in innovation, design, and the arts. cambridge university press. tokyo copywriters club. 1963-present. tcc kopii nenkan [tcc advertising copy annual]. sendenkaigi. fisher formatted with page numbers v.2         anthropology  of  versus  anthropology  for  business:   exploring  the  borders  and  crossovers  between  an   anthropology  of  business  and  anthropological   consultancy   guest  editor:  daniela  peluso     foreword   melissa  fisher             four  years  ago,  i  published  my  ethnography  wall  street  women  and  an   article  entitled:  towards  a  feminist  para-­‐ethnography  on  gender  equality   policy  making  in  business  (2012  a  and  b).  in  the  article,  drawing  on  nearly   two  decades  of  research—fieldwork  with  women  on  wall  street,   consulting  work  as  a  business  anthropologist,  and  a  new  project  on  global   gender  equity  initiatives—i  discussed  the  challenges  of  studying   ethnographically  the  global  gender  policy  movement.  working  in  new   assemblages  of  institutions,  persons,  and  practices,  i  wrote,  had  altered   my  understanding  of  the  purpose  of  anthropology.  following  state,   corporate,  and  academic  actors  coming  together  at  conferences,  i  saw  that   i  was  navigating  a  field  in  which  others  were  already  conducting  research,   taking  action  and  making  policy  on  gender,  and  that  these  elite  actors   were  themselves  already  engaged  in  some  form  of  ethnographic  inquiry.     my  article  argued  that  global  gender  equity  initiatives  were   feminist  para-­‐ethnographic  sites.  my  term  built  on  the  work  of  douglas       page  1  of  7     jba  6(1):  1-­‐7   spring  2017     ©  the  author(s)  2017   issn  2245-­‐4217   www.cbs.dk/jba     journal  of  business  anthropology,  6(1),  spring  2017      2   holmes  and  george  marcus  on  para-­‐ethnography,  “the  conception  that   traditional  objects  of  study  have  developed  something  like  an   ethnography  of  both  their  predicaments  and  those  who  have  encroached   upon  them,  and  their  knowledge  practices  in  this  regard  are  in  some  ways   parallel  to  the  anthropologist’s  and  deserving  of  more  consideration  than   mere  representation  in  the  archives  of  the  world’s  people  that   anthropologists  have  created”  (holmes  and  marcus  2006:35).  in  the   essay,  i  described  my  experience  zig-­‐zagging  from  a  purportedly  “pure”   academic  ethnographic  project  on  finance  to  ostensibly  applied   ethnographic  projects  on  behalf  of  businesses,  to  participating  and   observing  in  a  set  of  meetings  about  global  gender  initiatives  in  which  i   was  no  longer  sure  of  the  boundaries  between  of/for  business,   researcher/informant,  and  business/non-­‐business.     my  narrative  about  my  experiences  and  my  methodological   reflections  of  engaging  in  both  the  anthropology  of  and  the  anthropology   for  business,  were  part  of  an  ongoing  effort  to  understand  the   relationship  between  anthropology  and  business,  including  the   positionality  of  ethnographers  and  their  informants  over  the  past  several   decades  (downey  and  fisher  2006).    while  by  no  means  a  unique   endeavor,  the  consideration  of  the  histories,  methods,  theories,  and   epistemologies  of  an  emergent  field  of  business  anthropology  as  such  had   not  been  particularly  commonplace  during  my  graduate  years  at   columbia  university’s  anthropology  department  in  the  1990s  or  at  my   first  academic  position  in  georgetown  university’s  anthropology   department.  imagine  my  surprise,  then,  when  on  the  heels  of  the   publications  of  my  book  on  wall  street  women  and  the  article  on   feminist-­‐para-­‐ethnography,  i  had  the  opportunity  to  comment  on  the   2012  american  anthropological  association’s  panel  anthropology  of   versus  anthropology  for  business—revised  and  expanded  versions  of  five   panel  papers  that  form  this  special  issue  of  business  anthropology.  indeed,   i  was  intrigued  by  the  fact  that  the  panel  was  being  organized  by  one  of   my  colleagues  from  graduate  school,  daniela  peluso,  an  anthropologist   best  known  (at  the  time)  for  her  work  in  the  amazon.  it  turned  out  that  a   number  of  other  participants  had  also  moved  from  more  traditional   anthropological  field  sites  to  business  inflected  venues,  bringing  to  bear   their  critical  anthropological  theories  and  methods.  these  new  sites   included  organizations  typically  associated  with  business  such  as   advertising  agencies  headquartered  in  nyc  (malefyt,  this  volume)  and  a   global  danish  consumer  electronic  company  (krause-­‐jenson,  this   volume).  but  they  also  encompassed  institutions  that,  at  least  up  until   recently,  were  not  considered  businesses:  the  department  of  sanitation   in  nyc  (nagle,  this  volume).    beyond  this,  one  anthropologist  conducted  a   longitudinal,  in-­‐depth  ethnographic  study  of  the  institutional  field  that   makes  up  the  industrial  meat  industry  (stull,  this  volume);  and  one  even   addressed  ethnographers’  positionality  in  field  research  associated  with   business,  including  a  discussion  of  the  para-­‐ethnographic  in  relation  to                                                                                                                                                                                                                                  fisher  /  foreword       3   corporate  ethnography  (sedgwick,  this  volume).   the  purpose  of  this  special  issue  of  business  anthropology  on   “anthropology  of  versus  anthropology  for  business:  exploring  the   borders  and  crossovers  between  an  anthropology  of  business  and  an   anthropological  consultancy”  is  to  critically  interrogate  different  types  of   anthropological  engagements  with  business  and  industry,  while   simultaneously  investigating  their  overlaps.  the  papers  highlight  the   complexity  of  thinking  about  precisely  how  to  interpret  this  landscape.   they  raise  three  central  questions:  what  exactly  is  business  anthropology   in  the  21st  century?  how  has  neoliberal  capitalism,  expressed  by  the   encroachment  of  finance  into  organizational  life,  reshaped  the  field-­‐sites   and  forms  of  ethnographic  inquiry  of  business  anthropology?  what  is  the   relationship  between  ethnographers  and  their  informants  in  the  field  of   business,  and  how  do  these  relationships  shape  the  production  of   knowledge?   the  papers  in  this  volume  reveal  that  there  is  no  one  such  thing  as   business  anthropology.  nor  is  the  field  simply  defined  by  its  inhabitants,   academic  anthropologists  studying  business  organizations  and  those   working  on  behalf  of  industry  (along  with  the  distinctions  and  overlaps   between  them)  (moeran  2014).  rather,  the  objects  of  study,  methods,  and   theories  discussed  by  the  contributors  reveal  that  their  work  overlaps  far   more  with  the  discipline  of  anthropology’s  concerns  writ  large  than  is   often  acknowledged.  after  decades  of  focusing  mostly  on  the  poor,   minorities,  and  other  marginalized  peoples  in  so-­‐called  “developing   countries,”  they  are  part  of  two  if  not  three  generations  of  anthropologists   studying  advertising  agents,  human  resource  consultants,  advocacy   groups,  and  other  experts  in  the  global  north  and  the  global  south.     courses  in,  for  example,  “the  anthropology  of  capitalism”  began   emerging  even  before  the  2008  financial  crisis,  and  have  only  grown  since   along  with  essays  and  ethnographies  on  traders,  neoliberalism,  and   capitalism  (fisher  and  downey  2006;  greenhouse  2012;  holmes  2013).   these  works,  along  with  the  papers  in  this  volume,  illuminate  the   importance  of  bringing  social  and  cultural  analysis  to  the  study  of   corporate  corridors  and  business  strategy  meetings  (garsten  and  nyqvist   2013).  in  some  ways,  what  is  happening  in  this  area  of  anthropology   mirrors  shifts  in  history.  for  many  decades,  business  history  was  a  small   subfield  that  focused  largely  on  corporations  (lipartito  and  sicilia  2004).   during  the  last  decade  and  a  half,  however,  that  field  has  moved  to  look   more  broadly  at  the  history  of  capitalism  (ott  2011).  in  business   anthropology,  while  some  continue  to  focus  their  work  more  squarely  on   corporations  (like  malefyt,  this  volume),  others  (like  stull,  this  volume)   are  looking  at  entire  supply  chains  as  in  the  case  of  the  production  of   industrial  meat  -­‐  from  growers,  to  eaters,  from  processers  to  retailors,   from  multinational  corporations  to  unauthorized  immigrant  workers.   business  here  is  not  conceptualized  or  studied  as  an  isolated   journal  of  business  anthropology,  6(1),  spring  2017      4   organizational  form  or  practice.  instead,  as  marietta  baba  drawing  on   new  institutional  theory  points  out,  it  refers  to  an  institutional  field   composed  of  organizations  and  actors,  including  for  example,  firms,   suppliers,  and  even,  activists  (2012).     paralleling  discussions  in  the  papers  in  this  volume  about  the   variation  of  corporate  forms,  supply  chains,  and  workers,  is  a  shift  in   anthropology  more  generally  to  consider  the  multiple,  often  contingent   and  unstable  networks  and  social  relations  that  make  up  capitalism  (bear   et  al  2015).    particularly  in  the  wake  of  the  2008  financial  crisis,  both   business  anthropologists  and  anthropologists  studying  capitalism  are   examining  businesses  as  a  way  to  understand  increasing  forms  of   inequality  and  wealth.  unpacking  how  particular  authors  in  this  volume   engage  with  concerns  circulating  within  the  anthropology  of  capitalism   requires  reading  their  work  against  other  bodies  of  work.  one  might   juxtapose  stull’s  study  of  the  corporate  control  of  america’s  food  system,   including  the  industrial  meat  chain,  to  anthropologist  anna  tsing’s   theorization  of  supply  chain  capitalism  (ibid,  2009).    both  are  interested   in  understanding  and  addressing  the  impact  of  changing  conditions  of   global  business  on  workers.  these  include,  for  example,  the  ways  firms   (and  the  elites  that  run  them)  disavow  the  legacy  of  unions  and  the   struggle  for  better  wages  and  working  conditions  by  outsourcing  and/  or   using  immigrant  labor  (ibid,  157;  stull  this  volume).  or  one  might  read   nagle’s  analysis  of  the  department  of  sanitation  in  new  york  city  as   having  attributes  of  a  powerful  corporation  in  conjunction  with   anthropologist  julian  brash’s  bloomberg’s  new  york—a  study  of  the   emergence  and  now  dominance  of  bloomberg’s  corporate  model  of  urban   governance  in  nyc  (brash  2011).  together  they  reveal  the  ways   government  institutions  are  increasingly  run  like  businesses.   all  of  the  contributors  to  this  volume  reflect  on  the  relationship(s)   between  the  business  of  anthropology  and  anthropology  of  business  by   tracing  their  own  experiences  moving  within,  outside  of,  and  between   academia  and  industry.  several  do  so  in  an  auto-­‐ethnographic  sense,   drawing  on  autobiography  as  a  strategy  to  make  sense  of  their   professional  experience  and  write  about  their  shifting  role  as   anthropologists  in  these  various  and  varying  contexts  over  time.  drawing   over  nearly  three  decades  of  research  on  industrial  meat,  stull  offers  a   “confessional  tale”  describing  how  his  experience  expanded  beyond  the   impact  of  the  industry  on  communities  to  include  engaging  in  advocacy   on  behalf  of  plant  workers,  growers,  and  the  environment.  picking  up  on   this  thread,  nagel  recounts  her  trials  and  tribulations  in  becoming  the   anthropologist-­‐in-­‐residence  for  new  york  city’s  department  of  sanitation   and  the  multiple  roles  she  inhabits  in  her  capacity  as  resident  -­‐  including   writing  on,  speaking  about,  and  communicating  on  behalf  the  dsny.   the  pieces  by  malefyt,  krause-­‐jenson,  and  sedgwick  explore  the   complex  relationships  between  researcher  and  informants/collaborators,                                                                                                                                                                                                                                  fisher  /  foreword       5   and  how  these  relationships  shape  the  production  of  knowledge  and   work  product.  like  my  earlier  work  on  feminist  corporate  ethnography   and  para-­‐ethnography  (2012),  they  bring  questions  of  positionality  in  the   ethnographic  study  of  and  for  business  to  the  fore.  in  so  doing,  they  again   reveal  the  often  unacknowledged  and  indeed  understudied  links  between   business  anthropology  as  a  field  and  broader  concerns  circulating  within   cultural  anthropology  about  the  refunctioning  of  ethnography  in  the   contemporary  moment  (cefkin  2009;  westbrook  2009).  drawing  on   fifteen  years  of  experiences  in  advertising,  malefyt  argues  that  working   from  within  an  agency  allows  corporate  anthropologists  to  form  close   relationships  with  clients  that  produce  knowledge  about  consumer   practices  that  are  not  only  in  the  “client’s  best  interest  for  his  or  her   brand,  but  are  also  essential  to  sustaining  relationships  that  continue   future  modes  of  production  in  the  advertising  industry  (malefyt,  this   volume).”  similarly,  krause-­‐jensen  considers  his  relationship  as  an   academic  anthropologist  studying  bang  &  olufsen  with  human  resource   consultants,  some  of  whom  had  anthropological  backgrounds  and  used   ethnographic  methods  to  study  the  corporate  culture  of  the  firm.  his   work  shows  that  along  with  striking  similarities  between  himself  and  the   consultants,  there  were  important  differences  in  the  conditions  and  aims   of  their  work.  notably,  unlike  malefyt  who  worked  on  behalf  of  the   advertising  agency  and  was  responsible  for  developing  branding  and   marketing  strategies  for  clients,  krause-­‐jensen  was  not  held  accountable   for  analyzing  and  strategizing  about,  in  his  case,  changing  corporate   values  of  the  firm.  rather  he  was  interested  in  how  anthropological   concepts  like  culture  were  used  in  management  discourse  and  practice.   while  acknowledging  some  overlaps  between  academic  anthropologists   and  anthropologists-­‐consultants,  he  argues  that  the  primary  aim  for   academics  is  to  refine  theory  and  understanding.   rather  than  draw  on  a  specific  ethnographic  corporate  case  or   professional  history  of  engaging  in  the  anthropology  of  business,   sedgwick’s  article  focuses  more  broadly  on  the  history  and  politics  of   ethnographer’s  positionality  in  field  research,  paying  particular  attention   to  questions  of  positionality  between  ethnographers  and  their  subjects  in   business.  this  includes  the  ways  fieldwork  when  studying  up  often  turns   traditional  power  relations  between  anthropologists  and  informant   upside-­‐down.  business  anthropologists  are  often  less  rather  than  more   powerful  than  their  subjects.  drawing  on  work  on  revisionist   ethnography,  sedgwick  argues  that  paying  closer  attention  to  the   circumstances  of  studying  up  in  business  could  further  drive   reconsiderations  of  methodology  and  ethics,  and  therefore  ways  of   knowing  in  anthropology.  this  includes,  for  example,  a  consideration  of   the  para-­‐ethnographic  to  corporate  ethnography.  as  discussed  earlier,   “para-­‐ethnography”  is  an  approach  that  considers  what  it  means  to  take   seriously  the  efforts  of  anthropologists’  informants  in  the  co-­‐production   of  knowledge  (holmes  and  marcus  2006).  as  such,  sedgwick’s  piece   journal  of  business  anthropology,  6(1),  spring  2017      6   explicitly  calls  for  anthropologists  of  business  to  contribute  more  largely   to  the  field  of  anthropology,  something  that  has  not  yet  transpired.     this  volume  provides  a  wide  range  of  perspectives  on  the   overlaps  and  disconnects  between  the  anthropology  of  business  and   business  anthropology.  aspects  also  challenge  traditional  understandings   of  the  relationship  of  the  field  of  business  anthropology  to  cultural   anthropology  writ  large.  as  such,  together  they  provide  a  set  of   provocations  designed  to  provoke  consideration  of  how  business   anthropologists  contribute  important  insights  to  the  larger  discipline   about  theory,  methods  and  our  understanding  of  the  neoliberal  moment.         references     baba,  m.  2012  ‘anthropology  and  business:  influence  and  interests.’   journal  of  business  anthropology  1(1):  20-­‐71.     bear,  l.,  k.  ho,  a.  tsing,  and  s.  yanagisako  2015  ‘gens:  a  feminist   manifesto  for  the  study  of  capitalism.’  theorizing  the  contemporary,   cultural  anthropology  website,  march  30,  2015.   https://culanth.org/fieldsights/652-­‐gens-­‐a-­‐feminist-­‐manifesto-­‐for-­‐the-­‐ study-­‐of-­‐capitalism     brash,  j.  2011  bloomberg’s  new  york:  class  and  governance  in  the  luxury   city.  atlanta:  university  of  georgia  press.   cefkin  m.  ed.  2009  ethnography  and  the  corporate  encounter:  reflections   on  the  research  in  and  of  corporations.  oxford:  berghahn.   downey,  g.  and  m.  s.  fisher.  2006  “introduction:  the  anthropology  of   capital  and  the  frontiers  of  ethnography.”  in  frontiers  of  capital:   ethnographic  reflections  on  the  new  economy,  ed.  greg  downey  and   melissa  s.  fisher,  1–32.  durham,  n.c.:  duke  university  press.   fisher,  m.  2012a  wall  street  women.  durham:  duke  university  press.     _____________  2012b  ‘toward  a  feminist  para-­‐ethnography  on  gender   equality  policy  making  in  business’.  collaborative  anthropologies.   december.  volume  5(1):  1-­‐27.   garsten,  c.  and  a  nyqvist  2013.  ‘entries:  engaging  organizational  worlds.’   in  c.  garsten  and  a  nyqvist  (eds.)  organizational  anthropology:  doing   ethnography  in  and  among  complex  organizations,  pp.  1-­‐25.  chicago:   university  of  chicago  press.   greenhouse,  c.  (ed.)  2012  ethnographies  of  neoliberalism.  university  of   pennsylvania:  penn  press.   holmes,  d.  r.  2013  economy  of  words:  communicative  imperatives  in   central  banks.  chicago,  illinois:  university  of  chicago  press.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                  fisher  /  foreword       7   holmes,  d.  r.,  and  g  e.  marcus  2006  ‘fast  capitalism:  para-­‐ethnography   and  the  rise  of  the  symbolic  analyst.’  in  m.  fisher  and  g.  downey  (eds.)   frontiers  of  capital:  ethnographic  reflections  on  the  new  economy,  pp.   209–36.  durham:  duke  university  press.   lipartito,  k.  and  d.  sicila.  2004  ‘introduction:  cross  corporate   boundaries’.  in  k.  lipartito  and  d.  sicila  (eds.)  constructing  corporate   america:  history,  politics,  culture,  pp.  1-­‐28.  oxford:  oxford  university   press.   moeran,  b.  2014  ‘theorizing  business  &  anthropology’.  in  r.  denny  and  p.   sunderland  (eds.)  handbook  of  anthropology  of  business,  pp.  69-­‐82.   walnut  creek:  left  coast  press  inc.   ott,  j.  2011  when  wall  street  met  main  street.  cambridge:  harvard   university  press.   tsing,  a.  2009  ‘supply  chains  and  the  human  condition’.  rethinking   marxism:  a  journal  of  economics,  culture  &  society,  21:2,  148-­‐176.   westbrook,  d.  2008.  navigators  of  the  contemporary:  why  ethnography   matters.  chicago:  university  of  chicago  press.                       melissa  fisher  is  a  visiting  assistant  professor  in  the  department  of   social  and  cultural  analysis  at  new  york  university  (nyu)  and  an   associate  researcher  in  the  department  of  social  anthropology  at   stockholm  university.  she  is  the  author  of  wall  street  women  (duke  press   2012)  and  co-­‐editor  of  frontiers  of  capital:  ethnographic  reflections  on   the  new  economy  (duke  university  press  2006).  she  is  engaged  in  two   ongoing  ethnographic  research  projects.  the  first  is  on  anticipatory  global   gendered  governance.    the  second  is  on  entrepreneurship,  alternative   economies,  and  new  forms  of  racial  and  gendered  activism,  based  on   fieldwork  in  new  york  city  and  berlin.     vi opdaterer systemet vi opdaterer systemet... rauli.cbs.dk opdateres og er snart tilgængeligt. consistent inconsistency in fashion magazines: the socialization of fashionability in hong kong tommy tse abstract fashion plays a significant role in the global creative industries and in urban social space, and has recently evolved from a peripheral topic to a valued interdisciplinary subject coined as “fashion-ology,” investigating how fashion as an intangible and changeable meaning is systematically produced by and amongst different cultural intermediaries, and how it is cyclically diffused in society. as an exercise in understanding the conflictual notions of fashion in operation under the rubric of production inside a local fashion media organization, this study emphasizes how text and image in fashion representation can be multifarious and are intertwined with the commercial and capitalist logic of the fashion industry. this research supplements related ethnographic studies and discerns how industry practitioners actually negotiate fashion meanings and are constantly torn between encoding desirable (luxury) fashionability, while at the same time anticipating and serving different advertisers’ interests. fieldwork data portray partly conflicting, partly consistent notions of fashion among different workers in the fashion media. the focus was: what shapes the collective interpretation and production of fashionability within a media organizational setting? the responses demonstrate the effect of advertising on fashion editorial pages and its major role in shaping fashionability, in addition to the contradictory rules guiding how page 1 of 26 jba 5(1): 154-179 autumn 2016 © the author(s) 2016 issn 2245-4217 www.cbs.dk/jba tse / consistent inconsistency in fashion magazines 155 media people strive to present a preferred face of luxury fashion in the magazine and why such an attempt was unsuccessful in this case. keywords creative labor, fashion, fashion magazines, media and cultural studies, hong kong encoding fashionability fashion is ubiquitous as a social phenomenon. it has a significant role in the global marketplace as well as in creative industries. although many still regard mainstream fashion as a hypocrisy that merely presents delightful and glittery images in the media, and advertising that triggers endless consumption (mostly by women)(barnard 1996), in scholarly circles, the subject itself has evolved from a subaltern and frivolous domain to a much more important field across various disciplines, particularly in sociology, anthropology, marketing, and media and cultural studies,1 now it even has a specific interdisciplinary home in “fashion studies,” and a handful of dedicated academic journals— including critical studies in fashion and beauty, fashion practice: the journal of design, creative process and the fashion industry, fashion theory, and international journal of fashion studies (aspers and godart, 2013, pp. 171–192). simmel, blumer and kawamura have been particularly interested in investigating the interaction between individuals and institutions within the fashion system, depicting fashion as simultaneously “a form of imitation” and “a product of class distinction” (simmel, 1957, p.m541, 544); as “a central mechanism in forming social order” in a modern world that can be found not just in apparel, but also “in operation in a wide variety and increasing number of fields” (blumer, 1969, p. 285, 290); and as a “social phenomenon” (kawamura, 2005, p. 108). from kawamura’s viewpoint, the progress of cultural globalization has dissolved the eurocentric “old structure and boundaries” (ibid.), as modern designers from various cultural backgrounds are moving into the center of the fashion system that is destabilized by its diversified fashion contents “created peripherally” (ibid., p. 108). kawamura also emphasizes the challenges traditional fashion magazines are facing due to newly germinated “street fashion magazines” (ibid., p. 106). trajecting beyond various conflicting notions of fashion and the debates about whether fashion is eurocentric, this study—conducted between 2011 and 2013—investigates and describes how conflicting 1 see, for example, aspers and godart 2013; chevalier and lu 2009; crane 2000; entwistle 2000; kawamura 2005; lea-greenwood 2013; mears 2014; moeran 2015; steele 2005; wilson 2007. journal of business anthropology, 5(1), autumn 2016 156 content published in a fashion magazine is the result of decision making characterized by contrasting opinions held by editors, journalists, advertorial copywriters, and ad sales executives, as they set about encoding a desirable (luxury) fashionability to strengthen an aspired positioning of the magazine, and balancing various advertisers’ interests and advertising revenues. it explicates fashion not as a consistent, definitive, and fixed idea, but as a collection of institutions, with an attendant set of personnel, objects, and practices in the complicated process of encoding fashionability. it focuses on apprehending the nuanced mechanisms of decision-making in a fashion print media organization in hong kong with its publication circulating across greater china, while seeking to create a substantial case for the social construction of fashion, which can also be applied to and compared with those in other sociocultural contexts (moeran 2015). the aforesaid shifts in the conceptions of fashion have engendered it as a constructor of discourses across diverse classes and genders. the potency of the fashion media in psychological and behavioural steering of consumers is particularly evident in women’s magazines, in which “represented fashion” (jobling, 1999, p. 2) manifests images that pander to commercial or ideological pursuits. magazine covers, often laden with names of designers, photographers and models, reflect the commercial intent of publishers curtained behind the more ostensible cultural contents (moeran, 2015, p. 33); they also resonate underlying social and cultural norms through fashion photography. as an instrumental means of objectifying "sex, gender, race, class, the politics of consumption and pleasure” (jobling, 1999, p.3), fashion photography reaches into individuals' consciousness, leaving imprints of "self-contained, sexual or identificatory fantasies” (ibid., p. 10). such fantasies go as far as to mould readers’ consumption patterns by indicating the purchase of fashion items as a channel for asserting one’s “public persona” (moeran, 2015, p. 36). through this process, the fashion media create and propel "hyperreality" (jobling, 1999, p. 5), as coined by baudrillard; ultimately, what compose an entirety of the photographs' meanings and establish text-to-photograph relationships are intra-textual layers within fashion photographs (ibid., p. 62). in the fashion system, barthes also argues that fashion meanings are not derived from the physical representation of garments, but are created in and through fashion media under an intermix of social, aesthetic and economic factors that ideologically produce "verbal and iconic forms of representations” (as cited in jobling, 1999, pp. 9–10). entwistle postulates that fashion contextualizes human bodies in culture, sets a discourse about them, and navigates the way they are perceived and adorned. in this respect, fashion magazines play a significant role in not only promoting certain looks and products, but also, more importantly, in representing an “abstract idea and aesthetic discourse” (entwistle, 2000, p. 237) for consumers. by perceiving fashion as both “discourse and practice” and revitalising the “social and tse / consistent inconsistency in fashion magazines 157 identifiable” role of the human body, cultural intermediaries such as fashion journalists and editors are pivotal in the producer-consumer chain, directing consumers’ daily fashion choices (ibid., p. 238). some concrete examples of how the media construct and produce our modern identities (kellner, as cited in massoni, 2004, p. 49) are shown below. in her study of the relationship between media representations, gender socialization, and occupational aspirations, massoni (2004, p. 49) claims that for girls and women in particular, magazines inexplicitly direct readers’ everyday behaviour and thought through textual and visual contents. crane contends that, fashion acts as a “carrier of social agendas” (ibid., p. 24) that flexibly mold social identities beyond gender and social class, exposing fashion consumers to a wider field of options for defining their human experience and articulating their personae in a “hypersegmented” society (ibid., p. 11). ferguson’s notion of “feminist fallacy” challenges the assumed positive correlation between media imaging and female empowerment; and she critiques the media’s inaccurate depiction of women’s social positions in popular cultures, such as their continual portrayal of women as homemakers in contrast to their rising professional salience (ferguson 1990, pp. 215–230). recently, wilson (2010, cited in riello and mcneil, 2010, p. 531) also became more critical of the fashion industry and its derived meanings saturated in the media as merely reflecting our sexist, celebrity-mad, mass culture. with a rampant increase in fashion publication advertising, the tension between “creativity” and “money” has become a recurring issue. this is highlighted by the way in which women’s magazines have been subjected to the “pervasive invasion and takeover of editorial matter by advertising” (moeran, 2015, p. 17). oftentimes creative workers are “manipulated by the system for which they work” (ibid.) in pursuit of commercial success. the tension arises primarily from the “bedrock structural properties” (caves, 2003, p. 74) of the creative industries, in which the structural requirements—in forms of contracts, joint ventures and so on—necessary for executing creative works simultaneously limit the creative autonomy of workers. becker also acknowledges the incompatibility between artistic will and the rigidity of distribution systems—artists need a mechanism that allows others to access their work, appreciate it, and "repay the investment of time, money and materials in the work" (becker, 1984, p. 93). yet differences between the interests of the artists and those of intermediaries may hinder the effective distribution of creative work. even in the presence of structural agreements between artists and intermediaries, however, uncertainties regarding the degree of contractual binding and means of renegotiation abound, resulting in an ongoing conflict between market power and creative talents (caves, 2003, p. 82). in the hong kong context, leung’s analysis of the dominant depiction of western “‘glamorous’ women with supple lips, the ‘femme journal of business anthropology, 5(1), autumn 2016 158 fatale’ look” in cosmopolitan hong kong revealed a strong tendency toward adopting and perpetuating a foreign, upmarket, feminine image as an ideal in the fashion media communication process (leung 2004, p. 430-432), even though conservative chinese values still retain a strong hand in shaping local readers’ fashion taste, and rendering a “toned-down image of sex and sexuality” represented in the female fashion magazine (ibid., p.435, 439). although barthes (1990) and jobling (1999) also highlight the media as fashion’s key mediator monitoring and generating its meanings, the symbolic message is sometimes implicit and subliminal, inevitably creating ambivalence and illogicality in fashion communication. moeran (2015) further points out how most fashion magazines explicitly strive to sell their understanding and profiling of target readers to potential advertisers. by juxtaposing textual and visual messages, they shape the potential consumers’ knowledge of fashion, although in most cases it is rather uncertain and difficult to synchronize the seemingly consistent market segment with the dissimilar brand images of a myriad of advertisers. based on the above discussions of various cultural intermediaries’ power (particularly fashion media’s) in generating fashion discourses, this study was designed to uncover the actual decision-making process of a fashion magazine in hong kong, revealing the difficulties for workers within the organization to produce and represent a linear set of fashion messages appealing to their “ideal readers” (as a discursive category), in accordance with the promises they made to their advertisers and the magazine’s positioning described in the media sales kit. a history of hong kong fashion magazines: participant observation at stylistic x through participant observation2, this empirical study investigates how the fashion print media in hong kong and global fashion publicists negotiate and insist on specific meanings among themselves in their work through written text and visual images (what i will here term encoding fashionability), and discuss how those meanings relate to larger historical, social, economic, and cultural trends in euro-american fashion, its particular organizational and industrial setting, and the changing economic conditions in asia. through three local fashion editors with whom i was personally acquainted—one from an international title and two from two other local publications—i started exploring the 2 the participant study at stylistic x lasted for three months, where i served as an unpaid junior fashion reporter working for the chinese language hong kong high fashion publication. this involved daily interaction with other employees, also with others such as freelance photographers and models, journalists with other international and local fashion titles, and fashion publicists. this enabled studying and analyzing their styles of operation and cooperation. in this article, all those concerned have been given pseudonyms. tse / consistent inconsistency in fashion magazines 159 opportunity to work in any of these media as an unpaid participant observer in the local fashion industry. eventually fei, fashion editor of stylistic x, was the first one to facilitate this opportunity for me during summer 2011. as it was difficult to gain access to the rather closed fashion media industry to conduct an academic participant study in general, i immediately seized the chance offered. unpredictably, this semi-intentional step provided me with a chance to participate in and observe the particular production and negotiation of globalized fashion meanings in the hong kong context. as a high-end fashion magazine published across greater china,3 stylistic x turned out to be a magazine exhibiting the characters of both global monthly fashion titles (which mainly feature euro-american luxury fashion and lifestyle news) and local weekly fashion magazines (which also feature local street fashion, celebrity gossip and news). other ethnographic research published recently—such as vangkilde’s study of hugo boss (2011), oliveira’s of wine branding (2012) and moeran’s of various international fashion magazines (2015)—all take a micro approach when examining the industry’s internal operations and institutional structures. regardless of the different organizational scales and structures, my interviews with a dozen fashion editors working for other publications (tse 2015) revealed that stylistic x unexpectedly demonstrated very similar traits in its fashion communication when compared to other fashion print magazines of different market positions in hong kong and mainland china, as well as those in other asian countries such as japan (moeran, 2015). founded in 2006, stylistic x is a monthly magazine which has focused on discussions of high-end fashion, beauty, food, travel, and entertainment. it is published by stylistic limited, which has also circulated youth style since 2001, a street fashion magazine extremely popular among teenagers in hong kong, with a circulation of 100,000 copies per week.4 youth style aimed at keeping younger readers abreast of the latest and the most exciting social information without following any particular trends. in fact, stylistic x first emerged from youth style as its original young readers became more conscious of world fashion and lifestyles over time. stylistic x was then launched to satisfy their evolved “needs” for luxury fashion. the “x” in the title was intended to connote extraordinary, extravagant and excellent—the utmost version of youth style. stylistic x publishes three different editions in hong kong, taiwan, and mainland china with respective circulations of 50,000, 20,000 and 3 about 70 per cent of the core content is identical, except the magazine is translated into simplex chinese in its prc edition, with rhetorical adjustments made for both its prc and taiwan editions. 4 see census and statistics department, the government of hong kong, sar, 2015. in mid-2011 total population estimate was 7,071,600, among which the estimated number of people between the ages 10 to 24 was 1,206,300, and 25 to 39, 1,646,700. journal of business anthropology, 5(1), autumn 2016 160 300,000 copies. its reporters participate in various fashion weeks and interview many designers in order to introduce some of the latest features and brands that are (in their opinion) worth noticing. as a result, the stylistic x media sales kit claimed that it attracted a group of loyal readers, comprising administrative executives (27%), artists or designers (20%), and other professionals (31%). 57 per cent were female and 43 per cent male. 75 per cent of them are aged between 25 and 39 and about 80 per cent claimed to have a monthly income in excess of hk$20,000 (approximately us$2,600). clashing masks of stylistic x? the deeper organizational structure where fashion messages (conflicting with the aspired stylistic x positioning) were produced emerges after interview material had been rearranged and re-read. class, economic influence, age, experience, cultural imperialism, and much else all exerted very significant influences on the production and diffusion of fashion. what emerged did not seem to match the desired image of luxury fashion the media organization aimed to encode and represent in its profiling of target readers to potential advertisers. studying and interpreting the utterances of fashion industry insiders confirmed that the understandings and intended meaning(s) of fashion they expressed were not just occasionally inconsistent, but rather were consistently contradictory. in practical terms, this seemed to lead to a cognitively intricate and internally inconsistent fashion rhetoric being presented in the magazine. writing stylistic x stylistic x maintained a media sales kit setting out what it termed the “stylistic x ingredients”—the core content of the publication. to collectively and consistently present a sense of luxury fashion, it specified eleven categories which its journalists should constantly investigate and write about: cover stories, special features, fashion, beauty, lifestyle, trendy items, design and art, food, toys, events, and customized projects. in the summer of 2011, those with the specific job title of journalist at stylistic x were dedicated to clearly defined editorial and advertorial areas.5 for instance, junior reporter ringo specialized in menswear features; kris in women’s wear features; and kim in culture, lifestyle and food features. fashion editor fei was responsible for supervising all the junior reporters, coordinating photography, and interviewing for cover stories, as well as other fashion-related feature writing. advertorial copywriter timothy and junior advertorial copywriter bee were responsible for all custom-made projects proposed by the advertisers and the relevant copywriting tasks. senior advertorial copywriter ginny 5 see appendix 1. tse / consistent inconsistency in fashion magazines 161 supervised all the other copywriters, coordinating custom-made projects with the ad sales team and the advertisers, and also took on copywriting related to beauty, jewelry, watches, and accessories. tina and tribecca were the senior editors responsible for supervising all the other editorial staff, as well as specializing in reporting news stories about beauty and skincare products. cello, the chief editor of stylistic x, once told me that “most of the time our [editorial] teammates don’t formally talk about work…we don’t have official meetings often, maybe only a quick, casual [topic] meeting once a month…the working style here is quite different”—thereby appearing to present a rather autonomous and decentralized organizational structure. in fact, the editorial supervision process was not perhaps as informal and decentralized as the chief editor described it. as the key decision maker, he constantly and tightly monitored the progress of all his editorial staff by phone, via email, and in person. at the start of each calendar year (january), the chief editor and the managing editor-in-chief sporty gathered all the journalists to set out the publication’s editorial framework and alignment and discussed a rough plan for each issue of the magazine throughout the whole year. about a week after each month’s editorial deadline (the 15th of each month) for next month’s issue, the editorial team had a one-hour topic meeting where the last issue’s editorial work was discussed and the next issue’s general content was decided, and topics to work on were assigned. reporters were required to improvise relevant topics and verbally present their proposed content during that meeting. usually, the chief editor and the managing editor-in-chief made the key editorial decisions immediately. otherwise they made comments and suggested revisions of the topics presented, and also suggested new topics as necessary. figure 1. example of draft editorial layout (by kim). journal of business anthropology, 5(1), autumn 2016 162 in the process of brainstorming editorial ideas, both journalists and ad copywriters at stylistic x were required to prepare their thoughts in both written and visual format, implying their nearly equal status in encoding fashion meanings. the rough editorial layouts (see figure 1) were shown to the chief editor for evaluation. in our first individual meeting, cello alerted me to pay close attention to the unique style of collaboration in a fashion magazine, because the staff all worked in a very individual, isolated mode. a chief editor should provide seasoned, critical suggestions to improve the ideas of the junior staff conceptually and help them to visually and verbally enhance the editorial appeal of their articles. on the one hand, individual journalists (fashion encoders/mediators) enjoyed a certain freedom in encoding fashionability according to their own knowledge, preferences, and impressions; on the other, they had to negotiate and align with the archetypal luxury fashion meaning of stylistic x with the chief editor as a helmsman who upheld a consistent fashion image delivered by the publication, in order to maintain a loyal readership and make it the advertisers’ ideal tool to reach their target segments. a typical afternoon editorial meeting lasted 75 minutes. in july, it began with cello’s critical comments on the editorial work of the latest issue, and continued with each editorial staffer sharing his or her ideas about topics for the annually most heavily advertised september issue that they were planning. these elicited immediate feedback from the chief editor. cello’s critique of the latest issue included some criticism of what he considered to be disorganized, uninteresting, unoriginal, and repetitive writing of mediocre quality, but the bulk of his criticism was directed at graphic and visual elements, which he felt were boring and unsurprising. more in tune with jobling (1999)’s perspective, the main focus of cello’s criticism was on the iconic rather than the written content: rich fashion writing alone could not satisfy his expectations of “good” fashion editorial content. cello did not, however, provide concrete examples to demonstrate what he regarded as organized, interesting, and original fashion coverage—at least not in these topic meetings. perhaps a feature idea presented by senior editor tribecca at one such meeting can unravel this puzzle. entitled “old but beautiful,” the proposed feature was intended to exploit a sense of nostalgia about old hong kong. it was to feature the history and operations of long-standing local grocery stores and some of their representative products, interviews with some old product collectors, and (the most important part) the vintage housewares showcased and available at lane crawford, a local luxury department store. cello’s approval demonstrated an implicit logic in his editorial judgment: here he agreed that fashion coverage was not exclusively about the new and the modern; the old, the nostalgic, “hong kong culture,” and everyday, ordinary items could also be beautiful and be made fashionable when stylistically presented alongside “true” luxury merchandize (by lane crawford). on other occasions, he categorically rejected such a standpoint, usually when there was no such linkage with tse / consistent inconsistency in fashion magazines 163 an identified advertiser. implicitly and explicitly, editorial staff were reminded to take potential advertisers’ interests into consideration while writing fashion, and to feature a wide range of advertised products—not just in the advertising pages (including both print advertisements and advertorials) but also in editorial content. as a result, the traditional wall between editorial and ad sales teams has gradually been blurred, and the notion of creativity has evolved into a kind of technical mastery of advertiser-media relationships (croteau, 2003). ringo at one point suggested a special feature entitled “back to the future.” it would suggest that what a consumer bought this year could be used for another five to ten years without being regarded as outdated— seemingly the very antithesis of the entire fashion concept regarding ephemerality and cyclicality. he proposed treating “five dichotomies in menswear fashion” to be built around five opposing themes: everchanging versus eternal; simplicity versus complexity; thickness (fall and winter menswear) versus thinness (spring and summer menswear); must-have versus out-of-date; and safe and understated versus bold and playful. cello suggested that while the five dichotomies idea sounded interesting, it was rather impractical due to its extensive scope (rather than its contradictory logic, such as “fashion is simultaneously everchanging and eternal”), and repeatedly asked ringo if he really could manage three editorial features in a month. but cello and the other editorial team members did not find ringo’s five dichotomies logically problematic at all, but rather normal and natural. both tribecca’s and ringo’s cases resonate with baudrillard’s (2007) criticism that fashion is about the cyclical, illogical, and paradoxical exchanges of the old and the new, and a displacement of the signifier and the signified—the oldfashioned (the local grocery stores selling old products) is constantly and unquestionably presented as, and merged with, the fashionable (the renowned multi-label fashion retailer lane crawford selling designer vintage housewares). specifically, cello regarded the novel and nonrepetitive combinations of the old and the new as fashionable—the infinite interplay between the old signs and the new signifieds—leading to an endless stylization of everyday objects as fashion. logics of visualizing stylistic x stylistic x’s journalists, copywriters, and graphic designers often held opposing views about what constituted barthesian iconic fashion. senior graphic designer jet, a rather thin young man who was self-named “stylistic x han shuei shuei” (shuei literally means “water” in chinese),6 and well-known for his bold fashion styles among his colleagues, repeatedly reminded me that cello preferred small 6 to 8 point chinese 6 the name was compatible with the mainland star fashion journalist of marie claire china han huo huo—huo literally meaning “fire” in chinese. journal of business anthropology, 5(1), autumn 2016 164 characters, on he grounds that it made a layout more aesthetically pleasing. culture and lifestyle reporter kim disagreed, and suggested that cello’s perception that only very small (chinese) fonts looked aesthetically pleasing (and stylish) was wrong. in jet’s viewpoint, the power of stylistic x or any other high-end fashion magazines lay in its visual rather than textual communication, and that was how he believed a typical contemporary fashion magazine reader would be mesmerized and taught about luxury aesthetics. “it also depends on how skillful the graphic designer is in typesetting,” suggested women’s fashion reporter kris—a twenty-something with an asymmetrical and stylish crop hair, slender torso and white skin, wearing light makeup, a beige light-weight dress, dark colour cardigan and delicate silver accessories—adding, in an indirect critique of jet’s logic, that in such a small point readers would not be able to read the content clearly and the blocks of words would be diminished as part of the total layout. kim took the graphic style of the ming, a well-known lifestyle magazine in mainland china, as an example to substantiate her point that larger chinese characters can look stylish, although she also emphasized her impression that cello cared primarily about the visual aspect of the magazine. jet later criticized my own feature entitled “the fashion network: fashion marketers outside and inside.” he was unhappy with its length. the article covered sixteen interviews with fashion marketers, each of around 3,000 words, so in total there were nearly 50,000 chinese characters excluding the introduction and photo captions. jet pointed out that the layout would be too packed and would not look good according to the chief editor’s aesthetic standards. he also criticized my adding shadow and enhancing the colour contrast of photos. he was apparently saying that, as a crucial procedure in strengthening the impact of graphic fashion among readers, photo-retouching must be and could only be “professionally and aesthetically done by the design team.” it could never be the territory of an amateur fashion journalist who was supposed to be learning from the good graphical representations of the professionals with whom he was working. these two episodes reinforce the validity of jobling (1999)’s emphasis on the power of iconic fashion and vividly portray the organizational socialization process at work in producing a fashion magazine. at stylistic x, fashion writing was at times superseded by graphic representation, in contrast with the way diana vreeland cared for the standard of editorial writing in harper’s bazaar and vogue (mcneil and miller, 2014, p. 107), or how fashion critic suzy menkes crafted her critical and professional fashion writing in the international herald tribune and vogue (ibid., p. 125). however, later on i also realized that the feature article’s sequencing was not simply guided by the fame of featured fashion brands as suggested by cello, or by the aesthetic harmony stressed by jet. rather, it implicitly followed these featured fashion brands’ previous (and potential future) ad spends in stylistic x, something tse / consistent inconsistency in fashion magazines 165 that was quite noticeably socialized amongst both editorial and graphic design personnel. for instance, local multi-label distributors joyce boutique, lane crawford, harvey nichols, and i.t. apparel, which have large aggregate advertising budgets to advertise the hundreds of individual fashion labels they sell, were perceived as deserving a more prioritized position (tse, 2014, pp. 37–38). international luxury brands such as fendi, piaget and van cleef and arpels, received double-page layouts, in a secondary prominent position. remaining brands such as diesel, guerlain, loewe, mcm, and marc jacobs, which did not advertise a lot and were deemed as “less important advertisers”, were featured in a much less prominent position, each as a one-page coverage in the middle and ending pages of the editorial feature (tse, 2014, p. 38). cello reiterated a few times during the period of observation that visual impact should be of utmost importance. as a specific example, he insisted that all products must display their shadows on the right hand side at an oblique angle (to create a three-dimensional visual effect). journal of business anthropology, 5(1), autumn 2016 166 figure 2. example of kris’s product styling. red-lacquered soles of christian louboutin and other branded high heels. kris later explained that, for instance, a voluminous feeling should always be highlighted when shooting shirts and trousers. the two hems of a pair of trousers should not overlap. the strap of a handbag should be suspended. shoes must be shown at a 45 degree angle with their shadows on the right hand side to highlight their eye-catching features, patterns and details. figure 2 illustrates these principles in an ad for the red-soled shoes of christian louboutin. the aesthetic wisdom is to maintain consistency, as kris repeatedly emphasized. she regarded cello’s visual guidelines as unique, but very japanese-influenced (in its minimalist and tone-on-tone style; abundant white space; mainly using white, grey, beige and other pale-colour palettes instead of other sharply contrasting colours), culturally “odourless” (iwabuchi, 2006), and quite troublesome to implement. this illustrated the fact that the iconic fashion was highly valued by the chief editor, who imposed his aesthetic preferences and fashion style deemed appropriate for stylistic x in order to differentiate itself from other international titles in hong kong with an “asian” or “nonwestern” twist. rather than strictly adopting euro-american notions of fashion, he applied japanese aesthetic standards as the primary artistic direction of the magazine. the encoding process involved a more complicated appropriation and negotiation. in the case of kris’s product styling, placing the branded, flamboyant heels on a japanese-styled tse / consistent inconsistency in fashion magazines 167 evacuated white background demonstrated a dramatic shift of artistic direction through the parisian and japanese styles. although a certain degree of flexibility was allowed, the process was still systematically governed by habits acquired within the organization. fashionability as a relative concept the chief editor’s feedback on the ideas presented at editorial meetings suggested that, instead of clearly separating advertising material and advertorials from textual matter, stylistic x presented many (if not all) of its fashion editorials in a shopping guide format—highlighting product styling features and unambiguously providing tips on what to buy and wear, through a mechanism not simply driven by cyclical fashion trends and aesthetic judgement, but also by the magazine’s prioritized commercial relationships with its major advertisers. the magazine aspired to tell of “new” fashion trends in clothing, accessories, and housewares, ascribing luxury meaning to the patterns and designs of its advertisers’ seasonal merchandise through a bricolage of texts and visuals in its editorial pages, although many of them were not typically regarded as luxury fashion products. this, cello felt, would create novelty and address the target readers’ main interest, apparently not realizing that this approach logically contradicted his cherished ideas about the true essence of luxury fashion—a cultivated mindset of connoisseurship and subtlety, rather than just materialist consumption. his comments showed how the fashion media institutionally strived to manufacture a consistent order of stylistic x fashionability and quasi-newness ready for consumption; yet its meanings became elusive and inconsistent amid its interplay with various fields, such as market dynamics and various advertisers’ interests. ideas about what was considered unfashionable came from casual daily conversations with various stylistic x co-workers. among the magazine’s workers, fashionability was a relative concept. bee, the junior copyeditor from the custom project team, prepared an advertorial for an american sandal brand. when packs of brand new sandals arrived for a photo shoot, bee criticized them as “too dazzlingly colourful… i just don’t like them.” but her custom editorial feature in the next issue commended them as “beautiful and trendy items for the new season.” on another occasion, jet picked up a scarlet clutch and sarcastically mocked it: “well, this bag simply has no linkage with the words beautiful and luxurious!” while it could have been just jet’s opinion, bee and timothy just smiled, and neither seemed to disagree with him. in a subsequent issue, stylistic x featured a specific range of handbags in an advertorial, praising them as “elegant, chic and colourful.” the above cases show the fluidity of fashion meanings—the complicated assemblage of a range of visual, textual, physical, and psychological elements in fashion photography for the sake of aestheticizing a seasonal product for the summer sales. when it came journal of business anthropology, 5(1), autumn 2016 168 to sponsorships, advertorials, and custom projects, the senior managers took the lead in deciding whether or not to accept a project. importantly, what was produced as fashionable in the media as a means to target its specified market segments did not necessarily reflect the personal taste and inner thoughts of the producer, from whom a typical fashion magazine reader would have liked to seek professional and aesthetic advice. those who produced the copy had no control. they were socialized into manufacturing and maintaining a kind of stylistic x visuality. fei, the 28-year-old fashion editor—tastefully dressed in her longsleeve black t-shirt, black leggings with an eye-catching red floral-print dress on top and black leather gladiator shoes—was one who, without any structured questioning, expressed discontent with her current career and the hong kong fashion media scene. as an example, she cited a campaign featuring a well-known but middle-aged hong kong singer, sandy lam, on an international fashion magazine’s cover. fei severely criticized the hair style and make-up of the star as making her look “weird and ugly.” i asked if the problem was in the retouching, but fei responded: “the truth is, sandy can never appear in such a lady gaga style, with her ‘wet’ look and heavy make-up in a bold and sexually seductive posturing. in one photo she put on a one-piece dress made of see-through fabric on the upper chest area, and in the other she wore a v-neck, low-cut, glitzy and body-revealing evening gown. she’s way too ‘oriental’ to fit in this style. it was probably the responsible fashion stylist’s intention, but she looks bewitched. she can look good only in a clean and simple style. of course, she’s famous and a good singer, but that doesn’t mean she can be playfully styled in all sorts of different looks.” fei’s criticism of the insensitive and crude presentation of sandy lam in an international fashion magazine as unstylish, inelegant, vulgar, and anachronistic went along with the stylistic x aestheticism in which she was deeply socialized. her comments also implied that age, facial appearance, body shape, ethnicity, and associated cultural style all affected a celebrity or model’s suitability for representing particular fashion aesthetics. according to mears, it is crucial that celebrities or models, as “material signifiers” of fashion (2014, p. 1331), aesthetically fit the brand or style in order to communicate “the classed culture of the organization” (ibid.), and to instill a competitive edge in fashion retailers. this indicates that one should not regard the fashion media industry as a purposeful, unified apparatus which unthinkingly manufactures cyclical fashion trends. on the industrial and organizational level, fashionability is generated and sustained through the articulation and maintenance of fashion media publications’ respective market positions; the entrance, exit, and merger of media organizations; the ideal target audiences they intend to reach; and a gradually changing network of advertisers and tse / consistent inconsistency in fashion magazines 169 sponsors with whom they ally themselves. it is rather simplistic to think that their power in encoding fashion relies solely on their financial strength. the industry itself can be pluralistic and dynamically generate a variety of styles to gratify the increasingly segmented markets and customers’ needs. and this mutuality of fashion meanings among the agents, organizational and industrial structures elucidates the reason why it is futile when one attempts to uncover a systematic set of aesthetic criteria to evaluate whether stylistic x and its employees were conveying a consistent set of fashionability, and it was not difficult to find counterexamples in previous stylistic x issues, and in each employee’s judgments at work and in their everyday lives, so that the only consistent fact was their overall consistent inconsistency. iconic fashion elements presented in stylistic x—such as preferred colour schemes and aesthetic styles—were not being consistently articulated or maintained, and it was not really about the diverse backgrounds and conflicting aesthetic preferences of various fashion journalists, but a constant change of collaboration with an extensive range of fashion and non-fashion advertisers available in the local market, and a constant competition with other media vehicles that were also perceived to be able to convey intended fashion messages to their ideal target segments. eventually, new ways of coordinating a myriad of textual and visual fashion representations were produced approximating to the imagined taste and profile of a constructed readership. at the same time, the magazine’s (symmetrical) graphic design and grid, its typeface and point, superficially maintained an aesthetic consistency despite the broad range of colours, silhouettes, and materials being presented. the documentary film the september issue (cutler, 2010) portrayed the constant disagreements between vogue editor-in-chief anna wintour and her creative director grace coddington over which aesthetic styles and visual presentations were and were not fashionable. their debate spanned thirty years. it seems that fashion journalists can never make an accurate guess about what the editor-inchief really wants and his or her aesthetic guidelines in any consistent way. the encoders work from no such common code book, and their sense of fashionability is constantly shaped and reshaped by the updated list of advertisers and socio-cultural changes at large. what makes a physical item fashionable or unfashionable? what caused physical objects to be regarded as fashionable by stylistic x? taking the items featured in the magazine as examples, we can see that there was an endless list of “lifestyle” goods which qualify. the selfprofessed high fashion magazine discussed splendid interior decorating items, delicate western cuisine, glittering evening gowns, but also ecofriendly hiking outfits, feather hats and sportive caps, hobo bags, clutches, sneakers, and high heels. the fashion journalists could juggle with a wide journal of business anthropology, 5(1), autumn 2016 170 range of items as long as they could line them up with the world of fashion tactfully and, importantly, could convince the chief editor that their ideas went well with the magazine’s positioned fashionability. apparently, for a publication specializing in fashion and aimed at educating consumers about the idea of real luxury, it seemed unlikely that a feature on hiking outfits would have higher priority than one on the historical development of western fashion design. situating the production logic of fashionability within the symbiosis of media and advertising unearthed an otherwise invisible network. kim was assigned to tag specific hiking products of a sponsoring brand in a lighthearted outdoor activity feature, whereas kris’s suggested feature story about fashion history was regarded as “not an urgently needed topic.” the difference was that kris’s feature was not sponsored by any specific brand. this episode shows that, as might be expected, commercial interests frame a professional and seasoned judgment about what is fashionable. fashion is always commercial; yet different forms of commercial alliance fabricate different sorts of fashionability. among the preset eleven categories of “stylistic x ingredients,” the special features, lifestyle, trendy items, and other custom-made project categories are the most flexible for directly or indirectly featuring advertised products and services which may or may not apparently relate to the notion of fashion. yet there are exceptional cases too. according to sally, the sales director of youth style, sponsorships by advertisers of body slimming, liposuction, and breast implant surgery would never be accepted by any of the company’s fashion publications under any circumstances. some regarded such services as part of a contemporary worldwide trend toward fashioning one’s physical body; many other fashion publications were more than happy to include such advertisements. but owners of youth style and stylistic x regarded them as harmful and unethical, and that made them “unfashionable.” more crucially, they were perceived to be graceless and untasteful in the eyes of the magazine’s major advertisers and desired luxury consumers. the specific ethic strictly upheld by the media organization thus interplayed with the preferences of its advertisers and consumers once again. although its fundamental goal must be to make a profit and stay in business, a one-dimensional viewpoint would suggest that other nonmonetary objectives were simultaneously embraced to help establish a sense of professionalism. yet it seems more convincing to see the exclusion of such sensitive advertisements as a protection of the fashion publication’s unique sense of “real” luxury and fashionability, and its ongoing commercial partnership with major advertisers—a concrete example showing how the “editorial text versus advertising” tension in a fashion magazine was played out. the definition of “luxury” is a particular conundrum. is deluxe status based solely on price, exclusivity of the materials, or some other quantifiable factor? in reality, prestigious fashion brands like jimmy choo, tse / consistent inconsistency in fashion magazines 171 versace, and lanvin consider cooperating with the swedish street fashion brand h&m in launching a budget priced “affordable luxury” collection, resonating with the emerging “masstige” motto—the mixture of “mass” and “prestige” to propagate the new luxury for masses (silverstein and fiske, 2003, pp. 48–57; von maltzahn, 2015). exuding high-end brand appeal, yet affordable at a price level “just above the average” (von maltzahn, 2015, p. 1), this democratized form of luxury has rendered itself accessible to all, expanding a firm’s customer base exponentially at the cost of the lowered exclusivity of its products. shifting market factors have also attributed to the devaluing of the concept of luxury: the rise of the new markets and media has led to destratification of consumer segments, thereby propelling changes in tastes and consumer behaviour, and blurring the “definition of true luxury” (von maltzahn, 2015, p. 3). in frequent conversations, the chief editor shared his conception of the spirit of luxury. he conceived of stylistic x as presenting real luxury, defined not just in terms of price, but also by image. he literally asserted that “fashionability is not just about materials and affordability, but also a cultivated mindset of connoisseurship, understatement, and subtlety. this is the true spirit of luxury which nowadays many teenagers and young consumers do not realize that even they can afford. stylistic x exists to educate these people.” in other words, the abstract, refined, yet esoteric, sense of taste cello so splendidly described constituted a vibrant deployment of bourdieu’s (1984) notion of cultural capital in the contemporary materialist world—learning about the fashion news and familiarizing oneself with particular luxury fashion imagery by reading stylistic x enriched one’s cultural capital, and socialized one to believe that s/he was appreciating luxury in a distinctively superior manner, while simultaneously distinguishing one’s self in the world. stylistic x fashionability: associated only with certain firms and institutions? surely there was no clear definition of, or guidebook to, fashionability, but in their daily work media personnel adhered to an unspoken yet concrete paradigm. they often automatically referred to certain brands whenever they spoke of luxury fashion or high fashion. at stylistic x, chanel, christian dior, fendi, giorgio armani, gucci, hermès, louis vuitton, and prada, all ostensibly french or italian, were the automatic referents. they all presented different design concepts, styles and materials, as well as product specializations, but all were affiliated with the largest and financially strongest global fashion conglomerates which could make huge investments in international advertising and promotion. this recalls what chevalier and mazzalovo (2008) described as a powerful tactic of many global fashion marketers in historicizing their brands, enhancing their global visibility, and reinforcing their fashionability among their target journal of business anthropology, 5(1), autumn 2016 172 segments. and the alternative, subversive brands that evans (2003) suggested were supposedly influential in the fashion world today were in fact not so highly regarded by those in the fashion media—at least not when they were pragmatically anticipating their wearability for, and impact on, their target audiences. stylistic x’s editorial, copywriting, and design personnel regularly and habitually flipped through a range of western and japanese fashion and design magazines for conceptual inspiration, as well as for design layout references. if fashion is a religion, these magazines are its bibles, reinforcing the paradigms. they borrowed and circulated the magazines constantly. as kris explained: “we all know that fashion magazines like soen (japanese), vogue (american), l’officiel and elle (french) are classic and authentic fashion media. they always capably and powerfully represent the ‘true’ fashion [paradigm].” during fieldwork, it took time for me to learn the rules of inclusion and exclusion. this i did by flipping through the back issues of stylistic x and studying previously featured brands. the more frequently and extensively a brand had been featured and advertised, the more voguish and significant it seemed to be. fashionable labels were commonly affiliated with fashion conglomerates like the lvmh or kering group. price range and degree of perceived luxury were positively correlated in most cases. origin (france, italy or britain) was also important. technically, non-mainstream yet prestigious brands (like the belgian martin margiela and the british/turkish cypriot hussein chalayan) would still be occasionally featured in the “special features,” “fashion”, “trendy items,” “design and art,” and “events” coverage, but it was very rare for them to be featured as a “cover story” or a custom-made project with prominent and extensive coverage, as they could not compete with the big advertisers who bought out the most visible space in the magazine. in hong kong, post magazine (a weekly magazine inserted in the top english newspaper south china morning post on sundays [sunday morning post]), marie claire hong kong, and elle hong kong were the titles which did not sell their cover page to a single fashion brand, as it was not necessary financially for them to feature big brands on their cover. nonetheless, it was essential for fashion magazines, amongst all other types of media businesses, to generate profit in order to survive in the commercial world. following the rise of digital technology and social media, the worldwide magazine industry has faced lean times. from 2007 to 2010, its advertising revenue fell around fifteen percent; magazines also started offering ancillary services including e-commerce, custom publishing, and joint-event promotion, as well as database assistance, to generate new sources of revenue (dominick, 2013, p. 152). it became apparent that fashion is being defined through a process of organizational and industrial socialization, which to some extent theoretically contradicts the chief editor’s concept of real luxury discussed earlier, but which is more in tune with the advertising revenues paradigm. cello indirectly expressed his view that some brands affiliated tse / consistent inconsistency in fashion magazines 173 with the lvmh group were in fact not treated as luxurious and fashionable because they would be unable to appeal to the magazine’s audience or fit with its other content. for cello, it seemed, luxury and fashionability were in the eye of the beholder. in reality, it was more about which brand (instead of what fashion) was fashionable and luxurious: it mattered more about these fashion brands’ marketing activities in hong kong, their advertising budgets, and the possibility of collaboration with stylistic x. stylistic x fashionability: agents, culture, history and social class cello always insisted that stylistic x is about “real” luxury, highlighting subtlety, details and delicacy, which he believed other local fashion magazines did not truly care about and could not accurately represent. “stylistic x is a fashion magazine [presenting taste] young people are not usually interested in…[it is] linked with history and an historical aura—about eternal beauty rather than merely about the avant-garde… not only focused on celebrity endorsements, as they can be very superficial… [the magazine] can be treated as a fashion encyclopedia to be collected and read over a long period of time.” in cello’s mind, fashion has an “authentic” history that would interest the magazine’s target readers, who are not young, superficial consumers who do not know how to appreciate luxury fashion. nevertheless, certain of the editorial and copywriting staff to some extent adopted the aesthetic styles displayed in american, parisian, british and japanese fashion magazines and on their websites. paradoxically, most stylistic x staff apparently saw themselves as gatekeepers, but did not necessarily perceive a need to have a strong personal interest in high fashion. personal interest in fashion was not common among the staff. the editorial and copyediting team had a large proportion of people younger than 25 who did not really appreciate or consume luxury fashion themselves, if only because they just could not afford it. among the entire stylistic x staff of 23 persons (eight male/fifteen female),7 fei, kris and jet were the only three who explicitly demonstrated a personal interest in fashion both at work and in their everyday lives. in general, the others were neither overtly model-fit nor especially attractive physically. timothy and kim even expressed their personal indifference to, and disinterest in, luxury fashion. cello and sporty, the two seasoned editorial team heads, were in fact regarded by the junior staff as very unfashionable. kim, kris and jet secretly mocked sporty’s and cello’s looks, suggesting that they actually looked more like athletes or journalists of sports world, a local television programme, than stylish fashion editors. in the eyes of their stylistic x co-workers, the 7 refer to appendix 1 journal of business anthropology, 5(1), autumn 2016 174 senior staff (cello, sporty, tribecca and tina) were not necessarily seen as more fashionable or as having a superior understanding of fashion. certainly, this was not intended to denigrate their work, but it was in distinct contrast with the magazine’s positioning and with the glitzy image of senior fashion journalists. conclusion viewing the case of stylistic x through participant observation reveals clashing fashion meanings in the collective encoding and representation processes taking place in the fashion magazine industry. as moeran (2015, p. 144-146) has described in his ethnographic research on japanese fashion magazines, written clothing, as barthes asserted, consists of a large number of free-floating signifiers, and the lexical structure of the fashion discourse is more unstable when compared to those of similar evaluative discourses in the fields of aesthetics and wine. different fashion media personnel, and sometimes the same person on different occasions, apply contradictory rules in determining what is and is not fashionable in written, tangible, intangible, and iconic presentation, based on the ‘evaluative terms’ benchmarking stylistic x fashionability— luxurious, understated, cultivated and timeless. these keywords, “imbued with multiple condensed meanings, while at the same time being lexically and syntactically predictable” (moeran, 2015, p. 151), are promiscuously used by people in and around the fashion world who believe they agree on their ‘meanings’. association with specific companies, people, cultures and nations is often adopted as a shorthand in defining fashion’s meanings— especially in iconic presentation. this apparently resonates with jobling (1999)’s proposed power of iconic fashion; yet its fundamental logic lies in the objective of profiling ideal target consumers to appeal to a diverse range of existing and potential advertisers (moeran, 2015). episodes exemplifying the ideas of the critical school of fashion theorists certainly were observed. intentionally or unintentionally, a range of random, cyclical, and inconsistent fashion meanings were consistently adopted (“five dichotomies in menswear fashion,” “old but beautiful,” and “hiking outfits,” for example). at times fashion editorials were presented in shopping guide format, rather than as critical and professional comments on fashion trends and styles, and were intended simply to trigger consumption. fashionability generated in the observed hong kong magazine was closely linked with capitalist evaluation criteria—such as its monetary value, the financial power of the brand, and its advertising budget. items not normally considered fashionable like hiking outfits, candles, and sandals could be tactfully fused with fashionable meanings in the right season through rhetoric, description, and visual portrayals, as well as by means of sponsored advertorial coverage, even replacing editorial topics indisputably related to fashion. in general, the media personnel observed, ostensibly fashion tse / consistent inconsistency in fashion magazines 175 mediators, did not seem very powerful in manipulating the encoding process. this does not mean that fashion meanings are rigidly prescribed, nor that media workers could not influence fashion meanings at all. some fashion media personnel were observed criticizing or mocking those fashion meanings they saw as deviating from “stylistic x fashionability.” they expressed their personal tastes and aesthetic sense in order to differentiate their superior fashion-selves from those at other companies, or of different nationality, or simply to display their unique academic, social, cultural and historical background—“as a means of displaying their membership of that [fashion] world on the one hand, and their exclusiveness vis-à-vis outsiders on the other” (moeran, 2015, p. 152). the most vivid instance of this was the way cello mystically defined luxury fashion as a cultivated mindset of connoisseurship, understatement and subtlety unreachable by most youngsters and mainlanders, yet so obvious to the cultured eye. the evaluative term “luxury” was subject to multiple elucidations between different fashion brands and cultural contexts, depending on “who uses it, to and about whom, and in what context” (ibid.). overall, observation demonstrated that fashion meanings are encoded in a non-linear and continuously inconsistent way. the encoding process did involve aesthetic and creative judgments, although more often it relied on capitalist benchmarks through organizational and industrial socialization processes. a few of the media workers observed were personally passionate about fashion, and able to demonstrate and articulate their preferred and pluralistic senses of fashion, whether japanese minimalist style or euroamerican glamour. this seems to disagree with the critical perspective that fashion consists purely of an unaesthetic, drifting and “vulgar” taste. the continuous monitoring of fashion meanings throughout the encoding process—from cello’s comments on graphical layouts to jet’s principles in retouching of fashion images—did not help facilitate consistency in encoding fashionability. in reality, the researched magazine had to survive by collaborating with a variety of fashion and non-fashion advertisers, whose brand identities, products and services might or might not match the ideal stylistic x fashionability—representing the tastes and lifestyles of their readers—at once aspired to and simulated by the magazine’s media personnel. on an industry level, such an encoding process also involved competition with other major players in the local market, from local fashion magazines to international fashion titles, to other media organizations, all trying to siphon off the limited aggregate luxury fashion ad spends of the advertisers who are always in high hope of catching the eye of their imaginary luxury consumers. on a monthly basis, a new yet dissimilar blend of fashion and non-fashion products and brand messages becomes the resources and ingredients for media staffers to manufacture stylistic x fashionability, which was one significant reason why they manifested contradictory fashion meanings at different times, visually and textually, thereby perpetuating “consistent inconsistency”. journal of business anthropology, 5(1), autumn 2016 176 references aspers, p., and godart, f. 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(2007). a note on glamour. fashion theory, 11 (1), 95-108. journal of business anthropology, 5(1), autumn 2016 178 dr. tommy tse is an assistant professor at the department of sociology, the university of hong kong. he specializes in asia’s cultural industries and sociology of fashion. his work has appeared in asian journal of business research, international journal of fashion design, technology and education, clothing cultures, international journal of fashion studies and young consumers. previously, tse worked in various media and creative companies, and also taught at the school of communication, hong kong baptist university; central saint martins, university of the arts london; the culture and media domain, hku space; and hong kong design institute. tse / consistent inconsistency in fashion magazines 179 appendix 1 organization structure of stylistic x valediction prose and qualms: on editing the journal of business anthropology brian moeran the time has come for me to step down as founding editor of the journal of business anthropology. as is customary on such occasions, i should start by thanking all those who have supported me during the past five years: claus rosenkrantz hansen, librarian at the copenhagen business school who has selflessly dedicated himself over the past five years to ensuring that each issue of the jba is properly uploaded on the journal website; melissa cefkin who first pointed me in the direction of open access publishing; elizabeth briody who stepped in out of nowhere to help when i thought the journal was about to go into oblivion; various members of the jba’s supporting cast of gaffers, grips, and best boys (better known as the jba’s advisory board), who came through with essays, articles, and submission reviews when called upon for help; and last―but certainly never, never least―my five co-editors: elizabeth briody, jakob krause jensen, dixon wong, timothy de waal malefyt, and ghislaine gallenga. i owe a special word of thanks, too, to greg urban, who, thankfully, has agreed to take over the jba’s editorial reins from the beginning of next year. at the best of times, editing is a hard task. taking on the editorship of an academic journal―especially when that journal is totally new―is daunting. due to an unexpected concatenation of circumstances which, at the time, included a collective unease at robert tian's newly page 1 of 9 jba 5(1): 180-188 autumn 2016 © the author(s) 2016 issn 2245-4217 www.cbs.dk/jba moeran / prose and qualms 181 launched international journal of business anthropology, coupled with a shared desire to broaden the net and come up with something that really does reflect the kind of work anthropologists do in business environments around the world, i ended up doing precisely this. now, more than five years later, i am stepping aside. the jba needs someone at the helm who is younger, more in tune with what is going on in both academic and business worlds, and who can breathe fresh life into the project. not that i am disappearing entirely from view. jakob and i—with the able assistance of james carrier—are launching a jba book series, to be published by berghahn books, so please send us your book proposals and manuscripts. needless to say, perhaps, my retirement from the journal’s field of editorial battle has led to a certain introspection. what have we done right? what might we have done better? what should a journal devoted to business anthropology be trying to do, and for whom in particular? in other words, who is our audience? businessmen? unlikely, unless we alter the style of discussions published in the jb a. anthropologists working in, for, with business? possibly, at least with some of the stuff we have published. academics? almost certainly. so how might the journal become more inclusive? what needs to be jettisoned from what has been done so far? what new forms of writing (or other media) should we experiment with in order to get a broader audience?1 this introspection leads me to think not just about editing the jba, but about editing in general. i will, therefore, in this valediction indulge myself a little. please bear with me. editorial moments to edit is to make a choice, or series of choices. such “editorial moments” (becker 1982: 198) involve editing of both the self and others.2 as anthropologists, we are aware that self-editing starts when selecting the kind of research we want to do, where we want to do it, and how to go about doing it. fieldwork is one long series of editorial moments, as we make choices about what is, and is not, relevant to our observations, participation, and communication. who do we speak to, and whom do we ignore? what’s the best way to broach a tricky issue like money? what questions are better left unasked? what do we, and what do we not, record? do we write more than one record: a “subjective” diary, for example, as well as “objective” field notes? how much do we consign to memory; and how much to the tape recorder or video camera? 1 the fact that early articles of the jba have been downloaded more than 10,000 times suggests that there is in fact a broad audience―if only of automatic download software programmes! 2 much of what follows is taken from a chapter written for helena wulff (ed.), the anthropologist as writer. oxford: berghahn books, 2016. journal of business anthropology, 5(1), autumn 2016 182 and when we start to analyse all we’ve learned, we make more editorial decisions. how are we going to organize our material and structure our results? what sort of theoretical frame should we use? how much detail should we include? what sort of style should we adopt? who, if anyone, is going to be our audience? what is the sound of one hand clapping? an answer to one of these questions inevitably has an effect on the answers to others, which in turn may enforce a change in the first. editorial moments are messy, not least for anthropologists. they do not constitute a neat or logical process, if only because of their variety. in the words of clifford geertz (1995: 20): one works ad hoc and ad interim, piecing together thousandyear histories with three-week massacres, international conflicts with municipal ecologies. the economics of rice or olives, the politics of ethnicity or religion, the workings of language or war, must, to some extent, be soldered into the final construction. so must geography, trade, art, and technology. the result, inevitably, is unsatisfactory, lumbering, shaky, and badly formed: a grand contraption. the anthropologist, or at least one who wishes to complicate his contraptions, not close them in upon themselves, is a manic tinkerer adrift with his wits. writing, editing, and rewriting editing is not writing. the two should be kept separate as activities. when i write, i go with the flow, allowing the words to form their own spaces, to take over from my thinking self, and to express ideas i never knew i had. in writing, words should have a mind of their own. this is the point at which creativity begins. when i edit, i put down anchors that interrupt what the cognitive psychologist, mihaly csikszentmihalyi (1996: 118-23), refers to as the merging of action and awareness. it is at this point that my logical mind takes over. i have to be careful, of course, to balance the two activities, the two states of being. the perfectionist is someone who edits all the time and doesn’t allow himself to write. this leads to writer’s block. or is it editor’s block? whichever, at that stage it’s time to learn a few tricks of the writing trade: using fewer words, and active, rather than passive, tenses; paying attention to syntax; avoiding repetition, metaphors and abstractions; basic common sense stuff like that. this is something almost all future contributors to the jba should keep in mind. when writing, we compose, we build, we weave our prose (benjamin 1985: 61). so, at the beginning at least, writing should exclude editing. this is particularly important for anthropologists, who often have to wrestle with mountains of data that they believe should be theoretically framed. how on earth are we to get started? moeran / prose and qualms 183 when i was in the middle of the second year of fieldwork studying folk art potters in japan, my supervisor, rodney clark—himself an early anthropologist of business—unexpectedly wrote to me, saying that he was coming to tokyo and that i should send him the first draft of my doctoral dissertation, “with a beginning, a middle, and conclusion, and no loose ends,” no later than 15th november that same year. i had exactly three months and two days from the time i received his letter (this was before the era of e-mail) to write my thesis. because i was, in spite of appearances maybe, conscientious, i settled down to do as he asked. but because i was in the field, i had no scholarly books to read and rely on for help, and the nearest university library (which, in fact, had few of the works i needed) was more than two hours away from my fieldwork site. this was a blessing in disguise. i had no choice but to write the whole of my thesis on the basis of my copious field notes and nothing else. i had two sets of notebooks. one contained unexpurgated, raw material, consisting of hurriedly jotted field notes made during interviews, making pottery, and sake drinking sessions. the other consisted of larger notebooks, in which i had neatly transcribed these jottings in greater detail, and edited them too, according to specific themes such as household organization and community structure, pottery production and distribution, and aesthetics and the japanese folk art movement. beginning is the hardest part. i remember gazing rather hopelessly at these two sets of notebooks piled on a table temporarily set up on the earthen floor of a storeroom in our kyushu farmhouse. i remember, too, the harsh symphony of cicadas in the pear orchard outside, and the keyboard of my portable typewriter with a fresh white sheet of a4 paper inserted, straightened and with margins adjusted. gradually it dawned on me that all i could do was tell a story―a story about the community of potters i’d been studying and how they’d been caught up in an artistic movement that they didn’t really understand or appreciate. i would tell the story they had been telling me the past eighteen months. and so i began to write that story―a long story maybe, but a story nevertheless. i edited it, of course, to fulfil rodney’s criterion that it have a beginning, middle and conclusion―themselves prerequisites for what constitutes a story. but because the emphasis was on writing, and writing a story, rather than on trying to fit the details of that story into some kind of theoretical framework, i managed to finish the whole of my thesis two days ahead of the stipulated time. (i wish colleagues would write their books and articles in the same way.) “very interesting,” rodney remarked when i went up to tokyo to hear his judgement on what i’d written. “now go away and find a theory.” journal of business anthropology, 5(1), autumn 2016 184 it was then that i started editing.3 editing, then, is not writing but re-writing. already i’ve made three changes in the sentence you’ve just read, before moving on to this one. before i’m through, i may well have made several more, or less, significant changes, or even deleted what i’ve written altogether. in which case, you will not read any of this paragraph. how do you read a cut without the paste? re-writing isn’t easy. you have to learn to be tough with yourself. you have to stand back and read what you’ve written with the eye of another. you have to make sure the theory makes sense, avoid clichés, eliminate inconsequentia, check those ingrained habits that lead to the same old spelling or grammatical mistakes, and cut down on all those fascinating snippets of research detail so that they do no more than illustrate a particular point you wish to make. editing operates at two levels in particular: one at that of grammar and style; the other, of organization. the first demands an experienced love of language; the second clear-headedness. what you have written must be clear and simple, and it must be organized in such a way that your reader can easily follow your argument. organization’s the key. so, how do you know when your written work will be judged sufficiently well written to be understood by people potentially interested in what you have to say? rodney clark helped me with this, too. after reading one particularly tortuous theoretical section in the third draft of my thesis (there were six in all before it was ready to be examined), he said: “why don’t you read this aloud to your elder son when you go home tonight? see what he makes of it.” poor alyosha was only thirteen years old at the time. he was bewildered by my account of the intricacies of the japanese household system and what made it different from a family. dutifully, though, he managed to ask a question about one of his school friends when it came to my description of how to make pots (“is takuchan going to be a potter like his dad?”). but he soon fell asleep night after night as i read aloud extracts from what i’d written. from this i learned two things: first, how to put a restless child to sleep; second, to write more simply, in such a way that alyosha―or someone like an intelligent baker in a greek island village (moeran 2005)―could understand what i was communicating, if he put his mind to it. it’s an effective test, or trick of the trade (becker 1998), but not many of my colleagues seem to have tried it. you can see how people nod off in department seminars as the speaker drones on in what, to a layman, 3 none of my doctoral students, alas, has ever followed my suggestion that they write their theses in the same way. moeran / prose and qualms 185 is pure gobbledygook. it was during the course of reading my second departmental seminar paper that i realised that what i’d written sounded pompous (a common feature of theory), and didn’t make sense, even to myself. i stopped in mid-flow and extemporized, speaking to what i’d written. people woke up and smiled encouragingly. if only we could all learn from our mistakes! i was once invited to attend a workshop on “advertising and the new middle class in india.” other participants included a dozen or so, mainly american, academics and a handful of representatives from the bombay (or should i now say mumbai?) advertising industry. five minutes after one, rather famous, anthropologist had begun reading a prepared paper―littered with obscure phrases about an epistemological this, a postmodern that, and a subaltern other―one of the advertising executives interrupted the speaker: “excuse me, sir,” he said, “but i don’t understand a bloody word you’re saying. could you please be speaking in plain english? that’s what we have to do in advertising. get to the point.” alas! the rather famous anthropologist was rooted to his text and was totally unable to engage his audience. we dutifully nodded off. don’t forget, then. your audience is an intelligent layperson, not just a colleague. i think this is what we should be aiming for in the jba. journal editing and what has all this to do with my five years as editor of the jba? editorial moments occurred throughout the process of first envisaging, then launching, the journal. should we link up with a respected publisher (in which case an editor who was either american, or who was located in a university in the usa, was crucial to success)? if so, which publisher? or should we stray from the hitherto customary path and try out open access? the latter offered several advantages, in that the jba didn’t have to be published at precise intervals every year―the inevitable slippage of manuscript completions could be overlooked (although, as one seasoned contributor moaned early on, i was a hard task master). open access also lessened the importance of finding an american colleague to co-edit the journal. moreover, the jba didn’t have to follow the standard format of editorial, articles, and book reviews, but could branch out into parallel streams, which published fieldwork accounts and case studies as they came in (book reviews have never materialized). it could also make use of other media―like video or blogs (although we have only published one video to date―something to be developed in the future?). ultimately, open access became more than a series of ideas when claus said, yes, of course, cbs managed open access journals, and had the necessary platform for us to launch the jba. suddenly, my fear of digital technology melted into total acceptance (filled with confusion). journal of business anthropology, 5(1), autumn 2016 186 but, if we were to have a website, we needed to distinguish it from other journal websites. this meant talking to a designer and making more editorial decisions on formats, colours, designs, lettering, and so on. we needed both advisory and editorial boards, so names were selected and their owners approached. remarkably, not one of those we wrote to declined. and then we needed submissions. we still need them. submissions needed to be reviewed and authors contacted with reports and requests to revise their articles (more editorial moments). belatedly, i realized that we needed some sort of journal “style.” what size of what font should authors use? should capital letters be used in bold throughout a heading? how much should each paragraph be indented? should there be spacing between paragraphs? should all authors follow a single referencing style? or should each be allowed to use whatever s/he preferred―provided that s/he was consistent in that usage? the answers to these, and many other, questions have been worked out over time as i have copy edited submissions for inclusion in each issue of the jba, but some still confuse (for instance, should one write phd or ph.d.?). regretfully, because we have had no back-up support for the journal (other than claus’ voluntary work in uploading each issue), i have been obliged to devote a lot of my time to copy editing (about 20-30 hours per issue). here more editorial moments have come into play, as i wrestled with the texts of those writing in a second language, as well as (occasionally horrific) articles and essays by native english speakers. i sometimes felt that i worked like a dress designer―cutting, fitting, twisting, and matching the material to hand. whether this editorial exercise was successful or not, i leave to you to judge. a journal editor must also have a vision. he or she must know how to communicate (especially when dealing with difficult situations affecting authors), and needs to be aware of flow in deciding what should go where in an issue (necessary in a journal to take readers seamlessly from start to finish). a journal editor cannot hope to be abreast of all the latest developments in all the fields of knowledge covered by his journal, so s/he subcontracts work to referees, who assess manuscripts and make editorial judgements for him (or her) about their worth (or lack thereof). even so, a journal’s editor has to make decisions. which accepted manuscripts should be placed together with which, and in what order? should a referee’s recommendations be followed to the letter, or should the author be allowed some leeway in revising her manuscript? and what if two referees give totally opposing assessments and recommendations? the editor of one journal to which i submitted my first article on advertising sent the manuscript out to three reviewers. one liked it very moeran / prose and qualms 187 much and recommended it for publication as it stood; another thought it lacking in scholarship and rejected it; a third regarded it as a bit like the curate’s egg: good in parts. i was asked to revise in the light of reviewers’ comments. i did so and sent the manuscript back. unable to make up her mind, the journal editor sent it out to three more reviewers, one of whom liked it, another disliked it, while the third wavered between hot and cold. since the journal editor still couldn’t make up her mind, i sent the manuscript to another journal, together with the six reviewers’ assessments. it was published without further ado! fortunately, we have never faced this kind of situation when having submissions refereed for the jba. flexibility, adaptability, and an openness to new ways of doing things are crucial aspects in a journal editor’s work. here we have a classic case of structure versus agency. a journal’s name and reputation enforce a particular kind of article to be found therein. this limits editorial choices. but an editor should be able to spot a gap and broaden the field of her journal’s enquiry, thereby encouraging the publication of slightly different kinds of articles that contribute to creating―and then sustain―the reputation of the journal’s “brand.” she should also realise that journal articles generally make very little contribution to scholarship, if she insists on their following a format that includes problem orientation, research question, literature review and methodology sections before presentation of the actual data. this is why we have been open to articles that abandon this traditional format and try something new. so, there you have it―the prose and qualms of an elderly anthropologist heading for senility. i hope, though, that you, dear readers, have enjoyed reading what has been published in the jba. i’m sure you don’t read every essay or article in every issue, but hopefully you find more of interest in the jba than in your average academic journal. but do please remember, the journal of business anthropology is your journal. you are the ones who contribute to it, who read it, who recommend it to students and colleagues. its quality and its future depend on you as much as on its editor. references becker, h. 1982. art worlds. berkeley & los angeles: university of california press. becker, h. 1998. tricks of the trade: how to think about your research while doing it. chicago: university of chicago press. benjamin, w. csikszentmihalyi, m. 1996. creativity: flow and the psychology of journal of business anthropology, 5(1), autumn 2016 188 discovery and invention. new york: harpercollins. geertz, c. 1995. after the fact: two countries, four decades, one anthropologist. cambridge, ma: harvard university press. moeran, b. 2005. the business of ethnography. oxford: berg. vi opdaterer systemet vi opdaterer systemet... rauli.cbs.dk opdateres og er snart tilgængeligt. vi opdaterer systemet vi opdaterer systemet... rauli.cbs.dk opdateres og er snart tilgængeligt. cefkin formatted with page numbers v. 2           afterword:  questions  of  an  anthropology  of  and   anthropology  for  business   melissa  cefkin             concerns  about  positioning  sit  at  the  very  heart  of  anthropology.  while  a   matter  of  seemingly  heightened  concern  recently,  the  significance  of   positioning  dates  back  to  the  very  origins  of  the  discipline.  malinowski’s   time  in  the  trobriand  islands  and  boas’  travels  to  the  baffin  islands   solidified  the  shift  from  the  arm-­‐chair  analysis  of  the  late  1800’s  to  active   empirical  investigation  in  the  field.  it  is  worth  pausing  to  note  that  these   developments  happened  almost  accidently,  as  if  each  man  tripped  over   experiences  and  observations  that  encouraged  them  to  see  things   differently,  with  malinowski’s  long  stay  in  the  trobriands  as  an  exile  from   war  and  boas’  travels  as  a  physicist  and  geographer.  boas’  case  also   reminds  us,  lest  we  forget,  that  other  sciences  go  into  the  field  for   research  as  well.  he  went  as  a  scientist  to  analyze  the  colors  of  seawater.   his  investigation  turned  specifically  anthropological  when  he  found  that   local  people  described  numerous  and  varied  colors  from  what  he  saw.  it   was  not  just  being  there,  but  being  there  and  seeing  things  differently  (or   really,  listening  to  things  differently)  that  matters  to  anthropology.     where  we  stand  and  from  where  we  listen  and  speak  matters.   there  are  at  least  three  things  at  stake  in  these  questionings  of   positioning.  one  is  the  positioning  of  the  anthropologist  herself.  where  is   she,  how  did  she  get  there  and  why  is  she  there?  a  second  is  the   positioning  of  the  actions  the  anthropologist  takes  to  produce  knowledge       page  1  of  3     jba  6(1):  121-­‐123   spring  2017     ©  the  author(s)  2017   issn  2245-­‐4217   www.cbs.dk/jba     journal  of  business  anthropology,  6(1),  spring  2017      122   about  the  subject  at  hand.  is  the  looking  honest  looking?  is  it  in  the  right   places  and  at  the  right  things?  is  it  enough  and  does  it  build  on  others’   prior  thoughts?  (or,  put  another  way,  is  the  data  valid  and  the  analysis   theoretically  informed?)  and  a  third  is  the  positioning  of  the  discipline  of   anthropology  vis-­‐à-­‐vis  other  domains  of  knowledge  and  practice.  if  we   aren’t  a  professional  occupation  dealing  in  practical  effects,  on  the  one   hand,  and  we  don’t  drive  towards  universal  laws  on  the  other,  what  do  we   deal  in?     the  anthropologist  often  finds  herself  needing  to  manage  her   positionality  across  all  three  of  these  stances  at  the  same  time,  tacking   back  and  forth  between  the  role  she  is  playing  and  the  validity  of  the   knowledge  she  produces,  between  the  techniques  she  engages  and  their   status  in  the  worlds  of  both  practice  and  science.  and  often  she  must   grapple  with  simultaneous  but  nearly  opposing  gazes  from  two   directions,  from  her  interlocutors  and  co-­‐participants  in  the  field  and   from  her  fellow  anthropologists  ‘back  home’  in  the  disciplinary  halls  of   power.       our  practices  do  not  always  look  that  different  from  others  we   find  inside,  from  others  we  encounter  in  the  field.  anthropologists  who   work  with  marketing  and  brand  professionals,  for  instance,  may  find   themselves  engaged  in  something  of  a  semiotics  smack-­‐down,  vying  for   who  can  render  more  insightful,  more  incisive  or  more  useful  meanings.   or  we  may  have  to  contend  with  the  fact  that  there  is  often  little  interest   from  our  colleagues  in  the  field,  in  the  end,  in  how  we  do  what  we  do,  in   our  processes  and  approach,  but  only  to  the  potential  of  the   instrumentality  of  its  effects.     for  many  of  us  who  work  "in",  "with"  and  particularly  "for"   contemporary  institutions  of  power  such  as  business,  worries  about   where  we  stand  and  from  where  we  speak  seem  especially  fraught.  the   interests  and  concerns  we  invest  in  when  facing  our  fellow   anthropologists  and  broader  communities  of  scholars,  and  our  interests   and  worries  when  facing  those  in  the  institutions  and  markets  we  hope  to   affect,  are  both  profound  and  not  necessarily  the  same.  today's   anthropological  work  involves  a  double  move:  we  consider  not  just  the   subject  or  site  or  problem  at  hand,  whether  it  involves  meat  packing   plants,  sanitation  workers,  technical  support  or  corporate  strategists  and   change  management  leaders  but  also  our  own  relationship  to  it.  we   project  both  forward  and  back  to  evaluate  what  we  know,  how  we  know   what  we  know,  and  where  it  fits  in  the  scheme  of  broader  scholarly   interests,  knowledge  and  debates.   so  perhaps  it  is  no  wonder  that  we  repeatedly  ask  these  questions   about  the  positionality  of  our  work,  our  knowledge,  and  our  discipline.   but  who  actually  cares  about  the  answer  to  this  question?  what  kind  of  a   question  is  it,  really?  in  my  experience,  having  spent  decades,  now,                                                                                                                                  cefkin  /  afterword     123   amongst  scientists,  strategists,  managers  and  workers,  the  kind  of  self-­‐ reflexivity  engendered  by  this  set  of  questions  is  simply  not  typical  of   those  who  occupy  the  realms  we  work  and  reside  in.  it  is  by  no  means   wholly  absent—i’ve  come  to  appreciate  that  people  in  the  worlds  we   intersect  in  are  certainly  smart  enough  and  thoughtful  enough  to  ask   them—but  it’s  not  a  typical  part  of  their  professional  practice,  so  why  is  it   ours?     we  have  counted  on  both  ‘being  there’  and  seeing  and  listening   differently  for  our  anthropological  endeavor.  the  combining  of   ethnographic  observation  with  questions  of  meaning  and  social  and   cultural  forms  are  what  make  the  discipline  of  anthropology.  and  yet  we   have  also  come  to  expect  more.  embodied  in  the  many  and  sustained   inquiries  into  questions  of  positioning  and  the  calls  both  for  and  against   studying  up,  sideways,  adjacent,  with,  in,  for,  and  against  are  pushes  for   an  accounting  of  ourselves  and  of  our  work,  accountings  of  both  our  being   there  and  of  our  ways  of  seeing.  we  are  faced  with  questions  not  only  of   why  we  are  there  and  what  we  are  doing,  but  also  (though  often  only   subtlety  and  tangentially),  is  it  enough  and  is  it  right?  these  questions  are   in  part  questions  of  epistemology,  to  be  sure,  and  here  we  share  with   other  sciences,  both  human  and  natural,  in  asking  after  the  basis  of  our   knowledge  claims  and  the  methods  we  use  to  arrive  at  them.  but  they  are   also  questions  of  politics.  whose  interests  do  we  serve?     this  reality  should  give  pause  to  anyone  continuing  to  imagine   anthropology  to  be  the  swashbuckling  discipline  of  adventure.  these   many  entanglements  suggest  instead,  for  better  or  worse,  a  rather   treacherous  walk  down  an  infinite  hall  of  mirrors.           melissa  cefkin  (phd  anthropology,  rice)  leads  a  social  science  research   team  at  the  nissan  research  center-­‐silicon  valley.  she  explores  the   potential  of  having  autonomous  vehicles  as  interactive  agents  in  the   world  and  works  with  technologists  and  designers  to  build  socially   acceptable  and  meaningful  autonomous  vehicles.  prior  to  nissan,  she  was   at  ibm  research  where  her  research  focused  on  studies  of  work  and   organization.  she  also  has  experience  in  design  and  consulting,  and  was   previously  a  director  of  advance  research  and  user  experience  at  sapient   corporation,  and  a  senior  research  scientist  at  the  institute  for  research   on  learning.  melissa  served  on  the  board  of  directors  for  the   ethnographic  praxis  in  industry  conference  (epic),  as  well  as  conference   co-­‐organizer.  she  is  the  editor  of  ethnography  and  the  corporate   encounter  (berghahn  books  2009)  and  numerous  other  publications.  a   fulbright  award  grantee,  she  enjoys  frequent  presentations  at   conferences,  serves  regularly  on  editorial  and  review  boards,  and  has   served  a  committee  for  the  national  academies  of  science  and  on  a   number  of  editorial  boards.   nagle formatted with page numbers v.2           the  job  is  in  the  field:  notes  from  municipal   anthropology   robin  nagle             abstract   the  department  of  sanitation  in  new  york  city  is  a  mayoral  agency  with  a   key  role  in  municipal  government,  but  it  also  has  the  attributes  of  a   powerful  corporation.  with  an  annual  budget  in  excess  of  a  billion  dollars,   it  hires,  monitors,  and  replaces  private  vendors  and  contractors  for  a  host   of  essential  services,  balances  the  often  conflicting  demands  of  several   unions,  and  answers  to  a  watchful  but  perpetually  critical  public.  as  the   department's  anthropologist-­‐in-­‐residence  since  2006,  my  work  has   included  consulting,  advocacy,  collaboration,  education,  and  organizing   various  projects  focused  on  the  interface  between  sanitation  and  that   larger  public.  these  efforts  have  helped  me  understand  the  urban   environment  from  the  perspective  of  those  who  keep  it  clean,  while  also   letting  me  become  intimately  acquainted  with  the  complex  dynamics  of  a   workforce  that  is  generally  scorned  even  while  it  is  fundamental  to  the   well-­‐being  of  the  metropolis  it  serves.  this  paper  considers  the  model  of   anthropologist-­‐in-­‐residence  as  i've  structured  it  within  the  dsny,   discusses  contributions  to  an  anthropology  of  organizations,  and  explores   the  possibility  of  similar  relationships  between  anthropologists  and  other   public  and  private  institutions.         page  1  of    17     jba  6(1):  41-­‐57   spring  2017     ©  the  author(s)  2017   issn  2245-­‐4217   www.cbs.dk/jba     journal  of  business  anthropology,  6(1),  spring  2017      42   keywords     bureaucracy,  organizations,  solid  waste  management,  public  institutions,   urban  studies     of/for/with   since  2006,  i  have  been  the  anthropologist-­‐in-­‐residence  for  new  york   city’s  department  of  sanitation  (dsny).  the  department  is  a  municipal   government  agency,  not  a  private  business  or  corporation,  and  no  one   within  it  ever  requested  my  help  as  a  consultant  or  as  an  advisor;  rather,  i   asked  to  learn  about  it  and  then  to  become  part  of  its  structure.  i  created   the  title  “anthropologist-­‐in-­‐residence”  to  anchor  my  place  in  sanitation   after  i’d  been  doing  ethnographic  research  with  the  department  for  four   years.  as  far  as  i  know,  it’s  a  unique  position  in  anthropology  and  in   government.     though  i  invented  the  role,  wrote  a  proposal  to  explain  it,   advocated  for  it,  and  was  delighted  when  it  was  adopted,  i  was  slow  to   understand  its  full  range  of  privileges  and  limitations.  the  status  “in   residence”  has  much  potential  for  anthropology,  to  the  mutual  benefit  of   the  discipline  and  the  host  organization,  but  it  creates  an  essential   responsibility  and  a  perpetual  challenge:  i  am  always  striving  to  balance   an  anthropology  of  the  dsny  with  an  anthropology  for  it.  those  aims  are   sometimes  contradictory.  as  i’ll  show  in  this  essay,  the  conflict  is  resolved   by  forging  a  continually  collaborative  anthropology  with  the  organization.       just  say  no   until  recently,  garbage  was  considered  a  curious  focus  for  social  science.   the  assumption  even  among  anthropologists  was  that,  if  it  belonged  in   the  discipline  at  all,  it  was  the  purview  of  archaeology  (see  martin  and   russell  2000;  cantwell  and  wall  2003:  227-­‐241;  rathje  1984;  rathje  and   murphy  1992).  investigating  it  from  a  socio-­‐cultural  perspective  seemed   to  have  occurred  to  few  scholars.1  when  i  talked  to  professional  solid   waste  managers,  they  were  puzzled  that  an  academic  not  trained  in  civil   or  chemical  engineering,  urban  planning,  materials  science,  or   environmental  economics  would  want  to  learn  about  trash  systems.  they   were  especially  perplexed  that  i  wanted  to  study  the  cultural   underpinnings  and  social  patterns  of  municipal  sanitation  work.     but  i  knew  that  new  york’s  sanitation  department  had  rich   ethnographic  potential.  a  quasi-­‐military  urban  subculture,  its   approximately  9,000  members  serve  8.4  million  people  through  a  tightly                                                                                                                   1  thompson  1979  and  o’brien  1991  are  early  exceptions  from  anthropology  and   sociology,  respectively.                                                                                                                                                                                          nagle  /  the  job  is  in  the  field       43   structured  operation  across  more  than  6,000  miles  of  streets,  six  and   seven  days  a  week,  twelve  months  a  year.2  it  marshals  an  annual  budget   of  $1.6  billion  and  moves  roughly  13,000  tons  of  discards  every  day  while   simultaneously  attending  to  constant  and  unpredictable  demands  from   the  larger  city.3  depending  on  whether  the  job  is  done  well  or  badly,   sanitation  safeguards  or  endangers  public  health,  enhances  or   compromises  basic  quality  of  life,  and  makes  or  destroys  the  careers  of   various  powerbrokers.4  despite  this,  the  department  and  its  employees   are  generally  scorned,  even  though  its  mission  is  fundamental  to  the  well-­‐ being  of  the  metropolis  it  serves  and  even  though  the  job  of  sanitation   worker  is  one  of  the  most  hazardous  occupations  in  the  nation  (bls   2014).  the  agency  is  rigidly  hierarchical,  has  a  stark  division  between   uniformed  and  civilian  job  titles  (there  are  roughly  7,000  of  the  former,   2,000  of  the  latter),  and  thoroughly  distrusts  outsiders—especially   outsiders  who  want  to  write  in  detail  about  this  particular  “tribe.”     i  first  approached  the  dsny  with  a  research  proposal  in  the  late   1990s.  i  told  department  officials  that  i  wanted  to  learn  its  dynamics  and   daily  rhythms  from  the  perspective  of  those  who  drive  municipal  garbage   trucks  and  pick  up  new  york’s  household  refuse—that  is,  by  working   with  the  city’s  ground  troops  in  its  perpetual  war  on  grime.  my  goal  was   to  show  the  elemental  realities  of  labor  that  i  believe  is  the  most   important  in  any  urban  arena.   there  are  two  main  reasons  for  its  primary  significance.  if  urban   solid  waste  management  isn’t  effective,  public  health  is  soon   compromised  to  the  point  where  people  start  suffering  diseases  that  have   been  held  in  check  for  decades.  reformer  and  journalist  jacob  riis   observed  in  1902  that  clean  streets  and  regular  garbage  collection  had   “saved  more  lives  in  the  crowded  tenements  than  a  squad  of  doctors.”   today  the  job  is  done  well  enough  to  let  the  public  forget  that  riis’s  claim   is  just  as  true  now  as  it  was  a  century  ago.     economic  well-­‐being  is  equally  dependent  on  competent  garbage   handling  systems:  if  we  can’t  discard  what  we  no  longer  want,  we  risk                                                                                                                   2  street-­‐mile  calculations  depend  on  many  variables.  mechanical  brooms  (street   sweeping  vehicles)  clean  a  street  along  one  curb  at  a  time,  but  streets  have  a  curb   on  two  or  more  sides.  when  planning  a  broom  route,  a  single  street-­‐mile  must  be   calculated  as  at  least  two  curb-­‐miles.  snow  plows  cover  approximately  one  lane   at  a  time;  for  plowing,  one  mile  of  a  four-­‐lane  avenue  is  measured  as  four  lane-­‐ miles.     3  the  budget  figure,  for  fiscal  year  2016,  comes  from  the  council  of  the  city  of   new  york  (2015).  the  household  waste  collected  by  the  dsny  is  roughly  a  third   of  new  york  city’s  daily  total.  the  other  two  thirds  are  made  up  of  commercial   waste  and  a  category  called  c&d,  for  construction  and  demolition  debris.     4  i  write  sanitation  (upper-­‐case  s)  and  not  sanitation  (lower-­‐case  s)  because  i’m   referring  specifically  to  the  department  of  sanitation  by  name,  not  to  a   homogenized  or  generic  idea  of  sanitation  as  infrastructure  or  civic  concern.   journal  of  business  anthropology,  6(1),  spring  2017      44   being  overwhelmed  by  our  stuff.5  and  in  a  more  basic  measure,  garbage   that  is  not  wrestled  into  stasis—trash  for  which  there  is  no   management—signals  general  decay,  lack  of  order,  impending  chaos.  it   carries  big,  bad  symbolic  weight.     the  department,  i  explained  to  sanitation  bosses,  stands  between   new  yorkers  and  those  collective  horrors.  if  the  public  more  fully   understood  the  job  and  were  better  acquainted  with  the  people  who  do  it,   i  argued,  some  of  the  persistently  negative  attitudes  toward  the  dsny   might  shift.  in  short,  i  was  trying  to  convince  department  brass  that  my   research  of  sanitation  would  result  in  benefits  for  them.     my  investigation  fit  into  larger  concerns  about  climate  change  and   the  likelihood  that  homo  sapiens  will  or  will  not  survive  the   anthropocene.6  if  we  are  to  change  the  way  we  inhabit  a  world  marked  by   an  increasingly  tempestuous  environment  and  by  ever-­‐widening   disparities  between  the  planet’s  wealthiest  and  poorest  citizens,  we  in   richer  nations  must  understand  all  the  consequences  of  the  way  we  live.   this  includes  scrutiny  of  large-­‐scale  industrial,  economic,  and  political   processes,  and  it  must  also  focus  on  the  multiple  costs  borne  by  individual   human  beings.  these  have  been  tallied  in  many  ways  in  many  sources,7   but  it  seemed  to  me  that  one  important  perspective  was  glaringly  absent.   though  efficient  solid  waste  management  is  an  absolute  necessity  for  any   healthy  municipality,  there  was  scant  research  on  the  workers  and                                                                                                                   5  someone  who  has  particular  trouble  discarding  or  otherwise  letting  go  of  things   (broadly  defined)  and  instead  holds  onto  them  obsessively  and  excessively  is   called  a  hoarder.  hoarding  behavior  can  be  stressful,  disruptive,  and  even   physically  harmful.  see  lidz  2003  for  a  nonfiction  account  and  doctorow  2009   for  a  novel  about  the  collyer  brothers,  a  famous  and  tragic  example  of  extreme   hoarding  in  new  york  city.  from  2009  to  2013,  a  reality-­‐television  series  called   “hoarders”  profiled  the  plight  of  hoarders  across  the  united  states.  see  frost  and   steketee  2010  for  a  study  of  hoarding  behavior  as  a  component  of  mental   disability.  in  2013,  “hoarding  disorder”  was  added  to  the  dsm-­‐v  (the  most  recent   edition  of  the  diagnostic  and  statistical  manual  of  mental  disorders,  a   comprehensive  compendium  published  by  the  american  psychiatric   association).  the  oxford  handbook  of  acquiring  and  hoarding  was  published  in   2014.   6  the  label  anthropocene  refers  to  the  profound  impact  of  human  activity  on  the   global  environment  and  asserts  that  such  activity  is  now  a  permanent  part  of   earth’s  geological  record.  stratigraphers,  geologists,  and  environmentalists,   among  others,  are  still  debating  whether  or  not  it  should  be  the  official   designation  for  the  contemporary  era.  for  an  overview,  see  monastersky  2015.   for  a  concise  argument  in  favor  of  the  term,  see  stager  2011:  4-­‐12.  see  hann   2016  for  a  discussion  of  anthropological  engagement  with  the  idea.   7  to  name  only  a  few  examples,  see  bales  2004  on  international  human  rights   violations  and  economic  injustice;  kolbert  2014  on  the  growing  possibility  that   environmental  devastation  will  result  in  human  extinction;  mckibben  2013  on   the  importance,  and  personal  toll,  of  environmental  activism;  rivoli  2006  on  the   global  exploitations  of  labor  and  ecology  that  stand  behind  a  commodity  as   humble  as  a  t-­‐shirt;  rogers  2010  on  the  tie  between  capitalism,  greenwashing,   and  anti-­‐environmental  politics.                                                                                                                                                                                          nagle  /  the  job  is  in  the  field       45   managers  who  create  and  maintain  such  systems  (exceptions  include   corteel  and  le  lay  2011,  perry  1998  and  reno  2009,  2016).8  i  wanted  to   address  that  gap  by  learning  from  the  people  charged  with  keeping  north   america’s  largest  city  clean—or,  as  one  source  phrased  it,  keeping  it  alive   (ukeles  2002).     because  my  goals  were  straightforward  and  because  i  wanted  to   tell  a  positive  story,  i  assumed  my  proposal  would  be  accepted  with   enthusiasm.  research,  as  i  imagined  it,  would  take  several  months  in   locations  across  the  city,  and  of  course  i’d  be  welcomed  wherever  i  went.   it  didn’t  occur  to  me  that  there  would  be  no  interest  in  my  idea  and  no   need  for  my  project.  i  didn’t  realize  that  i  was  the  umpteenth  person  with   an  of/for  sanitation  proposal;  my  anthropology  bona  fides  did  nothing  to   help  me  stand  out  from  a  crowd  of  similarly  enthusiastic,  similarly   clueless  journalists,  students,  and  documentary  film  makers.   in  hindsight,  i  wonder  at  my  naïveté.  i  was  not  new  to   ethnographic  research,9  but  my  attitude  toward  sanitation  was  that  of  an   inexperienced  first-­‐timer.  it  was  a  classic  dilemma  of  fieldwork  access:   without  an  insider  advocate  to  champion  my  cause,  or  even  just  a   sanitation  acquaintance  who  could  vouch  for  me,  no  one  within  the  dsny   had  any  reason  to  welcome  me.10  when  the  department  still  did  not   embrace  me  or  my  project  after  many  months  of  communication,  i  was   confused  and  discouraged.  i  didn’t  yet  understand  the  culture  of   bureaucracy.       models  and  flaws     max  weber  charted  the  territory  a  century  ago.  he  wasn’t  the  first  (karl   marx  and  john  stuart  mill  were  among  those  who  preceded  him),  and  of   course  much  has  been  done  since,  but  his  insights  still  hold.11  in  its  truest   form,  weber  argued,  a  bureaucracy  is  organized  around  a  “fixed  and   official  jurisdictional  area”  with  responsibilities  distributed  across  a   transparent  hierarchy  that  abides  by  uniformly  applied  rules.  it  keeps   meticulous  records;  jobs  and  promotions  are  given  according  to  clearly                                                                                                                   8  solid  waste  refers  to  various  forms  of  garbage  or  trash  and  is  distinct  from   human  waste,  which  is  called  sewage.  reid  1991  is  an  able  history  of  parisian   sewer  workers;  more  recently,  sewer  workers  in  montpellier  where  the  subject   of  an  ethnography  by  jeanjean  2006.   9  nagle  1997.     10  on  the  importance  of  an  insider  advocate,  and  its  potential  pitfalls  when  trying   to  gain  access  to  a  field  site,  see  fetterman  1998:  33-­‐34.  fine  2013  discusses  the   problem  of  trust  in  the  context  of  a  hierarchical  work  place;  his  experiences  in  a   restaurant  kitchen  were  very  similar  to  mine  once  i  was  finally  allowed  to  start   fieldwork.     11  there  is  a  rich  literature  of  bureaucracy  studies,  but  a  review  is  beyond  the   scope  of  this  paper.   journal  of  business  anthropology,  6(1),  spring  2017      46   delineated  metrics  of  appropriate  skill  (rather  than  according  to  who   knows  or  owes  whom,  or  according  to  sacerdotal  or  royal  decree).   management  requires  training  in  specialized  functions,  and  officials   charged  with  running  the  bureaucracy  owe  it  their  “full  working   capacity”—that  is,  theirs  is  not  a  part-­‐time  job  or  mere  honorific  title   (weber  1958  [1946]:  196-­‐198).   new  york  city’s  department  of  sanitation  fits  this  model   perfectly—except  when  it  doesn’t.  the  department’s  jurisdictional  area   seems  clear:  it  is  in  charge  of  garbage  collection,  street  cleaning,  and  snow   removal.  those  responsibilities  are  a  subset  of  the  city’s  obligation  to   safeguard  public  health  by  protecting  its  residents  from  the  many  hazards   that  trash  would  unleash  if  left  untended.  but  the  problem  of  garbage  in   new  york  is  delegated  according  to  its  source  and  context.  the  public  at   large  doesn’t  generally  understand  that  garbage,  as  a  category  of  material   and  as  a  management  challenge,  is  handled  by  different  entities   depending  on  its  genesis  and  where  it  accumulates.  the  dsny  is   concerned  with  household  waste,  which  accounts  for  only  a  third  of  the   city’s  total.  the  other  two-­‐thirds  are  made  up  of  commercial  waste   (generated  by  restaurants,  stores,  businesses,  etc.)  and  what’s  known  as   c&d,  or  construction  and  demolition  debris.  more  than  200  private   carting  companies  pick  up  the  city’s  c&d  and  commercial  waste.  and   while  a  single  public  agency  manages  municipal  household  waste,  it’s  not   responsible  for  all  public  trash.  when  left  behind  in  new  york  city’s   parks,  garbage  is  the  burden  of  the  department  of  parks  and  recreation.   in  the  subway  system,  it’s  cleaned  up  by  the  metropolitan  transit   authority.  highway  litter  belongs  to  the  department  of  transportation.     but  the  very  matter  at  the  heart  of  sanitation’s  purpose—refuse— presents  deeper  problems.  garbage  does  not  respect  jurisdictional   boundaries,  nor  does  it  submit  to  mechanisms  of  bureaucratic  control.  it   is  in  such  perpetual  motion  that  waste  managers  use  the  language  of   water:  waste  streams  flow  from  specific  waste  sheds.  like  water,  waste   spreads  to  fill  the  space  allowed  it,  and  it  regularly  breaches  its   containments.  sometimes  sanitation’s  basic  mission  feels  like  plugging   holes  in  a  dyke  that  has  so  many  leaks  it’s  about  to  burst.  the  department   has  no  power  to  stem  the  deluge—the  source  originates  far  upstream   from  any  single  municipal  system—but  the  public  often  demands  that  the   dsny  do  more  to  reduce  the  amount  of  trash  that  new  yorkers  create.   that’s  rather  like  asking  the  neighborhood  mortician  to  lower  his   community’s  mortality  rate.  imagine  if  any  public  agency  were  charged   with  legislating  and  monitoring  the  minute  details  of  our  daily   consumption  habits  and  concomitant  disposal  behaviors.  it  would  be  the   ultimate  imposition  of  government  bureaucracy  on  private  life.  indeed,   when  curbside  recycling  was  reintroduced  to  new  york  in  1989  (the  first   effort  was  in  the  1890s),  the  press  reported  city-­‐wide  grumbling  along  the   lines  of  “how  dare  the  government  tell  me  what  to  do  with  my  trash!”                                                                                                                                                                                          nagle  /  the  job  is  in  the  field       47   weber  could  not  have  anticipated  the  troublesome  nature  of  the  material   that  forms  sanitation’s  jurisdictional  area,  nor  could  he  have  predicted   the  public’s  hostility  toward  that  material  and  toward  the  department   itself.     another  of  weber’s  requirements  concerns  record-­‐keeping.   sanitation’s  is  meticulous,  but  it’s  also  situational  and  short-­‐lived.  details   about  who  worked  where,  for  how  long,  with  what  result,  in  which  piece   of  equipment  (itself  given  a  paper  trail  that  tracks  consumption  of  petrol,   motor  oil,  hoist  fluid)  are  noted  with  extreme  care,  as  are  facts  about  the   weight  and  dumping  location  of  each  truckload  of  garbage.  but  the   ledgers  that  hold  these  data  are  saved  only  a  few  years.  state  and  city   laws  about  record-­‐keeping  schedules  aren’t  flouted  so  much  as  they   aren’t  taught;  in  part  because  the  dsny  is  very  good  at  getting  rid  of   things,  and  because  there  is  no  training  within  the  agency  about  what  to   do  with  documents  over  time,  files  and  paperwork  that  could  or  should  be   preserved  are  often  lost.  this  is  not  a  trivial  problem.  the  history   contained  within  archival  material  tells  intimate  details  that  cannot  be   conveyed  by  any  other  means.  grand  architectural  monuments  are  meant   to  stand  against  time,  but  the  stories  that  inspired  their  creation  are  often   forgotten.  archives,  in  contrast,  can  help  us  understand  a  narrative  arc  of   history  that  anchors  us  to  the  past  and  that  one  day  will  reveal  us  to  our   descendants.  when  a  wealth  of  department  information  comes  into  being   and  then  disappears,  along  with  it  goes  the  chance  for  a  more  thorough,   nuanced,  and  informative  history  of  the  agency,  of  the  city  it  serves,  and  of   larger  forces  at  play  across  a  range  of  economic,  political,  and   infrastructural  arrangements.     here’s  one  more  way  in  which  the  department  both  follows  and   departs  from  the  weberian  model.  promotion  opportunities  are   determined  with  carefully  crafted  measures  of  competence,  just  as  weber   says  they  should  be,  but  those  measures  are  contentious.  ethnic  and   gender  disparities  in  various  job  titles  are  corrected  by  lawsuits,  by  court   orders,  and  by  decisions  at  the  upper  echelons  of  department  leadership.   when  people  are  promoted,  their  new  titles  require  them  to  master  new   forms  of  expertise  and  competence,  but  training  and  support  are   sometimes  insufficient.  the  transition  from  sanitation  worker  to   supervisor  is  especially  stressful.  it’s  the  first  step  up  the  ladder  for   uniformed  employees,  and  is  the  moment  when  workers  are  yanked  into   the  managerial  class.  if  a  person  can’t  make  it  as  a  supervisor,  all  future   promotional  opportunities  in  the  uniformed  ranks  are  closed.     labor  issues  in  general  provide  challenges.  because  the   department  stands  as  management  in  relation  to  unionized  sanitation   workers,  officers,  chiefs,  and  civilian  personnel,  it  must  always  balance  its   policies  with  the  varied  and  sometimes  contradictory  demands  of  its  well-­‐ organized  labor  force.  the  work  has  been  structured  as  an  on-­‐going   military  campaign  since  1895,  but  unlike  a  conventional  army,  most  ranks   journal  of  business  anthropology,  6(1),  spring  2017      48   have  shop  stewards  and  business  agents  representing  their  interests.  the   influence  of  the  sanitation  workers’  union  in  particular,  6,000  or  so   members  of  teamsters  local  831,  far  exceeds  its  modest  size.     in  short,  weber’s  ideal  can’t  account  for  changes  in  political  whim,   histories  of  policy  accumulation,  or  forces  external  to  the  department’s   immediate  mission  but  regularly  complicating  its  day-­‐to-­‐day  routine.   more  importantly,  from  my  perspective,  weber  neglects  the  influence  of   human  volition.  organizational  success  depends  on  managers  having  a   combination  of  “incentives,  culture,  and  authority”  (wilson  1991:  365).   these  three  essentials  are  not  always  available  in  sanitation,  but  their   absence  can  be  overcome.  within  any  institutional  setting  are  individuals   whose  choices  can  invigorate  or  discourage  colleagues,  inspire  or  demean   subordinates,  support  or  undermine  superiors,  facilitate  or  obstruct   work.  specific  people  refused  to  answer  when  i  first  knocked  on   sanitation’s  door,  and  then  some  of  those  same  people,  reacting  to  slightly   altered  circumstances,  let  me  in.  observing  their  access  to  and  exercise  of   a  casual  but  all-­‐controlling  power  was  enlightening.       an  awkward  fit   any  corporate  or  municipal  or  academic  organization  of  any  appreciable   age  and  size  follows  a  cardinal  rule  of  communication:  when  an  unusual   request  crosses  their  desks,  bureaucrats  will,  with  few  exceptions,  just   say  no.  if  the  idea  is  outside  the  parameters  of  business-­‐as-­‐usual,   resembles  no  other  model  of  successful  work,  comes  from  an  unknown   source  who  lacks  internal  advocates,  and  guarantees  no  positive  outcome   (that  is,  has  no  relevant  deliverables),  there  is  no  motive  for  anyone   within  the  organization  to  approve  it.  on  the  contrary:  because  both  the   petitioner  and  her  proposal  represent  several  different  but  simultaneous   forms  of  risk,  there  is  clear  motive  to  turn  her  down—or,  even  more   cautiously,  to  deny  her  a  firm  yay  or  nay.     a  change  of  leadership  can  significantly  alter  an  organization’s   internal  culture.  my  request  to  do  research  with  the  dsny  languished  in   administrative  purgatory  for  a  long  time.  after  a  mayoral  election,   however,  the  old  guard  left,  and  among  the  new  players  were  people  who   knew  people  i  knew—in  other  words,  i  suddenly  had  insider  advocates.   more  than  two  years  after  i’d  first  reached  out  to  the  department,  i  was   granted  my  first  face-­‐to-­‐face  meeting  with  a  sanitation  official  who  had   the  authority  to  approve  my  plan.  by  then  i  was  wise  to  the  ways  of   municipal  decision-­‐making:  the  official  didn’t  give  me  a  green  light,  but   because  he  didn’t  turn  me  down,  i  considered  the  conversation  a  success.     old  bureaucracies  can  embrace  new  ideas,  but  it  helps  if   institutional  uncertainties  are  alleviated,  if  the  potential  utility  of  the   innovation  is  made  clear,  and  if  the  newcomer  (who  happens  to  be  the   one  with  the  new  idea)  can  prove  herself  trustworthy.                                                                                                                                                                                            nagle  /  the  job  is  in  the  field       49   i  spent  the  summer  and  early  fall  of  2002  in  the  sanitation   official’s  office  reading  through  a  collection  of  archival  material.  by   october  i’d  shown  enough  credibility  to  be  allowed  a  single  half-­‐hour  visit   to  a  sanitation  garage  at  the  end  of  a  day  shift,  where  i  was  permitted  to   interview  one  worker  while  under  the  watchful  eye  of  the  garage   superintendent.  it  was  the  first  of  what  became  a  regular  series  of  visits,   which  grew  into  less  formal,  more  social  connections  with  sanitation   workers,  officers,  and  civilian  employees,  which  opened  the  possibility  for   access  to  other  corners  of  the  department.     in  a  really  big  organization,  a  researcher  can  only  go  so  far  as  a   participant  observer.  after  two  years  of  fieldwork,  i  had  established  a   good  rapport  with  dsny  personnel  around  the  city,  but  by  then  i  realized   that  i  needed  to  go  deeper.  i  took  the  required  civil  service  exams,  cleared   various  medical  hurdles,  learned  to  drive  a  garbage  truck,  passed  the  road   test  for  my  commercial  driver’s  license,  and  was  hired  as  a  uniformed   new  york  city  sanitation  worker.  some  friends  inside  the  department   were  delighted  by  my  choice  and  encouraged  me  throughout  the  many   steps  of  the  hiring  process,  but  not  everyone  was  pleased.  as  one  chief   said  to  me,  “we  take  this  job  so  our  children  don’t  have  to  take  jobs  like   this.”  no  matter  how  many  times  i  tried  to  explain  my  motives,  it  made  no   sense  to  him  that  a  college  professor  wanted  to  be  a  sanitation  worker.  he   couldn’t  see  that  there  was  no  other  way  for  me  to  learn  what  i  needed  to   know.     and  it  was  quite  the  education.  for  the  few  months  i  was  in  title,  i   drove  collection  trucks,  operated  mechanical  brooms,  and  plowed  snow;   through  that  process,  i  crossed  the  line  from  both  of  and  for,  and   established  a  genuine  with.  the  experience  gave  me  insights  that  i  never   would  have  had  otherwise,  and  it  distinguished  me  from  the  many  other   would-­‐be  chroniclers  of  sanitation  life.  they  came  and  went.  i  came,   stayed,  and  joined  the  force.       bureaucracies  must  assign  everyone  within  them  a  place  and  a   definition.  when  i  took  the  job  of  sanitation  worker  and  then  resigned,  i   generated  a  fresh  round  of  confusion.  if  i  were  just  a  researcher,  why  did  i   take  the  job  in  the  first  place?  if  i  were  really  a  sanitation  worker,  why  did   i  leave  it  after  only  a  short  time?  where  did  i  fit  within  the  dsny,  anyway,   and  what  was  my  project  really  about?  the  bureaucratic  categories  of  city   government  had  no  pre-­‐existing  slot  for  a  roaming  scholar.  lack  of  clarity   about  the  anthropologist’s  context  and  classification  is  anathema  to   healthy  ethnographic  research,  especially  in  an  organization  as  complex   and  tightly  knit  as  sanitation.  i  needed  a  fixed  position  within  its   institutional  framework.  i  also  needed  a  title  that  i  wouldn’t  have  to  quit,   that  would  let  me  be  an  anthropologist,  and  that  would  serve  the   department.  the  model  for  a  solution  was  close  at  hand.       journal  of  business  anthropology,  6(1),  spring  2017      50   in  residence   when  the  artist  mierle  laderman  ukeles  first  became  a  mother,  she   chafed  at  the  messy,  isolated  tedium  of  childrearing.  it  was,  she  realized,   basic  maintenance  work:  repetitive,  mundane,  invisible,  and  essential  to   the  well-­‐being  of  what  was  maintained—in  this  case,  her  family.  but  what   if  that  labor  were  understood  differently?  did  it  have  to  be  separate  from   her  identity  as  an  artist?  why  not  designate  maintenance  work  as  a  form   of  art?  she  introduced  her  idea  in  her  now-­‐famous  “maintenance   manifesto,”  a  fiery,  articulate  demand  that  the  world  recognize  the  false   separation  between,  on  the  one  hand,  process,  development,  and   creativity,  and,  on  the  other  hand,  tending,  caring,  nurturing,  shepherding:   the  basic  tasks  of  maintaining.12  there  can  be  no  revolution—or  even   survival—without  both.     her  first  project  in  the  new  genre  was  with  maintenance  workers   at  a  branch  of  the  whitney  museum  in  downtown  manhattan.  a  glowing   review  in  the  village  voice  suggested  that  perhaps  this  innovative  art   form  meant  the  department  of  sanitation  could  qualify  for  funding  from   the  national  endowment  for  the  arts  (bourdon  1976).  according  to   ukeles,  a  few  days  later  she  received  a  phone  call  from  sanitation’s   commissioner,  who  asked  her,  “how’d  you  like  to  make  art  with  10,000   workers?”  “i’ll  be  right  down,”  ukeles  replied.  her  first  piece  with  the   dsny  was  a  performance  work  called  “touch  sanitation.”  for  eighteen   months  between  1979  and  1980,  she  visited  every  department  facility  in   the  city,  shook  hands  with  every  sanitation  worker  on  the  force,  and  said   to  each  one,  “thank  you  for  keeping  new  york  city  alive.”  shortly   thereafter  she  was  named  the  department’s  artist-­‐in-­‐residence,  an   unsalaried  position  she  has  held  ever  since.13     by  the  time  i  found  myself  without  location  or  definition  within   the  dsny,  i  had  known  ukeles  for  several  years.  i  asked  if  she  thought  the   department  had  room  for  both  an  artist  and  an  anthropologist.  when  she   embraced  the  idea,  i  suggested  it  to  sanitation’s  leadership.  after   department  lawyers  scrutinized  my  proposal  to  make  sure  the   arrangement  would  not  impose  any  obligations  upon  nor  create  risks  for   sanitation  or  for  the  city,  i  was  named  the  dsny’s  anthropologist-­‐in-­‐ residence  (like  the  artist,  also  unsalaried).  the  title  gave  me  a  place   within  sanitation’s  institutional  scaffolding—it  was  understood  that  i   would  be  part  of  the  office  of  public  affairs—and  gave  me  a  classification,                                                                                                                   12  for  the  full  text  of  “maintenance  manifesto,”  see   http://sites.moca.org/wack/2007/07/25/mierle-­‐ukeles-­‐manifesto-­‐for-­‐ maintenance-­‐art-­‐1969/   13  ukeles’  example  has  inspired  at  least  one  other  waste  management   organization  to  host  artists.  recology,  the  company  responsible  for  collecting  san   francisco’s  municipal  and  commercial  waste,  has  had  an  artist-­‐in-­‐residence   program  since  1990.  http://www.sfrecycling.com/index.php/about-­‐air                                                                                                                                                                                          nagle  /  the  job  is  in  the  field       51   even  if  few  people  inside  the  organization  knew  anything  about   anthropology.  the  title  also  gave  the  department  bragging  rights;  as  the   commissioner  for  public  affairs  pointed  out  to  various  media  sources,   sanitation  is  the  only  government  agency  in  new  york  with  its  own  in-­‐ house  social  scientist  (see,  for  example,  mcgrath  2006  and  haberman   2008).     in  common  usage,  to  reside  somewhere  means  to  occupy,  live   within,  or  inhabit  a  place.  to  be  “in  residence”  can  have  the  same   connotation,  but  it’s  also  used  to  mean  “formally  affiliated  with.”   residency  programs  are  often  found  in  arts  organizations  (res  artis  in   the  netherlands  has  an  international  list)  and  in  academic  settings  (there   are  hundreds  of  examples  around  the  world).  they  can  take  many  forms,   but  broadly  speaking,  an  individual  “in  residence”  is  hosted  by  an   organization  that  provides  time  and  space  for  her  to  pursue  a  creative   endeavor;  in  exchange,  she  may  offer  lectures,  workshops,  classes,  or  an   exhibition,  or  simply  acknowledge  the  organization’s  support  when  work   results  from  the  residency.  whatever  its  particulars,  the  arrangement  is   meant  to  serve  both  parties.   concern  about  of  versus  for  had  been  put  aside  long  before  i   invented  my  new  title,  but  an  anthropologically  informed  and   institutionally  formalized  relationship  between  myself  and  sanitation   makes  the  with  explicit  and  clarifies  the  mutual  benefit  of  our  association.   it  lets  me  create  a  permanent  affiliation  with  my  research  site  and  stay   involved  in  the  life  of  the  department  for  the  long  term.  it  also  amplifies   my  voice.  part  of  my  responsibility  to  sanitation  is  to  communicate  on  its   behalf  whenever  and  however  possible.  journal  articles  and  scholarly   publications  can  reach  my  fellow  academics,  but  that  by  itself  is  too   narrow.  my  association  with  the  dsny  arouses  curiosity  in  places  far  from   the  academy.  i  give  public  lectures  in  many  venues,  speak  regularly  to   various  media,  and  in  2013  did  a  ted  talk.  this  has  a  triple  impact.  i  am   representing  sanitation  work  in  general  and  new  york  in  particular;  i  am   also  putting  anthropology  into  the  world  through  an  unusual  context,  and   that  lets  me  proselytize,  directly  and  indirectly,  for  the  discipline.   for  its  part,  the  dsny  is  pleased  that  my  work  consistently   addresses  themes  fundamental  to  its  overall  message,  and  newcomers  to   the  department  find  my  insights  helpful  in  understanding  the  culture  of   the  world  they’ve  just  joined.  there  have  even  been  signs  that  my  basic   message  about  sanitation’s  importance  in  the  life  of  the  city  is  beginning   to  spread  (bobrow  2016;  hennessy  2014;  mann  2014;  newman  2014).         partnership   after  more  than  a  decade  of  anthropological  trial  and  error  with   journal  of  business  anthropology,  6(1),  spring  2017      52   sanitation,  i  see  possibilities  for  fruitful  new  partnerships  between   academics  and  various  bureaucratic  organizations.  as  anthropologists,  we   build  our  careers  around  research  that  we  hope  creates  insightful   understandings  of  the  mess  and  beauty  of  human  culture  as  a   foundational  “actant”  (pace  latour)  across  the  globe.  what  if  some  of  that   effort  supported  the  just  and  sustainable  efficacy  of  public  authorities?     bureaucracies  in  any  context  are  often  concentrated  nodes  of   mundane  power.  it  can  seem  at  times  as  if  bureaucrats  exist  simply  to   invent  pointless  new  forms  of  control  (du  gay  2000).  when  a  disgruntled   public  clamors  for  less  government,  the  demand  is  partly  a  protest  against   intrusive,  confusing  impositions  of  bureaucracy  made  manifest  in  many   forms  (using  all  meanings  of  that  word).  errors  on  the  part  of  government   functionaries  can  seem  like  intentional  gestures  of  disrespect,  but  more   often  than  not  they  are  “simple  but  ineluctable  failures  to  communicate”   (kafka  2012:12).  that’s  where  anthropologists  come  in.  if  our  work  is   clearly  relevant  to  causes  bigger  than  our  disciplinary  affiliations  and   academic  careers,  many  bureaucratic  institutions  might  be  eager  for  us  to   help  them  articulate  and  achieve  goals,  measure  impact,  even  help  build  a   brighter  organizational  future.  anthropology  could  have  a  vital  and   creative  role  in  a  variety  of  settings  where  it  currently  has  no  presence.   the  key  to  such  an  arrangement  is  to  be  aware  of  its  potential  limitations   while  making  good  use  of  its  privileges.     a  primary  constraint  comes  from  the  relationship  itself.  my  bond   with  sanitation  is  like  a  form  of  kinship:  loyalty  prevents  me  from  writing   about  some  elements  of  the  job,  though  no  one  in  the  department  ever   articulated  such  a  rule.  because  i  am  their  in-­‐house  social  scientist,   whenever  i  speak  or  write  about  sanitation,  i’m  also  speaking  and  writing   on  the  agency’s  behalf.  i  don’t  dissemble  when  telling  sanitation  stories,   but  i  don’t  necessarily  share  my  opinion  when  asked  about  politically   sensitive  dsny  concerns.  in  other  words,  my  scholarly  work  is  not   entirely  my  own.  if  a  more  orthodox  anthropologist  would  argue  that   therefore  my  research  is  incomplete,  i’d  counter  that  all  social  science  is   incomplete,  especially  if  we  are  guided  by  the  precept  to  do  no  harm.     then  there’s  the  way  in  which  a  long-­‐term  connection  to  a  single   institutional  field  site  can  alter  the  researcher’s  perspective.  i  no  longer   speak  only  as  an  anthropologist.  that’s  no  hardship:  like  many  of  my   colleagues,  i  aim  to  be  an  anthropologist  in  service  of  the  larger  world.   without  a  specific  focus,  however,  that  goal  is  too  vague  to  be  meaningful,   so  i  concentrate  my  efforts  on  the  slice  of  the  world  that  is  the  dsny.  this   perspective  allows  me  a  meta-­‐level  view  of  the  entire  organization  and   the  city  it  serves,  while  at  the  same  time  it  helps  me  understand  fine-­‐ grained  details  of  particular  events,  places,  and  controversies.  the  duality   is  enhanced  by  deep  knowledge  of  the  institution’s  history  and  by  noting   how  changes  in  any  part  of  the  organization  affect  the  dynamic  of  work  in   other  areas.  the  dual  perspective  also  implies  a  dual  obligation.  one  of  my                                                                                                                                                                                          nagle  /  the  job  is  in  the  field       53   tasks  is  to  translate  sanitation  to  the  larger  world,  and  another  is  to   translate  sanitation  back  to  itself.     the  people  of  the  dsny  continually  teach  me  new  insights,   perspectives,  and  logistical  details  about  themselves,  their  work,  and  the   city  they  serve,  and  i  share  those  lessons  with  many  audiences.14  readers   and  listeners  are  often  astonished  to  realize  how  little  they  know  about,   and  how  completely  they  take  for  granted,  an  infrastructure  on  which   their  lives  depend.  they  are  equally  startled  to  see  that  the  effectiveness   of  the  system  requires  the  skill  of  an  eclectic  sub-­‐culture  of  talented  men   and  women  whom  they  had  never  before  considered.  in  some  cases,  it’s  a   revelation  that  inspires  a  new  attitude  toward  the  department,  and  helps   members  of  the  public  understand  that  there  are  many  ways  to   collaborate  in  the  success  of  sanitation’s  mission.15   another  element  of  this  is  to  be  vigilant  for,  and  offer  corrections   of,  media  reports  about  the  dsny  that  are  misleading  or  just  plain  wrong.   these  are  especially  common  when  the  department  is  accused  of  failing   to  fulfill  some  part  of  its  mandate.16  the  speed  of  journalistic  output  in   the  age  of  the  internet  has  allowed  more  news  through  more  venues  than   was  possible  even  half  a  decade  ago,  but  as  a  result,  misinformation  is   created  faster  and  travels  farther  than  ever  before.  sanitation  is  not  given   much  affection  even  when  there  is  no  negative  press,  but  when  a   derogatory  story  gets  widespread  attention,  the  public  responds  with   venom—and  they  don’t  just  write  angry  letters  to  the  editor  or  spew   bilious  comments  on  a  web  page.  sanitation  workers  across  the  city  have   been  verbally  insulted,  spat  upon,  threatened  with  guns,  had  their  cars   vandalized.  bad  press,  and  especially  sloppy  bad  press,  can  have  violent   consequences.17   the  other  side  of  my  dual  perspective  is  to  translate  the   department  back  to  itself.  i  am  one  of  the  few  people  in  the  dsny  with   access  to  and  knowledge  of  the  entire  structure  of  the  job.  though  i  will   always  be  a  beginner  in  an  organization  as  historically  rich  and                                                                                                                   14  i  chose  to  publish  my  book  picking  up  with  a  trade  press.  it  speaks  to  my   fellow  anthropologists,  but  it  was  intended  to  reach  beyond  the  confines  of  the   academy.  as  of  mid-­‐2015,  my  ted  talk  has  had  more  than  1.5  million  views.  see   http://bit.ly/1rgogti.   15  this  speaks  to  a  growing  trend  of  encouraging  more  fully  collaborative   relationships  between  public  administration  and  the  public  at  large  (trudeau   2011).   16  it’s  a  problem  not  unique  to  sanitation;  large  government  agencies  “are   imperfect,  vastly  complex,  usually  reliable,  and  noticeable  only  when  they  break   down”  (goodsell  1994  [1983]:  4).   17  the  dsny  was  the  target  of  public  fury  incited  by  grossly  inaccurate  press   coverage  of  the  christmas  blizzard  of  2010;  goldenberg  2010  is  one  typical   example.  for  more  complete  details  about  that  storm  and  its  aftermath,  see  nagle   2014:  200-­‐209. journal  of  business  anthropology,  6(1),  spring  2017      54   strategically  complex  as  sanitation,  i  often  know  more  than  people  who   have  been  on  the  job  for  decades  but  have  only  worked  in  a  few  locations   or  at  a  single  rank.  department  personnel  in  general  do  not  always   understand  the  full  implications  or  large-­‐scale  consequences  of  their   work.  when  i  give  talks  at  dsny  benevolent  society  meetings  or  in   training  classes  for  new  hires,  i  try  to  illuminate  less  obvious  elements  of   sanitation’s  role  in  the  city  and  to  explain  the  sometimes  mysterious   connections  between  different  agency  bureaux.  more  recently  i’ve  been   suggesting  that  some  bureaux  within  the  agency  should  consider   including  uniformed  workers  when  planning  structural  changes  to  the   job.  managers  in  charge  of  such  projects  have  a  habit  of  concentrating   almost  exclusively  within  their  own  enclaves  of  expertise.  when  their   efforts  are  not  unanimously  applauded,  this  group  takes  it  as  proof  that   “the  uniforms”  (as  sanitation  workers  and  officers  are  called)  are  an   ungrateful  lot.   whatever  their  title,  wherever  they  are  located  within  the  dsny,   however  much  they  grumble  about  each  other,  all  department  personnel   are  constantly  striving  to  balance  the  requirements  of  their  pre-­‐defined,   historically  situated,  sometimes  institutionally  calcified  jobs  with  their   own  unique  creativities.  they  insist  on  themselves,  despite  and   sometimes  against  the  weight  of  the  bureaucratic  power  that  would   dictate  the  minutiae  of  their  professional  lives.  my  job  as  their   anthropologist  is  to  continue  blending  the 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thompson,  m.  1979  rubbish  theory:  the  creation  and  destruction  of   value.  new  york:  oxford  university  press.   trudeau,  l.  2011  the  evolution  of  collaboration.  transforming  american   governance:  rebooting  the  public  square.  a.p.  balutis,  t.f.  buss,  and  d.  ink,   eds.  armonk,  ny:  m.e.  sharpe.                                                                                                                                                                                          nagle  /  the  job  is  in  the  field       57   ukeles,  m.  l.  2002  ‘leftovers  /  it’s  about  time  for  fresh  kills.’  cabinet  6;   spring.  http://www.cabinetmagazine.org/issues/6/freshkills.php   u.s.  department  of  labor,  bureau  of  labor  statistics  (bls)  2014  “national   census  of  fatal  occupational  injuries  in  2013  (preliminary  results).”   september  11.   weber,  m.  1958  [1946]  ‘bureaucracy.’  from  max  weber:  essays  in   sociology.  h.h.  gerth  and  c.  wright  mills,  trans./eds.  new  york:  oxford   university  press.   wilson,  j.  1991  bureaucracy:  what  government  agencies  do  and  why  they   do  it.  new  york:  basic  books.                                     robin  nagle  is  the  author  of  picking  up:  on  the  streets  and  behind  the   trucks  with  the  sanitation  workers  of  new  york  city  (farrar,  straus  and   giroux,  2014),  an  ethnography  of  the  dsny.  she  teaches  anthropology  and   environmental  studies  at  new  york  university  and  is  anthropologist-­‐in-­‐ residence  for  new  york  city’s  department  of  sanitation.   vi opdaterer systemet vi opdaterer systemet... rauli.cbs.dk opdateres og er snart tilgængeligt. editorial business, broadly understood kasper tang vangkilde, samantha dawn breslin, and simon lex there is a danish saying – kært barn har mange navne – which literally translates into “a dear child has many names.” more broadly, and also more true to its actual meaning and use, a better translation would be something like “the one you hold dear has many names.” the saying can be used quite plainly to denote precisely how children who are liked by many tend to have several nicknames, but just as often, or perhaps even most commonly, it is used somewhat sarcastically to refer to different terms, concepts, and expressions that, with only minor variation, describe the same phenomenon. there is, as such, a certain ambiguity underlying the saying as it may, every so often, be expressed in a slightly irritated tone of voice. anthropological work in and around business could be described with precisely this danish saying: kært barn har mange navne. indeed, it has been emphasized that a “terminological confusion” (moeran 2014: 71) surrounds the concept of business anthropology due to a number of closely allied notions such as organizational anthropology (caulkins and jordan 2013; garsten and nyqvist 2013), economic anthropology (carrier 2022; hann and hart 2011), and design anthropology (gunn, otto, and smith 2013; smith et al. 2016), to name only some of the most important. in the history of the journal of business anthropology (jba), a central aim has always been “to subsume all these terms under the single heading of page 1 of 5 jba 12(1): 1-5 spring 2023 © the author(s) 2023 issn 2245-4217 www.cbs.dk/jba doi: https://doi.org/10.22 439/jba.v12i1.6923 journal of business anthropology, 12(1), spring 2023 2 business anthropology,” as brian moeran and christina garsten (2012: 3), the founding editors of the jba, initially put it. for moeran and garsten, this was an attempt not to establish “yet another sub-discipline,” but “rather to suggest that business anthropology is not a marginal enterprise” (2012: 3). across a broad range of domains, scales, and regions, people are involved in business, moeran and garsten argued, in the sense that they all engage in practices which, in one way or another, are related to trade. business anthropology, in other words, “is an anthropology of trading relations,” and, precisely therefore, “it also reaches out to other disciplines such as business history, cultural studies, management and organization studies, some parts of sociology, and even cultural economics” (2012: 4). hence, it is a wide-ranging field of research and practice. we agree. in fact, we wish to suggest that the point is not only that people all over the world are inextricably embedded in trading relations of one kind or another, voluntarily as well as involuntarily. in many parts of the world, it is moreover the case that logics and practices commonly associated with business (in the sense of trade and commerce), not least in a context of “free” market capitalism, have increasingly pervaded areas and matters that were hitherto distinct from associations with business. most clearly, perhaps, this is one of the core characteristics of neoliberal governance – or “advanced liberalism,” as nikolas rose (1999) terms it – which is broadly known to have rethought the relation between the social and the economic. as rose has so accurately put it in his discussion of the emergence of advanced liberalism: the solution was not to seek to govern bureaucracy better, but to transform the very organization of the governmental bureaucracy itself and, in doing so, transform its ethos from one of bureaucracy to one of business, from one of planning to one of competition, from one dictated by the logics of the system to one dictated by the logics of the market and the demands of customers (1999: 150). with neo-liberalism, in other words, a central style of governing has been “to create simulacra of markets” in domains previously governed by more social logics (1999: 146). to fully account for this relationship between neo-liberalism and business logics is not possible, of course, within the scope of a fairly brief editorial letter. let the above suffice to emphasize, then, that the notion of business in the jba is to be understood, as it always has, broadly. business logics, activities, and agents are to be found in a broad variety of contexts and situations in most, if not all, geographical regions, often cutting across conventional distinctions between private and public, for-profit and nonprofit, formal and informal, social and economic, labor and leisure, and, yes, the list can go on. also, the terminological confusion that may be seen vangkilde, breslin, and lex / business, broadly understood 3 to surround the concept of business anthropology should be considered not as a problem, but as an invitation that allows for open exploration and critical scrutiny of its multiple facets, relations, and problematics. thus, we wish to reiterate here what we briefly stated in our previous editorial letter (vangkilde, breslin, and lex 2022: 165-166); namely that we insist on a broad definition and understanding of business that, hopefully, will lead to publications with numerous different angles on, and approaches to, business. indeed, we encourage all our readers and potential authors to think about the scope of the jba in precisely this way. as such, we also hope to connect to audiences in the varied fields mentioned above, which are part of this broad scope of business anthropology. in this issue, we believe that we already present a set of research articles and essays that feed productively into this perspective. the first research article by christina jerne explicit expands a conventional use of the concept of business by zooming in on the distinct economies of danish minority gangs with a particular focus on aspects of solidarity. while the term “solidarity economy” has mainly been used to describe altruistic and socially beneficial ways of doing business, jerne explores how economies of gangs also draws significantly on solidarity, which, however, typically entails more exclusive and violent aspects. solidarity economies are, thus, empirically multiple. in the next research article by frederik larsen, we are introduced to work practices in an organization whose business is not to create and sell new products, but to receive, handle, and “move” (in the sense of low-priced reselling) divested objects: the thrift store. instead of focusing on thrift in consumption, larsen demonstrates how thrift serves as a principle and value guiding work and organizational practices in the store, thus constituting one of the key elements of its business. in the final research article, lise tjørring, martina s. mahnke, matilde l. petersen, mikka nielsen, and mark vacher focus on how humanities researchers in universities are increasingly expected to not merely generate knowledge, but to engage in business collaborations with an impact beyond academia. while such collaborations may often entail interactions with people who share some of the same terminologies and concepts as the researchers, thus posing distinct methodological challenges (see, for instance, krausejensen 2010: 23-50; vangkilde and sausdal 2016), tjørring et al. argue that, despite a shared willingness to work together, humanities-business collaborations can often be tense affairs. in particular, they put forth the concept of productive uneasiness as a sensitizing tool to capture how tension and discomfort come into play in these collaborations, and how accepting and engaging in this uneasiness can eventually be productive. the remaining contributions in this issue consist of two essays. delving into the pertinent question of the role of digital technologies, such as artificial intelligence, matt artz offers a discussion of what he considers to be an emerging “digital turn” in business anthropology. he argues that including digital anthropology into the work of business anthropologists journal of business anthropology, 12(1), spring 2023 4 offers substantial opportunities that will shape the discipline in the years to come. last, but not least, elisabeth powell continues her essays in the millennial and post-millennial section with a discussion of the value that anthropologists potentially bring to business. based on her “anthropology of anthropologists,” if you will, she contends that this value is tied to their academic training, but often contingent upon them “educating” the people with whom they work in the world of business. this is all, for now. enjoy! references carrier, j. g. (ed.) (2022). a handbook of economic anthropology (third edition). cheltenham: edward elgar publishing. caulkins, d. d. and jordan, a. t. (eds.) (2013). a companion to organizational anthropology. west sussex: wiley-blackwell. https://doi.org/10.1002/9781118325513 garsten, c. and nyqvist, a. (eds.) (2013). organisational anthropology: doing ethnography in and among complex organisations. london: pluto press. gunn, w., otto, t., and smith, r. c. (eds.) (2013). design anthropology: theory and practice. london & new york: bloomsbury. hann, c. and hart, k. (2011). economic anthropology: history, ethnography, critique. cambridge: polity press. krause-jensen, j. (2010). flexible firm. the design of culture at bang & olufsen. new york & oxford: berghahn. moeran, b. (2014). “theorizing business & anthropology.” in r. denny and p. sunderland (eds.), handbook of anthropology in business (pp. 6982). walnut creek, ca: left coast press. https://doi.org/10.1201/9781315427850-5 moeran, b. and garsten, c. (2012). “what's in a name? editors' introduction to the journal of business anthropology.” journal of business anthropology 1(1): 1-19. https://doi.org/10.22439/jba.v1i1.3545 rose, n. (1999). “advanced liberalism.” in power of freedom: reframing political thought (pp. 137-166). cambridge: cambridge university press. https://doi.org/10.1017/cbo9780511488856.005 smith, r. c., vangkilde, k. t., kjærsgaard, m. g., otto, t., halse, j., and binder, t. (eds.) (2016). design anthropological futures. london & new york: bloomsbury. vangkilde, breslin, and lex / business, broadly understood 5 vangkilde, k. t., breslin, s. d., and lex, s. (2022). “back to copenhagen: a few words from the new jba editors.” journal of business anthropology 11(2): 164-167. https://doi.org/10.22439/jba.v11i2.6794 vangkilde, k. t. and sausdal, d. b. (2016). “overponderabilia: overcoming overthinking when studying ‘ourselves’.” forum: qualitative social research 17(2): art. 28. vi opdaterer systemet vi opdaterer systemet... rauli.cbs.dk opdateres og er snart tilgængeligt. vi opdaterer systemet vi opdaterer systemet... rauli.cbs.dk opdateres og er snart tilgængeligt. research article selling thrift: work practices in an american thrift store frederik larsen abstract thrift, in its simplest definition, is the practice of using resources in a considered way. the concept has long been employed as a moral trope to condemn or promote a variety of human practices. in the literature, thrift is addressed as it is played out in consumption in and around the household as a way of preserving and saving resources. thrift stores form part of a thrift economy and, as the receiver of divested objects from the household and a site for thrifty consumption practices, they present aspects of thrift in a variety of ways. in this article, i look at thrift as it relates to work and organizational practices in an american thrift store. although often linked to work ethics, thrift has mainly been proposed as a moral concept guiding individual and not organizational practices. in order to explore the value of thrift in the thrift store, i present parts of my ethnographic research on second-hand markets. examining work practices as “thrifty” shows how economic prudence is paired with material frugality and community concern. this, i argue, has significant effect on the flow of consumer goods, as resources flow through the thrift store and appear to be spent, not saved. page 1 of 19 jba 12(1): 37-55 spring 2023 © the author(s) 2023 issn 2245-4217 www.cbs.dk/jba doi: https://doi.org/10.22 439/jba.v12i1.6914 journal of business anthropology, 12(1), spring 2023 38 keywords thrift, consumption, marketing, second-hand, business practices. introduction in the electronics department of a community thrift store in san francisco, they handle everything from old phones and record players to cookers and coffee makers. the department is located in a warehouse in the mission district and is one of seven departments handling the donations that people drop off. when someone donates used electronics to be sold to raise money for the thrift store, rick, who oversees the department, examines the objects thoroughly. he starts by looking them over and cleaning them using a cloth and a can of compressed air. then, he tests them by turning them on and off and, in the case of cd-players, for example, he connects them to speakers and makes sure they work. old laptops are wiped off content and computers are connected to monitors. only after this process are the objects priced and put in the store. besides the objects waiting to be placed on the shelves in the store, the department is also home to a selection of objects waiting on a shelf for the right spare part to arrive through the donations. some are missing cords or chargers; others need maintenance or repair. whenever new donations arrive, rick makes sure to check if the right spare parts are in the box or crate, so the broken products can finally move on to the sales floor. making the products ready to sell in the store requires quite a lot of care and time, but is necessary to make the most of the donations received. thrift, or perhaps in its simplest definition, “the considered use of resources,” has been employed as a moral trope to condemn or promote a variety of human practices for centuries (hunter and yates 2011). frugality, prudence, and growth have all been described as thrifty, but so has being stingy. over the course of the 20th century, thrift has been marginalized as a guiding principle in the process of advancing consumer economies (strasser 2000). even beyond the academic interest in thrift (for instance, podkalicka and potts 2014; alexander and sosna 2022), thrift guides the way in which consumers and organizations perform a variety of everyday practices. being a means, but also described as an end in itself (miller 1998), thrift plays a significant role in activities involved in the relationship between people and things. although historically thrift has often been linked to work ethics, the contemporary literature addresses thrift chiefly as it is played out in consumption in and around the household. in their conversations in colombia, stephen gudeman and alberto rivera (1990) describe how thrift plays out in the domestic economy around the household, and thrift has been central to conversations around household economies and consumption over the larsen/ selling thrift 39 following decades. as an analytical concept, it relates to acquisition, possession, consumption, and disposition (askegaard 2015). in this article, i explore the concept of thrift in relation to the thrift store, not as a space for consumption, but as a place of work. as the name indicates, a thrift store is a place where thrifty consumption takes place, and thrift and thrift stores have earlier been addressed in literature on shopping and consumption (miller 1998; bardhi and arnauld 2005; horne and maddrell 2002). here, however, i will examine thrift as a principle and value in relation to running the thrift store. in other words, my discussion focuses on how thrift affects the business, the marketing of second-hand objects, the flow of goods, and the everyday work practices. in order to explore the value of thrift in the thrift store, i turn to my ethnographic research on second-hand markets. examining work practices as thrifty demonstrates how economic prudence is paired with material frugality and concern for the community. the first part of the article presents an overview of the varied understandings of the concept of thrift in everyday use and in existing literature. in particular, i focus on thrift in studies of consumption, as thrift has primarily been explored in the context of the household. thrift stores, however, form part of a thrift economy as the receiver of divested objects from the household and as a site for thrifty consumption practices, representing the end of conventional consumption flows and an opportunity for a new life for objects in second-hand markets. in the main part of the article, i draw on my ethnographic research on second-hand organizations to extend the focus on thrift beyond the household and the individual.1 based on descriptions of the thrift store, i show how organizational practices may be seen as thrifty, and i argue that this has important effects on the flow of consumer goods in that being thrifty appears to direct more products into the market and works as a tool to speed up the flow of goods rather than to slow it down, as the literature describes the effect of thrift in the household. in the final part of the article, i therefore discuss the value of an analytical focus on thrift in business and organizational anthropology which seeks to develop the understanding of the social and cultural dimensions in and around business settings (moeran 2012; garsten and nyqvist 2013). thrift, consumption, and the household industry is the parent of thrift [. . .] i never knew an early-rising, hard-working, prudent man, careful of his earnings, and strictly honest who complained of bad luck. 1 the ethnographic account draws on my fieldwork for my doctoral dissertation on valuation practices in second-hand markets (larsen 2015). journal of business anthropology, 12(1), spring 2023 40 henry ward beecher, lectures to young men on various important subjects (1844, quoted in blankenhorn 2008: 21). thrift is a multifaceted concept and can be identified in practices in most settings. the overview presented here concerns primarily the angloamerican context of thrift. this is in part due to the word itself, partly because my own research has focused on thrift stores in the us, and partly because of the particular role of thrift in american consumer cultures. terrence h. witkowski (2010), david blankenhorn (2008), and james d. hunter and joshua j. yates (2011), the primary sources on the history of thrift, all elaborate on the particular significance of thrift in the us. this significance has had the effect that thrift has taken on a number of specific meanings beyond a moral value. one of them, “to thrift,” refers specifically to “going to the thrift store” or “second-hand shopping,” a meaning that connects consumption with the organizational context of thrift stores. another specific meaning relates to “thrift societies,” particularly in terms of saving and loans associations, which applies the literal meaning of thrift as saving money. in many ways, thrift is caught between the very practical everyday actions of performing practices in a particular way and the morality indicated in the quote above from beecher. in shopping or consumption, this morality is essential since appreciating the importance of thrift does not necessarily lead to actually saving money, as daniel miller (1998) describes. thus, thrift is clearly embedded in the social arrangement of lived culture, social and material resources, and meaningful ways of life that make up consumer culture (arnould and thompson 2005: 869). steve gudeman (2001) developed thrift as an economic concept in anthropology and described its role in the household, in social relations, and its implications for society. moreover, thrift has been identified as a value and as a means in a variety of different settings. fleura bardhi and eric j. arnauld (2005) refer to a definition accepted in the marketing literature as a “careful management of resources – careful consumption and saving in the present in order to consume better in the future” (2005: 227). this definition underlines the everyday practice and the investment in the future that thrift often entails. thus, thrift is rooted in a number of academic discourses, and, in this article, i address thrift in an organizational context mainly through perspectives from anthropology and cultural studies of consumption. in an effort to assemble various approaches to thrift, aneta podkalicka and jason potts (2014) argue that the meaning of thrift has changed with growing prosperity and ecological concerns (2014: 277). a greater interest in the motivation or reason for being thrifty has emerged as thrift is not seen as a necessity alone, but more often as a choice. in its simplest form, understood as the considered use of resources, thrift larsen/ selling thrift 41 influences almost all consumption practices. not being wasteful, like saving leftover food or buying things on sale, can be seen as expressions of thrift, but, in the literature, thriftiness is also often seen as something more specific. in their study of thrift shopping, bardhi and arnould (2005) identify a number of different ways in which thrift is practiced by consumers, and they emphasize that thrift is often seen in opposition to hedonism as a form of excessive consumption practice, prompted by the pursuit of gratification or pleasure, but carrying moral implications. as i shall elaborate on below, miller (1998) also emphasizes these moral implications in his studies of shopping in which he describes thrift as an essential meaningful aspect of household shopping experiences. according to podkalicka and potts (2014), thrift may be positioned between three dimensions: causes of thrift, meaning of thrift, and thrift capital (2014: 230). they point out how the distinction between necessity and choice has dominated understandings of thrift. in the history of divestment and waste practices, this distinction is evident as well. historical accounts of consumption show that thrift practices around reuse and reselling have been actively marginalized during the course of the 20th century. in her history of waste, susan strasser (2000) describes how preserving, mending, and taking care of objects and materials had to be “un-learned” by substituting them with consumption practices more geared towards acquisition to propel industrial production forward. strasser also describes the influence of advertising and books promoting modernity as the “progressive obsolescence” that helped rid american consumers of their conservative habit of saving and repairing (2000:196). other examples of this active un-learning of thrift demonstrate how the deliberate discouragement of thrift was carried out on both sides of the atlantic. blankenhorn (2008), for example, presents the historical instance when john maynard keynes went on air to encourage british housewives to stop saving and start buying (2008: 23-24). here, thrift is positioned as the enemy of the domestic economy and also as opposed to the luxury of hedonistic consumption. the opposition between necessity and choice as a cause for thrift is, thus, muddled by processes of active unlearning. the varied understandings of thrift relay different meanings, but refer to relatively similar understandings as a way of saving – or the considered use of – resources. however, according to blankenhorn (2008), there has historically been an even wider variety of understandings. in his book on thrift (2008), he identifies five main understandings of thrift: growing, good fortune, prospering, saving, and hoarding (2008: 12). in part, these understandings describe a historical development from thrift as thriving – a status or a condition – which gives way for thrift as a habit or a set of values (2008:19). the changing nature of thrift has also meant a higher emphasis on the material, economic aspects of thrift as a means to gain prosperity at the expense of growing journal of business anthropology, 12(1), spring 2023 42 and thriving. however, thrift behaviour in consumer culture is much more than just material and economic because it carries a signal, presumably intended to be observed, about the moral qualities of the thrifty agent or household (podkalicka and potts 2014: 231). this emphasis on the moral qualities of thrift is also a significant theme in miller’s (1998) book on shopping in which he views thrift as an important principle in everyday household shopping and, importantly, as part of a form of sacrifice. in miller’s account, when parents are being thrifty in acts of shopping, it is in order to spend, or sacrifice, the savings on the family. miller develops the idea of thrift in the family to include the saving that older members make as a sacrifice to, for instance, the younger grandchildren. he describes this as a “husbanding of resources” (1998: 102). miller thus describes thrift as a value both for middle-class and working-class consumers, a point that underlines his argument that thrift is rarely just about saving money; it is about restraint, sobriety, and respectability (1998: 56). the moral implications of thrift lead miller to suggest, in regard to the household, that thrift is an end in itself and not a means. he argues that “[t]hrift itself is the end since thrift is the way in which the other is objectified as a presence” (1998: 202). in this way, thrift is positioned so centrally that it transforms shopping experiences from “the fantasy of spending to the fantasy of saving money” (1998: 137). thrift, then, can act as a way of condoning spending and consuming if, as miller contends, that spending is actually a sacrifice. developing the concept of thrift from miller, benedetta cappellini and elizabeth parsons (2013) add to the ethnographic literature on thrift in the household. they observe that “[p]ractising thrift represents a form of control over the flow of resources in the household, even if this does not equate to a reduction in overall resource usage and/or wastage” (2013: 132). as such, besides the symbolic act of sacrificing, thrift entails a sense of control, of retaining resources, which is further highlighted when podkalicka and potts point out that thrift can also amount to frugality through something like “conspicuous conservation” (campbell in podkalicka and potts 2012). while illustrating a broad variety of aspects of thrift, a key point of the discussion above is that meanings and practices of thrift often relate to the realm of the household and consumption. in that context, secondhand shopping is seen as an expression of thrift because products are cheaper, and as a way to save economic resources in the household and material resources in the wider economy. although thrift is also considered a work ethic, it is decidedly distinct from industry and sometimes seen as an enemy of prosperity on a societal level, as the keynes address demonstrates. the question is, then: how does thrift come to dominate the work practices of a second-hand organization dedicated to selling people’s unwanted things and raising money for charity? in the following, i zoom in on this question as i now turn to the larsen/ selling thrift 43 context of the thrift store and to my ethnographic account of thrift in practice. the account highlights the situatedness of thrift practices, as well as their conceptual and moral dimensions, as i apply the anthropological approach to thrift as a practical way of managing resources, to imbue a sense of control over the flow of goods that carries moral value and a consideration for the future. entering an american thrift store thrift stores have become a staple in american shopping centers and so has the term “thrift store.” although not always used in the name of the store, even online second-hand shops are referred to as thrift stores. modern thrift stores first emerged during the first decades of the 20th century in the us as consumption spaces that sold used goods to the needy (le zotte 2013: 170). the number of second-hand stores and the size of the trade then greatly increased in the 1970s with the emergence of a budding interest in protecting the environment and accelerated by growing prosperity and rise in general consumption. although few consumers today probably consider the actual meaning of the term “thrift,” it describes a value and a certain type of practice: that of not being wasteful and of having a considered use of resources. as such, the term is related to the thrift societies mentioned earlier urging citizens to use and, more specifically, save their money wisely (haveman 1997). in the thrift store in which i conducted fieldwork, however, the thrifty principles went far beyond the customers. as part of my doctoral research, i studied practices of valuation in second-hand markets on the west coast of the united states. i followed old things around global value chains to explore their social lives (appadurai 1986), which included participant observation in and around second-hand organizations. as i began by exploring all the different stores, markets, and organizations in the area, i came across the community thrift store which had a wide and, i thought, interesting selection of stuff in the store. it was a bit more expensive than most of the goodwill shops, but not much, and they had a lot of different departments and curious objects in the store. the people who worked there also caught my attention. they appeared to be a diverse group of people who also seemed to have a particular way of communicating with each other in the store. there was a lot of banter and shouting, but in a fun and playful way, it seemed. the store also appeared to attract a large variety of different customers, including people whom i read as mexican american families, queer people, older people, tourists, and hipsters, as well as locals. before i settled on this particular thrift store for my fieldwork, i spent a lot of time visiting second hand stores, flea markets, and charity organizations. i wished to find the best place to study how used things become valuable, and i had initially decided to focus on charity journal of business anthropology, 12(1), spring 2023 44 organizations because they make up such a big part of the industry, but i also wanted to get to know “the field” more broadly. hence, i talked to people, interviewed owners of antiques stores, and asked almost everyone i met what they knew about reuse or second-hand. they all pointed me to different places. one of the places often suggested to me was goodwill and their stores around the area, and i visited the goodwill’s sorting plant in the middle of san francisco. another place often suggested was a place called urban ore in berkeley which i found to be a fascinating place that focused on collecting and reselling everything related to furnishing a house: doors, windows, toilets, kitchen utensils, boards, lamps, etc. they also had a small section of vintage clothes, although they mainly focused on building and household components. in this field of reuse and second-hand places, i ultimately decided that goodwill would probably be too big and difficult to manoeuvre, and that urban ore was too focused on building materials and furnishings. i therefore decided to contact the community thrift store which, like goodwill, is centrally located in the city and carries all types of products: electronics, art, clothing, housewares, books, and furniture. the community thrift store is a charity, but has paid employees as well as volunteers, and, importantly for my research, the entire operation is run from one large warehouse. here, the employees and volunteers do everything from accepting donations to selling the objects. after reading more about the charity and the history of the organization, i decided to contact them to see if they would be willing to let me work with them. i thought that the best way to approach an organization like this one would be to go there in person and talk to a manager or a hr representative (if they had one). this had worked well with goodwill, taking them slightly by surprise, and not getting caught in bureaucracy. so, on a wednesday morning, i went down to the community thrift store. i had decided to make my request as simple as possible, so i approached the person behind the register and asked if they had volunteers working there. when he said yes, i asked if they needed more volunteers and how i could apply. i thought that offering my help would be most productive since organizations, especially smaller ones, tend to imagine participating in research to be a lot of work for them. ryan, as i found out he was called, happened to be an operations manager, and he responded right away that they always needed extra help and that they had a form that i had to fill out. ryan asked what i was mostly interested in. “everything, basically,” i said. “i do research on second-hand industries, and i am eager to learn more about how you handle, sort, and resell the donations.” i could not read ryan’s reaction to what i had just said, so i decided not to explain more about my research at that moment, but just ask if he thought that it would be a problem. he shrugged and said that i could fill out the form and that they would contact me once the manager had looked at my application. larsen/ selling thrift 45 a few days passed and i got a call from ryan who said that they would be happy to get my help. he also asked how much and for how long i would be able to volunteer. i told him that i would be in san francisco over the next seven months and that i would like to come in at least two or three times a week. i repeated that i was open to work in any of the departments, but that i would like to get around to different ones. i also repeated that i was doing research and, again, i did not really get a sense of whether this was relevant or a problem. so, we decided that i should come by a couple of days later to talk to the manager and get to know the facility. for the next six months, i thus trained and worked in the community thrift store to learn how to value second-hand objects. the training and work formed the main part of an apprentice-type ethnographic fieldwork (lave 1996) that allowed me to gain first-hand experience of sorting, cleaning, pricing, and selling.2 the community thrift store the community thrift store is a registered charity that divides its profits between more than 200 local charities. the organization was founded in 1982 by a group of bar owners and restaurateurs in the gay community as a response to the aids epidemic with the purpose of raising money for victims of the disease. in the beginning, the organization only raised money for hiv and aids related charities, but it has since expanded the types of charities to include animal sanctuaries, shelters, healthcare centers, and many others.3 at the time of my study, the operation was run by 22 paid employees, managers and assistant managers, and an executive director.4 the store operates like many other charity organizations in the us by collecting and accepting material donations for resale, from which it generates all of its revenue. people donate their unwanted objects clothes, furniture, kitchenware, art works, cds, books, etc. and the staff sort, value, and price the objects before they are remarketed.5 as one of many charity-run organizations utilizing discarded household goods as a means of generating profit for charitable causes, the 2 for an extended description of the ethnographic fieldwork, see larsen (2018). 3 a full roster of the charities can be found here: http://www.communitythriftsf.org/charities/ 4 the fieldwork was carried out in 2013 with additional field visits between 2014 and 2016. 5 in many cases, the objects themselves have captivating biographies and the nature of second-hand objects is an important material aspect of the work that goes into running a thrift store. i have explored aspects of the object’s being elsewhere in a book chapter on the ontology of second-hand objects (larsen 2019). journal of business anthropology, 12(1), spring 2023 46 store is inscribed in a history of charity organizations utilizing the surplus of consumer goods created by increasing industrial production. while thrift stores now cater to a wide audience, as jennifer le zotte (2017) notes, the community thrift store is dedicated to serving its local community by offering affordable goods to low-income patrons as well as serving a growing number of affluent newcomers. the organization is located in a large warehouse in san francisco where all its activities are housed. the store has a large pink façade towards valencia street, one of the most popular streets in the area, with new shops and restaurants opening up regularly. the area has undergone a gentrification process starting in the late 1990s when the area became popular with the tech entrepreneurs. after the so-called burst of the techbubble at the end of the millennium, the developments decreased slowly, but took off again in the last decade, positioning the community thrift store in a central and highly coveted retail position. the area is now inhabited and visited by people from varying backgrounds and with very different income levels, something also reflected by the clientele of the store. when entering the store through the small entrance on valencia street, customers are met with bulletins, notices, posters, and free magazines scattered across the windows and shelves. as you walk through the next door, you encounter a long counter stretching almost half of the length of the space that makes up the retail area. behind the counter, employees are busy helping customers and ringing up purchases. throughout the store, a broad range of items are displayed, with the more expensive and fragile items placed in the front near or behind the counter and all the other product groups divided into their respective departments. beyond the counter area, the departments follow from shoes, clothes, and electronics, and then furniture, music, homeware, and books. within each department, the objects are displayed with varying degrees of order, as some departments have sub-divisions such as in electronics, for example, where the products are divided into lamps, phones, kitchen appliances, musical equipment, and others. sometimes, products end up in the wrong department, either due to the difficulty of deciding where to put them, or because customers will often pick up things from one section and then put them down somewhere else. as the employees and volunteers are busy accepting, sorting, filling up, or servicing customers, not much time is allocated daily to clearing up the disorder. in every department, shelves and racks are positioned close together and packed with stuff, so that the store can easily hold thousands of items at any given time. while this retail area makes up about twothirds of the warehouse, the rest is the back area where only employees and volunteers are allowed. in a sense, this back area constitutes the “heart” of the facility as this is where people drop off donations and objects are received, sorted, and priced. larsen/ selling thrift 47 importantly, working in a thrift store is hard work. from the first day, i was told that i should wear clothes that i would not mind getting dirty, and even though the store front has bright colors and the store has big bright signs, it is still a functioning warehouse. the front of the store has a gate that opens so new furniture donations can be unloaded directly onto the shop floor, and most of the shelves are made from heavy metal posts and rough wooden boards. throughout the day, the employees are bringing out crates of new products, dragging around large pieces of furniture, removing products that have not sold, and clearing the aisles of products that customers have left or dropped. detecting thrift during my fieldwork, it became clear to me that making the most of the resources donated was a dominant principle in organizing the work practices in the community thrift store. the employees and volunteers sorting and selling the goods would go to great length to ensure that everything was put to good use. there are several reasons for this focus on making the most of the donations. first, this is how the organization makes money, as all revenue comes from the donated items. second, the store relies on donors to trust them with the things they donate. some only drop off stuff to get rid of it, but there were several examples of how donors trust that the employees and volunteers will turn their donated objects into economic pay-outs to a charity. one of them was a regular donor who dropped off things that he had picked up at garage sales. he told me how he would buy mixed boxes and select the objects he knew that he could make a profit on. as for the rest of the objects, he would drop them off at the community thrift store to raise money for his charity, a local bird sanctuary. in this way, the employees and volunteers turned his leftovers into resources for the sanctuary. this seemingly magical process of transformation required a host of activities, tools, knowledge, and consideration on the relatively low economic value of the objects; in brief, the investment of thrift. this investment to make the most of the donations and offer them for sale almost at any cost creates trust from the donors. the trust was expressed by many of the patrons and, perhaps, is most clearly expressed by an example of a lack of trust. one day, a donor approached alma, one of the employees who often worked at the register, to complain about a bowl that she had donated. the bowl, in her opinion, was worth much more than it had been priced, and it should, therefore, also be placed in the “special section” behind the counter, where all the expensive objects were kept. as drew, who was in charge of the book department and had been working at the community thrift store for more than 20 years, told me, this sometimes happens: journal of business anthropology, 12(1), spring 2023 48 yes, we do get people in here who spot an object they have donated and disagree with the pricing. usually, we explain how we price – that we want the objects to be affordable for our customers – to make sure they get sold. but it doesn’t happen that often. usually, people are okay with it. this trust allows the community thrift store to run its business and, as a value guiding the work practices, thrift serves the purpose of building trust by demonstrating the attention that each object is given by the employees and volunteers. it should be added, however, that thrift is rarely expressed specifically and almost never to customers. in other words, thrift is not conspicuous, but rather a more tacit principle guiding the work. the following excerpt from my notes describes one of the instances where thrift is expressed in practice, but not in words: one day when i was working at the back door with scott, i came across some office supplies that were left at the bottom of a box: some pins, a roll of tape, some post-its, pens, etc. i asked scott if he ever priced stuff at less than fifty cents, because i had just priced a number of items slightly bigger and more attractive than these at fifty cents. he told me that they did not and said that i should “bundle them together.” bundling means finding a way to ensure that the items stay together, either by securing them with tape or using one of the various sized bags which they keep for the same reason. i made bundles of ten pens and an eraser for two dollars, and three post-it blocks or three packets of staples and five pens. i then taped up the bags, priced them, and put them in “office supplies” in the homeware section of the store. this investment of time ensures that the leftover objects become marketable. in this instance, the rationale is that the bundles serve to offer office or school supplies to low-income patrons. here, the engagement with the community that the thrift store serves becomes evident.6 clearly, the marketing “strategy” is not only guided by economic value, but use value and social value affect decisions as well. during my time in the community thrift store, i heard the statement that “we just want the stuff to sell” again and again. no one working in the organization prices objects with the expectation that the items will hang around until the right buyer turns up. the objects must “move”; that is, they have to sell in a relatively short period of time. this is an underlying principle, just like the principle that the organization will try to raise as much money as possible from the donations received. the two principles work together, not through extracting maximum profit 6 a further examination of the community thrift store’s relationship with its community, either the gay community that it originally served or the local community of the mission district, is certainly relevant, but beyond the scope of this article. larsen/ selling thrift 49 from each individual objects, but by making sure that as many of the donated objects “move” as possible. the principle acts as a way of using up the donated things, but also as a way of making sure that they do not end up on a shelf somewhere. making things “move” is a jargon also applied in conventional retail encouraging sale staff to sell more and applying attractive pricing, to ensure a good flow of goods that ultimately result in higher economic profit. in the thrift store, making things move also ensured an economic flow. at the same time, it makes room for the constant supply of donations that arrive daily at the back door. another way of ensuring room for new stuff could, of course, be to simply get rid of the things that are not easily sellable. it is clear, however, that throwing things out is not easy, even when keeping stuff goes against other principles or regulations. this is clear in another excerpt from my fieldnotes: karen, one of the employees in the clothing department, is sorting the linen that comes in. the community thrift store doesn’t actually accept linen, which is stated on a sign at the donation drop-off. but once in a while some will come in as wrapping for other items. when i talked to her, she was inspecting an old star wars bed sheet from the 1980s. unfortunately, somebody had cut out a piece of it, but she tells me that it is still something that people like, so they will sell it for 1,75$ anyway. as she says, “somebody will probably use the fabric for a craft project.” instead of throwing the cut-up bed sheet away, she comes up with a way for it to be of some use, even if it goes against regulations and it is in less than good condition. these specific examples describe how thrift is practiced in specific instances. but they are by no means the only instances. thrift is also expressed in the monthly sales, for example. the price reductions during the sales period ensure that the objects which have been in the store for more than a month get another chance of being sold. it is expressed in the continuous and meticulous repricing of objects that have not sold, in the hope that the reduced price will make the object “move.” in the back area, thrift is also evident in the employees’ use of unsellable office supplies in their daily work. most, if not all, pens and notebooks that are used have arrived in the warehouse through donations. and most of the furniture in the back area also come from donations. not to mention the distribution of donated perishables like shampoo or canned goods, which cannot be sold in the store, amongst the employees to make sure they are not wasted. thrift practices are carried out across the organization and are encouraged by management. journal of business anthropology, 12(1), spring 2023 50 getting rid of resources the accounts above describe how thrift is expressed throughout the process of bringing second-hand objects to market. although there are many similarities between the values underpinning thrift in the household and in the community thrift store, the accounts suggest that the thrift store turns thrift upside down. in the literature on consumption, podkalicka and potts (2014) describe thrift as a form of delayed gratification and savings behavior, and miller (1998) construes it as saving for the future. understood as a way of saving and retaining resources, thrift is visualized within a frame of material consumption as a flow of objects, from production through use and finally to divestment. thrift, then, becomes a way of establishing control by ensuring that some resources and money stay put. it emerges as a form of tactic in michel de certeau’s terminology (1984); that is, a situated response to a reality of the flow of objects that seems inevitably to flow out the other end of the household. in the community thrift store, however, thrift is employed as a principle to ensure that the flow continues, that things do not stay put. in the store, thrift is often at odds with pure economic rationality since the investment of time involved in making objects valuable does not always transform into higher economic output. being thrifty certainly means to make the most of the donations, but not necessarily in terms of economic gain. making the best use of the donations includes bundling objects, reducing prices, looking things up, testing, cleaning, and sorting. one of the primary features of thrift in most definitions is a sense of responsibility, whether by consumers wanting to save money for the future or to save leftovers in the household. what unites the two is the concern for others, whether it be family members or the community. although miller (1998) argues that thrift is an end in itself, it can, in the thrift store, also be understood as a means. miller argues that thrift constitutes “the way in which the other is objectified as a presence” (1998: 102), and while that resonates with the social and even environmental concern of the people working in the community thrift store, thrift practices, in this context, are a means in that they are a way of ensuring that the community thrift store can deliver on its social and economic responsibilities. choosing to be thrifty even though, as podkalicka and potts (2014) point out, thrift practices are linked to a variety of psychological, economic, social, and cultural factors, saving and frugality is central to a wider understanding of thrift. besides the practical implications, thrift is also often linked to a moral stance, whether by “signaling cooperation in stewardship of collective resources” (2014: 228) or as a moral resistance to short-term satisfaction. thrift involves, as such, a concern for the future. and while this concern is for larsen/ selling thrift 51 the community and the future of that community, thrift in the thrift store means the opposite of thrift in consumption: offering as many objects as possible and attempting to “move” objects out of the store. this does not mean, however, that thrift practices, when performed in the store, oppose consumption, not even hedonistic consumption. customers are encouraged to buy and to spend. the collapse of this seeming contradiction between thrift and hedonism has been explored by bardhi and arnould (2005) in the context of thrift shopping. besides pointing out that there is no necessary opposition between thrift and consumption, they show how thrift shopping can act as treat for customers. in the case of selling thrift, the dialectic between thrift and consumption is expressed in the marketing of goods as well. the thrift store is dependent on consumption and encourages it. and, more specifically, the very qualities of being thrifty are put to use to sell. making the best use of resources and not being wasteful helps market products. this aspect represents perhaps the most radical diverging from what thrift is usually seen to do. in the context of the store, thrift is put to work as a marketing vehicle. thrift practices thus underpin consumption and makes products attractive by low prices and regular sales. the distinction between necessity and choice is also relevant in the thrift store. on various occasions, i heard employees and local residents discuss economic pressures, but not from a larger economic crisis. rather, the pressure came from the rising rent levels in the local context, often attributed to the influx of high-earning tech employees in the area. so, although the community thrift store may be embedded in a larger context of austerity, locally prosperity is more visible. the prosperity of the urban area as a whole had negative impact on specific residents, which was a great concern for the employees who expressed deep worry for their patrons’ well-being. but for the community thrift store, it also meant a steady supply of attractive donations from other stores that were closing down as they were pushed out by large rent increases. the change in the customer base with new high earning customers (and donors) also resulted in the highest monthly turnover ever in 2016 as armun, the manager, told me when i returned for a follow-up visit. perhaps the distinction between necessity and choice is better understood as dimensions that affect behavior and practices differently at different times. it seems dismissive to describe thrift as a value when saving is born from necessity. at the same time, ignoring the agency of choice even in dire situations is also too simple. in the context of the thrift store, it is easier to identify thrift as a principle or a value since the sense of human necessity is further removed from the organizational context. and although the practice of thrift in the store is not externally advertised, it still carries a moral signaling to the community. journal of business anthropology, 12(1), spring 2023 52 the practice of thrifty selling in the store, thrift constitutes a business practice that informs marketing, pricing, and selling second-hand objects, and, as such, it unfolds differently than in consumption and the household. this becomes even clearer when re-examining the activities that have been attributed to thrift in the literature: being frugal, preserving, saving, investing, and keeping control over resources. in the thrift store, prices are set to attract patrons as well as wholesale buyers. this means that the prices are deliberately lower than the estimated economic value of the product in the market. when selling, the overarching ambition in the thrift store is to get rid of as many things as possible, as quickly as possible. it is an expression of thrift as the considered use of resources, but frugality, preserving, and saving do not seem to be the aim of thrift in this context. investing as the purpose of being thrifty, however, seems similar. the way in which thrift is carried out in the thrift store is a form of investing in the future for the community, but it is done by letting resources flow out of the organization instead of keeping them. thus, investing also has an immediate expression: the investment of time or the investment, even, of thrift. investing time in sorting and using every donation is in direct opposition to a pure economic rationality. the investment of time allows the organization to fulfil their purpose of transforming donations into marketable goods, but arguably by compromising their purpose of raising money for charity. the employees could be spending their time selling more products instead of investing time in thrift practices. it seems, however, that the investment of thrift is valuable to the organization. ultimately, thrift in the context of the store emerges as a distinct value that allows charitable organizations to engage in commercial activities, in encouraging consumption and attracting customers without losing their moral respectability. thrift imbues their activities with a moral foundation linking the messy and dirty work of handling what otherwise would end up as waste with a higher purpose. thrift is a practical response to larger circumstances: at times borne out of necessity and scarcity, at other times as a moral act of choice. the circumstances vary, but the response is bound by a concern for preserving or saving resources. either for family, community, or environmental concerns. in that sense, thrift practices in the thrift store are by all means thrifty, even in selling and marketing objects for consumption. and since thrift is embedded in everyday activities, often unnoticed and very practical, its expressions must be examined in the minutia. thrift in the workplace reverses the effects of thrift by being a means of increasing the speed of the flow of resources out of the store. in this article, i have explored how thrift is manifested in the context of a thrift store. i have addressed different understandings and discussed conceptualizations of thrift. the danger of theorizing thrift is to arrive at a place where the quotidian qualities of thrift are overlooked. larsen/ selling thrift 53 thrift is performed every day, everywhere as part of other practices. very few people are un-thrifty all the time. so, as part of consumption practices, thrift is one value among other values. the surprising effects of thrift as a principle guiding work practices are that it is a way of getting rid of resources, not saving them. although thrift can be described as a practical way of managing resources, to imbue a sense of control over the flow of goods that carries moral value and a consideration for the future, the consequences are very different in the household and in the thrift store. while the thrift store works to “move things along,” the aim is to generate resources in the form of profit for the charities they support. there is a clear economic aim, but the aim is pursued through being thrifty. practicing thrift in the thrift store means making sure that objects move along, that they do not get stuck or left on a shelf. thrift thus takes on a whole new meaning in the context of a thrift store and reveals a dynamic relationship between the ethical dimension and the practical application of thrift. the perspectives i present here underline the value of pursuing thrift as an analytical concept to reveal the different dimensions of business in practice. acknowledgements i would like to thank the employees of the community thrift store for allowing me to work with them and ask endless questions. i would also like to thank professor emeritus karen tranberg hansen and associate professor ana alacovska for their valuable comments on the manuscript. references alexander, c. and sosna, d. 2022. thrift and its paradoxes: from domestic to political economy. new york & oxford: berghahn. https://doi.org/10.1515/9781800734630 appadurai, a. 1986. “introduction: commodities and the politics of value.” in a. appadurai (ed.), the social life of things: commodities in cultural perspective (pp. 3-63). cambridge: cambridge university press. https://doi.org/10.1017/cbo9780511819582.003 arnould, e. j. and thompson, c. j. 2005. “consumer culture theory (cct): twenty years of research.” journal of consumer research 31(4): 868-882. https://doi.org/10.1086/426626 askegaard, s. 2015. “consumer culture theory (cct).” in d. cook and j. ryan (eds.), the wiley blackwell encyclopedia of consumption and consumer studies (pp. 124-127). hoboken nj: wiley & sons publishers. https://doi.org/10.1002/9781118989463.wbeccs054 journal of business anthropology, 12(1), spring 2023 54 bardhi, f. and arnould, e. j. 2005. “thrift shopping: combining utilitarian thrift and hedonic treat benefits.” journal of consumer behaviour 4(4): 223-233. https://doi.org/10.1002/cb.12 blankenhorn, d. 2008. thrift: a cyclopedia. radnor, pa: templeton press. cappellini, b. and parsons, e. 2013. “practising thrift at dinnertime: mealtime leftovers, sacrifice and family membership.” the sociological review 60(s2): 121-134. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-954x.12041 garsten, c. and nyqvist, a. 2013. organisational anthropology: doing ethnography in and among complex organisations. london: pluto press. gudeman, s. 2001. the anthropology of economy: community, market, and culture. oxford: blackwell. gudeman s. and rivera, a. 1990. conversations in colombia: the domestic economy in life and text. cambridge: cambridge university press. https://doi.org/10.1017/cbo9780511558009 haveman, h. a. and rao, h. 1997. “structuring a theory of moral sentiments: institutional and organizational coevolution in the early thrift industry.” american journal of sociology 102(6): 1606-1651. https://doi.org/10.1086/231128 horne, s. and maddrell, a. 2002. charity shops: retailing, consumption and society. london: routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203167458 howe d. 2011. “the controversial virtue of thrift in the early american republic.” in j. yates and j. hunter (eds.), thrift and thriving in america: capitalism and moral order from the puritans to the present (pp. 37-60). oxford: oxford university press. https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199769063.003.0002 hunter, j. d. and yates, j. j. 2011. “introduction: the question of thrift.” in j. j. yates and j. d. hunter (eds.), thrift and thriving in america: capitalism and moral order from the puritans to the present (pp. 3-36). oxford: oxford university press. https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199769063.003.0001 larsen, f. 2015. objects and social actions – on second-hand valuation practices. phd thesis, copenhagen business school. larsen, f. 2019. “valuation in action: ethnography of an american thrift store.” business history 61(1): 155-171. https://doi.org/10.1080/00076791.2017.1418330 larsen, f. 2019. “transformations: the appearing of abject objects.” in a. michelsen, f. wiegand, and t. kristensen (eds.), transvisuality: the cultural dimension of visuality, volume iii: purposive action: design and branding (pp. 62-76). liverpool: liverpool university press. lave, j. 1996. “teaching, as learning, in practice.” mind, culture and activity 3(3): 149-164. https://doi.org/10.1207/s15327884mca0303_2 larsen/ selling thrift 55 le zotte, j. 2017. from goodwill to grunge: a history of secondhand styles and alternative economies. chapel hill: university of northern carolina press. https://doi.org/10.5149/northcarolina/9781469631905.001.0001 le zotte, j. 2013. “’not charity, but a chance’: philanthropic capitalism and the rise of american thrift stores.” new england quarterly 86(2): 169-195. https://doi.org/10.1162/tneq_a_00275 moeran, b. 2012. “a business anthropological approach to the study of values : evaluative practices in ceramic art.” culture and organization 18(3): 195-210. https://doi.org/10.1080/14759551.2011.634193 miller, d. 1998. a theory of shopping. london: polity press. podkalicka a. and potts, j. 2014. “towards a general theory of thrift.” international journal of cultural studies 17(3): 227-241. https://doi.org/10.1177/13678779134961 strasser, s. 2000. waste and want: a social history of trash. new york: henry holt and company. witkowski, t. h. 2010. “a brief history of frugality discourses in the united states.” consumption, markets and culture 13(3): 235-258. https://doi.org/10.1080/10253861003786975 yarrow, a. 2014. thrift: the history of an american cultural movement. amherst & boston: university of massachusetts press. frederik larsen is the co-founder of the consultancy in futurum advising companies and organizations on sustainability and social justice. he holds a phd in organizational anthropology from the copenhagen business school with a doctoral dissertation on secondhand valuation practices from 2015. he completed his post doc at the design school kolding in 2018 and has published industry reports and book chapters on sustainability, business practices and design, and an article in business history on the workings of a thrift store. frederik larsen can be reached at: https://www.linkedin.com/in/frederik-larsen-4b40b42b/ sedgwick formatted with page numbers v.2           complicit  positioning:  anthropological  knowledge   and  problems  of  ‘studying  up’  for  ethnographer-­‐ employees  of  corporations   mitchell  w  sedgwick                 abstract   contemporary  work  by  ‘corporate  ethnographers’,  as  employees  of   businesses,  offers  a  refreshing  perspective  on  anthropology’s  ‘crisis  of   representation’  and  its  extensions—from  neo-­‐colonial  concerns  and   reflexivity,  to  para-­‐ethnographic  and  recursive  approaches—that  are   increasingly  characterized  by  complicit  relations  between  ethnographers   and  their  informants/‘collaborators’.  this  article  focusses  on  the  history   and  politics  of  ethnographers’  positionality  in  field  research  and  the   analytic  products  of,  and  audiences  for,  their  work.  it  contrasts  the  often   confounded  labor  of  ‘anthropologists  of  business’  with  that  of  ‘corporate   ethnographers’,  who  work  for  businesses,  while  highlighting  that,  for   both,  the  ‘studying  up’  (nader  1974  [1969])  methodology  required  for   research  at  business  sites  disrupts  assumptions  surrounding  the  politics   of  traditional  ethnographic  fieldwork.  tracing  shifts  in  core  interests   across  general  anthropology,  it  is  argued  that  close  attention  to  new   sitings  and  circumstances  of  fieldwork—including  studying  up  in   businesses—could  productively  drive  reconsiderations  of  methodology,   ethics  and,  therefore,  epistemology  in  anthropology.     in  this  context,  corporate  ethnographers,  who  are  often  formally       page  1  of  31       jba  6(1):  58-­‐88   spring  2017     ©  the  author(s)  2017   issn  2245-­‐4217   www.cbs.dk/jba                                                                                                                                                                                  sedgwick  /  complicit  positioning       59   trained  in  anthropology,  are  specifically  encouraged  to  analytically   engage  with  the  problematics  of  their  perhaps-­‐awkward  complicities  with   their  employers.  it  is  suggested  that,  alongside  the  work  of   anthropologists  of  business,  corporate  ethnographers—should  they   choose  to  do  so—are  well-­‐positioned  to  assist  in  exposing  the  black  box  of   the  culture(s)  of  secrecy  through  which  the  work  of  corporations   intimately  penetrates  modern  life.     keywords     corporate  ethnography,  anthropology  of  business,  positionality,  ‘studying   up’,  ‘culture(s)  of  secrecy’,  crisis  of  representation,  complicity,  para-­‐ ethnography     introduction   anthropology  of  business  takes  business  seriously,  as  it  does  the  ethical   conundrums  of  engaging  it  ethnographically.  along  with  providing   detailed,  empirically-­‐rich  analyses  of  an  arena  that  drives  much  of  our   contemporary  modern  condition,  anthropology  of  business  could  also   make  foundational  contributions  to  general  anthropology  because  it  is  in   the  nature—and  i  use  that  word  specifically—of  their  subjects  that   ethnographic  work  on  businesses  pushes  to  the  edges  of  anthropology’s   ethical  envelopes.  in  raising  ethics,  i  flag  contested  terrain,  and   ethnography  of  business  generates  particular  tensions,  and  suspicions.   along  with  other  formal  organizations,  businesses  or,  more  specifically,   corporations  are  private,  legally  protected  fictions  with  very  real   boundaries,  forcefully  guarded.  from  gaining  access  to  such  spaces,  to  the   unpacking  of  their  private/internal  activities,  to  their  external   representations  as  brands,  goods  and  services,  and  as  persons—think   ‘steve  jobs’—businesses  are  particular,  and  particularly  demanding,   anthropological  sites.  the  ambiguity  generated  from  ethnographic   positioning  in  such  edgy  sites  should  be  an  asset  to  our  thinking  about   anthropological  fieldwork,  and  a  source  of  analytic  power.  along  with   making  significant  contributions  to  general  anthropology,  it  should   constitute  a  means  of  speaking  to  power  and  providing  commentary  on   and  critique  of  the  diverse  socio-­‐economic  conditions  constituting,  for   lack  of  a  better  term,  the  ‘neo-­‐liberal’  regimes  that  structure  most  of   humanity’s  contemporary  circumstances.       regrettably,  however,  while  generating  interesting  soundings   regarding  ‘another  village  heard  from’,  with  some  outstanding  exceptions   the  quality  of  ethnographic  research  on  businesses  is  uneven.  as  a  result,   given  the  obviously  central  position  of  businesses  in  the  larger  picture  of   how  the  world  looks  today,  this  work  has  been  less  influential  than  one   might  have  hoped  to  general  anthropology,  as  it  has  been  in  providing   journal  of  business  anthropology,  6(1),  spring  2017      60   pithy  commentary  for  public  discussion.  astride  ethical  considerations,   there  are  real  concerns  regarding  methodology,  including  the  duration,   depth  and  quality  of  ethnographic  research  on  businesses,  which  of   course  impacts  its  analytic  breadth  and  interpretive  precision.  this  would   seem  to  be  the  case  especially  among  ethnographers  employed  by   businesses  who,  as  it  happens,  tend  to  dominate  the  field.  as  i  will  discuss   at  length,  what  can  be  claimed  with  regard  to  anthropological  knowledge   creation  is  impacted  by  the  form  and  intentionality  of  any  ethnographic   work.  non-­‐disclosure  agreements  (ndas)  that  are  commonly  found  at  the   center  of  the  employment  contracts  of  corporate  ethnographers  are,  of   course,  relevant  here.  but  the  questions  i  raise  are  more  far-­‐reaching,  and   insidious:  the  extent  to  which  some  ethnographers  may,  inadvertently   perhaps,  perpetuate  the  culture(s)  of  secrecy  pervasive  in  business.  with   the  public  psychologically  branded  by  corporations’  advertisements,   products,  services  and,  sometimes,  their  famous  leaders,  i  argue  that  it  is   in  illuminating  the  erstwhile  ‘black  box’  of  corporations’  inner  workings   that  anthropological  work  on  business  would  most  productively  focus.   and  while  in  this  article  i  critique  the  work  of  ethnographers  employed   by  businesses,  i  also  raise  the  perhaps  counterintuitive  prospect  that  they   may  be  able  to  offer  particularly  cogent  insights  into  those  very   corporations  with  which  they  are  complicitly  engaged.         in  this  article,  then,  i  address  the  conduct,  representation  and   ethics  engaged  in  ethnographic  fieldwork  on  businesses,  all  of  which   revolve  to  a  significant  degree  around  questions  of  positionality  between   ethnographers  and  their  subjects  in  business  contexts.  as  a  proxy  for   these  issues  i  flag  ‘studying  up’  (nader  1974  [1969])  as  a  form  of   anthropological  knowledge  production,  emphasizing  the  problems   entailed  in  engaging  ethnographically  with  informants  of  equal  or  greater   status  than  the  ethnographer.  the  core  thrust  of  my  argument  is  the   following.  if  not  necessarily  generating  an  inversion  of  authority,  studying   up  would  seem  to  confound  the  supposed  politics  at  the  core  of  classic   ethnographic  fieldwork  in  anthropology:1  the  structural  dominance  of   ethnographers  (as  representatives  or  embodiments  of  their  home   community)  over  informants  (as  representatives  or  embodiments  of  their   local  context).  traditional  fieldwork  relations  unfolded,  and  continue  to   unfold,  within  overarching  political  frameworks—that  were  sometimes   colonial,  and  are  now  occasionally  described  as  neo-­‐colonial—which  have                                                                                                                   1  the  model  is,  of  course,  malinowski’s  fieldwork  among  trobriand  islanders,   beginning  in  1914  (malinowski  1922).  doing  extensive,  ‘immersion’   ethnographic  fieldwork—usually  for  a  minimum  of  one  year:  an  annual  seasonal   cycle—is  understood  as  a  rite  of  passage  in  anthropology,  and  is  ordinarily  the   basis  for  writing  an  ‘ethnography’,  which,  if  successful,  allows  for  a  phd   qualification.  there  is  obviously  considerable  variation  in  the  fieldwork   experiences  of  anthropologists  who  have  come  after,  but  whether  or  not  they   have  done  extensive,  immersion  fieldwork  like  malinowski,  all  anthropologists   are  aware  of  and  must  contend  with  his  model  as  an  ideal  form.                                                                                                                                                                                sedgwick  /  complicit  positioning       61   allowed  anthropologists  the  extraordinary  privilege  of  going  to  sites,   often  very  far  away  from  home,  staying  there  for  a  considerable  length  of   time  and,  often,  returning  to  those,  or  related,  sites  in  the  years  to  come.  if   construed  in  the  negative  sense  implied  by  neo-­‐colonialism,  the   interpersonal  positionality  implicated  in  the  structural  dominance  of   ethnographers  over  informants  allowed  anthropologists  to  impose   themselves  on  local  communities.     i  will  expand  on  this  over-­‐simplistic  rendering  below,  but  it  serves   to  make  the  key  point  that  in  studying  up,  the  fundamental  positionality   of  the  ethnographer  vis-­‐à-­‐vis  persons  in  the  host  community  under  study   is  unorthodox  according  to  the  traditional  anthropological  norm.  if  so,   these  new  forms  of  relations  pose  important  problems  regarding  the   particularities  of  ethnographic  research  produced  through  fieldwork  in   these  unorthodox  contexts  that,  in  turn,  generate  significant   epistemological  questions.  as  the  number  of  ethnographers  in  such  sites,   e.g.,  studying  up,  proliferate,  engaging  with  these  new  circumstances  of   fieldwork  is  important,  in  terms  of  methodology,  ethics  and,  therefore,   epistemology  in  anthropology.         studying  up,  the  structural  politics  of  positionality,  and  the  day-­‐to-­‐ day  work  of  ethnography   i  define  studying  up  as  conducting  ethnographic  research  among  persons   within,  or  who  are  closely  affiliated  with,  organizations.2  as  i  understand   them  here  organizations  are,  among  other  possible  criteria,  formally   constituted  legal  entities.  they  stand  within,  and  are  therefore   reproductive  of  larger  institutional  contexts  that  have,  or  have  the   potential  for,  powerful  effects  on  the  larger  society  in  which  that   organization,  and  its  institutional  context,  is  found.  to  unpack  this   organizational/institutional  nexus,  an  example  of  what  i  mean  by  an   organization  is  a  hospital,  which  stands  within  the  institution  of  the   health  care  system  in  such-­‐and-­‐such  national  context.  another  example  of   studying  up,  familiar  from  my  own  work,  is  ethnographic  research  in   foreign  subsidiary  factories,  affiliated  local  communities,  as  well  as  at   headquarters  of  multinational  corporations.  the  work  of  these   corporations  generates  products  and  forms  of  symbolic  capital  with  reach   across  globally  dispersed  sites  in  the  vast  institutional  context  of   contemporary  capitalist  production  and  consumption.  i  might  also                                                                                                                   2  while  ‘studying  up’  has  become  the  moniker  associated  with  nader’s  (1974   [1969])  proposal  that  anthropologists  should  conduct  fieldwork  within   organizations  effectively  constituting  america’s  ‘military-­‐industrial  complex’,  as   nader  herself  points  out  (1974  [1969]:  292),  methodologically  this  would   obviously  include  studying  ‘down’  and  ‘sideways’  in  those  same  organizations   and  among  communities  closely  associated  with  them.     journal  of  business  anthropology,  6(1),  spring  2017      62   include  in  the  definition  of  studying  up  or,  in  any  case,  its  use  as   methodological  technique,  conducting  ethnographic  research  focusing  on   the  condition  of  persons  who  are  more  directly  affected  by  their  relations   with  particular  institutions  (and  their  attendant  organizations)  than   would,  perhaps,  be  the  case  of  more  mainstream  citizens.  (of  course,  it   must  be  acknowledged  that  the  state  is  profoundly  implicated  in  the  lives   of  all  modern  persons.)  for  instance,  anthropological  analysis  of  the   situation  of  afro-­‐american  male  urban  youth  in  american  cities  would,   necessarily,  require  both  knowledge  of  the  police  at  a  local  organizational   level  as  well  as  the  larger  legal/institutional  system  in  which  the  work  of   the  police,  which  so  intimately  affects  those  under  primary  consideration,   takes  place.     as  a  foundation  to  further  examination  of  positionality  when   studying  up,  i  emphasize  the  phrase  ‘structural  dominance’  in  relating  the   uncomfortable  perception  of  neo-­‐colonialism  in  anthropological  practices   that,  some  claim,  informs  classic  and,  indeed,  much  recent  work  in   anthropology  (rosaldo  1989a).  this  is  in  order  to  make  the  point  that  we   would  do  well  to  take  a  disaggregated  approach  to  this  problem.  on  the   one  hand,  we  should  obviously  take  seriously  the  overarching  geopolitics   that  inform  the  historical  circumstances  that  allowed  for  anthropological   fieldwork  in  colonial  times,  and  may  continue  to  structure   anthropological  fieldwork  in  notionally  neo-­‐colonial  and  other  sites.  on   the  other  hand,  in  whatever  historical  period,  we  should  appreciate  the   practical  circumstances  and  the  emotional  engagements  accompanying   the  anthropologist’s  day-­‐to-­‐day  practice  of  conducting  fieldwork  on  the   ground,  as  part  of  a  community,  in  the  company  of  local  people,  over  a   long  period  of  time.  the  traditional,  western-­‐educated  elite   anthropologist  studying,  say,  a  tribe  in  the  ‘global  south’  may  inevitably   be  a  cog  in  the  wheel  of  a  larger  set  of  unequal  geopolitical  relations  that   may,  tangibly,  allow  him  certain  freedoms  that  his  informants  may  not   enjoy:  including  mobilizing  resources  that  allow  him  to  arrive  at,  remain   in  and  leave  the  field  on  his  own  terms.  that  said,  the  particular   circumstances  allowing  field  ethnographers  to  gain  access  to  field  sites  in   the  first  place  (and  remain  in  them)  has  never  been  as  simple  as  this   domination  model  suggests,  nor  is  life  on  the  ground  during  fieldwork   unproblematic,  including  the  personal  upheaval  of  anthropologists   uprooting  themselves  from  the  relative  physical  and  emotional  comforts   of  their  ‘home’  lives.     along  with  any  overarching  politics,  it  is  valuable  to  be  reminded,   then,  of  what  jobbing  anthropologists  got  up  to  and  what  they  get  up  to  in   the  field  while  conducting  ethnographic  research.  my  sense  is  that  across   the  discipline’s  history,  as  today,  the  vast  majority  of  anthropologist   fieldworkers  have  empathized  genuinely  with  the  circumstances  of   members  of  their  host  communities.  if  possibly  seen  here  through  overly   rose  colored  glasses,  successful  ethnographers  are  inevitably  caught  up  in                                                                                                                                                                                sedgwick  /  complicit  positioning       63   important  relationships  with  persons  who  we  professionally  call   informants  but  who  are  usually  friends  who  we  treat  as  erstwhile  equals,   at  the  very  least  when  we  are  sharing  ‘coeval  time’  (fabian  1983).  in  the   field,  as  at  home,  we  devote  ourselves  to  personal  interactions  that,  in  the   nature  of  human  relations,  are  complicated  and,  so,  rewarding.  thus  it  is   my  own  experience,  which  i  suspect  is  shared  by  most  anthropologists,   that  fieldwork  is  undergirded  by  the  long  term  construction  of  a  practical   and  emotionally-­‐enriched  lifeworld  between  anthropologist  and  hosts   that  literally  makes  space  for  shared  community.  we  might  understand   this  as  a  process  that  allows  the  strange  to  become  familiar:  from  the   perspectives  of  both  the  anthropologist  and  members  of  the  host   community,  and,  so,  a  two  way  process.  as  such,  a  collaborative   movement  across  time,  feeling  and  apperception  is  central  to  sound   anthropological  analysis.  (i  will  revisit  this  point  later  in  the  article.)   meanwhile,  in  the  field,  ethnographers  very  often  find  themselves   humbled  by  the  knowledge  and  practices  taking  place  in  the  communities   they  are  allowed  to  join.  (in  such  circumstances,  who  is  the  dominant   party?  how  and  when  do  dominance  and/or  questions  of  inequality   matter?)  if  knowledge  of  such  practices  is  what  we  go  to  the  field  to   understand,  i  would  suggest  that,  along  with  respect  for  and   interpersonal  commitment  to  those  among  whom  we  study,  knowing   little  and  being  willing  to  learn  a  lot  about  the  local  situation  is  what   constitutes  competent  ethnographic  practice.       at  risk,  30  years  on,  of  revisiting  a  hackneyed  debate,  i  raise  these   matters  as  a  mild  retort  to  what  seems  to  have  been  an  overemphasis,   especially  in  (north  american)  cultural  anthropology,  upon  guilt,  and   subsequent  angst,  regarding  the  circumstances  of  traditional   anthropological  fieldwork.  as  rosaldo,  as  understood  by  marcus,  would   have  it,  especially  in  the  morality  tale  driving  his  noted  piece,  ‘imperialist   nostalgia’  (rosaldo  1989b),  field  anthropology  has  reached  an  ‘impasse’:   it  is  a  ‘tragic  occupation’,  so  ‘paralyzed’  (marcus  1997:  95)  and  tainted   that  it  should,  effectively,  stop,  at  least  in  its  current  form.  i  suggest,   contra  rosaldo,  that  rather  than  tarring  every  anthropologist  with  the   brush  of  neo-­‐colonial  operative,  wherever  ethnographic  fieldwork  takes   place,  including  in  situations  of  studying  up,  we  recognize  that  structural   differences  between  ethnographers  and  members  of  informant   communities  are  present.  and,  despite  the  likely  fact  of  structural   inequalities,  we  nonetheless  work  toward  an  ideal—that,  of  course,  is  not   in  all  cases  achieved—of  communicative  equality  with  our  interlocutors   in  the  field.       anthropologists  are  conscious,  or  soon  become  so,  of  the  political   circumstances  through  which  their  work  is  made  possible,  and  they   recognize  how  the  politics  accompanying  interpersonal  relations  in  the   field,  including  their  capacity  to  gain  local  knowledge,  affects  their   fieldwork  experiences.  in  turn,  they  should  be  explicit  about  how  those   journal  of  business  anthropology,  6(1),  spring  2017      64   particulars  of  the  field  are  subsequently  represented,  or  translated,  as   they  must  be,  for  other  audiences.  and  should  it  be  that  ethnographers   are  invited  to  produce  knowledge  representing  their  field  experience  in   particular  forms  for  particular  audiences,  they  should  be  conscious  and   explicit  about  how  and  why  that  field  experience  is  being  re-­‐translated,  or   translated  differently,  for  that  different  audience.  if  all  corporate   ethnographers  were  so  engaged,  i  believe  their  work  would  be  more   powerfully  rendered,  more  widely  read  and  their  very  important  subject   matter  more  deeply  appreciated  in  general  anthropology.  without   explicitly  representing  such  engagements  in  their  work,  however,  the   question  is  raised  to  what  extent  their  ethnographic  renderings  can  lay   claim  to  producing  in-­‐depth  anthropological  knowledge.       unorthodox  sitings:  the  production  of  the  current  wide-­‐open   ethnographic  moment   while  it  has  largely  shared  the  same  intellectual  trajectory,  the  fact  is  that   in  the  history  of  anthropology,  the  study  of  businesses—and  other   formally  organized  contexts,  such  as  public  bureaucracies—has  been   unusual,  and  sporadic.  thus,  although  there  have  been  significant  studies   of  particular  organizations,  sometimes  with  anthropologists  working  in   multidisciplinary  teams,  the  anthropology  of  organizations  (including,   therefore,  anthropology  of  business)  lacks  intellectual  momentum  as  a   subject  of  study.3       asking  why  studying  businesses  has  been  unorthodox  takes  us   right  back  to  the  beginnings  of  anthropology.  briefly,  classic  sites  in   anthropology  were  asked  to  bear  the  de  facto  weight  of  extreme,  if   usually  implicit,  analytic  comparisons  with  anthropologists’  own,  read,   western  societies.  i  say  ‘implicit’  despite  some  late  19th  century  work  that   explicitly  distributed  the  world’s  societies  in  a  highly  elaborated   hierarchy,  with  victorian  britain  at  its  apex  (stocking  1987).  historically,   work  in  such  extreme  or,  from  a  western  perspective,  extremely  different   sites,  among  hunter-­‐gatherers,  nomads,  slash  and  burn  agriculturalists,   etc.,  has  been  variously,  if  sometimes-­‐unfortunately  and  often-­‐tenuously   described  as  studying  among  ‘primitive  peoples’  or  ‘savages’  living  in   ‘tribal’  or  ‘simple  societies’  or,  in  more  recent  articulations,  among   ‘marginal  communities’,  say,  urban  slum  communities,  in  ‘less-­‐developed’                                                                                                                   3  for  competent  surveys,  see  baba’s  (1988)  discussion  of  both  collaborations  and   antagonisms  between  ‘anthropologists  of  work’  and  large  american  corporations   across  the  20th  century;  and  wright’s  edited  volume,  where  her  opening  chapter   (wright  1994:  1-­‐31)  nicely  covers  the  history  of  ‘anthropology  of  organizations’,   some  of  it  overlapping  with  baba’s  treatment.  sedgwick  (2007:  9-­‐20)  provides  a   survey  of  the  very  substantial  and  longitudinally  rich  anthropological  literature   on  japanese  businesses,  from  craft  producers  to  major  global  corporations.                                                                                                                                                                                  sedgwick  /  complicit  positioning       65   nations.  in  any  case,  if  under  british  social  anthropology  ‘social   organization’  was  a  construct  accounting  for  various  forms  persons  might   take  in  organizing  themselves,  i.e.,  kinship  groups,  tribes,  markets,  etc.,   those  studying  formal  organizations,  of  which  businesses  are  a   quintessential  ‘modern’  example,  have  traditionally  been  a  marginal   community  in  anthropology.     in  recent  years  there  has  been  an  explosion  of  ethnographic   fieldwork  in  locations  considerably  different  from  traditional   anthropological  sites.  this  has  to  do  with  general  changes  in  our  external   environment,  including  the  proliferation  of  communications  technology   and  dependence  on  the  internet  for  all  sorts  of  relations,  simplifying,  for   instance,  the  maintenance  of  communities  that  are  literally  globally-­‐ dispersed.  technological  developments  have  also  generated  prodigious   opportunities  for  increasing  numbers  of  people,  often  including  our   informants,  to  experience  personal  displacements,  e.g.,  mass  travel.  these   phenomena  collude  in  complicating—not  displacing—our  common  sense   notions  of  time,  space  and  place  in  social  relations  built  up,  as  they   fundamentally  remain,  from  face-­‐to-­‐face  contact  and  spatial  relations   unfolding  physically  in  the  present.     the  rise  of  new  and  more  creative  sitings  for  ethnographic   fieldwork  also  has  to  do  with  internal  changes  in  anthropology,  including   severe  self-­‐critique  regarding  the  neo-­‐colonial  pretenses  of  traditional   anthropological  practices,  as  outlined  above.  these  matters  were   combined  in  anthropology’s  ‘crisis  of  representation’:  a  fully  justified   assault  on  traditional  forms  of,  and  concern  over  the  audiences  for,   anthropological  texts,  as  the  basis  for  overall  critique  of  the  politics  of   (representation  in)  anthropology.  hence,  its  foundations  shaken,  with  no   consensus  as  to  what  should  happen  next,  theoretical  debate  in   anthropology  has  splintered,  as  have  forms  of  fieldwork:  there  is  little   agreement  as  to  what  now  constitutes  a  proper  site  for  anthropological   research.  more  recently,  meanwhile,  albeit  a  far  smaller  discipline  in   terms  of  number  of  staff  employed,  anthropology  has  shared  with  other   social  sciences  a  severe  downturn  in  resources.  that  said,  in  my  view,   despite  multiple,  on-­‐going  intellectual  crises,  anthropology  is  increasingly   popular  with  students  and,  judging  by  the  high  quality  of  talent  that  it   attracts  and  its  influence  across  ‘the  conversation’  between  the   humanities  and  social  sciences,  e.g.,  in  the  ‘human  sciences’,   anthropology  is  an  extremely  successful  discipline.       in  the  discipline’s  current  wide-­‐open  moment,  among  the   proliferation  of  new  sites,  increasing  numbers  of  anthropologists  study  in   or  around  formal  organizations.  perhaps  this  is  to  be  expected:  after  all,   despite  postmodern  pretentions,4  formal  organizations—including                                                                                                                   4  in  ‘late  capitalism’,  often  understood  as  coinciding  with  the  turn  toward   postmodernity,  ‘progress’  may  seem  thoroughly  stalled  across  a  decade  or  more   journal  of  business  anthropology,  6(1),  spring  2017      66   businesses,  government  agencies,  voluntary  agencies,  etc.—are  central  to   the  reproduction  of  the  complex  modern  societies  that  dominate  the   planet.  furthermore,  it  is  perfectly  obvious  that  the  reach  of  modernity   has  touched  the  supposedly  isolated,  smaller,  ‘simple’  communities  that   were  traditionally  sought  out  for  classic  anthropological  fieldwork.   happily,  many  anthropologists  continue  to  work  in  such  communities,  but   their  porous  and  often-­‐contested  boundaries—the  comings  and  goings  of   its  members,  the  interactions  of  parts  of  the  community  with  the  outside,   etc.—are  now  essential  to  contemporary  anthropological  analyses.5         while  current  circumstances,  including  networks  of  connections   imagined  across  the  internet  and  individuals  and  families  calling  multiple   parts  of  the  world  ‘home’,  suggest  a  plethora  of  new  contexts  informing   anthropological  work,  we  would  want  to  recall  that  the  world  has  always   been  linked  up,  if  at  times  more  dynamically  than  others.  in  collusion  with   technological  development,  networks  of  trade  and,  of  course,  migration,   have  reconfigured  the  globe  (wallerstein  1979),  sometimes  with  tragic   results.  one  thinks  here  of  the  devastation  of  many  african  tribes  through   the  marketing  of  slaves  that  constituted  the  middle  leg  of  the  16th-­‐19   century  atlantic  ‘triangular  trade’:  an  enormously  complex  example  of  the   effects  of  western  colonialism,  and  with  far  reaching  consequences  still   prevalent  today.  given  this  history,  as  a  product  of  western  academia  that   developed  in  the  mid-­‐late  19th  century,  but  based  in  earlier  forms  of   accumulation—exploration,  missionary  work,  colonial  administration,   trade,  etc.—anthropology  could  not  have  arisen  outside  of  a  colonizing   framework.  it  is  natural  that  acknowledgement  of  the  historical  linkages   between  colonialism  and  anthropology  should  be  articulated,  then.  the   question  is  anthropology’s  intersections  with  that  historical  record.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                               of  stagnation  for  europeans,  for  the  japanese—over  20  years  of  recession  here— and,  to  a  somewhat  lesser  extent,  in  north  america.  but  even  putting  rapid   economic  growth  in  china  and  india  across  the  last  two  decades  or  more  to  the   side,  the  progressive  project  of  modernity  continues  to  capture  imaginings  of  ‘the   future’,  at  a  minimum  at  least  as  far  as  the  institutional  configurations  that  drive   that  very  modernity  in  which  our  lives  are  deeply  embedded  are  concerned.  as  a   thought  exercise  we  might  ask,  where  are  ‘no-­‐growth’  economic  relations—that   might,  incidentally,  help  preserve  the  planet—being  seriously  discussed?   furthermore,  the  current  period  of  great  recession  is  hardly  historically   unprecedented.  rather,  such  dips  are  anticipated—normalized  in  capitalism— and,  so,  indicative  of  the  project  of  modernity.  it  is  not  for  nothing  that  the   naming  itself,  great  recession,  refers  directly  to  the  great  depression  from  which,   in  conventional  understanding,  we  ‘recovered’.         5  by  no  means  are  interactions  between  communities  new  to  anthropology.  one   thinks  immediately  of  edmund  leach’s  pathbreaking  work  in  burma  here  (leach   1977  [1954)).  nonetheless,  the  dominant  trope  in  anthropology  until  the  mid-­‐ 1990s  has  been  the  analytic  unpacking  of  single  communities  that  were   considered  bounded,  at  least  as  a  methodological,  ‘scientific’  and/or  interpretive   convenience.                                                                                                                                                                                          sedgwick  /  complicit  positioning       67   a  different,  more  optimistic  alternative  to  the  colonial/neo-­‐ colonial  imperatives  of  anthropology  that  rosaldo  raises,  then,  might   consider  the  early  development  of  american  anthropology  as  a  reaction   to  that  very  colonialism:  for  instance,  the  early  20th  century  american   ‘salvage  anthropology/ethnography’  undertaken  by  boas  and  his   colleagues  (stocking  1974),  among  native  american  tribes  devastated  by   white  america’s  western  expansion.  of  course,  by  this  time,  across  north   america’s  vast,  verdant  stretch—from  the  atlantic  coast  to  the   mississippi—most  native  american  tribes  had  already  been  decimated   through  contact  with  whites  that  began  in  the  17th  century.  (far  earlier,  of   course,  in  central  and  south  america.)  the  practical  exercise  in  salvage  of   (at  least,  information  about)  remaining  native  american  communities   was  based  not  in  a  romantic  aesthetic,  or  nostalgia  (cf.  rosaldo  1989b),   but  an  effort  to  provide  substance  to  boas’  forceful  theories  about  cultural   relativism.  while  subject  to  possible  negative  extensions,  the  cultural   relativist  view  is  that  no  culture  is  any  better,  or  any  worse,  than  any   other:  each  has  arisen  in  human  history  as  an  equally-­‐laudable  human   accomplishment  within  its  own  particular  environmental  context.  these   views,  which  deeply  informed  north  american  cultural  anthropology   until  the  1980s,  to  say  nothing  of  the  american  civil  rights  movement,   perhaps  arose  in  boas  both  as  a  reaction  to  the  appalling  destruction  of   native  american  populations  and  his  experience  as  a  jewish  immigrant   from  germany,  educated  in  the  german  intellectual  tradition.  in  any  case,   driven  by  this  uplifting,  egalitarian  ethos,  it  is  unsurprising  that  the  idea   that  anthropologists  ‘should  do  no  harm’  to  their  ethnographic   interlocutors  should  constitute  the  foundation  of  anthropological  ethics   itself,  guiding  both  ethnographic  work  in  the  field  and  the  subsequent   representation  of  communities  studied.6       positioned  engagements     as  suggested  above  anthropology’s  more  recent  rethink  regarding  its   colonial  roots  has  in  some  quarters  been  morally  debilitating:  it  has   attempted  to  hoist  responsibility  onto  the  shoulders  of  anthropology   as/of  the  western/dominant  system  in  which  it  was  first  institutionally   constructed.  i  would  suggest  that  an  outcome  of  the  discipline’s  recent   concern  over  its  colonial  roots,  and  fears  regarding  its  possibly  on-­‐going   neo-­‐colonial  disposition,  has  been  an  extension  of  the  missive  that   anthropologists  ‘should  do  no  harm’  toward  the  view  that                                                                                                                   6  at  a  minimum  this  has  been  expressed  through  maintaining  the  anonymity  of   specific  persons  and  communities  studied  ethnographically.  while  a  comparative   discussion  worth  pursuing,  as  it  may  serve  to  respectively  elucidate  both   contexts,  note  that  the  anonymity  typical  of  public  representations  of   anthropologists’  field  research  should  not  be  confounded  with  the  non-­‐disclosure   agreements  (ndas)  typical  of  for-­‐hire  ethnographers’  work  for  businesses.         journal  of  business  anthropology,  6(1),  spring  2017      68   anthropologists’  work  ‘should  do  some  good’.7  what  might  constitute   ‘doing  good’  or  being  ‘politically  engaged’  of  course  varies.  for  some,  the   act  of  conducting  competent  research  or  educating  students  well—on  the   basis  of  a  rich  and  varied  literature  in  anthropology  to  which  one’s  own   specialist  ethnographic  knowledge  is  appended—is  sufficient.  for  others,   meaningful  good  is  only  achieved  through  direct  political  action.8   meanwhile,  it  is  worth  recalling  that,  traditionally,  as  in  the  present,   anthropologists  have  variously  supported  their  host  communities  outside   of  the  frame  of  those  communities  as  subjects  of  the  anthropologist’s   enquiries.  (not  considered  of  academic  or  ‘scientific’  merit,  such  activities   between  anthropologists  and  hosts  remained  largely  private.)  without   intending  to  suggest  a  sea  change  in  the  left  leaning  and  sometimes   radical  politics  of  anthropologists,  however,  in  its  contemporary  guise   ‘doing  some  good’  seems  often  to  be  articulated  as  an  explicit  desire  that   the  anthropologist’s  work  should  engage  politically-­‐relevant  subject   matter.  by  this  i  mean  political  relevance  from  the  personal  viewpoint  of   the  anthropologist,9  as  opposed  to  the  discovery,  among  other  things,  of   material  relevant  politically  to  the  community  that  the  erstwhile  naïve   anthropologist  is  studying.10  of  further  interest  is  the  fact  that  the  many   sites  now  studied,  as  communities,  are  often  institutionalized  within  the   ethnographer’s  own  society,  or  familiar  national  context:  in  shorthand,   they  are  conducting  ‘anthropology-­‐at-­‐home’.       while  possibly  worth  celebrating,  collectively  these  new                                                                                                                   7  this  is  further  suggested  in  the  cover  blurb  of  the  recent  edited  volume,  writing   culture  and  the  life  of  anthropology  (starn  2015).  in  his  cover  blurb  for  the  book,   arturo  escobar  says,  ‘to  the  question  posed  twenty-­‐five  years  ago  of  “why  write,   and  how,”  some  of  the  essays  now  pointedly  add  “why  act,  and  how  do  we  act?”’   8  in  my  experience,  most  anthropologists  in  fact  do  both,  but  balance  them   differently,  i.e,  as  public  or  private  activities,  including  in  their  scholarship.   9  for  instance,  currently  there  is  broadly-­‐shared  concern  over  environmental   decline  with  increased  consciousness  of  the  linkages  between  local  contexts— that  would  typically  be  the  sites  of  anthropological  work—and  global  impacts,   and  vice  versa.  pertinent  questions  that  arise  might  include:  how  can   anthropological  knowledge  assist  in  understanding  how  we  got  here,  what   institutions  sustain  such  damage  and,  by  implication,  what  forms  of  engagement   would  be  relevant  in  how  we  are  going  to  get  out  of  our  environmental  mess?   corporations,  national  and  local  governments,  multilateral  agencies,  universities   and  ngos  linked  up  through  technology,  finance  and  the  consumption  of  goods   and  depletion  of  resources  collectively  engage  this  ‘environmental  problem’.  as   its  creators,  understanding  the  human  dimensions  of  any  one  part  of  this  puzzle   and,  better  yet,  generating  the  capacity  to  describe  the  links  across  its  complex   (organizational)  contexts  is  interesting,  and  important.  how  can  anthropological   knowledge,  as  means,  be  deployed  here,  and  to  what  productive  ends?     10  the  classic  example  of  this  sort  of  serendipitous  discovery  is  clifford  and   hildred  geertz’  sudden,  and  inadvertent,  injection  into  the  politics  of  the  balinese   village  where  they  were  conducting  ethnographic  fieldwork  during  a  raid  by   indonesian  authorities  on  the  village’s  illegal  cockfight  (geertz  1972).                                                                                                                                                                                      sedgwick  /  complicit  positioning       69   commitments  among  anthropologists  also  confound  the  intellectual   premises  upon  which  anthropological  fieldwork  was  established  and  the   forms  through  which  it  was  predominantly  practiced  up  until,  say,  the   1990s.  first,  anthropology  at  home  may  undermine  the  analytic   advantages  of  studying  others—commonly  describe  as  ‘the  other’— usually  expressed,  as  discussed  above,  as  an  implicit  form  of  comparative   method  operationalized  through  the  personal  experience  of  the   ethnographer.  typically  this  has  been  articulated  as  learning  about   another  society  ‘from  the  bottom  up’.  while  this  characterization  perhaps   suggests  the  ethnographer  as  if  innocent  child,  anthropologists  are  adults   upon  whom  interpersonal  experience,  usually  through  co-­‐habitation   within  a  society  quite  different  from  their  own,  makes  its  mark:   emotionally,  intellectually  and,  often,  physically.  in  practice,  despite   preparation—in  the  form  of  language  study,  reading  ‘everything  you  can   get  your  hands  on’,  etc.—this  rite  of  passage  usually  begins  with  the   ethnographer  entering  the  field,  at  least  for  the  first  time,  with  extreme   naïveté.  if  that  is  the  case,  among  those  studying  ‘at’  or  ‘in’  their  own   society,  what  is  the  impact  of  prior  knowledge—the  de  facto  lack  of   naïveté—before  conducting  ethnographic  work  at/on/with  it?  i   understand,  of  course,  that  modern  societies  may  be  defined  by  the   enormously  complex  range  of  social  roles  and  circumstances  entailed  by   its  members,  as  well  as  a  vast  range  of  ‘sub-­‐cultures’  about  all  of  which  no   individual  could  possibly  be  truly  knowledgeable.  that  condition,   however,  does  not  mean  that  individuals  within  a  society,  in  this  case  an   ethnographer,  does  not  have  a  viewpoint,  however  unsophisticated,  on   other  parts  of  their  own  society.  meanwhile,  obviously  an   anthropologist’s  decision  to  study  a  particular  part  of  the  complex  puzzle   of  their  own  modern  society  would  strongly  suggest  their  interest  in  and   an  at  least  implicit  viewpoint  upon  it.  good  or  bad,  how  does  that  ‘pre-­‐ positioned’  aspect  affect  their  access  to  and  their  methodological   engagements  with  their  sites,  their  analyses  and  their  interpretive  work?       second,  ethnographic  work  in  such  sites  may  invert  or,  in  any  case,   significantly  complicates  the  inequality  common  to  the  erstwhile  neo-­‐ colonial  relationship  of  anthropologist  of  the  ‘cosmopolitan  center’   toward  their  ‘peripheral  subjects’.  while  i  have  argued  for  the  ideal  of  de   facto  equality  in  the  day-­‐to-­‐day,  coeval  relations  of  informants  and   ethnographers  across  the  history  of  anthropology,  in  new,  modern  sites,   and  especially  in  studying  up  in  formal  organizations,  ethnographers  are   very  often  structurally  subordinate  to  their  informants.  this  matters.  if   overly  simplistically  rendered,  a  practical  articulation  of  these  changes  in   field  circumstances  is  the  following.  it  seems  that  in  traditional  sites   anthropologists  could  remain  in  situ  until  they  themselves  judged  it  was   time  to  go.  in  studying  powerful  organizations,  the  head  of  the   organization  under  study,  if  not  many  other  members  of  that   organization,  can  show  the  anthropologist  the  door  at  any  time.  problems   raised  in  such  new  circumstances  of  fieldwork,  now  increasingly  common   journal  of  business  anthropology,  6(1),  spring  2017      70   in  anthropology,  have  been  nicely  spelled  out  by  marcus  (1997:  100):       the  fieldworker  often  deals  with  subjects  who  share  his  own   broadly  middle-­‐class  identity  and  fears,  in  which  case  unspoken  power   issues  in  the  relationship  become  far  more  ambiguous  than  they  would   have  been  in  past  anthropological  research;  alternatively,  he  may  deal   with  persons  in  much  stronger  power  and  class  positions  than  his  own,  in   which  case  both  the  terms  and  limits  of  the  ethnographic  engagement  are   managed  principally  by  them.  here,  where  the  ethnographer  occupies  a   marked  subordinate  relationship  to  informants,  the  issues  of  use  and   being  used,  of  ingratiation,  and  of  trading  information  about  others   elsewhere  become  matters  of  normal  ethical  concern,  where  they  were   largely  unconsidered  in  previous  discussions.   how  would  such  conditions  affect  the  day-­‐to-­‐day  conduct  of   ethnographic  fieldwork  in  businesses?  what  knowledge  do  we  lose,  or   gain,  by  working  ethnographically  under  such  conditions?     one  may  celebrate,  as,  indeed,  i  do,  shifts  in  anthropology  as   reflections  of  new  realities  in  an  evolving  world,  including  changes  in  the   political  relations  between  anthropologists  and  informant  communities.   one  may  also  want  to  problematize  the  details  of  received  wisdom  in   anthropology  as  i  have  expressed  it,  including  anthropology’s  recent   crises  and  to  what  extent  they  have  exercised  the  discipline.  (this  may   also  look  somewhat  different  in  santa  cruz,  ca  from  how  it  does  in   cambridge,  uk.)  nonetheless,  these  historical  forms  remain  extremely   well  travelled  ideas  in  anthropology,  driving  crucial  methodological   premises,  with  foundational  theoretical  implications.  as  i  have  suggested   above,  at  their  heart  lie  profound  questions  regarding  the  positionality  of   ethnographers  in  the  production  of  their  work.       and,  yet,  as  fieldwork  sites  have  increasingly  diversified,   becoming  unorthodox  by  previous  standards—including  corporations   and  other  formal  organizations—engagement  with  fundamental   questions  of  positionality  and  their  effects  on  the  quality  of  ethnographic   research  have  quietened.  in  the  uncharted  territory  of  the  expanding   repertoire  of  sites,  are  ethnographers  just  getting  on  with  new  studies   with  the  intention  of  working  out  questions  regarding  positionality  later?   have  the  throes  of  self-­‐examination  following  the  crises  of  the  1980s   generated  disciplinary  exhaustion  in  anthropology,  discouraging  any   hope  for  agreement?  or,  perhaps,  is  avoiding  these  questions  just  as  well   because  much  contemporary  ethnographic  work  rubs  uncomfortably   against  some  of  the  ethical  concerns  raised  specifically  by  those   important  crises  in  anthropology?           cultures  of  secrecy:  exposing  power/knowledge  in  businesses                                                                                                                                                                                      sedgwick  /  complicit  positioning       71   as  my  title  suggests,  i  am  concerned  that  questions  of  positionality   remain  insufficiently  explored  in  the  ethnographic  study  of  businesses.   for  one  thing,  a  large  proportion  of  the  ethnographic  work  on   businesses—including  that  available  for  public/academic  consumption— is  based  on  research  conducted  on  behalf  of  those  firms,  e.g.,  with   ethnographers  working  for  the  corporation.  indeed,  as  i  will  further   examine  below,  in  this  ‘vendor’  context  ‘ethnography’  has  become  part  of   a  saleable  methodological  toolkit.  this  has  obvious  implications  for   interpretative  and  other  analytic  work  produced  for   businesses/organizations,  and  for  interpretative  and  other  analytic  work   that  may,  or  may  not,  stem  from  those  ethnographic  experiences  for  an   anthropological  audience.  this  is  not  about  hand  wringing  regarding  the   authenticity  of  analysis  or,  necessarily,  an  argument,  per  se,  that   employment  by  an  ethnographer  in  a  business  should  rule  out  that  work’s   credibility  to  the  academic  anthropology  community.  it  concerns  the   provision  of  clarity  in  revealing  the  context  through  which   anthropological  knowledge  is  derived.  this  seems  particularly  important   to  analysis  of  businesses,  which,  i  suggest,  are  contexts  that  are  subtly   loaded,  especially  for  the  ‘native  anthropologist’  working  ‘at  home’.  allow   me  to  expand  on  this  point.   it  is  not  unusual  that,  like  other  normal  persons,  informants  are   unconscious  of  their  own  apperceptions.  that  said,  the  powerful   interlocutors  who  ethnographers  work  with  in  studying  up  are  often  able   to  control  how  their  labor  is  perceived,  and  in  ways  that  may  significantly   affect  the  pith  of  ethnographers’  analysis  of  that  labor.  it  is  part  and  parcel   of  both  the  ethos  and  the  explicit  knowledge  of  those  with  organizational   power  that,  if  provoked,  they  can  draw  on  the  resources  of  the  state,  both   physical  and  otherwise:  say,  through  their  capacity  to  deploy  legal   resources  to  derive  favorable  outcomes.  notably,  however,  the  day-­‐to-­‐day   work  of  persons  in  positions  of  authority  intimately  depends  on  the   ‘invisibility’  of  their  means  of  deploying  power  (herzfeld  2015).   meanwhile,  of  course,  it  is  precisely  in  uncovering  what  is  below  the   surface  that  anthropological  methods  thrive.  ‘[t]he  enduring,  lived   consequences  of  events  taking  place  in  the  centers  of  power…’  can  be   recognized  ‘…in  the  way  that  [anthropology]  extracts  hidden  and  highly   significant  social  realities  in  tiny  local  details…  [and  in]  keep[ing]  both  the   detail  and  the  larger  picture  in  focus  (herzfeld  2015:  18)’.  to  extend   herzfeld’s  discussion  of  ‘invisibility’,  the  non-­‐disclosure  agreements   (ndas)  under  which  much  corporate  ethnography  is  conducted  is  but  a   literal  articulation  of  the  culture  of  secrecy  typical  of  the  mobilization  of   power  in  formal  organizations.  but  the  ‘corporate  veil’,  if  a  legal  fiction,   may  have  quite  real  analytic  effects.  as  i  will  expand  upon  in  detail  below,   it  may  well  be  that  ethnographers  employed  by  businesses  are  positioned,   inadvertently  or  not,  to  enact  the  invisibility  and  secrecy—the   mythmaking—characteristic  of  managing  the  tension  between  the  public   and  private  work  of  corporations.  to  what  extent  are  ethnographers  of   journal  of  business  anthropology,  6(1),  spring  2017      72   business  willing  to  elucidate  for  anthropological  and  public  audiences   those  very  black  boxes  which  they  themselves  may  be  complicit  in   constructing?       profligate  naming:  boundary  trouble  and  the  uneven  carving  of   ethnographic  claims   while  there  are  some  important  anthropological  studies,  much  of  the   ethnographic  work  on  business  is  driven  by  ‘corporate  ethnographers’.   many  corporate  ethnographers  have  formal  academic  training  in   anthropology  but  they  are  clear  about  their  non-­‐academic,  professional   position  in  the  workplace.  ‘[p]articipant[s]  in  corporate  settings  in  such   roles  as  researcher,  consultant,  manager,  and  designer,  the  anthropologist   operates  as  a  mutual  corporate  actor  with  other  members  of  the   corporation  (cefkin  2012:  5)’.  in  their  favor,  then,  corporate   ethnographers  do  not  pretend  to  the  quasi-­‐objectification  of  their  work   that  is  typical  of  academic  anthropology.11  rather,  corporate   ethnographers’  goal  is  to  produce  ethnographically-­‐sensitive   ‘deliverables’  for  the  profitability  of  the  corporations  they  work  for.  that   said,  while  clarity  is  provided,  or  implicitly  understood,  regarding  the  fact   of  their  employment  by,  or  their  erstwhile  membership  in,  corporations,   when  it  is  made  publicly-­‐accessible  the  implications  of  the  de  facto  lack  of   detachment  structured  into  their  ethnographic  engagements  tend  to  be   distanced.  most  simply,  the  effects  of  the  empirical  context  of  the  work  go   largely  unacknowledged.  it  seems  that  in  producing  ‘deliverables’  the   middle-­‐level  guts  of  these  ethnographic  projects  are  carved  out.  as  the                                                                                                                   11as  discussed  above,  the  interpersonal  linkages  of  anthropologists  and   informants,  that  is  both  typical  of  the  experience  of  fieldwork  and  emblematic  of   anthropology’s  fieldwork  model,  generates  tension  in  anthropologists’  later   representations—the  analysis  and  interpretation  elsewhere—of  that  field   experience.  this  makes  the  production  of  anthropological  texts  highly   challenging.  it  is  quasi-­‐objective,  i  claim,  because  while,  on  the  one  hand,   anthropologists  attempt  to  make  an  accurate  portrayal  of  the  world  ‘out  there’,   on  the  other  hand,  our  research  processes,  if  radically-­‐empirical,  are  hardly   scientifically-­‐objective.  rather,  the  field  is  so  subjectively  experienced  by  the   anthropologist—the  subjective-­‐objective  gap  so  artificial—that  what  we  write   are  real  fictions.  as  such,  given  the  already  fully-­‐loaded  condition  of  reflexivity  at   the  heart  of  anthropological  practices  in/as  foundational  to  interpretive  work— that  is  to  say,  at  a  minimum,  deep  reflection  on  one’s  position  as  an   anthropologist  in  the  field—it  seems  that  moves  toward  even  more  reflexive   representations  are  likely  to  involve  more  complex  objectification  work  than  that   typically  undertaken  by  anthropologists.  (what  i  have  in  mind  here  are  attempts   to  make  the  explanatory  power  of  anthropological  texts  more  evocative,  as,  say,   art:  for  example,  as  poetry.)  as  a  result,  given  the  representational  challenges   anthropologists  already  experience  it  is  no  surprise  that  the  air  has  rather  gone   out  of  extending  ‘reflexivity’  beyond  it  informing  a  personal  ethic  surrounding   our  translations  of  fieldwork:  it  is  a  nice  idea  to  push  things  further  aesthetically,   but  so  difficult  to  do  convincingly.                                                                                                                                                                                  sedgwick  /  complicit  positioning       73   ethnographic  descriptions  often  feel  hollow,  analysis  runs  thin:  it  lacks   the  intent  toward  holistic  richness  driving  anthropological  ethnographers’   highly  contexualized  work.  the  impression  of  a  hollowed  out   ethnographic/empirical  center,  meanwhile,  is  encouraged  by  corporate   ethnographers’  publicly-­‐available  presentations  and  writing  sometimes   being  accompanied  by  a  (compensatory?)  veneer  of  high  theoretical   abstraction.12       corporate  ethnography  takes  many  forms—as  above,  ‘researcher,   consultant,  manager,  and  designer’—but  ethnographic  work  for  business   has  been  especially  prolific  in  consumer  research.  according  to  malefyt   (2009),  at  the  intersection  of  consumption  research  and  ‘ethnography’,  a   plethora  of  interventions  by  consultants  using  various  forms  of   qualitative  methods  has  been  established  under  the  ‘brand’  of   ethnography.  guided  no  doubt  by  the  adage  ‘time  is  money’,  it  appears   that  in  this  sphere  there  are  a  number  of  consulting  firms  where   ‘technomethodologies’,  that  claim  to  improve  on  ethnographic  methods,   are  deployed  as  a  matter  of  course  (malefyt  2009:  204-­‐06).  as  i   understand  it,  here  erstwhile  ‘informants’  provide  information  through   still  cameras  and/or  video  that  interface  with  computer-­‐driven   operations  or  programmes  that  are  perhaps  custom-­‐built  (‘tweaked’)  for   the  needs  of  a  particular  client.  in  the  analysis  of  consumption  patterns,  it   would  seem  that  such  ‘ethnographic’  interventions  may  have  become  an   alternative  to  the  focus  group:  instead  of  gathering  isolated  sets  of  people   together  to  discuss  their  likes  and  dislikes,  e.g.,  regarding  a  product,  an   advertisement,  etc.,  here  individual  preferences  are  literally  recorded  as   they  take  place.  of  course,  this  data  is  raw—arguably,  therefore,  it  is   pure—compared  with  the  garnering  of  group  opinion.  that  is,  rather  than   analyzing  the  work  of  a  group  of  consumers  in  considering  what  appeals   to  them,  it  is  the  analysts  or,  perhaps  initially,  their  computers,  to  whom   or  which  this  information  is  fed,  and  who/which,  in  combination,  do  the   work  of  interpretation,  i.e.,  at  the  other  end  of  a  technological  tunnel  from   the  action  as  it  takes  place.  it  seems  that  consumers  are  not  even  invited   to  talk  about  their  choices  while  they  make  them,  which  furthers  the  point   that  there  is  no  visceral  ethnographical  knowledge  of  the  space  in  which   consumers’  actions  take  place.  in  short,  there  is  nothing  ethnographic   about  this.  meanwhile  we  know  nothing  of  the  capacities  of  those,  back  in   the  ‘ethnographic’  consultancy,  working  through  this  already  highly   abstracted  material.  here,  technology-­‐driven  interfaces  have  replaced   ‘inefficient’  face-­‐to-­‐face  interactions.     in  noting  these  cases  malefyt  does  not  directly  problematize  this   ‘shift  in  the  work  of  ethnography  from  anthropologist-­‐fieldworker  to                                                                                                                   12  such  inclinations  are  typical  of  several  of  the  entries  in  cefkin’s  (2009)  edited   volume.  see,  for  instance,  the  chapter  by  nafus  and  anderson  (2009).     journal  of  business  anthropology,  6(1),  spring  2017      74   technology-­‐enhanced  ethnography  vendor’  (melefyt  2009:  206),  nor  the   attractions  their  work  may  hold  for  clients.13  but  i  believe  he  is  implicitly   policing  what  is  at  stake.  such  research  operations  water  down  the   meaning  of  ethnographic  methods  among  the  larger,  if  overlapping,   community  of  corporate  ethnographers,  many  of  whom,  as  mentioned   above,  are  formally  trained  in  anthropology.  while  operating   professionally  as  employees  or  consultants  for  corporations,  and   positioned  in  their  use  of  ethnographic  techniques  in  ways  that,  i  argue,   are  variously  problematic,  most  corporate  ethnographers  respect  the   ideas  behind  proper  anthropological  inquiry,  and  are  keen  to  self-­‐identify   as  anthropologists.  quick-­‐and-­‐dirty,  computer  driven  ‘ethnography’   represents  a  commercial  threat  to  this  community.  it  should  be  noted,   however,  that,  following  malefyt’s  lead,  i  have  purposefully  exposed   methods  that  have  so  stripped  the  ‘brand’  of  ethnography  that  they  risk   denuding  it  altogether.  it  is  unfortunate  that  malefyt,  as  a  corporate   ethnographer  himself,  does  not  make  the  point  that  these  technologically-­‐ enhanced  examples  of  ethnography-­‐emptied-­‐of-­‐content  undermine  the   idea  of  ethnographic  inquiry  as  we  have,  up  until  now,  understood  it:  that   is,  participating  in  the  observation,  in  shared  time  and  space,  of  other   persons’  actual  behavior  and,  in  turn,  putting  co-­‐experienced  events  at   the  center  of  analysis.     taking  our  discussion  of  ethnography  well  beyond  the  sphere  of   corporate  ethnographers,  as  an  academic  discipline  anthropology  may   rightly  claim  to  have  invented  (field)  ethnography  or,  in  any  case,  the   participant-­‐observation  method  strongly  associated  with  malinowski’s   work  among  trobriand  islanders.  that  said  as  a  matter  of  record,  or   anthropological  congratulation,  it  is  perfectly  clear  that  ‘ethnography’  has   gone  its  own  way,  carving  out  methodological  space  across  the  social   sciences  and,  to  some  extent,  in  related,  practical  fields.  indeed,  the  state   of  ethnography  is  such  that  in  its  proliferation  across  the  academy,  and  in   claims  to  its  use  elsewhere,  there  is  by  now  no  general  consensus  as  to   what  ethnography  is.  i  have  forwarded  a  most  cursory  definition  above   but,  generally,  ethnography’s  contours  have  been  so  intellectually   depleted  that  it  rests,  precariously,  on  negative  definitions,  i.e.,  of  what   ethnography  is  not.  in  practice,  ethnography  has  become  an  increasingly   large  receptacle  for  all  sorts  of  qualitative  methods:  again,  ‘ethnography’                                                                                                                   13    malefyt  suggests—rightly,  so  far  as  i  know—that  the  (well-­‐known)   advertising  firm  where  he  works,  or  worked,  is  not  a  ‘technology-­‐enhanced   ethnography  vendor’.  that  said,  along  with  more  traditional,  face-­‐to-­‐face   ethnographic,  as  well  as  various  technologically-­‐enhanced,  methods,  malefyt  is   frank  about  the  use  in  this  firm  of  ‘deprivation’  techniques  in  gathering   information  on  behalf  of  clients  (malefyt  2009:  204).  these  are  activities  that   academic  anthropologists  would  recognize  as  manipulations  of  informants  and,   so,  entirely  unethical.  but,  then,  the  intention  behind  these  techniques  is  not  at  all   academic:  they  are  directed  toward  ‘client  deliverables’.                                                                                                                                                                                  sedgwick  /  complicit  positioning       75   is  not  quantitative  methods.14  meanwhile,  i  note  with  some  irony  that   malinowski,  in  arguably  treading  a  scientific  line  of  enquiry,  did  plenty  of   quantitative  work  or,  at  least,  counting,  as  do  most  anthropologist   fieldworkers  today.   corporate  ethnographers,  meanwhile,  also  describe  themselves  as   ‘practicing  anthropologists’.  (if  broadly  accepted,  this  wording  confounds   the  common  sense  meaning  of  practice,  i.e.,  anyone  who  practices   anthropology,  whether  in  the  academy  or  elsewhere.)  so,  although  there                                                                                                                   14  i  suspect  that  the  rise  of  ethnography  is  a  consequence  of  frustration  with  the   limits  of  the  types  of  questions  that  quantitative  methods  could  ask  and,  so,  the   quality  of  answers  that  they  produce.  that  is,  situations  encountered  among   highly  complex  subjects,  i.e.,  the  behavior  of  human  beings,  are  not  easily   parcelled  into  simple  variables  that  can  be  meaningfully  correlated.  (regular   tooth  brushing  and  reduction  of  tooth  decay  are  strongly  correlated,  but  this  is   not  surprising.  the  interesting  problem  is  why  some  people  brush  regularly,   while  others  do  not.)  ethnography  has  furthermore  become  attractive  among   ‘soft’  social  scientists  as  they  have  increasingly  recognized  that  the  forced   packaging  of  their  quantitatively-­‐oriented  qualitative  methods—structured   interviews,  postal  surveys,  and  so  on—yielded  insufficient  ‘data’  to  account  for   circumstances  that  interested  or  concerned  them.  such  researchers  might  have   an  intuitive  understanding  that  attracted  them  to  their  research  problem  in  the   first  place  and  about  which  they  were  observant  on  their  passages  through  the   production  of  ‘data’.     those  opinions  stated  as  a  matter  of  conjecture  in  explaining  the  rise  of   ethnography  as  method,  the  fact  is  that  the  parcelling  of  variables  into   manageable  packages  is  generally  what  is  sought  in  the  social  sciences:   quantitative  methods  remain  overwhelmingly  dominant.  this  is  especially  so  in   economics,  in  policy  studies—where  interested  parties,  such  as  governments,   increasingly  demand  ‘fact-­‐based  evidence’—and  in  north  american  sociology   and  political  science.  perhaps  of  greater  relevance  to  our  interests  in  the   ethnography  of  business,  is  the  field  of  business/management  studies,  where  its   highly  complex  subject  matter  seems  particularly  well-­‐situated  to  attract  analysis   via  qualitative  methods.  unfortunately,  this  field  also  remains  america-­‐centric  in   terms  of  scope,  with  quantitative  methods  overwhelmingly  dominant.     the  missive  ‘follow  the  money’  provides  the  necessary  evidence  of  this   overarching  phenomenon.  in  terms  of  number  of  staff  employed  and  number  of   academic  departments,  while  increasingly  popular  with  students,  anthropology   is  a  miniscule  discipline  compared  with  any  of  the  quantitative-­‐methods-­‐heavy   social  science  disciplines  listed  above.  in  the  social  sciences,  qualitative  methods,   and  the  turn  toward  ethnography  in  particular,  provides  but  an  addendum  to   core  quantitative  methods.  and,  in  the  supposedly  scientific  thinking  driving   most  of  these  fields,  qualititative  methods  are  an  easy  target,  with  the  vagueness   associated  with  what  it  is  that  constitutes  ethnography  as  method  making  it   particularly  vulnerable  to  critique.  rightly  so.  ethnographers  do  not  do   themselves  any  favors  here.  at  one  extreme  an  ‘ethnographic  observation’  might   include  a  social  scientist  noting,  on  the  way  to  conducting  a  structured  interview,   that  in  the  cafeteria  workers  wear  different  clothes  from  managers.  at  the  other   extreme  is  the  (traditional)  anthropological  ethnographic  experience:   participant-­‐observation  for  at  least  one  year,  ordinarily  in  a  foreign,  unfamiliar   location,  far  away  from  home:  a  de  facto  rite  of  passage  both  personally  and   professionally  for  the  anthropologist  and,  no  doubt,  for  some  members  of  the   host  community.       journal  of  business  anthropology,  6(1),  spring  2017      76   seems  to  be  some  formal  disagreement  and,  certainly,  confusion,  we  can   define  ‘practicing  anthropologists’  as  a  community  using  ethnographic   techniques  who  are  employed  at  or  working  on  behalf  of,  e.g.,  as   consultants  to,  private  enterprises,  as  well  as  other  formal   organizations.15  (albeit  less  visible,  the  ‘practicing  anthropologist’   community  also  includes  anthropologists  working  in  ‘development’:  in   public  and  private  sector  agencies,  consulting  firms  and  ngos.  the   community  of  anthropology-­‐oriented  ‘development  practitioners’,   however,  is  more  closely  associated  with  the  terms  ‘applied   anthropologist’  or,  more  specifically,  ‘development  anthropologist’.16,  17)                                                                                                                   15  the  community  of  ‘practicing  anthropologists’  who  work  in  business  settings   is  most  parsimoniously  represented  in  two  formal  groupings.  founded  in  1983,   the  national  association  of  practicing  anthropologists  (napa)  is  a  formal  section   of  the  american  anthropological  association  (aaa)  and  has  the  remit:   ‘promoting  the  practice  of  anthropology,  both  within  the  discipline  and  among   private,  public,  and  nonprofit  organizations’   (http://practicinganthropology.org/about).  i  think,  however,  that  napa  is   understood  as  representing  the  interests  of  non-­‐academic  anthropological  work.   in  furthering  that  point  the  society  for  the  anthropology  of  work  (saw)  is  also  a   section  of  the  aaa,  but  with  an  explicitly  academic  focus.  (with  most  other   sections  of  the  aaa  focussing  on  subject  or  regional  subfields  within  academic   anthropology,  it  is  extremely  valuable  to  have  sections  representing  particular   interest  groups,  in  this  case,  the  professional  concerns  of  non-­‐academic   practicing  anthropologists.)  meanwhile,  the  ethnographic  praxis  in  industry   conference  (epic),  as  the  name  suggests,  is  a  group  specifically  oriented  to   ethnography  for  industry.  it  started  its  annual  conferences  in  2005  and  has  an   active  web-­‐based  forum  for  those  pursuing  careers  in  this  area,  especially   ‘corporate  ethnographers’.   16  again  as  a  matter  of  common  sense  one  would  assume  that  those  with   anthropological  training  (or  other  training  that  includes  in-­‐depth  ethnographic   techniques)  who  are  employed  by  private  consulting  firms  servicing   development  agencies,  or  who  are  employees  at  (state-­‐run)  development   agencies  or  ngos,  would  also  describe  themselves  as  ‘practicing  anthropologists’.   when  articulated  in  contrast  with  academic  anthropology,  some  of  them  might   agree  to  that  nomenclature,  but  their  more  common,  specialist  self-­‐description  is   ‘development  anthropologist’.  (meanwhile,  at  the  uk’s  department  for   international  development  (dfid),  anthropologists  and  other  qualitative   methods-­‐inclined  social  scientists,  i.e.,  non-­‐economists,  are  called  ‘social   development  officers’.)  in  terms  of  formal  representation,  this  group  is  most   closely  associated  with  the  society  for  applied  anthropology  (sfaa),  which  is  not   part  of  the  aaa  and  runs  its  own  annual  conferences.  (it  publishes  the  journal   ‘human  organization’  and,  just  to  confuse  my  argument  regarding  development   anthropology,  has  ‘a  career-­‐oriented  publication’  called  ‘practicing   anthropology’.)  founded  in  1941,  sfaa’s  remit  is  extremely  large,  describing   itself  as  ‘a  worldwide  organization  for  the  applied  social  sciences’.    it   ‘…promote[s]  the  investigation  of  the  principles  of  human  behavior  and  the   application  of  these  principles  to  contemporary  issues  and  problems.  the  society   is  unique  among  professional  associations  in  membership  and  purpose,   representing  the  interests  of  professionals  in  a  wide  range  of  settings  -­‐  academia,   business,  law,  health  and  medicine,  government,  etc.  the  unifying  factor  is  a   commitment  to  making  an  impact  on  the  quality  of  life  in  the  world.’   (http://www.sfaa.net)                                                                                                                                                                                  sedgwick  /  complicit  positioning       77   i  am  purposeful  in  supplying  a  range  of  overlapping  nomenclature   for  those  laying  claim  to  ethnographic  methods  in  the  service  of  their   (non-­‐academic)  employers.  meanwhile,  in  addition  to  those  sited  above,  i   have  also  found  the  following  representations  of  ethnographic  and/or   anthropological  work  for  business:  ‘corporate  anthropology’  (cefkin  2012:   2)  and  ‘corporate  anthropologist’  (malefyt  2009:  202);  ‘consumer   ethnography’  and  ‘branded  ethnographic  practices  in  consumer  research’   (malefyt  2009:  201);  and  ‘professional  cultural  anthropologist’  and   ‘professional  ethnography’  (powell  2015).  no  doubt  there  are  other   names,  or  soon  will  be.  meanwhile,  among  trained  anthropologists  who,   due  to  their  work  on  business  contexts  i  would  describe  as  studying  up,   the  contrast  between  those  who  ‘study  businesses  as  sites  for   anthropology’  (as  a  discipline)  versus  those  who  ‘work  for  business’  is   most  parsimoniously  defined  by  the  respective  labels  ‘anthropologist  of   business’  versus  ‘business  anthropologist’.  meanwhile,  although  authors   of  articles  for  the  journal  of  business  anthropology  come  from  both   communities,  it  generally  publishes  articles  by  academic  anthropologists   on  business-­‐related  topics,  i.e.,  written  by  anthropologists  of  business.       my  point  is  to  highlight  the  boundary  trouble  in  this  profusion  of   naming:  between  what  i  call  ‘anthropology  of  business’  and  those   working  for  businesses,  in  ‘business  anthropology’,  ‘corporate   anthropology’,  ‘professional  anthropology’,  ‘corporate  ethnography’,   ‘professional  ethnography’,  etc.  i  condense  what  i  have  suggested  above   in  noting  that  there  are  significant  differences  between  these  respective   communities’  approaches  where  it  comes  to,  a)  intent  regarding  the   gathering  of  knowledge,  b)  the  position  of  the  ethnographer  in  gaining   knowledge  and,  c)  the  dissemination  and  core  audience(s)  for  that   knowledge.  and  i  would  suggest  that  if  there  is  confusion  among   specialists  about  the  meanings  of  different  names  for  the  application  of   ethnographic  methods  in  business  contexts—when  the  fundamental   intent  of  work  among  those  who  do  ethnography  for  business,  and  those   who  study  businesses  ethnographically  as  sites  (for  academia)  is  so   different—this  important  distinction  is  even  more  confusing  for  general   anthropology.  the  result,  i  believe,  is  that  in  general  anthropology  it  is   thought  that  most  studies  of  businesses  by  anthropologists  are  not                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                             17  there  is  a  notable  literature  in  anthropology  animated  by  the  tensions   between  anthropologists  who  critique  the  politics  and  practices  of   ‘development’—as,  for  example,  a  neo-­‐colonial  exercise—and  anthropologists   who  use  anthropological  techniques  and/or  claim  anthropological  sensitivities  as   analytical  assets  in  providing  ‘assistance’  in  the  developing  world.  while  i  do  not   consider  that  literature  here,  the  discourse  between  ‘anthropologists  of   development’  and  ‘development  anthropologists’  should  be  pursued   comparatively  in  unpacking  the  similarly-­‐structured  tensions  between   anthropologists  who  study  businesses  academically,  as  research  sites,  and  those   using  ethnographic  methods  as  employees  of  businesses.       journal  of  business  anthropology,  6(1),  spring  2017      78   academic  projects,  but  the  exercises  of  consultants  or  in-­‐house   employee/ethnographers.  this  is  suggested  by  academic  work  on  sites   that  are  perfectly  obviously  businesses,  but  use  different  nomenclature   from  anthropology  of  business.  for  instance,  there  is  robust  academic   work  in  anthropology  of  finance,  and  a  whole  plethora  of  research  at   sites  affiliated  with  businesses  under  the  rubric  of  science  and   technological  studies  (sts).  projects  in  economic  anthropology,  as  an   overarching  subfield  of  the  discipline,  meanwhile,  are  often  based  in  work   that  could  easily  be  called  anthropology  of  business.     the  ambivalence,  at  best,  toward  studies  of  business  by  the   discipline  of  anthropology  is  driven  both  by  the  confused  naming  i  have   highlighted  above  and  by  the  dynamism  of  the  ‘practice’  communities   working  for  businesses  which  are,  perfectly-­‐justifiably,  formally   represented  within  the  american  anthropology  association  (aaa),  to  a   somewhat  lesser  extent  in  the  (british  commonwealth-­‐based)   association  of  social  anthropologists  (asa),  and  elsewhere,  i.e.,  the   society  for  applied  anthropology  (sfaa),  etc.  meanwhile,  in  the  larger   move  toward  ‘relevance’  in  the  context,  it  must  be  said,  of  significant   declines  in  academic  employment,  the  management  of  the  aaa  constantly   advocates  a  larger  public  voice  for  anthropological  knowledge  as  well  as   the  role  of  anthropologists  in  non-­‐academic  work.  some  university   anthropology  departments  of  course  explicitly  emphasize  applied  work.   (development  anthropology  is  particularly  strong  in  the  uk,  for  instance,   with  its  intellectual  training  set  in  relation  to  the  anthropology  of   development,  as  outlined  in  note  17.)  implicitly,  among  those  working  in   the  discipline,  and  perhaps  occasioned  with  some  regret,  the  decline  in   opportunities  for  careers  in  academic  anthropology  encourages   awareness  and  concern  regarding  the  practical,  non-­‐academic  use  of   anthropology.  these  are  all  perfectly  rational,  and  reasonable,  reactions   to  a  changing  environment.  however  the  scepticism  that  accompanies   perceptions  of  the  role  of  anthropology  with  regard  to  business  is   different  from  perceptions  of  development  anthropology  versus   anthropology  of  development.  in  my  view  this  comes  down  both  to  a   normalized,  if  thoroughly  myopic,  hostility  toward  ‘business’  among  left-­‐ leaning  anthropologists—that  tends  to  make  corporations  unpalatable   research  sites—and  to  problems  of  positionality  in  ethnographic  work  on   businesses.  the  former  may  take  care  of  itself  as  anthropology  becomes   increasingly  engaged  with  analysis  of  corporations  and  other  formal   organizational  forms,  i.e.,  as  core  drivers  of  modern  capitalism  and,  so,  of   foundational  relevance  to  anthropologists’  political  concerns,  whatever   they  may  be.  the  latter,  however,  requires  a  serious  and  self-­‐conscious   engagement  with  method  as  epistemology  in  the  ethnography  of  business.         ‘complicit’  attractions:  corporate  ethnography  and  the  potential   diversions  of  contemporary  theories  of  method  in  anthropology                                                                                                                                                                                  sedgwick  /  complicit  positioning       79   it  seems  to  me  that  in  much  of  what  i  call  corporate  ethnography,  as  a   catch-­‐all  for  ‘ethnography/anthropology  for  business’,  there  is  a   fundamental  lack  of  engagement  with  the  ethnographer’s  positionality  in   relation  to  the  conditions  under  which  the  work  is  being  conducted.  this   has  crucial  implications  for  its  production  of  anthropological  knowledge.   while  laying  claim  to  responsibility  for  ‘the  emergence  of  a  nascent  canon   of  corporate  ethnography’  (italics  mine)  (cefkin  2009:  2),  i  am  concerned   that  these  ethnographers  do  not  acknowledge,  a)  their  de  facto  lack  of   structural  control  over  the  direction  of  their  work  and,  b)  their  lack  of   control  over  the  use  of  that  work,  i.e.  as  the  commissioned  property  of  the   firm.  these  structural  conditions  of  work  impact  basic  problems  of   positionality  and  often  lead  corporate  ethnographers  to  c)  thin  out  critical   detachment  in  their  interpretation  of  the  ethnographic  work  they   conduct.18  as  i  have  also  suggested,  such  problems  in  anthropological   relations  with  informants/  communities  are  sometimes  disguised   through  an  insinuation  of  anthropological  credibility  slipped  in  via   engagement  with  sophisticated  anthropological  theory.       the  parsimonious,  if  simplistic,  approach  among  corporate   ethnographers  in  addressing  these  concerns  is  to  state  frankly  the  limits   of  their  fieldwork:  the  audience  should  consider  the  work  for  what  it  is,   within  its  own  framework  of  production.  if  insufficient  for  some  purposes,                                                                                                                   18  in  his  concluding  chapter  of  cefkin’s  impressive  edited  volume,  ethnography   and  the  corporate  encounter  (cefkin  2009),  michael  m.j.  fischer  discusses  the   work  of  corporate  ethnographers  comprising  the  rest  of  the  volume.  he  asks,     could  corporate  anthropologists  ever  be  allowed  to  produce  the   equivalent  of  such  studies  of  the  biotech  industry  as  those  by  barry  werth,  paul   rabinow,  kaushik  sunder  rajan,  or  melinda  cooper;  of  the  it  world  such  as  those   of  gabriella  coleman,  chris  kelty,  or  hal  abelson,  ken  ledeen,  and  harry  lewis;   or  (from  the  legal  world)  lawrence  lessig  [sic];  or  of  the  financial  world  as  those   of  donald  mackenzie?  or  is  that  request  less  in  conflict  just  with  ndas  [non-­‐ disclosure  agreements],  and  rather  more  in  conflict  with  the  new  ethnographic   products  being  developed…?  (fischer  2009:  236-­‐37)       two  points  here.    first,  the  serious  and  highly  respected  anthropological   work  of  the  scholars  listed  by  fischer  is  ‘anthropology  of  business’.  although   studying  business  contexts  as  academics,  i.e.,  not  as  employees  of  those   businesses,  they  are  also  ‘corporate  ethnographers’,  at  least  in  the  common  sense   meaning  of  the  term.  they  just  do  not  wish  their  work  to  be  described  under   either  identifying  rubric.  as  i  have  explained  above,  ‘corporate  ethnography’  is   now  for-­‐profit  terrain,  a  problem  that,  i  maintain,  bleeds  into  the  comparatively   negative  perceptions  of  ‘anthropology  of  business’  in  the  academy.  second,   elsewhere  in  his  chapter  fischer  (2009:  232-­‐33)  misconstrues  non-­‐disclosure   agreements  (ndas)  in  corporations  as  having  equivalent  effects  on  corporate   ethnographers’  work  as  north  american  universities’  institutional  review   boards  (irbs)—ethics  review  boards  (erbs)  in  the  uk—do  on  academics’   research  plans  and  results.  however,  he  is  correct  in  highlighting,  as  i  do,  the   centrality  of  corporate  control  over  the  output  of  corporate  ethnographers’   research  and  what  might  be  construed  as  the  resulting  limited  impact  it  enjoys  in   academic  anthropology  at  present.     journal  of  business  anthropology,  6(1),  spring  2017      80   ‘what  it  is’  is,  nonetheless,  a  plentiful  resource.  the  personal  and   intellectual  effects  (and  affects)  of  working  under  conditions  in  which,  for   example,  proprietary  control  over  information  allows  supposed-­‐ ethnographic  work  to  reproduce  the  ‘black  box’  of  business  contexts,  are  a   potentially  productive  route  to  unpacking  the  tensions  inherent  in  the   lifeworld  of  business.19  auto-­‐ethnography  comes  with  its  own  package  of   analytic  difficulties—that  i  will  address  only  tangentially  here—but  there   is  no  reason  why  any  number  of  corporate  ethnographers,  perhaps  during   a  sabbatical  from  the  workplace,  or  between  jobs,  could  not  engage  in   what,  in  practice,  would  be  reflections  on  their  work  in  businesses  as   ‘anthropology  at  home’.     more  substantively  i  would  suggest  a  collective,  two-­‐pronged   analytical  tack  that  acknowledges  and  examines  businesses  as  familiar   organizational  forms  that  are,  on  the  one  hand,  closed,  bounded  or  ‘black   boxed’:  operations  that  serve  to  make  them  ‘foreign’  or  estranged  from   day-­‐to-­‐day  public  life,  except  for  their  appropriately-­‐processed  members   and  properly-­‐vetted  visitors.  these  would  be  combined  with  analyses   that,  on  the  other  hand,  unpack  both  the  penetration  of  many  businesses’   products  and  brands  into  day-­‐to-­‐day  public  experience  and   consciousness,  while  the  work  of  other  businesses—perhaps  most   businesses—goes  nearly  entirely  unnoticed  in  the  public  realm  but,   nonetheless,  is  likely  to  affect  us  all.     my  earlier  examples  of  the  unfortunate  mobilization  of  the  ‘brand’   of  ethnography  through  ‘technomediation’  are  not  representative  of  the   broader  community  of  corporate  ethnographers.  many  are  trained   anthropologists,  fully  sensitive  to  the  emotional  and  intellectual  rigors  of   their  face-­‐  to-­‐  face  work  as  ethnographers.  tracking,  as  suggested  above,   between  corporate  settings  and  within  an  active  self-­‐representing   community  with  a  particular  (ethnographic)  skill  set—e.g.,  their  formal   ethnographic  praxis  in  industry  conference  (epic)  group—they  are   sophisticated  operators,  positioned  to  intelligently  unpack  the  conditions   of  their  ethnographic  work  and  the  corporate  elaborations  that  surround   it.     that  stated  as  a  matter  of  encouragement  to  this  community,   given  the  intellectual  open-­‐endedness,  if  not  splintering,  across  the  last  30   years  of  anthropology,  perhaps  it  is  perfectly  reasonable  that  such  work   is  not  undertaken  by  corporate  ethnographers.  as  discussed  above,   anxiety  among  anthropologists  regarding  the  colonial  roots  and  neo-­‐ colonial  implications  of  research  among  non-­‐western/‘less  developed’   peoples  provoked,  along  with  an  often  guilty  political  consciousness,  a   crisis  of  representation  regarding  the  content,  style,  production  and                                                                                                                   19  brun-­‐cotton  (2009)  sensitively  outlines  the  ethical  problems  and,  thus,  the   interpersonal  tensions  entailed  in  her  consulting  work  for  corporations.                                                                                                                                                                                    sedgwick  /  complicit  positioning       81   reception  of  anthropological  texts  themselves.  in  such  an  already-­‐highly-­‐ contested  representational  environment,  it  is  easy  enough  to  leave  the   stone  of  the  black  box  of  business  unturned,  leave  businesses’  culture(s)   of  secrecy,  secret.  at  least,  that  has  been  the  prevalent  approach  in   corporate  ethnography  to  date.       in  addition,  my  criticism  of  corporate  ethnographers  for   insufficiently  unpacking,  and  so  insufficiently  exposing  to  anthropological   scrutiny  the  corporate  contexts  in  which  they  work,  is  not  assisted  by   highly  theorized  discussion  in  anthropology  that  explicitly  challenges   traditional  understandings  of  anthropologists’  ethnographic  work  with   informants.  in  an  important  intervention  that  specifically  deals  with   contemporary  modern  contexts  and,  so,  may  be  especially  relevant  to   those  working  in  or  on  businesses,  ‘complicity’  is  preferred  over  what  has   been  previously  understood  as  rapport  with  informants  (marcus:  1997).   with  his  work  already  positioned  to  dislodge  previous  assumptions   regarding  anthropologists’  work,  i.e.,  the  influential  writing  culture   volume  (clifford  and  marcus  1986)  and  the  de  facto  movement  that   followed  it,  especially  in  north  american  cultural  anthropology,  marcus’   deployment  of  ‘complicity’  is  surely  a  rhetorical  strategy,  a  provocation:   the  common  sense  understanding  of  complicity  clearly  generates   suspicion  and,  therefore,  a  discomforting  response,  perhaps  especially   among  anthropologists  who,  whatever  their  faults,  attempt  to  maintain  a   high  ethical  threshold.     ‘complicity’  is  analyzed  by  marcus  both  through  an  offering  for   the  reader’s  consideration  of  its  oxford  english  dictionary  definitions  and   in  reference  to  geertz’  and  rosaldo’s  canonical  work.  he  proposes  new   ethnographic  configurations  through  which  anthropologists  reposition   their  relations  with  informants  toward  one  of  collaboration  in  knowledge   production.  (thus,  on  the  surface  of  it,  marcus’  idea  would  seem  to  map   easily  onto  the  consultative  work  of  corporate  ethnographers.)  the  goal,   therefore,  is  not  the  erstwhile  one-­‐way  ‘sharing’  of  the  informant’s   knowledge  (of  his  or  her  own  society)  with  the  (visiting)  ethnographer,   however  collaborative  that  ‘coeval’  (fabian  1983)  experience  might  be  for   anthropologist  and  informant  alike  (rabinow  1977).  rather,  for  marcus,   informants  are  understood  as  persons  operating  in  lifeworlds  similarly   complex  to  that  of  highly  trained,  cosmopolitan  anthropologists  or,   perhaps,  depending  on  how  broadly  it  is  construed,  within  the  same   overarching  lifeworld,  e.g.,  long  term,  elite,  western  educational   backgrounds,  etc.  marcus  claims  that  the  anthropologist  and  his   informant,  as  two  de  facto  experts,  ‘complicitly’  align  themselves  as  an   insider  pair  together  confronting  the  outside  world,  articulated  as  a  ‘third’   (marcus  1997).  the  external  ‘third’  world,  amorphous  and  shifting,   generates  anxiety  and  is  possibly  threatening:  it  seems  to  be  experienced   as  a  form  of  postmodern  anomie.  in  any  case,  the  core  point  is  that   knowledge  of  the  ‘third’  is  an  outcome,  or  a  fabrication,  of  the  relations  of   journal  of  business  anthropology,  6(1),  spring  2017      82   the  pair.  as  such,  the  complicit  co-­‐production  of  the  outside,  ‘third’  world,   or  parts  of  it,  seems  suggestively  therapeutic—the  external  ‘third’  could   certainly  be  a  fantasy—if,  unlike  therapy’s  typical  professional  form  (as  a   quasi-­‐confessional  space),  it  generates  knowledge  through  the  relations   of  two  parties  coming  to  this  process  as  presumed  equals.  (i  believe  the   point  is  that  the  privacy,  and  so  the  intimacy,  of  the  pair’s  joint  work  in   confronting  or  producing  the  ‘third’  encourages  the  complicity  of  the   relationship.20)     perhaps  marcus’  exploration  of  complicity  is  an  early  move   seeking  to  socialize,  through  externalization,  the  erstwhile  internal  world   of  the  reflexive,  highly  self-­‐conscious,  anthropologist  into,  e.g.,  recursive   relations  with  informants.  that  is,  a  revival  as  well  as  an  extension  of   anthropologists’  traditional,  deep-­‐seated  social  relations  with  informants.   in  this,  my  own  conceptualization  of  the  precursors  to  this  extension,  the   ‘traditional’  anthropologist,  through  fieldwork  in  faraway  climes,  i.e.,   extreme  commitment  to  personal  displacement,  was  preoccupied  with   the  ‘other’,  and  perhaps  at  risk  of  losing  himself  in  his  social  relations   with  his  interlocutors’  lifeworld.  (thus  the  warning  to  never  ‘go  native’.)   in  some  quarters,  i.e.,  cultural  anthropology,  this  self-­‐other  boundary   was,  perhaps  inadvertently,  made  more  explicit  in  the  work  of  the   ‘reflexive’  anthropologist.  here  the  anthropologist  would  indulge,  rather   than  repress,  the  personal,  private  emotional  labor  of  field  experience,   indeed,  in  its  more  narcissistic  forms,  becoming  self-­‐obsessed,  while   also—more  helpfully—remaining  aware  of  the  political  positionality  of   his  work  across  its  entire  trajectory:  from  access  to,  work  in  and  later   representations  of  ‘the  field’.     now  the  extension.  unlike  the  traditional  anthropologist,  who  is   apparently  obsessed  by  the  ‘other’,  the  ‘complicit’  anthropologist  need   not  lose  himself,  nor  adopt  the  self-­‐engrossed  attributes  of  the  reflexive   anthropologist,  but  should  resist  the  ‘other’,  conjoining  himself  with  the   reflexivity  of  his  similarly-­‐positioned  informant  vis-­‐à-­‐vis  an  othered   ‘third’.  in  a  later  articulation  along  these  lines,  informant-­‐collaborators   complicit  with  anthropologists  are  themselves  granted  the  status  of   quasi-­‐  or  ‘para-­‐’  ethnographers  (marcus  2000).  (or,  more  simply,   particular  artifacts  become  ‘para-­‐ethnographic’  and,  so,  worthy  of  our   attentions—for  example,  ‘anecdotal’  comments,  in  this  case  in  the   minutes  of  formal  meetings  of  bank  officials—as  they  suggest  the   ‘intuitive’  ‘structures  of  feeling’  typical  of  anthropologists’  sensitivities   (holmes  and  marcus  2006).)  positioned  in  broadly  overlapping  worlds  to   anthropologists,  para-­‐ethnographers  are  serious,  sensitive  and  thinking                                                                                                                   20  if  so,  albeit  moving  away  from  our  common  understanding  of  expertise,   perhaps  the  less  this  joint  work  is  able  to  identify  reality  in  the  outside  world,  or   have  it  confirmed  elsewhere,  the  more  the  complicit  relationship  would  be   reinforced?                                                                                                                                                                                  sedgwick  /  complicit  positioning       83   people  who  are,  similarly,  coping  with  the  ‘outside’  over  the  long  term.  it   seems  that  in  their  relations  with  anthropologists  they  are  effectively   ethnographers  in  the  making,  just  waiting  to  break  out  of  their  shells.  (or,   perhaps,  given  the  proliferation  of  ethnographic  methods  generally,  the   anthropologist  is  no  longer  required  at  all.)       in  any  case,  so  far,  the  several  ethnographic  projects  so   operationalized  indeed  do  unfold  with  collaborators  positioned  similarly   to  that  of  anthropologists  vis-­‐à-­‐vis  their  own  societies:  nearly  all   westerners,  they  are  bankers,  scions  of  wealthy  american  families,   european  politicians,  scientists,  artists,  architects  and  civil  servants.   marcus  acknowledges  these  persons  as  ‘experts  with  shared,  discovered,   and  negotiated  critical  sensibilities’  (marcus  2000)  similar  to   anthropologists.  although  he  makes  little  of  it—perhaps  because  he  is   aware  that  many  anthropologists  would  be  embarrassed  to  admit  to  such   a  status—moving  through  the  world  as  highly  educated,   cosmopolitan/metropolitan  types  (albeit,  no  doubt,  far  better  paid  than   anthropologists),  para-­‐ethnographers  enjoy  positions  of  significant   authority  in  their  own  society:  they  are,  like  us,  elites.  pushing  this  thread   even  further,  riles  articulates  her  work  with  financial  regulators  as   ‘…suggest[ing]  ways  of  thinking  about  problems  of  concern  to  them  and   ways  of  engaging  their  various  publics,  produced  recursively  and   relationally,  that  at  once  strike  at  the  heart  of  what  matters  to  them  and   yet  would  not  have  been  thinkable  outside  the  ethnographic   conversation….  [a]n  ethnographic  sensitivity  can  provide  venues  for   market  governance  and  a  professional  life  worth  living,  to  making   proposals  for  how  financial  markets  might  be  governed  (riles  2011:  6-­‐7)’.   such  configurations  of  relations  between  anthropologists  and  complicit   collaborators,  as  erstwhile  ‘informants’,  sound  remarkably  like  the  sort  of   private  interactions  that,  as  ordinary,  if  elite,  modern  persons,  we  seek   out,  and  pay  for,  from  any  number  of  knowledgeable  persons  from  whom   we  require  professional  advice:  physicians,  tax  accountants,  therapists,   business  advisors,  dentists,  etc.  ‘ethnographer’  as  specialist  consultant   with  a  broad  remit.     the  risks  of  the  para-­‐ethnographic  to  corporate  ethnography   while  i  have  discussed  some  of  marcus’  interesting  provocations  across   the  last  couple  of  decades,  by  no  means  is  my  elaboration  of  ‘new   ethnography’  exhaustive:  that  is  for  another  context.  after  all,  here  we  are   unpacking  the  problems  of  positionality  among  corporate  ethnographers.   the  point,  rather,  is  that  the  problematics  of  corporate  ethnography,  and   the  positionality  of  corporate  ethnographers,  run  parallel  with  techniques   some  anthropologists  are  suggesting  regarding  ethnographic  complicity   with  elite  informants  in  positions  of  authority.  indeed,  in  my  reading   through  the  work  of  corporate  ethnographers,  as  well  as  listening  to  their   journal  of  business  anthropology,  6(1),  spring  2017      84   (academic)  talks  and,  indeed,  getting  to  know  them,  i  have  been  surprised   that  they  seem  not  to  have  acknowledged,  evoked  or,  possibly,  embraced   the  move  to  collaborative/‘complicit’  ethnography  advocated  in  some   corners  of  anthropology.       alas,  while  fully  admitting  that  i  may  have  missed  something   earlier,  i  have  discovered  that  recently  this  has  begun  to  be  discussed  in   the  community  of  corporate  ethnographers.  without  wanting  to  make  too   much  of  a  project  that  is  clearly  in  progress,  i  raise  the  interesting  case  of   a  phd-­‐trained  anthropologist  now  ‘…work[ing]  for  a  strategy  and  design   firm…  [as]  a  professional  cultural  anthropologist  experienced  in  retail   innovation  and  branding  efforts  for  major  food  retailer  companies   (powell  2015).’  presumably  working  pro  bono,  powell  commendably   ‘assembled  a  team  of  experienced  retail  designers  with  whom  [he]  had   professional  relationships  to  work  alongside  community  development   experts  already  at  work  on  a  small  market  makeover  project’  of  a  corner   store  in  a  poor,  and  mainly  hispanic,  south  los  angeles  neighbourhood.   he,  thus,  ‘helped  facilitate  an  exchange  of  ideas  between   professional/corporate  food  retail  discourse—which  largely  lacked  an   awareness  of  how  to  affect  the  health  of  low-­‐income  communities—and   food  justice  discourse’.  in  addition,  in  due  course,  powell  serendipitously   encountered  an  anthropologist  who  was  working  on  the  food  justice   movement  in  los  angeles  and  decided  to  ‘form  [with  her]  an   ethnographic  collaborative  team  to  study  the  project’.       the  project  is  evidently  ‘doing  good’  and,  of  course,  is   intellectually  interesting  in  its  own  right.  what  i  want  to  highlight  are  the   multiple  roles  that  powell  plays  and,  indeed,  celebrates  in  this  one   context,  including  his  control  over  the  production  of  that  very  nexus.  that   is,  while  mobilizing  his  expertise  initially  as  a  food  retail  discourse   specialist,  he  states,  ‘i  also  had  the  ability  to  create  an  ethnographic  field   site,  as  well  as  the  ability  to  ethnographically  study  it.  [thus]  in  my   capacity  as  a  key  informant  (to  my  own  project),  i  am  arguably  a  para-­‐ ethnographer  who  is  co-­‐creating  ethnographic  analysis.’  over  time  powell   continued  his  specialist  retail  consultations,  and  the  redesigned  shop  is   apparently  a  success.  meanwhile,  as  the  ethnographic  work  on  the  site  he   has  himself  created  is  still  unfolding,  we  do  not  yet  know  about  the   entirety  of  the  project,  which,  after  all,  is  perhaps  meant  to  be   disaggregated.  this  process  further  suggests,  however,  questions   regarding  the  analytic  efficacy  claimed  for  ‘the  multiple  roles  inhabit[ed]   in  an  ethnography  and  redesign  project’  unfolding  in  the  same  space.     i  return  to  concerns  regarding  the  possible  loss  of  anthropological   knowledge  in  the  larger  move  toward  complicit,  para-­‐ethnographic   collaborations  that  i  raised  about  marcus’  initiatives.  powell  links  the   following  statement  about  the  rise  of  para-­‐ethnography  to  the  work  of  his   corporate  ethnographer  colleagues  who  ‘…understand  well  and  engage  in   [work],  either  as  consultants  to  client  groups  or  positioned  inside  of                                                                                                                                                                                sedgwick  /  complicit  positioning       85   larger  organizations  and  corporations’  and  who,  as  discussed  above,   organize  themselves  publicly  under  the  aegis  of  epic,  the  website  on   which  powell’s  article  appears.  he  states:  ‘[f]rom  technology  and  finance   to  consumer-­‐focused  industries  and  the  non-­‐profit  sector,  a  general  trend   toward  diversification  and  collaboration  is  prevalent…[with]…  these   processes…  increasingly  including  experts  with  “para-­‐ethnographic”   sensibilities—that  is,  people  who  think,  act  or  analyze  culture,   community,  identity  and  social  behaviors  in  ways  similar  to   anthropologists,  but  who  may  or  may  not  necessarily  have  any  formal   academic  training  in  anthropology.’  i  would  ask,  however,  in  considering   the  prospects  for  para-­‐ethnography,  if  authority  among  anthropologists  is   derived  from  their  sensitive  deployment  of  substantive  ethnography,  do   we  want  to  give  up  claims  on  this  expertise  quite  so  easily?       conclusion:  reverse  infusing  the  lifeworld  of  corporations     finally,  rather  than  a  sideshow,  the  tensions  with  anthropology   generated  by  the  work  of  corporate  ethnographers—in  studying  up,   down  and  sideways  in  businesses—confront  in  altogether  refreshing   ways  the  problems  generated  by  the  ‘crisis  of  representation’  and  its   methodological  extensions.  where  ethnographers  are  subordinates  to   informants,  as  is  typical  of  research  in  business  settings,  neo-­‐colonial   angst  might  be  put  entirely  to  the  side.  on  the  other  hand,  this  apparent   inversion  of  what  is  thought  of  as  the  traditional  informant-­‐ anthropologist  condition  allows  for  interesting  reassessments  of   anthropologists’  work  with  interlocutors,  and  their  work  with  us,  past   and  present.  thus  the  potential  exists  for  corporate  ethnographers  to   speak  to  new  formations  in  informant-­‐ethnographer  relations.     the  relevance  of  unpacking  the  critical  role  of  businesses  to  our   contemporary  modern  condition  cannot  go  underestimated.  rather  than   worrying  about  anthropology-­‐at-­‐home  and  the  suggested  loss  of  the   efficacy  through  estrangement  typical  of  traditional  anthropological   sites—working  with  ‘others’  in  foreign  spaces  and,  in  the  process,   eventually  making  the  strange  familiar—i  would  suggest  that  the   questions  raised  by  that  problem  be  inverted  to  deepen  our  insights.  that   is,  we  engage  the  really  hard  task  of  making  our  familiar  strange.  the   work  of  corporations  is  entirely  infused  into  our  contemporary  condition.   are  we  not,  in  fact,  estranged  from  reality  in  imagining  our  modern  lives   as  unfettered  by  corporations?  indeed  the  fantasy  of  our  individual   efficacy,  and  freedom,  may  be  the  most  important  work  these   organizations  perform.  understanding  that  our  resistance  to  the  effects  of   modern  corporations  is  porous  at  best,  better  that  we  get  inside  this   problem  through  fieldwork  of  ourselves  in  the  here  and  now.  and  better   still  if  we  do  that  through  conducting  substantive 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 1974  the  shaping  of  american  anthropology,  1883-­‐ 1911:  a  franz  boas  reader.  new  york:  basic  books.     stocking,  g.w.  1987  victorian  anthropology.  new  york:  free  press.   wallerstein,  i.  1979  the  capitalist  world  economy.  cambridge:  cambridge   university  press   wright,  s.  (ed.)  1994  anthropology  of  organizations.  london  and  new   york:  routledge.     journal  of  business  anthropology,  6(1),  spring  2017      88                                             mitchell  w  sedgwick  has  conducted  fieldwork  among  minorities,  the   aged,  and  in  rural  communities  in  japan  but,  from  the  early  1990s,  has   focused  ethnographically  on  japanese  multinational  corporations’   headquarters  and  subsidiaries  in  japan  and  abroad,  including  long  term   projects  in  thailand,  france,  and  on  the  us-­‐mexican  border.  current   fieldwork  includes  a  factory  community’s  ‘recovery’  from  japan’s  march   11,  2011  earthquake  and  tsunami.  more  broadly,  mitch  engages   anthropological  theory  and  methodology  in  relation  to  the  study  of  formal   organizations.  he  holds  a  ba  and  a  phd  in  anthropology,  respectively,   from  ucsc  and  the  university  of  cambridge,  where  he  was  attached  to   king’s  college,  and  has  an  mald  from  the  fletcher  school,  tufts.    mitch   has  held  positions  at  harvard,  university  of  tokyo,  cambridge,  and   oxford  brookes  university,  and  had  an  earlier  career  as  an  organizational   anthropologist  at  the  world  bank.  he  is  currently  senior  fellow  in  the   department  of  anthropology  at  the  lse.   research article productive uneasiness as a driver of knowledge creation processes in humanities-business collaborations lise tjørring, martina skrubbeltrang mahnke, matilde lykkebo petersen, mikka nielsen, and mark vacher abstract over the last few decades, danish humanities researchers have become increasingly expected to engage in business collaborations that have an impact beyond academia. although there is great willingness to work together, humanities-business collaborations are often tense affairs. this calls for a deeper understanding of the collaboration and knowledge creation processes. in this article, we develop the concept of productive uneasiness as a sensitizing tool to show how humanities scholars enable specific knowledge engagements. examining three empirical examples, we discuss how emerging tension, discomfort, and the like come into play in business-humanities collaborations, and how accepting and engaging in this uneasiness can become productive, eventually leading to innovation. the aim of the article is to provide a tool for reflection for humanities and social science researchers wishing to engage in humanities-business collaborations and, more generally, to spark a page 1 of 22 jba 12(1): 56-77 spring 2023 © the author(s) 2023 issn 2245-4217 www.cbs.dk/jba doi: https://doi.org/10.22 439/jba.v12i1.6910 tjørring, mahnke, petersen, nielsen, and vacher / productive uneasiness 57 discussion on how one of the core elements of the humanities – in-depth analysis of the intangible – can leverage business processes. keywords humanities, business, collaborations, knowledge creation, productive uneasiness. introduction a meeting. somewhere in denmark. five people sitting around a table, eagerly looking at each other. nervous smiles. two of the participants are humanities researchers. the other three belong to a medium-sized danish production company. the meeting was initiated by the researchers and met with a strong collaborative interest. the company had had some good experiences with university collaborations before and was very interested in initiating another one. this meeting, however, seems somewhat odd. while there is a common interest and strong willingness to work together, finding common ground is demanding, somewhat troublesome, creating an elusive tension and uneasiness. over the last few decades in denmark, there has been a growing political demand to create visible and accountable impact and conduct research that is closer to businesses and practitioners. the danish university law states that universities are expected to “exchange knowledge and competences with the surrounding society and encourage employees to participate in the public debate” (ministry of higher education and science 2019: §2, sec. 3). this is especially challenging for humanities research. while the creation of spin-offs, patents, and licenses is prevalent and well-established in the technical fields, knowledge creation processes in the humanities and social sciences are seldom as transferable. amongst humanities scholars, there is, nevertheless, a growing awareness of the need for more humanities-business collaborations, recognizing humanities’ vast knowledge of human beings as great potential for enriching the work of businesses (mahnke et al. 2022). like the rest of the university, humanistic disciplines are increasingly expected to contribute to society’s growth and engage more directly in collaborations that go beyond academia (oddershede 2009). and yet, humanities researchers’ pursuit of intangible subjects such as culture, mind, aesthetics, ethics, etc. often struggles in light of the growing demand for visible impact. the research project humanimpact based at the university of copenhagen was born out of the process outlined above. the aim of the humanimpact project was to build bridges between humanities research and small and medium-sized companies in order to support the companies’ innovation processes. during a four-year project period from journal of business anthropology, 12(1), spring 2023 58 2018-2022, 18 research projects for and in collaboration with companies were carried out. the five researchers (and authors of this article) who carried out the 18 research projects have diverse humanistic backgrounds ranging from communication studies to cultural studies and anthropology. drawing on our experience from the humanimpact project, the aim of this article is to explore and examine the specifics of knowledge creation processes in humanities-business collaborations. we aim to shed light on encounters between humanities researchers and business actors who have a common interest in collaborating on an equal footing. drawing on organizational theory and more general discussions on the nature of humanities research, we seek to contribute towards advancing our understanding of how humanistic in-depth analysis of mostly intangible aspects creates valuable knowledge in business contexts. we argue that humanities scholars enable specific knowledge engagements that contribute to enriching and leveraging business processes. to advance our understanding of this, we develop the concept of productive uneasiness as a sensitizing tool to illustrate what is unique in such collaborative knowledge creation processes. we argue that emerging tension, discomfort, and the like play an important role in businesshumanities collaborations, with implications on both the one and the other. accepting and engaging in this tension and discomfort is of great value, eventually leading to innovation. in a nutshell, we argue that humanities-business encounters can become more fruitful when embracing precisely that which is demanding and troublesome. with this article, we wish to inspire humanities researchers wanting to work more closely together with business partners and, further, hope to spark a more general discussion about the potential of humanities-business collaborations. we begin the article with a short presentation of theoretical conceptualizations of knowledge. we then shed light on the particularity of humanities knowledge and what this type of knowledge brings to a collaboration with business partners and their quest for knowledge. subsequently, we develop the concept of productive uneasiness, and we exemplify and discuss the use of the concept through the lens of three empirical examples. theoretical perspectives on knowledge creation modern businesses operate in complex, uncertain, and constantly changing environments, and an effective way of dealing with this is through the creation of knowledge (schulze and hoegl 2006). in the following, we briefly outline and discuss two theoretical approaches to knowledge creation, one grounded in organizational theory and one representing a feminist science perspective influential among humanities and social science researchers. these two approaches each offer their tjørring, mahnke, petersen, nielsen, and vacher / productive uneasiness 59 own way of viewing knowledge as becoming. with the presentation of the two theoretical approaches, we aim to situate our research in the context of viewing knowledge as becoming, thus distancing ourselves from a more traditional view of knowledge as provision, which has been prevailing in business knowledge research (thorpe et. al. 2005). within organizational theory, the widely applied theory of organizational knowledge creation (okct) focuses on knowledge creation processes through the lenses of epistemology and knowledge conversion (nonaka, krogh, and voelpel 2006). the theory argues against an instrumental view of knowledge which assumes that information needs to be gathered to solve a given, pre-formulated problem. it further states that knowledge is highly dependent on individual viewpoints and experiences (nonaka and takeuchi 1995; nonaka, krogh, and voelpel 2006). knowledge from this understanding is bound to people and their way of (inter-)acting with knowledge rather than something abstract and independent. knowledge creation processes are described as situationoriented in the sense that knowledge needs to enable the individual employee to define a situation and act upon it. another aspect of this theory is the distinction between knowledge as explicit or tacit. while explicit knowledge can be uttered and formulated, tacit knowledge is tied to human senses and intuition. ikujiro nonaka (1991) argues that knowledge is simultaneously explicit and tacit and that research should focus more on the interrelationship between these two concepts. donna haraway, a science and technology scholar known for her work within feminist theory, underscores the importance of understanding knowledge creation processes as matters and not only as an explicit distribution of what is known. according to her, one implication of approaching knowledge as provision is the risk of putting it on what she calls “the trial of strength” (haraway 2016: 42). on trials of strength, she argues, knowledge is pushed, defended, accused, accepted, or rejected, but rarely evolved, shared, or embraced. haraway does not provide a recipe for how to co-create knowledge, but underscores the concepts of “making-with” (haraway 2016: 58) and “bringing home” (haraway 2016: 43) as crucial preconditions. rather than focusing solely on delivering what we know, she argues, emphasis should also be put on whom we know and how knowledge is brought home by those involved in knowing (haraway 2016). similar to haraway, okct theory describes the process of knowledge creation as a process of becoming (nonaka et al. 2000). the interrelation of different kinds of knowledge is described through the concept of knowledge conversion, a process by which knowledge becomes or expands by means of externalization, internalization, socialization, and combination (nonaka, krogh, and voelpel 2006). each in their own way, both of these perspectives consider knowledge as being in a constant process of becoming and being tightly journal of business anthropology, 12(1), spring 2023 60 linked to its surroundings. the argument is made against a more traditional view of knowledge as provision, which has been prevailing (thorpe et. al 2005). this view of knowledge as something to be used and acquired places researchers in a position of knowledge providers who are expected to deliver analyses, insights, and results. humanities researchers may then end up in the precarious position of becoming defenders of what is known by the research field rather than becoming participants in the actual knowledge creation processes. what is knowing in the humanities? stem1 disciplines have long created knowledge for direct use in businesses through patents and product development, while knowledge from the humanities – with their rich and nuanced analysis and interpretations of complex questions – deals with much more diffuse and inferential contexts of application (cassity and ang 2006). this difference, we argue, plays a significant role in the positioning of researchers in collaborative settings. with a patent comes a defined product or procedure (the patented), which constitutes something possibly very complex, but nevertheless tangible. representing stem disciplines, researchers’ legitimacy and authority can be established with reference to how products/procedures function, are operated, or potentially transformed. in other words, what makes the stem researcher a relevant academic partner in the research-business collaboration often relates to knowing what something is, how it works, and when to intervene in order to control its processes. although researchers from the humanities also build their expertise on knowing what, how, and when,2 the reference to which their knowledge is validated is rarely a product or a process. in the following, we explore the particularity of humanities knowledge and the effect it has on the positioning of researchers. for this purpose, we present the thoughts of michel foucault and donna haraway. in 1966, foucault published les mots et les choses (the order of things) with an aim to conduct what he describes as “an archaeology of knowledge” in order to identify the conditions of what he sees as a prevalent knowledge regime. these conditions, he argues, change over time and influence what and how we know. the book is devoted to the emergence of the humanities and, of particular relevance to our argument, the conditions on which its knowledge is being produced. since its publication, the order of things has been a recurrent reference in the humanities and, in particular, in 1 stem is an acronym for the fields of science, technology, engineering, and maths. 2 for instance, what, how, and when are of crucial matter to historians and archaeologists. tjørring, mahnke, petersen, nielsen, and vacher / productive uneasiness 61 debates on knowledge production among its disciplines (bille, engbergpedersen, and gram-skjoldager 2019; smith 2005; lloyd and thacker 1997). according to foucault (1966), the humanities do not study what the world is, but what the world means. to know things within the humanities is to know the meaning in which they are embedded. emphasizing meaning over appearance situates the humanistic researcher in the position of a reader or an audience. what appears before the researcher is approached as a sign that refers beyond itself. to the humanities, study objects thus become expressions of something more than themselves (foucault 1966). a poem is more than words, a painting more than colors, and a piece of music more than sounds. foucault states that what defines and distinguishes humanistic academic research is the “unveiling of the non-conscious” through particular kinds of reading (1966: 364). to be a researcher from the humanities implies looking beyond what meets the eye. in this light, hermeneutics, semiotics and material semiotics, phenomenology, psychoanalysis, historical materialism, structuralism and post-structuralism are but a few of the wide range of analytical approaches used to unveil the tacit knowledge(s), the unconscious, the cultures, the structures, and the power relations which, in humanistic terms, represent the “non-conscious” in which the world is embedded. to us, this means that when we, as humanities researchers, enter into business collaborations, we are, in foucault’s words, readers of meaning embedded in the specific contexts we encounter. as an academic practice, however, humanistic research is more than just reading. it also involves articulating the outcome of an analysis. according to foucault, it is how words and things are related in humanities research that sets it apart from other ways of speaking about the world. humanistic analysis, he states, applies a vocabulary aimed at overflowing the boundaries of language in order to reach a hidden form, a foundation, an analytic finitude beyond appearance (1966: 336-340). foucault ends his extensive analysis by launching a stark critique of the humanities (1966: 385), asking: what can this supposedly deciphering eye actually see, what qualifies its visions and words over others, and by what powers are these legitimized? this critique has been repeated by others and forms an ongoing discussion. referring to foucault, gayatri spivak (2006) questions the legitimacy of speaking on behalf of others, and, in the book woman, native, other, trinh t. minh-ha (1989) accuses the very notion of “others” to be analyzed and spoken of as a construction of power and dominance. haraway (1988) challenges the gaze of the all-seeing eye and the universality of its knowledge more generally and points instead to the notion of situated knowledge. she insists that the sight of the researcher is always embodied, here echoing the phenomenological perspective that journal of business anthropology, 12(1), spring 2023 62 the human being perceives the world from a position of always already being embedded in the world. there is no view from nowhere (or above) that gains its objectivity through its distance – what haraway calls “the god trick in science” (1988: 582). instead, haraway argues for a partial perspective that actively seeks out the viewpoint of the unknown marginalized position while at the same time deconstructing its own position as a specific vision in a specific embodied reality (1988: 585). through such an approach, the unmarked dominant positions of the scientific gaze will cease to be unmarked and will become concrete actors in the specific social, technological, and cultural systems of which they form part. following foucault, the particularity of humanities knowledge lies in the ability to read meaning, while this also poses the problem of the humanities taking the position of the deciphering eye. engaging in haraway’s perspective, the gaze of the all-seeing eye is flawed, as all knowledge is situated. this requires humanities researchers to reflect on the situatedness of knowledge and the role and power of each partial perspective. the particularity of humanities knowledge can here be found in the ability to reflect on the situatedness of knowledge and the role of the parties involved. transferring the ideas of foucault and haraway into our own work with humanities-business collaborations, it is our understanding that what we bring as humanities researchers is investigations into what things mean, represent, and signify. we do not, however, adhere solely to the research position of a distanced analytical gaze – as pure readers. rather, we choose to approach business collaborations as embodied encounters in which analytical distance conflates into shared presence, and this very approach is the hallmark of humanities research, which has the potential for creating valuable knowledge. towards productive uneasiness as a sensitizing concept in order to make sense of the knowledge creation processes that happen in the humanities-business collaborations, we propose productive uneasiness as a sensitizing concept. here, sensitizing should be understood in its literal sense as being sensitive to and/or raising awareness of a particular issue. as a theoretical concept, it thus provides “a general sense of reference and guidance in approaching empirical instances” (blumer 1954: 7). the concept evolved out of a systematic analysis of our different collaborations, as we compared and examined our experiences and the respective knowledge creation processes across disciplines and business contexts. we concluded that a common aspect of all our collaborations is what we have termed productive uneasiness. this concept helps us to be sensitive towards, and remain aware of, the distinct particularity of humanities-business collaborations. by tjørring, mahnke, petersen, nielsen, and vacher / productive uneasiness 63 uneasiness, we seek to emphasize the subtle yet strong feelings of discomfort that appeared when we, as researchers, experienced the implications of being situated as interdependent subjects in collaborations with business partners. by productive, we refer to the point that the uncomfortable feelings tend to be a marker of productive potential and can be leveraged as such. before we exemplify productive uneasiness empirically, we will substantiate the concept with regard to the post-modern turn in anthropological methodology and delineate it towards theoretical conceptualizations of awkwardness, looking at similar feelings and experiences. the post-modern turn in anthropological methodology is most notably captured by james clifford and george e. marcus (1986), who argue for the need to acknowledge the researcher as an interdependent subject (rather than an objective observer) influencing and being influenced by the field. the post-modern turn has called upon humanities and social science researchers to adopt more reflexive research practices. however, as wanda pillow (2003) notes, reflexivity has mostly been interpreted as the need to rationally reflect on one’s position in the field and the theoretical, as well as personal, perspectives influencing one’s interpretations. through this type of reflexive practice, researchers have come to believe that their analyses become more right, valid, and true. pillow goes on to argue that researchers have moved into a somewhat “paralysed reflexivity” (2003: 186), meaning that they are stuck in a narrow conceptualization of what reflexivity is and how it should be performed. she argues that we need to move towards more uncomfortable reflexive practices, which means positioning reflexivity not as clarity or honesty, but as practices of confusing disruptions that embrace non-simple stories. our concept of productive uneasiness is meant as a move towards such uncomfortable reflexive practices and an embracement of the confusing disruptions that occur in humanitiesbusiness collaborations. as an element of discomfort, the feeling of awkwardness as being close to uneasiness has received much attention in recent literature, particularly in the context of doing ethnographic fieldwork. lynne hume and jane mulcock (2004) state that uncomfortable fieldwork is often really good fieldwork. in their work, they seek to normalize feelings of inadequacy, social failure, and awkwardness and point to the need to analyze situations and feelings of discomfort, as they can create new insights. being sensitive and reflective towards feelings of discomfort can, thus, create surprising insights both into the social worlds being studied and into the methodology being used. similarly, birgitte r. sørensen and matti weisdorf (2021) focus on awkward fieldwork moments in their study of the danish military. they identify and analyze awkward moments that appear in their fieldwork with veterans, in public discourse about the military, and in conversations with scholarly colleagues about journal of business anthropology, 12(1), spring 2023 64 their study. they use their focus on awkwardness to demonstrate conflicting normative views of the veteran and propose a pluralizing attitude to the field. juliette koning and can-seng ooi (2013) also emphasize the value of analyzing feelings of awkwardness. they find that awkwardness is rarely a focus in organizational ethnography and point out the enriching potential of identifying and analyzing feelings of awkwardness, showing how a focus on awkwardness brings new insights and enhances the quality of ethnographic work. our concept of productive uneasiness echoes these arguments. it differs, however, from previous work in the way that it primarily focuses on the feelings of discomfort that arise between the researcher and a collaboration partner and not between the researcher and the field. compared to the latter, the former type of relationship takes a more equal form in that it seeks to conduct research in collaboration with a business partner rather than for a business partner or solely for research purposes. when conducting research in collaboration with, other power dynamics are at play. one is not more powerful than the other, but the researcher and the business partner have different skills and different power positions which affect their relationship and, thereby, the collaboration process. productive uneasiness further differs in the choice of wording and the affiliated meaning. as described above, previous research on the topic mostly focuses on the feeling of awkwardness as a rather strong feeling of worry, discomfort, or anxiety (clegg 2012; koning and ooi 2013; sørensen and weisdorf 2021). with uneasiness, however, we want to primarily capture more subtle feelings such as a slight touch of worry or tension in the relationship. our concept of productive uneasiness is also inspired by a norm-critical analysis strategy whereby one reads the material through the lens of “what comes off as odd” and what “itches” in the text (see, amongst others, staunæs 2007). we use the norm-critical strategy as a way of unveiling the productive potential in the collaborative context. instead of looking at the structure, the norm, or the main characteristics, we look at the unwelcome irritation or annoyance; in other words, the lingering feeling of discomfort that tells us something about the cracks in our professional roles, letting us zoom in on the unplanned encounters. examining productive uneasiness through three empirical examples in the following three examples, we explore and discuss what happens to the humanistic research approach when we, as humanities researchers, encounter businesses in their settings and environments. how and why does it “itch” in the social setting of the humanities-business collaboration process? or, in other words, how and when does the uneasiness present tjørring, mahnke, petersen, nielsen, and vacher / productive uneasiness 65 itself, what does it stem from, and what potential does it create? we see rising tensions as both a challenge to the collaboration as well as its productive potential. it becomes a tool with which to embrace the humanities-business collaborations as embodied encounters inclusive of not just rational reflexivity, but also emotional reflexivity. the three examples have been chosen because they demonstrate three significant ways that knowledge creation is productively entangled with feelings of uneasiness: through asking odd questions, embracing unfamiliar spaces, and vulnerable self-reflection. the examples are anonymized versions of real collaborative situations in the humanimpact project and represent what we have identified as typical situations in the collaboration process. the examples are written from the personal perspective of an “i”, each representing a researcher in the group. following the description of the empirical examples, we will discuss further possibilities and the challenges of embracing productive uneasiness in university-business collaborations. example 1: knowledge creation through asking odd questions i, an anthropologist, participated in a meeting with three representatives from the company (a project manager, a sales director, and a designer). the meeting was a short follow-up meeting as part of a collaboration in which i was to examine how elderly people, with disabilities or frail bodies, experience challenges in the bathroom. after two weeks of ethnographic fieldwork, doing interviews, and observing bathroom usage, i was eager to share some insights from the sites i had visited and the interviews i had conducted. as an anthropologist, i was particularly interested in interactions, routines, and the social and ethical dimensions of the everyday practices of using the bathroom – or the meaning of these practices, as foucault would put it. as the fieldwork was taking place in private and intimate situations, i had only a few pictures to show the company, and i therefore chose to read aloud from my field notes in order to give a few examples of bathroom usage. the company representatives listened carefully to my accounts from the field. one of the examples demonstrated the use of a shower trolley at a rehabilitation center. besides serving as an assistive aid when showering residents, use of the trolley had a rehabilitative purpose. at the visit, i was shown how a shower would normally proceed and how different rehabilitation exercises were integrated into the practice. i noticed how the care worker moved around the room, interacting with both the trolley and the person lying on it. rehabilitation was naturally fundamental to all practices at the center, but rehabilitation as an ideal has generally become central to most care work (hansen and grosen 2019). the case, therefore, served as a good example of how to think rehabilitation as an ideal into the design of assistive aids. journal of business anthropology, 12(1), spring 2023 66 after finishing my presentation, i asked the company representatives if and to what extent they consider how to design products that not only compensate for users’ disabilities, but also promote rehabilitative purposes. the question sparked an interesting discussion about the product as not only an object to be used, but also as an active producer of certain uses – and what responsibility the company had as a producer not only of products, but also of practices. however, i was not the only person to ask questions. as i presented the example to the company representatives, the designer posed, with great interest, a number of questions: where do they put the towels? where is the drain located? how do the wheel brakes function? all questions i could not answer. i simply had not paid attention to any of those details because my research interest had a very different focus. my inability to answer the designer’s questions left an uneasy void in our conversations and i felt exposed as being the expert that was expected to know the field in detail and then could not answer these quite simple questions. i tried to recall the details that the designer was asking for while also trying to direct our conversation towards my own interests and questions. the conversation continued oscillating between these very concrete details and my attempt to talk about rehabilitation in design without ever getting closer to the location of the towels or the function of the wheel brakes. after leaving the meeting, i wondered: were our different questions a symptom of a collaboration in which we were too far removed from each other and were speaking two different languages, making it impossible to continue collaborating on a common project? was my knowledge from the field less useful given that i could not answer the designer’s questions? i do not think so. rather, the meeting and the situation of uneasiness displayed the importance of discussing what we perceive as relevant knowledge and of appreciating different perspectives. from the designer’s questions, i gained a glimpse into her way of thinking, investigating, and crafting, which i could take back into my forthcoming fieldwork. while i, as an anthropologist, was focusing on the practices i observed, the designer was already thinking of how to transform knowledge from the field into new and better products. from my questions and descriptions from the field, the company gained both detailed descriptions from everyday use of their products and an opportunity to discuss the values inherent in their products. moreover, and maybe even more importantly, our different questions initiated new reflections about what we were working towards as collaborators. the process of asking each other questions indicated a contour of something, maybe still unidentifiable, but something that could materialize into a product in time. how will this “something” look? what functions will it have? which needs will it satisfy? and how will it affect care work? the shape or function of the product was not clear to any of us. we may feel a little uneasy about not being able to answer these tjørring, mahnke, petersen, nielsen, and vacher / productive uneasiness 67 questions immediately, but our common, not yet materialized product, was being negotiated and slowly identified by all of us as a shared product as we remained in the uneasiness and got to know each other’s perspectives, work processes, and ideas about this “something” through the questions we asked each other. example 2: knowledge creation through embracing unfamiliar spaces in the following project, i was collaborating with two partners: a consultancy that specializes in organizational transformation and an interest organization (io) working for improvements in the quality of life of people with disabilities in denmark. my role was to contribute to the consultancy’s evaluation of the io’s work, in particular how their unique interaction and close connection with their members was relying on, and could be improved through, digital communication. besides my own meetings with the project managers in the io, i attended the evaluation workshops arranged and facilitated by the consultancy. the setup was knowledge co-creation through the concept of collaborative evaluation (see, for instance, petersen and søndergaard 2021). in what follows, i will zoom in on one of these evaluation workshops to explore how productive uneasiness was present in this meeting. the consultant led the workshop through different knowledge facilitation processes; for example, a session of group brainstorming in which the project managers and i, along with the workshop participants, wrote our input concerning a specific element in the evaluation on colored paper cards. we categorized the colored cards as a group effort, discussing each card. going through different variations of this process, the workshop was filled with dialogue, sharing thoughts and inputs, and reaching shared understandings of relatively complex and compressed knowledge about the io’s work. in the workshop, it was as if the consultant was mining out a presumed silent knowledge from each participant, helping that knowledge to take a specific form of colored cards and post-its on a whiteboard. at one point, the consultant said: “write short statements – we don’t want to be too academic. no one wants to read too much text.” i, the humanities researcher being the epitome of “academic,” felt slightly affronted by the thought of too much text being something unwanted. one could argue that my professional knowledge is, after all, primarily text-based. the consultant’s statement made me feel uneasy. i had to lay off my long-text-based approach because, in the context of the evaluation workshop, the valuable and intelligible format of knowledge was keywords, co-created visualizations on a board, dialogue, and discussion. since i was there to collaborate and contribute my professional expertise, it made me feel uneasy that my “academic” approach and virtues were not considered very useful or valued. so, what kind of post-it statements were useful? and how was my journal of business anthropology, 12(1), spring 2023 68 presence then valuable to the collaboration? how was my uneasiness productive? a typical challenge in humanities-business collaborations is the question of translating between knowledge spheres; for instance, the theoretical/academic vs. the practical/expert, and how to make research knowledge applicable to businesses – and to become intelligible to each other (tjørring and nielsen 2022; vacher 2022). the co-creation workshop proved to have a surprising practical solution to this problem in this specific collaboration. the dogma of the workshop was that everyone present should participate, which meant that any attempt to be outside the situation looking in as a quiet observer was not possible. everyone had to chime in on the brainstorms with no time for preparation or working through arguments such as textual references, for example. in that sense, the workshop dogma also implied that everyone present was to be trusted as knowledgeable on the subject matter. as i was participating on equal terms with the project managers of the io, our respective knowledge and experiences were, thus, set on equal terms. this is not to say that it suddenly made all of our knowledge and experience available and intelligible to each other. in the current task of evaluating the io’s work and organization, we had to put ideas and statements on the table so that we could take part in a shared process of building intelligible knowledge together. for this, i made a statement on a post-it saying that “authentic presence in digital communication” was an “effective mechanism” for the io to achieve its goals of including citizens with cognitive disabilities in volunteer organizations as volunteers. i based this statement on my knowledge of the io’s digital presence, of which i had already done a preliminary analysis, and found that they had an extraordinary authenticity and presence with their target group. i knew that this was only partly conscious from their side, as they had not prioritized their digital communication, even though they wanted it to have a stronger role in their recruitment process. my statement was put next to the io project managers’ statements such as “make adjustments in volunteer tasks to match abilities” and “clear expectations” as effective mechanisms. these statements were based on their practical expert knowledge from working every day on organizing and communicating with their members. as we discussed our statements with each other, they became part of a specific shared understanding of important knowledge in the evaluation process. when i put into words what was unique about their communication and social media presence, they reflected on the concepts of authenticity and presence in relation to their self-perception and work. furthermore, we discussed with the consultant how to align their communicative strategy to their values and goals as an io. tjørring, mahnke, petersen, nielsen, and vacher / productive uneasiness 69 before the workshop, i might unconsciously have fallen into the idea that i should provide specific knowledge to the io. however, in this shared workshop space with set ground rules – which made me uneasy as they constrained the use of my academic tools such as reading and comprehensive writing – we each participated in an accumulation of our separate knowledge. it became something shared and something new in this space. the uneasiness indicated an opportunity to enter a knowledge creation process not based on two parallel partners providing insights from each side of the table, but as a social process of becoming. the fact that i could not provide a lengthy written analysis not only made me uneasy about what to do, but also made me uneasy in not knowing how my knowledge would be transferred or provided – how it would “stick.” as we put up post-its on the wall, i experienced how the knowledge we collectively built up in a post-it pattern was transforming the ways in which we conceptualized certain topics, and how we created a terminology that was richer now that it involved our different input. i was further able to integrate a self-reflexive analytical perspective on the communication aspects of their work into the evaluation that would not have been included if i had not been present. the uneasiness turned out to be a premise in a space that was highly productive in terms of collaborative knowledge creation and learning about the collaboration partners. what if i had not participated in the workshops? i could have gone through with my part of the evaluation and just met with the project managers, interviewing them about their communication practices and analyzing their digital communication output. i might have concluded my evaluation in a textually-rich and analytically-dense report, wanting to really give them a worthy product. this, however, would have been of little value to them, as i learned in the workshops. in this situation, research-business collaboration also means participating in knowledge sharing practices. this means relaying what one knows in forms that are intelligible and valuable to others, and it means embracing unfamiliar spaces where dialogue and co-creation are making way for a becoming of knowledge as shared understanding. example 3: knowledge creation through vulnerable self-reflection in the following project, i was collaborating with a global environmental organization with the purpose of investigating the challenges of crosscultural collaboration in employee-leader relationships within the organization. the collaboration between the organization and me was facilitated through my monthly meetings with a follow-up group consisting of five employees in the organization. throughout these meetings, preliminary knowledge emanating from my data collection was presented, debated, and reflected upon. it was through these meetings journal of business anthropology, 12(1), spring 2023 70 that vulnerable self-reflection appeared and accelerated the knowledge creation, which the following two examples illustrate. at one of my meetings with the follow-up group, i presented the preliminary finding that the main leadership style was heavily based on the ideas of a non-hierarchical relationship between employee and leader and of direct communication being a positive thing. when i pointed out that these leadership values were dominating other types of leadership values in the company, it caused several reactions among the members of the follow-up group. firstly, the follow-up group objected to the point made and tried to soften the word dominate: “all staff are equal and we don’t favor one leadership style over others.” next, it caused the follow-up group to self-reflect on the matter and develop solutions to the problem: “we need to discuss whether we prefer this leadership style and how we balance this with respect for other employees and their leadership styles.” the research presented caused the members of the follow-up group to critically observe themselves. they felt exposed, and some of the leaders in the follow-up group took the research finding as a personal attack on their leadership style. empirically, this could be seen in the way in which members of the follow-up group started defending themselves as well as through changes in their body language (for example, looking troubled and moving restlessly). the research was not just presented; it was also felt and caused an uneasy feeling of vulnerability among the follow-up group members. the vulnerability also accelerated knowledge transfer, as the organization noted this finding more than others. this is in line with joshua w. clegg’s (2012) point that feelings of awkwardness and vulnerability tend to intensify the social experience and make it difficult to ignore. the feeling of vulnerability also accelerated further knowledge creation, as the finding was heavily discussed by members of the organization beyond the follow-up group. it brought forth nuances about leader-employee relations that i was able to use to sharpen the research findings. for example, it became clear that the ceo of the organization, who was not part of the follow-up group, had little interest in disseminating a research finding that was critical of his leadership style. this demonstrated the importance of the power dynamics between leaders and between leaders and employees, and it also made me reflect on my role as a researcher and my ability to disrupt those power dynamics. in this sense, knowledge creation became a collaborative process characterized by negotiations and a reciprocal interplay in the form of a serial movement back and forth between the follow-up group and me. the follow-up group had important knowledge and experience of what was going on in the organization, and i came with the position and skill of being able to look at things differently. neither of these stood alone, but became something together. tjørring, mahnke, petersen, nielsen, and vacher / productive uneasiness 71 another example shows the opposite situation where the organization caused me to “see myself” followed by a feeling of vulnerability. in the process of conducting research for the company, it was decided that the findings were to be presented in what i called a cultural guide, to be distributed to all employees. the cultural guide consisted of a presentation of my research in a systemized way under various topics. each topic was followed by a list of open-ended reflection questions in order to encourage the employees to discuss the issues in the organization and develop their own solutions to the problem. the idea was to create a product that was beneficial to all employees and respected the need for local and cultural embeddedness by way of posing open-ended questions. the follow-up group was generally very pleased with the cultural guide. however, one member of the group, an employee with a leadership position who had worked more than 10 years for the organization, commented: “i’m worried what the eastern european team will think. i don’t think they’ll get the point of the cultural guide. it might just make things worse, because we have exposed the problems, and that’s not a common way of doing things for them.” i realized that, despite the aim of creating a tool that could help employees in the organization improve their cultural collaboration skills across boundaries of difference, for some employees it could have the opposite effect. it made me reflect upon my work in a new way: that the very idea of exposing problems as well as the idea of encouraging discussions through open-ended questions was, in fact, highly embedded in my own understanding of how to develop solutions. i was feeling vulnerable in this situation and felt the comment from the organization manifesting itself as bodily discomfort, which could very well be an example of what haraway (1988) terms embodied encounter. i started asking myself questions such as: “should i not have thought about this as an anthropologist?” on a positive note, the comment from the follow-up group enabled me to critically reflect upon my own results and practices. the comment caused a collapse of knowledge, exposing my vulnerability as a researcher, but it also sparked new ways of thinking and new processes of knowledge production and meaning-making. for example, i started reflecting more upon what part of the research results to share, in what (other) way(s) and with whom. i also recognized new aspects of the importance of power dynamics in the organization and how these power dynamics took different forms. in both examples, the vulnerability caused by self-reflection was powerful in the sense that it immediately attracted the attention of the people involved in the discussions. it seemed to accelerate processes of knowledge creation, which was perhaps due to the emotional nature of feeling vulnerable. emotions such as feeling vulnerable can be treated with intellectual vigor and can assist rather than impede processes of understanding (davies 2010). taking the journal of business anthropology, 12(1), spring 2023 72 feeling of vulnerability, as well as other feelings of uneasiness, seriously is also an example of performing an inclusive reflexivity (pillow 2003; koning and ooi 2013), which in this case helped reveal nuances of power dynamics in the organization. to sum up, the knowledge creation happening in this example was enabled and accelerated through the vulnerable act of “seeing oneself.” the process of collaboration between the humanities researcher and the employees in the organization enabled these uneasy moments of self-reflection and sparked new insights. embracing productive uneasiness: possibilities and challenges in our three examples, we have shown how feelings of uneasiness were entangled with knowledge creation processes in different ways. in all examples, all partners involved demonstrated a strong desire to collaborate. it was nevertheless a meeting of two rather different approaches to the world, for which reason some degree of friction seemed inevitable. rather than trying to dissolve differences or erase friction, we started to embrace the insecurity and undecidedness, realizing the potential and openness that derives from these. the examples are meant to show three significant ways that uneasiness can become productive for knowledge creation. they also spurred new reflections on what knowledge is, how the business partners experienced the collaboration, and whether confrontation should be actively sought. in the following, we discuss these reflections. at the start of this article, we outlined different positions on what knowledge is and drew attention to a division between viewing knowledge as provision and knowledge as becoming. it seemed to be a division between a theoretical understanding of knowledge as becoming and a more traditional, common sense understanding of knowledge as provision. in the three examples, we showed that knowledge creation is a process of becoming influenced by both researchers and business partners. it is, however, worth noting that the process of becoming-with also entailed a certain element of coming-with-something; for example, a research skill or experience of the workings of the organization. it can, therefore, be argued that knowledge creation in the three examples had both elements of provision and becoming. even if we had found no empirical evidence for knowledge as provision in our analysis of the collaboration projects, it was nevertheless an empirical finding that the business partners often expected us to provide them with knowledge and, hence, perceived us as knowledge providers. as humanities researchers, we need to be aware of this distinction lurking in the background and address it up front. this will help to connect the different understandings and use them as fruitful resources. the different perceptions on knowledge also raise the question of whether university-business collaborations would benefit from explicit tjørring, mahnke, petersen, nielsen, and vacher / productive uneasiness 73 discussions about processes of knowledge creation. on the one hand, such discussions could facilitate closer collaboration ties and understandings of each other’s work, which could reveal new insights. on the other, such rather abstract discussions may likely be considered irrelevant and too time-consuming for business partners concerned with the practical value of their engagements. what all three examples also show is that the humanities researchers felt a responsibility for enabling processes of knowledge creation. whether the business partners felt a responsibility was less clear. nor was it clear whether they felt that they were playing an active part in knowledge creation even though we, as researchers, experienced this collaborative effect. we argue that knowledge creation processes should be made more visible and discussed as part of the collaboration process. perhaps feelings of uneasiness may naturally appear in such discussions and, thus, become productive. we propose making businesses aware of the concept of productive uneasiness as a tool rather than solely using the concept as a tool for researchers. this has the potential to strengthen business partners’ perception and experience of being an active part in the knowledge creation process. another consideration is whether we, as researchers, could gain from being more confrontative in collaboration processes and actively provoke feelings of uneasiness with the purpose of driving knowledge creation. there is probably a balance to be considered as too much confrontation could damage collaboration processes rather than make them productive. in the example of the environmental organization, the confrontation was not planned, but the presentation of preliminary research results happened to be confrontative and subsequently turned out to be productive. rather than advising one or the other, the point is to draw attention to the possibilities inherent in using the tool of productive uneasiness. it will always be up to the individual researcher to consider the relevance and possibilities in the specific context of which they form part. concluding remarks humanities researchers in denmark are called upon to show the impact of their work beyond academia. one way of doing so is by engaging in humanities-business collaborations. drawing on the experiences and research material gathered throughout the humanimpact project, we argue that humanities-business collaborations often take place in a space of tension, uneasiness, and/or discomfort. initially, this may appear as an obstacle; however, in our view, it is this productive uneasiness that has the potential to become one of the main drivers of knowledge creation in humanities-business collaborations. being able to read and embrace the human aspect of such collaborations has the potential to improve them. with each encounter also come moments of tension, uneasiness, and journal of business anthropology, 12(1), spring 2023 74 discomfort. this is what makes collaboration difficult, but this is also where humanities researchers have their advantages. they can look to their analytical and reflexive skill set and turn experienced uneasiness into something productive. focusing on knowledge as becoming implies shifting focus towards how knowledge is created. the process of becoming is a result in itself as both researchers and business partners come to think in new ways through the collaborative project. this does not mean that we cannot (or should not) pause and say “this is what we know” nor that we should stop recognizing that each part is coming-with-something. rather it means that any knowledge created is simultaneously knowledge with the potential of becoming something more. the humanities researcher’s ability to provide a specific analytical gaze, embedded and situated in the collaboration processes rather than distanced, is what creates novel forms of collaborative knowledge. translating the findings of this article into concrete hands-on advice for humanities researchers planning and/or wishing to enter humanities-business collaborations requires one specific point of attention; that is, any collaboration will involve a certain amount of tension. preparing for this tension and using – rather than avoiding – it can become an entry point to understanding and accelerating knowledge creation processes. in this article, we have shown three ways in which knowledge creation has been connected to feelings of uneasiness. our hope is that these examples will serve as inspirations to focus attention on productive uneasiness in researchers’ collaborations and empirical work. the moments of tension and uneasiness are potentially unique spaces of innovation that humanities researchers have a particular ability to read and use productively. references bille, m., engberg-pedersen, a., and gram-skjoldager, k. 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happens when an architect company acquires humanistic knowledge as a competitive business strategy.” in m. s. mahnke, m. nielsen, m. l. petersen, and l. tjørring (eds.), business meets the humanities: the human perspective in university-industry collaborations. new york: taylor & francis. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003195658-6 lise tjørring is a postdoctoral researcher in the department of crosscultural and regional studies at the university of copenhagen, denmark. she specializes in environmental anthropology and is currently conducting applied research for companies within the energy, climate, and environmental sector. martina skrubbeltrang mahnke is an associate professor in digital humanities at roskilde university, denmark. her research takes place at the crossroads between communication and digital media studies, and she engages mainly in questions related to algorithms and artificial intelligence, user-data relations, and users’ experiences of digital technology. matilde lykkebo petersen, phd, focuses her research on digital health communication, the patient perspective, reproductive health technologies, and bodily and somatic experiences. mikka nielsen is a medical anthropologist working at vive, the danish centre for social science research. mikka specializes in the phenomenology of mental illnesses, ageing, experiences of suffering, welfare technology, and doctor-patient communication. mark vacher is an associate professor at the saxo institute, university of copenhagen, denmark. he is a cultural analyst specializing in housing issues and urban anthropology. he focuses on gentrification and urban transformations and their impact on private homes, dwellings, and public domains. millennial & post-millennial perspectives anthropologists at work: challenging business “common sense” elisabeth powell introduction so, even among a lot of [business] crowds, if you come in and introduce yourself as an anthropologist, that’s code for “you’re going to be interesting, but useless. you’ll tell me a great story, but will not ultimately change how i do my job.” these words belong to richard hill, a global strategist and researcher with a phd in anthropology. during an interview, he recounted the challenges that he faced from colleagues who did not recognize his relevance as an anthropologist in business. he elaborated that, in business, quantitative data takes precedent over anything qualitative, which is deemed fluffy and inconclusive. anthropological inquiry and insight could not possibly be sufficient to make decisions on how to better serve current or future customers (notwithstanding the fact that anthropology specializes in understanding human behavior). through my twenty interviews with anthropologists in business, conducted for my thesis research at princeton university, i also learned that business counterparts often did not even know what an anthropologist was, dismissed them as “weird,” or conflated them with narrowly defined page 1 of 11 jba 12(1): 92-102 spring 2023 © the author(s) 2023 issn 2245-4217 www.cbs.dk/jba doi: https://doi.org/10.22 439/jba.v12i1.6920 powell / anthropologists at work 93 business “ethnographers,” which have become increasingly common across business contexts. while i have, in a previous jba essay in the millennial and postmillennial perspectives section (powell 2021), focused on the processes of transitioning into a foreign culture – that of business – this essay will explore and dimensionalize the misperceptions of anthropologists at work in corporate contexts. it was clear in my thesis research that all of the anthropologists i interviewed felt that they were perceived as counter-cultural beings in business. in various ways, their methods and insights defied what dominant actors in business have conventionally considered valid and valuable. and, while their foreigner status posed barriers in business, it also served as the anthropologist’s unique contribution. in this essay, i will precisely focus on the unique depth of value that anthropologists do bring to the business world. importantly, this value is intimately tied to their traditional academic training, which must then be translated into business terms (see also powell 2021). finally, i will close by considering the process by which business people may come to grasp that value – contingent upon anthropologists in business educating them through their work. “ethnography” hijacked through my interviews, i learned that, to the “natives” comprising the world of business, the anthropologist is a foreign, perhaps “weird,” and maybe even “frightening” being. indeed, rita denny, phd anthropologist and founder of a consulting firm, reflected that clients commonly have a “partial and sometimes caricatured view of what anthropology is.” mirroring the tropes in press articles on anthropologists in business, she explained that clients may believe that anthropologists are “exotic,” “pithhelmeted,” and study only “exotic people.” consistent with denny’s observations, my research suggests that anthropology and its effective application are, at best, misunderstood by non-anthropologists in business. before exposure to the work of anthropologists, business people seem to rarely understand what an anthropological perspective can bring to the table. perhaps even more problematic, many business people apparently think that they know what anthropologists are, though their perceptions are often mistaken. because they are not understood, anthropologists often face challenges in being able to contribute to business in the depth that their anthropological educations can provide. this confusion is only exacerbated by the proliferation of “ethnography” within the business landscape (especially in consumer and market research), along with the improper assumption that journal of business anthropology, 12(1), spring 2023 94 anthropologists are these “ethnographers.” on the surface, the popularization of ethnography in business might seem like an encouraging trend for anthropologists, but it has, as john sherry emphasized in an interview, “made the marketplace for ethnography and anthropology in business a real mess.” in talking about the growing presence of “ethnographers” in the business world, one of my informants described these individuals colorfully as “data sluts”: they “are not analyzing, interpreting, making sense, thinking about the purpose, thinking about the implications, and thinking about how it is used.” rather, these “ethnographers” are merely going “out in the field,” collecting data, and reporting on that data without any critical analysis or theoretical application. this informant refuses to simply collect data and then give that data to someone else to interpret from another perspective. however, he acknowledged that this costs him business, for employers often seek cheaper and quicker “ethnographers” – despite the fact that those people lack the analytical expertise and holistic perspective of an academically trained anthropologist required to get to deep insight. phd anthropologist and ceo of a california-based research firm, ken c. erickson, recounted an experience in which a client clearly failed to understand the anthropological interpretation requisite to make sense of “data collection.” he explained that a vice president from coca-cola contacted him with a request to interpret a number of videotapes filmed by “ethnographers” of consumers eating breakfast. he explained: “cocacola paid a lot of money for all these videotapes of what people do for breakfast with no analysis and no context, no explanation of why people were doing what they were doing. it was utterly useless to them.” erickson recounted emphatically responding to the vice president: “no! i wasn’t there when [the data] was collected, so i don’t know what it means.” this is a striking example of the distinction between filming (which anyone with a camera is capable of doing) and attending to and interpreting observations in their broader context through an anthropological analytical lens. if anthropological work is not defined by simply a set of methodological techniques, then what does define the contribution of academically trained anthropologists in business? can nonanthropologists come to understand and appreciate anthropologists for more than just their “methods”? value beyond methodology in their book, doing anthropology in consumer research, patricia sunderland and rita denny (2007) expand upon the reductionist adoption of anthropology in business: “the truly troubling side of the powell / anthropologists at work 95 proliferation of ethnography in consumer research, then, has been the relative absence of an accompanying proliferation of anthropological cultural analysis” (2007: 14). they contend that ethnography conducted in business contexts often masquerades as “anthropological” while actually serving “as simply a means to obtain deeper psychological understanding of a target audience” (2007: 14). the cultural analysis, they argue, is the critical way by which anthropologists deliver powerful, deep human insights for business. similarly lamenting the emergence of “ethnography” in the marketplace as a “catch-phrase term for in-person research,” susan mitchell, a phd anthropologist working in global research and design, explained that she continuously feels a need to educate her colleagues that ethnography transcends simply “going into people’s homes and interviewing them and taking some pictures.” indeed, she confided: “i have this soap box that i’m constantly on: ‘ethnography is not a method, folks’.” mitchell believes that any method of data collection might be used, depending on the research questions you are asking. what is crucial is the analytic approach that parcels out contradictions and consistencies between what people “say” and what they “do” – a classic academic anthropological distinction addressed powerfully through immersive participant observation. she contended that “ethnography” is the final, meaningful story at the end of research that accounts for “differences between people’s actual behavior and what they say they’re doing and what their beliefs are.” for susan squires, a professor of applied anthropology and consultant with a phd in anthropology, the critical value added by anthropologists in business is in the interpretation of great observations or semi-structured interviews, using an analytical frame embedded in theory and attentive to patterns, themes, and the cultural context. she explained her holistic perspective that includes cultural context, “political relationships, economic considerations, kinship and other social networks” that all fit together “in a way that can explain a group of people with common beliefs, values, rituals that no other discipline can.” moreover, squires remarked that the theory around “how to set up a good research design,” not just the methods themselves, distinguishes anthropologists in business. erickson reinforced the importance of theory for anthropologists in business with his view of the threefold primary value of anthropology. first, he explained that anthropology has a body of ethnographies with information on “how people live their daily lives all around the world.” in his view, anthropologists often forget that rich resource. second, if anthropologists have not already studied the topic, then anthropology provides a methodological approach to “go out into the field and journal of business anthropology, 12(1), spring 2023 96 understand.” third, he emphasized that anthropological theory “is very useful in a business setting.” as an example, erickson used the theoretical concept of “rites of passage” in his sense-making on a project for boeing. for me, prior to my research, rites of passage had only figured in a classroom and certainly not on an airplane. in fact, a number of my informants described how they drew upon the anthropological theoretical concepts of ritual process and “rites de passage” (famously proposed by arnold van gennep (1960) and elaborated by victor turner (1967)) to make sense of consumer experiences. erickson explained that he and his team applied the theory of rites of passage “to the airline passenger experience studying how disabled people fly. what is their experience like? the one thing that nobody had ever thought of before was applying the context of a ritual process to a flight.” erickson’s comments reflect the “novelty” of applying anthropological theory to understand consumer experiences in business, and they support the previous discussion regarding how the anthropologists’ value (and challenge) in business is intertwined with their position as counter to business common sense. though he did not explicitly refer to turner’s concept of “liminality,” erickson’s analysis of the flight clearly reflects turner’s work: “when you are in the air, you can be hypersexual, the food is different, you have restricted movement, restricted dietary options. it is just like ritual process.” intriguingly, when erickson asked his client if he could present the project findings to an academic conference, boeing did not ask him to keep the “tactical” implications of his work confidential (for instance, the challenges faced by disabled passengers using “the seatbelts or buttons, or how hard it is to move your wheelchair down the aisle”). these aspects, the clients reasoned, competitors likely already knew. to erickson’s surprise, they restricted him from revealing the application of his anthropological theory, viewing the flying experience through the lens of ritual process. this example testifies powerfully to a client’s recognition and appreciation of how valuable classic anthropological theory can be when applied to make sense of consumer contexts. reflecting on her “use” of anthropology, and how that has shifted over her career, phd anthropologist with research, management, and consulting experience, melissa cefkin told me that she continues to use anthropological conceptual frameworks in her work: this has everything to do with thinking about forms of social organization – thinking about social cultural patterns of work and the meanings and values in identities that get constructed by way of people’s working identities and lives. anthropological theories even help answer questions about work/family divides, or work and play as contrasting concepts. powell / anthropologists at work 97 strikingly, her “anthropological” identity hinges not upon what she does, but how she does her work: the analytical, interpretive frame for interpreting data. she explained that, at times, she finds herself explicitly drawing on “a particular social theory or cultural understanding,” but that more often her general theoretical training helps to inform how she frames things. in my conversation with genevieve bell, former intel vice president, technologist, and futurist with a phd in anthropology, she conveyed to me that anthropological theory is critical to the value that she can add within her business context: i think that there is something about the fact that i was trained as a theoretician that is actually incredibly important to my job. for better or for worse, i think you can teach pretty much anyone to do fieldwork. most people do a good interview. almost anyone can transcribe a genealogy, and most people can take photos. making sense of all of that, and making claims and knowledge on the basis of it, requires more than just an ability to transcribe and summarize. it requires theory. for me, i think theory is crucial. while noting the critical relevance of theory in her work, bell emphasized that anthropological theory by itself was not valuable in business (see also powell 2021). rather, the theory must be applied “in service of interpretation and action,” as she put it. bell elaborated that, with her academic program’s emphasis on theory, she could explain baudrillard and durkheim in their full theoretical complexity. however, that would not be an effective approach to communication in her business environment full of engineers. if she were to tell a room of engineers that she was going to explain foucault to them, “they would just stop listening.” rather, she must effectively translate foucault’s work into terms meaningful to her audience (which requires her understanding the audience’s worldviews): they understand that governments do things to citizens, and they use their body to do it. they understand that the power is not always evenly distributed. they understand that not everything that is said is what is meant. they understand that the things that are not said are often as important as the things that are, and they understand some things that are theoretical. bell explained that she and her colleagues have conversations about all of those issues without her ever explicitly mentioning foucault. similar to several of my informants, anthropological theory is a critical resource in her sense-making, but she must tailor her communication of it in a way that enables others to understand. journal of business anthropology, 12(1), spring 2023 98 an unexpected career in teaching despite the widespread misunderstanding of anthropology in business, squires noted that people in the business world could be educated on anthropology, primarily through exposure to an anthropologist’s work. this exposure is a function of the collaborative, multidisciplinary nature of many business contexts where the anthropologist is part of a team comprised of members across multiple business functions and levels of authority. over the course of her career, squires has worked on teams with “engineers, physicists, industrial designers, educators, sociologists, psychologists, geographers, medical doctors, and nurses.” she recalled that most of these colleagues “are primarily interested in the methods to start.” in the analysis stage of research, many come to understand the unique perspective and analytical expertise that she, as an anthropologist, brings to the table. rather than performing “statistical analysis,” she leads the group to look for “shared patterns” in the data collected (for instance, “transcriptions of conversations, observational notes, or actual visuals”). here, squires touched upon a crucial distinction between the “common sense” business reliance upon quantitative data and an anthropological approach. the bias toward “numbers” poses a challenge, but also an opportunity for anthropologists to change their colleagues’ ways of thinking and, in doing so, add value to the business. after the group analysis, squires explained that “you have a theoretical model or explanation for what you have observed,” then you translate those conclusions into “recommendations for how you might make a product that is more useful to people or a service that is going to intervene in a bad situation.” through this collaborative exposure to anthropological analysis, squires is able to educate her colleagues on the depth of what anthropologists are and do – and, implicitly, on the limits of relying upon quantitative approaches. indeed, a hallmark of academic anthropological research is to study “small samples” in greater depth of time, relationship, and interpretation. this is directly in opposition to the business obsession with large sample sizes with statistical significance. to illustrate both the challenge and the opportunity of effectively educating an initially uninformed employer, phd anthropologist, professor of anthropology, and consultant, patricia sachs-chess, related an entertaining, though poignant, experience. on her third day of work at nynex, sachs-chess was sitting with jim (her boss) and another employee at the phone company. sachs-chess recalled: “it is morning, we have coffee, and jim says, ‘so, i want you to meet pat. she is an anthropologist.’ the guy had just taken a sip of coffee, and he literally spit it out! i thought, ‘how weird is that?’ it was unbelievable.” however, sachs-chess’ “unbelievable” experience on day three turned into a “good news story.” she continued: powell / anthropologists at work 99 but fast forward maybe about a year and a half. jim comes up and says, ‘now you know how successful you are.’ i said, ‘how?’ he said, ‘i was just at a meeting, and four different vice presidents all claimed that they hired you, and none of them did.’ there is the mark of success. it is the mark of when your work is taken on and is valuable, everybody claims you. to me, this story reflects the powerful role that anthropologists in business can play in educating non-anthropologists on the role and value of anthropology – not in a formal classroom setting as is typical of academic anthropology professors, or through scholarly writing, but by “teaching” through “doing.” similarly, sunderland described a process of educating clients who initially lack understanding of what “the anthropologists bring to the party as opposed to a psychologist or a sociologist or a communications specialist or a designer” through engagement together on a research project. she informed me that, often, client representatives participate in their in-home or in-store observations and conversations with customers. sunderland explained that this real-life exposure to their actual customers is often an “eye opening” moment for clients who have never actually gone out to speak with customers and observe how their products are being used. however, the real moment of understanding anthropology comes after the analysis stage. sunderland explained: “often, when we come back with our report a couple weeks later, they will say, ‘you saw completely different things than [we] did!’” the depth of meaning that sunderland and her team draw out of their research – that “other level of interpretation or analysis” – surprises clients who “were not looking at it that way.” akin to sunderland, maryann mccabe, phd anthropologist and consumer research firm founder, described that, by bringing clients along throughout the work process, they better understand and appreciate the value of anthropological perspectives and analytical approaches. she explained that, often, clients’ eyes are opened merely by being in the field, hearing and observing first-hand the experiences of their consumers. remarkably, many have never been with “real” consumers. however, the true “eye opening” moment comes when she delivers her team’s analysis to the clients, and they realize that the team was able to “see” things that they were oblivious to. these profoundly similar comments suggest that the difference between members of business and academic anthropology cultures hinges not just upon values, sociopolitical systems, and language. rather, the very way by which each “sees” the world is different. this difference in worldviews, i think, derives critically from business anthropologists’ academic anthropological theoretical educations. this academicallyjournal of business anthropology, 12(1), spring 2023 100 rooted anthropological perspective is the lens by which most of my informants seem to make sense of their world, and it is crucial to their ability to add value to business. clearly, anthropologists contribute not only their data collection techniques, despite that widespread misperception among many business people. for mitchell, part of the process of educating non-anthropologists is tied to her commitment to maintaining her identity as “anthropologist” in her work. she commented that, in her experience, anthropologists are unique among her colleagues across the company for holding onto their distinctive anthropological identities. for mitchell, this is essential because anthropologists approach problems from a distinctive perspective, and she wants that distinctiveness to be maintained and acknowledged. she explained: i have always kind of viewed myself as an ambassador of anthropology in certain ways, a defender of it, and a person who’s trying to get people to really understand the value of it – not just the methods that are associated with it. i think that it is really a profession in the truest sense, where you are professing what you do. strikingly, as reflected in mitchell’s comments, many of these anthropologists do indeed seem to have “teaching careers,” though not in the academic context that they had intended while in their graduate studies. indeed, while anthropologists face barriers and biases as they seek to convey the value of their academic anthropological conceptual resources, these are also central to their contributions. if people in business could “see” in the same way that an academically trained anthropologist can “see,” then what value would anthropologists in business add? ruminations the observations and anecdotes in this essay reflect the reality that anthropologists in business must justify their anthropological approaches and value as opposed to more “common sense” business approaches (for instance, reliance upon quantitative data and psychology-oriented research). furthermore, they must also defend themselves against, and distinguish themselves from, anthropology imposters that have proliferated within the business world – confusing “anthropologists” and “ethnographers” with “data collectors” and “reporters.” despite the challenges that anthropologists face, we know from clifford geertz (1975) that “common sense” is a “cultural system.” thus, there are alternative systems, and the hegemonic business culture could (and, i argue, will) change in the future. i believe that anthropologists in business who maintain commitment to their academic anthropological powell / anthropologists at work 101 perspectives and cultural identities, and who are able to strike the challenging balance between professing anthropology and being intelligible to people in business, are contributing project-by-project in altering the “common sense” system of business. business people can, and are, learning through exposure to academically trained anthropologists that the true value of anthropology in business (as anywhere) transcends a narrow set of data collection techniques. rather, the anthropologist’s value is constituted by their traditional academic theoretical and conceptual resources, translated so that they are culturally relevant (to business). while anthropologists use various anthropological concepts (for instance, rituals and liminality), the consistent thread across them all is their treatment of “economic activity” as deeply embedded in social contexts and laden with culturally contingent meaning. these anthropologists see business challenges through a distinct human-centric lens that leads to profoundly different questions and conclusions than would be typical from many business people. despite the challenges noted in this essay, it is clear that anthropologists in business leverage their academic educations to bring tremendous value in the “real world.” interviews bell, genevieve. 2014. skype interview. march 12, 2014. cefkin, melissa. 2014. skype interview. february 6, 2014. denny, rita. 2014. skype interview. january 28, 2014. hill, richard.* 2014. skype interview. february 10, 2014. mccabe, maryann. 2014. skype interview. february 11, 2014. mitchell, susan.* 2014. skype interview. february 13, 2014. sachs-chess, patricia. 2014. skype interview. january 20, 2014. sherry, john. 2014. skype interview. january 21, 2014. squires, susan. 2014 skype interview. january 22, 2014. references erickson, k. 1999. “postal modernism and anthropological relevance at hallmark cards, inc.” anthropology news 40(2): 6. https://doi.org/10.1111/an.1999.40.3.17 * these interviewees are anonymous per their request. journal of business anthropology, 12(1), spring 2023 102 geertz, c. 1975. “common sense as a cultural system.” the antioch review 33(1): 5-26. https://doi.org/10.2307/4637616 powell, e. 2021. “fieldwork in a foreign culture: business.” journal of business anthropology 10(2): 368-385. https://doi.org/10.22439/jba.v10i2.6418 sunderland, p. and denny, r. 2007. doing anthropology in consumer research. walnut creek, ca: left coast press. turner, v. 1967. “betwixt and between: the liminal period in rites de passage.” in the forest of symbols (pp. 93-111). ithaca, ny: cornell university press. van gennep, a. 1960[1908]. rites of passage. chicago: university of chicago press. https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226027180.001.0001 elisabeth powell graduated phi beta kappa and with highest honors from princeton university, where she earned first prize for her senior thesis anthropologists in business: teaching anthropology in the classroom of everyday life. she is a published author and speaker and has applied her anthropological lens to drive human-centered, global innovation and brand strategy for her clients such as hilton, uber, diageo, apple, kraft, estee lauder, saks fifth avenue, and google. she is currently attending the harvard business school in pursuit of her masters in business administration (m.b.a.) and interning as a consultant at the boston consulting group, where she plans to focus on people and organizational performance and the future of work. vi opdaterer systemet vi opdaterer systemet... rauli.cbs.dk opdateres og er snart tilgængeligt.