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 ground-

breaking 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

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Journal of Business Anthropology, 1(1), Spring 2012

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

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

plantation in the Himalayan foothills or in a Bulgarian rose field; or

among drivers of a camel train in the Saudi Arabian desert. Our counter-

argument 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 ‘para-

ethnography’ (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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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 mid-

1990s. 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 business-

related 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

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

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

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

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!

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