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

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Desjeux / The itinerary approach

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

“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

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 micro-

individual 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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.