Chapter 1 - What Is Business Anthropology Flashcards
Anthropology
The study of human society and culture.
But also:
The study of human interaction; how we live, what we value, what matters to people and how they are organised.
Behaviours, habits, morals, beliefs, religion etc.
How? - Fieldwork (participant observation) and qualitative research.
Mary Douglas
British Anthropologist
- Works on classification – how people make worlds make sense
- She discovered that people have a habit of structuring the world in their heads into certain categories. ‘Good + bad’ ‘Clean + dirty’ ‘high + low’ (binary oppositions). Through these binary oppositions, people classify the world in their minds and make sense of the world.
• She was particularly fascinated in the cultural understand of ‘dirt’ – what is clean and what is dirty and how this varies for societies around the world.
• Famous quote: “Dirt is matter out of place”
• What is clean and not clean can differ according to culture, what social context one is in.
e.g. Pangolin, Lele tribe. (An anomaly) people cannot classify it.
Classification helps people define things and thus become comfortable with them. When something escapes classification it becomes ‘taboo’ I.e. Something dirty.
• Mary Douglas’ work shows how cultural understanding of dirt can better help us understand how people consume, how people clean, how people arrange their words, and how they attribute meanings to objects and practices.
Malinowski
“The founder of field work” - In Trobriand Islands - WW1 started so was trapped. Ending up spending 2 years there. - Ended up doing extensive fieldwork and writing the first every ethnography.
• He became aware that when you spend a prolonged amount of time with a certain culture, you are able to better understand that culture.
- Fieldworks came to be the standard practice of anthropologists
He is famous for ‘Holism’ - Looking at society as a whole in order to understand events.
- One of the most interesting theoretical incites Malinoski developed, was that every practice, be it eating, dancing etc, is related to a bigger, cultural whole.
- Business anthropologists today pay attention to this sense of holism. We came to understand that you cannot separate practices like buying or marketing or branding from a bigger cultural whole.
- This is what makes ethnography and anthropologists useful to businesses.
- The fact that they explore everyday practices of consumption be relating it to culture as a whole.
Geertz
He was a US anthropologist
Performed fieldwork in Bali and Morocco.
His theory has to do with meaning and symbolism – he believed that everyday practices or everyday objects used in daily life have a certain symbolism.
“Man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun… I take culture to be those webs and the analysis of culture… anthropology is an interpretative science in search of meaning”
“Theory of thick description” - goes back to Holism, it is a way to access culture through layers of meaning. It says that in order to understand an event we must look at all events.
• By writing about these layers separately, they you make a thick text that conveys everyday meaning.
• Observing, empathy, experience and writing.
What is the relationship between business and anthropology?
Anthropology can help us understand how:
- Businesses arise in the modern world
- How companies organise themselves
- Why people buy what they buy
- How people use what they buy
- How culture influences what people buy
- What does it mean to look at branding, marketing and culture through an anthropological perspective
Why business anthropology?
Genevive Bell
- She was Head Anthropologist at Intel.
• Many companies now have in-house anthropologist departments
• Other businesses go to anthropological agencies and ask anthropologists to work for them
•Genevive Bell: “I knew I needed anthropologists and other social scientists other than myself, because you want people who have that training, that deep connection to people, and an ability to understand what they’re telling you even when they’re not saying anything”
•Quote is important is because she is saying that when you look around you there are all these cultural ques, with meaning, the way people communicate with each other, the ways people talk to each other, in the way people act, eat, walk, buy things. All these practices have deep cultural meaning. What she suggests in order to develop a deeper meaning of these actions, you need to develop a certain anthropological understanding of the world
• This is why ethnographers and anthropologists are useful to business: its because they adopt this perspective of understanding the cultural dimensions of consumption, marketing, branding etc.
• This understanding of culture is vital in corporate environment. Consumers come all over world, when companies try and enter new markets – its important to understand the cultural dimensions of these aspects such as consumption, communication, branding etc.
Participant observation/fieldword:
Anthropologists live with, watch and talk to people - they do what is called qualitative research.
By spending this prolonged amount of time with them, by participating and observing them, you start thinking like them, and picking up on those cultural ques like Genevive was talking about. You start understanding there practices and what they say to each other is full of meaning, and this constitutes of culture
Business Anthropology?
- Examines how culture affects businesses, organisations and behaviors
- Focus on companies, consumers, products and services
- Analysis, understanding and product development
- Associated with marketing and technology sectors
- Uses qualitative research – not surveys. Data from note taking, videoing, photographs, talking with people and asking them things like ‘why do you buy this’ ‘what is the significance of this product to you and your family?’
- Do research in corporation, business places, products and services
- Pay particular emphasis to peoples relations to objects to people.
- Through participant observation, anthropologists can gather information that can get be useful for development new products
- Methods are observation, dialogue, film and participation
An anthropologist’s fieldwork
- participant in its everyday life and special occasions taking notes and recording every small detail.
- For an extended period of time, between one and two years.
- Anthropologists then write their findings up as what are called ‘ethnographies’ – writing about people and social life.
- Some anthropologists make films/documentaries as well.
MAIN LEGACIES FROM GEERTZ
- Fieldwork as participation
- Object is culture
- Tied to social organisation
- Method is holistic
- Thick description and interpretation = ethnography
- Ethnographic methods as observation and analysis
