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1、What Anthropology Brings to BusinessA Foreword for the Textbook General Business Anthropology (2nd edition)Alex Stewart, Marquette UniversityAnthropology has a great deal to offer for business researchers, whether their research is applied and commercial or “pure” and foundational. Here are seven ma
2、jor advantages of an anthropological approach: patient participant observation, insider vistas, methodological versatility, relevant expertise, cross-cultural alertness, a bias for the underdog, and respectful collaboration.1. Patient participant observation. Applied anthropologists face stricter de
3、adlines than do their disciplinary colleagues (Aguilera, 1996). However, all anthropologists try to make long-term commitments to stick with it and learn a social and cultural setting in depth (Hamada Connolly, 2011; Tian, 2011). Their patience contrasts with most “qualitative” research in business
4、schools, which pays more attention to supposedly theoretical elaborations than it does to data quality or to the basis of that quality in fieldwork duration, participant roles, and attention to context (Stewart, 1998).2. Insider vistas. The reward for the anthropologists stints of immersion is acces
5、s to insiders vistas: to actions, interactions, and expressions that typically are hidden from view (van Marrewijk, 2011). Impression management is a task of all organizations; organization scholars can be among the duped. Other levels and other units of the same organization may fail to see past fa
6、cades (Kondo, 1990; Sayles, 1993; Weeks, 2004). For those business leaders who truly want to know what goes on in their terrains, anthropologists have the tools for the task (Jordan, 2011).3. Methodological versatility. In fact they have many such tools, evidenced in Bernards (2011) Research Methods
7、 in Anthropology: Qualitative and Quantitative Approaches. Even ethnography - the default tool - is far from standardized and comes in many configurations. Perhaps it is better thought of as a toolbox that holds many methods. Ethnography varies in the way that data are (so-called) collected: not jus
8、t participant observation but also oral histories, life stories, and interviews designed to elicit the informants cultural world with minimal reactivity (Spradley, 1979). Modes of data collection (and presentation) also include visual methods such as photoethnography and ethnographic film (for a cla
9、ssic example, Bateson & Mead, 1942). Analysis of these data can incorporate mathematical techniques such as network analysis, with successful studies using highly sophisticated (White & Johansen, 2006) and homespun approaches (Kapferer, 1972).Ethnography varies also in the scope of its purview, rang
10、ing from studies of global impacts on localities (Meisch, 2002), through clusters of firms in an industry (Yanagisako, 2002), to individual people - including the self as the informant (that is, autoethnography, McClendon, 2011). Even the types of subjects observed may vary, and include not only peo
11、ple (of course) but also material culture in visual culture research (Curasi, Price, & Arnould, 2004; van Marrewijk, 2011). Moreover, anthropologists can take as their data the prior ethnographic record, seeking qualitative or quantitative syntheses of its findings. Within anthropology, the best kno
12、wn such approach is hypothesis testing using the dataset of the Human Relations Area Files (Ember & Ember, 2009), although this approach remains underutilized in business research. An alternative approach that seeks the best of both qualitative and quantitative synthesis is Ragins Qualitative Compar
13、ative Analysis or QCA (Ragin, 2008). An example of the use of QCA in business is Rosigno and Hodsons (2004) study of worker resistance to management.4. Relevant expertise. As the Rosigno and Hodson study illustrates, ethnographies have explored topics of immediate interest to business. Moreover, ant
14、hropologists have developed expertise in fundamental concerns such as “culture” (Batteau, 2011), with a depth well beyond that of “folk ethnography” (that is, the views of practicing managers; Weeks, 2004; van Marrewijk, 2011). Kinship studies is another example of expertise that is relevant to the
15、majority of businesses world-wide, as these are in some sense “family firms” (Gao, 2011; Stewart, 2010). Perusing just the table of contents of recent introductions to the discipline will uncover many other topics of relevance to business. A few examples: “contested norms and social control. propert
16、y and tenure” (Hendry, 2008); and “rebels and innovators”, and “the changing nature of consumption” (Rosman, Rubel, & Weisgrau, 2009).5. Cross-cultural alertness. The relevance of anthropological concerns can be missed if we attend only to the apparent (and real) exoticism of its specific subject matter. For example, the Rosman et al. text contains a randomly picked photograph with the caption “Hijras in India are born male but live a
