Organisational Anthropology: Doing Ethnography in and Among Complex Organisations

by Christina Garsten (Editor), Anette Nyqvist (Editor)

Overview

Organisational Anthropology, newly published in paperback, is a pioneering analysis of doing ethnographic fieldwork in different types of complex organisations. The book focuses on the process of initiating contact, establishing rapport and gaining the trust of the organisation's members.

The contributors work from the premise that doing fieldwork in an organisation shares essential characteristics with fieldwork in more ‘classical’ anthropological environments, but that it also poses some particular challenges to the ethnographer. These include the ideological or financial interests of the organisations, protection of resources and competition between organisations.

Organisational Anthropology brings together and highlights crucial aspects of doing anthropology in contemporary complex settings, and will have wide appeal to students, researchers and academics in anthropology and organisation studies.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780745335285
Publisher:	Pluto Press
Publication date:	05/10/2013
Series:	Anthropology, Culture and Society Series
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	272
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 8.80(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

Christina Garsten is Professor at the Department of Social Anthropology at Stockholm University and Chair of the Stockholm Centre for Organizational Research (Score) at Stockholm University and Stockholm School of Economics. She is the author of Workplace Vagabonds: Career and Community in Changing Worlds of Work (2008) and co-editor of Ethical Dilemmas in Management Organizing (2009), Transnational Accountability (2008) and Transparency in a New Global Order (2008).

Anette Nyqvist is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Social Anthropology at Stockholm University and holds a research position at Stockholm Centre for Organizational Research (Score) at Stockholm University and Stockholm School of Economics. She is the author of Opening the Orange Envelope: Risk and Responsibility in the Remaking of Sweden’s National Pension System (2008).

Read an Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

Entries

Engaging organisational worlds

Christina Garsten and Anette Nyqvist

INTRODUCTION: ENTANGLED IN ORGANISATIONS

Our contemporary world is an organised world. Whether in Stockholm, Singapore or Santiago de Chile, we live most of our lives within and among organisations. We grow up in kin groups of one sort or other; we attend schools; we are employed in firms or public agencies; we join the local athletic clubs, trade unions, secret societies or international human rights organisations. In any corner of the world, people organise. In fact, we would face great challenges if we were to free ourselves from the opportunities and clutches of organisational life.

Some of the most pervasive forms of organisations, such as families, state agencies and business corporations, play critical roles in shaping our individual and personal lives. We need only think of the many intricate ways in which our citizenship in a nation manages to penetrate our lives through passport routines, tax regulations, and public (i.e. state) schools and health care, for instance, to realise that, whether we like it or not, the state is part of our personal and social lives. Similarly, the business corporation weaves itself into our everyday existence through the food we eat, the clothes we wear, the values that are communicated to us by the management of our workplace and the payment we receive for our labour. Whereas the human propensity to organise is universal, how we organise, and why and when we organise, vary across historical and cultural contexts. Anthropologists have always geared themselves to understanding how social forms are shaped by human actions, and how we, in turn, are shaped by them. The study of social organisations lies at the very core of the anthropological enterprise.

This book is about doing ethnography in and among complex organisations. Rather than trying to define how fieldwork is done and access gained, the book focuses on the processes of engaging with the field, and the challenges, dilemmas and opportunities involved when the field is an organisation. The notion of 'engaging' implies ways of approaching and researching, but also ways of analysing and producing knowledge. It entails both a methodological and a theoretical process. More specifically, this book addresses how the organisational context influences the research process, the methodological adjustments and innovations that may be needed and the openings that may be entailed in the fieldwork in such milieux. The contributing authors discuss the process of initiating contact, establishing rapport and gaining the trust of organisational members. The book also examines more closely the knowledge that may be gained, the assemblage of ideas and resources that influence the construction of that knowledge, and the blind spots that may emerge from restricted access and trust.

The book is based upon the premise that processes of gaining entry into and doing fieldwork in an organisation share essential characteristics with fieldwork in more classical anthropological environments. But the ethnographer is also faced with specific challenges related to the boundaries that organisations are prone to maintaining: exclusive membership, protection of ideological or financial interests and secrecy around key resources. These challenges are also related to constant restructuring, change and transformation, and to distributed localities and mediatised discourses and forms of interaction. Furthermore, informants or interlocutors are often well-educated, highly skilled professionals (sometimes with advanced academic degrees) who challenge or engage the skills of the ethnographer in ways that differ from the conventional perception of what it is like to 'engage with the locals'. Doing anthropology in complex settings therefore requires a different set of skills, a readiness for 'polymorphous engagements' (Gusterson 1997), for 'studying sideways' (Hannerz 1998, 2006) and 'studying through' (Wright and Reinhold 2011), for 'following' (Marcus 1995), and for doing ethnography 'at the interface' (Garsten 2009) of organisational structures.

For us to understand better the challenges and opportunities involved in doing anthropology in and among organisations, we invite the reader to explore the distinct characteristics of organisation that give rise to these challenges, and to examine some courses of action that anthropologists take in order to deal with them. The contributing authors share their experiences and insights into ways of engaging anthropologically with professional elites, experts and high-level managers in government organisations, business corporations, and non-governmental organisations. Our aim is for the book to provide an inspirational and reflexive contribution to contemporary discussions on the challenges and opportunities of doing anthropological fieldwork in complex organisational settings.

FROM TRIBES TO CORPORATIONS

There was a time when we could claim with some confidence that the anthropological study of formal organisations was young and innocent. This is no longer the case. Anthropology now has a relatively long and well-established record of researching state agencies, business corporations, multilateral institutions and non-governmental organisations. It is now close to a century since anthropologists and other social science scholars engaged in the path-breaking Hawthorne studies at the Western Electric Hawthorn Plant studies in western Chicago and Cicero, Illinois, and discovered workers' 'social system' or 'social organisation'. Elton Mayo, who played a central role in the project, was himself a psychologist, sociologist and organisation theorist. He was as well acquainted with the work of anthropologists Bronislaw Malinowski and Alfred Radcliffe-Brown and their studies on social organisation. At a critical point, he was introduced to one of Radcliffe-Brown's students, William Lloyd Warner, who had just returned from fieldwork in Australia, studying the Murngin. Warner, intrigued by the insights that could be brought to bear on the informal social organisation of the plant, consulted with the Hawthorne researchers in designing and conducting the next phase of their experiment. 'With this act', Marietta Baba (2006: 87) writes, 'he fathered industrial or organizational anthropology'.

As Marietta Baba (2006) and Helen Schwartzman (1993) recount in vivid detail, the Hawthorne researchers conducted the final phase of the Hawthorne project, known as the Bank Wiring Observation Room (BWOR) experiment, with W. Lloyd Warner on board as design consultant. This portion of the project was aimed at exploring what workers actually did on the job, in contrast with what they said during the interviews. Hawthorne management, working in the spirit of Scientific Management, had accepted Frederick W. Taylor's concept of 'economic man' as a baseline. However, the piece rate system installed to motivate workers had exactly the opposite effect to what the managers envisioned. Workers had their own notion of a 'fair day's work', which was considerably below that which management envisioned as desirable. The workers had their own informal standard, minutely calculated and translated into a certain number of units to be produced by each man during the day.

The Hawthorne findings thus defied the dominant management theory of the day. In Taylor's vision of the economic man, individuals would respond positively to incentive structures, give their maximum effort, and push their peers to do the same. What the management ideology failed to consider was that the workers did not respond as individuals, but as a social group. They had developed their own informal organisation, their own perceptions of what constituted a good day's work, and their own local response to management ideology. The BWOR study was the first to demonstrate empirically the perspectival gaps between management and the workers. In Baba's (2006: 88) words:

Here was the first solid empirical evidence of informal organization (what we might call an occupational subculture or counter-culture), defined as the actual patterns of social interaction and relationships among the members of an organization that are not determined by management.

This informal organisation could be and was mapped by quantifying interactions among workers and by graphically depicting networks of relationships among the various work groups or cliques. It was seen to differ remarkably from the formal organisation, as laid out in the rules and policies of the corporation and that management had established to enable pursuit of corporate goals (Baba 2006). In this spirit of discovery of the social system, the informal organisation and its relation to the formal, the networks and local ideologies, anthropologists have continued to venture into organisations.

Ever since the days of the Hawthorne studies, many anthropologists have contributed to the feeding of trajectories of organisational anthropology. We say trajectories in the plural, because this is, first of all, a highly varied and rich field of research and, more important, we have no wish to stake out yet another sub-discipline in anthropology. On the contrary, our aim is to zoom in on researching organisations, while maintaining the position that the study of organising is at the core of mainstream social anthropology. We wish to highlight some theoretical strands and lines of interest in the anthropological study of organisations.

Organisational anthropology in its contemporary versions can be traced back to essential concerns in anthropology – the study of social relations and social forms, in comparative perspective. As such, it embraces the study of social processes of organising and social forms of organisation in their entirety, and is not to be equated merely to the study of western formal organisations. In his seminal work, Argonauts of the Western Pacific (1922), Malinowski demonstrated how the kula ring of exchange was predicated upon and contributed to the shaping of the social and political organisation of the groups involved. In today's business corporations, exchange is also at the very core of the organisation, and structures much of the climate of social interaction and perspectives on both politics and competitors. Exchange was also at the heart of Fredrik Barth's (1966) interest in how social groups were formed. In his influential collection of essays on 'models of social organisation', he advances the view that social structures are formed by the strategic transactions of individuals, and thus by an unfolding of interactive social processes.

The study of organisation from an anthropological point of view also builds on classic insights gained from studies on the linkages between kinship systems and organisation. Such early anthropologists as Alfred Radcliffe-Brown (1922, 1931), Claude Meillasoux (1975) and Edmund Leach (1954, 1968) have demonstrated the pivotal role of kinship in structuring systems of exchange and political systems. Contrary to official standpoints, and as every ethnographer of contemporary organisations knows, kinship continues to play a role in recruiting, promoting and sharing resources. Think, for example, of the meaning of family ties in the mafia, the camorra and similar organisations (Blok 1988; Pine 2012), the significance of affinity in big business (Marcus and Hall 1992) and in charity organisations (Harr and Johnson 1991). While our contemporary organisations may embrace ideals of meritocracy, neutrality and formalism, in daily practice it is often the case that affinity, personal preference and improvisation gain the upper hand.

Organisations may be seen as circuits of power, in which normative frameworks are produced and globally diffused, where knowledge is crafted and circulated and from where packages of ideas are diffused. A prevalent view in the history of anthropology has been that systems of meaning and symbolic universes are shaped by or generated in systems of social relations (Hannerz 1992). Paraphrasing Marshall Sahlins, one could say that organisations emerge as 'dominant sites of cultural production' (1976: 211). In this view, organisations are sites where systems of meaning are cultivated, shaped, diffused and contested. Mary Douglas (1978), inspired by sociologists Durkheim and Fleck, proposed that the symbolic order represents the social order through the forms of 'group and grid'. In brief, 'group' referred to an individual's social position as inside or outside a bounded social group and 'grid' referred to an individual's social role within networks of social privileges and obligations. Individuals are expected to move across the dimensions, according to choice or circumstances. As the model developed, the mapping of cultures upon types of social organisation was transformed into a dynamic theoretical system, challenging methodological individualism (Douglas 2006).

Perhaps more starkly, Douglas's (1970) perspective on institutions as legitimised social groupings has been highly influential in shaping our understanding of how it is that institutions shape our ways of thinking and acting, and how thinking itself is dependent upon institutions, and continues to be so. There is a great deal of confusion around the terms 'institution' and 'organisation' and how they relate to each other. Sometimes, anthropologists and sociologists use the term 'institution' or 'institutional order' synonymously with organisation. Usually, though, an institution does not denote an organisation. In a general sense, institutions refer to a set of cultural rules that regulate social activities in patterned ways. In Ahrne's (1994: 4) words, '[o]rganizations are materialized institutions'. In the new institutional theory in organisation studies, institution represents 'a social order or pattern that has attained a certain state or property' (Jepperson 1991: 45). Douglas, however, used the word 'institution' in a way that overlaps largely with organisation, to mean a legitimised social grouping. With Douglas, we learn that different types of organisations prompt us to think different thoughts and respond to different emotions. Douglas did not suggest that we are merely mindless cogs in a machine; she convincingly demonstrated how institutions, the way we conceive of them, and the categories and rationalities they foster have significant implications for human agency.

If Douglas's notion of institution is one key entry point of anthropological interest in organisations, another is the notion of 'corporation', which may connote to an anthropologist any collective of individuals who act as one unit for one or several purposes. In common parlance, the most common conception of the corporation is a limited-liability joint-stock company. This legal person is now the dominant organisational and institutional form of our time, with characteristics that cannot be reduced to the individuals who own, manage and work for it (Bashkow 2012; Micklethwait and Wooldridge 2005). Through the production and dissemination of corporate ideology and normative ideals, it powerfully shapes the ways its members – its employees – think and act. It also moulds public discourse and practice through its public relations and marketing efforts, and contributes to the ideological transformation of the individual from producer to consumer. The limited-liability joint-stock company has become an agent par excellence of cultural production and, as Sahlins would have it, a site of cultural production. A thorough understanding of the corporation as an organisational form is essential if we want to understand the workings of organisations, and their implications for the lives of people.

(Continues…)

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Table of Contents

Acknowledgements
1 Entries: Engaging organisational worlds, by Christina Garsten and Anette Nyqvist
I Corporate corridors
2 Counter intelligence: The contingencies of clerkship at the epicenter of convenience culture, by Gavin Hamilton Whitelaw
3 Counter-espionage: Fieldwork among culture experts in Bang & Olufsen, by Jacob Krause Jensen
4 When life goes to work: Authenticity and managerial control in the contemporary firm, by Peter Fleming
5 Oblique ethnography: Engaging collaborative complicity among globalised corporate managers, by Emil A. Røyrvik
II Policy arenas
6 Access to all stages?: Studying through policy in a culture of accessibility, by Anette Nyqvist
7 Punctuated entries: Doing fieldwork in policy meetings in the EU, by Renita Thedvall
8 The instrumental gaze: The case of public sector reorganisation, by Halvard Vike
III Working the network
9 All about ties: Think tanks and the economy of connections, by Christina Garsten
10 Working connections, helping friends: Fieldwork, organisations and cultural styles, by Brian Moeran
11 Messy logic: Organisational interactions and joint commitment in railway planning, by Åsa Boholm
IV Opaque worlds
12 The profane ethnographer: Fieldwork with a secretive organisation, by Lilith Mahmud
13 Communicative nature of money: Aligning organisational anthropology with technocratic experiments, by Douglas R. Holmes
14 Not being there: The power of strategic absence in organisational anthropology, by Tara Schwegler
15 Momentum: Pushing ethnography ahead, by Christina Garsten and Anette Nyqvist
Index

Editorial Reviews

'This excellent and timely book shows that the anthropological gaze continues to shed light on all things human in surprising ways''This vital and vibrant collection is sure to appeal to graduate students in anthropology and sociology as well as those in organizational psychology. Highly Recommended.''Lively first hand accounts of carrying out ethnographic fieldwork in contemporary organisational settings - from convenience stores to high tech firms, from think tanks to advertising companies. This is a work that will appeal not only to anthropologists but also to all those with a scholarly or practical interest in culture and organisation''The engagement between organisation studies and anthropology is both long standing and rapidly developing. In this fascinating volume some of the leading exponents of organisational anthropology reflect on its history and future directions; its potentials and pitfalls''An indispensable summary of contemporary organisational anthropology, presenting methodological challenges, theoretical discussion and insight into what it is like to embark on research in this area'

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