工商人类学的理论视野与兴趣点.docVIP

What Anthropology Brings to Business A Foreword for the Textbook General Business Anthropology (2nd edition) Alex Stewart, Marquette University Anthropology has a great deal to offer for business researchers, whether their research is applied and commercial or “pure” and foundational. Here are seven major 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 deadlines 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 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 anthropologist’s stints of immersion is access 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 facades (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 Bernard’s (2011) Research Methods in Anthropology: Qualitative and Quantitative Approaches. Even ethnography - the default tool - is far from standardized and comes in many configurations. Perhaps it is better th