Organizational Anthropology

Conceptual Overview

The focus of the research can be classified into two sets. The first set has developed around the notions of corporate or organizational cultures. The objective was to describe specific organizations (private, public, small, medium, or big organizations), craftsmanship, and workplaces. There are numerous works of this kind all over the world, showing how organization is and has a culture and how the workplace is a producer of professional identities. The second set of research tries to understand behavior at work, the relationships to authority, cooperation dynamics, attitude toward time and space, gender relations, relations to otherness, and differences according to cultural frames that belong to national or regional groups. In other words, it tries to show how organization and management are deeply embedded into environmental cultures. These approaches have considerable consequences for managerial practices and key managerial issues (organization, decision, negotiation, leadership, and quality management), notably in a context of intercultural relationships. Today, internationalization exchanges, mergers and acquisitions, training, and socioeconomic globalization are particularly sensitive to these cultural differences. In effect, according to some management research, the cultural factor is one of the key elements of success or failure in many managerial situations. These observations have led to a new subdiscipline in business called intercultural management. Although culture seems to be the conceptual cement of this current of thinking, its great diversity shows some notable differences in the vision of culture. Some, following Hofstede's position, see it as a mental program and develop a statistical methodology for analysis of culture while others, such as d'Iribarne, put emphasis on culture as a universe of meanings and use a qualitative methodology. While these two postures can be complementary, the second seems to be more comprehensive in concrete contexts because of its field investigation and its ethnological posture.

Critical Commentary and Future Directions

Another perspective is related in some aspects to these anthropological foundations but is also distinct from them. Faced with the fragmentation of knowledge in human sciences, some French thinkers have tried to develop a unitary account of human being. In effect, fragmentation of knowledge has often meant that researchers restrict themselves to examining a relatively narrow, even microscopic, world. Concomitantly, a shattered image of the human being has also developed. This vision of a fragmented individual has had a double effect: On the disciplinary level, it has led many researchers into the pathways of reductionism and biological, psychological, and sociological imperialism; on an organizational level, it has often resulted in actions and social practices that ignore a large number of human dimensions. In the field that has come to be known as administrative or organizational science, this has often been the case. Such a narrow vision of human beings cannot totally encompass the complexity of human being. It is the reason the dominant vision of the human being as a homo economicus, as rational and reactive to external stimuli, whose universality (Westerner and U.S.) is not to be questioned, has been heavily discussed and criticized.

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