Commercial/corporate anthropology

Starting work on one of our projects for 2007, I notice that I could see myself as a corporate/commercial anthropologist. This is a jolt.

The book will be about The Economist’s Project Red Stripe – a 6-month, 6-person project to "develop and bring to market a web-based idea" for the magazine group. In fact, it's more than an idea that they're hoping to develop - it's a workable template which can be replicated many times as the group develops a whole new shape for The Economist's Internet presence.

I’ll be observing the project team at work over the six months and recording my impressions. I expect to be writing about ‘the process’ more than about the technology or the end product, and one of my immediate interests is in the very public way that the project is being conducted. There’s a public website about the project and the project team members will be writing a regular blog. The site has already attracted considerable attention from other bloggers.

Having concluded that my role is that of anthropologist, I’ve been trying to learn a little more about the subject of commercial/corporate anthropology. An interesting article in the Financial Times, where I learn that, almost inevitably, there’s a debate running amongst academic anthropologists about whether it’s valid for anthropologists to use their skills to serve giant corporations and governments. In my experience, anthropologists are endlessly agonising about what role they can properly play.

At a recent lecture I heard anthropologist Tim Ingold say that anthropology had "lost confidence in itself" to such a point that it had ceased to be a "net exporter" of ideas to other disciplines (like psychology, sociology and history) and had become a net importer of ideas. As Gillian Tett says in her FT piece:

"Some have become so obsessed with the moral interaction between the "observer" and "observed" that their research seems more akin to introspective travel writing. Others have tried to give the discipline a harder scientific edge by moving into realms similar to psychology or linguistics. And a few seem to commit intellectual suicide, by writing essays that essentially declare there is little moral justification to studying other ‘cultures’ at all."

I also learn from this piece and from a collection of related articles that much of what corporate anthropologists are doing is related to technology and product development (observing how consumers live and use existing products, like mobile phones or breakfast cereals) and then developing better ones. To this extent, they are filling a gap between the focus group and office-based market research.

As I research this field more, I’d be grateful for any thoughts or comments from anyone with an interest in this field.

Organizational and movement approaches to change

I was mumbling incoherently last night about the “comfort of despair” when my companion (as they say in restaurant reviews) congratulated me on the term and asked if I had coined it. I was sure that I hadn't and guessed that a Google search would reveal about 1500 occasions of its use on the Web. Take a guess how many occurrences you can find of the phrase on Google. (Answers at the bottom of the page*).

One of them led me to an article by Parker J Palmer, of whom I had never previously heard. He writes about different ways of effecting change. He is talking about education, but his point applies to society as a whole and had, I think, fascinating implications for those interested in organizational change.

He characterises the organizational approach to change thus:

The organizational approach to change is premised on the notion that bureaucracies - their rules, roles, and relationships define the limits of social reality within which change must happen. Organizations are essentially arrangements of power, so this approach to change asks: “How can the power contained within the boxes of this organization be rearranged or redirected to achieve the desired goal?” That is a good question except when it assumes that bureaucracies are the only game in town.

Now that, of course, is music to Triarchy's ears. But not so rare or revealing in itself. He continues:

This approach pits entrenched patterns of corporate power against fragile images of change harboured by a minority of individuals, and the match is inherently unfair. Constrained by this model, people with a vision for change may devote themselves to persuading powerholders to see things their way, which drains energy away from the vision and breeds resentment among the visionaries when ‘permission’ is not granted. When organizations seem less interested in change than in preservation (which is, after all, their job), would-be reformers are likely to give up if the organizational approach is the only one they know.

But our obsession with the organizational model may suggest something more sinister than mere ignorance of another way. We sometimes get perverse satisfaction from insisting that organizations offer the only path to change. Then, when the path is blocked, we can indulge the luxury of resentment rather than seek an alternative avenue of reform and we can blame it all on external forces rather than take responsibility upon ourselves.

Then comes the good bit. He talks about the ‘movement way’ thus:

But there is another avenue toward change: The way of the movement. I began to understand movements when I saw the simple fact that nothing would ever have changed if reformers had allowed themselves to be done in by organizational resistance. Many of us experience such resistance as checkmate to our hopes for change. But for a movement, resistance is merely the place where things begin. The movement mentality, far from being defeated by organizational resistance, takes energy from opposition. Opposition validates the audacious idea that change must come.

And he clinches it like this:

The genius of movements is paradoxical: they abandon the logic of organizations in order to gather the power necessary to rewrite the logic of organizations.

It's a fascinating piece and we've republished it on our website. Follow the link to Divided No More at http://triarchypress.co.uk/pages/articles/articles.htm

*In fact there are only 12 occurrences of “comfort of despair” on Google. 32 on Yahoo.