Business Anthropology

Business anthropology is an all-embracing term designed to cover a number of others that have emerged
over recent years and proposed by anthropologists working for the most part in and for, as well as on,
business organizations of one sort or another. These include ‘corporate’, ‘organizational’, ‘enterprise’ and
other anthropologies, which themselves owe some allegiance to more traditional sub-disciplines of
anthropology such as economic anthropology, industrial anthropology, and the anthropology of work.
But what exactly is business anthropology? And in what directions might it usefully develop in the
future? These questions are only just beginning to be addressed, so it is hard to say what will happen with
any degree of certainty. However, it is clear that, for it to become accepted more generally among
mainstream anthropologists, business anthropology is going to have to stake out its claims as to what
differentiates it from these other sub-disciplines. I suspect that two areas in which such claims need to be
made are in (1) theory, and (2) methodology. Its position is also likely to be strengthened by the emergence
of numerous case studies based on fieldwork and inside knowledge of how business organizations,
networks, and social relations in general operate and are sustained.
At present, those who publish in the field of business anthropology tend to form two distinct groups:
(1) academics working in universities and business schools who have conducted research on businesses,
corporations, family firms, entrepreneurs, careers, and so on; and (2) anthropologists who are either
freelance consultants of one sort or another often running their own small firms (primarily in advertising
and marketing-related areas), or employed by large organizations like Intel or Xerox to carry out particular
research projects on behalf of their organizations. The former very often include mainstream
anthropologists who happen to be conducting research on some aspect or other of modern business, but
who do not see themselves as ‘business anthropologists’ as such. The latter often find that their hands are
tied, in terms of publishing results, because of contractual obligations to their employers and clients.
This distinction between those who conduct ‘pure’ academic research and those whose work is more
‘applied’ and directed at the needs of a client leads us to posit, perhaps, the kind of distinction already
existing in anthropologists’ approach to the study of development. Those who are very much involved in
the nitty gritty of everyday issues call themselves ‘business anthropologists’, while those who think of
themselves as more leisurely scholars are likely to try to distinguish themselves from their colleagues by
calling themselves ‘anthropologists of business’. It is likely that the former will pursue ethnographic case
studies, while the latter develop theoretical positions.
Whether this distinction will become reality is hard to tell, but the important thing is to hold the two
types of anthropologists in the balance, and not to favour either the one group or the other.