The Social Anthropology of Management

This paper argues that social anthropology as a field science has great potential for informing multi-disciplinary research in management both conceptually and methodologically. Social anthropology takes as its objectives both accurate description of context and accurate understanding of how those contexts are interpreted and experienced by participants. It adopts a methodology of ethnographic immersion. This enables the capture of elusive, ambiguous and tacit aspects of research settings, and also allows grounded theory to be generated from `thick' or `rich' data. Social anthropology, having taken into account recent developments in postmodern and critical thought, can contribute to the study, practice, and teaching of management in three categories. Focusing on culture, new theoretical lines of enquiry can be developed that reassess the significance of shared meaning and conflicting interests in specific settings; the concept of the symbolic in management can be critically elaborated; and modes of representation of management can be opened up to self-reflexivity. Focusing on critique, ethnography can be used to defamiliarize taken-for-granted circumstances and reveal suppressed and alternative possibilities; new or unheard voices and forms of information can be resuscitated and used to sensitize managerial processes; and cognitive, affective, epistemological, ideological and ethical considerations can be linked in the same framework. Focusing on change, anthropological ideas and concepts can shape and reflect change processes and resolve unproductive dilemmas; and managerial learning can be enhanced by promoting the ethnographic consciousness as a way of investigating and understanding, an attitude of openness. Finally the paper gives an example of the application of the approach in a management development programme, where teaching and research progressed in harness.

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