Emerging Trends in The Social and Behavioral Sciences

Business Anthropology

Item

Title

Business Anthropology

Author

Moeran, Brian

Research Area

Theory

Topic

Theory ‐ Discipline specific

Abstract

This essay outlines the overall scope and location of business anthropology within the overall field of the discipline. It outlines its foundations as an applied form of anthropology in early developments in the United States (in particular, in Western Electric's Hawthorne Project and the Human Relations School at Harvard University), as well as in the United Kingdom and elsewhere, before turning to five areas of research and practice: academic ethnographies of business practices, regional studies, case studies developed by practitioners, theoretical applications, and methods. The essay then asks what a future program for business anthropology might look like and suggests four areas for theoretical development against a background of education, engagement, and comparative work. These are an examination of structures of power in, between, and dependent on business organizations of all kinds; cross‐cultural comparison of work cultures; attention to the materials, technologies, and goods with which business people engage and which afford their organizational forms; and explicit attention to cutting‐edge fieldwork methods.

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Identifier

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extracted text

Business Anthropology
BRIAN MOERAN

Abstract
This essay outlines the overall scope and location of business anthropology within
the overall field of the discipline. It outlines its foundations as an applied form of
anthropology in early developments in the United States (in particular, in Western
Electric’s Hawthorne Project and the Human Relations School at Harvard University), as well as in the United Kingdom and elsewhere, before turning to five areas of
research and practice: academic ethnographies of business practices, regional studies, case studies developed by practitioners, theoretical applications, and methods.
The essay then asks what a future program for business anthropology might look
like and suggests four areas for theoretical development against a background of
education, engagement, and comparative work. These are an examination of structures of power in, between, and dependent on business organizations of all kinds;
cross-cultural comparison of work cultures; attention to the materials, technologies,
and goods with which business people engage and which afford their organizational
forms; and explicit attention to cutting-edge fieldwork methods.

OVERVIEW
Business anthropology refers to ethnographic research conducted in, for, with,
and on business organizations of one sort or another. Such research has been
carried out both by anthropologists employed full-time in academic institutions and by professional anthropologists employed as such in large organizations like Intel, General Motors, and Xerox, or working for, or running
their own, consultancy and marketing firms. As such, it is very much an
applied form of anthropology that makes extensive use of fieldwork and
ethnographic methods.
The applications to which business anthropology has been put are
extremely varied. They include, for example, studies of time, place and
space, communication, organizational cultures, managerial ideologies,
transnational joint ventures, migration, repatriation experiences, people’s
understandings of and relations with technologies, marketing and branding
strategies, design methodologies and concepts, ethnic and gender differences, consumption behavior, and so on among others. Like many other
Emerging Trends in the Social and Behavioral Sciences. Edited by Robert Scott and Stephen Kosslyn.
© 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. ISBN 978-1-118-90077-2.

1

2

EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

forms of applied anthropology, business anthropology tends to be project
driven. It is often carried out by means of teams, whose members work
together intensively over comparatively short periods of time, making
regular use of sophisticated and advanced ethnographic methods with
which clients tend to engage actively (e.g., in viewing with the fieldworker
the daily rushes of video footage of ethnographic activities and interviews).
It applies anthropological theories developed in seemingly unrelated fields
such as ritual, magic, and animism, as well as in others closer at hand
(family systems, markets, and exchange mechanisms), to business situations
in different parts of the world.
As a term, business anthropology embraces a broad spectrum of already
existing branches of the discipline. These include “corporate,” “enterprise,”
“organizational,” 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. The term itself seems to have been coined in the mid-1980s, but has
only come into consistent and regular usage during the first decade of the
new millennium, which has seen the publication of several new monographs
and edited books, together with the launching of two journals from 2010
[the Journal of Business Anthropology (www.cbs.dk/jba), and the International
Journal of Business Anthropology].
There is, potentially, a double confusion concerning the term business
anthropology. The first concerns the word “business,” which reflects some of
the terminological uncertainty alluded to above over anthropologists’ study
of work and its surrounding institutions in contemporary societies. Yet, the
argument may be made that oil riggers, weavers, dealers, planters, farmers,
and camel drivers are all linked by the fact that they engage in trade—in
the sense that they practice a particular line of business, often involving
the purchase, sale, and exchange of commodities; and that they pursue an
occupation, which often makes use of skilled manual or mechanical work,
as a livelihood. In addition, in trade they engage in practices that form
many of the building blocks of anthropological theory: material culture
and technology; gifts, commodities and money; labor and other forms of
social exchange; (fictive) kinship, patronage, quasi-groups, and networks;
rituals, symbolism and power; the development and maintenance of taste;
and so on. Thus, defined as the anthropology of trading relations, business
anthropology reaches out to other disciplines such as business history,
cultural studies, management and organization studies, some parts of
sociology, and even cultural economics.
The second confusion concerns “anthropology” and, more specifically, “anthropologist.” Not only is it at times difficult to fathom the theoretical and
methodological connections between—say—cognitive and development, or

Business Anthropology

3

legal and sensory, anthropologies. Distinctions between anthropologists and
other professions are not always that clear cut. Managers, for example, all
exhibit ethnographic skills to one degree or another. They talk and listen to
the people with whom they deal; try to understand what they are not saying, and why; and plan organizational and business strategies accordingly.
The same can be said of advertising executives, journalists and detectives,
among other occupations, all of whom zigzag back and forth between observation and theoretical reasoning, and the endless spiral of modifications that
each brings to the other.
FOUNDATIONAL RESEARCH
Given that the development of anthropology was from the very beginning
predicated upon its being of practical use to “the utilities and requirements
of society” (mainly in terms of colonial administration, rather than of business as such), it is not surprising to learn that, despite its apparently recent
emergence as a defined branch of the discipline, the study of business in
anthropology goes back to the 1920s. Marietta Baba, among others, has documented in detail how the received view is that anthropology’s relationship with the domain of business began in the United States with Western
Electric’s Hawthorne Project (1927–1932) and the subsequent rise (and fall)
of Elton Mayo’s Human Relations School. Anthropologists such as Lloyd
Warner contributed to these projects by initiating studies of human and social
behavior in corporations such as IBM, Sears & Roebuck, and Western Electric.
At the same time, they also launched ethnographic studies of consumption,
branding and advertising through the successful spin-off of a consulting firm
by anthropologists at the University of Chicago. The Society for Applied
Anthropology was founded in the United States in 1941.
In many respects, the anthropological study of business is primarily an
American development, and the businesses studied have for the most part
been themselves either American or located in the United States. This is, perhaps, to be expected. It is in the United States that applied anthropology, in its
multiple forms, has been most institutionalized in the post-secondary education system. However, business (under its guise as applied) anthropology
has not been entirely American. A number of British anthropologists (including Malinowski and Radcliffe-Brown) were also involved and theoretically
influential in different ways during the period between the 1930s and 1950s.
Resulting developments in the United Kingdom have included the founding
of the Tavistock Institute in 1946; the institution of the Manchester factory
shop floor studies of the 1950s and 1960s by South African anthropologist,
Max Gluckman; and the funding of (mainly British) anthropological research
by the Carnegie Corporation and Rockefeller Foundation.

4

EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

The main conclusion to be drawn from studies during this early period
of business anthropology is that “business anthropology” did not exist
as such in name. Rather, as intimated earlier, researchers would carry
out independent studies of different forms of economic activity and
organization—Norwegian herring fleets, labor migration in Uganda, family
firms in the Lebanon, and so on—and not worry too much about how
precisely to categorize their research other than as “anthropology.”
CUTTING-EDGE RESEARCH
Selecting what might be regarded as “cutting-edge” research in the field
of business anthropology is an unenviable task. While very aware of its
limitations, this section will focus on five areas of research and practice: (i)
ethnographies of business conducted by anthropologists employed full-time
in academia; (ii) regional studies, (iii) case studies developed by freelance,
professional practitioners; (iv) theoretical applications of business anthropology; and (v) methods.
First, if we accept that business anthropology is the anthropology of trading relations, we can cite a number of classical anthropological monographs
as forming the foundation of business anthropology. Bronislaw Malinowski’s
Argonauts of the Western Pacific, for example, would be one; Hortense Powdermaker’s Hollywood, the Dream Factory another. Neither of these authors would
have thought of themselves as “business” anthropologists as such. The same
is almost certainly true of James “Woody” Watson, who has published a study
of emigration and the Chinese lineage, and of Sylvia Yanagisako, with her
more recent account of family firms and the silk industry in northern Italy.
Yet it is clear that these works are examples of what is now commonly
referred to as business anthropology, although they are also very close to,
and in some cases explicitly identify with, economic anthropology. One
thinks here of Stuart Plattner’s study of a local art market in Kansas, or of
Marianne Lien’s of a Norwegian food company. The financial crash in 2009
has seen the publication of a number of monographs in the emergent field
of the anthropology of finance: notably Karen Ho’s timely account of Wall
Street in Liquidated and Melissa Fisher’s long-term study of the women of
Wall Street. This and other research by Annelise Riles and Hiro Miyazaki
has built on earlier work by Ellen Hertz on the Shanghai stock market, Bill
Maurer on Islamic finance and currencies, and Caitlin Zaloom on Chicago
traders’ relations with technology.
Second, although two of the works cited just above describe finance and
trading relations outside the United States, it is probably fair to say that the
anthropological study of business—and thus business anthropology—is an
American development, and that the businesses studied tend themselves to

Business Anthropology

5

be either American or located in the United States. Yet, we should note in
this context that research on contemporary business formations—in particular, the limited stock company—was undertaken comparatively early on
in a non-Western society: that of Japan. Robert Cole’s study of blue collar
workers, Thomas Rohlen’s of a Japanese bank, Ronald Dore’s of a British
and Japanese factory, and Rodney Clark’s of The Japanese Company all preceded by a decade or so the emergence of the term business anthropology in
the mid-1980s. Indeed, Japan has been a fruitful source for later anthropological accounts of trading relations. These include Brian Moeran’s detailed
monograph of a Japanese advertising agency, and Ted Bestor’s analysis of the
fish market of Tsukiji in Tokyo.
Japan is not the only focus of attention in the anthropology of business. A
large number of anthropologists have studied firms and organizations in various European countries as part of an ongoing interest in different cultural
forms of capitalism. In this respect, Danny Miller has conducted an ethnographic study of capitalism in Trinidad, while cultural variation has underpinned research on advertising agencies in India, China, and Sri Lanka. The
problem is how to keep abreast of such regional research, especially when it
is still not classified fully under the rubric of “business anthropology.”
The third area of research in this field consists of what may be referred
to, perhaps a little crudely, as case studies. Professional business anthropologists are usually employed on projects, which they are later permitted by
their clients to write about. Some of this work appears in anthropology
journals like Human Organization and Applied Anthropology, but a lot more
appears in edited volumes such as Melissa Cefkin’s Ethnography and the
Corporate Encounter, and Brigitte Jordan’s Advancing Ethnography in Corporate
Environments. There are also two or three monographs by professional
anthropologists who make use of numerous case studies in which they have
been engaged over time to illustrate theoretical issues. One thinks here of
Patti Sunderland and Rita Denny’s Doing Anthropology in Consumer Research
and Timothy Malefyt and Bob Morais’s investigation of Advertising and
Anthropology.
Fourthly, it is clear that for many professional business anthropologists
who are neither “here” in industry nor “there” in academia, theorizing
their work presents problems. This is in large part, perhaps, because they
subconsciously adopt academic anthropologists’ unspoken assumption that
theory is somehow “better than” practice, so that being a good ethnographer
in itself is insufficient to make a “great” anthropologist. However, for the
professional business anthropologist, theory is not limited to its academic
emanations. It is also a major component of the ways in which clients think
about their problems (in terms of brand management, product communication, marketing strategy, and so on), and practitioners therefore find

6

EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

themselves having to weigh and balance academic and business theoretical
inputs when proposing solutions to clients’ problems.
This conundrum tends to affect the work of professional business anthropologists outlined under “case studies” above. When they apply general
anthropological theories, the latter tend to be specific to particular business
situations (which themselves may also be amenable to theoretical developments in another discipline, such as psychology, for example). We find
age-old anthropological concepts such as totemism, animism, and contagious magic applied to branding strategies, for example; spatial orientation
metaphors to the organization of the home; and ritual tournaments (or
tournaments of values) to competitive presentations in advertising, awards
ceremonies, and trade fairs more generally. However, the question naturally
arises: to what extent are such theoretical applications generalizable to other
branches of business?
Finally, methods. One of business anthropology’s strengths, in particular
as it has been carried out among professional practitioners, has been in its
cutting-edge methods—many of them now being carried across into more
mainstream anthropology. Often working in teams with comparatively
short deadlines, practitioners have sought ways to improve and validate
data collection techniques and both client and informant interaction. They
have made use of informants’ diaries, e-mails, blogs, and various forms
of sociodigitization (Facebook, YouTube, and so on) when researching
particular problems. They regularly use video to capture social interaction
and share it with their clients, while also pursuing classical ethnographic
techniques of participant-observation and interviews.
KEY ISSUES FOR FUTURE RESEARCH
This, albeit incomplete, outline of key research issues raises the more general question: what might a program for business anthropology look like
in the future? There are three key issues underpinning the development of
a coherent research program. One is opportunities for learning; a second,
engagement; and the third, comparison.
Firstly, business anthropologists, especially those employed in academic
institutions, need to fight to revitalize current anthropology programs taught
in universities and other institutions of higher learning. In an era when
most anthropology students get jobs in business organizations of one sort
or another, there is a strong case for arguing that anthropology programs
should be preparing students specifically for such job opportunities, rather
than giving them endless doses of ethnographic and theoretical discussions
that are in large part irrelevant to their future careers. An education in
anthropology that includes, rather than ignores, the role of business in social

Business Anthropology

7

and cultural relations should lead to an increase in interest in, and numbers
of people practicing, business anthropology.
Secondly, business anthropologists need, far more than they do, to engage
with anthropological theories. They must go beyond making passive use
of theories, first by recontextualizing them in different business situations,
and then by applying them consistently across sectors and societies. If one
accepts, for example, Rodney Clark’s argument that joint stock companies
have major social, financial, political, cultural, and structural repercussions
on the organization of any society, then we need to ask, in contexts outside Japan, just how and to what extent, for example, they distribute wealth,
engage with local, regional and national governments, support education
and research, sponsor sporting and cultural events, and so on in different
societies. What differences do we find? In addition, how do these differences
inflect people’s understandings of firms in different societies?
A second aspect of engagement concerns business anthropologists’
engagement with scholars studying business from different disciplinary
perspectives. How can business anthropology help those in management
or organization studies, strategy, marketing, business history, consumer
culture studies, and so on, understand the varieties of business practices and
organizational forms that they study? There is, at present, an unfortunate
“siloization” at work, which separates those working in business anthropology from those employed in business schools around the world. Somehow
this needs to be overcome by anthropologists engaging more with those
working in similar areas in other disciplines.
Thirdly, as implied above, business anthropology must be comparative.
Those anthropologists working in, on, for, or against businesses must
compare their findings with those of their colleagues working both in other
branches of business and in other societies. Are analogies to be drawn
between north Italian silk manufacturing family firms, on the one hand, and
family restaurant owners in Chinatown in London, on the other? If so, what
are they? In addition, how do they compare with the ideals and practices
of Japanese corporate “familism”? What are the mechanisms sustaining a
preference for family forms as a means of making a living from different
kinds of business activities over generations and across cultures? Business
anthropologists need to adopt a broader perspective than they generally do.
Given these key issues, we may ask: in what directions should theoretical
endeavors in business anthropology proceed in future?
Firstly, anthropologists could usefully examine social relations and structures of power in, between, and dependent on business organizations
of all kinds, but particularly firms.

8

EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

Secondly, they might usefully make explicit comparison between these
social forms (companies, industries, conglomerates, and so on) and the
various cultures (work, management, professional, regional, national,
and so forth) that, in one way or another, impinge upon and form them,
and by which they themselves are developed and sustained.
Thirdly, they should pay far more attention to materials, technologies and
things (goods, commodities, equipment, tools) with which business
people of all kinds engage, in which they are entangled, and which
afford their organizational forms.
In addition, finally, they should advertise more forcefully the benefits of
the fieldwork methods that they have developed in business contexts.
If all of this were done, and done well, we might find that business anthropology brings together both a French structural anthropologist and a brand
of jeans and that business is, indeed, “good to think.”
FURTHER READING
Baba, M. L. (1986). Business and industrial anthropology: An overview. (National Association for the Practice of Anthropology. Bulletin No. 2.). Washington, DC: American
Anthropological Association.
Bestor, T. (2004). Tsukiji: The fish market at the center of the world. Berkeley: University
of California Press.
Cefkin, M. (Ed.) (2009). Ethnography and the corporate encounter: Reflections on research
in and of corporations. Studies in Applied Anthropology (Vol. 5). New York, NY:
Bergham Books.
Clark, R. (1979). The Japanese company. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Cole, R. E. (1971). Japanese blue collar: The changing tradition. Berkeley: University of
California Press.
Malefyt, T. de W., & Morais, R. J. (2012). Advertising and anthropology: Ethnographic
practice and cultural perspectives. Oxford, England: Berg.
Dore, R. P. (1973). British factory-Japanese factory. Berkeley: University of California
Press.
Hertz, E. (1998). The trading crowd: An ethnography of the Shanghai stock market. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.
Ho, K. (2009). Liquidated: An ethnography of Wall Street. Durham, NC: Duke University
Press.
Jordan, A. T. (2012a). Business anthropology. Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland Press.
Jordan, B. (Ed.) (2012b). Advancing ethnography in corporate environments: Challenges
and emerging opportunities. Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press.
Lien, M. (1997). Marketing and modernity. Oxford, England: Berg.
Malinowski, B. (1922). Argonauts of the Western Pacific. London, England: Routledge
& Kegan Paul.

Business Anthropology

9

Miller, D. (1995). Capitalism: An ethnographic approach. Oxford, England: Berg.
Moeran, B. (1996). A Japanese advertising agency: An anthropology of media and markets.
London, England: Curzon.
Moeran, B. (2005). The business of ethnography: Strategic exchanges, people and organizations. Oxford, England: Berg.
Moeran, B., & Pedersen, J. S. (Eds.) (2011). Negotiating values in the creative industries:
Fairs, festivals and competitive events. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University
Press.
Nader, L. (1969). Up the anthropologist—Perspectives gained from studying up. In
D. Hymes (Ed.), Reinventing anthropology. New York, NY: Random House.
Plattner, S. (1996). High art down home: An economic ethnography of a local art market.
Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Powdermaker, H. (1950). Hollywood, the dream factory: An anthropologist looks at the
movie-makers. Boston, MA: Little, Brown.
Rohlen, T. (1974). For harmony and strength. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Schwartzman, H. (1993). Ethnography in organizations. Newbury Park, CA: Sage
Publishers.
Sunderland, P. L., & Denny, R. M. (2007). Doing anthropology in consumer research.
Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press.
Yanagisako, S. (2002). Producing culture and capital: Family firms in Italy. Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press.
Zaloom, C. (2006). Out of the pits: Traders and technology from Chicago to London.
Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

BRIAN MOERAN SHORT BIOGRAPHY
Brian Moeran is Professor of Business Anthropology at the Copenhagen
Business School and Founding Editor of the Journal of Business Anthropology
(www.cbs.dk/jba). He is a social anthropologist by training and has conducted comparative research on pottery, department store art marketing, an
advertising agency, women’s fashion magazines, publishing, and incense
production—mainly, but not exclusively, in Japan. More details may be
found under http://www.cbs.dk/en/research/departments-and-centres/
department-of-intercultural-communication-and-management/staff/
bdmikl. He may be reached at bdm.ikl@cbs.dk
RELATED ESSAYS
Emergence of Stratification in Small Groups (Sociology), Noah Askin et al.
Rent, Rent-Seeking, and Social Inequality (Sociology), Beth Red Bird and
David B. Grusky
Authenticity: Attribution, Value, and Meaning (Sociology), Glenn R. Carroll

10

EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

Trust and Economic Organization (Sociology), Karen S. Cook and Bogdan State
Heterarchy (Archaeology), Carole L. Crumley
Youth Entrepreneurship (Psychology), William Damon et al.
Financialization of the US Economy (Sociology), Gerald (Jerry) F. Davis and
Suntae Kim
Cultural Differences in Emotions (Psychology), Jozefien De Leersnyder et al.
Globalization: Consequences for Work and Employment in Advanced
Capitalist Societies (Sociology), Tony Elger
Diversity in Groups (Sociology), Catarina R. Fernandes and Jeffrey T. Polzer
Empathy Gaps between Helpers and Help-Seekers: Implications for Cooperation (Psychology), Vanessa K. Bohns and Francis J. Flynn
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The Future of Employment, Wages, and Technological Change (Economics),
Michael J. Handel
The Reorganization of Work (Sociology), Charles Heckscher
Ethnography in the Digital Age (Methods), Alan Howard and Alexander
Mawyer
The Development of Social Trust (Psychology), Vikram K. Jaswal and Marissa
B. Drell
Participant Observation (Methods), Danny Jorgensen
Cultural Neuroscience: Connecting Culture, Brain, and Genes (Psychology),
Shinobu Kitayama and Sarah Huff
The Psychological Impacts of Cyberlife Engagement (Psychology), Virginia S.
Y. Kwan and Jessica E. Bodford
Transformation of the Employment Relationship (Sociology), Arne L. Kalleberg and Peter V. Marsden
Built Environments and the Anthropology of Space (Anthropology), Gary W.
McDonogh
Emerging Trends in Culture and Concepts (Psychology), Bethany Ojalehto
and Douglas Medin
Ethnography: Telling Practice Stories (Methods), Karen O’Reilly
Culture as Situated Cognition (Psychology), Daphna Oyserman
Organizations and the Production of Systemic Risk (Sociology), Charles
Perrow
Sociology of Entrepreneurship (Sociology), Martin Ruef
How Do Labor Market Networks Work? (Sociology), Brian Rubineau and
Roberto M. Fernandez
Impact of Limited Education on Employment Prospects in Advanced
Economies (Sociology), Heike Solga
Emerging Trends: Shaping Age By Technology and Social Bonds (Sociology),
Annette Spellerberg and Lynn Schelisch

Business Anthropology

11

Leadership (Anthropology), Adrienne Tecza and Dominic Johnson
Creativity in Teams (Psychology), Leigh L. Thompson and Elizabeth Ruth
Wilson
The Institutional Logics Perspective (Sociology), Patricia H. Thornton et al.
What is Special about Specialization? (Archaeology), Anne P. Underhill
Gender and Work (Sociology), Christine L. Williams and Megan Tobias Neely



Business Anthropology
BRIAN MOERAN

Abstract
This essay outlines the overall scope and location of business anthropology within
the overall field of the discipline. It outlines its foundations as an applied form of
anthropology in early developments in the United States (in particular, in Western
Electric’s Hawthorne Project and the Human Relations School at Harvard University), as well as in the United Kingdom and elsewhere, before turning to five areas of
research and practice: academic ethnographies of business practices, regional studies, case studies developed by practitioners, theoretical applications, and methods.
The essay then asks what a future program for business anthropology might look
like and suggests four areas for theoretical development against a background of
education, engagement, and comparative work. These are an examination of structures of power in, between, and dependent on business organizations of all kinds;
cross-cultural comparison of work cultures; attention to the materials, technologies,
and goods with which business people engage and which afford their organizational
forms; and explicit attention to cutting-edge fieldwork methods.

OVERVIEW
Business anthropology refers to ethnographic research conducted in, for, with,
and on business organizations of one sort or another. Such research has been
carried out both by anthropologists employed full-time in academic institutions and by professional anthropologists employed as such in large organizations like Intel, General Motors, and Xerox, or working for, or running
their own, consultancy and marketing firms. As such, it is very much an
applied form of anthropology that makes extensive use of fieldwork and
ethnographic methods.
The applications to which business anthropology has been put are
extremely varied. They include, for example, studies of time, place and
space, communication, organizational cultures, managerial ideologies,
transnational joint ventures, migration, repatriation experiences, people’s
understandings of and relations with technologies, marketing and branding
strategies, design methodologies and concepts, ethnic and gender differences, consumption behavior, and so on among others. Like many other
Emerging Trends in the Social and Behavioral Sciences. Edited by Robert Scott and Stephen Kosslyn.
© 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. ISBN 978-1-118-90077-2.

1

2

EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

forms of applied anthropology, business anthropology tends to be project
driven. It is often carried out by means of teams, whose members work
together intensively over comparatively short periods of time, making
regular use of sophisticated and advanced ethnographic methods with
which clients tend to engage actively (e.g., in viewing with the fieldworker
the daily rushes of video footage of ethnographic activities and interviews).
It applies anthropological theories developed in seemingly unrelated fields
such as ritual, magic, and animism, as well as in others closer at hand
(family systems, markets, and exchange mechanisms), to business situations
in different parts of the world.
As a term, business anthropology embraces a broad spectrum of already
existing branches of the discipline. These include “corporate,” “enterprise,”
“organizational,” 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. The term itself seems to have been coined in the mid-1980s, but has
only come into consistent and regular usage during the first decade of the
new millennium, which has seen the publication of several new monographs
and edited books, together with the launching of two journals from 2010
[the Journal of Business Anthropology (www.cbs.dk/jba), and the International
Journal of Business Anthropology].
There is, potentially, a double confusion concerning the term business
anthropology. The first concerns the word “business,” which reflects some of
the terminological uncertainty alluded to above over anthropologists’ study
of work and its surrounding institutions in contemporary societies. Yet, the
argument may be made that oil riggers, weavers, dealers, planters, farmers,
and camel drivers are all linked by the fact that they engage in trade—in
the sense that they practice a particular line of business, often involving
the purchase, sale, and exchange of commodities; and that they pursue an
occupation, which often makes use of skilled manual or mechanical work,
as a livelihood. In addition, in trade they engage in practices that form
many of the building blocks of anthropological theory: material culture
and technology; gifts, commodities and money; labor and other forms of
social exchange; (fictive) kinship, patronage, quasi-groups, and networks;
rituals, symbolism and power; the development and maintenance of taste;
and so on. Thus, defined as the anthropology of trading relations, business
anthropology reaches out to other disciplines such as business history,
cultural studies, management and organization studies, some parts of
sociology, and even cultural economics.
The second confusion concerns “anthropology” and, more specifically, “anthropologist.” Not only is it at times difficult to fathom the theoretical and
methodological connections between—say—cognitive and development, or

Business Anthropology

3

legal and sensory, anthropologies. Distinctions between anthropologists and
other professions are not always that clear cut. Managers, for example, all
exhibit ethnographic skills to one degree or another. They talk and listen to
the people with whom they deal; try to understand what they are not saying, and why; and plan organizational and business strategies accordingly.
The same can be said of advertising executives, journalists and detectives,
among other occupations, all of whom zigzag back and forth between observation and theoretical reasoning, and the endless spiral of modifications that
each brings to the other.
FOUNDATIONAL RESEARCH
Given that the development of anthropology was from the very beginning
predicated upon its being of practical use to “the utilities and requirements
of society” (mainly in terms of colonial administration, rather than of business as such), it is not surprising to learn that, despite its apparently recent
emergence as a defined branch of the discipline, the study of business in
anthropology goes back to the 1920s. Marietta Baba, among others, has documented in detail how the received view is that anthropology’s relationship with the domain of business began in the United States with Western
Electric’s Hawthorne Project (1927–1932) and the subsequent rise (and fall)
of Elton Mayo’s Human Relations School. Anthropologists such as Lloyd
Warner contributed to these projects by initiating studies of human and social
behavior in corporations such as IBM, Sears & Roebuck, and Western Electric.
At the same time, they also launched ethnographic studies of consumption,
branding and advertising through the successful spin-off of a consulting firm
by anthropologists at the University of Chicago. The Society for Applied
Anthropology was founded in the United States in 1941.
In many respects, the anthropological study of business is primarily an
American development, and the businesses studied have for the most part
been themselves either American or located in the United States. This is, perhaps, to be expected. It is in the United States that applied anthropology, in its
multiple forms, has been most institutionalized in the post-secondary education system. However, business (under its guise as applied) anthropology
has not been entirely American. A number of British anthropologists (including Malinowski and Radcliffe-Brown) were also involved and theoretically
influential in different ways during the period between the 1930s and 1950s.
Resulting developments in the United Kingdom have included the founding
of the Tavistock Institute in 1946; the institution of the Manchester factory
shop floor studies of the 1950s and 1960s by South African anthropologist,
Max Gluckman; and the funding of (mainly British) anthropological research
by the Carnegie Corporation and Rockefeller Foundation.

4

EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

The main conclusion to be drawn from studies during this early period
of business anthropology is that “business anthropology” did not exist
as such in name. Rather, as intimated earlier, researchers would carry
out independent studies of different forms of economic activity and
organization—Norwegian herring fleets, labor migration in Uganda, family
firms in the Lebanon, and so on—and not worry too much about how
precisely to categorize their research other than as “anthropology.”
CUTTING-EDGE RESEARCH
Selecting what might be regarded as “cutting-edge” research in the field
of business anthropology is an unenviable task. While very aware of its
limitations, this section will focus on five areas of research and practice: (i)
ethnographies of business conducted by anthropologists employed full-time
in academia; (ii) regional studies, (iii) case studies developed by freelance,
professional practitioners; (iv) theoretical applications of business anthropology; and (v) methods.
First, if we accept that business anthropology is the anthropology of trading relations, we can cite a number of classical anthropological monographs
as forming the foundation of business anthropology. Bronislaw Malinowski’s
Argonauts of the Western Pacific, for example, would be one; Hortense Powdermaker’s Hollywood, the Dream Factory another. Neither of these authors would
have thought of themselves as “business” anthropologists as such. The same
is almost certainly true of James “Woody” Watson, who has published a study
of emigration and the Chinese lineage, and of Sylvia Yanagisako, with her
more recent account of family firms and the silk industry in northern Italy.
Yet it is clear that these works are examples of what is now commonly
referred to as business anthropology, although they are also very close to,
and in some cases explicitly identify with, economic anthropology. One
thinks here of Stuart Plattner’s study of a local art market in Kansas, or of
Marianne Lien’s of a Norwegian food company. The financial crash in 2009
has seen the publication of a number of monographs in the emergent field
of the anthropology of finance: notably Karen Ho’s timely account of Wall
Street in Liquidated and Melissa Fisher’s long-term study of the women of
Wall Street. This and other research by Annelise Riles and Hiro Miyazaki
has built on earlier work by Ellen Hertz on the Shanghai stock market, Bill
Maurer on Islamic finance and currencies, and Caitlin Zaloom on Chicago
traders’ relations with technology.
Second, although two of the works cited just above describe finance and
trading relations outside the United States, it is probably fair to say that the
anthropological study of business—and thus business anthropology—is an
American development, and that the businesses studied tend themselves to

Business Anthropology

5

be either American or located in the United States. Yet, we should note in
this context that research on contemporary business formations—in particular, the limited stock company—was undertaken comparatively early on
in a non-Western society: that of Japan. Robert Cole’s study of blue collar
workers, Thomas Rohlen’s of a Japanese bank, Ronald Dore’s of a British
and Japanese factory, and Rodney Clark’s of The Japanese Company all preceded by a decade or so the emergence of the term business anthropology in
the mid-1980s. Indeed, Japan has been a fruitful source for later anthropological accounts of trading relations. These include Brian Moeran’s detailed
monograph of a Japanese advertising agency, and Ted Bestor’s analysis of the
fish market of Tsukiji in Tokyo.
Japan is not the only focus of attention in the anthropology of business. A
large number of anthropologists have studied firms and organizations in various European countries as part of an ongoing interest in different cultural
forms of capitalism. In this respect, Danny Miller has conducted an ethnographic study of capitalism in Trinidad, while cultural variation has underpinned research on advertising agencies in India, China, and Sri Lanka. The
problem is how to keep abreast of such regional research, especially when it
is still not classified fully under the rubric of “business anthropology.”
The third area of research in this field consists of what may be referred
to, perhaps a little crudely, as case studies. Professional business anthropologists are usually employed on projects, which they are later permitted by
their clients to write about. Some of this work appears in anthropology
journals like Human Organization and Applied Anthropology, but a lot more
appears in edited volumes such as Melissa Cefkin’s Ethnography and the
Corporate Encounter, and Brigitte Jordan’s Advancing Ethnography in Corporate
Environments. There are also two or three monographs by professional
anthropologists who make use of numerous case studies in which they have
been engaged over time to illustrate theoretical issues. One thinks here of
Patti Sunderland and Rita Denny’s Doing Anthropology in Consumer Research
and Timothy Malefyt and Bob Morais’s investigation of Advertising and
Anthropology.
Fourthly, it is clear that for many professional business anthropologists
who are neither “here” in industry nor “there” in academia, theorizing
their work presents problems. This is in large part, perhaps, because they
subconsciously adopt academic anthropologists’ unspoken assumption that
theory is somehow “better than” practice, so that being a good ethnographer
in itself is insufficient to make a “great” anthropologist. However, for the
professional business anthropologist, theory is not limited to its academic
emanations. It is also a major component of the ways in which clients think
about their problems (in terms of brand management, product communication, marketing strategy, and so on), and practitioners therefore find

6

EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

themselves having to weigh and balance academic and business theoretical
inputs when proposing solutions to clients’ problems.
This conundrum tends to affect the work of professional business anthropologists outlined under “case studies” above. When they apply general
anthropological theories, the latter tend to be specific to particular business
situations (which themselves may also be amenable to theoretical developments in another discipline, such as psychology, for example). We find
age-old anthropological concepts such as totemism, animism, and contagious magic applied to branding strategies, for example; spatial orientation
metaphors to the organization of the home; and ritual tournaments (or
tournaments of values) to competitive presentations in advertising, awards
ceremonies, and trade fairs more generally. However, the question naturally
arises: to what extent are such theoretical applications generalizable to other
branches of business?
Finally, methods. One of business anthropology’s strengths, in particular
as it has been carried out among professional practitioners, has been in its
cutting-edge methods—many of them now being carried across into more
mainstream anthropology. Often working in teams with comparatively
short deadlines, practitioners have sought ways to improve and validate
data collection techniques and both client and informant interaction. They
have made use of informants’ diaries, e-mails, blogs, and various forms
of sociodigitization (Facebook, YouTube, and so on) when researching
particular problems. They regularly use video to capture social interaction
and share it with their clients, while also pursuing classical ethnographic
techniques of participant-observation and interviews.
KEY ISSUES FOR FUTURE RESEARCH
This, albeit incomplete, outline of key research issues raises the more general question: what might a program for business anthropology look like
in the future? There are three key issues underpinning the development of
a coherent research program. One is opportunities for learning; a second,
engagement; and the third, comparison.
Firstly, business anthropologists, especially those employed in academic
institutions, need to fight to revitalize current anthropology programs taught
in universities and other institutions of higher learning. In an era when
most anthropology students get jobs in business organizations of one sort
or another, there is a strong case for arguing that anthropology programs
should be preparing students specifically for such job opportunities, rather
than giving them endless doses of ethnographic and theoretical discussions
that are in large part irrelevant to their future careers. An education in
anthropology that includes, rather than ignores, the role of business in social

Business Anthropology

7

and cultural relations should lead to an increase in interest in, and numbers
of people practicing, business anthropology.
Secondly, business anthropologists need, far more than they do, to engage
with anthropological theories. They must go beyond making passive use
of theories, first by recontextualizing them in different business situations,
and then by applying them consistently across sectors and societies. If one
accepts, for example, Rodney Clark’s argument that joint stock companies
have major social, financial, political, cultural, and structural repercussions
on the organization of any society, then we need to ask, in contexts outside Japan, just how and to what extent, for example, they distribute wealth,
engage with local, regional and national governments, support education
and research, sponsor sporting and cultural events, and so on in different
societies. What differences do we find? In addition, how do these differences
inflect people’s understandings of firms in different societies?
A second aspect of engagement concerns business anthropologists’
engagement with scholars studying business from different disciplinary
perspectives. How can business anthropology help those in management
or organization studies, strategy, marketing, business history, consumer
culture studies, and so on, understand the varieties of business practices and
organizational forms that they study? There is, at present, an unfortunate
“siloization” at work, which separates those working in business anthropology from those employed in business schools around the world. Somehow
this needs to be overcome by anthropologists engaging more with those
working in similar areas in other disciplines.
Thirdly, as implied above, business anthropology must be comparative.
Those anthropologists working in, on, for, or against businesses must
compare their findings with those of their colleagues working both in other
branches of business and in other societies. Are analogies to be drawn
between north Italian silk manufacturing family firms, on the one hand, and
family restaurant owners in Chinatown in London, on the other? If so, what
are they? In addition, how do they compare with the ideals and practices
of Japanese corporate “familism”? What are the mechanisms sustaining a
preference for family forms as a means of making a living from different
kinds of business activities over generations and across cultures? Business
anthropologists need to adopt a broader perspective than they generally do.
Given these key issues, we may ask: in what directions should theoretical
endeavors in business anthropology proceed in future?
Firstly, anthropologists could usefully examine social relations and structures of power in, between, and dependent on business organizations
of all kinds, but particularly firms.

8

EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

Secondly, they might usefully make explicit comparison between these
social forms (companies, industries, conglomerates, and so on) and the
various cultures (work, management, professional, regional, national,
and so forth) that, in one way or another, impinge upon and form them,
and by which they themselves are developed and sustained.
Thirdly, they should pay far more attention to materials, technologies and
things (goods, commodities, equipment, tools) with which business
people of all kinds engage, in which they are entangled, and which
afford their organizational forms.
In addition, finally, they should advertise more forcefully the benefits of
the fieldwork methods that they have developed in business contexts.
If all of this were done, and done well, we might find that business anthropology brings together both a French structural anthropologist and a brand
of jeans and that business is, indeed, “good to think.”
FURTHER READING
Baba, M. L. (1986). Business and industrial anthropology: An overview. (National Association for the Practice of Anthropology. Bulletin No. 2.). Washington, DC: American
Anthropological Association.
Bestor, T. (2004). Tsukiji: The fish market at the center of the world. Berkeley: University
of California Press.
Cefkin, M. (Ed.) (2009). Ethnography and the corporate encounter: Reflections on research
in and of corporations. Studies in Applied Anthropology (Vol. 5). New York, NY:
Bergham Books.
Clark, R. (1979). The Japanese company. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Cole, R. E. (1971). Japanese blue collar: The changing tradition. Berkeley: University of
California Press.
Malefyt, T. de W., & Morais, R. J. (2012). Advertising and anthropology: Ethnographic
practice and cultural perspectives. Oxford, England: Berg.
Dore, R. P. (1973). British factory-Japanese factory. Berkeley: University of California
Press.
Hertz, E. (1998). The trading crowd: An ethnography of the Shanghai stock market. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.
Ho, K. (2009). Liquidated: An ethnography of Wall Street. Durham, NC: Duke University
Press.
Jordan, A. T. (2012a). Business anthropology. Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland Press.
Jordan, B. (Ed.) (2012b). Advancing ethnography in corporate environments: Challenges
and emerging opportunities. Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press.
Lien, M. (1997). Marketing and modernity. Oxford, England: Berg.
Malinowski, B. (1922). Argonauts of the Western Pacific. London, England: Routledge
& Kegan Paul.

Business Anthropology

9

Miller, D. (1995). Capitalism: An ethnographic approach. Oxford, England: Berg.
Moeran, B. (1996). A Japanese advertising agency: An anthropology of media and markets.
London, England: Curzon.
Moeran, B. (2005). The business of ethnography: Strategic exchanges, people and organizations. Oxford, England: Berg.
Moeran, B., & Pedersen, J. S. (Eds.) (2011). Negotiating values in the creative industries:
Fairs, festivals and competitive events. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University
Press.
Nader, L. (1969). Up the anthropologist—Perspectives gained from studying up. In
D. Hymes (Ed.), Reinventing anthropology. New York, NY: Random House.
Plattner, S. (1996). High art down home: An economic ethnography of a local art market.
Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Powdermaker, H. (1950). Hollywood, the dream factory: An anthropologist looks at the
movie-makers. Boston, MA: Little, Brown.
Rohlen, T. (1974). For harmony and strength. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Schwartzman, H. (1993). Ethnography in organizations. Newbury Park, CA: Sage
Publishers.
Sunderland, P. L., & Denny, R. M. (2007). Doing anthropology in consumer research.
Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press.
Yanagisako, S. (2002). Producing culture and capital: Family firms in Italy. Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press.
Zaloom, C. (2006). Out of the pits: Traders and technology from Chicago to London.
Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

BRIAN MOERAN SHORT BIOGRAPHY
Brian Moeran is Professor of Business Anthropology at the Copenhagen
Business School and Founding Editor of the Journal of Business Anthropology
(www.cbs.dk/jba). He is a social anthropologist by training and has conducted comparative research on pottery, department store art marketing, an
advertising agency, women’s fashion magazines, publishing, and incense
production—mainly, but not exclusively, in Japan. More details may be
found under http://www.cbs.dk/en/research/departments-and-centres/
department-of-intercultural-communication-and-management/staff/
bdmikl. He may be reached at bdm.ikl@cbs.dk
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10

EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

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Business Anthropology

11

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Business Anthropology
BRIAN MOERAN

Abstract
This essay outlines the overall scope and location of business anthropology within
the overall field of the discipline. It outlines its foundations as an applied form of
anthropology in early developments in the United States (in particular, in Western
Electric’s Hawthorne Project and the Human Relations School at Harvard University), as well as in the United Kingdom and elsewhere, before turning to five areas of
research and practice: academic ethnographies of business practices, regional studies, case studies developed by practitioners, theoretical applications, and methods.
The essay then asks what a future program for business anthropology might look
like and suggests four areas for theoretical development against a background of
education, engagement, and comparative work. These are an examination of structures of power in, between, and dependent on business organizations of all kinds;
cross-cultural comparison of work cultures; attention to the materials, technologies,
and goods with which business people engage and which afford their organizational
forms; and explicit attention to cutting-edge fieldwork methods.

OVERVIEW
Business anthropology refers to ethnographic research conducted in, for, with,
and on business organizations of one sort or another. Such research has been
carried out both by anthropologists employed full-time in academic institutions and by professional anthropologists employed as such in large organizations like Intel, General Motors, and Xerox, or working for, or running
their own, consultancy and marketing firms. As such, it is very much an
applied form of anthropology that makes extensive use of fieldwork and
ethnographic methods.
The applications to which business anthropology has been put are
extremely varied. They include, for example, studies of time, place and
space, communication, organizational cultures, managerial ideologies,
transnational joint ventures, migration, repatriation experiences, people’s
understandings of and relations with technologies, marketing and branding
strategies, design methodologies and concepts, ethnic and gender differences, consumption behavior, and so on among others. Like many other
Emerging Trends in the Social and Behavioral Sciences. Edited by Robert Scott and Stephen Kosslyn.
© 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. ISBN 978-1-118-90077-2.

1

2

EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

forms of applied anthropology, business anthropology tends to be project
driven. It is often carried out by means of teams, whose members work
together intensively over comparatively short periods of time, making
regular use of sophisticated and advanced ethnographic methods with
which clients tend to engage actively (e.g., in viewing with the fieldworker
the daily rushes of video footage of ethnographic activities and interviews).
It applies anthropological theories developed in seemingly unrelated fields
such as ritual, magic, and animism, as well as in others closer at hand
(family systems, markets, and exchange mechanisms), to business situations
in different parts of the world.
As a term, business anthropology embraces a broad spectrum of already
existing branches of the discipline. These include “corporate,” “enterprise,”
“organizational,” 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. The term itself seems to have been coined in the mid-1980s, but has
only come into consistent and regular usage during the first decade of the
new millennium, which has seen the publication of several new monographs
and edited books, together with the launching of two journals from 2010
[the Journal of Business Anthropology (www.cbs.dk/jba), and the International
Journal of Business Anthropology].
There is, potentially, a double confusion concerning the term business
anthropology. The first concerns the word “business,” which reflects some of
the terminological uncertainty alluded to above over anthropologists’ study
of work and its surrounding institutions in contemporary societies. Yet, the
argument may be made that oil riggers, weavers, dealers, planters, farmers,
and camel drivers are all linked by the fact that they engage in trade—in
the sense that they practice a particular line of business, often involving
the purchase, sale, and exchange of commodities; and that they pursue an
occupation, which often makes use of skilled manual or mechanical work,
as a livelihood. In addition, in trade they engage in practices that form
many of the building blocks of anthropological theory: material culture
and technology; gifts, commodities and money; labor and other forms of
social exchange; (fictive) kinship, patronage, quasi-groups, and networks;
rituals, symbolism and power; the development and maintenance of taste;
and so on. Thus, defined as the anthropology of trading relations, business
anthropology reaches out to other disciplines such as business history,
cultural studies, management and organization studies, some parts of
sociology, and even cultural economics.
The second confusion concerns “anthropology” and, more specifically, “anthropologist.” Not only is it at times difficult to fathom the theoretical and
methodological connections between—say—cognitive and development, or

Business Anthropology

3

legal and sensory, anthropologies. Distinctions between anthropologists and
other professions are not always that clear cut. Managers, for example, all
exhibit ethnographic skills to one degree or another. They talk and listen to
the people with whom they deal; try to understand what they are not saying, and why; and plan organizational and business strategies accordingly.
The same can be said of advertising executives, journalists and detectives,
among other occupations, all of whom zigzag back and forth between observation and theoretical reasoning, and the endless spiral of modifications that
each brings to the other.
FOUNDATIONAL RESEARCH
Given that the development of anthropology was from the very beginning
predicated upon its being of practical use to “the utilities and requirements
of society” (mainly in terms of colonial administration, rather than of business as such), it is not surprising to learn that, despite its apparently recent
emergence as a defined branch of the discipline, the study of business in
anthropology goes back to the 1920s. Marietta Baba, among others, has documented in detail how the received view is that anthropology’s relationship with the domain of business began in the United States with Western
Electric’s Hawthorne Project (1927–1932) and the subsequent rise (and fall)
of Elton Mayo’s Human Relations School. Anthropologists such as Lloyd
Warner contributed to these projects by initiating studies of human and social
behavior in corporations such as IBM, Sears & Roebuck, and Western Electric.
At the same time, they also launched ethnographic studies of consumption,
branding and advertising through the successful spin-off of a consulting firm
by anthropologists at the University of Chicago. The Society for Applied
Anthropology was founded in the United States in 1941.
In many respects, the anthropological study of business is primarily an
American development, and the businesses studied have for the most part
been themselves either American or located in the United States. This is, perhaps, to be expected. It is in the United States that applied anthropology, in its
multiple forms, has been most institutionalized in the post-secondary education system. However, business (under its guise as applied) anthropology
has not been entirely American. A number of British anthropologists (including Malinowski and Radcliffe-Brown) were also involved and theoretically
influential in different ways during the period between the 1930s and 1950s.
Resulting developments in the United Kingdom have included the founding
of the Tavistock Institute in 1946; the institution of the Manchester factory
shop floor studies of the 1950s and 1960s by South African anthropologist,
Max Gluckman; and the funding of (mainly British) anthropological research
by the Carnegie Corporation and Rockefeller Foundation.

4

EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

The main conclusion to be drawn from studies during this early period
of business anthropology is that “business anthropology” did not exist
as such in name. Rather, as intimated earlier, researchers would carry
out independent studies of different forms of economic activity and
organization—Norwegian herring fleets, labor migration in Uganda, family
firms in the Lebanon, and so on—and not worry too much about how
precisely to categorize their research other than as “anthropology.”
CUTTING-EDGE RESEARCH
Selecting what might be regarded as “cutting-edge” research in the field
of business anthropology is an unenviable task. While very aware of its
limitations, this section will focus on five areas of research and practice: (i)
ethnographies of business conducted by anthropologists employed full-time
in academia; (ii) regional studies, (iii) case studies developed by freelance,
professional practitioners; (iv) theoretical applications of business anthropology; and (v) methods.
First, if we accept that business anthropology is the anthropology of trading relations, we can cite a number of classical anthropological monographs
as forming the foundation of business anthropology. Bronislaw Malinowski’s
Argonauts of the Western Pacific, for example, would be one; Hortense Powdermaker’s Hollywood, the Dream Factory another. Neither of these authors would
have thought of themselves as “business” anthropologists as such. The same
is almost certainly true of James “Woody” Watson, who has published a study
of emigration and the Chinese lineage, and of Sylvia Yanagisako, with her
more recent account of family firms and the silk industry in northern Italy.
Yet it is clear that these works are examples of what is now commonly
referred to as business anthropology, although they are also very close to,
and in some cases explicitly identify with, economic anthropology. One
thinks here of Stuart Plattner’s study of a local art market in Kansas, or of
Marianne Lien’s of a Norwegian food company. The financial crash in 2009
has seen the publication of a number of monographs in the emergent field
of the anthropology of finance: notably Karen Ho’s timely account of Wall
Street in Liquidated and Melissa Fisher’s long-term study of the women of
Wall Street. This and other research by Annelise Riles and Hiro Miyazaki
has built on earlier work by Ellen Hertz on the Shanghai stock market, Bill
Maurer on Islamic finance and currencies, and Caitlin Zaloom on Chicago
traders’ relations with technology.
Second, although two of the works cited just above describe finance and
trading relations outside the United States, it is probably fair to say that the
anthropological study of business—and thus business anthropology—is an
American development, and that the businesses studied tend themselves to

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5

be either American or located in the United States. Yet, we should note in
this context that research on contemporary business formations—in particular, the limited stock company—was undertaken comparatively early on
in a non-Western society: that of Japan. Robert Cole’s study of blue collar
workers, Thomas Rohlen’s of a Japanese bank, Ronald Dore’s of a British
and Japanese factory, and Rodney Clark’s of The Japanese Company all preceded by a decade or so the emergence of the term business anthropology in
the mid-1980s. Indeed, Japan has been a fruitful source for later anthropological accounts of trading relations. These include Brian Moeran’s detailed
monograph of a Japanese advertising agency, and Ted Bestor’s analysis of the
fish market of Tsukiji in Tokyo.
Japan is not the only focus of attention in the anthropology of business. A
large number of anthropologists have studied firms and organizations in various European countries as part of an ongoing interest in different cultural
forms of capitalism. In this respect, Danny Miller has conducted an ethnographic study of capitalism in Trinidad, while cultural variation has underpinned research on advertising agencies in India, China, and Sri Lanka. The
problem is how to keep abreast of such regional research, especially when it
is still not classified fully under the rubric of “business anthropology.”
The third area of research in this field consists of what may be referred
to, perhaps a little crudely, as case studies. Professional business anthropologists are usually employed on projects, which they are later permitted by
their clients to write about. Some of this work appears in anthropology
journals like Human Organization and Applied Anthropology, but a lot more
appears in edited volumes such as Melissa Cefkin’s Ethnography and the
Corporate Encounter, and Brigitte Jordan’s Advancing Ethnography in Corporate
Environments. There are also two or three monographs by professional
anthropologists who make use of numerous case studies in which they have
been engaged over time to illustrate theoretical issues. One thinks here of
Patti Sunderland and Rita Denny’s Doing Anthropology in Consumer Research
and Timothy Malefyt and Bob Morais’s investigation of Advertising and
Anthropology.
Fourthly, it is clear that for many professional business anthropologists
who are neither “here” in industry nor “there” in academia, theorizing
their work presents problems. This is in large part, perhaps, because they
subconsciously adopt academic anthropologists’ unspoken assumption that
theory is somehow “better than” practice, so that being a good ethnographer
in itself is insufficient to make a “great” anthropologist. However, for the
professional business anthropologist, theory is not limited to its academic
emanations. It is also a major component of the ways in which clients think
about their problems (in terms of brand management, product communication, marketing strategy, and so on), and practitioners therefore find

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EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

themselves having to weigh and balance academic and business theoretical
inputs when proposing solutions to clients’ problems.
This conundrum tends to affect the work of professional business anthropologists outlined under “case studies” above. When they apply general
anthropological theories, the latter tend to be specific to particular business
situations (which themselves may also be amenable to theoretical developments in another discipline, such as psychology, for example). We find
age-old anthropological concepts such as totemism, animism, and contagious magic applied to branding strategies, for example; spatial orientation
metaphors to the organization of the home; and ritual tournaments (or
tournaments of values) to competitive presentations in advertising, awards
ceremonies, and trade fairs more generally. However, the question naturally
arises: to what extent are such theoretical applications generalizable to other
branches of business?
Finally, methods. One of business anthropology’s strengths, in particular
as it has been carried out among professional practitioners, has been in its
cutting-edge methods—many of them now being carried across into more
mainstream anthropology. Often working in teams with comparatively
short deadlines, practitioners have sought ways to improve and validate
data collection techniques and both client and informant interaction. They
have made use of informants’ diaries, e-mails, blogs, and various forms
of sociodigitization (Facebook, YouTube, and so on) when researching
particular problems. They regularly use video to capture social interaction
and share it with their clients, while also pursuing classical ethnographic
techniques of participant-observation and interviews.
KEY ISSUES FOR FUTURE RESEARCH
This, albeit incomplete, outline of key research issues raises the more general question: what might a program for business anthropology look like
in the future? There are three key issues underpinning the development of
a coherent research program. One is opportunities for learning; a second,
engagement; and the third, comparison.
Firstly, business anthropologists, especially those employed in academic
institutions, need to fight to revitalize current anthropology programs taught
in universities and other institutions of higher learning. In an era when
most anthropology students get jobs in business organizations of one sort
or another, there is a strong case for arguing that anthropology programs
should be preparing students specifically for such job opportunities, rather
than giving them endless doses of ethnographic and theoretical discussions
that are in large part irrelevant to their future careers. An education in
anthropology that includes, rather than ignores, the role of business in social

Business Anthropology

7

and cultural relations should lead to an increase in interest in, and numbers
of people practicing, business anthropology.
Secondly, business anthropologists need, far more than they do, to engage
with anthropological theories. They must go beyond making passive use
of theories, first by recontextualizing them in different business situations,
and then by applying them consistently across sectors and societies. If one
accepts, for example, Rodney Clark’s argument that joint stock companies
have major social, financial, political, cultural, and structural repercussions
on the organization of any society, then we need to ask, in contexts outside Japan, just how and to what extent, for example, they distribute wealth,
engage with local, regional and national governments, support education
and research, sponsor sporting and cultural events, and so on in different
societies. What differences do we find? In addition, how do these differences
inflect people’s understandings of firms in different societies?
A second aspect of engagement concerns business anthropologists’
engagement with scholars studying business from different disciplinary
perspectives. How can business anthropology help those in management
or organization studies, strategy, marketing, business history, consumer
culture studies, and so on, understand the varieties of business practices and
organizational forms that they study? There is, at present, an unfortunate
“siloization” at work, which separates those working in business anthropology from those employed in business schools around the world. Somehow
this needs to be overcome by anthropologists engaging more with those
working in similar areas in other disciplines.
Thirdly, as implied above, business anthropology must be comparative.
Those anthropologists working in, on, for, or against businesses must
compare their findings with those of their colleagues working both in other
branches of business and in other societies. Are analogies to be drawn
between north Italian silk manufacturing family firms, on the one hand, and
family restaurant owners in Chinatown in London, on the other? If so, what
are they? In addition, how do they compare with the ideals and practices
of Japanese corporate “familism”? What are the mechanisms sustaining a
preference for family forms as a means of making a living from different
kinds of business activities over generations and across cultures? Business
anthropologists need to adopt a broader perspective than they generally do.
Given these key issues, we may ask: in what directions should theoretical
endeavors in business anthropology proceed in future?
Firstly, anthropologists could usefully examine social relations and structures of power in, between, and dependent on business organizations
of all kinds, but particularly firms.

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EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

Secondly, they might usefully make explicit comparison between these
social forms (companies, industries, conglomerates, and so on) and the
various cultures (work, management, professional, regional, national,
and so forth) that, in one way or another, impinge upon and form them,
and by which they themselves are developed and sustained.
Thirdly, they should pay far more attention to materials, technologies and
things (goods, commodities, equipment, tools) with which business
people of all kinds engage, in which they are entangled, and which
afford their organizational forms.
In addition, finally, they should advertise more forcefully the benefits of
the fieldwork methods that they have developed in business contexts.
If all of this were done, and done well, we might find that business anthropology brings together both a French structural anthropologist and a brand
of jeans and that business is, indeed, “good to think.”
FURTHER READING
Baba, M. L. (1986). Business and industrial anthropology: An overview. (National Association for the Practice of Anthropology. Bulletin No. 2.). Washington, DC: American
Anthropological Association.
Bestor, T. (2004). Tsukiji: The fish market at the center of the world. Berkeley: University
of California Press.
Cefkin, M. (Ed.) (2009). Ethnography and the corporate encounter: Reflections on research
in and of corporations. Studies in Applied Anthropology (Vol. 5). New York, NY:
Bergham Books.
Clark, R. (1979). The Japanese company. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Cole, R. E. (1971). Japanese blue collar: The changing tradition. Berkeley: University of
California Press.
Malefyt, T. de W., & Morais, R. J. (2012). Advertising and anthropology: Ethnographic
practice and cultural perspectives. Oxford, England: Berg.
Dore, R. P. (1973). British factory-Japanese factory. Berkeley: University of California
Press.
Hertz, E. (1998). The trading crowd: An ethnography of the Shanghai stock market. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.
Ho, K. (2009). Liquidated: An ethnography of Wall Street. Durham, NC: Duke University
Press.
Jordan, A. T. (2012a). Business anthropology. Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland Press.
Jordan, B. (Ed.) (2012b). Advancing ethnography in corporate environments: Challenges
and emerging opportunities. Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press.
Lien, M. (1997). Marketing and modernity. Oxford, England: Berg.
Malinowski, B. (1922). Argonauts of the Western Pacific. London, England: Routledge
& Kegan Paul.

Business Anthropology

9

Miller, D. (1995). Capitalism: An ethnographic approach. Oxford, England: Berg.
Moeran, B. (1996). A Japanese advertising agency: An anthropology of media and markets.
London, England: Curzon.
Moeran, B. (2005). The business of ethnography: Strategic exchanges, people and organizations. Oxford, England: Berg.
Moeran, B., & Pedersen, J. S. (Eds.) (2011). Negotiating values in the creative industries:
Fairs, festivals and competitive events. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University
Press.
Nader, L. (1969). Up the anthropologist—Perspectives gained from studying up. In
D. Hymes (Ed.), Reinventing anthropology. New York, NY: Random House.
Plattner, S. (1996). High art down home: An economic ethnography of a local art market.
Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Powdermaker, H. (1950). Hollywood, the dream factory: An anthropologist looks at the
movie-makers. Boston, MA: Little, Brown.
Rohlen, T. (1974). For harmony and strength. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Schwartzman, H. (1993). Ethnography in organizations. Newbury Park, CA: Sage
Publishers.
Sunderland, P. L., & Denny, R. M. (2007). Doing anthropology in consumer research.
Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press.
Yanagisako, S. (2002). Producing culture and capital: Family firms in Italy. Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press.
Zaloom, C. (2006). Out of the pits: Traders and technology from Chicago to London.
Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

BRIAN MOERAN SHORT BIOGRAPHY
Brian Moeran is Professor of Business Anthropology at the Copenhagen
Business School and Founding Editor of the Journal of Business Anthropology
(www.cbs.dk/jba). He is a social anthropologist by training and has conducted comparative research on pottery, department store art marketing, an
advertising agency, women’s fashion magazines, publishing, and incense
production—mainly, but not exclusively, in Japan. More details may be
found under http://www.cbs.dk/en/research/departments-and-centres/
department-of-intercultural-communication-and-management/staff/
bdmikl. He may be reached at bdm.ikl@cbs.dk
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