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ORGANIZATIONAL CHANGE

The last two decades of the 20th century were a time of change for organizations, with a preoccupation in changing organizational culture, a concept attributed to business anthropology. These changes have been accompanied by questions about different styles of organizing. In both public and private sector organizations and in the first and third worlds, there is now a focus on understanding how organizational change can be achieved, how indigenous practices can be incorporated to maximum effect, and how opportunities can be improved for disadvantaged groups, particularly women. Business anthropologist Susan Wright once explored organizational culture as a tool of management. She presented and analyzed the latest anthropological work on the management of organizations and their development, demonstrating the use of recent theory and examining the practical problems which anthropology can help to solve (Wright, 1994).
Scholars have paid much attention on the enormous changes in the global economy, which certainly brought the changes in organizations. For instance, Nigel Thrift (2001) notes that in the new economy condition women are a declining because finance is representative of a certain kind of male role model. Anthropological study on the new economy suggests that organizational changes are unavoidable and firms must very well prepare for changes (Fisher and Downey, 2006). Just like cultures, businesses are very dynamic rather than static; this is particular true for those large transnational corporations, which are in a constant state of change.
Business firms are expanding to take advantage of economies of scale, contracting or restructuring for greater efficiency, constantly implementing innovations to encourage greater productivity. One innovation that has become very popular in the past fifteen years is a change from a department-based structure to a team-based structure. An aerospace company in which all the engineers were formerly assigned to the engineering department, for example, has created new “integrated product teams” (IPTs) in which all the workers involved in producing one type of aircraft, from managers to engineers to shop floor workers, are organized into a single team. Another popular innovation is “self-directed work teams” (SDWTs), the members of which manage themselves (to a greater or lesser extent, depending on the company). Both kinds of teams have been shown to enhance productivity and to contribute to employees’ sense that they are an integral and important part of a larger pattern (Jordan, 1999, 1997).
A major role for business anthropologists is to contribute to such organizational changes. The team structure is particularly well suited to anthropological analysis (Van Marrewijk, 2010). For example, applied anthropologist Judith Benson helped the Boeing Company create and integrate product teams into the structure of the business. Applying anthropological methods and skills, Benson helped to improve Boeing’s team work efficiency by interviewing shop floor mechanics. She was able to recommend specific changes in the way team leaders worked with their teams, which fostered Boeing’s goal of involving its entire labor force in “determining the course of work” (Benson, 2000; Gwynne, 2003).

PRODUCT DESIGN AND DEVELOPMENT

Another major role for business anthropologists involves helping businesses improve their products, design and develop new products, or improve the way their products are presented to consumers. In general, companies hire an anthropologist to conduct an internal or external ethnographic study for a simple reason: to uncover new ways to achieve competitive advantage. It takes research to understand new opportunities for products or services, or internal focus to change organizational issues, among other things. In recent years, ethnography has become popular with designers of products and technologies as a way of learning about the experience of the users. This research approach has been applied to such diverse problems as: How to design office environments that encourage group work and collaboration? How to design websites that fit the “mental model” and usage patterns of their target audiences? How to design museum exhibits that maximize the engagement between visitors and displays? (McDonough and Braungart, 2002).
The value of incorporating ethnography into product development and work practices research has been widely recognized in the business world, particularly in the design industry in recent years (Squires and Bryan, 2002). New firms have arisen that specialize in design research, and some of them explicitly include ethnography. Although some scholars may disagree that these “ethnographers” are business anthropologist, in special cases it appears that being an “ethnographer” means a willingness and ability to make observations about how consumers use the products in their everyday life at their own home or other locations. In such a case, contextual analysis of findings is strictly optional, and not well understood or necessarily valued by the design firm or its clients (Baba, 2006).
Some business anthropologists specialize in helping businesses design and develop products that will result in profits for the company. As an example, a business anthropologist undertook research on behalf of a corporation manufacturing surgical instruments to assess medical doctors’ demand for these instruments. The method used was to observe emergency-room doctors on the job in order to gain insight into how the doctors actually used the instruments. In prior interviews, the doctors had reported that their main concern was that their instruments be highly accurate. The anthropologist, however, discovered through direct observation that speed was actually more important than accuracy; the doctors preferred instruments that permitted them to work rapidly. The anthropologist’s insight convinced the company to redesign its surgical instruments; the new design helped company increased its market share (Baba, 1998).
The burgeoning high-technology field is particularly ripe for anthropological input into product development. Business anthropologists are increasingly called upon to help generate ideas for new technologies or new ways to use existing ones as well as to provide businesses with a clearer understanding of the effects of new technologies on consumers. In order to develop ideas for new products and services, for example, applied anthropologist Bonnie A. Nardi has studied the ways in which workers use technology at Apple Computers and AT&T. Jean Canavan, a business anthropologist and manager of culture and technology initiatives at Motorola, has described how a 1996 study of pager use in rural China, where there is a scarcity of telephones, “prompted Motorola to start thinking seriously about two-way paging outside urban markets (Hafner, 1999).

In a very different application, Patricia Sachs’ work at Nynex illustrates the way in which an anthropological analysis of ethnographic data can influence the re-design of work systems. Customer repair work at Nynex became disjointed and inefficient when a new ‘trouble ticketing system’ was introduced. It broke repair work down into small pieces to be distributed to disassociated individual workers. If a worker did not complete a repair job by the end of his shift, the job was re-cycled to another worker, without an opportunity for the two workers to talk to one another. An activity analysis conducted by Sachs showed that the whole activity surrounding repair work, especially making sense of a problem through conversations among multiple workers, is crucial in solving a customer problem efficiently. The new information system disrupted the natural activity pattern and made the problem resolution process much less effective (Sachs, 1995).

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TACIT KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT

Patricia Burke, the founding director of Workspace International, suggests that observing what employees are doing about their day-to-day tasks is an important way of externalizing tacit knowledge, which is one of the ways that anthropology can make a significant contribution to the implementation of knowledge management. Tacit knowledge often consists of habits and culture that we do not recognize by ourselves. In the field of knowledge management, the concept of tacit knowledge refers to a knowledge which is only known by an individual and that is difficult to communicate to the rest of an organization (Burke, 1988).
Knowledge that is easy to communicate can be termed as explicit knowledge. The process of transforming tacit knowledge into explicit knowledge is known as articulation or codification. This kind of knowledge contrasts with formal knowledge in that it is not made explicit. For instance, a factory worker may have an “informal mental map” of the way raw materials actually flow through a manufacturing logistic process, a map that may reflect what really happens on the shop floor more accurately than what is shown on an idealized schematic drawing of the manufacturing process. When study tacit knowledge management, just as Gwynne (2003) suggests, an important part of what business anthropologists can make contributions is to tease out tacit knowledge that would otherwise remain hidden.
All employees will gradually develop tacit knowledge, which is defined as an informal body of knowledge gained in the course of doing a particular job (Baba, 1998). With tacit knowledge, people are not often aware of the knowledge they possess or how it can be valuable to others. Tacit knowledge is considered more valuable because it provides context for people, places, ideas, and experiences. Effective transfer of tacit knowledge generally requires extensive personal contact and trust. Tacit knowledge is not easily shared. One of Polanyi's famous aphorisms is: We know more than we can tell (Polanyi, 1966).
Business executives who understand their employees’ various bodies of tacit knowledge can use these to improve the efficiency with which a business is run, which ultimately, of course, helps increase profits. This skill is called tacit knowledge management. The tacit knowledge of a group of experienced, long-term employees, for example, can sometimes be “captured” and taught to incoming employees (Baba, 1986). This may be accomplished formally, by means of orientation lectures or written guidelines for new employees, but is more often done quite informally by having long-term employees talk to newcomers about a corporation’s history and traditions (Laabs, 1992).

CULTURAL AUDITS

Cultural values and preferences can impact how the employees, vendors/suppliers and customers of a global organization respond to its strategies, products, practices and communications. A marketing strategy, training program, compensation plan, advertising campaign, competency model, corporate communication or personnel policy is successful in one culture might be totally ineffective in another culture, if adopted without modification the result will not only make the adopting firm lose its revenue, but will lose its goodwill as well. Cultural audits examine current practices, programs and processes to identify how culturally appropriate they may be for multi-cultural or global audiences. Cultural audits will enable the global organization to align business processes with desired outcomes. ITAP International is a professional consulting firm that is ready to help business organizations achieve their global vision and strategy through customized cultural audits and action plans based on auditing results. (Cf. ITAP International homepage, accessed in Dec. 2008: http://itapintl.com/)
Businesses firms fail to reach their production or sales goals despite reasonable investments in capital and labor from time to time. Sometimes they experience strikes or other disputes. In such cases, a business anthropologist may be hired to carry out a cultural audit, a detailed study of the company undertaken in order to pinpoint discrepancies between the company’s goals and what is really going on (Weber, 1986). A cultural audit can be conducted by a permanent employee of the company but is more appropriate to be done by an outside cultural consultant with anthropological training. In either case, the results of a cultural audit are considered highly confidential, since companies, especially those publicly traded ones, usually prefer not to air their problems publicly (Gwynne, 2003).
Cultural audit or audit culture is the process for study and examination of an organization’s cultural characteristics, such as its assumptions, norms, philosophy, values, and relations among employees, to determine whether they hinder or support its vision and mission (Strathern, 2000). Gwynne (2003) outlines the process to perform a cultural audit, in which a business anthropologist may need to interviews employees at all levels of the organization. She suggests that business anthropologist, as a cultural auditor, might be not only interested in employees’ opinions (both positive and negative) and their suggestions for improvement, but also be interested in their values, feelings, attitudes, and expectations about their organization and the place they are within it. When doing cultural auditing business anthropologist may ask the interviewees a wide range of questions as below:
What are the company’s strategic goals, and what strategies are employed to reach these goals? What happens when these goals are not met? How can the workplace atmosphere best be characterized? What positions do the interviewees occupy in the company, and what do they feel they are contributing to the company’s success? How are they expected to behave and to communicate with others? Do these expectations reflect reality? What mechanisms exist through which employees can make their opinions, ideas, or grievances heard? Are performance incentives offered and, if so, to whom and under what circumstances? Do they work? Why or why not? These questions are merely examples of the types of questions asked by cultural auditors; the scope and range in fact could be virtually unlimited (Gwynne, 2003).

Sometimes the business anthropologist who functions as a cultural auditor may go outside the immediate company to interview members of its board of directors or even its stockholders for detailed information. The information collected is put together in the form of a report containing specific recommendations, the company’s manages or directors can take specific corrective actions according to the recommendations made by the business anthropologist made. A cultural audit undertaken by Briody and Baba at General Motors, for many years one of the giants of the American automobile manufacturing industry, provides a good example. A few years ago, management observed that some of the employees who had worked long-term in any one of GM’s overseas branches seemed discontented and less than fully productive on their return to the United States (Briody and Baba, 1993). Many returnees, for their part, felt their overseas work had not been sufficiently appreciated and that their status in the company had suffered because of their overseas service.
GM’s in-house, full-time business anthropologist Elizabeth Briody was assigned the task of undertaking a cultural audit of the company to help its managers solve the problem. Briody conducted a series of interviews with GM employees at all levels of the company. The results were interesting. It turned out that some of GM’s domestic operations were administratively linked, or “coupled,” with overseas operations, while others were not. Employees of “de-coupled” domestic operations saw themselves as GM’s “elite” (Garza, 1991). Their managers had little understanding of, or appreciation for, the importance of overseas work, and they sometimes shunted employees returning from overseas assignments into less promising career paths. On the basis of her cultural audit, Briody was able to recommend some specific ways in which GM could improve returning employees’ productivity and job satisfaction. In addition to coupling operations, she recommended, for example, the establishment of an exchange program in which American and foreign workers would trade places for a few years and then return to their original jobs without having sidetracked their careers (Garza, 1991; Gwynne, 2003).

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CORPORATE CULTURES

More recently, anthropologist Grant McCracken (2009), by combining a mastery of marketing, culture, anthropology, and modern business practice, argues that given the rapid changes in today’s business environment a chief cultural officer (CCO) is necessary for every company to anticipate cultural trends rather than passively waiting and reacting. McCracken suggests that the chief cultural officer should have the ability to process massive amounts of data and spot crucial developments among an array of possibilities. CCOs will be able to see the future coming, no matter which industry they serve, and create value for shareholders, move product, create profit and increase the bottom line.

A business, like a small-scale society or subculture, exists under certain rules and policies established by the government or industries. As discussed previously, a business firm consists of many individuals, of both genders, and a wide range of ages with different educational backgrounds; moreover, the individuals within the same business organization may have different skills and levels of ability. A business firm may include members of different ethnic groups and representatives of different socioeconomic classes. Each of these individuals will play a particular role in the institutional structure of the business, and this role conveys, on each, a particular status in the corporate hierarchy structure. The first, and perhaps the most important, contribution of business anthropologists to business organizations therefore is their systematic understanding of the corporate or organizational culture (Kotter, 1991; Reeves-Ellington, 1999).

For anthropologists, business firms are not only economic organizations that exists primarily to make a profit, but also groups of people similar in many respects to the other kinds of human groups studied by anthropologists traditionally. Business anthropologists have the ability to “penetrate” corporate cultures and to elicit not only formal but also informal knowledge from them (Garza, 1991). For example, business anthropologist Eleanor Wynn, who has worked for a number of high-tech companies on a consulting basis, compares the work she did for one of them, the Xerox Corporation, to “going to deepest, darkest New Guinea… What goes on in an R&D (research and development) computer lab … was one of the strangest things I’d ever seen” (Quoted in Corcoran, 1993).

Business anthropologists tend to find out the answers to the following questions in a given business organization under the study: Who are the leaders and who are the followers in the business? How many different groups of people exist in the business? What common beliefs, values, and attitudes do members of each group inside the business hold? What does the existing political hierarchy, according to which power and authority are wielded and responsibility is delegated, look like? How is information passed through among the members of each group? How do group members relate to and communicate with each other? What causes disputes among group members, among groups, and how are these resolved? It is sometimes difficult to convey to business managers that studying the answers to these and other anthropological questions can lead to corporate policy recommendations, which will be able to help a business function more smoothly and thus more profitably. Anthropological theory is sometimes not easily adopted by the average businessperson (Aguilera, 1996).

According to Gwynne (2003), any cultural anthropologist who is going to unknot and make explicable the culture of a small-scale society will have several different models to follow, which include Levi-Strauss’s structuralism, Malinowski’s functionalism, Geertz’s symbolic approach, and Marcus’s postmodern approach. Each of these models, and there are many others as well, provides a different means for conceiving of and investigating the culture of a group of people who are bonded together by same shared common values. Any of the models listed above can be used as a conceptual tool for investigating the culture of a business organization. Dr. Alfons van Marrewijk (2010) identified that, in the European context, business anthropologists developed their own interpretive perceptions on organizational culture, and created a cultural approach to study organizational issues. The analysis of the culture for a specific business organization by business anthropologists can be approached in different ways.

In reality, no matter what the model to be followed, a business anthropologist will always view a business as a bounded cultural community of people to be studied, analyzed, and understood in the same manners as other anthropologists study non-business communities (Gwynne, 2003). Take Judith Benson, an applied anthropologist, as an example. She worked for Kaiser Permanente, a health care management firm. Her responsibilities ranged from conducting focus groups to setting up a computerized system for processing clients’ complaints and managing a local call center. When Kaiser decided to embark on a “re-engineering” project intended to implement significant organizational changes within the firm, she smoothed the way for process change by offering guidance to the team members on how to identify the cultural context within which the change would take place. One of her concerns was to ensure that any changes made to the corporate culture would be sustainable for employees being affected, a task she addressed by developing a series of strategies that promoted communication, idea sharing, and collaboration among employees:

“I worked closely with individuals whom I recognized as potential roadblocks to the process change…I spent time with these major stakeholders to understand their points of view. At the same time, I worked with team members so that they could develop the process change in a way that blended with rather than confronted the existing cultural context.” (Benson, 2000).

The Unique Contributions and the Unique Methodologies:A Concise Overview of the Applications of Business Anthropology (1)

The Unique Contributions and the Unique Methodologies:
A Concise Overview of the Applications of Business Anthropology

Robert Guang Tian
Medaille College



Anthropologists can make their great contributions to improve business operations. Business anthropology is a relatively new but fast growing subfield in anthropology and the business anthropologist is becoming a major occupation for anthropologists. This paper analyzes the roles that business anthropologists can play, the functions that anthropologists can have, and the contributions that anthropologists can make in the real business world. It suggests that by using specially developed research methods of anthropology, such as participant observation, informant interview, focus group, various survey techniques, and network analysis, business anthropologist can help business management to improve performance from product design to marketing strategies, from organizational change to consumer behavior studies, from domestic to international business development.

INTRODUCTION

The roles and functions of business anthropologists have been widely recognized; in fact anthropologists are able to help solve most business problems in the real world and have made their unique contributions (Jordan, 2010). Business anthropologist Timothy Malefyt recently (2009) discusses the changing public role of anthropology in last few years by exploring the rise of branded ethnographic practices in consumer research. He argues that a juncture in the “New Economy”—the conjoining of corporate interest in branding, technology, and consumers, with vast social changes—help to explain the rapid growth of ethnography for consumer research and predict its future direction. Business problems are various, for example, some of the business problems are related to the acceptance of new technical tools, methods, and processes by reluctant workers. Business firms that have workers with different educational, ethnic, and cultural backgrounds may face serious difficulties in creating a coherent organizational culture (Schwartz, 1991). Business anthropologists have been hired to investigate sources of trouble and to suggest remedies (Mars, 1994). In some cases, business anthropologists are able to help mediate and open communication between groups of workers and management (Reice, 1993).
In practice, most business anthropologists play very different roles in the companies for which they work (Jordan, 2010; Marrewijk, 2010; Morais and Malefyt, 2010). Some focus on the products that businesses produce, for example, by helping businesses to develop attractive, salable products and to market these products successfully. While others focus on business organizations themselves, for example, by helping businesses to improve the efficiency with which they are run. No matter what their topical focus or employment status is, however, business anthropologists rely on the same methods other kinds of applied anthropologists use in their practice, especially participant observation, informant interviewing, focus groups, various survey methods, and network analysis (Aguilera, 1996; Corbett, 2008). They also research and analyze many of the same cultural variables as other anthropologists, such as beliefs and values, social structure, and gender-related behavior differences in organizations. In general, their work includes the same process and methods along with other kinds of applied anthropology (Marrewijk, 2010; Ybema et al., 2009).

Margaret A. Gwynne (2003), an applied anthropological theorist, along with Ann Jordan (2003), a business anthropologist, places business anthropology as a subfield of applied anthropology. However, in Gwynne’s view there is a major methodological difference between business anthropology and other kinds of applied anthropology because in most cases the fundamental purpose of private sector economic activity is to make profit, and as such, there is always full of competitions in the business world. Moreover, because when working for highly competitive business firms business anthropologists usually face a difficult task in being “open” with results, publications, and sometimes must undergo through severe concerns about professional ethical questioning (Gwynne, 2003).
The profit motive usually means that the “product cycle” of any given item produced by a business – the amount of time between the development and introduction of a product and its decline – tends to be relatively short. For this reason, research conducted by business anthropologists is usually of a much shorter duration and involves much fewer informants than research conducted by their colleagues in the academic world (Hafner, 1999). In the business world there are various approaches to the real problems that are mostly associated with people. The anthropological approach seeks to answer the ever-widening questions such as: “Why do people do what they do?” “What do they mean when they doing so?” Keeping these questions in mind we can further analyze the roles that business anthropologists can play, the functions that anthropologists can have, and the contributions that anthropologists can make to improve the business operations.
In her recent article on the importance of business anthropology Jordan (2010) suggests that business anthropology can be effectively divided into three fields: 1) organizational anthropology (the study of complex organizations to include their cultures, work processes, and change directives), 2) anthropology of marketing and consumer behavior, and 3) design anthropology (product and services design). While fully agree with Dr. Jordan, this author tends to add the fourth and the fifth fields, the fourth field can be termed as anthropology of competitive intelligence and knowledge management, focus on the study of unique methods by anthropologists to be used in competitive intelligence and knowledge management (Tian 2009), and the fifth field can be termed as anthropology of international and cross-cultural business (Ferraro, 2006; Lillis and Tian, 2009). In the following sections the author will briefly present the contributions that business anthropologists can make in the studies of corporative cultures, knowledge management, cultural audits, organizational changes, product design, marketing, consumer behavior, and international business with an additional section to discuss how anthropologists make their contributions.

The First International Business Anthropology Conference (China) Newsletter (1)

The conference committee had its formal meeting recently at Sun Yat-Sen University to discuss the procedures and arrangements for the conference. The committee decided the conference is to be held as we originally proposed from May 17 to May 20, 2012 on Sun Yat-Sen University campus. The detailed programs will be sent to the delegates later. By this time, the committee has received about 100 proposals and inquires.
Dr. Daming Zhou suggested that the conference would edit the conference proceedings and get it formally published with the IE index registration. The committee determined that Ms. Xiang Lin, a Ph. D. candidate at Sun Yat-Sen University, would be responsible for operation business, Ms. Lingyan Guo, a Ph. D. candidate at Sun Yat-Sen University, would be responsible for academic affairs. Dr. Guang Tian would be responsible for corresponding with the international scholars, and Ms. Lingyan Guo would be responsible for corresponding with the domestic scholars.

The committee elected Dr. Daming Zhou as the chair of the conference and invited Dr. M. Baba, Dr. B. Moeran, Dr. Robert G. Tian, and Dr. Alfons van Marrewijk as the co-chairs of the conference.

International Journal of Business Anthropology Volume 3(1)

Table of Contents

Editorial Commentary

Practices of Cross Cultural Collaboration in Sustainable Water Management in Bangladesh
Jaap de Heer and Andrew Jenkins

Vitamin Practices and Ideologies of Health and the Body
Maryann McCabe and Antonella Fabri

Space and Place as User-Experience: Taking Notting Hill as an Example
Pedro Oliveira

Making Sense of Good Life: Local Modernity from a Traditional Industrial-Commercial Region in Southern China
Luo Youmin

The Effectiveness of Social Marketing Mix Strategy: Towards an Anthropological Approach
Guang Tian and Luis Borges

Applied Ethics: Anthropology and Business
Barry R. Bainton

Localization of French Hypermarket Carrefour and Japanese General Merchandise Store Ito-Yokado
Zoe Zhu Yi

Negotiating Intimacies in an Eroticized Environment: Xiaojies and South China Entertainment Business
Yu Ding

We Need Business Anthropology Education

(Editorial Commentary)

The increasing attention and interest in business anthropology have not yet resulted in a clearer definition of business anthropologists as a distinctive professional group. In this volume of IJBA, Barry Bainton suggests the term “career anthropologist” to define a group of people occupying mixed positions between the traditional academic researcher, the business teacher, the private consultant practitioner, technical staff and other members of the business milieu. Clear boundaries of the professional group of business anthropologists are hard to give because of their multiple paradigms and perspectives. Business anthropologists tend to adapt to business and sector cultures, as there is a large variety of different fields, roles and positions (Serrie, 1984; Baba, 1986; Jordan 1994).

Clients do not always recognize the competences of the career anthropologist. In return, anthropologists often find it hard to sell their professional qualities to the business world. Anthropologists have been trained to both distance themselves from their own society and trained not to be fully assimilated in the local cultures which they take as the object of study. This dual position posits anthropologists in a privileged “in-between” position, in which they can serve a fundamental role for corporations as translators of local markets, expert on customers’ behavior and observers of culture at the work floor. On the other hand, greater distance from one’s own society also makes it harder for some anthropologists to strategically present their “in-between” position as a business asset. Paradoxically, praised competences of anthropologists such as emphatic understanding, flexibility, cultural sensitivity and knowledge of local culture and language seem not to come across the right way when anthropologists apply for jobs in business. In many cases, anthropologists trying to make it to the business world do not survive the rivalry with other professionals coming from organizational psychology, public service, economics etc. Anthropologists have difficulties aligning their competences with the needs of business organizations. In our opinion, we need to do much better than we have done so far in terms of preparing anthropologists for the business job market.
Business anthropologists working in academia are not extremely visible to the anthropological community at large, in part due to their infrequent writings in academic journals. There are different reasons for this, some being the shortage of practice-oriented journals, time/resource limits and company restrictions. There are other reasons why business anthropologists remain invisible as a professional group in the larger world of academia. Bainton observes a division between academically-oriented research anthropology and applied/practitioner research anthropology, shifting toward the creation of two separate disciplines. Here, the research practice of academic anthropologists and the research practice of business-oriented anthropologists seem to exist at cross-purposes. While the former is directed towards an academic audience and towards publication in higher-rank journals, the latter is pressed by clients and management to come up with practically oriented, prescriptive solutions that help the organization in its cultural problems.

We are still recruiting anthropology students with the idea of pursuing a traditional career in the academic world; however, an overwhelming majority of the students we recruited will not become academics but to find their way into business (e.g. Tett, 2005). Conversely, we do not train them to enter the labor market. We are training new generation of anthropologists in a rather traditional fashion at a time when market needs for innovation are higher than usual. Given the opportunities of a market seeking innovation more than usual, we argue that we need business anthropology education to support our students job-hunting in the world of business. We argue further that we can apply the theories and methods of anthropology into business practice and thus help business firms, large or small, domestic or international, to become more effective and profitable (Tian 2010).
The significance of business anthropology education has triggered many universities to launch new programs with business anthropology curricula. For instance, recently, the VU University in Amsterdam, one of many other universities and colleges in the U. S. and Europe to do so, began occupational training of business anthropologists. Such training concerns groups of anthropology students with a background in anthropology, organizational studies and marketing. For many of these students it was the first time that they understood how to use anthropology in a job application, while making genuine contributions with it. Unfortunately, for many years, we have told them that academic lectures should not mention jobs, as it was a common myth that someone trained in anthropology would never find a job at all. Such myth no longer holds water in contemporary times. Business anthropology education has gained a role of importance in business schools with many business faculty members currently applying an anthropological approach to their business education programs (Tian, Lillis, van Marrewijk, 2010).
In this new issue, we include seven papers show the unique augmentation of anthropology to business and the interesting interface of academia and practitioners. The first contribution is a clear example of the fruitful collaboration of academics and practitioners. Dr. Jaap de Heer of the VU University, Amsterdam, works closely together with Andrew Jenkins, a rural development specialist working at BRAC, a large development organization in Bangladesh. They share extended experience in Bangladesh in the fields of strategy development, organizational change and adaptive water governance. In their paper, they describe how local sustainable water management is being introduced in Southern Bangladesh to improve living conditions of Bangladeshi people by means of a revitalization process. Their case shows how Dutch-Bangladesh cross-cultural collaboration resulted in a hybridization of Dutch concepts of water managements mixed with Bengali practices. As a result of this hybridization, Bangladesh started a pilot project for the introduction of participatory water management.
The second contribution, entitled “Vitamin Practices and Ideologies of Health and the Body” is a very interesting example of the intersection between anthropology and medically based consumer behavior. In this article, Dr. Maryann McCabe and Antonella Fabri examine vitamin consumption practices among U.S. consumers in order to understand the cultural beliefs and values that motivate increased assimilation of vitamins into the national diet. Using anthropological insights of people like Malinowski and Frazier, who perceive vitamin consumption as a manifestation of a magical connection between the mind and the body, McCabe and Fabri reframe vitamin consumption as a matter of symbolic capital invested in the body.
In the third contribution, Dr. Pedro Oliveira advances an essay on the intersection of business anthropology, user-experience and design thinking. In his article, Oliveira joins a recent growing attention for space and spatial settings in matters of user-experience. Through an ethnographic account of his personal experience entering and living in Notting Hill, West London, he uncovers the importance of space and place in the construction of identity. He describes a process of growing gentrification in Notting Hill leading the new cultural elites to move to Ladbroke Grove, the adjacent area, considered the “new place” to identify with. By connecting place and class struggle, the author both sheds light on the London riots of 2011 while ending with a series of research lines for business anthropologists concerned with the intersection of place, space, design thinking and user experience.

In the fourth paper, Luo Youmin provides us a detailed ethnographic study with the focus on the process of searching for good life in a traditional industrial-commercial area in South China after 1949. She tries to unravel the dynamic process of how the “good life” pursued by state gradually alienated from local people’s expectation. Her findings suggest that the process of pursuit of good life reflects how to perceive, image, and to make the modernity by the people in the Southern China. She argues that people have to strive for good life by themselves. Cultural tradition and daily experience have become a greatly important drive to impel them in the pursuit of good life. She addresses that good life means not only food and clothes, but also individual emotion, community cohesion and sense of belonging. Therefore, material and intangible affluence are equally important for local people. Luo’s study is very significant for us to understand the modernization process in rural China from a business anthropological perspective.
In their contribution, Dr. Tian Guang and Dr. Luis Borges explore an anthropological approach to matters of social marketing. Largely, social marketing verses on how to improve the overall quality of life through adopting marketing strategies and skills, without a primary emphasis on profit. A highly effective example of social marketing is the attempted elimination of smoking through an effective combination of TV campaigns, advertisements, billboards, and governmental laws. Tian and Borges translate the “Four P’s” of the commercial marketing mix, namely product, price, place and promotion, to a social marketing case. Such an anthropological approach helps social marketers to be able to identify the social and/or cultural factors that influence the behavior targeted for change while contributing to strategy formation. They argue that social marketing is one of the main domains where business anthropologists can intervene.
In the sixth paper, Dr. Barry Bainton discusses the wide variety of ethical conflicts of anthropologists in the business context. He defines “career anthropologists” as a mix of traditional academic researchers, business teachers, private consultant practitioners, and technical staff members of business enterprises. Career-oriented anthropologists have different status and roles from academically research-oriented fellows. Taking a historical perspective, Bainton explains how Boasian rules and principles have become the normative ethic for future generations and how the anthropological establishment has traditionally been focused on the ethics of academic research anthropology over the needs of “career anthropologists”. He suggests the creation of a new anthropology brand to account for the current market potential of professional anthropological services in government and private sector.
Zoe Yi Zhu of the University of Hong Kong writes about her comparative study of the management strategies of French hypermarket Carrefour, and Japanese general merchandise store Ito-Yokado in China. To capture greater market share, Carrefour and Ito-Yokado engaged in a fierce competition around opening new shops, yet not without studying the reasons for greater success of the French hypermarket. According to Zhu, Carrefour’s success in China is due to its unique strategy for adapting to the local situation. HR strategy has a close connection with market entry strategy here. Zoe studied how Carrefour’s decentralized human resources strategy includes the selection and training of local Chinese employees, while the Japanese remain in control of the headquarters to maintain the high quality of services for which the company is rewarded by its Chinese customers.
Finally, we include an ethnographic study on a group of sex workers in South China by Yu Ding. In her study, Ding discusses how marriage and intimate relations exert a long-term ongoing influence on these women’s rural-urban migrations and work choices, and how the highly developed sex industry in the coastal region poses difficulties, as well as creates opportunities, for them to rethink what they want in their intimate relations. Ding stresses that the sex business is a “special” kind of business based on mutual monetary (material) exchange, and yet involves more non-monetary issues.
The quality and scope of the articles submitted show the need for connecting academics and practitioners in the field of Business Anthropology. Only by fostering this connection can we carry on pushing business anthropology further in the field of education, hence creating the conditions for greater dissemination of our knowledge and practices. We continuously seek articles by anthropologically oriented scholars and practitioners on topics such as general business anthropology theories and methods, marketing, consumer behavior, organization culture, human resources management, cross cultural management etc. Regionally focused contributions are welcome, especially when their findings can be generalized. We encourage practitioners, students, community, and faculty members to submit theoretical articles, case studies, commentaries and reviews. Please send manuscripts, news notes and correspondence to: Dr. Robert Guang Tian, Editor, IJBA, via e-mail to ijba@na-businesspress.com, or rgtian@yahoo.com (Robert G. Tian, Daming Zhou, and Alfons H. van Marrewijk).

References:

The First International Conference of Business Anthropology (China)

The First International Conference of Business Anthropology (China)

May 17-20, 2012

The First International Conference in Business Anthropology (China) will take place in Sun Sat-Sen University (Guangzhou, Guangdong). We are currently inviting paper submission. This conference will consider critical and timely questions in the development of business anthropology. There are several purposes to our conference:
- To generate an exchange of ideas between scholars, practitioners and industry specialists in the field of applied and business anthropologies;
- To encourage a bridge building between the practitioner and the academic world;
- To provide a vehicle of communication for anthropologists working within the practitioner world;
- To provide a work forum around qualitative business research, and analysis , inspired by anthropological theory and methods;
- To encourage the sharing of issues among business professionals;
- To encourage business educators in adopting an anthropological approach in teaching practices

With these goals in mind, conference organizers are currently inviting submissions from established scholars and graduate students exploring any of the following topics and questions as they bear on the relationship between business and anthropology:
1) Inter-cultural consultancy, training and management;
2) Design anthropology and product development;
3) Consumer research;
4) Ethnography and organizations;
5) Marketing and competitive intelligence;
6) Human resources management;
7) Organization changes;
8) International business;
9) Economic anthropology;
10) Teaching and learning business anthropology;
11) Business anthropology development history;
12) Business anthropology case studies.

Proposals should include a 300-word abstract and a short CV and should be sent to (name of the presenter) at hsszdm@mail.sysu.edu.cn, cc to huangjinglin2511@126.com and rgtian@yahoo.com with “Business Anthropology International Conference” in the subject line. Final papers will be due on March 31, 2012.

CFP deadline: Dec. 31, 2011.

We have specially invited the following scholars, who confirmed to come pending on the final approval by the conference committee. The formal invitation letter will be issued by March 15, 2012
Dr. Marietta L. Baba, University of Michigan, USA
Dr. Allen Batteau, Wayne State University, USA
Dr. Ann Jordan, North Texas University, USA
Dr. Alfons van Marrewijk, VU University Amsterdam, NL
Dr. Belete Mebratu, Medaille College, USA
Dr. Brian Moeran, Copenhagen Business School, DK
Dr. Robert J. Morais, Weinman Schnee Morais, Inc., USA
Dr. Pedro Oliveira, IPAM Marketing School, POR
Dr. Timothy de Waal Malefyt, BBDO Worldwide Advertising, USA

Cross Cultural Strategy in International Business Competitive Intelligence (4)

The Processes of Developing a Cross Cultural CI Program

To beat the competition in today’s globalised economies, it is necessary for firms involved in international business to design and develop a cross cultural CI program. Such a program should reflect the needs of the firms, facilitate the information processes, and assist the strategic decision-making by the management. The structure and the scope of cross cultural CI program will depend on the individual firm and their needs. Based on previous research (Robertson 1998) and our own experiences we will suggest that in establishing a formal international CI program cross culturally, a firm needs to follow an eight-phase process (Table 2).

Table 2. The Eight-Phase Processes of Cross Cultural CI Program
Steps Major Issues
Phase One: Define Requirements To be aware of cultural, social, and economic differences between the home country and the potential host country
Phase Two: Identify the Main Competitors To analyze the characteristics of the firm's industry in the world, then identify the first few major competitors, and locate the positions of those competitors in the industry worldwide with an emphasis on cultural issues.
Phase Three: Assess Resources To determine the existing information residing internally. Make sure it should be completed prior to the collection and analysis of external resources.
Phase Four: Assign a Leader To select the individuals who are keen on cross cultural differences, fluent in more than one language and able to listen for content without being strictly bound by context.
Phase Five: Set-up CI Program To define the objectives of the program and to make the budget for the program. It is important to separate the direct objectives from the indirect objectives.
Phase Six: International CI Structures To staff the team with consideration to cultural backgrounds. To develop a common language and an ethical framework for the cross cultural CI project.
Phase Seven: Collect Data and Analyze Data To learn as many details of the industry in the foreign country as possible; to keep in mind the cultural challenges can occur at any times and thus should be culturally sensitive.
Phase Eight: Present the Findings To keep the final presentations available and accessible only to the decision makers; failure to do this may lead a great loss in terms of intelligence properties.


Phase One: Define Requirements At this stage, the co-ordinator has to be aware of cultural, social, and economic differences between the home country and the potential host country. The seven basic questions posed earlier provide a good guideline for the issues that need to be addressed, and thus suggest research/analysis areas. It is suggested that regulatory and legislative differences between the targeted country and the home culture, as well as all related changes that affect the competitive market are critical components to include while assessing new markets’ and competitors’ strengths and weaknesses. Contextual content, time prioritisation and sensitivity, as well as multi-tasking skills will deepen the analytical content and the effectiveness of the intelligence delivered (Robertson 1998).
Phase Two: Identify the Main Competitors For instance; a Canadian firm once hired one of the authors to conduct international competitive intelligence. According to the client’s needs, he first analyzed the characteristics of that company’s industry in the world, then identified five major competitors to the company, and finally located the positions of those five competitors in the industry worldwide with an emphasis on cultural issues. Based on the best information resources and his propounded analysis, he predicted what those five competitors were likely to do in the marketplace individually; and made some suggestions to the company as what actions should be taken to achieve a competitive advantage based on its cultural and social capitals. The result turned out to be excellent.
Phase Three: Assess Resources Company need to determine the existing information residing internally. An assessment of knowledge, expertise, foreign national employees, and on-site materials can prove beneficial in a gap analysis. Furthermore, expatriates who have returned from field trip can provide valuable sources of competitive intelligence. At this stage it is suggested that the strategies include interviewing experts who are familiar with the subject concerned and have lived, worked or studied in the country in question, as they can provide significant inputs in terms of cross cultural values. Evaluating internal resources should be completed prior to the collection and analysis of external resources (Robertson 1998).
Phase Four: Assign a Leader A person who is keen on cross cultural differences, fluent in more than one language and able to listen for content without being strictly bound by context should be the right candidate. In addition, the CI analyst needs to build an international network of professionals. This way, primary information can be readily obtained. Having analysed the information, the CI practitioner then has the duty to keep the organisation informed about the general state of their industry and competitors. Prescott and Gibbons (1993) suggest building a project-oriented approach, which means emphasising temporary involvement by different individuals “funded” by different interested managers.
Phase Five: Set-up CI Program Objectives and Budget are two dimensions needed to be addressed when defining the objectives. Separate direct objectives from the indirect objectives and distinguish the comprehensiveness of the assignments and the type of assignments for the CI program. According to Robertson (1998), the budget can sometimes dictate the number of trips that need to be made abroad. In addition to general administration expenses, the following needs to be considered: a) The acquisition of new physical sources (books, maps, periodicals); b) Additional part-time or full-time staff for collection and analysis; translation, and other aspects of the collection process; c) Potential or required training on cultural, trade or international business issues; d) Specialized conferences and/or association memberships; and e) Any on-site visits for collection of information.
Phase Six: International CI Structures In this stage, there needs to be an analysis of staff requirements for projects. If there are limited human resources, the CI analyst may need to cover the entire world. Robertson (1998) suggests that if the CI team is able to hire specifically for internationally-focused intelligence assignments, background and living experience in that culture may be preferable, but education and international orientation are the primary objectives. At the same time it is important to develop a common language for CI, an ethical framework for the collection of information including a code of conduct, skill-building workshops related to CI topics, and a vision of how CI fits with the mission of the firm (Prescott & Gibbons 1993). The code of ethics and conduct must be flexible and suitable to be used in different cultures and countries or it will be irrelevant. Moreover, the CI program needs to be able to counteract current threats and facilitate or establish a learning organisation. By so doing it will enable the firm to continue surviving even if the competitive conditions change.
Phase Seven: Collect Data and Analyze Data Prior to leaving for the international site a few things need to be arranged. Interviews with a variety of sources need to be set up to learn as many details of the industry in the foreign country as possible. Also, prepare information that can be exchanged when conducting interviews, as leaders recognise the value of trading facts. The CI analyst further needs to define the specific requirements and goals the visitation is designed to fulfil. While at the site, the CI practitioner needs to keep in mind the cultural challenges can occur at any times and thus should be culturally sensitive. The person should have an intimate knowledge of the effects of social, cultural, and political factors on market performance along with more traditional reliance on financial, business, and economic factors to gather relevant and worthy material. Failure to understand the social and political dynamics can lead to wasted time, resources, and money (Werther 1997).
Phase Eight: Present the Findings Having acquired, interpreted, analysed and transformed the information, the last remaining step is to distribute or disseminate the intelligence. The CI program needs to be designed to deliver proficient and complete solid analysis to people who can act on it. It has to assist in making timely, effective and competitive decisions. There might be different formats in terms of presentations but the fundamental content should be basically the same. It is up to individual CI professionals, according to management preferences, to decide what types of formats are the best for presenting the findings and recommendations. One important point for all the CI professionals to keep in mind is that the final presentation be available and accessible only to the decision makers; failure to do this may lead a great loss in terms of intelligence properties. We would also like to suggest that CI professionals should not over estimate the cultural sensitivity and awareness by the managers, as such to give them certain amount of education in terms of different meanings cross culturally.

Conclusion

In today’s highly competitive global village, knowledge and information have to be analysed and converted into intelligence to be effective and worthwhile. It is important for any company to know its competitors in terms of their products, their distribution channels, and their marketing strategies from a cross cultural perspective. This is particular crucial in these cases where companies produce similar goods and compete directly for the same market. Only with a competitive intelligence program to supplement its international marketing can a firm be assured success in the global market.
If competitive intelligence as a dynamic business function is a recent function, the global CI program cross culturally is just in its introduction stage. At this time both academic scholars and business practitioners are lacking theories and practices to consult; much more works need to be done to maturely develop the global competitive intelligence function. Our experiences and practices demonstrate that CI alone will not guarantee success in today’s highly competitive, global business environment. However, if CI program conducted cross culturally, in some form, is not a part of the decision-making process, sooner or later a company will lose a crucial marketplace battle to a competitor. We hope our research can be useful for all those who are interested in either research about or practice in the fields of global competitive intelligence.

I am sorry that I cannot post anything in my blog in China