Anthropology of Organizations. - Review - book reviews

Administrative Science Quarterly,  Sept, 1998  by Stacia E. Zabusky

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Susan Wright, ed. London: Routledge, 1994. 217 pp. $16.95.

This edited volume emerged from a 1991 conference organized by the Group for Anthropology in Policy and Practice, a British organization committed to bringing together academic and applied researchers to discuss "how anthropological concepts were being used by researchers and practitioners in the context of rapid organizational change" in both the Third World and the West (p. x). It is always difficult to produce a streamlined edited volume out of the myriad interests and perspectives represented at conferences, and Anthropology of Organizations betrays the telltale signs of its origin in conference presentations. It suffers from a lack of coherence; the papers do not reference each other and seem unaware of each other's existence; and the brief introductory commentaries to each section attempt to impose some artificial connections on what are otherwise quite independent papers, but they are not always successful at doing so. Moreover, the papers are uneven in quality; a few of them would have benefited from another round of editing. Nonetheless, this volume provides readers with some gems of insight and analysis that reveal the essence of what is a distinctively anthropological approach to understanding organizations in a time of organizational change.

Wright introduces the volume with a clearly written and informative essay on two of the concepts most integral to an anthropological perspective: culture and ethnographic methodology. She emphasizes a view of culture as a kind of sense-making mechanism, one that provides participants with processes for negotiating (and contesting) understanding and action; moreover, culture as process is always situated in a particular social and historical context, which means that the power relations between actors must be taken into account in any discussion of cultural meanings. Primarily, for Wright, researchers interested in culture should not be studying "the culture of an organization" but, instead, the "organization as culture" (p. 19). This idea is hardly new (see, e.g., Van Maanen and Barley, 1985); nonetheless, it bears repeating, particularly in a volume that is aimed at researchers in the interdisciplinary field of organizational studies.

The second concept that Wright investigates is that of ethnographic methodology itself. Here, she emphasizes the importance for anthropologists of "problematizing" rather than of participant-observation per se: "anthropological analysis commences through the discovery of 'problems'. These are not a priori hypotheses. They arise from the interaction between the anthropologist's wider understanding of social organization and the perspectives of workers learned in the field" (p. 11). In other words, anthropologists proceed inductively rather than deductively, and this is reflected in their written papers, where ethnographic data and "thick description" (Geertz, 1973) have pride of place over a hypothetico-deductive expository structure. It is, in fact, the emphasis on "fine-grained ethnography of organizational arrangements [together] with a study of the symbols and concepts through which [people] ... negotiate their interactions with [others]" (p. 165) that characterizes the distinctiveness of the anthropological perspective.

Wright discusses these two concepts in part by reviewing the history of anthropological approaches to organization, including work done in the United States and in Britain and discussions of both the Hawthorne Experiments of the 1920s and 1930s and the Manchester shop floor studies of the 1950s and 1960s. She reviews a variety of theoretical approaches to culture and organizations, both American and British (those of Mary Douglas, Laura Nader, and Talal Asad, among others), although I missed any discussion of either Giddens' or Bourdieu's frameworks, especially given the focus in many of the volume's papers on the reproduction of organizational structures and ideologies. The historical and theoretical overview is helpful and revealing in many ways, and Wright does a good job of tracing the related concepts of culture and ethnographic method through the diverse approaches to organizations taken in the discipline.

Unfortunately, this careful historical and conceptual review does not provide Wright with a sturdy basis for introducing the particular theme of the volume at hand, namely, as the book's blurb indicates, to "argue that in the 1990s our aim should be to build institutions which empower those hitherto excluded from decision making." This is quite a different orientation than simply to display the distinctiveness of an anthropological approach to organizations; in fact, most of the papers in this volume are geared precisely to exploring ways in which various participants (indigenous people, women, staff, clients, etc.) are disempowered by current organizational arrangements and, concomitantly, the ways in which organizations and the people in them resist various forms of change and critique. The papers examine organizational arrangements and organizational discourse in an effort to reveal the ways in which relations of domination and ideologies of oppression are reproduced through everyday practices and discourses. This kind of organizational reproduction is examined in a wide variety of contexts, including Third World organizations, trade unions, public service bureaucracies, hospitals, courts, financial service firms, and non-governmental organizations.