ANTHROPOLOGY AND BUSINESS

THE CONTEMPORARY LANDSCAPE

Presenter
Md. Tahmid Hasan
Department of Anthropology
University of Rajshahi
KEY CONCEPTS

• Market, Consumer, Producer

• Goods and Services
• Tangible and Knowledge based assets
• Post-Fordist economy
• Deregulation of Market
• Globalization
• Organizational Culture and Behavior
• Consumer Behavior
• Consumer Culture
GLOBALIZATION: 1980 TO PRESENT

• The fall of Post-Fordist Economy and end of Producer Domination

• Consumers became more important than the producers
• Services and Knowledge content became more valuable than physical, tangible assets
• Globalized market needed more in-depth understanding of target community
• Shortage of Vacancies in Academia, research funding and revised rules of AAA
• Rise of Business related research
Types of Business Research

• Organizational Behavior and Management

• Ethnographically-Informed design of Products, Services and Systems
• Consumer Behavior and Marketing
 ORGANIZATIONAL BEHAVIOR AND
MANAGEMENT
• Fathered by W. L. Warner
• Focuses on the Interior of the firm
• Try to modify the behaviors of people to increase production
• Considers organizations as small society
• Originated based on Functionalist theory
• Currently interested in three key areas-
a. Organizational Cultures in Tech Based Farms
b. Boundary Crossing in a Global Context
c. Regional Perspectives on Work and Corporations
A. ORGANIZATIONAL CULTURES IN TECH BASED
FARMS
B. BOUNDARY CROSSING IN A GLOBAL
CONTEXT
C. REGIONAL PERSPECTIVES ON WORK AND
CORPORATIONS
 ETHNOGRAPHICALLY-INFORMED DESIGN OF
PRODUCTS, SERVICES AND SYSTEMS
• Brainchild of L. Suchman and R. Robinson
• Often called as “Design Ethnography”
• A multidisciplinary subfield which include anthropology and designing
• Root can be traced back to Mayo’s “Hawthrone project”
• “Human Factor”
• Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center (PARC)
• Susan Squires’s “Go-Gurt”
• Two type of focus-
a. Individual level analysis
b. Group level analysis
 CONSUMER BEHAVIOR AND MARKETING

• Consumers become more important than the producers

• Changed perspectives about decision making by including “other” factors
• Shift to quantitative analysis to qualitative analysis
• Steve Barnett’s invention of “unfocus group”
• Anthropology and Consumer Culture
• G. McCracken’s “Manufacture and Movement”
SUMMERY

 Globalization has changed the concepts of market and business

 The focus and nature of business has changed from producer to consumer
 Corporations has become one of the most important workplace for anthropologists
 Anthropologists are contributing in product design, organizational and production
improvements and consumer culture
 The focus of anthropology and the definition of field has changed
Thank You