Ethics in the Anthropology of Business

Explorations in Theory, Practice, and Pedagogy

Timothy de Waal Malefyt, Robert J Morais, Timothy de Waal Malefyt, Robert J Morais

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351768962
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Sozialwissenschaften
• Subtopic: Anthropologie

Ethics in business is a major topic both in the social sciences and in business itself. Anthropologists, long attendant to the intersection of ethics and practice, are particularly well suited to offer vital insights on the subject.

This timely collection considers a range of ethical issues in business through the examination of anthropologically informed theory and case examples. The meaning of ethical values, practices, and education are explored, as well as practical ways of implementing them, while the specific ethical challenges of industries such as advertising, market research, and design are considered. Contributions from anthropologists in business and academia promise a broad range of perspectives and add to the growing discussion on the ways anthropologists study, work, teach, and engage in a variety of industry settings.

Engagingly written, Ethics in the Anthropology of Business will be of interest to a wide variety of audiences, including practicing anthropologists, current and future business leaders, and scholars and students from a range of social sciences.

1

INTRODUCTION

Capitalism, Work, and Ethics

Timothy de Waal Malefyt and Robert J. Morais

Over the years, ethics has become a highly topical issue, encompassing the social sciences, philosophy, a wide array of university courses, and business practices. The focus on ethics has grown dramatically as business has expanded globally, and scholarly discussions on capitalism have become increasingly vigorous. Anthropologists, aware of ethics for decades, have written extensively about ethical issues from an increasingly broad range of perspectives. ¹ The greater attention to the study of ethics within corporate environments is apparent, with ethical discussions frequently appearing on business anthropology blog posts. ² Indeed, this broadening interest in ethics reflects Cefkin’s observation that “Ethical issues infuse every aspect of corporate ethnography … from the very constitution and formation of the research agenda to the nature of fieldwork encounters” (2010, 18).

Ethical concerns are more relevant than ever as anthropologists are increasingly employed in business endeavors and other forms of capitalistic enterprises. Nevertheless, Marietta Baba identifies “an uneasiness that some anthropologists feel in the use of their work in ethically questionable sales of products and services (Baba 2006, 47), and notes the “aversion to (anthropologists) applying knowledge in the domain of business” (Baba 2012, 55). This sensibility presents challenges for anthropologists who believe they have a “moral obligation to act and make this world a better place” (attributed to Genevieve Bell in Sinatti 2015), or concur with the Society for Applied Anthropology’s “commitment to making an impact on the quality of life in the world” (www.sfaa.net).

This volume encompasses a variety of ethical circumstances and examples of the work of anthropologists in business and academia, and discusses what ethical practice and education mean in terms of shared or contrasting values and how such values should be implemented. ³ We propose that ethics for anthropologists working in and for business are complex, and differ fundamentally from academic and other practicing non-business anthropologists. This difference can be traced to capitalism and the nature of exchanges, encounters, and interactions and practices, which form myriad relationships in these associations. We examine such difference of relations in terms of what it means to work in and for capitalistic enterprises, since, as we suggest, the very nature of capitalism assumes an alternate ontology for ethical considerations. First, we provide a background to the challenges of anthropologists in corporate work, and then discuss the complexities of capitalism as an orientation for employment, and then spell out our thoughts on capitalistic ontology as a distinct ethical environment for anthropologists to navigate, followed by a discussion on the Code of Ethics of the American Anthropological Association.

Confronting Controversy Over Anthropologists in Business

There is a range of responses in reaction to anthropologists employed in or for businesses. At one end of the spectrum, there are anthropologists who advocate greater involvement in investigations of capitalism, consumption and production, organizational development, and business education as alternatives to academic practice of anthropology and to better inform the myriad modern social practices, theories and peoples involved in these areas. At the other end, there are anthropologists who denounce any sort of involvement by anthropologists or social scientists in capitalistic enterprises. Some argue that anthropologists typically study “less advantaged people” precisely because they are not in positions to demand something in return. Marilyn Strathern, for instance, claims that the local people with whom anthropologists engage have no agency when they experience exploitation and that others have the power to turn data collected into materials whose value cannot be shared with the subjects of study (Strathern 1987, 20). Laura Nader questions the extent of “power relationships” in anthropological research and whether such dominant-subordinate relationships of inequality may be affecting the kinds of theories anthropologists produce (1974, 289).

Nevertheless, this widespread Boasian perspective typically implicates more abstract moral concerns than specific ethical quandaries. As Lucas (2009,13) writes of anthropologists in the military, ethics should be reserved for specific groups or organizational norms and principles, while morality applies more broadly to shared principles or guidelines of human behavior. Moreover, there is widespread practice, notes Lucas, in Geertz’s comments (1973) on moral philosophers, “to resort to very focused, narrowly-defined, and quite frequently hypothetical or fictionalized cases … to focus on precisely the elements of a controversy that are most in dispute, while relegating other, perhaps confusing and less relevant details to the background” (Lucas 2009, 14). This is often the case for anthropologists employed in businesses that are critiqued for working on “bad” products (such as tobacco and liquor) while products that are benign or healthy are less likely to raise critical attention. The issues we discuss in this opening chapter have direct ethical bearing on business anthropology practices that are debated and discussed as ethical issues for all anthropologists – “clandestine and secret research,” “transparency,” and the question of full disclosure with informants – how open and available should and can business anthropology be. More importantly, we consider how can and should anthropological work be framed within the larger business context of capitalism, corporate competition and responsibility. We posit that ethics are best applied with relativism to business and from within business rather than through moral judgments outside and across fields, since capitalism implies a different ontology for the framing of ethics.

Business Anthropology: Capitalism, Customer Insights, and Ethics

For anthropologists employed in and for corporations there are many ways to frame their work in a capitalist system, depending on context and use (Miller 1997). What does it mean to work in or for profit-driven marketers, for instance, gathering customer insights for product design, brands, or to help advance organizational efficiencies within a corporation when employment in capitalistic organizations is a matter of framing what is ethical and what is not (Borofsky 2016)? While economists would define capitalism as an economic system based on private ownership and as the means of production and operation for profit, other social scholars posit capitalism as more mercurial where, “its definition shows a chameleon-like tendency to vary with the ideological bias of the user” (Deane 1996, 71). Daniel Miller applies a practical ethnographic approach to what he calls “organic capitalism” (1997, 9) in describing his work with consumers in day-to-day practices of commerce, shopping exchanges, and human relationships of consumption. Nigel Thrift and other cultural theorists emphasize capitalism’s transient and malleable nature, defining it as “a series of relations of relationships” that are adapted by actors, intervened by objects and instituted by practices (2005, 1–2).

In light of these issues, we discuss four conditions of capitalism that situate our analysis of ethics relative to anthropologists’ work in firms today. These conditions contain the inherent difficulties and complexities in vetting out ethical issues for anthropologists. First, capitalism itself represents a fluid field of strategic possibilities with a high degree of instability and uncertainty. Second, since capitalism operates under such uncertain conditions, it draws for its effect on what can be conceptualized as a kind of magical enchantment. Third, capitalism increasingly blurs the distinction between production and consumption by building off co-operative relations between consumers and firms, so that assigning agency, power and responsibility to specific parties is increasingly complex. Fourth, “innovation” is an ever more essential mandate that continuously calls for change in relations between consumers and producers, seeking novelty as a cultural imperative. These perspectives, increasingly narrow their focus from top down to the groundwork of ethnography, to detail the conditions and implications of what it means to work in or for capitalistic industries, and they necessitate new ethical considerations.

First, a fundamental challenge for anthropologists working in and for business is that capitalism creates highly unstable conditions under which work transpires, where ethics are not absolute but shift according to cultural, organizational, staff, and working conditions. Capitalism, Thrift contends, does not consist of neat whole systems of “unities and totalities” (2005, 2), but rather is highly unstable, “unfinished,” in constant flux, changing in form and practice as it is uncertain about the future, and yet depends upon it. Like works of art that shift in value through symbolic power (Bourdieu 1993), capitalism develops subjective value via a shifting network of relations. As such, economies, both global and local, exist within a field of “strategic possibilities” and “position-taking” (Bourdieu 1993), relative to other cultural forms and processes, so “that every position, even the dominant one, depends for its very existence on the other positions constituting the field” (1993, 30). Any new redistribution of capital describes a change in a “field of forces” at work, as much as a shift in a “field of struggles” (Bourdieu 1993, 30). Since corporations are comprised of such malleable fields and shifting networks, which are only “partly in control” as “constantly mutating entities” (Thrift 2005, 4), business anthropologists employed in such domains are faced with endlessly more challenging and emergent contingencies, as they, themselves, comprise the “relations of relationships.”

This performative yet transient context presents business anthropologists with numerous and complex ethical choices since capitalism is “perpetually unfinished” (Thrift 2005, 3). As such, capitalistic products and processes and the myriad working relations that unfold must be understood, not in terms of fixed structural relations or behavioral models that economists might follow and attempt to predict, but more as an assemblage (Latour 2005) or a way of coming into being (Ingold 2013), that brings into play particular combinations of populations (target audiences), territories (markets), brands and services, and corporate initiatives. The unpredictable quality of such assemblages requires continual rethinking and updating of ethical behavior. In a world of shifting ground, such relations continually unfold under potential conditions of manipulation and oppression, but also contain “little spaces of joy and generosity” (Thrift 2005, 2) that are part of its products and processes. This affirms the claim that most ethical crises that anthropologists encounter are likewise, even more emergent, “unplanned, unanticipated, and revolve around conflicts between ethical principles rather than the violation of them” (Whiteford and Trotter 2008, 97). How then do anthropologists respond in such a shifting environment, in which ethical implications are emergent, unplanned, and unanticipated?

Second, since capitalism is a network of relations that operates under conditions of uncertainty and instability, it also inhabits what we interpret as a magical world of enchantment (Thrift 1997, 2005; Holmes 2014; Moeran 2015; Moeran and Malefyt 2016). Magic thrives under conditions of uncertainty, since it is employed in “the domain of the unaccountable and adverse influences, as well as the great unearned increment of fortunate coincidence” (Malinowski 1954, 29). In other words, multiple forms of capitalism use magical practices and ideology to deal with uncertainty – from the uncertainty of fishing under open sea conditions (Malinowski 1954, 31), to the modern-day profit-making activity of central bankers (Appadurai 2015, 32), to the practices of financial trading floors (Zaloom 2006), and the marketing of cultural products in fashion and advertising (Moeran 2015, 219–222). Even economic forecasting reveals that the rise and fall of central banks of commerce hinges on the magical language and spoken words of its “magicians,” like Alan Greenspan (Holmes 2014, 21–22). Because magic “speaks to realms other than material reality” (Greenwood 2009, 8), it engenders a sense of enchantment in our modern world. A “magical consciousness” accesses hidden, unseen forces, or acts at a distance, as a prime vehicle for firing the imagination and rallying purposeful capitalistic practices that seek to achieve specific ends. Magical rites and affirmative language are designed to effect transformations (in share prices, advertising, and “fashion” trends), and so tend to be strictly prescribed in terms of time; they are performed regularly at particular times of the year (fashion “week” or advertising awards ceremonies) or, if daily, within strictly controlled time limits (e.g., the opening and closing bell at the New York Stock Exchange). To be effective and to do things (Mauss 1972, 19), these events occur in specially qualified places such as the World Economic Forum in Davos (Mauss 1972, 46) or as set rituals in advertising agency and corporate offices before a client pitch of creative work (Malefyt and Morais 2010). All of this creates the necessary conditions for an emergent awareness of “magical capitalism” which flourishes under enchantments (Moeran and Malefyt 2016). The world of capitalism thus resembles less a rational or intellectual world of proper checks and balances and more an “imaginary of the medieval world of dark superstitions and religious bliss than we fondly choose to believe” (Thrift 2005, 2; cf. Miyazki 2003).

Some argue that magical language and enchantment in the objective and affective forms that capitalism produces may be invaluable to ethical life. Bennett (2001) presents the concept of “enchantment” as a feeling of being connected to existence in an affirmative affective way and represents an overlooked feature of contemporary experience. Capitalism can energize ethical and political life in positive ways. Enchanted capitalism can be a powerful force that motivates people to engage “more positively” in intense relationships with other people, life, and the cosmos at large. The “positive effects” of capitalism are evidenced, for instance, in advertising messages (Malefyt 2015), which can enhance consumer’s social bonds and worldview. As philosophers Deleuze and Guattari (1987) write, an enchanted lens can foster transformations with a “catalytic function” that increases the speed of e...