Anthropology of Organizations

Susan Wright, Susan Wright

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2004
• ISBN:
  9781134882809
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

The 1980s and 1990s have been a time of change for organizations, with a preoccupation for changing `organizational culture', a concept attributed to 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 concern to understand 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.
The Anthropology of Organizations questions `organizational culture' as a tool of management and presents and analyses 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.

1
‘Culture’ in anthropology and organizational studies

Susan Wright

This book concerns the contribution of anthropology to the study of government, non-government (voluntary), and private sector organizations in the Third World and the West. The 1980s and 1990s have been a time of change for organizations in all sectors. The discrediting of modernization as a western domestic policy and as the basis for Third World development has been accelerated by the international reorganization of capital.¹ Production has become organized on an international division of labour with competition between First and Third World sites and the introduction of new management systems. Structural adjustment in the Third World and New Right policies in the West have reduced the role of the state, moving functions over to the private sector and relying more heavily on voluntary and non-government organizations. These changes have been accompanied by questions about different styles of organizing. The western model of bureaucracy is seen to have shortcomings: it is asked in the Third World, but not yet in the West, whether it is possible to build upon indigenous methods of organizing? Despite such widespread institutional change, some aspects of organizations have proved recalcitrant to alteration. Notably this concerns gender. Initially public sector organizations, and now more private sector companies have been concerned to improve opportunities for disadvantaged categories of people, especially women, and to maximize their potential in the labour market: but why have organizations proved so difficult to change? And who is benefitting? One theme running through these programmes is ‘empowerment’. But who is empowered by empowerment? Is it principally the intended beneficiaries, people in the Third World, women and customers or clients? These questions about changing ways of organizing through indigenous management, addressing gender inequalities and empowerment of clients are the focus of the three parts of this book.

In the search for new ways to manage organizations in these changing contexts, ‘the culture concept’ has become prominent. Organizational studies literature attributes the culture concept to anthropological sources (Geertz 1973, Turner 1974, Bateson 1972 and Douglas 1987). For an anthropologist reading this literature there are moments of recognition closely followed by the discovery of familiar ideas being used in disconcertingly unrecognizable ways. It is the aim of this introduction to explore the reasons for this and to clarify some of the ways the concept ‘culture’ is being used both in the organization studies literature and by anthropologists in the chapters of this book.

In organizational studies ‘the culture concept’ is used in four ways. First, it refers to problems of managing companies with production processes or service outlets distributed across the globe, each located in a different ‘national culture’. Second, it is used when management is trying to integrate people with different ethnicities into a workforce in one plant. Third, it can mean the informal ‘concepts, attitudes and values’ of a workforce; or, fourth, ‘company culture’ can refer to the formal organizational values and practices imposed by management as a ‘glue’ to hold the workforce together and to make it capable of responding as a body to fast changing and global competition (Deal and Kennedy 1982:178, 193).

A ‘strong company culture’ has been deemed the sine qua non of success in the private sector and now no public or voluntary organization can be without its mission statement. Even these company cultures are of different kinds: one is strengthened Fordism while the other is a turning away from that idea. In the first case, an organization’s ‘culture’ is converted from a mission statement into detailed practices, dividing each task into tiny details and specifying how each should be done. These are imposed on the workforce through training and disciplined supervision. This strengthens the Fordist management style of the modernization era whereby management was separate from the workforce which was divided according to clearly demarcated repetitive tasks. Some companies with international operations have used this system to institute a standardized way of performing tasks (the most quoted example is McDonald’s). In opposite cases a ‘culture’ of flexible organization has been introduced. The Fordist division between management and workers has been revised, the role of middle management reduced, and the workforce organized in teams, with each member able to take on a full range of tasks. Instead of being adjuncts to a machine or to a predetermined sequence of paper movements, workers are ‘empowered’ to take initiatives and ensure operations are continually improved by communicating ideas directly to management In this way workers’ knowledge is to be harnessed in a flexible response to fast changing environments and to new or high standard demands from clients. Already it can been seen that ‘culture’ refers to diverse problems, ideas and styles of organizing.

How do these ideas connect with anthropological approaches to culture? One reason for introducing anthropological ideas about culture into organizational studies was methodological. Organizational studies from its inception has had a close relationship to the thinking of practising managers, such that, as Calas and Smircich have pointed out (1992:223), organization researchers have played a central role in ‘making’ organizations.² The institutional changes outlined above inspired a search for new methods. In place of the modernist paradigm of organizations as rational and replete with objective facts which had dominated organizational studies, anthropological studies of culture offered a more interpretive approach through which to understand organizations as sites for constructing meaning.

However the paradigm shift does not seem to have been fully achieved. For example, Schein (1991) holds both an interpretive and a positivist approach to organizations in a way that appears contradictory to an anthropologist. He takes the anthropological argument that culture resides in conceptual categories and mental models. Therefore, he argues rightly, it cannot be researched through ‘thin’ description of its surface features which miss the holistic and systematic aspect of culture, or through questionnaires with their a priori assumptions and reliance on attitudes expressed out of context. But he also hankers for a ‘real’ positivist hold on a world of slippery intangibles, constructing culture as an object capable of standing free of its context: ‘We cannot build a useful concept if we cannot agree on how to define it, “measure” it, study it, and apply it in the real world of organizations’ (Schein 1991:243).

Schein returns to an interpretive approach when he explains that culture is ‘deeper’ than its symbolic manifestations, the rites, rituals and stories of origin on which Deal and Kennedy (1982) focused. Schein’s ‘deeper’ level of culture is recognizable: it is systematic, permeating all aspects of daily life, persisting over time, and shared. However, his concluding definition of culture provokes further realization that what seemed like anthropological ideas of culture have been twisted into a different form:

If there is no consensus or if there is conflict or if things are ambiguous, then, by definition, that group does not have a culture in regard to those things…the concept of sharing or consensus is core to the definition, not something about which we have an empirical choice.

(Schein 1991:248)

‘Culture’ has become the property of a ‘group’ (both conceptualized as bounded and unitary), which ‘persists over time’ in the sense of being unchanging, and is ‘shared’ in the sense that there is consensus and no ambiguity.

This focus on consensus seems to be a key point of difference between organizational studies and anthropology. Initially, as will be explained below, the two disciplines shared a concern with consensus. But its weakness was identified; it led the Hawthorne Bank Wiring study (see below), for example, to conclude that only management had ‘rationality’. Subsequently, the Manchester shop floor studies focused on conflict. Now, to an anthropologist influenced by Geertz’s ideas, ‘sharedness’ is more likely to imply a common repertoire of ideas which are reworked continually in imaginative ways that are systematic, explainable, but not predictable. Not only is ambiguity essential, as it provides the space for this reworking, but the process is political: meanings of concepts and symbols are not just not fixed, they are actively contested. In organizational studies literature which also uses Geertz, often only one, supposedly consensual definition of the situation is given. Culture has turned from being something an organization is into something an organization has, and from being a process embedded in context to an objectified tool of management control. The use of the term culture itself becomes ideological.

This literature provokes an anthropologist into realizing that culture has become one of the discipline’s own ‘taken for granted’ categories or working assumptions.³ In order to explore its meaning it is essential to understand the methodological processes by which we arrive at culture as an analytical concept Anthropology is best known for its fieldwork by participant observation, yet this is only part of the methodology. The distinctive anthropological process of ‘problematizing’ relies on continually testing the ability of existing ideas or theories about society to explain the detail of what is experienced in the field. Out of this interplay analytical concepts like culture are generated and progressively refined. Some of the chapters in this book look to anthropology more for its fieldwork methods (indeed a few of the authors might not call themselves anthropologists) while others develop the distinctive problematizing process of anthropology in their analyses.

All of the authors contributed papers to the conference organized by GAPP (Group for Anthropology in Policy and Practice) on the anthropology of organizations held at University College Swansea in January 1991. The aim was to bring together researchers and practitioners engaging with anthropology whilst involved in the extensive contemporary organizational changes in the Third World and the West. Their work clustered around indigenous management, gender and organizational change, and empowerment of clients, the issues represented in the three parts of this book. It was found that all used various concepts of culture in their research and analysis. Anthropologists treated this in a ‘taken for granted’ fashion, but practitioners and participants from other disciplines encouraged us to subject this analytical concept to far more scrutiny. The book is therefore designed to be approached in two ways. Firstly, specialists in any of the three substantive issues covered by this book will find each part has an introduction which sets out current thinking in that field, followed by chapters taking different approaches to the central issues. Secondly, the book is to be read for anthropological analyses of culture in organizations. The introduction is written with this in mind. By providing an historical account of the development of anthropological studies of organizations, and of the research and analytical methods used, it contextualizes the approaches to culture to be found in subsequent chapters. These historical studies of organizations are largely missing from accounts of the development of the discipline and one aim of discussing them in detail is to give this work on organizations more visibility within anthropology itself. There have however been a number of interchanges of ideas between anthropology and organization studies during their parallel histories, and the second aim is to show how anthropological approaches to culture can contribute to current developments in organization studies.

EARLY ANTHROPOLOGICAL STUDIES OF ORGANIZATIONS—THE HAWTHORNE EXPERIMENTS

There were three periods when anthropologists made particular contributions to organizational studies. These were the 1920s, when both disciplines were in their early stages of development; the 1950s and 1960s; and the present. Each period of interaction reflected the development of the discipline’s methodology and of ideas about social organization and culture. Each raised a number of issues about participant observation, analysis of context and meaning, and refinement of analytical concepts, which continue to be relevant.

The history of organizational studies often starts with ‘Scientific Management’ (also called Taylorism, following Taylor’s paper of 1911, incorporated into his 1947 text). This took a manager-centred or top-down view of how to get right the production system within an organization. Production processes were divided into strictly demarcated tasks. The details of each task were investigated, and if physical conditions for the work were correct, the appropriate human behaviour and performance were meant to follow automatically. Between 1927 and 1932 a study of the Western Electric Hawthorne Plant in western Chicago and in Cicero, Illinois, was to test these scientific management principles. But, the story goes, with the help of anthropologists, they discredited these principles by discovering the social organization of the workplace and establishing the Human Relations school which was to dominate organizational studies for the next twenty-five years.

At first the research methods were ‘experiments’ dislocated from everyday working conditions. The Hawthorne management was testing the impact of changing physical conditions on output. They called on Harvard University for help, where a Committee on Industrial Psychology had been set up with funding from the Rockefeller Foundation. Elton Mayo, a psychologist, with a team of researchers from the university and the company, tested the effect of ten physical and incentive changes on fatigue levels of six women workers. They discovered the now disputed Hawthorne effect: the women’s output increased whatever changes were made and even when the women were returned to their original working conditions. The researchers attributed this to the effect of the experimental conditions. The women were in a special Relay Assembly Test Room which did not replicate their usual working conditions. They formed a tightly knit friendship group, with much less ‘apprehension of authority’ (Roethlisberger and Dickson 1939:189) and took much more initiative in their relations with their supervisor than usual (Chapple 1953). In particular, the researchers took on a supervisory role and paid a great deal of sympathetic attention to the workers. The conclusion of the experimental work was that psychological factors were more important than physical conditions in achieving changes in output.

The second stage of the research adopted another method. To explore further the link between morale and supervision, and to provide materials for training supervisors, a large-scale interviewing programme was embarked upon. Between 1928 and 1930 a new Industrial Research Division in the company interviewed 21,126 workers (Roethlisberger and Dickson 1939:204). This programme ended with the lay-offs of the Depression. Whilst the Industrial Research Division waited for an upturn, they compared the results of this largescale programme of single interviews with individuals, which had proved difficult to analyse, with repeated interviews of a small group. This produced a finding which had escaped them before: social groups on shop floors were capable of very strong control over the work behaviour of individuals (1939:379).

To study the social organization of work groups, the team entered a third stage and introduced a further method: anthropological direct observation study. Mayo, who was a friend of leading anthropologists Malinowski and Radcliffe-Brown, brought in one of the latter’s students, Lloyd Warner. He had just returned from studying Aborigines in Australia and was keen to use anthropology in ‘modern’ societies. He helped the research team apply anthropological fieldwork techniques to the workplace (1939:389). The aim was to treat a shop floor as a small society in which every aspect of life was interconnected in a social system. However, because most shop floors consisted of more than a hundred workers they were too large and complex to study if ‘technical, administrative, supervisory and personal problems are all mixed up into one interacting whole’ (1939:385). Therefore three teams of three men who wired banks of switches for telephone offices, the three solderers who worked to them, and two inspectors (fifteen in all) were moved into a separate room. In this Bank Wiring Observation Room the layout, the conditions of work, and the supervision replicated that on the shop floor. To test the impact of the experiment a base line study of output had been made in the preceding eighteen weeks.

The research was carried out by two staff from November 1931 to May 1932, although the later months were disrupted by lay-offs occasioned by the Depression. One researcher, the interviewer, remained an outsider to the group, believing this would enable the employees to talk about their attitudes. The other, the observer, stayed as unobtrusively as possible in the workroom and detailed the formal organization of the work process and the workers’ informal organization, that is, their interactions, each individual’s participation in groups, and expressions of solidarity. The aims were to treat the shop floor as a small society and to understand the function of the informal organization for the workers and its relation to the formal organization of the work.

Results of this research were analysed using Radcliffe-Brown’s idea of a social system; that is, actual interactions between people form a systematic whole. The three work units formed two cliques which organized spontaneous games whenever there was a lull: bets and games of chance, group candy purchases and binges. Friendships and antagonism were also sited within and between these groups, although helping each other with work (against the formal rules) was not confined to work groups or cliques and integrated all the men. Variations and discrepancies in the workers’ output were explained in terms of individual workers’ positions within the informal social organization (1939:520). All elements of the social organization had a function in a coherent informal system.

The informal system contrasted with the company’s formal system of rules and incentives which was designed to make it to the workers’ advantage to strive continually to increase output. Company records showed instead that most workers maintained Straight line’ output curves.⁴ Moreover, company records were at variance with the actual output recorded by the researchers. The workers went to great lengths to keep an even record of output, whilst carrying in their heads comp...