ABSTRACT
This chapter provides some stories that show how people shape relationships within their groups and how to apply this anthropological knowledge to organizations. These stories as examples of ways that people define relationships, both formally and informally, within their own kinship group, with colleagues and within networks. In cultural anthropology, a distinction is made between biological, genetic relationships and relationships with culturally determined significance, that is, cultural kinship. Just as in a kinship system, an organogram contains a particular logic. According to anthropologist Peter Kloos, there are three fundamental principles underlying kinship structures, namely only women bear children, a universal ban on incest, and men must monopolize women. The chapter discusses each of Kloos’s three principles and how they translate into the working practices of organizations. The intimacy of relationships is also regulated within organizations, which have their own taboos.
