ABSTRACT
Social anthropology has a post-war history of concentrating upon primitive societies, of working through the shift from 'function to meaning', of holistic study, of participant observation, and of retreat from numerical analysis. Business and management studies, by contrast, have been late-born aspirants to the positivist social sciences. There is growing resistance, within business, to continued cooperation with the research procedures of traditional business academia – in particular, there is growing resistance to filling in research questionnaires; return rates are low, and the quality of response must often be very doubtful, even when return is made. The author's own approach, by contrast, allowed managers to formulate and pursue problems in their own terms. From a social anthropological point of view, this is routine. Within business and management studies, it was rather a radical departure. Open-ended and unstructured interviews allow the expression of all apparently relevant dimensions of thought and action.
