ABSTRACT
The anthropology of organizations is a new field of theoretical enquiry. An anthropological approach would, for example, raise fundamental questions about the nature and extent of our dependence on organizations and the implications of this dependence for the way we perceive social life. In this chapter, the author examines the question of organizational rationality through the prism of anthropological theory. He contrasts the relations between sexual liaisons and corporate ethos in two organizations. While in one of them symbolic sexuality is unconsciously tied by managers to the driving logic of corporate success, managers in the other make no such link. The author deliberately chose this comparison to give ethnographic prominence to the profound cultural differences that can be found to exist between organizations within British political economy. Developing a cultural perspective on political economy involves understanding the relation between the rationalization (our theory of ourselves) and our practice.
