ABSTRACT
Anthropologists who work in or for business organizations, whether as employees, consultants, or partners, seek to understand cultural groupings within institutions from an anthropological perspective. While the size, scope and type of organizations differ, modern organizations face similar challenges when addressing issues of management, work processes, mission fulfillment, and implementing innovation and change. Forms of culture are expressed in employees’ shared values, behavior patterns, and communication styles, and become evident in employee gatherings at common workspaces, meetings and workplace-based interactions, and even schedules. Ironically, earlier US studies of industrial organizations that occurred in the 1920s and 1930s are mostly forgotten or were dismissed, even as now the value of several key studies legitimize the importance of using ethnographic investigations to understand workers and their role in industrial plant behavior. Anthropology applied to the study of contemporary society in the form of “studying up” is noted in two famous studies of organizations.
