Enrico Mulawarman,  The Jakarta Post | Sat, 01/31/2009 |  Opinion

A trend is on the horizon. Many people are jumping on the multicultural bandwagon. In the political realm, more politicians are more often stressing the importance of cultural diversity.

In academic circles, qualitative research is gaining ground on the predominant penchant for quantitative research, highlighting a renewed interest in social and cultural phenomena. President Barack Obama said, “there are no blue states or red states, just the United States of America”. Obama highlights the importance of unity in cultural and social diversity. This trend is also apparent and highly visible in business and corporate settings.

Tom Davenport of Babson College has been predicting for years that anthropologists would be in demand in the workplace of the future. As the world’s economies have become globally oriented and interdependent, the consequences of the 2008 global financial crisis is forcing governments across the globe to find ways to save their ailing economies.

Governments and the private sector, financial institutions and corporations battle to preserve themselves by restructuring their approach or coming up with new business models and plans. Anthropological approaches and research is increasingly appealing to business because it is helping answer pressing questions about consumers, consumption, and how people use products and services.

What anthropologists have to offer is not just confined to marketing and consumer behavior research. Anthropological approaches also makes it possible to understand what we have come to call the culture of an organization: every business entity, because it is a kind of social organization, develops its own corporate culture.

Anthropologists commonly use the term culture to refer to a society or group in which many or all people live and think in similar ways. Likewise, any group of people who share a common culture and, in particular, common rules of behavior and a basic form of social organization constitutes a society.

An anthropological approach is able to expand the understanding of corporate culture from an organizational premise, where often serves as a management tool, to an analysis on how corporate culture can be used to identify an individual’s way of life in relation to an existing structure.

Cultural anthropologists have been very effective in studying organizational behavior (Jordan 2003). In his essay “A Scientific Theory of Culture”, Bronislaw Malinowski states the science of human behavior begins with organization.

Malinowski argues that the frame of an institution is a legitimate isolate of cultural analysis. In the 1970s, Clifford Geertz radically refigured culture theory in anthropology arguing that culture must be seen as “webs of meaning” within which humans must live.

There are differing perspectives on organizational culture, from the idea that culture is a continuous process in which meaning is made collectively to that idea that culture as a thing which managers can define from above and act upon within a system of command and control.

The concept of corporate culture grew from organizational studies, but scholars of this research have been largely influenced by the field of anthropology from the outset.

Within corporate organizational settings in general, anthropology makes it possible to analyze in depth a company’s value system, language, thought and behavior.

Anthropology constantly stresses the importance of ethnography in its approach and methodology. In corporate settings, ethnography helps describe and interpret the culture and worldview of consumers and employees.

For example, employees, particularly those in the field, have frequent encounters with consumers which gives insight into consumer patterns. Employees evaluate and classify customers and consumers needs, concerns, complaints and unfulfilled needs.

Consumers articulate them directly to employees, and effective employees turn those patterns into strategies to enhance sales, improve customer relationships and alleviate customer concerns and grievances. Within a business, ethnography helps explain the effect the corporation’s culture has on the implementation of operations by an organization’s employees.

Knowing how they perceive the effectiveness of the various sanctions or rewards that are attached to their work performance and vertical corporate relationships helps explain how employees manage their role within the broader social organization of the company.

It also explains how employees receive and interpret the relevance of top-down operational procedures, service policies and marketing initiatives.

Some companies use ideas of culture as management tools. Others emphasize that companies are clearly demarcated entities bounded vis-*-vis their environment, containing specified groups of people, organized hierarchically, each with a checklist of behaviors fostered by and unique to that company’s culture.

For example, McDonald’s is identified by their golden arches logo, standardized decor and branded packaging. The core beliefs of the company – quality, service, convenience and value – are instilled into managers in order to create a sense of unity across franchises. Counter staff have to follow a checklist of standardized behaviors as they perform their job.

I view corporate culture as a holistic concept. It refers to the ways in which an entire organization is perceived and construed. Over the years, mainstream anthropology has shifted from a discipline that enumerates a systematic functional approach of social structures to a more critique-oriented and postmodern methodology.

The writer is a graduate from the University of Indonesia and is currently a lecturer in the marketing and communications department at the Faculty of Communication and Multimedia of Binus University