Digging In

Anthropologists Have Their Hands Full Studying U.s. Corporations

September 26, 1991|By James Warren.

Margaret Mead wrote a 1928 book on Samoa that gained her renown as an anthropologist. These days, suggests Sept. 30 Business Week, she might have saved the travel time and just split to a downtown telemarketing office.

In ``Studying the Natives on the Shop Floor,`` it makes clear that the image of academics in pith helmets, scrutinizing scantily-clad folks in remote outposts is giving way to their study of U.S. corporations on behalf of the companies.

Several factors explain a bond between anthropologists and firms that once chose industrial engineers or management consultants to alter work systems. Those include a lousy academic job market, prompting 15 percent of the 30,000 U.S. anthropologists to labor in the private sector, and a sense that they can be more insightful than normal consultants.

``The strength of anthropology is in penetrating the corporate culture,`` writes Christine Garza, who cites Xerox as a prime example.

Xerox hired an anthropologist to simplify, and lessen the cost of, training service technicians. But the anthropologist, who studied the way the technicians actually worked, found that many service calls had little to do with repairs. Instead, they involved helping customers who didn`t know how to run a machine. Xerox didn`t realize that much of a technician`s job was teaching, thus it ``hasn`t been training repairers for precisely the right job.``

The article also explains how an anthropologist discerned how jingoistic prejudices of certain General Motors divisions were subverting its Detroit hierarchy`s desire to promote overseas assignments.

The American Anthropological Association long mandated that a member had to ensure that ``the people being studied be kept from physical, mental or social harm.`` In 1970, it banned any research that wasn`t made public, trying to avoid anthropologists` repeating the all-too-frequent practice of consultants shafting employees as they serve as corporate courtesans.

That ended most corporate anthropology, given the corporate preference for secrecy. Then, federal funding of academic research started drying up. Academia looked to private industry and, in 1989, the association reversed itself, allowing proprietary research ``as long as keeping it secret doesn`t harm the people being studied.``

Oct. 7 National Review offers factional feuding on the Right as it slams

(overreaching a bit) Budget Director Richard Darman for blowing projections of the federal deficit. It also takes out $15,000 worth of radio ads in Washington to herald the tale, ``Dead Wrong Again`` ... Meanwhile, Bill Moyers boosts Oct.7 New Republic coffers, paying for a two-page ad that`s a generally convincing rebuttal of an ``abominably inaccurate attack on me`` in the Aug. 19 issue (the magazine said his response was too long to run as a letter). He`s very sensitive to suggestions he went along with J. Edgar Hoover`s spying on Martin Luther King Jr. while Moyers was an aide to Lyndon Johnson.

In Sept. 26 New York Review of Books, Harvard historian Roderick Macfarquhar uses the August Soviet revolution to argue that virtually all similar upheavals in the communist bloc have resulted ``from assaults from above, not pressure from within. Totalitarian systems can withstand pressure from social forces; they tend to fall apart when their leaders, out of a desire for radical change ignited by some external challenge, take actions that help to destroy the system.`` (Romania seems an exception, where the army and party prompted the fall by not backing the leader.)

Sept. 30 Newsweek says dozens of CIA officials have privately told the Senate Intelligence Committee that they consider CIA director nominee Robert Gates a ``coldblooded careerist who slanted reports and drove people out of the agency`` ... Sept. 30 New Yorker is nifty on the British tradition of garden mazes, ``that curious form which lies at the conjunction of two English passions, horiticulture and crossword puzzles,`` while thoughtful Mideast expert Milton Viorst finds Kuwaiti citizens examining ``the validity of their culture of privilege`` after the Iraqi occupation but unlikely to change it.

Finally, if you wonder why you can`t go more than seven minutes without seeing a plug for a dumb 900 number on TV: October Entrepreneur says that 900 numbers amount to a $1 billion-a-year business: The average startup investment is $75,000 and average net profit before taxes is $38,000.