Ethnography at Work follows the experiences of the author as a participant observer in the day-to-day running of a Japanese advertising agency. The book reveals the intricate behind-the-scenes ...planning, discussion, negotiations and strategies needed to ensure that the agency's presentation to a potential client will be preferred over that of a rival firm. The book shows how detailed ethnography can lead to an understanding of numerous different, but interlocking, theoretical issues. It demonstrates how ethnography can travel beyond the academic realm and be used by business personnel to heighten their understanding of their companies' organizational structures, strategies and daily work practices. Asking crucial questions about the role of the anthropologist in the field, Ethnography at Work introduces students to ways in which anthropologists study social systems in business.
Based on the results of anthropological fieldwork conducted in 2015 and 2016, the paper aims to review the employees’ experience regarding the process of the acceleration of time in the office of one ...multinational company in Belgrade. The scientific focus is placed on working hours and certain temporal boundaries that characterize it. The most significant outcome is that the experience of a given phenomenon is the result of the fact that time spent during the work increasingly pushes the private time of interlocutors to the point of complete usurpation. The process of the acceleration of time was analyzed at three levels based on the statements of fifty-six respondents. The methods used in this study were structured interviews, observation of daily activities and practices in the company’s office, participant observation, survey on the demographic and socio-economic profiles of the interlocutors, and a field diary. The first level involved an analysis of business hours esteem; the second one was oriented towards studying the process and period of employees’ adjustment to foreign colleagues; while the third level of analysis aimed to instruct employees’ relationship to working hours before and after the experience of worink with foreign colleagues. This research design turned out to be the most appropriate if we keep in mind that the results of this study lean on the results of anthropological research from 2005, which aimed to review the experiences, strategies and expectations of 30 employed Belgraders of different work positions, work orientations and the length of careers in terms of working hours. Amonog these 30 respondents the blurring of the differences between business and private sphere of life has been detected due to the experience of working in a changed socio-economic and political context since 2000 and the beginning of the reform process within EU integration process, accompanied by the specific social acceleration. The continuation of these processes, with certain features that come as a result of another change in the country’s political climate in 2012, therefore, are the key pathways through which the phenomenon of the acceleration of time in the modern Serbian society was observed on the example of a specific work/business community. Consequently, the acceleration of the Serbian society during the second decade of the 21st century, on the example of employees in the office of one multinational company in Belgrade, showed that the experience of working hours and certain temporal boundaries that characterize it among employees is such that private time is almost completely usurped by work time. This can be read through working hours, which practically cease to have clearly defined temporal boundaries in life of most respondents. The performance of work tasks is placed in the service of merging the spheres of business and private life into one, within the wokring hours.
Multiple processes in modern Serbia occurred at the end of the twentieth and the beginning of the twenty first century. Almost all of them regard political, economic, and social changes. Influences ...caused by these changes can be seen in the social template across the spectrum of plans, encompassing various spheres of life of individuals from business to private, all the way to the point where this division, for many, is gradually disappearing. In that sense, this paper will follow the most anthropologically interesting example of research, the one that follows the influences of the undertaken reform processes and observed changes. This is the example that regards the experience and evaluation of time among employed inhabitants of Belgrade, the capital of Serbia. The aim of this paper was to refer to the results of anthropological fieldwork conducted in 2005, which focused on the experiences, strategies and expectations of employed Belgraders in terms of their working hours and certain temporal boundaries that characterize it. Due to the increasingly intensive business contacts with foreign partners and colleagues since 2000, the working hours of employees were analyzed in a narrower context, as they were on the long list of adjustments, mostly to Western influences. These contacts were not only more frequent after the period of the 1990s, which, among other things, is characterized by a sudden break in cooperation with foreigners, but were often dictated by the EU integration process, the increase of the private sector in which operated companies were oriented towards profit, and the acceleration of time. The last aspect was examined in 2005 through a sample comprising 30 interlocutors of various business backgrounds. The ethnographic material was categorized and analyzed with regard to the differentiation of respondents by age. Fifteen respondents were chosen to represent the older generation (born in the 1940s and 1950s) and as many the younger generation (born in the 1960s and 1980s). The blurring of the boundaries between the employees’ business and private life in Belgrade became more marked at the turn of the century, and it could be clearly stated through the example of working time. Differences between the period of socialism and the period of reforms since the 1990s relate also to a sense of insecurity and fear of losing one's job or having inadequate work, and the simultaneous development of the private sector, which is characterized by stricter rules for employees. More intensive was the influence of business on the private domain of life, but also the intrusion of the private into business life. This has become a necessity and a pledge of individual functioning on both levels, which show combined characteristics of acceleration through the increase of obligations.
The World of Wal-Mart Copeland, Nicholas; Labuski, Christine
2013, 20130104, 2012, 2013-01-04
eBook
This book demonstrates the usefulness of anthropological concepts by taking a critical look at Wal-Mart and the American Dream. Rather than singling Wal-Mart out for criticism, the authors treat it ...as a product of a socio-political order that it also helps to shape. The book attributes Wal-Mart's success to the failure of American (and global) society to make the Dream available to everyone. It shows how decades of neoliberal economic policies have exposed contradictions at the heart of the Dream, creating an opening for Wal-Mart. The company's success has generated a host of negative externalities, however, fueling popular ambivalence and organized opposition.
The book also describes the strategies that Wal-Mart uses to maintain legitimacy, fend off unions, enter new markets, and cultivate an aura of benevolence and ordinariness, despite these externalities. It focuses on Wal-Mart's efforts to forge symbolic and affective inclusion, and their self-promotion as a free market solution to social problems of poverty, inequality, and environmental destruction. Finally, the book contrasts the conceptions of freedom and human rights that underlie Wal-Mart's business model to the alternative visions of freedom forwarded by their critics.
There is significant evidence that an effective organizational
culture provides a major competitive edge-higher levels of employee
and customer engagement and loyalty translate into higher growth
and ...profits. Many business leaders know this, yet few are doing
much to improve their organizations' cultures. They are discouraged
by misguided beliefs that an executive's tenure and an
organization's attention span are too short for meaningful
transformation. James Heskett provides a roadmap for achievable and
fast-paced culture change. He demonstrates that an effective
culture supplies the trust that makes managing change of all kinds
easier. It provides a foundation on which changes in strategy can
be based, and it's a competitive edge that can't easily be hacked
or copied. Examining leading companies around the world, Heskett
details how organizational culture makes employees more loyal, more
productive, and more creative. He discusses how to quantify its
effects in order to sell the notion of culture change to the
organization and considers how to preserve an organization's
culture in the face of the trend toward remote work hastened by the
COVID-19 pandemic. Showing how leadership can bring about
significant changes in a surprisingly short time span, Win from
Within offers a playbook for developing and deploying culture
that enables outsized results. It is a groundbreaking demonstration
of organizational culture's role as a foundation for strategic
success-and its measurable impact on the bottom line.
This article discusses the way corporate cultures reproduce social structures in their internal organization, operating as microcosms of the larger society. Utilizing a qualitative ethnographic ...methodology, including participant-observation, in-depth interviews, and focus groups with around 400 associates of the largest private bank in Ecuador, this nationwide study provides both an analysis of the bank’s organizational culture and a collaborative interpretation of the institution’s perceptions concerning ethno-racial, gender, and disability inclusivity. The article offers abundant ethnographic data in conversation with the historical contexts of ethnic homogenization through the state project of mestizaje, which permeates even the internal structures of banking organizations. We discuss symbols of tradition, religion, and status that were key in shaping the bank’s identity in the past and that now weigh on the bank’s contemporary commitment to being a dynamic institution with responsible, inclusive, and diverse internal structures and workplace interactions. By addressing complex social issues around race, ethnicity, gender and sexuality, and disability, this study explores the role of corporations in society as they seek to confront their embeddedness in discriminatory social systems and act as conscious leaders in cultivating a more inclusive and diverse workforce.
Profitably Healthy Companies lays out ten essential principles of organizational development for sustained success. Bringing together practical and academic expertise, W. Warner Burke and Michael ...O'Malley detail proven methods for every organization at each level.
One of the world's largest sellers of footwear, the Bata Company of Zlï+½n, Moravia has a remarkable history that touches on crucial aspects of what made the world modern. In the twilight of the ...Habsburg Empire, the company Americanized its production model while also trying to Americanize its workforce. It promised a technocratic form of governance in the chaos of postwar Czechoslovakia, and during the Roaring Twenties, it became synonymous with rationalization across Europe and thus a flashpoint for a continent-wide debate. While other companies contracted in response to the Great Depression, Bata did the opposite, becoming the first shoe company to unlock the potential of globalization. As Bata expanded worldwide, it became an example of corporate national indifference, where company personnel were trained to be able to slip into and out of national identifications with ease. Such indifference, however, was seriously challenged by the geopolitical crisis of the 1930s, and by the cusp of the Second World War, Bata management had turned nationalist, even fascist. In the Kingdom of Shoes unravels the way the Bata project swept away tradition and enmeshed the lives of thousands of people around the world in the industrial production of shoes. Using a rich array of archival materials from two continents, the book answers how Bata's rise to the world's largest producer of shoes challenged the nation-state, democracy, and Americanization.
The field of strategy science has grown in both the diversity of issues it addresses and the increasingly interdisciplinary approaches it adopts in understanding the nature and significance of ...problems that are continuously emerging in the world of human endeavor. These newer kinds of challenges and opportunities arise in all forms of organizations, encompassing private and public enterprises, and with strategies that experiment with breaking the traditional molds and contours. The field of strategy science is also, perhaps inevitably, being impacted by the proliferation of hybrid organizations such as strategic alliances, the upsurge of approaches that go beyond the customary emphasis on competitiveness and profit making, and the intermixing of time-honored categories of activities such as business, industry, commerce, trade, government, the professions, and so on. The blurring of the boundaries between various areas and types of human activities points to a need for academic research to address the consequential developments in strategic issues. Hence, research and thinking about the nature of issues to be tackled by strategy science should also cultivate requisite variety in issues recognized for research inquiry, including the conceptual foundations of strategy and strategy making, and the examination of the critical roles of strategy makers, strategic thinking, time and temporalities, business and other goal choices, diversity in organizing modes for strategy implementation, and the complexities of managing strategy, to name a few. This book series on Research in Strategy Science aims to provide an outlet for ideas and issues that publications in the field do not provide, either expressly or adequately, especially as regards the comprehensive coverage deserved by certain emerging areas of interest. The topics of the volumes in the series will keep in view this objective to expand the research areas and theoretical approaches routinely found in strategy science, the better to permit expanded and expansive treatments of promising issues that may not sufficiently align with the usual research coverage of publications in the field. Cultural Values in Strategy and Organization contains contributions by leading scholars on the role of cultural values in the field of strategy science research. The 11 chapters in this volume cover the topics of ecological organizing and evolving cultural values, corporate cultural responsibility, cultural integration in mergers and acquisitions, culture and paradoxical frames, cultural values in the fair trade market, national culture and legitimacy, family businesses as values-driven organizations, cultural intelligence of executives, building an alliance culture, personal values of civil engineers and architects, and cultural characteristics of Chilean and Brazilian workforces. The chapters collectively present a wide-ranging review of the noteworthy research perspectives on the role of cultural values in strategy and organization.
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