European Developments in Business Anthropology

American anthropologists and practitioners have dominated the debate on organization culture for a long time. European business anthropologists have not been very visible to American scholars because they publish irregularly in American academic journals and generally use their national languages; French, German, Swedish, Dutch and Danish. Business anthropologists in the UK, the Netherlands, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, France, Italy and other European countries have dedicated their time and energy to study corporations but not to organize themselves in a network. This paper explores the European development of dissident business anthropologists criticizing the dominant concept of culture and used methodology in mainstream organization studies. Business anthropology in the different fields of management of diversity, cultural change, cross-cultural cooperation, organization culture, and organizational ethnography is well alive in Europe

The point of no return:Ritual performance and strategy making in project organizations

Organization scholars call for a more critical approach to the field of Strategy-as-Practice. Particularly, more interpretive and micro-level analyses of strategy from a performative perspective are endorsed. This paper addresses this call with an ethnographic study of rituals that mark kick-offs, launches, milestones, and deliveries in project organizations. Using a performative approach, the aim is to investigate how rituals are sociomaterially orchestrated and the implications this has for strategy making. To collect data, fieldwork was conducted during eight ritual events in four infrastructure projects in the Netherlands, and 46 in-depth interviews were held with ritual participants. Our study reveals the often overlooked strategic role of rituals in terms of (1) engaging an audience, (2) legitimizing project plans, and (3) catalyzing transitions via a ‘point of no return’. The contribution of this paper is a performative analysis of rituals offering insight into the understudied aesthetic, corporeal, and material nature of strategizing

Practices of isolation:The shaping of project autonomy in innovation projects

A project's autonomy, the degree to which a project can evolve without constant interference from the parent organization, is a key feature of innovation projects. The literature treats autonomy as a passive phenomenon and underestimates how projects as temporary organizations interact with more permanent forms of organizations. A dynamic and contextually sensitive understanding of project autonomy is valuable; autonomy can change over the course of the project's lifecycle and evolve into extreme isolation. We show how autonomy is shaped through practices of isolation and how this influences project outcomes. Two innovation projects were studied through qualitative-interpretive methods and we analyzed symbolic, discursive and spatial practices of isolation. These practices facilitate the exploration of innovations but limit the transmission of these innovations to the parent organization. We contribute to the literature on temporary organizations and project-to-parent integration by illustrating and theorizing the role of practices of isolation in this process

Constructieve cultuurverandering::Kritische reflectie op bestaande praktijken van samenwerking in complexe bouw en infraprojecten

7 October: Inaugural speech Constructon Cultures, TU Delf