Global Business Anthropology Summit 2018: Summary and Reflections

Global Business Anthropology Summit 2018: Summary and Reflection

Creating a Culture of Enterprise Cybersecurity

In this article I describe the fundamental dimensions of a security culture, a concept that builds on the experience of “safety culture” in several high-hazard industries. After outlining the concept and subtleties of corporate culture, I apply these concepts to issues of security, focusing on issues of trust, identification and authentication in complex environments. These issues become more challenging in virtual environments, as familiar tokens of identity such as face-toface recognition are absent, and where trust becomes a weakest-link problem. I conclude with a description of the challenges of “managing” the emergent phenomenon of culture, and how trust can be cultivated.&nbsp

Sustainability of Expansion in an African Airline: A Case Study

Ethiopian Air Lines (Ethiopian) has committed to the purchase of 41 new aircraft, nearly doubling their fleet and introducing three new, state-of-the-art types (the A350-900 and the 787-8, and the DA40NG) into a fleet currently consisting of seven models. In a logistically complex industry, this represents a substantial increase in resource commitments and management responsibility in many areas including maintenance, pilot training, facilities, and route planning. The purpose of this paper is to examine this growth strategy, its underlying assumptions, and its sustainability given long-range industry trends in both the developed and the developing world. Using corporate and industry data, we will construct a set of economic and operational models of corporate growth and fleet complexity, and benchmark these models against other airlines, in North America, Africa, and China. We will also examine some of the socio-technical issues identified by aircraft manufacturers and political issues from the perspective of national governments in rapid growth of airlines in developing nations. These issues include human resource requirements and management models appropriate to a technological periphery. We anticipate that these comparisons will yield useful insights to other airlines in developing nations that are planning their expansion into wider markets

Horizons of Business Anthropology in a World of Flexible Accumulation

Classically, anthropology supplied a cultural critique, by contrasting the Noble Savage to contemporary institutions and exposing the effects of structures of authority. This understanding of humanity was expanded a hundred years ago by Boas’s embrace of cultural and linguistic variety within a common humanity. Similarly, the classical role for business anthropology and other forms of applied anthropology has been to identify areas in contemporary enterprises and institutions where improvements could be made. Today anthropologists’ engagement with the contemporary world of business in a régime of flexible accumulation is expanding our understanding of the human project, interrogating the régimes of value and extension whose scale is global and whose scope penetrates to the deepest levels of consciousness. Using contemporary ethnographic insights from the authors and other anthropologists, this article suggests an enlarged understanding of and direction for business anthropology at the frontier of anthropology that uses classic anthropological approaches to investigate the sites where new human possibilities are being assembled and created

The Ethical Epistemes of Anthropology and Economics

This article examines the separate epistemologies of anthropology and neoclassical economics, suggesting that both epistemologies are tied to and represent ethical stances. After discussing the differences between morality and ethics, it suggests that the epistemologies of both disciplines are rooted in colonial encounters. Although numerous states and empires had previously encountered populations on their peripheries, the European colonial encounter of the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth century was uniquely on an industrial scale, creating new epistemological and ethical problems, out of which both economics and anthropology emerged. The global episteme and ethical stance of anthropology in its engagement with diversity now has as its frontier an engagement with powerful institutions in the business world

Les techniques et la globalisation au xxe siècle

Qu'est-ce que les techniques font à la globalisation ? Qu'est-ce que la globalisation fait aux techniques ? Cet ouvrage propose des réponses à ces questions dans une vingtaine d'études originales qui portent sur le Brésil, le Cameroun, la Chine, les États-Unis, la France, le Japon et l'Union soviétique. Il s'intéresse au long xxe siècle où l'ordre colonial, les antagonismes politiques et la division du monde en deux blocs ont joué un rôle capital dans les interconnexions et les interdépendances régionales. Dans leurs analyses des circulations des techniques, les auteurs de cet ouvrage s'emploient à suivre au plus près les déplacements pour en montrer la complexité et le travail permanent de requalification qui s'opère, tant les techniques et leurs porteurs se transforment au fil des disséminations et de leurs arborescences. De fait, la globalisation ne signifie pas une homogénéisation des mondes sociotechniques. Les circulations techniques changent les territoires de l'économie et les rapports entre les pays, les inégalités et les clivages entre les pays riches et les pays pauvres