Liminality, Anthropology, and the Global Organization

Turner described liminality as a “realm of pure possibility” that can give rise to novel configurations of ideas within a ritual framework, while Bourdieu referred to liminality as a “space of possibles.” One of the greatest challenges managers and their employees face in multinational enterprises that cross multiple boundaries is the increased complexity brought about by ambiguity, multiplicity, interdependence, and constant, rapid change. Working in global organizations means operating simultaneously in multiple contexts. Anthropologists can make a contribution to an understanding of global work by managing ambiguity and crossing boundaries; by living and working liminally―something acquired in both anthropological training and through experience; and by bringing creativity to the forefront to foster global understanding

Ethical Considerations in Global Multi-Stakeholder Work Contexts

Economic integration and globalization has brought increasing ethical complexity into business anthropology as more anthropologists work in or research multinational enterprises that cross multiple boundaries. Ethical challenges arise from the predominant neoliberal viewpoint in these enterprises, the embeddedness of ethics in culture, and from intercultural nature of multi-stakeholder environments. Using an example of one research project in an MNE, this article illustrates the ethical challenges of the MNE work context and how these challenges can be resolved and discusses current ethical dilemmas and the future implications for the growth and practice of business and organizational anthropology

The Vision for the Future of Mobility

The automotive industry is going through a transformation. Disruptive technologies and tools are shifting the business model from one of automobiles to one of mobility. To accomplish this shift, automotive companies are embracing acquisitions and partnerships. In a time when the consumer electronics industry is delivering new products to market at a rapid rate, automotive manufacturers must identify ways of getting new products and features to customers faster and with high quality to maintain or increase market share.  We provide an analysis of interviews with global automotive company professionals to understand the impact that quality requirements have on innovation and the advanced product design process.   The research contributes to the literature on innovation and quality, identifying organizational behaviors and practices that facilitate or obstruct the development of high quality fast-to-market innovations, particularly in the area of mobility

Using Boundary Objects to Facilitate Culture Change and Integrate a Global Top Management Team

As business anthropologists, we are often called upon to work on organizational change initiatives as members of a change team.  This article is the story of one organizational change initiative involving a global top management team in a healthcare division of a large multinational firm and the research that was used as the basis for implementing change in the top management team and subsequently in the division as a whole.  Specifically, the article focuses on how the change team, of which I was a part, communicated the research results to the top management team and to employees of the company by presenting the results in a map that became a boundary object, that facilitating translation across diverse groups, joint sensemaking, and local action in the change process. 

Using stop words in text mining: Immigration and the election campaigns.

In order to understand immigration sentiment and its relationship to other concepts in the Italian general election campaign of 2018 and the European election campaign of 2019, we collected in two corpora all the tweets in the Italian language containing the word “immigration” in the period preceding the vote. Both corpora underwent a sentiment analysis and a stop word analysis using two textual software packages: Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) (Pennebaker et al., 2015) and WORDij. LIWC was originally designed by James Pennebaker to understand how some patients recover from traumatic experiences by writing about those experiences and the emotions associated with it then and afterwards. LIWC consists of a dictionary of words which assesses the percent that they occur in a given text. LIWC analysis provides a measure of positive and negative emotion in the immigration text over time. WORDij is a text analysis program that can compute a Z-Score or the relative proportional test of difference between words and words pairs in two sets of texts. Using an include list of stop words we can determine how these relational words change over time with an emotional valence and Z-score to assess the immigration political debate over time. The paper represents a focus on stop-words, which have been an aspect of textual analysis that is often dismissed yet can be very important to our understanding of relational powe

Scientific mindfulness: a foundation for future themes in international business

We conceptualize new ways to qualify what themes should dominate the future IB research agenda by examining three questions: Whom should we ask? What should we ask and which selection criteria should we apply? What are the contextual forces? We propose scientific mindfulness as the way forward for generating themes in IB research

A Wicked Methodology for the Analysis of Wicked Problems: Integrating the Analysis of Meetings and Networks

One feature of the Anthropocene is the rise of large-scale environmental problems produced by human actions. A pressing problem is how to manage these environmental problems effectively. Their governance is often challenging because different stakeholder groups disagree on what the appropriate course of action should be. Furthermore, the problems are often complex, and scientific knowledge about them may contain significant gaps and uncertainties. We are interested in understanding the most challenging of these situations, which are often termed “wicked problems,” and what effective environmental governance might look like under those conditions. In this paper, we report on a new, integrative methodology we have developed for analyzing governance processes by examining communications both within an environmental decision-making group and across the stakeholder networks within which the group is embedded. Shaped by a systems perspective, our methodology weaves together multiple theoretical frameworks, methodological approaches, forms of data, and levels of analysis. Very few previous studies have closely examined the actual decision-making process in participatory meetings, or situated these meetings in the broader stakeholder network interactions within which they are embedded. Our approach redresses this significant gap in the literature. For our field site, we selected a commission that was formed to develop recommendations for a new municipal ordinance on hydraulic fracturing (fracking). In order to preserve the anonymity of the commission, we do not identify the geographic region in which the commission was located, other than to say it was in the United States. Fracking exhibits all of the features associated with wicked problems, including multiple stakeholders with conflicting values, scientific uncertainty, and political complexity