Close Encounters: Anthropologists in the Corporate Arena

The corporate encounter invites casting an anthropological gaze on the objects and practices of corporate worlds. This article delineates three perspectives of the anthropologist on this encounter: (1) with the things corporations make (products and services), (2) with the way they make them (acts of production), and (3) with organizational imperatives (corporate forms). This examination draws specifically on the work of those who operate from within the corporate arena by referencing papers from Ethnographic Praxis in Industry Conference (EPIC). Corporate actors, in turn, seek more nuanced views on human experience and aim to exploit the “people” and “practices” dimensions of their existence and have turned to anthropologists in the process. A brief exploration of the hopes and disjuncture that help shape the encounter from the point of view of anthropologists’ interlocutors inside the corporation rounds out this examination of the anthropologists’ corporate encounter

Afterword: Questions of an Anthropology of and Anthropology for Business

Afterword to the Themed Issue:Anthropology of versus Anthropology for Business: Exploring the Borders and Crossovers Between an Anthropology of Business and Anthropological ConsultancyGuest editor: Daniela Peluso

Choreographing culture: Dance, folklore, and the politics of identity in Turkey

Processes of transnational restructuring have significant, if complex, effects on local tradition. Turkey has been greatly effected by such transformations in the performative arenas of public culture which mediate between national and transnational spaces. These changes challenge Turks' notions of identity, giving way not only to concerns about the proper and most appropriate form of representation to advance as images of Turks and Turkey, but the need to negotiate among these varying identities (class, political, historical, aesthetic, professional, and gender) themselves. Domains of public culture often thought of as "traditional" such as folk dance and festival support the dynamics of middle-brow positioning vis-a-vis the global arena. Yet, while powerful, arenas of performance are also problematic when engaged as mediations on and representations of cultural identity. Because it exists only in the state of performance, dance poses particular difficulties to the effort to pin down meaning and intent. The practice of folk dance in Turkey, thus, is especially charged with debate. While folk dance is often assumed to present a virtual representation of the authentic spirit of Turkish culture, it is increasingly being conceived of as an arena capable of promoting further entree into global cultures of artistic expertise. Attempts to reformulate the practice of folk dance in terms of these goals have sparked intense debate. Tensions between people, including members of the state and participants, who support one position or the other reflect broader tensions of contemporary Turkish society

Human-Vehicle Interfaces: The Power of Vehicle Movement Gestures in Human Road User Coordination

Autonomous vehicles will have to coordinate their behavior with human road users such as drivers and pedestrians. The majority of recently proposed solutions for autonomous vehicle-to-human communication consist of introducing additional visual cues (such as lights, text and pictograms) on either the car’s exterior or as projections on the road. We argue that potential shortcomings in the visibility (due to light conditions, placement on the vehicle) and immediate understandability (learned, directive) of many of these cues make them alone insufficient in mediating multi-party interactions in the busy intersections of day-to-day traffic. Our observations of real-world human road user behavior in urban intersections indicate that movement in context is a central method of communication for coordination among drivers and pedestrians. The observed movement patterns gain meaning when seen within the context of road geometry, current road activity, and culture. While all movement communicates the intention of the driver, we highlight the use of movement as gesture, done for the specific purpose of communicating to other road users and give examples of how these influence traffic interactions. An awareness and understanding of the effect and importance of movement gestures in day-to-day traffic interactions is needed for developers of autonomous vehicles to design forms of human-vehicle communication that are effective and scalable in multi-party interactions

Making Crowdwork Work: Issues in Crowdsourcing for Organizations

Existing approaches to crowdwork center around the unique ways in which work is sourced from the crowd, often emphasizing the kind of work characterized by hyperspe­cialized, microtask labor, such as that found in Amazon’s Mechanical Turk. However, real work in organizations is complex and rich, and as crowdsourcing is increasingly used alongside mainstream organizational work, social, technological, human-factors and work practice-related challenges arise. This paper presents the preliminary results of a research study designed to investigate models and methods for effective organizational uses of the crowd. The results indicate that despite the growing trend in organiza­tional crowdsourcing, its implications on the organisational work performance and human requirements are yet to be fully understood