Women’s Softball and the Collaborative Spirit of Magic

All major US sports are high in superstitions because motivation to win is high and the game outcome is uncertain; athletes purportedly engage in superstitious behavior to reduce anxiety, build individual confidence and cope with uncertainty. Sports is also a male domain, where men traditionally display individual, masculine achievement. We observe magic rituals practiced in a women’s college softball team not as a means to overcome anxiety or display individual prowess, but as a way to blend creative individuality into the unity of the social whole, which manifests as a social narrative of the team. We analyze individual and team magic in two forms –institutionalized magic and individual superstitions – which build idiosyncratic behavior into a collective team dynamic. As such, this essay shows how women use magical power collaboratively. Women on a college softball team partake in practical work and magic, such that participating in magic through empathy and sensing one another creates team identity, allowing the reimagination of forms and outcomes

Anthropologist in Advertising Agencies: Mediating Structures of Power and Knowledge Capital by Managing Relationships

This essay discusses how working from within an advertising agency as an anthropologist yields particular advantages in terms of presenting anthropological insights and gaining access to information that one would not have been privy to, compared to a study of advertising from the outside. Working from within an agency affords access not only to forms of objective data and consumer research documents that are less accessible from the outside, but also to forming critical relationships and subjective associations with clients that produce knowledge practices and situate information in authoritative positions of power from within. I draw on fifteen years of experience as a corporate anthropologist working within and among relationships in advertising which define, produce and sustain various structures of power and knowledge capital that orient insights and information in critical ways

The Senses in Anthropological and Marketing Research: Investigating a Consumer-Brand Ritual Holistically

The study of the senses encompasses a range of approaches from the social sciences and humanities. Anthropology, in particular, turns our attention away from previous considerations of the senses as biologically determined and universally fixed, to more interactive, adaptable and fluid concepts of the senses that are continuously shaped by culture, geography and history. Alternately, business marketers increasingly explore the senses and consumer’s sensory response to brands as a means of eliciting deeper, more personal experiences with products and services. While anthropologists regard the senses as a form of social interaction, marketers seek to maximize consumer-brand relations by targeting specific sensory responses to consumption. This study integrates both views in an ethnographic investigation of a brand ritual. It examines the sensorial dimensions and symbolic associations of a shaving ritual that foster skills and reformulate time, which inform culturally situated notions of self-presentation and identity. This study advances a more holistic sensory approach to brand rituals as a means of enhancing consumer brand relationships and experiential consumption studies

Writing Advertising: the Production of Relationships in Historical Review

This article examines a range of writings on advertising. It shows that advertising has been written about as instrumental to an emerging capitalistic market, touted as a flamboyant lifestyle in autobiographical tales of charismatic advertising leaders, depicted as a coercive tool of manipulation for creating false desires in consumers, and analyzed for its complex social and political relations among its internal divisions and suppliers. I argue that the many ways advertising is written about reveal an ever-changing structural alignment within advertising itself, in what Pierre Bourdieu (1993) calls a field of strategic relations and possibles. In this, advertising, as well as the writing about advertising, is shown from a shifting ‘production of relations’ relative to economic, political, social and self-intended issues. The article concludes with possible future directions that writings on advertising will take

Proceedings of the 2019 Global Business Anthropology Summit

The second Global Business Anthropology Summit was held May 28-29, 2019 at Fordham University in New York City. The 2019 Summit brought together 160 industry practitioners and academic scholars to build upon the work of the 2018 Summit. The 2019 Summit was explicitly and emphatically forward thinking and action oriented to advance anthropological ideas in business. Its broad aims were to (1) advance thinking on the value of anthropological perspectives in business; (2) generate ways to spread appreciation of our work to academics, students, industry leaders, and the general public; and (3) build community among scholars and practitioners. The Summit's plenary panels and workshops demonstrated how anthropologists penetrate nearly every domain of business and are most adept at handling issues that are humanistic and complex. Throughout the two days, the Summit acknowledged the need to continue to grow the demand for anthropologists in business

Knowing me, knowing you : own orientation and information about the

The purpose of this study was to examine the effects of motivational orientations on negotiation outcomes in unstable negotiation contexts. Instability was created by pitting individualists against cooperators (mixed dyads), and by giving only one of the parties information about the other party’s orientation. A total of 162 subjects participated in negotiation simulations, where orientation and information were manipulated through instructions from management. The cooperative dyads got better outcomes than did the individualistic dyads. The mixed dyads did as well as the cooperative dyads when the cooperators had information, but did as badly as the individualistic dyads when the individualists had information. The process analyses indicated that the dyads with high outcomes achieved their results because the integrative activities increased over time. In the mixed dyads with informed individualists, the individualists reached higher individual outcome than their cooperative (uninformed) opponents. Thus, naive cooperators can easily be exploited