Anthropology and Management (Anthropologie et gestion)

At last a book dealing with the relationships between management (or business administration) and anthropology! Anthropology and Management is about grasping the opening up of management sciences toward social sciences through a study of the theory of organisations. Focusing on the academic French context of the past two decades, Maria Bonnafous‐Boucher addresses this complex and vexed issue. Her analysis mainly deals with the relations between the theories of organisations, those of the firm and the concept of institution. Anthropology and Management common reference is the concept of organisation, which allows an encounter between the two disciplines, whether it derives from the concept of culture or whether it stems from the theories of organisation.

A real and tangible object for management, it is considered as a symbolic system in anthropology, many differences oppose consequently the two versions of the concept of organisation. Sociological theories are structuring for management, but not for anthropology. Management sciences tend to refer only to firms when using the word organisation, yet missing its institutional dimension, what is of great importance for anthropology. Management and anthropology also disagree on the way of dealing with the rationality of action. Against the sociology of organisations, anthropology theorizes that there is, in organisations, no unique rationality, even limited, which could command to its behaviour or functioning. Its main question is neither that of a successful action nor that of the functioning of organisations, whereas it is crucial to management sciences. Here is probably the reason why they cling to the illusion of an overall goal of the organisation.

Anthropology, and especially Mary Douglas', tackles two intricate and connected issues: “how do organisations think?” and “in what conditions could an organisation be an institution?”. In Douglas' view, organising (which results in organisation) and instituting (which results in institution) are definitely entangled. For anthropology, organisation is a perceived and implicit order of things, a conventional process, some sort of classification linking heterogeneous things, whether tangible or intangible. The result is the institution, its becoming as an obvious and natural fact, interwoven with the rest of society. Institution is thus a set of rule that maintain or support coordination.

As a matter of fact for anthropology, the organisation is primarily a representation, something in the head of its members, and not some kind of a clearly visible structure. This analysis differs greatly from the traditional analysis of Mintzberg, which is widely accepted in management. One can easily see the benefit we can derive from anthropology so as to enrich management sciences (which claim to be social sciences) and vice versa; organisations theory is a mean to open up the functional sub‐disciplines of management to integrate the whole.

The first chapter (The use of anthropology in management) explain how difficult and misleading it has been to integrate a debased anthropological contribution. Such topics like corporate culture and “identity”, the use of “ethnography” (understood in the unique sense of participant observation) or the belief that management was just a set of techniques prevent the two disciplines to cross‐fertilise. Uncritical of ethnography's epistemological foundations, its positivism, the fetishism of fieldwork or the belief in the accumulation of “facts”, the relations between Anthropology and Management began poorly in a mutual incomprehension.

In the second chapter (The test of contemporaneousness), Maria Bonnafous‐Boucher examines the way ethnology has survived in France at the turn of the 1980s, when “exotic peoples” could not be studied anymore. Renouncing the traditional “big partitioning” between “Us” and primitives (“Them”), the French ethnology engaged all the same in the “patrimonial machinery”, a French government enterprise to preserve the industrial heritage from the nineteenth century. French ethnology had hard times turning into a new ethnology based on the present. This is referred to by the author as “The test of contemporaneousness”. The fact is that working for the government or a private structure that will use the knowledge created by ethnology for transformation purpose was despised and suspicious. Scars from the colonial era were not really healed at that time and political commitment was sacrilege … unlike its American or English cousins, who were influenced by Pragmatism and a business spirit. The author claim that this point of view is consistent with capitalism's use of knowledge for profit‐oriented purposes, where knowledge has value only if it can be used as a technique or a set of techniques.

With her last chapter (organisation, firm, institution), Maria Bonnafous‐Boucher paves the way for a possible common structure of management and anthropology built on the concept of organisation. Though in her opinion management only considers organisations as firms, firms can be seen as institution. If one relies on the new institutional economics of Coase and Williamson, the firm is an institution to be compared with that of market, the other institution of capitalism. The firm integrate an institutional dimension through its consideration of the law structure of contracts, also because institutions are supposed to protect property rights. The firm is therefore just an internal market and a centre of influence on the economy. But if the firm is instituted, its regulation comes from the other institution, another way of not thinking this dimension. In reaction to these approaches stands economic sociology. They claim that economic and social dimensions truly are embedded, that institutions are contingent upon human history and that seeing a firm as a nexus of treatises conflict with the being of an institution. French “regulation theory” (not regulatory) asserting that the balance between institutions is fundamental because the institutional dimension accounts for the “rules of the game”, legitimizing the decision making process.

The author of Anthropology and Management finally concludes that a theory of organisation is essential to clarify the functioning of market economy and capitalism. Examining the relationships between firm, organisation and institution could be the basis for a new discipline, the anthropology of the theories of organisation.

I liked this book, a premiere in French academic literature, for its original treatment of a complex and interesting theme: Anthropology and Management. Nonetheless, two or three things ought to be mentioned. The first thing is that Maria Bonnafous‐Boucher considers only the economic theories of organisation or “theory of the firm  … ” whereas there are many other important theorists, like Weick, Mintzberg, Pettigrew, Fayol, etc. but we should admit that they do not think specifically the institutional dimension, though their analysis could be interesting to apply to institution, even to point out how irrelevant they are. We can address to her the same kind of remarks concerning anthropology, a discipline that cannot be reduced to the only writings of Douglas or sociology, which cannot be reduced to organisations sociology.

The second thing is the question of legitimacy, which appear crucial to me in order to set the problem of institution. And among “institutionalism”, I wish the work of people quoted in Scott (2001), Institutions and Organizations, were also tackled. For example, DiMaggio and Powell are not even mentioned. I do think that the legitimacy concern and the way through which it is obtained matters to clarify the concept of institution, and especially compared with that of organisation.

Thirdly, I think the main question is “are theses two concepts total synonyms or just partially overlapping?” They both denote collective action but the fact is that the author never in‐depth discusses definitions of the institution or the organisation. She mostly relies on Douglas' definitions, but without calling it into question, especially because Douglas uses several ones. I guess an attempt to build an unequivocal definition may have proved useful.

An institution is something more and else than an organisation (defined as the “layout of collective action”): their temporalities are not the same. An institution is supposed to last, to be perpetuated whereas an organisation, which is, according to Weick, the result of the organising, may last … or not. If we think of a business or an enterprise, it is suppose to last, thus the firm (which primarily is a representation, an economic model or a normative theory) is suppose to last too … and then becomes a specific kind of institution, a formal organisation, an Organisation. Using this acceptation and according to Scott (2001, pp. 72‐3), Organisation means “rationalized conceptions of the world […] accompanied by its universal handmaiden, management”), a “structure” according to the word of Evans‐Pritchard (1969).

We probably now better understand one of Douglas' definitions of institution: a “socially legitimized group” or, in other words, a convention that is implicitly or explicitly acknowledge by a group (inner point of view) and its surrounding (“rest of society's point of view”). Then, an institutional dimension could be added to organisations (which, unlike organisations, do not have an economic purpose), but this is not necessarily linked with goal definition and, above all, with goal congruence. Here is probably Maria Bonnafous‐Boucher main point, well summed up by this quote of Abélès (1995, p. 76): “the concept of an order, concept linked to the instituting itself, does not mechanically imply a ruled order according to a global goal”.

Seemingly, the question is to know what exactly the theories of organisations are referring to: Firm, enterprises, Organisation, institution, organisation, etc. All the previous questions we have raised show the need for and importance of further researches on the topic. Maria Bonnafous‐Boucher's book is a landmark in this new field, a book worth reading.