Corporate Anthropology

Articles on Corporate Anthropology

"On February 24, 1991 an article appeared in the business pages of the New York Times, in the ‘Managing’ section, titled ‘Coping with Cultural Polyglots’. The article, by reporter Claudia Deutsch, told of a small (but by implication increasing) number of anthropologists employed by major corporations. This article was followed by another in the same year in the magazine Business Week, titled ‘Studying the Natives on the Shop Floor’ (Garza1991). In the almost fifteen years since similar articles have appeared periodically, with titles like ‘Anthropologists Go Native in the Corporate Village’, in the then new magazine Fast Company (Kane 1996), ‘Into the Wild Unknown of Workplace Culture’, U.S. News & World Report (Koerner 1998), ‘Fieldwork in the Tribal Office’, MIT’s Technology Review (Buderi 1998), ‘Coming of Age in Palo Alto: Anthropologists Find a Niche Studying Consumers for Companies in Silicon Valley’, New York Times (Hafner 1999), ‘It’s a jungle out there: Corporate Anthropology: Dirt-free research’, CNN.Com (Walsh 2001), Fast Company (again) (Tischler 2004) and the New Scientist (Knight 2004).