Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, March 10, 1991 TAG: 9103080807
SECTION: BUSINESS PAGE: B-4 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: By CLAUDIA H. DEUTSCH/ THE NEW YORK TIMES
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
Her goal is to spot how they keep track of people, airplanes, suitcases and cargo without letting each takeoff and landing touch off chaos. Xerox's goal is to use her observations to fine-tune its methods of handling documents, improve its instruction manuals, train its repair teams, and help it design user-friendly equipment.
"Anthropologists let you view behavior through a new set of eyeglasses," said John Seely Brown, the center's director.
Until recently, anthropologists - people trained to analyze group behavior - were spurned by corporations, which preferred to stress individuality and entrepreneurship. Now companies as disparate as Xerox, Arthur Andersen and Nissan are welcoming them on staff.
Companies that want to expand overseas - and nowadays, that's just about everybody - are asking anthropologists for help in understanding other cultures.
At home, the same companies want help dealing with work forces that increasingly are a collection of cultures and behaviors. Wherever they operate, they want data that can help them communicate with customers and employees.
"There is no question that a developing relationship between anthropology and business is on the agenda for the 1990s," said Roger McConochie, an anthropologist in St. Charles, Ill. Last year, McConochie started a newsletter, Global Business, to explore anthropological insights into corporate issues.
Business anthropologists still comprise a small group, about 100 of the 10,000 members of the American Anthropological Association. But anthropologists who do specialize in business are tackling increasingly complex projects.
For example, Lorna McDougall, a staff anthropologist at Arthur Andersen's Center for Professional Education in St. Charles, Ill., is studying why people from some cultures learn best from lectures, while others learn best through give-and-take. The results of her work will be passed on to center instructors, who train Andersen people from all over.
At the General Motors Corp., staff anthropologist Elizabeth Briody was asked to figure out why so many GM managers seemed nervous and fidgety when they were brought home from two-year stints abroad. Her conclusion: They needed more certainty about the jobs that would be waiting for them, and more help getting their families readjusted. GM now is providing both.
"She knew how to collate the responses of a lot of individuals and figure out the connections," said Walter Albers, head of operating sciences at GM's research laboratories and Briody's boss.
Companies with less broad-reaching projects often hire independent anthropologists as consultants. A large laundry service asked Madeleine Tramm, a New York anthropologist, to discern why one of its branches had a seemingly incorrigible problem with alcoholism and absenteeism.
She discovered that almost all of the branch's workers, from the boss on down, were related and were covering for each other's behavior.
"Labor and management was literally one big happy family, a fact that top management had never thought to ask about," Tramm said. After her findings, the unit's members were dispersed among different locations.
McConochie, meanwhile, is working with an airplane manufacturer to see whether some air crashes have roots in cultural anomalies.
"Some Asian and Latin American first officers are reluctant to point out a hazard to the captain, because correcting the captain runs up against their training to respect authority," McConochie said. On the agenda: figuring out how to help foreign crews circumvent that cultural imprint.
by CNB