The Importance of Business Anthropology: Its Unique Contributions

Abstract

When I entered the field of business anthropology in the 1980s, it was an exciting and new development in anthropology, although anthropologists had been in business since the 1930s. What we experienced in the 1980s was actually a revival of a field that had been for the most part inactive for decades. Since the 1980s, the importance of business anthropology has exploded both inside the discipline and outside of it in the world of public life. The reasons for this explosion are complex but at the heart of them is the importance of what anthropologists bring to business. We bring a special way of looking and of thinking and consequently we come to conclusions not reached by others.