North American Business Press
About the Book
Anthropology is a discipline that over the last hundred or so years has developed a wide array of qualitative techniques for understanding people and their behavior. Although its toolkit is broad, flexible, and illuminating, for many years, these analytic methods suffered as second class citizens within the business disciplines because research tastes were skewed towards quantitative and so called “rigorous” methods. Less formal techniques, such as those that distinguish anthropology, were not considered respectable.
That has changed.
Business practitioners have become impatient with techniques that are unable to provide culturally sensitive information in a timely and effective manner. As a result of these problems, anthropological fieldwork techniques (and those inspired by them) have evolved and are being applied within business. The “naturalistic” research stream of consumer behavior is an excellent example of this trend.
It is within today’s environment that Robert Tian, Michael Lillis, Alfons Van Marrewijk offer a text that explores ways in which the qualitative social sciences, in general, and anthropology, in specific, can serve the strategic sciences such as business and policy science. New books on this subject are always welcomed because this is an area of thought that is quickly evolving and writing only a few years old is likely to be dated. The authors seek to review the current literature and put it into an historical, intellectual, and tactical perspective.
About the Author
DR. ROBERT GUANG TIAN earned a Ph.D. from York University in social anthropology, with a post-doctoral M.B.A. from Wilfrid Laurier University. He also earned an MA in economics from the Central University of Nationalities in China. His research and peer-reviewed publications have looked at consumer behavior, cross-cultural studies in marketing, and business anthropology. He is the editor for the International Journal of Business Anthropology, the senior editor for the International Journal of China Marketing, and has served as an associate editor for the journal Applied Anthropologist for many years. He used to be a full professor of Business Administration, the Chair of the Business Department and the Director of International Education Service at Coker College. He can be reached by email at ijba@na-businesspress.com, ijcm@na- businesspress.com, and rgtian@yahoo.com, or by telephone at 716-907-6091.
DR. MICHAEL P. LILLIS received his Ph.D. in 1993 from the State University of New York at Buffalo. He has published several research articles on decisionmaking, organizational culture, organizational justice and student retention. In addition, he as a variety of consulting experience with both large and small organizations in the private and public sectors. He is currently Professor and Chair of the Business Department at Medaille College in Buffalo, NY. He maybe reached by email at mlillis@medaille.edu and by telephone at 716-880-2320.
DR. ALFONS VAN MARREWIJK is a professor in Business Anthropology at the Department of Culture, Organization, and Management of the VU University Amsterdam, where he received his Ph.D. in Organization Anthropology. His academic work focuses at the everyday life in technology driven organizations and complex (mega)projects. He co-edited (2010) Organizational Spaces. Rematerializing the Workaday World and has published in International Journal of Change Management, Scandinavian Journal of Management, Journal of Managerial Psychology, and Culture and Organization. Van Marrewijk combines his academic interest with international consultancy work in the infrastructure sector (www.bureauparadox.nl). He serves as the Co-editor for the International Journal of Business Anthropology. Contact: Faculty of Social Sciences, VU University Amsterdam . E-mail: a.h.van.marrewijk@vu.nl
