Handbook of Anthropology in Business
Edited by Rita Denny and Patricia Sunderland
June 2014
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2015 CHOICE OUTSTANDING ACADEMIC TITLE
“In this tour de force of scholarly contributions addressing the burgeoning field(s) at the intersection of anthropology and business, editors Denny and Sunderland provide lively, insightful, and well-crafted introductions to the book as a whole and to each of the five essay sections. The 43 individual remarkably focused, well-written, and current essays, all of which contain bibliographic references and are authored by anthropologically engaged researchers involved with business…” G.M. Herrmann, SUNY
The first major reference work on anthropology in business, includes chapters by more than 60 authors working in universities and corporate settings. The Handbook offers broad coverage of theory and practice and demonstrates the vibrant tensions and innovations that emerge at the intersections of anthropology and business and between corporate worlds and the lives of individual scholar-practitioners.
In recent years announcements of the birth of business anthropology have ricocheted around the globe. The first major reference work on this field, the Handbook of Anthropology in Business is a creative production of more than 60 international scholar-practitioners working in universities and corporate settings from high tech to health care. Offering broad coverage of theory and practice around the world, chapters demonstrate the vibrant tensions and innovation that emerge in intersections between anthropology and business and between corporate worlds and the lives of individual scholar-practitioners. Breaking from standard attempts to define scholarly fields as products of fixed consensus, the authors reveal an evolving mosaic of engagement and innovation, offering a paradigm for understanding anthropology in business for years to come.
“Anthropologists of the 21st Century inescapably study the pervasive role of consumption in people’s everyday lives. In an age of Big Data, scanner data, and online analytics, it is such ethnographic research that is providing the most compelling insights into consumption. As the chapters in this handbook demonstrate, some of the very best research on business — including consumption, technology, design, organizational and work practice studies — is being done by business anthropologists.”