Tag Archives: business anthropology

At Connection Cafe: Is Your Data Collection Unbalanced?

by on October 23, 2008 in Business

For the Connection Cafe blog this month, I wrote about the need to use a balanced qualitative and quantitative approach to learning about constituents. Here’s a teaser of my latest post…the full post is at the Connection Cafe…

Mixed in with the work that I do at Convio, I’m also pursuing a Master’s degree in business anthropology. If you’re like most folks, you may be wondering what that is exactly. This field is somewhat new even though anthropology as a social science has been around for long time. Basically, business anthropologists work with organizations to help them understand things like staff culture, customer relationships, and product design. That’s fairly broad but at it’s core, we study people and their patterns of behavior. What I most love about it is that we are trained to help non-profits and businesses understand the deeper meaning of what seemingly appears ordinary and everyday…then take what works and amplify it.

For an example, let’s apply a business anthropology approach to a common issue among non-profits: how to better engage constituents. Hopefully you have plenty of metrics showing your email open-rates, donor conversion rates, website flowthrough rates, etc. You may also have survey results and graphical analysis. (And if you haven’t recently done this type of quantitative data collection, no worries…hopefully this post will reinvigorate you.)

Now take it one step further. Most businesses and non-profits commit to collecting quantitative data but usually neglect the qualitative data. The reason for this often rests with some common misperceptions that collecting and analyzing qualitative data is difficult, unmeasurable, and overly time-consuming. But, the fact is that every organization that is committed to developing better relationships with its constituents needs to employ a balanced data collection plan. Strict number crunching usually fails to get at the heart of the things that matter most to non-profit organizations which are people and their emotional connection to your cause. It all comes back to understanding the deeper meaning of things which numbers can only hint at.

In addition to your quantitative measurements, what types of qualitative data collection techniques should you consider? It depends largely on what you’re trying to learn. Start with the big question you want to try to answer. Here are two familiar scenarios:

1. If you host events like walks, pet adoptions, or volunteer pledge drives and want to know why individuals are giving their time (always a highly prized commodity) to your organization, consider a participant-observation program. You’ll be actively participating alongside your constituents, learning about their passions and why they believe your cause matters. Your aim is to see your organization’s relationship through the eyes of others and find the commonalities that they share.

2. If you want to know what exactly will help convert individuals from one-time donors to recurring donors (an even more prized commodity in these economic times!), consider an interview program. This is not just a survey in a different form…think of it as a semi-structured conversation guided by your big question. You’re trying to dive deeper into understanding the major themes of the relationship between your constituents and your organization.

One significant caveat to note here…these qualitative approaches are only effective when performed with a curious objectivity. If you think you already know the answers to your questions, you might want to consider employing another impartial staff member to do them or hire a consultant (a business anthropologist, perhaps?).

This is just a thin, surface-level slice of what a balanced quantitative and qualitative approach can deliver to your organization. My hope is that it sparks some dialogue inside your organization about how to best discover significant patterns and meanings within your constituency; then use this knowledge to improve the effectiveness of your actions. If you’re interested in learning more about the field of business anthropology shoot me an email at cbailey@convio.com chris@chrisbaileyworks.com, leave a comment below, or follow the business anthropology tag on my own blog.

Latest Research: Using A Symbolic Approach To Connect Organizational and Corporate Cultures

by on September 4, 2008 in Business

As I progress into my Business Anthropology grad work, you’ll start seeing most of the discoveries, insights, and developed applications here either in the form of blogposts or downloadable resources. Look for a new Portfolio page soon.

Over the summer, I did some introductory research on culture in business. What might come as a bit of a shock to most managers within organizations is that the concept of “culture” that’s been thrown around for the last 30 years isn’t really culture in the purest (or at least anthropological) sense. Below is the introduction to my paper; you can download the full article here [pdf].

Culture in Business: Using a Symbolic Approach to Connect Organizational and Corporate Cultures

Introduction
In trying to understand the modern business organization, few concepts have been applied (and misapplied) by management and organizational theorists as frequently as culture. The genesis of this is likely the publishing of Deal and Kennedy’s Corporate Cultures and Peters and Waterman’s In Search of Excellence, both best-sellers in the early 1980s (Hamada 1998:1; Gamst 1989:15; Jordan 1989:2). Both non-anthropological works had a considerable impact on business thinking and in many ways challenged the idea of what culture is. Since then, the idea that culture exists in organizations has grown in acceptance to the point where most business leaders now take it for granted. And herein lies a significant problem for organizations: over the past thirty years the richness and salience of the culture concept has been diluted and devalued by the prevailing conventional wisdom. It is considered yet another faddish management tool rather than a valuable social process that reveals the holistic nature of human group behavior.

Today, when management talks about culture within their organizations, they often focus on tacit qualities they want to encourage among their employees or they use culture as a branding tool for attracting new employees and retaining current ones. While I don’t want to completely disparage the intent behind these efforts, I do argue that these simplistic and directive efforts ignore the complex symbolic and individualistic meanings that exist within an organization. It’s these symbols that help define the structure of the culture and ultimately guide the behavior of the organization’s employees.

In this paper I explore how culture has come to be defined and applied in the business organization and how this differs from the more traditional concepts of culture as developed by anthropologists. This contrast will be important as I examine organizational culture as viewed from a symbolic analysis. This paper will show how the theories of symbolic anthropology can provide a useful understanding of culture that reveals how organizational actors formulate meaning and reality in their collective work.

Download the full article [pdf]