Why Does the Study of Alternative Organizations (So Badly) Need Anthropology

Management studies have witnessed a surge of interest in alternative organizations and organizing in recent years. In the present chapter, I suggest that anthropology has a major role to play in the further development of this growing endeavour that seeks to better understand and promote existing alternatives, as well as imagine new ones. To that purpose, I first argue that anthropology when envisaged as a paradigm has for it a spirit of openness that may help eschew the preconceived perspectives that encumber most management studies with regard to the forms economic organizations may or should take on. This spirit is, I contend, particularly conducive to identifying alternative values and modes of organizing and providing positive interpretations thereof, thus contributing to the deconstruction of what are often reductionist managerial models. I then argue that when envisaged as a method – i.e. ethnography – anthropology can offer a unique window on the actual making of alternative organizations as it leans towards local meanings and everyday experiences of organizational members, and has a field- rather than theory-driven manner of problematizing. These characteristics provide, I suggest, a necessary counterpoint to an overly dominant focus in the literature on design and governance issues as well as on abstract theoretical problems. Finally, I illustrate these two arguments by discussing model studies of alternative organizations and organizing by anthropologists, that is, Sharryn Kasmir’s The Myth of Mondragon (1996) and David Graeber’s Direct Action (2009)

Sociology · Anthropology · Global and Cross-Cultural Management · Management and Organizational Studies

• The human side of self-managing organizations

  Open Access•Veiko Valkiainen•Human Relations•2026

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