Office culture
“So how do you feel about e-mail?” asks Simon Roberts, a social anthropologist. “How has it changed your workload?” This is not what social anthropologists are usually expected to ask: they observe courtship rituals, try to interpret ancient chants, analyse gift-giving or tribal cosmology. Simon Roberts, however, is searching for meanings in the daily life of Peter Quest, a senior auditor, who works for the global accountants PricewaterhouseCoopers, in a featureless tower block in central London. Quest, who has spent 32 years at the firm, manifests unease. “I call my e-mails the triffids,” he says, referring to the killer plants in John Wyndham’s 1950s novel. “You can spend all day killing them, then you turn your back for a second and those red things, those triffids, have taken over your screen again! It eats up your day. When I started my career we used to spend lots of time talking to clients and colleagues. Now it’s harder.”
ADVERTISEMENT
Roberts is patient. “But I have noticed that people here don’t seem to classify e-mail as ‘real’ work. They sit at their desk doing e-mails and then say, ‘Right, now let’s do some work’ - but e-mail is taking up work time. Perhaps that is the problem?”
Quest looks surprised: he hadn’t thought about how he thought about e-mail before. Indeed, like any long-time resident in a secure habitat, he hadn’t reflected extensively on his daily habits. That is why PwC has taken the unusual - and commendably imaginative - step of bringing in an anthropologist, in an effort to address the issue of workplace culture. “Everyone at an accountancy firm tends to be the same kind of person,” says Quest. “That is why it’s useful getting an outsider view.”
PwC is not alone. Practitioners of social anthropology - the branch of social science dedicated to the study of human culture - have traditionally flocked to exotic spots: examining the sexual mores of Polynesian islanders; studying disappearing tribal cultures in the Amazon jungle; wandering with Nuer herders in Sudan. But in the past few years, some have headed off to places such as accountancy firms and technology companies, partly because there are fewer unspoilt “native” cultures left to study. But the shift also reflects the growing complexity of public and private sector workplaces and the realisation by companies and governments that they must operate in a global environment. In America, anthropologists have been hired by technology groups including Intel, Microsoft, Apple and Xerox. In the UK, the “people watchers” can be found not just pacing the corridors of blue-chip companies, but also the Ministry of Defence, Immigration Services, National Health Service and Foreign Office, as well as non-governmental aid agencies.
But some academics are uneasy about the trend. Is it valid for anthropologists to use their skills to serve giant corporations and governments? And can a discipline better known for examining the culture of exotic tribes really have anything relevant to say about the modern world of companies such as PwC?
Defining what anthropology really is has never been easy: I received my PhD in anthropology 10 years ago, and for years I struggled to explain exactly what I had been up to. “It’s the study of other cultures - it’s telling people about other people,” was my stock answer. Adding to the difficulty is the way this practice of analysing other people has turned into a moral minefield.
That wasn’t the case when anthropology first emerged as a separate discipline. In the latter part of the Victorian era, intellectual life was convulsed by Charles Darwin’s theories of evolution. And this scientific theory - coupled with the might of the British Empire - gave the first generation of anthropologists a supreme moral confidence. Specifically, they were primarily concerned with collecting information about “natives” around the world, in order to rank them on an evolutionary scale of progress. British culture was naturally considered the end point on this scale and the research was based on the accounts of missionaries, travellers and colonial officers. Indeed, when James Frazer - the leading light of Victorian anthropology - was asked whether he had actually visited the “savages” he loved to analyse, he is said to have retorted: “Heaven forbid!”
But in the 20th century, western anthropology rejected this evolutionist approach. One reason for the shift was that anthropologists started to actually live with the “savages” they studied. As a result, many decided that it was wrong to assume that a “primitive” tribe was always morally and culturally inferior to western culture. Instead, the argument went, each society had its own internal balance - and beauty. It was up to the anthropologist, through first-hand research, to analyse all the interlinked parts of a culture.
This approach set the tone for anthropology in subsequent decades. When I started my PhD at Cambridge in the late 1980s, I decided to study how Tajikistan’s ethnic and religious identity had survived under Soviet rule. I dispatched myself to a tiny, mountainous Tajik village and spent a year taking part in everyday life (a cycle of cooking, cleaning, baby-sitting and goat-herding, punctuated by the odd wedding ritual or communist parade). It was utterly fascinating, but as I scurried around “my” village in 1990, filling dirty notebooks with endless observations, I was sometimes troubled by doubts, which reflected the bigger tensions stalking the discipline of anthropology.
In the early decades of the 20th century, anthropologists had approached their subjects like scientists peering down a microscope: they assumed that other cultures were neatly bound entities and that the objects of their study wouldn’t try to answer back. As the 20th century wore on, these concepts looked increasingly outdated. Globalisation was bringing radio, chewing gum and disease to the most remote people (in my case, Tajik villagers were watching Brazilian soap opera on Russian TV). Some of the people being studied were reading the research written about them, and that created an interaction and moral dilemma that had never troubled the Victorians. By the 1980s, some developing countries were curbing research visas, on the ground that anthropology was a patronising legacy of colonial imperialism.
I eventually overcame my qualms and completed my PhD, and have tried to incorporate what I learnt about “people watching” into financial journalism. Other anthropologists reacted differently. Some have become so obsessed with the moral interaction between the “observer” and “observed” that their research seems more akin to introspective travel writing. Others have tried to give the discipline a harder scientific edge by moving into realms similar to psychology or linguistics. And a few seem to commit intellectual suicide, by writing essays that essentially declare there is little moral justification to studying other “cultures” at all.
But many anthropologists are turning their gaze to western society instead. For the real value of anthropology lies not in its ability to gather data, but in its ability to look at everyday life with fresh, neutral eyes and to spot cultural patterns. The insights produced by that process in western cultures can be as interesting as any exotic jungle-tribe study.
Simon Roberts, the anthropologist at PwC, did his PhD in the 1990s at Edinburgh University, and decided to work in the Indian city of Varanasi, a sacred Hindu site. An earlier generation of anthropologist would have responded to the location by focusing on Hindu cremation rituals, but Roberts had other ideas - he investigated the impact of satellite TV. “Almost overnight, Indian families had gone from having two TV channels to having dozens, from all over the world. I wanted to know how that affected households and how they looked on the world.”
For a year, Roberts watched Indian families watch TV. When he returned to the UK and completed his doctorate, he discovered his experience was in demand. The BBC commissioned a research project, and other work soon followed, which led him to set up his consultancy, Ideas Bazaar. By anthropology standards, this was a controversial move. As a species, British academics are often wary of the world of commerce, and guilty historical memories have made anthropologists particularly wary of working for the government. Back in the time of the empire, colonial administrators tried to use anthropologists to work out how to control the natives - a practice that most anthropologists later came to see as a shameful betrayal of their academic endeavour.
Roberts vehemently denies that he is doing anything wrong by offering his insights elsewhere. “As a discipline, anthropology suffers from being far too introspective... it has to get involved in the outside world if it is to have an impact.” His consultancy employs several anthropologists, who have worked in sectors ranging from the media to mental health services in the NHS.
The study at PwC emerged because senior managers realised that staff felt overwhelmed by the volume of mundane bureaucratic tasks. They suspected the problem was partly due to cost cutting and moving too much back-office work to the front office. However, in a company as large as PwC, it was hard for managers at the top to understand grassroots working practices. So they called in Roberts. “Studying PwC is like looking at a town - you try to see how the bits all interact, and you are looking for patterns,” he says. “What we try to do is describe what is happening, but we don’t present solutions. We let the company decide that.”
The biggest boost to applied anthropology in the corporate world has come from a surprising source - US technology companies. At first glance, that might seem counter-intuitive: modern technology often appears to transcend cultural barriers with ease - the internet, for example, can be found in homes from Japan to Jordan to Java. Yet that very universality has created a new emphasis on cultural differences, and some companies have realised they need to adjust their western mindset if they want to reach customers or clients. “Many companies assume that if they want to have a global website, say, all they have to do is translate it into different languages,” explains Martin Ortlieb, an anthropologist who now works at a global software group. “But that isn’t true - what works in German can’t just be translated into Japanese with the same effect.”
Intel, the US technology giant, is a case in point. Before the mid-1990s its designers operated with a distinctly American view. “People here used to talk about ‘the US’ and ‘the rest of the world’,” laughs Ken Anderson, an anthropologist at Intel. In 1996, the company created a “People and Practices” group of researchers, such as Anderson, who spend their time trying to understand the cultural context in which technology is used around the globe. The timing of this move was no accident: in the late 1990s, the sector was flush with cash to spend on non-core activities. Despite the tech bubble bursting, Intel has expanded its team of anthropologists and other large technology companies have followed its lead. This suggests the research is proving useful. “I’m not sure that people at Intel always understand what we do... but they have come to understand that we have an intimate relationship with customers that can translate into value for the company,” says Anderson.
Intel anthropologists spend much of their time “out in the field”, living at close quarters in households around the world to analyse the way they use technology. Perhaps the most eye-catching project has been a three-year study of how technology is used by Asia’s fast-growing middle class. The anthropologists found Chinese families who take their mobile phones to temples to be blessed or burn paper cell-phones in funeral rituals, and Muslim devotees who use the GPS on their phone to locate Mecca for prayers. “In America, people might use their cell-phone to get stock information, but we now realise that people elsewhere have other priorities,” says Intel spokesman Kevin Teixeira.
Most anthropology academics expect a greater focus on modern, western societies in the future. Many also perceive the growth of “applied anthropology” as inevitable. In Britain, for example, the government is calling on universities to explain how they are preparing PhD students for “real” jobs - and making an actual contribution to society. “In the past, people would think that academic research was a valid pursuit in itself... but in the current climate that is not always enough,” says David Mills of the University of Birmingham. In response, Mills and other anthropologists conducted a study into what those with anthropology doctorates actually end up doing, and they found that less than half were in academic careers. The others were working in private sector jobs such as consultancies or the public and non-governmental aid sector, particularly in immigration, health and development.
Anne Kirah, an effervescent American with a neat elfin face, defines the trend. She started her career as an anthropologist in a seemingly classic manner, working with Tibetan families and then refugees in Norway. However, she was later hired by Boeing to study passenger behaviour on flights, and is now the senior design anthropologist at Microsoft, roaming the world to see how families use technology such as Windows. “I am like a trend-hunter. I go into people’s homes and watch them from dawn to dusk to understand patterns,” says Kirah. “I think of myself as an advocate for the consumer, helping to get products they want designed.”
It is not always a particularly glamorous occupation. On a drizzly Friday afternoon a few weeks ago, for example, Kirah could be found in the sitting room of a suburban family home in Chislehurst, Kent. In one corner of this room stood a bubbly middle-aged woman called Brenda, who was busy doing her family’s ironing while singing along to Whitney Houston. Behind her, Ken, her retired husband, was vacuuming the house’s acres of pastel carpet with meticulous care. Kirah, meanwhile, was casually sitting and chatting in the corner, in an effort to understand what makes the world of Brenda and Ken tick.
”So, that is quite a routine you have going there with the ironing - do you always do it that way?” asks Kirah. Carefully, Brenda runs through the mundane minutiae of her daily life: how her three sons like her to iron their T-shirts and tracksuits, but hate it when she gets them mixed up - so she has created a labelling system to tell the identical, perfectly pressed T-shirts apart.
Kirah does not ask much about technology per se - let alone about how people such as Brenda and Ken might use computers. But that is the whole point - and part of the defining nature of anthropology. A normal marketing person might approach a family with a barrage of highly directed questions about computers. But that way, Kirah argues, they are likely to just get the answers they expect to hear - and will only offer the consumers products that the software designers have already created. The anthropologist starts by observing everyday life, with all its odd little patterns, and then tries to work out how computers might eventually fit into that. Microsoft’s hope is that this will inspire entirely new applications for technology.
In the case of Brenda and Ken, for example, Kirah concludes that these are people who are highly cost-conscious, very well organised, with a strong sense of community and family. At the moment, they don’t use computers or e-mail much. Indeed, they seem rather scared of it. But Kirah is convinced that Brenda and Ken might potentially be very interested in products such as instant messaging to keep in touch with their friends and family when they go travelling. Kirah also notes the fact that the most computer-literate person in their family is the grandmother - contrary to the usual stereotypes - partly because she has more time to spare.
”One of the things we need to let people [at Microsoft] know is that there is life after 30,” chuckles Kirah after the meeting. “Most product designers are young - in their twenties, say - and so they don’t always think about how technology might be used by older people or children. We have to look much more at that.”
It is crucial, Kirah believes, to understand how technology is being used inside family groups as tools to assert power, negotiate relationships, mark rites of passage or in social bonding. “These days you get kids who take their mobile phones to bed like we used to take our teddy bears,” observes Kirah. “Then you get parents who use top-up mobile phones as a negotiating tool with their children... or people who use instant messaging as a form of gift exchange.”
This has practical applications. After Kirah analysed the way people send each other so-called “emoticons” - images that express emotion - via e-mail as a type of “gift exchange”, Microsoft came up with the idea of creating images that winked and blew kisses. “That came out of some of the work that Anne is doing,” says Neil Holloway, chief operating officer for Microsoft in Europe. “This is all about trying to understand what consumers want. Product developers are like artists - they create things. But then we need to go out into the community and see how people might actually use things as well... to personalise the technology.”
But does this mean that anthropologists are simply helping to exploit consumers? After all, from a purist academic perspective, furthering the interests of a global corporation such as Microsoft or Intel might not seem so morally different to helping support the British Empire. And, even now, some academics are wary about anthropologists helping companies. “When I was at grad school my supervisor did not want me to do anything applied - that was not considered the right track,” admits Anderson, the anthropologist at Intel. Yet Anderson, for his part, insists that he remains comfortable with his work. “The key point to realise is that a consumer can always say no to anything that a corporation comes up with, so what we are doing is not like colonialism.”
Kirah echoes this. “Yes, there have been periods in history when anthropologists have been abused by governments... but as long as I believe that I am helping the voice of the consumer to be heard, I am happy to do my job at Microsoft.”
人类学家进驻现代企业(上)
“那您觉得电子邮件怎么样？”社会人类学家西蒙?罗伯茨(Simon Roberts)问道，“电子邮件是怎样改变你的工作量？”这可不是人们通常期望社会学家提出的问题：他们观察求婚仪式，试图诠释古老的吟唱行为，分析礼品馈赠或部落的宇宙观等。但西蒙?罗伯茨所要探索的，是彼得?奎斯特(Peter Quest)日常生活的意义。
彼得?奎斯特是一位资深审计师，在全球性会计师行普华永道(PwC)工作，地点位于伦敦市中心一幢毫无特色的高层建筑。为普华永道工作了32年的奎斯特表达了自己的不安，他说，“我把我的电子邮件称为杀人三叶草。”他指的是约翰?温德汉姆(John Wyndham)在其五十年代小说中提到的杀人植物。“你可能花了一整天来消灭它们，但只要你稍停片刻，那些红色的东西、那些杀人三叶草，又占据你的屏幕了！它把你一天的时间都慢慢吞噬了。当我开始职业生涯时，我们花大量时间与客户和同事交谈。现在要这么做就更难了。”
罗伯茨耐心地说，“但我注意到，这里的人似乎并没有将电子邮件归入‘真正的’工作一类。他们坐在办公桌前处理电子邮件，然后说，‘好，我们现在该干些活了’――但电子邮件占用了工作时间。或许这正是问题所在？”
奎斯特显得吃惊；他没有想过以前他是怎样看待电子邮件的。的确，跟任何长期生活在安全环境的人一样，他没有仔细考虑过自己的日常习惯。那正是为什么普华永道为了解决工作场所文化问题，采取了这一不同寻常但也十分具有想象力的举措――引进一位人类学家。“在会计事务所里，每个人都很容易被同化为一类人，”奎斯特说，“因此引进局外人的观点将会有帮助。”
普华永道并不是唯一这样做的公司。社会人类学(致力于研究人类文化的社会科学)从业人员传统上大多会前往具有异国情调的地方：如考察玻利尼西亚岛民的性道德观念、研究正在消亡的亚马逊森林部落文化、跟随苏丹的努尔牧人一同迁徙。但过去几年里，有些社会人类学研究人员去了会计师事务所和技术公司等地方，部分原因是：未遭破坏而可供研究的“土著”文化越来越少。但这种转变也反映出公共和私人领域工作场所的复杂性与日俱增，也反映出企业和政府认识到，它们必须在全球环境中运作。在美国，人类学家已受雇于技术集团，例如英特尔(Intel)、微软(Microsoft)、苹果电脑(Apple)和施乐(Xerox)等。在英国，不仅能在蓝筹公司的走廊里可以看到“人类观察者”的踪迹，而且在国防部、移民局、英国国民保健服务部(NHS)、外交部和非政府援助机构里都能看到他们的身影。
但一些学术界人士对这种趋势感到不安。人类学家运用他们的技能为巨无霸企业及政府机构服务恰当吗？一门以考察异域部落文化而著称的学科，真的能对现代企业界(如普华永道)提供一些有用的启示吗？
给人类学一下个确切的定义绝非易事：我在10年前获得人类学博士学位，多年来我努力尝试给人们解释我在做什么。“那是对其它文化进行研究――告诉人们关于其他民族的事情，”这是我通常用的答案。更为困难的是，对其他民族进行分析所采用的做法在道德上已受到挑战。
当人类学最初作为一门独立的学科出现时，情况不是这样的。维多利亚时代后期，知识分子的生活受到查尔斯?达尔文(Charles Darwin)的进化理论所震撼。这一科学理论伴随着大英帝国强大的影响力在道德方面给了第一代人类学家极大的信心。具体来讲，他们主要关注的是，搜集世界各地“土著”的相关信息，旨在为他们的人类进步列出进化程度的优劣次序。英国文化自然被认为是这一进程的终结。研究是建立在传教士、旅行者和殖民官员的记述基础上。的确，当维多利亚时代人类学家的重要人物詹姆斯?弗雷泽(James Frazer)被问到是否真的访问过他喜欢分析的“野蛮人”时，据说他立即回嘴说：“老天保佑，千万别这样！”
但在20世纪，西方人类学摒弃了这种进化论的方法。这种转变的一个原因是，人类学家开始真正同他们所研究的“野蛮人”在一起生活了。结果，许多人类学家判定，认为“原始”部落总是在道德和文化上比西方文化低等的假设是错误的。相反，有观点认为，每个社会都有它自身的内在平衡和美丽之处。人类学家有责任通过第一手研究，去分析一种文化的所有内在关联部分。
这种方法为随后几十年的人类学奠定了基调。上世纪80年代末当我开始在剑桥大学攻读博士学位时，我决定研究塔吉克斯坦的种族和宗教认同是如何在苏联统治下存续下来的。我来到一个塔吉克人的山区小村，花了一年的时间参与到当地人的日常生活中(那是一个周而复始的做饭、洗衣、照顾孩子和牧羊的过程，当中不时会有古怪的婚礼仪式和共产党组织的游行活动)。那绝对令人着迷，但当我1990年在“我的”村里跑来跑去，将无穷无尽的观察记录在脏兮兮的笔记本上时，有时候也受到一些疑问所困扰，这些疑问反映了笼罩着人类学本身的更大困惑。
在20世纪早期的数十年中，人类学家们靠近他们的观察对象时，就像科学家们盯着显微镜一样：他们假定其它文化都是简单划一的封闭实体，他们的研究对象不会尝试做出回应。随着20世纪的逝去，这些观念愈发显得过时。全球化将无线电、口香糖和疾病带到了最偏远的人群中(在我的研究中，塔吉克村民们通过俄罗斯的电视广播看巴西肥皂剧)。一些被研究的人阅读了描写他们的研究报告，这也带来了互动性以及道德困境，而维多利亚时代的研究者则从未碰到过这种情况。到了上世纪80年代，一些发展中国家开始限制发出研究签证，理由是人类学是傲慢的殖民帝国主义遗产。
我最终战胜了自己的困惑，完成了博士研究，而且还尝试将我在“人类观察”时学到的东西融入到财经新闻工作中。其他人类学家的反应则各不相同。一些人跳不出“观察者”和“被观察者”之间的道德互动困惑圈子，以至于他们的研究看上去更像自省式游记。也有些人则进入到类似于心理学或语言学的领域，试图赋予这门学科一种较为结实的科学基础。还有少数学者则更像是进行学术自杀，他们所写的文章基本上是在讲，没有多少道德上的理由支持对其它“文化”进行研究。
人类学家进驻现代企业(中)
作者：吉利恩?泰特(Gillian Tett)
2005年06月6日 星期一
很多人类学家正把关注的目光转向西方社会，因为人类学的真正价值不在于其收集数据的能力，而在于其用新鲜、中立的眼光观察日常生活、发现文化模式的能力。从这一过程中产生的对西方文化的洞察，可以与所有异国丛林部落的研究一样有趣。
普华永道的人类学家西蒙?罗伯茨上世纪90年代在爱丁堡大学攻读博士学位，他决定在印度的一个印度教圣地瓦拉纳西展开研究。较早一代的人类学家对这一选址的反应可能会是集中研究当地的印度教火葬仪式，但罗伯茨则另有想法――他调查了卫星电视对当地的影响。“几乎在一夜之间，印度家庭就从只有两个电视频道变成了拥有数十个、而且是来自全球各地的频道。我想知道这是如何影响那些家庭的，而他们又是如何看待世界的。”
罗伯茨花了一年时间观察印度家庭看电视。当他回到英国并拿到博士学位后，便发现他的这种研究背景颇受欢迎。英国广播公司(BBC)委托他进行一个研究项目，其它工作也很快接踵而来，于是他建立了自己的咨询公司Ideas Bazaar。按照人类学标准，他这么做是颇有争议的。整体而言，英国学术界往往对商界保持戒心，而且由历史记忆引起的内疚感令人类学家尤其不愿意为政府工作。回想当初大英帝国昌盛时期，殖民地管理者就曾试图利用人类学家学会控制当地人的本事，大多数人类学家后来都认为，这么做是对他们学术研究的一种可耻背叛。
罗伯茨极力否认把他的学识运用在其它地方有何不妥。他说，“作为一门学科，人类学因过于自怨自艾而受到挫折……如果要产生影响，它必须参与外部世界的事务。”他的咨询公司雇用了几名人类学家，这些人曾经从事的行业非常广泛，从媒体业到英国国民保健服务部的精神健康服务部门等。
普华永道开始进行这项研究的原因是，公司高层管理人员意识到，员工因处理大量日常烦琐事务而感觉不堪重负。他们怀疑，问题的部分原因在于，为了削减成本，将太多后台工作转移给了前台人员。然而，在普华永道这种规模的公司中，高层管理人员要了解基层工作非常困难。于是他们请来了罗伯茨。“研究普华永道就像研究一个城镇――你试图观察各个组成部分是如何相互作用的，还要找出相互作用的模式，”他说，“我们尝试描述正在发生的事情，但不会提出解决方案。我们让公司自己决定。”
将人类学应用到企业界的最大推动力来自美国的科技公司，这让人感到有点意外。乍看上去，这似乎违背了人们的直觉：现代科技通常似乎能够轻而易举地超越文化隔阂――例如，无论在日本还是约旦、爪哇，各地的家庭都有互联网。然而，正是这种普遍性引起了对文化差异的重新重视，一些公司已意识到，如果想要接近顾客或客户，他们需要调整西方的思维模式。“许多公司想当然地认为，如果要建立一个全球网站，他们需要做的只是把网站文字翻译成不同的语言，”目前在一家全球软件集团工作的人类学家马丁?奥尔特利布(Martin Ortlieb)解释说，“但事实却不是这样――在德语中很有效的表达方式，翻译成日语后未必会产生同样的效果。”
美国科技巨擘英特尔就是一个佐证。在20世纪90年代中期之前，它的设计人员带有明显的美国视角。英特尔的人类学家肯?安德森(Ken Anderson)笑着说，“这里的人过去常常谈及‘美国’和‘世界其他地区’。” 在1996年，公司成立了“民族与实践”(People and Practices)团队，由像安德森这样的研究人员组成，他们花时间试图了解全球各地应用科技产品的文化背景。采取这一举措的时机决非偶然：20世纪90年代后期，科技行业拥有充足的资金可以花在非核心业务上。尽管科技泡沫破裂，英特尔仍扩大了人类学家队伍，其它一些大型科技企业也纷纷效仿这一做法。这表明，研究的实用性正在得到证明。安德森先说，“我不敢肯定英特尔的工作人员是否总能了解我们在做什么……但他们已经明白到，我们与顾客拥有一种亲密的关系，而这种关系可以为公司转化成价值。”
英特尔的人类学家花了大量时间“外出实地考察”，他们对世界各国的家庭进行近距离接触，分析他们运用科技产品的方式。最引人注目的研究可能是一个历时3年的项目，研究内容是快速增长的亚洲中产阶层如何使用科技产品。人类学家发现，有些中国家庭将手机拿去庙宇接受祈福，并且他们在葬礼上会烧掉纸制的手机；而穆斯林信徒则使用手机上的全球定位系统(GPS)为祈祷确定麦加的位置。“在美国，人们可能利用手机获取股票信息，但现在我们注意到，在其它地方人们也有其它优先考虑的用途，”英特尔发言人凯文?特谢拉(Kevin Teixeira)说。
人类学家进驻现代企业(下)
作者：吉利恩?泰特(Gillian Tett)
2005年06月7日 星期二
大部分人类学学者期望，未来会有更多的注意力放在现代西方社会上。许多学者也认为“应用人类学”的发展不可避免。比如在英国，政府正要求各所大学解释，它们如何为博士生的“真正”工作做好准备，以及为社会做出实际贡献。“过去，人们会认为，学术研究本身就是合情合理的追求……但在目前的环境下，这种解释并不够充分，”伯明翰大学的戴维?米尔斯(David Mills)说。有鉴于此，米尔斯和其他一些人类学家共同进行了一项研究，旨在了解人类学博士生最终究竟从事什么工作。他们发现，不到一半的人从事学术工作。其余的人则在咨询公司等私人部门工作，或者在公共部门和非政府援助机构工作，尤其在移民、保健和发展方面。
安妮?基拉(Anne Kirah)是个生性快乐的美国人，长着精灵般的标致脸孔，她的经历揭示了这一趋势。她开始人类学家职业生涯的方式看上去十分典型。她先做西藏族裔家庭方面的工作，然后又去了挪威的难民营。然而，她后来受聘于波音(Boeing)公司，研究飞机乘客的行为，目前则是微软(Microsoft)的资深设计人类学家，经常漫游于世界各地，以观察家庭如何使用视窗(Windows)操作系统等科技产品。“我像一个追寻潮流的人。我到人们的家里，从早到晚观察他们，从而了解不同的使用模式，”基拉说，“我把自己看成是消费者利益的倡导者，帮助公司设计出他们想要的产品。”
但这并不总是一个充满魅力的职业。比如说，几周前一个下着蒙蒙细雨的星期五下午，基拉就坐在肯特郡切索尔赫斯特郊区一家人的客厅里。客厅一角站着一个快乐的中年妇女，名叫布伦达(Brenda)，她一边忙着为家人熨衣服，一边和着惠特尼?休斯顿(Whitney Houston)的歌声吟唱。
在她背后，已退休的丈夫肯(Ken)正在细心地给屋里大片的浅色地毯吸尘。与此同时，基拉很随意地坐在客厅角落里和主人闲聊着，她试图弄明白到底是什么东西使布伦达和肯的世界这么和谐。
“这么说，熨衣服是你日常生活中的例行事项，你一直这样做吗？”基拉问。布伦达仔细地回答了这个问题，把她日常生活中的平凡细节娓娓道来：她的3个儿子都喜欢她把他们的T恤和田径服熨烫好，但当她把孩子们的衣服弄混了时，孩子们就会不高兴，于是她弄了一个标签系统，把一模一样、熨烫得非常平整的T恤区分开来。
基拉没有过多询问技术方面的问题，更别说问及像布伦达和肯这样的人会怎样使用电脑了。但这正是整个问题之所在，也部分反映出人类学定义的属性。要是换了一位普通的行销人士，在进行这种家访时，或许会直截了当地问一大堆关于电脑的问题。但基拉强调，那样的话，他们很可能只会得到他们所期望听到的答案，也只会向消费者提供那些软件设计者已经开发出来的产品。人类学家从观察日常生活开始，捕捉其千奇百怪的模式，然后再尝试弄明白电脑最终可以如何应用到日常生活中。微软希望，这一做法将为技术应用激发出全新的灵感。
比如在布伦达和肯的案例中，基拉的结论是，他们这样的人对成本非常敏感，办事极其有条理，社区和家庭感强烈。目前，他们不怎么使用电脑或电子邮件，事实上他们似乎显得害怕它。但基拉深信，布伦达和肯很可能会对即时通讯之类的产品非常感兴趣，因为他们可以在旅游时用来和亲友保持联系。另外基拉也注意到这样一个事实：大多数家庭里最会使用电脑的人都是些婆婆奶奶，这与人们通常的固有观念刚好相反，部分原因可能是因为她们有更多的空闲时间。
“我们需要让(微软的)人们知道的一件事就是，30岁以后还有人生，”会见结束后基拉笑着说，“大多数产品设计者都是20多岁的年轻人，他们不一定总会考虑到老年人或孩子们是如何使用技术的。我们必须对此多加关注。”
基拉认为，若能理解这样一点极为重要：在家庭团体内部，科技产品是如何作为一种工具，用来宣示权力、协调关系、庆祝成年礼或维系社会关系的？“现在，孩子们拿着手机上床睡觉，就像我们当初把玩具熊带上床一样，”基拉指出，“还有就是父母用充值手机作为和孩子谈判的工具……而且还有人用即时通讯作为交换礼物的一种形式。”
这些都有着实际的应用。在基拉分析了人们通过电子邮件相互发送的所谓“表情符号”（即表达感情的一些肖像）来作为“交换礼物”的一种形式之后，微软想出了一个主意，设计了能够眨眼和做出飞吻动作的肖像。“这出自安妮所做工作的一部分，”微软在欧洲的首席运营官尼尔?豪勒韦(Neil Holloway)说，“这完全是尽力想消费者所想。产品开发者们就像是艺术家，他们创造作品。但我们也需要走出去，进入社区，看看人们在实际中会如何使用它们……让科技人格化。”
但这是否意味着人类学家只是在帮助企业榨取消费者的利益？毕竟，从纯粹的学术观点来看，助长微软或英特尔等全球企业的利益与支持大英帝国，在道德上似乎并没有什么不同。而且，即使是现在，一些学者还对人类学家帮助企业持谨慎态度。“当我读研究生时，我的导师不让我做任何应用方面的工作――那被认为是不务正业，”英特尔的人类学家安德森说。但安德森坚持认为，他仍然对自己的工作感到满意。“关键是要认识到，消费者始终都能对一家企业提供的任何产品说不，因此我们做的和殖民主义不同。”
基拉也赞同这一观点。“是的，在历史上有一段时期人类学家被政府滥用了……但只要我相信，我是在帮助消费者，让他们的声音被听到，我就乐意在微软做我的工作。”
