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Solely protecting research subjects undermines ethical business anthropology practice. In this paper, we argue that a negative definition of ethics, manifest in the primary focus of “doing no harm” to research subjects, undermines a concern for the potential of business anthropology to do good in a broader sense. Alain Badiou’s concept of truth procedure gives, we argue, an actively responsible and necessary direction to ethical business anthropology in its complicity with constructing new subjectivities within contemporary society.
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PREAMBLE
Central to the AAA Code of Ethics sits the concepts of respect and rights. These respects and rights are designed to protect the subjects encountered and studied in applied anthropology. Indeed, a paragraph in the AAA Code of Ethics states that, “[…] anthropological researchers must do everything in their power to ensure that their research does not harm the safety, dignity, or privacy of the people with whom they work, conduct research, or perform other professional activities” (AAA 2012). As such the authority that these ethical ‘codes’ convey, rests in the apparent self-evidence of being logical and universally agreeable.
However, we insist that this statement is too easily escaped from, and that it demands further unpacking and more serious scrutinizing. The central problem rests not in its intentions but in the meaning that it conveys. What, for example, do concepts like harm, safety, dignity, and so forth really mean? Our question is this: When we know that business anthropology unfolds contingent to the contexts and objectives of the businesses that drive them, can these codes of ethics be anything but relative? Subsequently, to say that ‘rights’ and ‘respects’ mean something universally agreeable / decipherable implies that a contingent state can somehow found a stable principle.
In this paper we will argue, following French philosopher Alain Badiou, that the meaning of the ethical aspirations in anthropological practice is entirely ambiguous. When anthropology is applied within any context, we will argue that a principal question ought to be emphasized over general codes of conduct: Is ethics really derived from a universal set of “humanitarian”, moral principles because they somehow seem intuitively uncontroversial to us – Or are we obliged to retain moral integrity singularly confined to a situation? That is, paying no heed to method, should the practice itself conform to a universality of ethics or not? And if it should, how does it situate itself toward such an ethics? In other words, what is the meaning of the content and how does it unfold beyond relative statements such as “do no harm”?
Whilst a great deal of attention is directed towards methodology in anthropology, the discipline’s overall project and its understanding of ethics, both as an academic discipline and as in its history of being applied – that is to say in its representation of the Other and the capitalization hereof, is more complex. The reason why this is so, is not confined to this discipline alone. It reflects what ethics have come to mean in a larger populist sense, through what appears to us as innately universally agreeable principles that manifest in, above all, humanitarian concern and human rights.
If social sciences continue to follow this model of implied natural, universal morality, we will argue that it leaves them in the dark, even indifferent, toward how ethics and morality are being advanced, problematized and understood for example in some recent philosophical thinking. Crucially, it prevents it from engaging in ethical questions critically and systematically to inform praxis. We therefore in the following attempt to shed light on ethics in business anthropology in an attempt to further clarify the project of business anthropology, instead of uncritically assuming a demarcation between anthropologists and their subjects, or a contradictory positioning of anthropology and business.
Ethics in the field of business anthropology
In recent discussions of ethics in the still emerging field of business anthropology, where the quest to represent the Noble Savage has been replaced by an exploration of the effects of the organization of contemporary capitalist societies, the distinction between ‘pure’ academic anthropology and anthropology in its applied version, continue. Batteau and Psenka (2012), in the first issue of Journal of Business Anthropology 1(1) from 2012, set forth the idea of a collective clarification of the ethics of this new field among its practitioners:
“We need to negotiate just what is business anthropology, what are its conceptual and ethical boundaries and within those boundaries what constitutes good work. We should also examine both “what is business” and what should its anthropology look like.”
They furthermore suggest that the distinction between the pure, theoretical version of anthropology versus an applied, practicing version is correlated to a social hierachization of these two sub-disciplines, and therefore merely an academic convention we ought to examine. They discuss the contradictory interests between the anthropological and capitalist projects, and oppose more genuine business anthropology with simple ‘opportunistic ethnographies’. They propose that business anthropology should take as its primary concern, “the commercialization of numerous experiences and institutions uniquely human” (Batteau and Psenka (2012). It is in other words suggested that we, as business anthropologists, study both how these uniquely human experiences are commercialized, and what consequences this has, instead of implicitly contributing to this commercialization.
Batteau and Psenka go on to suggest that the ethical challenges around this kind of work often lie in the conflicting interest between the hired business anthropologist and his employer, but that the gain of anthropological knowledge derived from venturing into business as an anthropologist, is greater than the risks associated with the practice: “Our challenge and invitation to anthropology is to get your hands dirty, to transgress the boundary between Academia and Business, to understand better this Brave New World of flexible rationalization” (Batteau and Psenka (2012). This invitation is however set forth without having established in their entirety, the criteria for what constitutes good work within business anthropology, according to Batteau and Psenka’s initial proposal to clarify the ethical boundaries of this field.
Much more reassurance do we get, if we look to the International Journal of Business Anthropology and its first issue dating back to 2010. Jordan puts forth an, for a social scientist, enviable amount of trust in the AAA’s Code of Ethics within business anthropology and doesn’t question the ethical issues of the field: “By following these guidelines as outlined by the American Anthropological Association, we are able to ethically conduct business anthropological work.” (Jordan 2012). Jordan specifies how the code of ethics from the AAA focus on protecting the individuals studied from harm, and goes through the practical implications of the code of ethics, and how the ethical business anthropologist and Jordan herself should comply with the code:
“If it appears that the individuals they will be studying can be harmed by the work, they do not undertake the study. For example, if it appears the corporate bosses are only interested in increasing profit for the shareholders at the expense of the employees or the community, then I do not undertake the work. This is also the reason anthropologists do not work in competitive intelligence. No work should be illegal and no work should be done under false pretenses. I should always be able to tell those I am studying that I am an anthropologist conducting a study and I should always be able to tell them why I am conducting the study and what it is about. It is unethical for me to misrepresent my interests’’ (Jordan 2010).
However, the trust and implied straightforwardness of following the code of ethics doesn’t seem to question things like; Will the work I do be used to better the situation in general for the subjects studied, as opposed to not doing harm? In other words, avoiding harm (evil) is imagined to be of greater concern to us, than is contributing to a good project. Also assumed in this statement is that striving for maximum profit for shareholders is an exception rather than the rule. But most critically, this statement on the uncomplicatedness of conducting ethical business anthropology only takes responsibility for the anthropological work of capturing and representing data truthfully. By avoiding the larger ethical implications of business anthropology when discussing ethics in this field, it assumes a disassociation of business anthropology from the larger project of business.
If we look for guidance in the Final Report from the “Commission of Ethics to Review the AAA Statements on Ethics” how to ethically do business anthropology, we firstly learn about who should be concerned with the ethical dilemmas of anthropology, disregarding its setting and location. The Commission agrees that, as an educational document, the AAA Code of Ethics:
- Should become an integral part of the overall anthropological enterprise, from teaching through research, training and application.
- Should apply across the intellectual breadth of the discipline.
- Should apply to the conduct of all anthropological research, and not make distinctions based on funder, site, or purpose, and should not distinguish between basic, applied, academic-based, or proprietary research. (AAA 2012)
In other words, the AAA states clearly that the Code of Ethics applies to all anthropological research, also that of business anthropology. The report even mentions that:
The Code should be relevant to persons with anthropological training who are applying anthropological knowledge in their work, regardless of the setting (that is, for example, those hired by a for-profit firm because of their anthropological training). (AAA 2012)
In this way we cannot be left uncertain as business anthropologists as to whether the general AAA Code of Ethics applies to us. According to AAA we should simply follow the code and strive to protect the people we study. But the Review Commission also acknowledges the problems with the focus on protecting the individuals studied, as the statement in the Principles of Professional Responsibilities on ‘Anthropologists must respect, protect and promote the rights and the welfare of all those affected by their work’. Because as the Commission rhetorically asks in their final report: “Who determines what is in the best interests of the people studied?” (AAA 2012). And even though the question is raised, but left unanswered, the Commission goes on to say:
The anthropological researcher, however, does have duties to the people studied, including doing no harm or wrong, full disclosure and informed consent, warnings of possible outcomes (good and bad) of the research for the people involved, and a careful weighing of the risks and benefits of the study for the people being studied” (AAA 2012).
In other words, it is made clear to us as business anthropologists that we first and foremost must protect the subjects we study; however we are quite left to our own devices in regards to figuring out how we position ourselves towards the larger project and aim of business anthropology.