The field of socio-intercultural anthropology has become increasingly relevant in the context of organizational culture. This study aims to analyze the interplay between socio-cultural anthropology and organizational culture. It starts with the assumption that the application of anthropological disciplines to organizations is having an impact on the socio-cultural expressions and manifestations within those organizations. The study takes an analytical-descriptive approach, delving into the theoretical and empirical literature related to the topic. In summary, the study provides important insights into the role of socio-intercultural anthropology in organizational socio-interculture. It highlights how anthropological methodologies have influenced organizational culture and provides recommendations for future research and practice in this area.
TopTheoretical Framework
Organizations are social spaces or micro-societies where agents and actors conduct actions that represent reality. From an organizational perspective, identifying the different actors and agents involved who interact with each other is essential to establish the basis that allows for analyzing the integral processes of organizational systems in a sociocultural context.
Starting from the notion that recent organizational anthropology studies the categories and methods of social groups that contribute to enriching the anthropological perspective of organizations and entrepreneurs. Anthropology has studied and described the phenomenon of leadership in primitive societies, including the activities of leaders and the necessary personality traits, qualities, and attributes to conduct sociopolitical activities. Personal interaction with society and tolerance enhances the anthropological value and lead to mutual interactions with a non-unified socio-intercultural environment, resulting in socio-intercultural organizational dynamics.
Regarding this, Barret & Stanford (2016) describe organizational anthropology as a discipline that focuses on studying culture, behavior, and dynamics within an organization. Organizational anthropology uses the prediction of phenomena to anticipate and forecast future events.
Although the scientific nature of anthropology has been criticized due to the notion that science as a mode of inquiry is obsolete (Inga, 2021), organizational anthropology develops scientific theories grounded in functionalism and structuralism. For example, the theory of information goods, which is used to analyze the psychological adaptations of socio-intercultural learning by Henrich and Gil-White (2001), or the costly signaling theory, used to examine religious beliefs that decrease the costs of intra-group cooperation in ritual practices, explaining the emergence and evolution of small human groups to form large groups (Salali et al., 2015).