Journal of Business Anthropology

Back to Copenhagen: A Few Words from the New JBA Editors

Kasper Tang Vangkilde — 2022-12-22

Like Clockwork: Experts and Expertise in Stockholm’s Startup and Innovation Ecosystem

Angela Kristin VandenBroek — 2022-12-05

SthlmTech, Stockholm’s startup ecosystem, is famous for being an innovation hub that produces more billion-dollar startups per capita than anywhere else except Silicon Valley. This success, people within the community say, is down to the ecosystem of organizations and experts that facilitate the creation and growth of startups via a well-organized curriculum that guides entrepreneurs through the “business” of starting-up. In this article, I examine this understanding of the ecosystem as a neutral, smooth, and ordered apparatus for maximizing the speed and efficiency of innovation. Specifically, I challenge how this popular conception of the ecosystem conceptualizes expertise and experts as mechanistic components ready to be deployed along the path of entrepreneurs training. By analyzing the expertise of ecosystem experts in practice, this paper aims to demonstrate what the ecosystem curriculum foregrounds and what it obscures and how the ideas behind this curriculum shape much more than routine business procedure.

Appropriate Disturbances: Team Development in Sports and Business

Kasper Pape Helligsøe — 2022-12-05

In this article, we will present an anthropological research project that explores possible benefits of comparing a professional handball club and a software company. More specifically, we turn our attention to the phenomenon of “disturbances.” In workplace contexts, disturbances are most often experienced as hindering focus and immersion, thus having a negative impact on job performance. However, by exploring everyday practices in the Danish professional handball club Bjerringbro-Silkeborg Handball, it becomes apparent that (former) head coach Peter Bredsdorff Larsen deliberately uses what he calls “appropriate disturbances” to provoke change and give direction to processes of team development. This causes us to ask one of the fundamental questions of our overall research project: what form would such appropriate disturbances take in a software company? In an effort to explore this question, we describe our experiments with the concept of “reflection time” as an appropriate disturbance to team development in the software company Systematic. We argue that such disturbances can create moments and spaces in which the potential for improvement and development emerges through a temporary destabilization of everyday life in the workplace.

Muddling Through

Tamara Hale — 2022-12-20

How an Animation Production Studio Survived the Pandemic: The Case of Graphinica, Inc.

Nao Hirasawa — 2022-12-05

Organizing Cultural Change: Leveraging the Four Forces Framework

Matthew J. Hill — 2022-12-05

Book Review: Digital Cultures, Lived Stories and Virtual Reality by Thomas Maschio, Anthropology and Business Series. London and New York: Routledge

Wayne Fife — 2022-12-06

The author of this book, Thomas Maschio, has lived two anthropological lives; an earlier one as an academic anthropologist and a later one as an anthropologist running a company (Maschio Consulting) that specializes in the use of ethnographic research methods to help solve business problems and provide new kinds of information for business decisions. This combined background shows, as this volume is full of insights that translate both to the rough and tumble world of business practices and the more abstract world of academic understandings. This is to say that it offers readers insights into common social practices, such as the use of personal devices (for instance, smart phones) or the production of contemporary journalism, that can be utilized by both business practitioners and university-based researchers to think more about the ever-increasing role that digital technology is playing in our lives. As such, I could see this volume being used as a standard textbook in different kinds of social science or business courses, as well as being of interest to those who are simply curious about the intersection between business and anthropology or who want to gain a greater understanding of contemporary digital practices.

The Making of Pieces of the Puzzle: Reflections on a Collaborative Ethnographic Filmmaking Process

Thomas Scott Hughes — 2022-12-19

This is a companion piece to the “Pieces of the Puzzle” film.