Anthropology Audits

This place (PIGallery Coffeehouse) is getting popular. Four middle-aged women are cackling over specialty iced teas and sandwiches. It took me awhile to connect to the internet; a woman has taken my regular spot (as regular as that seat I've sat in once before and decided it was mine is). This place is someone’s dream. The owner is chatting casually with customers; I haven’t been coming here long enough to invite her to my booth for a heart-to-heart yet. Maybe some Saturday in the future.

My second week in the business world, I’ve found myself quite occupied by none other than my nosy anthropological antennae. Of course I'm here to learn, but I'm more than interested in the way employees interact with one another; the social spaces they manipulate; the tones of conversation that occur when the boss is out. The world inside the office is fascinating; it’s a culture with specific codes everyone seems to be aware of. Comfort levels vary; gossip levels vary; even places and times of physical convening vary based on who’s there, what the workday brings, what fight is breaking out among those 10 or so neighborhood girls who regularly shout forth vulgarities in the street.

Other than spilling the paper holepunch, and discretely scurrying on all fours to clean the mess up (see June 12 post below), I've certainly been busy with actual work this week. The feds are coming to audit 5 of HANDS’ properties, and we have been scrambling to get books together with all the needed, signed, official-looking (because they are) documents. All I can picture is the crew from Men in Black arriving to Erie via batmobile transit. They storm in with gun-modeled pens, dark sunglasses they never remove, and a dog named Frank that is actually a talking extraterrestrial well-versed in HUD policies and procedures.

I brought this image up to my supervisor, and she laughed. “They are actually really really nice,” she said. “But that’s why you have to be careful!” I.e. they have a way with making you feel you can trust them, so you might let something slip in conversation that HUD auditors didn’t necessarily need to hear (at least from the perspective of the org. under scrutiny). Even this short remark clued me in on some office policies stated nowhere in writing. (But maybe these are just common policies, understood across all businesses, all human nature, when one is being "audited" for anything. I know I'd certainly watch what I say, do, scratch, etc. )

Catherine Kingfisher’s ethnography Women in the American Welfare Trap is an insightful look at similar workplace politics. Hierarchical and oppressive are two modifiers she uses to describe the welfare system in Michigan. Two groups, workers and recipients both, resist and accommodate policy in attempts to navigate requirements set in place from the people or laws above them (recipient to worker; worker to supervisor; worker to official policy; recipient to official policy; etc.). These tenets however aren’t all really official. For example, pockets of workers actually produce unofficial meaning and “policy” training for future workers. Office and outside social exchanges “provide informal training for [welfare] workers on how to make sense of and handle the various situations they encounter in their work” (125).

I imagine these kinds of interactions happen in every work space, and the formative power they carry is something vital for organizations to consider. The trend now is to hire internal communication auditors to come in and assess your work place’s internal communication. I don’t know how long these people stay with organizations, but props to anthropologists for no doubt starting the trend.

In our field, our trend is multi-site ethnography. We no longer just stay in one place and paraphrase a culture seemingly unaffected by outside forces. (I'm staying in one place this summer, so an unofficial, uni-site, virtually recorded ethnography [i.e. this blog] will simply have to do.) To understand internal communication, we must also understand external interactions, perceptions, and relations. We must 'audit' official and unofficial policies, issues of external and internal power relations, community perspective, history, and heck, even globalization, even in Erie. It’s a lot more work, but something we anthropology undergrads might want to start marketing about ourselves...especially with the number of anthropology job openings out there.