Courses / Module

THE ANTHROPOLOGY of ORGANISATIONS and EXPERT CULTURES: from NGOs, through state bureaucracies and international institutions, to corporate worlds Is bureaucracy the art of making possible impossible? Is good policy un-implementable? Are all bureaucrats incompetent villains who never answer a phone? Is corruption and nepotism a universal problem? Is it a problem? This course will not give you a ready-made recipe to successfully navigate University Administration or Social Protection Services. It will not teach you how to fill out the forms and make successful claims in public and private institutions. However, it will help you to better understand the socio-cultural mechanisms that drive and shape modern institutions and organisational worlds. Using political and organisational anthropology we will unpack such issues as transparency, expert and audit cultures, policy-making and bureaucratic utopias. In the classes we will discuss examples ranging from the ethnographies of street-level bureaucracies (for instance Northern Ireland security services) to the powerful transnational mega institutions (such as the EU). We will also analyse bureaucratic manifestations of the commercial and non-profit sector and learn how to do ethnographic studies within organisations and with elites.