Career Tools for Anthropology

"What CAN you do with a degree in anthropology?" This Workbook answers that question and guides you through the possibilities of anthropology in the workplace.

Written with anthropology students, graduates, and instructors in mind, readers will learn how to assess their own skills, how to communicate the value of anthropology, and how to craft their own career path.

Each tool provides a guide on a career topic, such as basic skills like Crafting a Cover Letter to complex challenges like Reducing Polarization.

This Workbook features 39 peer-reviewed tools and exercises mapped along a career journey.

The Cultural Dimension of Global Business

Now in its ninth edition, The Cultural Dimension of Global Business continues to provide an essential foundation for understanding the impact of culture on global business and global business on culture.

The highly experienced authors demonstrate how the theory and insights of cultural anthropology can positively influence the conduct of global business, examining a range of issues that individuals, teams, and organizations face as they work globally and across cultures.

The cross-cultural scenarios presented at the end of each chapter allow students of business, management, and anthropology alike to explore cultural differences while gaining valuable practice in thinking through a variety of complex and thorny cultural issues.

Cultural Change from a Business Anthropology Perspective

This book offers keen insight and useful lessons underscoring the value of practice to theory. Conceived by two anthropologists who lead consulting practices, McCabe and Briody selected contributors to explore how cultural change happens in a variety of consumer and organizational contexts.

The 12 case studies illustrate the explanatory potential and the problem-solving strengths of assemblage theory, and the role of human agency in provoking cultural change. The case studies are compelling due to connections between the case narratives and graphics, and researcher engagement in the pragmatics of implementation.

This volume will be markedly useful to practitioners engaged in research and implementation. It will also appeal to students and faculty in a variety of fields including anthropology, business management, marketing, sociology, cultural studies, and industrial design.

Transforming Culture

Winner of the 2012 Robert B. Textor and Family Prize for Excellence in Anticipatory Anthropology from the American Anthropological Association.

Transforming Culture offers a discussion and exploration of American work culture that can serve as a guide for organizational-culture change through the description and explanation of a model for change used at GM.

The book describes the model, discusses culture-change tools that were derived from it and descriptions of how the tools work.

It is a cautionary tale about the death and hopeful rebirth of manufacturing in the Untied States and provides important social commentary on the American Dream at the beginning of a new millennium.

Partnering for Organizational Performance

The increasing practice of working 24x7 does not only refer to providing customer service day and night. It also describes how work now gets handed off from one time zone to the next, making business hours effectively all-day and world-wide.

Microsoft, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, General Motors, and the Ford Motor Company all have embraced the advent of an increasingly global work environment. The result is that business today necessarily spans cultures, languages, and continents.

In Partnering for Organizational Performance, applied anthropologists Briody and Trotter bring together an array of key practitioners and academics whose work demystifies the dynamics and life-cycles of partnerships.

Household Labor Patterns among Mexican Americans in South Texas

Elizabeth K. Briody’s 1989 monograph investigates how Mexican American households in South Texas—particularly within the Rio Grande Valley—navigate labor dynamics amid agricultural and economic uncertainty.

Focusing on the intersection of subsistence farming, wage labor, seasonal migration, and non-agricultural employment, the study maps how family members share and shift labor roles to create stability and pursue job security ("Trabajo Seguro").

Grounded in participant observation and household surveys, Briody’s work captures how these communities employ adaptive, pragmatic strategies to mitigate low-income pressures and sustain household resilience in a structurally constrained labor market.