Long before “design thinking” and “user research” became boardroom buzzwords, anthropologists were already inside factories, restaurants, and government offices, quietly studying how people actually behave at work. Business anthropology did not begin as a corporate strategy. It grew out of an academic curiosity about human relationships, and it took nearly three decades of trial, error, and sharp criticism before it became a recognised professional field. Understanding this history helps explain why anthropologists are now hired by companies to understand consumers, employees, and cross-cultural teams.
Table of Contents
- The Chicago School and the roots of workplace research
- Lloyd Warner’s unusual path into industry
- The Hawthorne effect and its significance
- Critical perspectives on the Hawthorne studies
- Formalising the field: The Society for Applied Anthropology
- Anthropologists inside the factory: Pioneering industrial studies
- Teamwork, kitchens, and assembly lines
- Incentives and industrial conflict
- Edward T. Hall and the silent language of global business
- From academia to the boardroom: The first business anthropology firm
- Why this history still matters
The Chicago School and the roots of workplace research
The story starts at the University of Chicago in the 1920s and 1930s, a period when the city was a hub of sociological and anthropological experimentation. Chicago’s rapid urbanisation made it a natural laboratory for scholars interested in how modern, industrial life reshaped human relationships. Much of the pioneering human relations research conducted in business settings took place between 1924 and 1933, right as American industry was scaling up mass production.
Lloyd Warner’s unusual path into industry
One of the central figures in this story is W. Lloyd Warner, an anthropologist who had spent years studying the Murngin Aboriginal people of Arnhem Land in Australia for his doctoral research. Warner had trained under influential anthropologists and completed a Rockefeller-funded study of Aboriginal kinship systems before turning his attention to American industry. In 1931, he joined a research team examining Western Electric’s Hawthorne Works manufacturing plant in Cicero, Illinois, bringing ethnographic fieldwork methods, close observation, interviews, and attention to informal social structures, into a factory setting for the first time.
The Hawthorne effect and its significance
Warner’s team applied anthropological theory to observe employee interactions inside the plant. What they found was strange: worker productivity rose even when researchers deliberately changed physical conditions like lighting, and even when they reversed those changes. The studies, which the Hawthorne experiments broadly ran from 1924 to 1932, eventually pointed to a surprising explanation: workers responded to the simple fact that management was paying attention to them.
This phenomenon came to be known as the Hawthorne effect, and it did more than explain a productivity puzzle. It established human relations as a legitimate field of study within management theory and effectively marked the birth of industrial anthropology. For the first time, a company had hired social scientists not to design machines or set wages, but to understand people.
Critical perspectives on the Hawthorne studies
The Hawthorne studies did not escape scrutiny. Decades later, researchers Richard Franke and Jay Kaul revisited the original data using statistical time-series analysis. Their reanalysis suggested that much of the productivity increase could actually be explained by measurable factors that the original researchers had downplayed, including managerial discipline (two underperforming workers had been replaced during the study) and the economic pressure of the Great Depression, alongside rest periods and incentive pay.
This critique exposed a deeper theoretical problem. The original Hawthorne research relied heavily on functionalism, a framework that treats organisations as harmonious systems working toward equilibrium. Critics argued that functionalism struggled to account for tension, conflict, and dissent within organisations, phenomena that are common in real workplaces. This gap pushed the emerging field toward new theoretical approaches that could better explain power struggles, resistance, and disagreement inside companies, rather than assuming everyone in an organisation ultimately wants the same thing.
Formalising the field: The Society for Applied Anthropology
By the 1940s, a new generation of anthropologists trained at Harvard was ready to build on Warner’s foundation. Two of his former students, Conrad Arensberg and Eliot Chapple, began applying anthropological methods to industrial problems and, in 1941, helped found the Society for Applied Anthropology (SfAA), which remains the oldest and largest professional association for applied anthropology in North America today. The Society went on to publish the journal Human Organization, still one of the longest continuously running journals in the discipline.
Anthropologists working in this Harvard-trained tradition largely operated within the functionalist paradigm inherited from the Hawthorne era, but they combined qualitative fieldwork with quantitative measurement, a blend that gave their industrial studies more credibility with corporate clients who wanted hard evidence, not just interpretation.
Anthropologists inside the factory: Pioneering industrial studies
Through the 1940s and 1950s, companies began hiring anthropologists to solve very specific, very costly problems: high absenteeism, strikes, and breakdowns in cooperation between workers and management.
Teamwork, kitchens, and assembly lines
Arensberg studied teamwork dynamics inside a shoe factory, applying the same close observational techniques anthropologists had once reserved for villages and kinship groups. Around the same time, William F. Whyte turned his attention to the restaurant industry, mapping the tense but predictable web of relationships between waitresses, cooks, supervisors, and customers in Chicago eateries. Meanwhile, researchers Richardson and Walker examined how the introduction of new technology reshaped work on IBM’s Endicott Plant assembly line in 1948, an early example of anthropologists studying technological change rather than just human relationships in isolation.
Incentives and industrial conflict
Whyte’s applied work extended further. He studied incentive pay systems at Bundy Tubing to understand how compensation structures shaped worker behaviour, and he examined the roots of labour unrest during a strike at Chicago’s Inland Steel Container Company. These studies mattered because they showed anthropology could be useful not just for describing culture, but for diagnosing and even helping resolve real organisational conflict, a far cry from the discipline’s traditional focus on small-scale societies.
Edward T. Hall and the silent language of global business
As American companies expanded internationally after the Second World War, a new kind of problem emerged: cross-cultural miscommunication. Edward T. Hall, an anthropologist who had done fieldwork among Native American communities in the American Southwest, was hired by the US State Department’s Foreign Service Institute in the 1950s to train technicians and diplomats headed abroad.
Hall’s landmark book, The Silent Language, argued that communication is about far more than the words people exchange. Tone, timing, personal space, and unspoken social rules all carry meaning, and misreading them across cultures can quietly derail a business deal or a diplomatic negotiation just as effectively as a spoken insult. Hall’s work laid the intellectual foundation for what we now call intercultural communication training, a field that remains essential for any Indian company managing global clients, remote teams, or cross-border partnerships today.
From academia to the boardroom: The first business anthropology firm
The final piece of this history is the moment anthropology formally entered the consulting business. In 1946, Burleigh Gardner and Lloyd Warner, along with fellow University of Chicago lecturer William Henry, founded Social Research Incorporated, widely regarded as the first management consulting firm built around business anthropologists. The firm applied anthropological theory and fieldwork techniques not just to workplace organisation, but to a new frontier: consumer behaviour and motivation research.
This was a turning point. Anthropology was no longer just an academic lens applied to businesses from the outside. It had become a professional service that companies could hire directly, a shift that set the template for how business anthropologists work with corporations even now, studying not only employees but also the people who buy the products those employees make.
Why this history still matters
From a single research team inside a Chicago telephone equipment factory to a recognised professional discipline with its own journals, associations, and consulting firms, business anthropology’s growth reflects a broader shift in how organisations understand people. Each stage, the Hawthorne studies, the critiques that followed, the founding of the SfAA, Hall’s cross-cultural insights, and the birth of consulting firms, added a layer of nuance that made the field more rigorous and more useful. The questions these early anthropologists asked, why do people really behave the way they do at work, and what happens when cultures collide in a business setting, remain just as relevant to companies operating in India’s diverse, fast-globalising economy today.
What do you think? Do you think the Hawthorne effect, the idea that people change their behaviour simply because they know they are being observed, still shapes how workplaces are studied and managed today? And as Indian companies increasingly manage global, cross-cultural teams, which of Edward T. Hall’s insights about unspoken communication feel most relevant now?
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