ANTHROPOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVES IN MODERN ORGANIZATION

This paper presents an anthropological analysis of human behaviour in big modern organizations, based on two fieldworks in a French car company and an Argentinian municipality. A firm or a public office establishes a specific context for the activity of its members (work places, tools and regulations; agents' categorization and hierarchy...); these logics of differentiation-a peculiar cutting up of reality-are theoretically governed by an agreement concerning ends and means; the relative transcendency of official institutional objectives legitimates organizational authorities. Nevertheless, members may also invoke other facets of their identity and mobilize external principles of legitimacy; so they perform imaginative bricolages with the material and symbolic organizational elements, and mobilize the symbolic and the imaginary in their practices. Thus big organizations appear as promisory fields for anthropology; as in the study of << traditional >> objects, the matter is not to apprehend the whole society, but << to distinguish levels which are worth comparing, and thus, significant >> (Levi-Strauss 1958: 100).