Breaking the cultural causes of risk

David Clover  13 January 2012 14:42:52

I found this excellent and thought-provoking video on the ZDNet website, but as it's so good, I'm posting it here too. It's well worth watching. Professor Gerald Mars provides very clear and effective insights.

Gerald Mars, PhD, BA, FRAI is an applied anthropologist, currently Visiting Professor at London Metropolitan University, Brunel and Newcastle Business School, and has held similar appointments at Hong Kong, Bradford and Cranfield. He has published nine books, including Cheats at Work (1982) and The World of Waiters (1984), and over sixty papers. He has been retained as consultant to British Airways, BT, P&O and (for 17 years) to Unilever, among others. In 2003 he was awarded the Royal Anthropological Institute's Lucy Mair Medal "to honour consistent excellence in applied anthropology".



I found I could readily recognise the four 'types' or subsidiary anthropological groups proposed by Prof. Mars in any large organisation and felt very 'at home' with the analysis. Of course he doesn't make recommendations as such, it's a purely descriptive analysis but it also examines how communication between groups goes wrong.

Understanding organisations and their response to threats and opportunities and the way in which they determine rules and enforce and carry out rule-based behaviours, provides a very clear insight into what happens when 'Institutional Risk' is faced and how it is dealt with and reacted to in the diffeernt cohorts.

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