Research and consultation in the public and private sectors:

Sarah (Sal) Buckler, Consultation Manager, City of Sunderland Council/Hon. Research Associate, University of Durham

I obtained my PhD from Durham University in 2004 having first studied anthropology for a Masters degree (1998-2000). Before venturing into anthropology I worked primarily in the arts - I decided to study anthropology as a result of a number of international arts projects that I had put together. I was (and am) particularly interested in the ways that people who come from different cultural backgrounds and traditions can nevertheless manage to communicate effectively with one another and work together to create something that is meaningful to all involved.

I did not, however, want to become an arts administrator and so I decided to stop working in the arts whilst I studied anthropology. In order to fund my studies I took a job as a development worker with Gypsies and Travellers. As my work became my fieldwork, developing into the subject of my PhD, so I almost inevitably developed the 'applied' side of anthropology as much as the theoretical.

A large part of my PhD thesis was concerned with the different ways people plan and communicate, focusing on the differences between the Gypsies I worked with and the officers in one council that were trying to decide where to put a site for Gypsies and Travellers.

I now manage a small research team in City of Sunderland Council - my remit is to co-ordinate and develop research and consultation cross the authority. I work with both qualitative and quantitative data and always try to make the two complement each other. Much of the focus of this work is applied - council officers and elected members want to know what can be done about a situation, not just how it can be understood. I still see myself very much as an anthropologist - helped by my continued involvement with the department at Durham which encourages me to continue to link the theoretical and applied aspects of my work.

I use my anthropological training all the time in my work - when deciding what issues need to be researched, how they should be approached and how the findings can be most effectively communicated to those responsible for setting and implementing policy. Anthropology has helped me to understand the different communicative strategies people use so helping me to be able to mediate when necessary between people from very different backgrounds and with very different interests in an issue.

I intend to continue my interest in both theoretical and applied anthropology - at present I am developing a research project which examines the ways in which policy is created, implemented and experienced by people at the 'grass roots.' I am also especially keen to revisit my initial interest in the arts looking at how it can be effectively used as a research method which can generate new kinds of understanding and more effective and inclusive research and consultation programmes.

Gerald Mars, Honorary Professor at University College London and Visiting Professor at London Metropolitan University

Brought up in Blackpool. I left school at 16. Blackpool in the fifties and sixties offered unlimited opportunities for part time and seasonal work. From 12 to 18  I had over 30 jobs. These were mostly menial - from dish-washing, shop work, weight-guessing and 'barking' on a fairground to being a waiter. I spent time on a conveyor belt and then became a Clerical Officer and active trade unionist in the Civil Service. This varied experience has served me well as an applied anthropologist, particularly one oriented to work in western society.

National Service in the RAF offered experience of a large organisation very different from the Civil Service. Besides offering a new basis of comparison, it made me and a few friends realise we'd no need to go back to our old lives - that fellow airmen who'd been, or were going on to university, were not much different from us. Basically we realised we weren't stupid - an unusual lesson for working class lads who'd failed the 11+. Two of us decided to go to night- school and on to university. While studying for A levels, I wrote an amateur thesis on the social organisation of the fairground on which I'd worked. I decided I wanted to carry on with that kind of work. Fortunately it won me a scholarship to Cambridge.

Experiencing work in different contexts had showed their similarities and differences. I was aware for instance, that fiddling and cheating was a normal part of normal jobs but that they had different functions. In each occupation, fiddling was built into the way jobs were structured. Its organisation affected how people were informally trained, affected industrial relations, controlled ideas of morality, influenced informal rankings and prestige. I realised comparison offered a good analytical tool and also that members of different occupations and classes had difficulty understanding each other. As I later confirmed, occupations were cultures and like most cultures are 'culturocentric'.

Here were roles I could fill as analyst and broker. I found that making the ordinary explicable was fascinating and there was need for its transmission that could involve practical results. I realised that comparing different work cultures was the key to understanding them. But doing it properly meant learning new things.

I read anthropology and economics and after graduation was elected to a fellowship in Newfoundland to study longshoremen and their industrial relations. There I found the way jobs were organised, the type of firm and the culture of their community were all necessary to understand behaviour in the docks. But anthropology alone was not enough - even with added economics. Certainly ideas of ethnocentricity, reciprocity, identity, kinship, differing views of time, culture and particularly participant observation as the prime method were invaluable. But here I was also intruding into Criminology, Industrial Relations, Sociology and Organisation Theory. I wrote this up as a PhD thesis at the LSE while working full time as a lecturer in sociology.
Then followed a spell as an associate (part-time) consultant at the Tavistock Institute of Human Relations (the Tavvy): a cross-disciplinary research/consultancy concerned with finding solutions. I was there seventeen years. I found anthropology good for analysis and helpful in being a broker but not much use for bringing about change. As expressed vividly by my boss, Harold Bridger, a psychoanalyst with years of industrial consultancy behind him. "Yes Gerry - you're brilliant at diagnosis, but you haven't a bloody clue about cures, have you?" And nor did I.

Since then I've worked a lot with Douglasian Cultural Theory. It offers a very useful guide to the links between social organisation, values and attitudes and justifying ideologies. I've used it fruitfully in cross-disciplinary teams both in and out of the Tavvy. Though working across discipline boundaries has its problems, I've found it invaluable both for diagnosis and for bringing about change. The latter is not much developed in formal anthropology but has its own skills and methods which have to be mastered if you want 'to have a clue about cures'.

Now I'm a part-time retiree. It was relatively easy for me to be a full-time academic and a part-time applied anthropologist. I always had the benefit of a full-time pay packet. But times are harder now and academic time-tables more onerous. Since applied work tends to be periodic and project based, I'd advise anyone now to have a second part-time string to their bow. And then to build up networks: much work is allocated through being known, which is a bit 'Catch 22ish'.

Presently I'm writing up the study of a family restaurant in Emilia-Romagna, and another belatedly, on a study of UK household cultures. A new project is about perceptions of risk and accidents among building workers; me and a PhD student/research assistant. I was able to get started on this only because of unpaid work I did. It led to a paper I could wave at a useful contact. But it took several years to set up! I have also worked on the culture of households and their different responses to health and sickness. 

So to sum up. For me applied anthropology builds upon practical experience in a variety of contexts. It exploits participative observation, and some key anthropological concepts, particularly awareness of ethnocentricity and the value of comparative method. But it needs the support of parallel disciplines and their insights and methods. And it needs to be practically oriented to finding solutions. Its solutions are usually required quickly so it can't depend on a lone scholar spending a long time in the field. It therefore, benefits from co-ordinated work in teams - preferably cross-disciplinary teams. And it needs to exploit a competitive market through network building. But it's stimulating -  and useful.