Anthropology and the Workplace: An Innovative Partnership between a University and a Pharmaceutical Company

Now, more than ever, business and businesses have become an inextricable part of our social, cultural and political lives. Whether through wide-scale privatization or the increasing degree to which individual and social identity is built on patterns of consumption, the ineludible certainty is that the market is everywhere and we, academia included, are part of it. Moreover, corporations themselves are growing, some becoming so large as to appear to be like societies, or small worlds with many 'countries.’ Simply put, anthropology cannot afford to ignore businesses, and indeed, should be engaging with them more extensively and intensely.