W. Lloyd Warner and the Anthropology of Institutions: An Approach to the Study of Work in Late Capitalism

Abstract

Abstract W. Lloyd Warner is re‐interpreted as an institutional anthropologist whose approach to the study of work in a capitalist context has relevance to contemporary disciplinary problems and issues. The essay traces the development and influences upon Warner's thought and research strategies from their origin in Durkheim's sociology and Warner's fieldwork among the Murngin, to the Hawthorne Project, where Warner held an intermittent yet significant consultancy, and on to the seminal contributions of the Yankee City Series where, it is argued, the anthropological approach to contemporary institutions took its initial form. Warner's approach to the study of work in formal organizations at Yankee City was ground‐breaking because it led away from the more conventional strategy of confining ethnography to a single organization (e.g., Hawthorne) by examining social relations and meanings that cross‐cut the larger society and in which all formal organizations are embedded (i.e., class, rank, and status). Warner's commitment to rigorous empiricism, and to engaging the problems of an era, led him beyond functionalist theory to the hallmarks of an institutional approach to work in late capitalism that still resonates today.

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