When Work Turns to Grief: The Applied Anthropologist as Engaged Scholar in the American Workplace

Abstract

This paper describes what I have learned over the last fifteen years in my role as an applied organizational and medical anthropologist. It describes the triad of change-loss-grief in the life of countless workplace organizations in the United States and how an applied anthropologist might be of help to traumatized organizations (Hormann and Vivian 2005). Specifically, it addresses how one can be an engaged anthropologist both within organizations and in writing about organizational life. When in the fall of 2007 Dr. Satish Kedia invited me to submit a proposal for a panel or paper on organizational grief, he was the second or third Society for Applied Anthropology program chair to extend this invitation in recent years. Given the current state of the American economy, I can only conclude that the idea of the topic resonated with them and at this moment is terribly timely (Geoghegan 2006).