73 notes &
‘Studying up’ as well as down would lead us to ask many ‘common sense’ questions in reverse. Instead of asking why some people are poor we would ask why other people are so affluent? How on earth would a social scientist explain the hoarding patterns of the American rich and middle class? How can we explain the fantastic resistance to change among those whose options ‘appear to be many?’ How has it come to be, we might ask, that anthropologists are more interested in why peasants don’t change than why the auto industry doesn’t innovate, or why the Pentagon or Universities cannot be more organisationally creative? The conservatism of such major insititutions and bureacratic organisations probably has wider implications for the species and for theories of change than does the conservatism of the peasantry
(via sociolab)
