Paper short abstract:

As an anthropologist working for the research arm of a large US property-casualty insurance company, I continually negotiate my insider/outsider status within the corporation. Differences in methodologies and agendas can forge us as insiders/outsiders and often impact how well research is received.

Paper long abstract:

Anthropologists are continually negotiating their insider/outsider status with the people they study (Powdermaker 1966). They work with research participants to understand their daily life and are empathetic to their needs and obstacles. They simultaneously strive to be objective and neutral, removed from the consequences of actually being an insider. Anthropologists working in corporations who collaborate with internal partners constantly discover and help create the badges that mark us as having corporate insider or outsider status. Working for the research arm of a large US property-casualty insurance company, my team does a combination of self-initiated, open-ended research and research requested by internal clients. The research center is geographically removed from the rest of the company. This affords us the freedom to explore ideas that are future-looking and to conduct ethnographic research that is not bound to the quarterly time line. This same freedom alienates us from our counterparts in the corporate headquarters. It marks us as outsiders, and our partners from other departments within the organization sometimes cannot see how our work could be relevant to their daily obstacles and project time lines. This combined with our small size (approximately 40 fulltime employees) and remote location has been to our detriment, and our work is often insignificant or invisible. It is not enough to conduct sound, rigorous research, presented beautifully in slides and meetings. We must become insiders and friends across our own organizations by understanding personal agendas, incentives, others' 'turf' and ownership of ideas, and pace of work flows.