Revealing, Widening, Deepening? A Review of the Existing and Potential Contribution of Anthropological Approaches to "Third-Sector" Research

Anthropology brings a distinctive paradigm and research methodology to bear on social research. However, the profile of anthropologists and anthropological approaches in current third-sector research is relatively low. The first part of the paper reviews the status of anthropological work dealing with organizations generally before focusing more specifically on work on the third sector, focusing mainly on ethnographic research on voluntary organizations carried out in the 1960s and 1970s, particularly in Africa. This paper notes that anthropologists have more recently done less work in this area, but shows how more recent anthropological work on bureaucracy, development, and policy issues is highly relevant to third-sector research, and the second part of the paper briefly reviews such work. The paper concludes that anthropological research can: 1) reveal more of the hidden third sector by providing detailed micro-accounts (e.g., of informal groups, grassroots associations); 2) widen the scope of third-sector research by throwing light on the diversity of organizational life and challenging Western bias and ethnocentricity; and 3) deepen the analysis of third-sector research through its distinctive use of an actor-centered, processual analysis of highly complex issues, such as organizational culture, and values. The paper concludes with the observation that closer engagement with third-sector research might also benefit current anthropology, which has been criticized in some quarters for losing relevance to the contemporary world.