Negotiating for What We Want: A Lesson From Anthropology

A well-known management consultant used to confront his workshop attendees with the following question: “So tell me, what business do you think you’re in?”

Typically, the responses would be both direct and specific. People reported they made and sold things like paper clips or vacuum cleaners or widgets. Unsatisfied with their responses, the consultant asked again: “No, really, what business do you think you’re in?”

That inquiry produced more general answers. Maybe they provided industrial supplies or home decorating expertise. Yet another question asked them to go further. Perhaps, their real business was offering safety or security or stabilizing family relationships.

As the reader might note, the consultant’s inquiry has many implications. What is it we are “really” doing when we behave as we do? Focusing on specific ends, do we disregard issues that are fundamental to our lives? Do we acknowledge some consequences and ignore others?

Bargaining for what

In my last post, I asked readers to consider some dangers of what is currently called the “transactional” approach to human relationships. To be sure, most of us take pleasure in certain acts of buying and selling, at least if we think we can get ourselves a “good deal.” But does this approach, if applied too broadly, effectively poison the situations in which we operate? Let’s consider that question further here.

For some years, I taught anthropology courses. For those who’ve never explored that discipline, I should say that anthropology is a fascinating field of study and, in some ways, the most philosophical of all the social sciences. That’s because anthropologists think hard about what it means to be human, and they do this both by examining our physical bodies through their millions of years of development and by recording all the ways in which societies have expressed themselves culturally. Amidst such wonderful variation, what is basic about being human, and what is largely a response to the circumstances in which we live?

Included in these descriptions of culture are economic matters—that is, how societies produce, distribute, and consume valued goods and services. Not surprisingly, there are many ways of allocating the goods people need. Our “capitalist” pattern is only one of these.

Although our own society sometimes mythologizes the lonely woodsman or explorer, no real society features such self-sufficiency. Instead, people depend on one another, and they express that dependency by exchanges of goods and services. This is especially the case in our immediate families, but exchanges also characterize our relations with more distant kin, community members, and even those who live at great distances from us. In so-called “modern” societies like ours, exchanges between buyers and sellers create vast webs of mutual dependency. Our jobs—and livelihoods—stem from other people needing what we offer.

Generalized reciprocity

In a classic writing, anthropologist Marshall Sahlins explains how most of the trades people make are not just “one-off” behaviors but rather acts of reciprocity, where participants recognize that they have ongoing connections to one another. In that light, he describes three different kinds of involvement.

Generalized reciprocity refers to exchanges where the providers of goods and services keep only a loose record of what they do for the other. For example, an adult brother and sister may not give each other a birthday present every year, but they do have a rough sense of what the other has done for them. More importantly, they feel some obligation to rebalance those exchanges from time to time. After all, what matters is not the gift itself but the knowledge that each is “there” for the other.

In a similar way, we do “favors” for our friends, extended family, and sometimes neighbors. We feed their pets, bring their trashcans in from the street, or “watch” their house with the expectation that they will (if asked) do similar things for us. We know that a “big” favor—perhaps watering their garden for a month while they are vacationing—may be equivalent to several small ones.

Balanced reciprocity

Sometimes, our exchanges with others are more specific and obligatory. For example, three families may agree to share the duties of driving their children to and from school. It’s important that drivers fulfill their assignments. A “missed” turn should be both planned and “made up” for.

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Likewise, couples may exchange dinner invitations. “I think we had them over here last time,” one partner says to the other. Sometimes, the sequence gets ignored or confused, but a pattern of several misses suggests that the party in question is not that keen on the current arrangement.

Pointedly, balanced reciprocity is something we expect from people who are outside our most intimate circles. When we do our part, we effectively say: “Yes, let’s keep our relationship going just as it is.”

Negative reciprocity

Sahlins’s third type is more common among strangers or even enemies. Negative reciprocity means that traders try to get the most benefit they can for themselves at the least cost. The feelings, or consequences, for the other party are not considered.

In that spirit, we come home from a yard sale crowing about our cheap purchase of something we know to be of much greater value. We tell our friends how we haggled with the car dealer or house seller. We use double-discount coupons and race to the back of the big-box store for the special sale item. Economic activity, or so it seems, is all about winners and losers, those who know what they are doing and those who don’t.

Although this pattern is commonplace today, most of us would acknowledge that it creates a world where buyers—and sellers—must beware. It presumes we do not have “relationships” with exchangers, perhaps that local car dealer or butcher we’ve patronized for years or the neighborhood man who mows our grass. If we can find a cheaper option, we take it.

Worse, negative reciprocity may easily drift toward forms of predation and exploitation, force and fraud. If we are more powerful than our neighbors, or just more comfortably positioned, why not “turn the screws” on those people? We can break them before they break us.

For some people, being rich and powerful has a certain glamour. If individuals themselves feel powerless or disregarded, at least “their” leader can wreak havoc in their name. However, most of us know that hard trading comes at great cost. Economic gains may mean the loss of social or even political standing. Long-time allegiances may be poisoned. Trust, the foundation of most of what happens in the social world, may disappear.

Effectively, our actions create the kind of world we choose to live in. Short-term maneuvering causes us to forget the “real business” that all of us are in.