The Rules That Make Us: Anthropology meets corporate strategy in this book

This book offers a fascinating look at the intersection of big business and the humanities, offering a glimpse into a unique career, though it can sometimes feel self-promoting

The Rules That Make Us: How Culture Shapes the Way We Act, Think, Believe and Buy

by Oliver Sweet

Published by Hachette India

293 pages ₹699

 

Business anthropologist Oliver Sweet begins each of the three parts of his book, The Rules That Make Us, with a “culture and cognition walk into a bar” joke. This is not just an attempt to make anthropology accessible, but also continuously underline the differences between anthropology and psychology, and why the former succeeds where the latter fails.

 

This also means that readers know what they’re in for by the time they reach the first chapter:  Mr Sweet’s quest to make anthropology “fun”. He takes us along on his own journey of working with businesses and governments to better understand what it is that people want and, more importantly, how does one bring about and sustain change. The book can also be read as a beginner’s guide to contemporary anthropological practices and why the field is important.

 

The end product is a fascinating account of a unique career — one that sometimes reads more like an advertisement for the author himself than an exploration of the intersection of big business and the humanities.

 

The book does show how rigorous anthropological research can be utilised to bring about behavioural change. But many of the examples Mr Sweet cites from his career seem to omit critical information that might be useful to the readers. For example, when he’s talking about Sensodyne trying to expand its business in India, he mentions the use of Ayurvedic ingredients as a way of appealing to the market — but he doesn’t expand on how these ingredients work with the standard toothpaste formulation. Is it a case of marketing slapping on words that they assume people want to hear, and leaving it at that? Additionally, it’s not like the Indian consumer wasn’t exposed to toothpastes with herbal ingredients, so how exactly did Sensodyne try to stand out? And what about the entrenched players Pepsodent and Colgate — did they follow suit and bring out their own Ayurvedic offerings? Did their market share decrease? One is left wondering what the purpose of giving this example is when it is surface-level at best.

 

Another writing choice that might frustrate some readers is the author’s tendency to repeat a point. Consider this paragraph in Chapter 1 (“Finding the Rules That Make Us”): “Psychology has infiltrated businesses to a huge extent, whether it’s understanding consumer motivation for buying products, setting performance-based targets for individual employees, or the constant goal-setting to keep people motivated and focused. In business, psychology is used to make sure customer needs are catered for and employees are driven to perform, which in turn creates the type of culture we live and work in.” It adds to unnecessary confusion when one of the principal aims of the text is to de-mystify concepts like culture and anthropology.

 

The book looks at how culture has evolved after the Covid-19 pandemic in workplaces and in hygiene practices  —and Mr Sweet does a good job of showing how even things one wouldn’t normally associate with “culture” constitute it, such as regularly washing hands. He also offers a precursory look into online fan cultures; considering how forward-looking the book tries to be, a more in-depth analysis of the phenomenon could have been more satisfying.

 

In a few instances where Mr Sweet talks about cultures not his own, a layer of absurdity creeps in. For India specifically, he has this to say: “Chai is Indian, and India is chai — it connects unknown people and signifies India’s growth to a stronger and more unified nation.” There is no context whatsoever, apart from the standard “Indians are obsessed with chai” statement. The reader doesn’t get an explanation for these claims, in the same way that Mr Sweet unpacks what a “mug of tea” means for the British.

 

Here is another absurd statement about India: “In the UK, our world is structured around class, in China around respect, and in India around unification”. India, to a great extent, represents “unity in diversity”, but that cannot take away from the fact that it is a deeply hierarchical society, where attempts at upward socio-economic mobility are often met with hostility from within the cultural framework.

 

Another drawback in the book is how often Mr Sweet offers saccharine descriptions of the companies for which he has worked. For example, this sentence about the Swedish furniture giant Ikea — “Once Ikea were able to map these cultural needs to their various designs and store layouts, they stopped selling furniture and started selling harmony at home” — reads straight out of a well-crafted press release.

 

One might find Mr Sweet’s assessment of counter-culture movements, that today’s resistance is often tomorrow’s mainstream, interesting. So is his prediction of how artificial intelligence (AI) can change culture as we know it. Here is one of the craziest sentences in the book: “You might find yourself at a curated rooftop soiree, surrounded by strangers who somehow feel like old friends, each sipping cocktails that match their mood metadata.” Some food (or drinks!) for thought.