2024/04/01 by Timothy W. Elfenbein, Andrew Hoffman · 1 voice
Social Sciences · #Anthropology: Ethics, History, Culture #Anthropological Studies and Insights
paper · pdf · doi:10.1111/1467-8322.12871
openalex publication_date 2024/04/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/29
This article advocates for a deeper engagement with the organizational structures that shape the governance of research ethics in anthropology. The authors argue that anthropological critiques of bureaucracy often sidestep the kinds of knowledge needed to pursue meaningful institutional change. They show how different regulatory dynamics and organizational arrangements across jurisdictions produce more or less responsive bureaucracies, comparing Institutional Review Boards in the United States with a case study of a European university's Ethics Review Committee. The authors suggest that such organizational understandings of bureaucratic processes can more meaningfully inform their redesign and contribute to developing more appropriately scaled ethics governance. In so doing, ethics review promises greater responsiveness to the particular demands of ethnographic research while remaining legible to regulatory stakeholders.