Are there helpful rules for working in a hierarchical environment?
Hierarchies are everywhere. Government, corporations, and academia all rely on structures that enable managers to allocate duties and evaluate employee performance. Employees know their responsibilities and the compensation they can expect based on the work they do. In writing this blog post, I am thinking about my experience and those of my practicing anthropology colleagues whose careers began at or transitioned into immense hierarchies. As a novice in the U.S. Department of State, a federal bureau, I had to generate my own unspoken “rules” to survive the challenges within this overwhelming behemoth. Fortunately, earlier in my life, I had begun [...]