Shirley Fiske

Improving the Effectiveness of Corporate Culture

“I conduct studies of GM culture. My role is to come up with ways to improve GM’s effectiveness. In my research, I try to understand the issues that people face in doing the work they have been asked to do, and then offer suggestions to make their work lives better.” Whether conducting rapid assessment, a fullblown ethnography or a focused evaluation, she uses the full range of the anthropological toolkit: interviews, observation and documentary materials combined with analysis of key themes and patterns. Typically she produces presentations first, followed by peer-reviewed internal research reports and later, external publications. Whether a project is initiated by Elizabeth or organizational leaders, she tries to educate internal GM groups about their culture while exposing them to the methods that she uses to describe and explain it.

From Redlining to Sub‐Prime Lending: Meeting the Housing Needs of Low‐Income Neighborhoods and Communities

How did you get to where you are today? Tim’s 29 years in neighboorhood redevelopment all started with his internship for the masters program in applied anthropology at the University of Memphis in 1978. As an intern with the Shelby County government in the Intergovernmental Coordination Offi ce, Tim wrote Shelby County’s fi rst communitydevelopment block grant, which was funded, for housing renovation in low income and unincorporated county neighborhoods With the block grant, the county started out doing repair jobs. “Ironically, I’d put myself through school doing construction, and the internship blended the construction knowledge with grantwriting and the neighborhood focus from graduate classes.” By 1991, there were about 30 employees and several different divisions in what had grown to become the Shelby County Department of Housing. Tim learned the real estate and mortgage business on-the-job, from the ground up, by working with groups such as the National Association of Counties, which deals with housing policy; in addition, he is grateful for the mentorship of an influential local mortgage lender who “took me under his wing.” In the early 1990s federal legislation (HOME Investment Partnerships Program and Low Income Housing Tax Credit, both US Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) programs) provided incentives for the nonprofit sector. “At that point [he] made a choice to move into the nonprofit sector, because ... [he] felt that it would be much easier to get the actual development done outside of government—use the government money, but operate from a nonprofit perspective.” And so United Housing Inc was born. Tim, as the director of UHI, worked with United Way of the Mid-South, to acquire Corporation, which means [it is] one of 230 nonprofi t affi liates to neighborhood reinvestment; [it is] also a United Way agency.” UHI now trains people to become home owners and to manage their money, provides assistance for down payment and closing costs and fi rst mortgage fi nancing, and builds and renovates single-family homes. For a HOPE VI project funded by HUD to eradicate severely distressed public housing, UHI “worked on College Park, which was a housing authority site, directly across the street from LeMoyne Owen College in Memphis, an historically black college. [HUD] demolished the site, came back in with several hundred multi-fam-