“What you think has everything to do with the postcode area where you were born.”
Interview
Danielle Braun corporate anthropologist
Danielle Braun is a born anthropologist. Even before she knew what it entailed, she was already doing fieldwork in her younger years. As one of the first corporate anthropologists in the Netherlands, she keeps things closer to home than the ‘traditional’ anthropologist: “Culture is also found in the tennis club just round the corner.”
As the first in her family to go to university, Danielle had to figure out for herself which course suited her best. In her own words, she ‘properly’ signed up for an open day at the VU and came across the anthropology course there. Yet she admits she didn’t really know what she was getting into. “I was drawn to the subject, but I didn’t really know what a university degree actually entailed.”
“I’d taken courses like voodoo and ancestor worship. But I wondered: why does it always have to be exotic and far away?”
A stroke of luck
Her choice of degree, however, turned out to be a stroke of luck. Danielle soon learnt what it meant to be both an anthropologist and a global citizen: “You start to fundamentally question your own norms and values, and your own reality. You realise that what you think is purely a function of the postcode area where you were born. I could talk about that with my fellow students late into the night. Nothing has meaning in itself; everything is just a construct.”
During her third year of university, in the early 1990s, she met two professors who were working in the field of corporate anthropology, André Wierdsma and Willem Koot. Their belief was that culture is everywhere – including in companies here in the Netherlands. It was as if a light went on for Danielle. “I’d taken courses like voodoo and ancestor worship. But I wondered: why does it always have to be exotic and far away?”
Image: Mirjam van der Linden
Image: Mirjam van der Linden
“I think your first job has a huge influence on how you view your work ethic, working hours and authority for the rest of your life.”
So, together with a fellow student, she decided to put together her own course programme. They literally cut and pasted different modules from various course catalogues. Danielle combined anthropology with psychology and business administration.
In the back seat of a police car
Danielle was one of the first in the Netherlands to graduate as a corporate anthropologist. She then carried out her PhD research with the police, under the supervision of Professor of Cultural Anthropology Hans Tennekes. In practice, she spent about a year and a half in the back seat of police cars.
She eventually became one of the first women to hold a managerial role within the police force. She looks back on that period with great fondness: “I think your first job has a huge influence on how you view your work ethic, working hours and authority for the rest of your life.”
Growing up fast
After a brief stint as an organisational consultant at Ernst & Young, she joined the COA in Dronten as director of an asylum seekers’ centre.
“I was 29, was handed the keys to my centre and was responsible for 800 residents and seventy staff members. I grew up in five days.”
“Nothing has meaning in itself; everything is just a construct.”
Corporate anthropologist
A few years later, around the time of her second child’s birth, she set up her own business. On her business card she wrote ‘anthropologist’. Danielle: “People asked me: ‘Can I learn to do what you do?’ At first, I thought: ‘No, you’d have to study anthropology for six years.’ But then I wondered: what if I could actually pass on that way of looking at things?” So, together with fellow anthropologist Jitske Kramer, she launched the corporate anthropology course.
As a corporate anthropologist, she facilitates mergers or cultural changes. She calls it fieldwork. “I view organisations as tribes. We literally spend three weeks by the coffee machine, getting lost in a whatsapp group. In short: what’s really going on in the workplace? That’s what we map out. Sometimes managers have no idea that what they do is completely at odds with what they say. I’m the one who tells them that. It’s not just a penny dropping, but whole blocks of flats.”
Image: Mirjam van der Linden
Image: Mirjam van der Linden
“Sometimes managers have no idea that what they do is completely at odds with what they say.”
Meetings like the Quakers
Daniëlle believes that for every corporate issue, something has already been devised somewhere in the world. “Do you want to hold meetings without egos? Then take the Quakers in the Lake District as an example, who hold meetings in silence and still reach decisions. Do you want to know how people emerge from a crisis? Then look at Cambodia, how people rose up after the Pol Pot regime.”
Danielle is now inundated with requests. Her courses are always fully booked. What is her secret? “I think it’s down to the radical realism of anthropology. You simply describe what is there and strip away the rest. It gives you an extra lens through which to look into the inner workings of organisations, with humour and lightness.”
Career Danielle Braun
Danielle Braun (b. 1968) studied anthropology at VU Amsterdam, where she also obtained her PhD. She was one of the first corporate anthropologists. She has worked for the police and the COA, among others. In 2016, she published De Corporate Tribe, as a syllabus for her course at the Academy for Organisational Culture. This was followed by further books, including: Patronen (2021), Da’s gek (2024) and the recently published In voor- en tegenspoed (2026).
magazine for social sciences and humanities alumni june 2026