More Corporate Applied Anthropology

Posted by Tad McIlwraith on October 3rd, 2005 filed in Applied Anthropology, Class Discussions, Everyday Life, Uncategorized

Inc.com has another article in a growing list of stories about anthropologists turning their research methods onto the corporate world. Here’s the rub:

Marketers … believe that people give more honest responses in their natural environment than during traditional focus group studies. “There’s often a gross disconnect between the public persona that people present and what their values actually are,” said [a market researcher]. “The person that shows up for a focus group is often at variance from who people are in their private life.”

The dilemma identified here sounds like the perfect reason to conduct participant observation.

And, once again, the article starts by setting up anthropologists as people who poke around villages in Papua New Guinea or Amazonia. I love it!

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4 Responses to “More Corporate Applied Anthropology”

  1. Charu Says:
    October 6th, 2005 at 5:12 am

    market research will try anything - and clients will get fooled by anything - for a short while. did you read lorenz of http://antropologi.info/blog/anthropology/index.php where he says that most ehtnography / anthropology studies that he has read about of late have been done not by ethnographers or anthropologists. I guess whatever sells is good!

  2. Tad McIlwraith Says:
    October 6th, 2005 at 7:19 am

    It’s an interesting issue, the question of whether or not ethnography is soley the purview of anthropologists. I suppose we like to think we do it best — and maybe we have more training in it — but the idea that many of my students have, that the methods of ethnography like participant observation are skills that we all intuitively possess, is not going away easily.

    Thanks for the reminder about Lorenz’s post.

  3. Tad McIlwraith Says:
    October 7th, 2005 at 3:22 pm

    Charu added two other comments worth mentioning … I accidently deleted them as I cleaned up 30 comment spams. Here they are:

    I think of ethnography more as a methodology that commercial (for lack of a better word - I am one myself!) researchers have adapted - and I have no issues with it staying that way - but using basic ethnographic methods does not make the researcher an anthropologist - which is what I see happening…

    oh, and another thing - not just ethnography skills - or participant oservation - I know many people who believe that qualitative research in itself is an intuitive skill - and something ‘anyone can do’ - as opposed to of course, the more ‘rigorous’ quantitative method - this debate will go on and on and on :)

  4. FieldNotes: Notes on the Anthropology of British Columbia » Corporate Ethnography Says:
    May 3rd, 2006 at 5:01 pm

    [...] I have been reminded in comments to my posts (or here) about corporate ethnography that anthropologists can be accused of elitism in our defense of ethnographic methods. I do think, however, that McCracken has identified nicely some of the ways in which corporate ethnographers are falling short. Perhaps his critique will push others to higher standards and to offer anthropologists new ways of thinking about and using ethnography. [...]

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