Selling the Story: Ethnographic Analysis in Marketing

Design

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Abstract

Anthropologists involved in advertising and marketing often struggle to explain

findings to people who must use our research and insights. We are often dismissed as

being too abstract even as we accuse members of the business and creative teams of

being shortsighted, thus furthering the divisions that may already exist. Consequently,

getting buy-in to our recommendations means working closely with other disciplines and

communicating stories that quickly explain a position and offer direction. The challenges

of imparting our findings in ways that will be understood by multidisciplinary teams are

daunting but rarely insurmountable. This article discusses how we can ensure our

findings are internalize, starting with the actual research engagement and following

through presentation.

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Introduction

Entering the world of business is a significant challenge for anyone coming out of

a discipline that until fairly recently has had limited presence in the private sector. There

are frequently questions about the presumed moral ambiguity of applied work by those in

an academic setting and the impact on the nature of the discipline. There are concerns

about the relationship between industrialized nations and the populations that invariably

produce the goods that are sold. There are the internal debates over the core values,

methods, and ethical responsibilities of a given discipline as a whole. All of these

concerns are relevant and cannot be dismissed, but at the end of the day, how does

someone from a traditionally academic discipline communicate with employers and non-

academic colleagues in such a way as to effectively convey our findings and produce

change? The first issues are exceedingly difficult to resolve, requiring individuals to look

within and determine what is and is not acceptable from his or her philosophical and

theoretical understanding of the world. It comes down, largely, to whether or not the

potential business anthropologist has moral qualms over the nature of business that they

cannot or will not compromise. The second issue is perhaps less difficult intellectually,

but at times just as perplexing.

Businesses employ anthropologists in an attempt to understand the ways in which

culture both shapes and reflects how people interact with, use, and conceptualize

products, services, and systems. Unfortunately, the nature of the work is such that

research time is often dreadfully limited and expected turn-around times extremely quick,

even though the results of the fieldwork may be broad. Thus, communicating the results

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is at times a seemingly insurmountable task.

The expectations of the business community regarding our presentation styles are

often at odds with our own expectations developed over the course of our academic

experiences. To conform to the business community’s expectations of simple, easy to

implement findings, we may forego discussing subtle (and possibly) valuable insights.

Structuring our findings to fit the communicative and procedural norms of the employer

may force us to oversimplify our findings in ways we may find professionally and

personally unacceptable. Doing so may cause the business harm. But the alternative,

namely, an unwillingness or inability to sufficiently adapt to the business culture, is to

have anthropological research methods and findings overlooked, or to witness the

disciplinary practices co-opted by other research practitioners. For anthropologists to

thrive in the business world it means being involved in an ongoing ethnography of the

business culture itself.

Consequently, while anthropology has a great deal to contribute both to the

business world and other disciplines, its practitioners also have a great deal to learn. This

becomes increasingly important as we sit as members of interdisciplinary research teams.

Preliminary Challenges

To begin, we should learn what the existing perceptions of anthropological work

are and attempt to understand how these perceptions may impact the structure of

interactions, how they might impact the way in which research findings get used, and

what level of education (for the business as a whole, for the research team and for

ourselves) is necessary to succeed. We must understand what each member of a team

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thinks the other members of the team do and then think about how those various

understandings will shape interaction, application, and presentation. Success usually

means producing a palatable outcome that provides something tangible, justifies the cost

of the research, and prepares the researcher for how much grief he or she can expect to

deal with as the project unfolds. It is much easier and more productive to learn what

misconceptions exist before a project begins.

Being defined by business executives, artists, engineers, other social scientists,

and all of the other varied semi-bounded peer groups within a company can be trying.

However, it also presents an opportunity to dispel misconceptions, establish clear goals,

operationalize the research experience, and confront problems from the beginning,

including who will be involved with what phases of a project (Baba 1986). The

researcher is defined by other members of a team and those definitions impact not only

interactions that take place over the course of a project but also in how the information is

finally distributed.

Defining ourselves in the context of the larger group is frequently a daunting task

particularly in light of the fact that we traditionally work alone:

Individualism also is a core value in academia. Initiation into its cult is

the price of professional (wo)manhood. For no academic enterprise is this
truer than ethnography; fieldwork is the ethnographer’s rite of passage,
and, like initiation rites among so many of those we study, the initiate
must suffer and survive alone. The lessons learned of individualism are
learned well. Individualism is more than a cult; it is the state religion of
ethnography (Erickson and Stull 1998, pp. 26 - 27).

The result of this individualism is that we often define ourselves as being associated with

the team rather than as part of it. Multidisciplinary teams require the components of the

team to quickly identify as a cohesive unit rather than as individual components. While

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we do not jettison our disciplinary, cultural and psychological baggage, we do adapt to

the principals of the community of which we have become a part. Our ability to develop

a good rapport is dependent on our willingness and ability to learn the cultural system

into which we step and demonstrate our respect for a different perspective.

While it is certainly reasonable to ask our employers and colleagues to reassess

the identities they construct for us, we must be willing redefine ourselves in the context

of the cultural/social/economic situation we have chosen to become a part of (Johnson

1984). The point is simply that we must treat our team with the same degree of reflection

and respect that we would the group we are studying. When it works, teams become far

more willing to share ideas and incorporate findings. When it does not, ethnographers in

a team are often marginalized or they are ultimately dismissed.

Finally, we must reevaluate or at least reflect upon how we construct the people

for whom we work. It is not enough to understand the accepted communicative norms,

the perceptions they may hold about the researcher, etc., because they may cloud how we

conduct and present our work. We should “spend some time on the couch” as it were and

confront our own biases and world views. Anyone unwilling or unable to do this should

probably reconcile him or herself to another line of work. This is by no means an

indictment. Rather it is a survival tip for anyone considering a professional life within

the business world. One should not visit a slaughterhouse if they can’t reconcile

themselves to the smell of blood.

Once we are able to do all that, we are capable of finding common ground and

adapting how we present methodologies and findings. Because of the constraints

frequently evident in the business climate, adaptation is necessary in order to get any

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work done at all. Even when the research team has ample supplies of time, money, and

resources, the client may not, in fact, probably does not have time or wherewithal to

dwell on the full range of our findings. Even within a multidisciplinary team, the tasks

and goals for the individual members will have wide degrees of variation as to what can,

indeed must be done with the information.

The people for whom and with whom we work often have little time and little

patience for anything exceeding a bare-bones approach; instead they want information

that meets specific, targeted goals. At the same time, their expectations of what they will

get are often vague. As Marietta Baba (1986) writes, “…business practice often is not

defined as ‘anthropology’ per se, but is frequently, and of necessity, described in terms of

more ‘marketable’ business-related functions such as consumer research, policy

evaluation, or organizational development.” While this may be more acute for

anthropology than it is for some of the social science disciplines that have been immersed

in the business world more completely and for a longer period, it is largely the case for

disciplines relying on a grounding in qualitative or interpretive methods.

Therefore, to see our work integrated into the business development, product

development, and design processes requires first evaluating our identity from the

perspective of being part of a research team within the constructs of the business culture,

and reconciling whether or not we can make the necessary compromises to how we

collect, share, construct, and present findings. This means defining the audiences who

will consume the research results, adapting to the context of the particular work

environment and community, and making a commitment to tailoring the level of

information presented according to the needs and expectations of those audiences.

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Doing Away With Disciplines?

The first hurdle we often face entails adequately describing the disciplinary

substance of anthropological practice to business professionals not necessarily versed

in any aspects of social science (Jordan 1994). Before a company, a product

development team, anyone will read or listen to what we put before them, they need

to understand what it is we do. One of the first steps in the process of reconciling

what we do in the context of the team is to determine what boundaries we set for

ourselves within the nature of the work itself and how that translates into the

business environment. The prospective researcher must examine the nature of the

boundaries between and across disciplines and determine where he or she fits into

these definitional categories.

The understanding of what anthropological fieldwork, specifically ethnography,

means and is capable of becomes further blurred when the clients and employers attempt

to make some sort of distinction between the researchers of various social science

disciplines that may be involved in the research process (in this case a corporate

environment), all of whom may be engaged in some capacity in an anthropologically-

oriented project (Ojile 1986). Added to this is the fact that employers have similar

categorical constructs for other disciplines. For example, psychology has a vague

definition attributed to it by non-psychologists and often all of its subdivisions are

compressed under a single, umbrella classification. The problem lies in effectively

communicating an understanding of the research capabilities to the multitude of others

who will need to either turn the data into products, services, etc., or those with the power

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to supply funding for research and application. The solution lies in developing

multidisciplinary teams with a range of perspectives that can generate ideas and methods

capable of addressing an assortment of client perspectives. It also means developing

teams with a keen interest in learning new skills, new ways of looking at the world, an

appreciation for different methodological perspectives, and an ability to turn the abstract

into the concrete – in short, the ability to make money.

While it varies from company to company and client to client, the boundaries that

define anthropology as a select discipline frequently break down in the business setting.

There are no academic review boards, few disciplinarily-specific journals, and essentially

no departments based on established traditions or theoretical leanings. Departments

within an organization are typically functional and/or reflect a general need for

information (Rubin 1994). There is little time for the nuances and peculiarities of

individual disciplines, and no time for theoretical models – results are measured in terms

that reflect the bottom line. While we certainly have an impact on the nature of how

business is conducted, in the final analysis the client or employer is responsible for

creating profits, products, and services. Just as it is unrealistic to assume that the bulk of

anthropologists will ever learn the subtle differences between the various technical strata

of electrical engineering, it is unrealistic to assume the consumers of our work will ever

come to understand or care that deeply about the methodological and epistemological

boundaries between social science disciplines.

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Within the group of people tasked with performing certain functions or research

projects for a company, disciplinary boundaries mean just as little, though for

somewhat different reasons. At the crux of the matter is determining whether the

various members of a research team are understood as “insert discipline X here” or

as part of a single organism trying to get a job done. For the other members of the

research team, the boundaries and the constructs we create have little relevance and

can hinder the process of getting the necessary work done (Rosenwald and Ochberg

1992). I would contend that a large part of this desired retention of boundaries can

be related fear often associated with moving into the unknown and the desire to hold

onto something old, something that defines us as us and not part of the new world of

which we become a part when entering the business environment. In a disciplinarily

enclosed space it may be easier to maintain boundaries and conclude that while other

disciplines may in fact be informed by similar theories and techniques, there is

typically less need to mix as freely as is the case in the business environment;

maintaining disciplinary purity is, in fact cherished in academia. In the business

environment shedding disciplinary titles is often encouraged, if not demanded

outright. For a multidisciplinary approach to be successful the various team members

must understand what the other members of the team do in terms of research, how

they do it, why they do what they do, and also how they think, insofar as it is

possible, and how those skills may overlap to produce something unique to that

setting.

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 While anthropology has a long history of work outside the academic setting, its

involvement as a daily part of the business process is fairly recent (Eriksen and Nielsen

2001). There are of course exceptions to the rule, but until recently anthropologists were

seen as the “new” thing. The longer a discipline or methodological perspective is part of

the commercial world, the less likely it is for boundaries to be maintained. This is not to

say that those boundaries will be completely lost. Of course they will not. The moniker

of anthropologist lends understanding about how and why we approach projects,

problems, and data as we do. However, the boundaries will probably continue to blur and

social scientists of all stripes in the business environment will be more readily defined in

terms of the their final products rather than their disciplinary groundings. Are we

creating “hybrid” disciplines as a result of multidisciplinary work? The answer is most

probably yes. Of course, this is neither an indictment of nor a call for hybridity. It is

simply a recognition that the tenets of business are frequently such that maintaining

disciplinary continuity becomes overwhelmingly a reflection of the both individual

researcher’s desire to maintain a separate, bounded identity, and the ability of the team of

which he or she is a part to recognize that person as a fully integrated part of the “tribe”

rather than as an outsider.

Of course there are times when it is best to keep a single disciplinary approach or

set of monodisciplines, just as there are times when it makes sense to build teams of

fieldworkers and other times to go it alone. Anthropology’s greatest contribution to

business is the introduction of the culture construct as a means of identifying shared

human experience and the ways that culture impacts consumption, use, and product

development. Expertise is expertise and maintaining disciplinary control may help

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maintain focus both for the specific research and the various members of the team.

The question still remains as to what makes a project multidisciplinary as opposed

to being comprised of several monodisciplines. There will, of course, be instances where

the work is singularly monodisciplinary; a test meant to determine the ergonomics of a

new shovel design may have little need for a multiple disciplinary perspective. More

complex problems typically involve a number of people, however, and require doing

more than simply handing the results off to the client once the work is done. This is a

significant boon if all of the members of a team feel they have a voice and are willing to

incorporate multiple perspectives into their understandings of the project. If this does not

occur, the result is a fractured mix of varying opinions vying for dominance in the final

report and list of recommendations. A multidisciplinary project can be defined through

how methodologies are built, how the knowledge is shared.

As stated, the length and scope of the project typically means more time in

preparing for the research itself. Multidisciplinary teams must work together to shape the

numerous sub-goals within the project and determine how these sub-goals are best

interwoven to produce a unified vision. From the outset this implies that all the members

of the team work openly to provide input on how data will be gathered, shared, and

discussed. The first step is to determine who will lead what phases of the research, how

the lead may change through time, and how the final output will be crafted and displayed.

Involvement from beginning to end (and with an implied extension into the product

and/or service as it moves through its lifecycle) must be complete insofar as each voice

must feel it is being heard and suggestions are openly assessed and probed by the group

as a whole. As the project moves from one phase into another, for example, from

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exploratory research through concept development through usability testing through

marketing, each team member needs to reinvest him or herself in the project and provide

input from their distinct perspectives.

Assessing the Audiences

Once there are established understandings of who will be involved in the research

process and why they are involved, it becomes imperative to establish a clear

understanding of the audiences for whom we present our findings. Vast numbers of

pages, complex discussions of theoretical frameworks, and jargon-laden language are

understood as hallmarks of academic writing. Whether this actually improves our

performance is contestable, but as we progress from undergraduate through graduate

programs, through our careers, the length of our texts and the intellectual mass of

specialized terminology as a rule grow in what seem to be exponential degrees. The most

avid consumers of ethnographies have traditionally been people engaged in fieldwork (or

who aspire to it), people who hold deep interests in the discipline and who are willing to

read what we create (Van Maanen 1988). We learn to write for people that have the

patience and frequently the need for lengthy, specialized, in-depth text, not for the fast-

paced corporate world, where quick and to-the-point presentations are the expected norm.

Assessing the audiences can be thought of as an extended, ongoing mini-

ethnography. Thinking in terms of an ongoing ethnography gives the researcher

important insights into what it means to be a participant within a given context and

allows him or her to begin formulating ideas about communicative tenets, power, and

perceived sub-groups within the organization. The processes we would employ if doing

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fieldwork in a more “traditional” setting must be employed, particularly during the earlier

phases of a project.

Of course, the criteria we construct for identifying a community can be extremely

varied and range from power relationships, racial distinction, job type, or any number of

other theoretical stances. The point being that the criteria we would employ for any field

study must be used within not only the largest manifestation of the organization of which

we are part, but also the multitude of other community divisions that occur throughout

the organization in its totality. We assume that the people we find ourselves among

constitute a “community” (with varying degrees and levels of situated identity and

subgroup allegiances) and that community must be sustained by systematic observations

(Anderson 1991). We look for and expect to find commonalities in behavior, mutually

intelligible habits, social activities, and modes of communication, etc.

In terms of presentation styles in the corporate world, sociolinguistic models of

adaptation and understanding apply themselves well to understanding what and what not

to do. Learning the “local” meanings and methods of communication to the speech

community is essential. This applies to the interdisciplinary team as well as the various

client audiences.

The greatest value of learning the language of another people does not
come from being able to interview informants without interpreters or from
providing native terms in ethnographic writings; it comes from being able
to understand what natives say and how they say it when they are
conversing with each other (Witherspoon 1977, pp. 7).

In short, learning the communicative norms and processes of the individual groups allows

us to better grasp and define our audiences, adapting our methods of presentation to be

understandable and, and perhaps more importantly, acceptable according to their

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worldviews.

In the business environment short, direct modes of communication with little or

no embellishment are standard practice. This is not to say that a lengthy, detailed report

is unnecessary. It frequently is an expected part of the package. However, the lengthy

piece is often little more than window dressing for most of the people we address. It is

meant to back up higher-level statements. This undoubtedly sounds cynical but it is not

meant to diminish the detailed report or argue that analytical rigor and detailed

information has no purpose. Indeed, analytical rigor and depth of information are

precisely what separate us from simple interviewers. It is simply meant to point out that

levels of detail serve different functions depending on who sees them. A “Just the facts

ma’am” process of communication is most frequently the best way to get your foot in the

door – hit them with the big points and get them to interact and ask questions.

Inevitably, understanding and navigating this change of audience from

disciplinarily and/or the academically bound almost always means abbreviating the

content or restructuring it so, for better or worse, the fine points and ambiguities of the

information are lost or downplayed for the immediate consumers of the research findings.

In most cases, the readers (or viewers of a presentation) are unfamiliar with our jargon,

largely disinterested in the finer points of the theories involved in the data acquisition and

the subtleties of human interaction that we often find so engrossing. This does not imply

that the conclusions we draw be “dumbed down,” but rather that we must synthesize and

distill the information so it can be readily applied to the needs of the consumers of that

data.

In the end, we are writers and interpreters of the complexities of behavior and

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culture, romantic as that may sound. The principal tools in our “tool kit” are theory, pen,

and paper (or camcorder and PC). Culture is created by the construction of text, the

video, etc.; it is not a distinct object of scientific inquiry though we often assume that this

is the case. Regardless of the specific theoretical leanings and documentary outlets of the

research and research team, the nature of human behavior does not typically lend itself to

simplified descriptions and bullet points. Consequently, it is little wonder that we are

frequently reticent to give explicit design or policy recommendations and advice. It is

easier by far to give a number, a description, and direct quote than it is to do something

with the information. And yet, reducing the information into recommendations that be

readily acted upon is precisely what we must do.

The crucial challenge is determining which data are most relevant to the specific

tasks of the people to whom you are providing the information, and presenting that

information in the simplest, most direct manor (Rubins 1994). The engineer designing

the mechanics of a product does not need to know everything that may come from the

research; he or she needs to know the information relevant to building a tool that will

function appropriately and cause a minimal amount of stress to the population using it.

Simply put, we must decide what story to tell and tailor it so that it will find use, knowing

that the majority of what we have seen, heard, digested and believe will never see the

light of day.

Regrettably, when we reduce the information to its barest form, we run the risk of

inadvertently misrepresenting what we have found or unintentionally giving the

client/employer the opportunity to interpret data incorrectly or in ways we did not

necessarily intend. It is rare that the results of our research provide such clear-cut answers

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as the example above seems to imply. This potentially results in misguided corporate

actions, flawed designs, exploitation, faulty policies, etc. (Altheide 1996).

Several points should also be made very clear. The first is that we have been

discussing communicative norms particular to the technology industry in North America.

While many of these characteristics carry over to other industries, each business

community (and each company as well) will have their own specific patterns of

communication. However, as a whole businesses generally expect presentations that are

succinct and short.

Second, communication styles, communities of practice, and expectations will

differ from place to place. The presentation expectations in Paris are significantly

different from those in the Omaha. While it is possible to think of Business as a distinct

cultural process, it is important that this is a construct we impose to make our lives

simpler, but business culture, such as it is, is subject to the historical, economic, and

sociolinguistic realities of the larger culture in which it is couched. Ultimately, this means

doing yet another internal ethnography even if it only touches on surface-level

communication practices.

Finally, while we do explore it in great depth here, external perceptions of a

researcher’s professional experience, expectations about how a scientist “should” sound,

and division of power all work to influence how we present our findings and how readily

they will be received. Suffice it to say, when determining audience needs and accepted

norms of communication, it is important to reflect on the nature of power and expectation

based in the local folk taxonomy, e.g. what is a “scientist” or an “anthropologist” and

how does that impact expectations of what we present.

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 One issue that is increasingly becoming a concern is how anthropology is

impacted as people in the business world, design world, and usability world become

familiar with our techniques. Pieces of methodology and terminology are borrowed, new

interpretations applied, sometimes dismally, and other times with varying degrees of

success. Other disciplines have seen similar patterns. For example, “ergonomic” has

fallen into common usage in many companies, but the definition used in most cases does

not reflect how a Human Factors specialist might use the term (Zeisel 1981).

The increased use of “anthropological” language may also lead to increased

interaction across disciplines. We regularly work as parts of multidisciplinary teams, the

result being that our methods and language are inevitably going to be commandeered.

And this street runs both ways. Certainly anthropologists are increasingly using the

language of design, psychology, human factors, and business; it may be fair to assume

that design, psychology, human factors, and business will begin using more of our

language. The result has produced a more complete vision of the world around us.

Certainly there is the risk that a discipline, be it anthropology, psychology, or something

else altogether, may see devaluation and dismissal because it is purportedly done by

people who do not have the proper training or an outlook that is in keeping with the

current concerns of that discipline, but as time passes, charlatans are weeded out and

quality work shows itself for what it is. Business people and designers appear to be

catching on to this fact.

This does not mean that we are out of line in asking business people, designers,

etc. to adapt and adjust to our communicative norms, definitions, etc. We must determine

what it is that separates our use of words like “culture” and “ethnography” from those in

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other disciplinary traditions and be willing to defend those determinations. The very

legitimate question becomes when should they adapt? Reality dictates that we make

changes when entering this new environment, but it should be noted that in order to effect

change, the people with whom we interact must be receptive and willing to meet us half

way. And the fact that anthropologists are increasingly in demand leaves us holding at

least some of the cards. The fact that business people are coming to understand that

disciplinary training is in fact necessary to effectively perform and interpret data (in the

sense of all acquired knowledge), that expertise is in fact more than a catch phrase, gives

us some degree of clout and places anthropologists in a better position to redefine the

emerging lexicon of business, of which words like “ethnography”, “culture”, and

“anthropology” are an undeniable component.

Coping with the Depth of Information

The preferred method of communicating anything of substance in the business

environment is through bullet points and one-page summaries. Video in the form of a

highlight tape is arguably of greater impact in terms of immediate results, providing the

“aha factor” and can generally increase the probability that those viewing the production

will take more time in reading the final, written report; but video is most valuable when

combined with a static presentation and a series of bullet points. The written document is

still frequently part and parcel of the anthropologist in the business world, but only

insofar as it can be used segmentally by various people in various departments. It may

see little practical application or concentrated attention, but there is an expectation that

richness of detail is part of the final package we deliver. However, it is significant that

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while we are generating a great deal of information, we are not writing for other

anthropologists. We are writing for people with unrelated backgrounds.

Nine times out of ten the reader is looking for information that is quite literal and

instructional. Ambiguity and/or involved anecdotal descriptions are usually rejected in

favor of what is more concrete. While there is a point to which we should comply, it is

imperative that we not allow our final reports to become too instructional. One of the

principal benefits to ethnographic research is, after all, the richness of detail and the

experience-near nature of the information and writing (Jordan 1994). The struggle is how

to provide this experience-near information.

It means breaking information down into a structure such that each “theme” is

easily identifiable within the first sentence. Ideally, this is also the moment in which to

include specific quotes and observations from participants. More often than not, specific

recommendations are preferred to implications and must be presented to the audience in

concrete, usable ways. While the tendency diminishes with time, the first response to

data is to ask for a tool with which to make immediate decisions. This varies according to

the type of job for which the anthropologist was hired, but the demand for knowledge as

a tool that requires minimal interpretation or adaptation is pivotal to the success of the

document. All of this runs the risk of seeing the readers miss connected pieces of

information; that is precisely why the role of the anthropologist is to direct the audiences

toward avenues of use and innovation that may otherwise be overlooked. And yet, it is in

the details that we add value and drive innovation, and because the ethnography must

offer information that can be applied to the needs of management, we walk a tightrope,

balancing what and what not to report.

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 All of this results in increased work and, frequently, a multiple versions for

multiple audiences that range from the scholarly to aesthetically and stylistically

polished. We cannot forget that we produce a product for consumption by a wide range of

people with specific needs. Making the text palatable for general consumption is critical

to seeing implementation and repeat business.

When the final, written report is provided, it must begin with a brief one-page

summary or a series of bulleted issues and recommendations regarding the key findings,

regardless of how vast the report is. While this essentializing may result in problems,

more often than not rendering data into highly simplified forms actually serves to get the

proper funding or actions taken that would not be forthcoming if we were to present our

findings in their entirety (Seeger 1997).

It is our responsibility to use synopsized information to compel the reader to delve

into the deeper, richer material. The synopses must make it clear that they are

abbreviations and require more commitment on the part of those watching or reading the

presented materials. It is worth noting again that the people employing us are generally

indifferent, at least initially, to our concerns about holistic approaches, theoretical

positions, etc. The first step in successfully entering the business community is

understanding the natives’ way of communicating. A business executive wants market

research, strategic planning advice, or new product designs. The anthropological aspect

of the research is only tangential in as much as it can bring fresh insight to the situation.

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Information and Recommendations

Dealing with the question of what we do with our findings is of particular

importance. For better or for worse, many anthropologists, ethnographers in particular,

have come to think of themselves as descriptive interpreters, not proscribes of

recommendations. Our role has been to translate cultural practices and allow those

people who consume our work determine what, if anything, should be done. We tell a

story, we do not tell people what to do. However, while disciplinary consensus may in

fact sway toward an anthropology of pure descriptive interpretation, limiting ourselves to

a single trajectory of presentation was never codified within the discipline, nor has it

necessarily been the state of affairs for the applied subfield. There is in fact a long

tradition within anthropology of providing recommendation (Grillo and Rew 1985,

Melhuish 1997). Giving recommendations or simply providing interpretations should be

dependent upon the goals and direction of the project. While leveling recommendations

may not always be what we are most comfortable doing, they are an expectation of the

employer and the team. And ultimately, who better to make the recommendations than

the people who know the subject matter best. Every discipline reflects the times in which

its practitioners find themselves and different theoretical and political positions come in

and out of fashion. Epistemology changes through time and while giving direct

recommendations might not be part of the norm today, providing recommendations will

by necessity become common.

Outside of anthropology, the practice of giving direct recommendations by other

social sciences has been part and parcel of the process. Cognitive psychology, for

example, has established a decades-long tradition of applied research, beginning most

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notably with the rapid technological advances of World War Two, which necessitated

practical research and applications from academia (Proctor & Van Zandt, 1994).

Though this primarily began as a military association, the number of everyday activities

that now involve interactions with computers and other types of complex machinery are

increasing exponentially and have necessitated a greater understanding of how the basic

limitations of human information processing affect these interactions. In the business

world, with tight margins and little room for error, it has become apparent that ease of use

can provide a strong selling point and propel a company further than its competition.

Given these considerations, it has become commonplace to find cognitive psychologists

working alongside engineers either providing recommendations for designs, or in many

cases, designing the interfaces and interactions from the very beginning.

The point is simply this: recommendations are part of the expectations of the

business world and the private sector in general. While not all projects will call for

explicit recommendations, many will. In the final analysis, the choice of whether or not

the researcher is comfortable with this is a personal one.

Conclusion

There will no doubt continue to be controversy over the role of anthropology in

the business environment. Practitioners are forced by the realities of this environment to

adapt their data gathering practices, methodologies, and presentation styles, frequently

reducing knowledge into palatable morsels to be consumed by a wide range of people.

However, the alternatives are to either render ourselves irrelevant while others borrow

our disciplinary hallmarks and adapt them to the needs of business, design, and

23
innovation, or to learn the language of business ourselves and make ourselves

indispensable. This means presenting our findings in ways that will speak to a business

audience rather than an anthropological one.

Developing multidisciplinary teams that can be flexible when necessary and adapt

to the conditions of the business goals is central to the survival of the social sciences

outside academic or public sector settings. Not only does it ensure that the various

disciplines will maintain, or perhaps find, relevance and application, but it also ensures

that the disciplines continue to have new perspectives injected back into them thus

remaining vigorous and intellectually robust.

24
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