Anthropologists at Work: Challenging Business “Common Sense”

Abstract

These words belong to Richard Hill, a global strategist and researcher with a PhD in anthropology. During an interview, he recounted the challenges that he faced from colleagues who did not recognize his relevance as an anthropologist in business. He elaborated that, in business, quantitative data takes precedent over anything qualitative, which is deemed fluffy and inconclusive. Anthropological inquiry and insight could not possibly be sufficient to make decisions on how to better serve current or future customers (notwithstanding the fact that anthropology specializes in understanding human behavior). Through my twenty interviews with anthropologists in business, conducted for my thesis research at Princeton University, I also learned that business counterparts often did not even know what an anthropologist was, dismissed them as “weird,” or conflated them with narrowly defined Page 1 of 11