Business Anthropology in a Digital Age

“All of these problems at the end of the day are human problems, I think that that’s one of the core insights that we try to apply to developing Facebook. What [people are] really interested in is what’s going on with the people they care about. It’s all about giving people the tools and controls that they need to be comfortable sharing the information that they want. If you do that, you create a very valuable service. It’s as much psychology and sociology as it is technology.”      
                                                                           

These are words of Mark Zuckerberg who studied psychology and computer science at Harvard University and went on to create Facebook whose initial IPO listed the company at a market cap of $104 billion.

  

Today there are many well-qualified anthropologists working in business. Companies increasingly hire anthropologists to design new technology, to learn more about their customers, and to improve their business. Increasingly, business anthropology is a preferred approach for business executives to understand why and how people around them do what they do, as well as why and how consumers choose to purchase the goods and services that they prefer.

Companies hire anthropologists to measure how customers like their products and what they can do to improve them. Companies like social gaming developer Zynga and web search company Yahoo hire people with anthropology degrees to do user research. These anthropologists use anthropological methods to collect information from game users and analyze it to help game designers make the games more attractive and fun for users. 

Intel is another company that has hired anthropologists. In particular, Director of Interaction and Experience Research, Genevieve Bell, is credited with changing Intel’s business plan. She has done research on the way people all over the world use computers and the internet and has helped redirect Intel into the smart phone and internet TV markets, both of which are non-computer-based ways of using the internet. She says that for large parts of the world, the Internet is, and will continue to be, mostly text on a phone. So Intel is pursuing that market with its Atom chips, which are cheaper and consume less power than, say, Intel Core i3 or Celeron processors. Bell has also been key in helping Intel move into the smart-TV market, studying how people behave when they are entertained by television in a living room, and how that experience is distinct from sitting in front of a computer.

Other tech companies have social scientists on staff. Microsoft, IBM, and Hewlett-Packard  are some of the corporations that have anthropologists and ethnologists working alongside systems engineers and software developers. 

Xerox  is credited with pioneering this practice when its Xerox Palo Alto Research Center in 1970s hired an anthropology grad student to help engineers build copiers with an easy-to-grasp user interface. This easy-to-grasp user interface was then adopted by Steve Jobs to create the Apple computer which revolutionized the PC industry.