What, Why and How Anthropologists Study Business Organisations

Ask most people what an anthropologist studies, and they will picture someone in a remote village, notebook in hand, far away from the corporate world. Yet some of the most well-known consumer products around you today, from the single green button on office printers to the packaging on the hand cream in your bathroom, were shaped by anthropologists working inside businesses. This branch of the discipline studies how people actually behave at work, in shops, and at home with the things companies make. It answers three simple questions: what do anthropologists study in business, why does this matter to a company’s bottom line, and how do they go about finding answers that surveys and sales data usually miss?

Why businesses need an anthropologist’s eye 🔗

Corporate anthropologists rely on ethnography, a method built on direct observation, open-ended interviews, and long periods of time spent inside a workplace or a customer’s daily routine. Rather than asking people what they think they do, ethnographers watch what people actually do, because the two are often different. Business schools that teach this approach point out that students learn to view consumers and organisations holistically across time and space, comparing patterns across departments, geographies, and history instead of isolating a single problem.

The unit of analysis matters 🔗

A central idea in this field is choosing the right unit of analysis. If a company wants to understand a product sold worldwide, an anthropologist does not simply measure sales figures. They study how that product is received, reinterpreted, and sometimes completely repurposed in a specific local market. A snack food designed for American lunchboxes might become a festival gift in one region and an everyday breakfast item in another. This recontextualisation, where a product takes on new social, economic, and even political meaning once it lands in a new market, is exactly the kind of insight that keeps global brands relevant across different cultures, including in India’s own hugely varied regional markets.

Lucy Suchman and the case of the confusing copier 🔗

One of the earliest and most cited examples of this work comes from Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center, where anthropologists have been part of the research staff since the late 1970s. Lucy Suchman, then a doctoral student, spent time filming and observing ordinary employees trying to operate a new high-speed copier. What she found was not that people were careless with machines, but that the machines themselves buried simple tasks under a maze of features and menus. Her research became foundational to the study of human-computer interaction, and it is still discussed today as an early example of anthropologists working alongside engineers to study everyday life inside a large company. The lesson that came out of this line of research was straightforward: a device is only as good as an untrained person’s ability to walk up and use it without instructions, which is why so many copiers today lead with one simple, unmistakable copy button.

Bonnie Nardi and the spreadsheet nobody filled out alone 🔗

Bonnie Nardi built her career studying how people interact with computers at companies including Hewlett-Packard, Apple, and AT&T. While working on spreadsheet design, engineers assumed a single employee would sit down and complete an entire sheet from start to finish. Nardi’s fieldwork showed otherwise. She observed spreadsheets being passed from desk to desk, with different colleagues filling in different sections based on their own area of expertise. This distributed, collaborative pattern of work directly shaped how the next generation of spreadsheet software was designed, making it easier for multiple people to contribute to the same document. Her broader body of work on how ordinary computer users interact with new digital tools helped establish ethnography as a standard part of technology design, not just an academic exercise. Nardi treated office workers the same way anthropologists had long studied unfamiliar communities, and found that the “obvious” way engineers expected people to behave was rarely the way people actually behaved.

Susan Squires and the products people didn’t want to be seen using 🔗

Susan Squires, whose career has focused on customer insights research for a range of companies, studied whether people would use personal care items such as hand lotion and tissues at the office the same way they used them at home. Interviews and observation revealed something the client had not expected: employees felt self-conscious using these products in front of colleagues, especially when the packaging looked casual or domestic. People wanted the same lotion or tissues, just presented differently, in containers that felt appropriate for a professional setting. Squires recommended repackaging the existing product for office use rather than reformulating it entirely, a far cheaper and faster fix than developing something new. This kind of finding, tied to customer insights research across technology and consumer product companies, shows how a small shift in framing can matter more than a change in the product itself.

Grant McCracken and the meaning behind a haircut 🔗

Grant McCracken, an anthropologist who has consulted for organisations including Netflix, Google, Amazon, and IKEA, focused his research on how people use everyday consumer goods to construct their sense of self. To understand this, he spent extended hours in beauty salons observing hairdressers and their clients rather than relying on marketing surveys. His conclusion was that women used hair colour and style as tools for actively building and revising their identity, guided in that process by their hairdressers, who functioned almost like ritual advisors. McCracken’s larger point was that consumer goods are rarely just functional. They carry meaning that helps people define who they are and how they want to be seen, which is why brands invest so heavily in the emotional and symbolic side of a product, not just its practical use.

Daniel Miller and what New Coke taught corporations about emotion 🔗

Daniel Miller’s work on consumer resistance offers one of the clearest illustrations of why cultural analysis matters to a business. When Coca-Cola introduced a reformulated recipe in 1985, later nicknamed New Coke, the company had extensive taste-test data suggesting people preferred the new flavour. What that data missed was the emotional bond consumers had built with the original drink over nearly a century. The backlash was immediate and intense, with complaint calls, protest letters, and public outrage flooding the company within weeks of the launch. Coca-Cola restored the original formula under the label “Classic,” and it was welcomed back enthusiastically. Miller used this episode to argue that consumer choices are never purely rational or purely about taste. They are wrapped up in memory, identity, and attachment, all of which quantitative market research tends to overlook.

Christina Wasson and furniture built around the hallway meeting 🔗

Christina Wasson’s research for Steelcase, a major manufacturer of office furniture, is a good example of how observation can quietly reshape an entire product line. Her fieldwork found that employees were meeting and discussing work in hallways and open corridors, spaces the company had never designed for group interaction. Designers had assumed collaboration happened in meeting rooms, but people were improvising their own informal gathering spots. Steelcase responded by developing products such as writable whiteboards and seating designed specifically for these communal, semi-public areas. This approach still shapes how the company works today, with trained researchers observing real behaviour inside offices before any new product is built. The underlying principle applies well beyond furniture: designing around how people actually behave produces better outcomes than designing around how planners assume they behave.

Taking design anthropology into banks and insurance companies 🔗

Not all business anthropology happens in tech labs or furniture showrooms. Alice Peinado, Magdalena Jarvin, and Juliette Damoisel worked with designers and executives from three banks and two insurance companies in France on a project aimed at understanding what appeared to be irrational customer decisions. Using qualitative interviews, the team explored how clients understood money, risk, and their relationships with financial institutions. The research found that customers wanted advisors who genuinely knew their personal circumstances and could offer guidance tailored to their situation, rather than generic products pushed through a sales counter. This led to an interactive interface that let clients personalise their financial information and communicate directly with their bank or insurer. The redesign focused on how services were delivered, not on inventing new financial products, which is often the more cost-effective and customer-centred solution.

Bringing it all together 🔗

Across every one of these examples, the pattern is consistent. Anthropologists do not start with assumptions about what employees or customers want. They observe, ask open questions, and let patterns emerge from real behaviour rather than from what people say they do in a survey. This holistic, ground-up approach helps businesses catch blind spots that engineers, marketers, and executives miss simply because they are too close to their own assumptions. As more companies expand into varied and fast-changing markets, including large and culturally diverse ones like India, this kind of grounded, human-centred research is only becoming more valuable.

What do you think? Which of these studies surprised you the most, and can you think of a product or workplace habit around you that might benefit from this kind of close observation?

References

1. https://business.columbia.edu/sites/default/files-efs/pubfiles/26300/Business%20is%20Booming%20for%20Business%20Anthropology%20blog%20post.pdf
2. https://www.technologyreview.com/1998/05/01/41585/field-work-in-the-tribal-office/
3. https://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/download/470/826/5662
4. https://anthropology.unt.edu/people/susan-squires.html
5. https://www.history.com/articles/why-coca-cola-new-coke-flopped
6. https://news.microsoft.com/transform/office-anthropology-steelcase-applies-behavioral-research-workplace-designs/
7. https://www.epicpeople.org/what-happens-when-you-mix-bankers-insurers-consultants-anthropologists-and-designers-the-saga-of-project-fidji-in-france/