ABSTRACT
This chapter introduces the importance and value of anthropological thinking to business anthropology in its prime areas of consumer research, design concepts and user experience, and organizational work culture. The client, a restaurant pizza chain, was aggressively pushing into home delivery service and sought a competitive edge by using ethnographic research to better understand in-home pizza consumption. In addition, the nature of the questions that the client wanted answered were also highly psychological. Anthropology, in contrast, assumes a structure of shared meanings that gives coherence to our everyday lives. Cultural processes and people are fluid and dynamic across place and time and show the ways in which human action and reaction in various contexts have an effect on others. The process of doing ethnographic research, then, is not merely collecting data by gathering what people say or by singularly observing what they do “out there” in a particular context.
