BST209

Over the past two decades, ethnographic techniques have become an increasingly important part of the repertoire of research strategies employed in the business world. These approaches can provide business with nuanced, fine-grained and culturally-specific kinds of information that traditional business market research and quantitative analyses are unable to access. The very same techniques that have been used by anthropologists to study non-western societies—participant observation, language fluency and long-term fieldwork are perfectly suited to understanding the 'cultures' of business and as a way to learn about markets, product usage and consumer experience. Students may learn the fundamentals of anthropological fieldwork through lectures and readings that focus on how the theory and methods of anthropology are successfully applied to business using case studies from around the world.